The Ghosts
It’s at Tel Hashomer where patients, doctors and visitors ignored the no-smoking signs——unless nurse Esther happened by——that Kranzdorf lay comatose. Yes, they’d brought the colonel by medevac and wheeled him into the OR, then five hours later out of the OR and into the ICU. And now still in the hospital half a year afterwards Golda is holding his hand in hers. Golda Meir née Mabovich. He knew she’d be coming when he surrendered to his wife and agreed to receive the Itur ha-Oz, the Medal of Courage.
The debate with Esther went as follows: What, thousands of men and boys killed leaving widows and orphans, parents, girlfriends, brothers and sisters, and thousands more wounded, many more grievously than himself, many of these deaths, burns and maimings preventable in hindsight, including Jacques’s death, and Kranzdorf was supposed to sit still for a decoration? Yes, his better half said into his good ear. Oh? And why? To qualify for the lifetime tax break holders of the IDF’s second-rarest medal enjoy? No, though it wasn’t to be sneezed at. He should accept because to refuse would be to insult not just the politicians who maybe deserved to be insulted but the army and the country. Is that what he wanted?
For him even to be able to quarrel was freakish—-though his doctors only called it unexpected, unusual, highly satisfactory, his recovery was possibly unique in the annals of medicine. Not only hadn’t he died. He’d emerged from the post-operative coma after ten days and then hallucinated for less than a week. Granted, he’d then had to recapitulate infancy and childhood, relearning eating, relearning speaking, first his Muttersprache, then Hebrew, then English and last French, relearning cleaning himself, but with Esther implacably pushing he’d done it, and regained the memory of life before the crossing into Africa, so that in May of ‘74, with he and she having decided not to amputate, he only had to have the permanent pins and rods installed and relearn walking.
Two days Kranzdorf and she fought with Vashti looking on—-the first non-guide dog ever brought into the hospital. Ultimately he yielded on condition she keep the event modest and there be no reporters, not even the French-born Zeev Schiff, no photographers, not even the Berlin-born Micha Bar-Am or the Vienna-born David Rubinger, and no speeches. Esther promised. But in return he had to promise to behave, all right? No lashing out at Golda, or, if he came, Dayan. A promise Kranzdorf gave, and then sought a delay. Why the hurry? In a matter of weeks he was going to be released after what the doctors were saying would be the last surgery.
His mate-for-life on whom he remembered cheating twice explained why a delay was impossible. Golda was set on having the occasion while prime minister, which she wasn’t going to be much longer, and since he couldn’t join the rest of the medalists in the upcoming ceremony at the presidential residence in Jerusalem it would have to be now, in the hospital.
And so now one day in May the colonel’s wife wheels him into a Tel Hashomer conference room. There is Kranzdorf in uniform in a wheelchair, one ear dead, a small titanium plate implanted just above his ear, his leg in a brace. In come Golda followed by Efraim Katzir, Dayan, Motta. They and the rest surround him—-the old woman, the president, the minister of defense, the new IDF chief-of-staff, the scapegoated David “Dado” Elazar in civvies who has less than a year to live, Arik, Gandhi, Esther, Nurit, Hamutal, Dora Kranzdorf, his father-in-law Eliyahu Toledano, his mother-in-law Rose who prayed for him at the Wall and fitted a note to God between the Herodian stones, Yirmiyahu who lugged him to med-evac, Dvorah the speech therapist, Bassem the physiotherapist, the orthopedist, the neurosurgeon and as many nurses as can squeeze in. A modest event? Hardly. They all crowd in, plus the ghosts of Jacques, Zvi Ofer, Sasson, Rafik, Ernst Kranzdorf. Modest? Well, at least Esther didn’t bring Vashti and did keep out the photographers, the reporters and the bodyguards.
First to enter had been Golda. A woman in her seventies wearing astronaut shoes and carrying a handbag. Kranzdorf’s bitterness ebbed at the sight of her—how not to pity a woman so devastated by what had happened, so grandmotherly, so flinty? An old woman who in girlhood had known Ukrainians looking for Jews to rape and massacre and who even now commanded barely a thousand words of Hebrew. She takes his hand in hers, and he whiffs the nicotine, and she makes do with reading out the citation in her U.S. accent.
Next the presentation by Katzir who forswears a speech but jokes that he’d expected nothing less of a Gymnasia Rehavia graduate. A joke for those in the know—-the president, a biophysicist with the colonel understood an international reputation, graduated from there himself as did Aharon Katzir his brother and fellow biophysicist at the Weizmann Institute who was murdered at Ben Gurion airport two years ago by the Japanese Red Army. Laughter including from Arik who’s become a politician and who Kranzdorf notices is gaining weight. Arik’s politics not his politics, but impossible to dislike the man, impossible for the colonel who fought under the battlefield genius Ariel Sharon for 20 years. Yes, a genius notwithstanding the Mitla Pass near-debacle. Arik laughs. But the ex-chief-of-staff? Or the minister of defense?
No, neither Dado nor Dayan laugh.
Kranzdorf’s heart goes out to Dado. He hopes the expression he gives this Jew from Sarajevo when he comes up afterwards to shake his hand tells him so. The postmortem commission of Supreme Court justices and retired generals laid the blame on military intelligence and unfairly on Dado and recommended he be fired while clearing Golda and Dayan, unfairly, outrageously thinks Kranzdorf. Outrageous even if because of the atmosphere Golda and Dayan have had to quit and have just stayed on as caretakers. Yes, that’s the atmosphere, the national mood as reported by Ha’aretz and by Esther and the mood in the room. Everybody controls himself but Kranzdorf feels no love lost among the politicians and generals who’ve come to salute him.
They all keep a distance from Dayan the general-turned-politician. Moshe’s bony skull puts Kranzdorf in mind of a death’s head with the addition of a pirate eyepatch. Not the hardest man, Dayan—-it’s rumored he briefly cracked on Yom Kippur, as Yitzhak briefly cracked ahead of the Six Day War—-yet one of the most intelligent Jews the colonel has ever known. If he now seems wasted, if he’s lost as much poundage as Arik has gained that’s understandable. “Rotzeakh!” Esther told her husband this ex-national idol had been yelled at during military funerals while he, Kranzdorf, was in a coma and later seeing things. A murderer? Kranzdorf wouldn’t go that far, but Moshe does well not to approach the wheelchair.
First to leave are the dignitaries, next the medical and nursing staff, next the comrades, last the family. Hamutal takes home the medal, a medal her abba will never wear other than to the ex-terrorist Abu Khalil’s funeral in Jerusalem.
But are his mother and daughters and father-in-law and mother-in-law really last?
No, last are the ghosts.
