Foreign Correspondence: A Pen Pal's Journey by Geraldine Brooks (best ereader for epub .TXT) 📕

day. In English far more fluent than her husband’s she invited me to dinner at their apartment in Netanya.

I expected to be able to locate their place without any difficulty but found myself lost instead in a warren of new streets and apartment-block construction. The huge wave of Russian immigration had flooded once sleepy seaside towns like Netanya. It had become a city in the four years since I had last been there, sprawling north and south in a maze of new streets over sand dunes and uprooted orange groves.

Cohen lived well away from the beach in a vast agglomeration of gray, weather-smeared apartment blocks. Inside, the three-bedroom flat had a hotel-room impersonality. The walls were stark white, free of artworks or knickknacks. The furniture was spare and standard: a leatherette lounge suite, a dark wood-veneer cabinet, a television and a scattering of toys belonging to their four-year-old.

The cool anonymity of it all contrasted with the warmth of Cohen’s wife. Ample-hipped, with wide, dark, heavily lashed eyes, she was as outgoing as Cohen was shy, greeting me with a hug and sitting me down at the kitchen table as she served the dinner. Her family also were Yemenites—a huge clan of six brothers and six sisters.

She bustled to and from the refrigerator, chattering as comfortably as if I were an old friend. She had met Cohen through a phone call. “He rang, and I thought he was a friend of my sister’s,” she said, “so of course I was nice to him, and we chatted for quite a long time. We were laughing and getting on really well when suddenly he realized that he’d dialed the wrong number—he didn’t even know my sister.”

The two of them decided they’d better meet. “As soon as I saw him I knew he would be my husband.”

By this time the kitchen table was covered with an array of dishes: macaroni, mushroom pie, tuna salad, assorted cheeses, Greek salad, avocado, hard-boiled eggs. It was a kosher dairy meal—no meat. But there also was something Arab-style in the way the meal was served: in the mass of items, the wide and plentiful choice, I recognized the kind of meal with which an Arab honors a guest.

In Israel, even ordinary lives brush up against extraordinary situations. The little boy who fidgeted restlessly at the table had been born in the midst of a Scud attack during the war with Iraq in 1991. “I was in labor when the sirens sounded,” Cohen’s wife recalled. There was no way she could make it to a room sealed against the possibility of poison gas. “I told the nurses just to give me a gas mask and leave me.”

She was able to draw on four years of military experience to get her through the ordeal. She had wanted to serve, unlike many Orthodox girls who claim exemption from serving in the army on the grounds that a woman shouldn’t take orders from a man not her husband. She loved her job as an army instructor, reenlisting for an additional two years after her first tour expired. Then she went to work for the trade-union movement. Now she stayed home to look after her son, who was enrolled part time at a religious day-care center. At four years old, he already davened like an ancient rabbi, bobbing and bending as he raced through the Hebrew prayers.

I asked Cohen about his army reserve duty during the intifada. He deflected my query, just as he’d left so many of my questions unanswered when I was his pen pal. But when his wife got up to put their son to bed, he abruptly returned to the subject. He told me quietly that he was sent to quell rioting in the West Bank town of Jenin in December 1987, just as the uprising began. “We had no idea how heavy would be the violence,” he said. In those first days the soldiers had no riot gear. Cohen wasn’t even wearing a helmet when a teenaged Palestinian dropped a concrete block from a rooftop. “It just missed my head and landed here,” he said, leaning forward and touching the vertebrae of his upper back. “I never told my wife.”

Technically, Cohen should still have been doing military service for about a month a year until he turned forty-five. But over time the explosions of artillery shells had impaired his hearing and, to his immense relief, the military doctor had recently excused him from serving.

One reason Cohen wasn’t needed was that, since the implementation of the 1993 Oslo accords, Israeli soldiers hadn’t been required to police the streets of Palestinian villages. “With the Arabs, we give, we give, until maybe we are in the sea. But we have to try. We have no choice.”

After dessert—warmed-up packaged blintzes—Cohen pulled out photo albums. Their wedding picture showed a traditional Yemeni bride, decked in a silver cowl and golden veil with a necklace of sweet herbs framing her face and intricate henna patterns painted on her hands. There were pictures of Cohen in the Sinai, a lean teenage warrior, not so different from the fantasy Israeli of my youthful dreams. But that hollow-eyed young man in stained khakis wasn’t who Cohen wanted to be. It had been a role imposed on him by a life that I, in my faraway, tranquil Sydney suburb, had romanticized. He, forced to live it, had hated every minute. At the time the photographs were taken he had just seen three of his platoon killed and one have his leg shredded by a mortar. He had no idea how many teenage Egyptian soldiers had been slain in turn by the artillery piece he fired blindly into their positions.

Be careful what you wish for, says the old proverb. You might get it. In peaceful Concord, I had wished for adventures. As a reporter, I’d covered five wars. As Scud missiles threatened the Cohens in Israel, I camped in the Saudi desert with the French Foreign Legion and rafted