The Hope: A Novel by Herman Wouk

Author:Herman Wouk [Wouk, Herman]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Israel, Literary, Jewish Families, Historical
ISBN: 9780316954419
Google: e8vctgAACAAJ
Amazon: 0316954411
Publisher: Back Bay Books
Published: 1993-01-02T08:00:00+00:00

Missions to America

A very little thing decided Zev Barak to withdraw, if he could, from a mission to Washington with Pasternak.

He was sitting at the small desk in his den at 1 a.m., with a late moon wanly shining through his black window, trying to finish a letter to Emily Cunningham before Sam picked him up for a visit to an armor exercise in the Negev. Propped against the desk lamp was the last snapshot Emily had sent him; inscription on the back, “New assistant headmistress of Foxdale School, with beloved friend Zev.” Zev was a big red horse. In brown baggy riding clothes and glasses, Emily Cunningham was an unglamorous figure, lean and almost plain. The second page of his letter ran so:

… You give me hell, Emily dearest, whenever I bring up marriage again, but I swear I worry about you. What a fooler that photograph is! Just a spinster assistant headmistress, to the life. You’re burning away in secret, consuming yourself. Not only could you make a man very happy with your power to love, you’d find out for the first time what happiness can be. The ultimate joy in life is children, but the ultimate sweet part is passionate love, and since your upbringing or your fastidiousness, I’m not sure which, won’t let you have casual relationships, you must put up with my nagging. Remember how Shakespeare in the sonnets keeps telling that mysterious handsome friend of his to get married and have children? So many of those lines apply to you, and “the bird of time is on the wing.” The other day, I can’t tell you why, I read the Rubaiyat again - it only takes ten minutes, you know - and my eyes were dropping tears when I finished. And I kept thinking of you …

He had written all that the night before with Nakhama sitting near him, reading a new Hebrew novel by the same floor lamp. She knew about the correspondence. He had shown her, as they came in over the years, snapshots of the peculiar girl who had once briefly visited her. Nakhama had long since apparently accepted his story that the CIA man’s daughter had had a schoolgirl crush on him, and that it had evolved into an interesting letter-friendship. She genially said she saw nothing wrong with it. In truth there was nothing wrong, except that of late Barak was falling in love with the schoolteacherish creature who wrote the letters. He was still trying to puzzle through this bizarre development, which he could no longer laugh off or put from mind, and meantime here was the letter to finish.

And I kept thinking of you, no doubt because you wrote me last year that your father had read the Rubaiyat aloud to you, and said it was a rhymed version of the Book of Ecclesiastes. That parallel has occurred to me, but I’ve never read it anywhere or heard anyone else point it out. Your father …

“What will you have for breakfast?” Nakhama startled him, standing there at his side in a woolen robe.

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