Wink: A Story

The new military governor, a colonel, was sitting in the last row. A colonel named Kranzdorf. Red boots, a red beret tucked under an epaulet, a dainty winged parachute badge on a field of red attached to his tunic. A field of red for a jump into combat at the Mitla Pass in October 1956.

Mitla wasn’t the governor’s only experience killing or risking getting killed, however. Nearly his whole life since being drafted, Haim Kranzdorf had made war or prepared to make it, being given, over a quarter-century, just a month off as a young lieutenant in 1953 to recover from an inconsequential wound—inconsequential except for meeting a nurse younger still when briefly hospitalized. That, plus three years in the mid-60s to gain a BA and MA in history and literature at the Hebrew University, plus a year spent in an intensive-care unit, hospital, and rehabilitation center following a bouquet of consequential wounds delivered on the 18th of October, 1973, and most recently a year at Tel Aviv University learning the elements of Arabic to be able to do a satisfactory job here in Ramallah. Just five years total not making or preparing to make war.

Yes, a professional. A hard man, a bareheaded Jew fluent in German, Hebrew, English, French, and now up to a point Arabic, outstanding in command, domination, killing. A hard man, that is, when necessary, yet whenever possible liberal. A hard liberal as it were. True, everything is relative. Wasn’t the brand-new military governor soft compared with that nurse, Esther Toledano Kranzdorf, his wife, the mother of his kids, both girls? Anyhow, today Kranzdorf had hobbled downstairs to see the quality of the justice in the courtroom of the fort-cum-administrative-office he’d be running the next three years.