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"The Autobiography of Muriel Sharon"

--a novel by Ron David--

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THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF MURIEL SHARON

-- a novel

BOOK ONE

Chapter 1

'The Paris of the East'

 

Chapter 2

'The Eyebrows of My Enemy's Wife'

("Isolde & the Duke" is the last half of Chapter 2)

 

Chapter 3

'My Father's Walk'

BOOK TWO

Chapter 4

'My Father's Hands'

 

Chapter 5

'Jordan Almonds'

 

Chapter 6 

'Life with the Smallest Possible 'L'

 

Chapter 7 

'Never Again'

 

Chapter 8

'Someone to Sing to Me'

 

Chapter 9

'Where Are the Birds?'

 

Chapter 10 

'...Surely They Can't Be Jews'

 

Chapter 11

'Not Exactly John Wayne'

 

Chapter 12

'Whores and Dead Chickens'

 

Chapter 13

'The Wall'

 

Chapter 14

'The Body Count'

 

Chapter 15

'Beautiful Eyes'

 

Chapter 16

'Lebanese Book of the Dead'

 

 

 

LINKS

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

the second half

of

Chapter 2

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sweden, 1982

 Isolde & the Duke

 

 

            I couldn’t imagine my father with ...

            (I couldn’t say it, even in my mind.) 

            I couldn't imagine him any way but strong.

            I couldn't sleep.  I kept thinking of him.  As I lay in bed, I thought of dozens of stories of my father but the one that kept coming back was the first time I saw him after I'd moved to New York.  Maybe because it was the closest he and I had ever come to living alone together?  Or maybe it seemed to amplify what was best and worst between us?  Damned if I know—all I know is that I kept thinking of it ...

 

 

                        A few months after I moved to New York—I think it was 1975—I got a call from my father bitching me out because I never called home and telling me that he had arranged his airline ticket to stop in New York for a few days so he could spend time with me on his way to Bermuda.  I said, "You and Mom have never been to Bermuda, have you?"

            "Your mother's not going.  Pete and I are playing in a golf tournament."

            "So you and I will be together without Mom to referee?"

            "Just what the hell is that supposed to mean?"

            We got in a little argument on the phone.

            A few days later, I met him at the airport.  He looked tan and fit and five years younger than when he'd retired a year earlier. 

            I said, "Christ, you look terrific."

            "Thank you," Buddy, he kissed me with great passion, "I wish I could say the same for you.  Are you using drugs?" 

            We had an argument before we left the airport.  On the bus ride to Manhattan I told him I was living with a girl.  "I don't mean to interfere, Son, but isn’t it about time you settled down?  You aren't exactly a spring chicken."

            "You mean with one woman?"

            "What the hell else would I mean?"

            "If I can't stay faithful to one woman, I won’t lie about it. I tell the truth."

            "Which is?"

            "Which is, I can't in good conscience give a commitment so I don't have the right to expect one."

            "For Christ's sake, Son, speak English."

            "I tell them that I'll probably fuck around."

            "That takes the goddam cake!  That’s the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard."

            "At least it's honest."

            "Honest, my ass, it's dumb! If you were stupid it would be easy to accept the things you do.  Do you want a perfect example?"

            "No thanks."

            I was expecting him to ignore me and give me (for my own good, of course) a perfect example of what he was talking about, but he didn't.  He simply took out the photographs of their trip to Lebanon and began showing them to me, describing them lovingly, one at a time.  He was so immersed in his Lebanon stories that he didn't notice when the bus stopped at Port Authority.  I had never before seen my father in a state of ecstasy.  I didn't care about Lebanon but I have great respect for ecstasy.  I bought us coffee in the Port Authority bus terminal while my father told me about the greatest experience of his life.  Ecstasy makes people beautiful.

            After we dropped his luggage at my ratty East Village apartment, I said, "I have to meet Isolde at her singing lesson in Brooklyn.  We can finish looking at your pictures when we get back."

 

 

We were sitting in Enzo the music teacher's parlor when, from an adjoining room, the singing started.  "Dear God in heaven," he said, visibly staggered, "what is that?"

            I smiled.  "It's opera singing."  

            "You're not going to sit there with a straight face and tell me that you consider that shit singing?"  He added, "I suppose you'd like me to put on an act for the benefit of your friends?"

             "Absolutely not," I said, grinning.  "Just be your old sweet self."  I went into the kitchen and poured two glasses of wine.  A half‑hour later, with his boozy smile and his teeth gently purpled from the wine, he looked damn near human.  "It's good to see you, Dad."  I kissed him and gave him a great hug.  We were on our third glass when Isolde finished her singing lesson and sat her big round ass on my lap. 

            I introduced her to Dad.  He said, "They didn't make bodies like yours when I was his age."

            "You never told me that your father was so charming," Isolde said.  She asked Dad, "What'd you think of the singing, Mr. Elias?"

            "It's not so bad once you get past the initial shock."

            When I laughed too loudly, Isolde said that maybe she could spend the night here with Enzo and his wife so Dad and I could have some privacy.  Enzo swished into the kitchen, followed by several of his fawning students.  Enzo smoked a rhinestone cigarette holder and made his students call him Maestro.

            The Duke said, "Quite an assortment of fruitcake."

           We left, laughing, and went for a walk in Brooklyn.  We stopped to shoot a few games of snooker (which he won) then we went to a Lebanese restaurant in the Arabic neighborhood on Atlantic Avenue. In the restaurant Dad complained about the hummus and bitched about the kibbe and gave the cook some valuable advice on how to prepare the tabouli.  He started rhapsodizing about Lebanon again so I headed back to my apartment where he could talk until he crashed.

 

           

Back at my apartment, I gave him a good pencil and some drawing paper.  I sat sketching him while he sketched me and told me how unprepared he was for the overwhelming feeling of finally seeing his own country: “After the airplane landed, everyone was rushing to the gangplank.  I was one of the first ones there, but when I saw our country, the land where my mother and my father grew up and where their parents were born and died and their parents’ parents...when I saw the actual land where our ancestors had lived for thousands of years, I had a thought that stopped me dead in my tracks.  I stepped aside at the top of the gangplank and let the others pass, and I thought, ‘My ancestors—people with my blood—actually saw Christ.’  I walked down the  gangplank crying like a baby.  When I stepped off the gangplank onto our country, onto the land where my ancestors—people with my blood—actually saw Christ, I got on my knees and I kissed the ground.”

            We didn’t talk for several minutes, then Dad broke the silence: “So what do you think, Son?  Is your old man cracked?”

            “Fuuuck no!  Sounds like you blissed out, found a serious dose of ecstasy!  I’m proud of you—I feel like you’re my son.”

            “Promise me you’ll go to Lebanon, Son.  There is no way that you can comprehend the pride you feel in being Lebanese until you go there yourself."

            I said, "Can I be honest without getting us into an argument?"        

            "Don't be silly, Son, I want you to be honest with me."

            "I believe in personal pride.  I believe that you have every right to be proud of what you yourself do, but I don't see how a person has the right to be proud of anything, including your country, that you, personally, didn't build."

             "Danny, Son, flesh of my flesh, blood of my blood, all you're talking about is ideas—I'm talking about feelings.  You're not going to sit there and tell me that Lebanon, your country, doesn't fill you with pride and joy...and a longing to protect it?" 

            "The truth?"

            "Of course, Son."

             "Lebanon doesn't do a thing for me.  It doesn't arouse a feeling in me one way or the other.  I have nothing against Lebanon but, truthfully, it's like Des Moines or Toledo -- it leaves me flat."     

            Without saying a word, he stood up and started packing.

            "I thought we weren't going to fight?"

            "I'm not fighting," he said, continuing to pack, "I'm leaving."

            "Suit yourself, man."

            "'Suit myself, man!'  You should be on your miserable hands and knees begging me to stay!  Why do I waste my goddam breath on a maniac like you?"  

 

Unfortunately, he didn’t get pissed off enough to leave.  By the third day, I was as cracked as he was.  When Dad turned on the TV and I saw Yasir Arafat speaking at the United Nations, I grumbled, "Ugly asshole."

            My father, who had just combined eight ounces of water with exactly one level teaspoon of instant coffee, said, "At least he cares about his goddam country."   He added one-third of a packet of Sweet-and-Low and, "Unlike some people we both know."

            We got in another fight, kissed and made up, fought again.

            I had never been so happy to put anybody on an airplane.

            I kept thinking of him, thinking of him...

            I tried to imagine my father with Alzheimer’s disease.

            I thought of crying but I was too stunned to cry.

 

 

 

 

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The

Autobiography

of

Muriel Sharon

    

 

Trust me on this: Lebanon is a stinking shithole.  If Lebanon had never existed, the people of Israel would still be carrying me on their shoulders, calling, "Sharon, Queen of Israel."  Instead--because of Lebanon--people blame me for everything.  (Did I make Begin buy those hideous Salvation Army shoes?  Or, God forbid, the retro white socks?) 

      No more mister nice girl—I’m blowing the focking whistle on the whole bunch of  those genitally challenged schmucks. 

 

Lebanon: the truth--check it out!

Face it—Lebanon had problems from the beginning, but since nobody blames me for that, we’ll skip that part and dolly in on the Spring of 1981...

I

Everyone in Israel knows that our voters respond enthusiastically to violence against the PLO so, on May 28, 1981, during Mr Begin's shaky campaign for reelection, without provocation, Israel bombed “alledged PLO strongholds” in Lebanon.  The savvy Arafat, aware that Mr Begin's reelection campaign was underway, did not retaliate. 

            Six weeks later Begin was doing poorly in the polls so, again without provocation, Israel renewed its bombing of PLO in Lebanon.  After five days of heavy Israeli bombing, the PLO dropped a few token shells.  Israel bombed the life out of PLO headquarters in Beirut.  Arafat was forced to fight back: he shelled Kiryat Shmonah in Northern Israel.  There were five or six Israelis killed and somewhere between 100 and 500 Lebanese and Palestinians killed.  The humorous Mr Arafat bragged about his "great victory" in the "Two Week War."  Prime Minister Begin was so depressed that he signed a truce with the PLO -- the first in Israel's history.  Shame.  To sign a truce with the PLO was to acknowledge its existence.  (Begin should have been tarred and matzohed.)

      Begin never forgave Arafat for making him sign that truce.  During a visit to the United States, late in 1981, Mr Begin told an Israeli General who visited him at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel, "I want Arafat in his bunker!"

            In Begin's softening mind, Arafat had become Adolph Hitler.

II

In August 1981 Prime Minister Begin appointed me Israel's Minister of Defense.  Finally, I was in a position commensurate with my vision.  Israel, at last, was mine to protect.

III

One of the justifications for our refusal to sign a truce with the PLO was — Why sign a truce when we know that those animals will not honor it?  You will, therefore, understand why, in Mr Begin's view, the PLO had done something worse than making him SIGN that truce: Those tricky savages were actually HONORING it.

            So, in the Spring of 1982, although the PLO had not broken the truce for nine months, we complained of PLO attacks.  The United States asked for proof.  We produced a list of 32 violations.  The fussy Americans pointed out that every one of those violations had occurred in Lebanon where our soldiers had no legal right to be. 

        Mr Arafat, smelling that Israel was looking for any excuse to break the truce and eradicate the PLO, contacted Washington.  The Americans assured Arafat that as long as he kept the ceasefire, Israel would not attack the PLO. 

            I wasted no time in endearing myself to America's special ambassador, Philip Habib: "If the terrorists continue to violate the ceasefire," I taunted, "we will have no choice but to wipe them out completely in Lebanon.  We WILL eradicate the PLO in Lebanon!"   The sweaty Mr Habib was nicely rattled by my assault.  He squealed like a flayed pig.

      On April 21, 1982, an Israeli soldier was killed in Lebanon.  We complained to the Americans—they pointed out that the Israeli soldier was in Lebanon illegally and that we had no justification for breaking the treaty.   Mr Begin and the entire Israeli Cabinet decided to ignore the Americans: We dishonored the treaty and bombed Lebanon.      

        Arafat convinced his companions not to retaliate.  But Mr Arafat is no fool: he knew that we would find another excuse to break the treaty and annihilate the PLO forever.

IV

On the night of June 3, Israel learned that our Ambassador Shlomo Argov had been shot and wounded in London.  Our intelligence officers knew within a few hours that Ambassador Argov's attackers were followers of Abu Nidal. 

        We knew that Abu Nidal was in no way connected with the PLO.

        We knew that Abu Nidal specialized in killing top PLO figures.

        We knew that Abu Nidal was Yasir Arafat's sworn enemy.

        The morning after the shooting, Prime Minister Begin called a meeting of the Israeli Cabinet.  Begin, in a gladiatorial mood, opened the meeting: "An assault on an ambassador is tantamount to an attack on the State of Israel, and we will respond to it!"   Machanaimi, Begin's adviser on terrorists, explained again that Abu Nidal was not in any way connected with the PLO.   

      Mr Begin screamed, "THEY'RE ALL PLO!"

        Begin then turned the meeting over to Chief of Staff Eitan.  The intelligence men, at their wits' end, reminded General Eitan that Abu Nidal, NOT the PLO, was responsible for our ambassador's attack.  General Eitan, who often says that the only good Arab is a dead Arab, said, "Abu Nidal, ABU SHMIDAL!  We have to strike at the PLO!"  General Eitan recommended that we bomb Beirut.

        Not one member of the Israeli Cabinet objected.  Not one.

        Where, you might be wondering, was the evil General Sharon?  Where was the reprehensible Minister of Defense who singlehandedly coerced the well‑meaning Israeli Cabinet and Prime Minister into an immoral course of action?

     I was NOT at the meeting.  I was in RUMANIA‑‑so those buck‑ passing little darlings of mine invaded Lebanon without me!   

V

Yasir Arafat was in Saudi Arabia when he got news of Israel's attack.  Mr Arafat has never been given sufficient credit for his sense of humor.  When he learned of our invasion, Arafat said, "We'll teach the Israelis a lesson, as we have in the past."