by Herman Wouk
“It’s a siege within a siege, the Jewish Quarter,” said Loeb. “If we only had some real leadership, Zev, we could win back the whole Old City, we’ve got the troops! But four commands keep pulling four different ways. They’ve made joint attempts to break in and relieve the Quarter. Always aborted.”
Barak repeated this to Marcus, whose voice took on urgency. The Jewish Quarter, he said, was militarily valueless; he had seen it before the siege, a warren of ancient houses and synagogues, with only a few hundred ultraorthodox families. But a small force of Haganah and Irgun troops were in there defending it from the Legion. Ben Gurion wanted it held at all cost, because Jews had lived there for over two thousand years, and its fall would be a political catastrophe. King Abdullah might even call for a truce after such a triumph, while Jerusalem was still cut off.
“Ben Gurion’s the commander-in-chief,” Marcus went on. “I have my orders, so I’m going to relieve the Quarter. We attack tomorrow night, the twenty-eighth. I’ll fly there at dawn with my plan and assume overall command of the forces there. You’ll be my operations officer. Call a conference of the combined Jerusalem Command staff for 0730 hours.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Now, Zev, there’s this young Haganah leader inside the Quarter—Motti something—”
“I know him. Motti Pinkus, a good boy.”
“You do? Great! Jerusalem Command is having some kind of trouble with the guy. He has to be informed of my intent to attack, and promise he’ll hang on till tomorrow night.”
“I’ll convey that word to him. Motti will believe me.”
“Outstanding. I’ll start working on this bypass thing.”
Barak asked Loeb how he could get inside the beleaguered Quarter. The food czar pulled a very long face. “Well, maybe at night, at great risk—but what could you accomplish? It’s a hopeless position. Those old Yerushalmis are quaint and charming, salt of the earth, but they live in the seventeenth century.” Loeb sadly shook his head. “They think Zionism is blasphemy, because it aspires to replace the Messiah. They’ve lived with the Arabs for hundreds of years. They don’t understand this whole war, and they want no part of it. They’re the ones talking surrender, and it’s just a matter of time.”
“I have to get in there, Hermann.”
Loeb peered out of the window. “I tell you what. There’s an old fellow you might talk to, right across the street down there. The tailor shop, with green blinds.”
***
Kishote had just gone into the dark little shop. In his heaving and straining at the jeep when it bogged down in a gully, he had split the seat of his badly fitting uniform. A graybeard in a skullcap and a four-corner talit katan with long fringes looked up grumpily from a sewing table. “I’m very busy,” he said in Hebrew. “Can’t take on more work.”
“Little father,” Kishote ventured in Yiddish, “have pity on a Jewish boy.” He turned around and showed the tailor his predicament, whereupon a loud peal of silvery giggles startled him. A little black-haired girl, eleven or twelve, stood in an open doorway at the back of the shop, doubled over with laughter.
“Shayna, shame on you,” exclaimed the old man, but he was laughing, too.
“I’m sorry, Grandpa,” she gasped, and vanished.
The old man closed his door and went to work on the pants. Kishote stood in his underwear, glancing nervously at the back door. “Shayna won’t come out, don’t worry,” said the tailor. “She’s a truly modest girl. Where are you from?”
“We just came over from Cyprus. Originally, from Katowice.”
“Katowice?” The tailor’s stern face softened. “We had family in Katowice. All murdered, peace to their souls. And what is your name? What does your father do?”
They were still talking about Katowice, and Kishote was trying on the trousers, when Barak entered the gloomy shop. “So, Kishote, here you are.” Squinting at the tailor he exclaimed, “By my life, is this Reb Shmuel?”
The tailor blinked and replied, “And is this the dancing soldier?”
Zev Barak had retained very little religion from his schooling, but on merry days like Purim and the Rejoicing of the Law he liked dancing in the Quarter, where the pious men took him into their dignified gambols, no questions asked. They knew him only as “the dancing soldier,” and he knew this tailor only as Reb Shmuel, an imposing straight-backed patriarch with a huge nose, in a silken caftan and fur hat. The hunched-over old man in an undershirt, suspenders, and talit katan was obviously the same person in workaday guise, but he seemed the less real of the two Reb Shmuels.
“Yossi, wait for me in the jeep.” Kishote went out. Barak took a confidential tone. “Reb Shmuel, I’m told you keep some kind of contact with the Old City. That even the military governor comes to you for information.”
“Nu, nu.” The tailor shrugged, his face blank.
“My job now, Reb Shmuel, is aide to the new army commander of Jerusalem. He’s an American officer, a colonel.”
“An American?” The tailor’s entire aspect changed and brightened. “Jerusalem’s getting an American commander? Truly? Thank God for a miracle! How can I help you?”
Presently Barak emerged from the shop, and drove the jeep through the middle of town, detouring around closed-off streets to a block of apartment houses. “Here’s where I live, Yossi.” He jumped out. “I won’t be long.” When he returned, he was carrying a big black flashlight. “We’ll get something to eat now at the army mess. It may be a long night. Hungry?”
“I’m starved,” said Kishote. “I just didn’t want to bother you.”
***
Barely visible, the ledge along the vaulted cistern wall looked to Barak no more than three inches wide. Far below, black water faintly reflected the flashlight beam. Using his good arm and hand to clutch the dank rough wall, holding the light awkwardly in his left hand, he sidled after the girl, who was scurrying along the ledge like a rat. Behind him Don Kishote came sidewise, step by cautious step. “Slower, Shayna!” Barak’s voice boomed and reechoed between the arch and the water, which, the girl had mentioned, was very deep and very cold.
“B’seder,” she piped.
Barak did not remember ever coming on this huge cistern in his scout troop’s explorations of these labyrinthine tunnels. Conceivably it could date back to Hasmonean times, he thought, or even to the era of David, for the earth under the Old City was a honeycomb of ancient history and war. But the water was probably fresh, since in advance of the siege the city’s water engineers had filled every cistern in Jerusalem, some of them unused for generations. Teetering along the ledge, he gasped with relief as he stepped off onto a stone tunnel floor. “That was fun,” remarked Kishote behind him.
The girl led them through low-arching passages smelling of earth, of graves, of musty decay. Barak ripped his blouse, crawling after her through a hole in a half-collapsed wall. A heavy wooden barrier encrusted with mold and spiderwebs almost stopped them. The girl and Kishote slipped through a narrow opening, but Barak had to wriggle hard to get by. At last they climbed broken rubble-strewn stairs and emerged into a cool smoky night; around them wreckage, rubbish, the rattle of small arms, and the glare of fires. They followed Shayna through crooked streets to a chilly basement of bare sooty cement, where an unshaven youngster in a torn sweater sat, marking up a map by the light of a kerosene lamp. “I have no idea where Motti is,” he said, peering at Barak with black-ringed haunted eyes. “Maybe at the hospital. Ask next door.”
In the adjoining candlelit cellar room, teenagers sat in a circle on the cement floor, stuffing yellow plastic into tin cans. Barak had produced his share of these homemade grenades, and the sour gelignite smell woke boyhood memories…
…of teenagers working in the summertime by candlelight to make grenades, “pomegranates,” in the hay-piled barn at Mishmar Ha’emek, Sam Pasternak’s kibbutz, while outside a girl paced the fence on the lookout for British soldiers. Scary, exciting time! Sam cracking irrepressible morbid jokes ab
out getting blown up, until the humorless Young Guardian supervisor lost his temper and bawled him out: “There’s nothing funny about these pomegranates, Pasternak, they’re meant to kill Arabs, and that’s serious business!” A sort of loner in the kibbutz, Sam was, a Czech boy among mostly Polish kids, disliked by the supervisor because he attended a “bourgeois” school in Tel Aviv; probably why he had brought Barak to the kibbutz that summer, when they had become really close friends…
“Shoshana, Shoshana, Shoshana!” The girl singing outside very loud, and the popular waltz triggering a scramble to hide all the stuff in the hay, so that the soldiers found the kids around a campfire outside the barn, some eating, some singing, some dancing to a concertina…
Barak asked the stripling with a scraggly goatee who seemed in charge of the grenade squad, “Where’s Motti?”
“Last I heard he went to Hurva.”
Outside Shayna and Kishote were watching shells streak and shriek across the smoke-fogged sky. “Hurva? B’seder,” said Shayna, and she led them through eye-stinging smoke to the majestic main synagogue, where crowds of the pious poor were huddled inside. Mothers were trying to soothe crying infants, bearded men with earlocks sat crouched over books, and a circle of men were reciting psalms in the old singsong by candlelight. White faces everywhere in the gloom wore looks of terror or apathy. As Barak came in, leaving Shayna and Kishote outside, a nearby explosion made the massive building shudder, and wails arose in the gloom.
A boyish soldier at the door told Barak that Motti was in a council meeting in the beit medrash, the study hall.
“What are all these people doing here?”
“Oh, they jam in when the shelling starts. It’s crazy. One solid hit on the roof can kill them all. They’d be safer back in their own cellars. But no, they run in here.”
Several elderly civilians were coming out of the study hall as Barak went in. Alone in the room lined with tall Talmud volumes, his head in his hands at a long table, Motti Pinkus sat. He glanced up, and the dulled despairing look on his bristly face changed to lively surprise. “Zev Barak! Elohim, is it a breakthrough? Where are the troops?”
Barak told the grimy leader how he had come, and why. Pinkus seized on the news about Marcus. “Honestly, an American? A West Point colonel? There’s a hell of a change! I only hope to God it’s not too late.”
“Motti, you haven’t been answering urgent signals from Jerusalem Command. Why not?”
“Don’t talk to me about those dogs! Those swine!” Pinkus pounded the table, grinding his teeth. “Liars! Cowards! Phony promises, and nothing happens!” He flung an arm toward the wall. “A few hundred yards from here, Zev—right outside the Zion Gate—the Palmakh is sitting on its ass! Safe and sound on Mount Zion! They broke in, brought some lousy supplies, and pulled out again! We’re in here fighting to prevent a massacre, and out of a hundred thousand Jews, the Jerusalem Command can’t even send in a platoon to reenforce us! The hospital is piled up with our kids, the doctors are putting the overflow into a synagogue next door, it’s horrible! Zev, in these narrow streets twenty-five fresh guys would be like a battalion, but if reenforcements don’t come we’re done for!”
“Why, how many fighters do you have left?”
“I’m not sure anymore. I’ve lost track. The wounded keep going back to their posts. Effective fighters, Haganah and Irgun together, maybe sixty. Includes girls. All exhausted, but still—”
Barak knew the defenders were sparse, but this astounded him. “Sixty? Against the Arab Legion?”
“Look, Zev, these Arabs, once they occupy a street—even the Legionnaires—they fall apart. They start looting and burning, dancing and screaming. No discipline. We regroup, set up new machine gun positions. Sometimes we can even counterattack. They pay plenty for every street they take.”
“Can you hold out till tomorrow night?”
Pinkus threw up his hands. “Who knows? Food and water, okay. Ammo, some left. It’s the artillery, Zev, the shelling. It crazes these poor civilians. They run around in panic, making trouble, bribing, hoarding, pleading for favors—”
“Any serious talk of surrender?”
“Any talk? You saw that council going out? They’re ready to organize a white-flag approach to the Red Cross! They voted to do it! But I vetoed that, and I had to get damned tough. I don’t like to shoot Jews, but I may have to, if I’m supposed to hold out much longer. Some of these haredim [pious folk] have been okay and given us a lot of help, but those others—” Pinkus stood up with a groan, shaking his head. “Did you know Kobi Katz? We grew up together. The best of the best, and he just got killed.”
“I knew him, Motti. I’m sorry.”
“I’ve got to”—Pinkus’s voice cracked—“go to his post. Come along.”
Barak sent Shayna back to the command cellar, and he and Kishote followed Pinkus to an alley where about a dozen young fighters in ragtag uniforms crouched behind a barricade of furniture and rubble. Beyond the barricade Barak recognized the little synagogue where he had danced with Reb Shmuel on holidays. “We know where the sniper is who killed Kobi,” said a youth in cast-off British fatigues, hunkered down by a heap of the tin-can grenades. “We tried to advance through here, we could have secured this whole sector if we’d gotten through. But Kobi went first as always, and that bastard up there blasted him. We had to carry him back out.” He pointed to the synagogue roof. “Too far to throw the grenades. We’ve been trying. It’s the way the alley curves—”
Pinkus and Barak were both peering up at the synagogue roof when two cans flew over their heads. One fell in the street, the other struck a wall, both exploding in fire and roars.
“What the devil!” exclaimed Barak, turning in time to see Kishote snatch a third can and heave it. The can tumbled end over end, starkly visible high in the fiery air, and landed with a blast on the synagogue roof. A machine gun came tumbling down, and crashed in the street. “Got him! Got him!” yelled the youngsters.
The soldier in fatigues stared at Kishote. “Who are you? What’s your name?”
“Yossi.”
The soldier slapped his back and turned to the others, calling, “After me!” He went sliding along the wall. The unit followed him, while a disheveled girl piled the grenades into a sack. “I’ll take that,” said Kishote to her, picking up the sack.
“Just don’t drop it, then,” she said. “You’ll make a big noise.”
“Kishote, where are you going? Come back here!” shouted Barak.
With a wave and a grin, Don Kishote slipped down the alley after the girl, and faded off in gloom and drifting smoke.
Pinkus said, “What is that kid, your runner? You want him back?”
“Well, it seems he wants to fight.” Barak shrugged and shook his head. “So let him!”
“Okay. I’m returning to the hole.”
“Motti, I’m leaving. I have to report to the American colonel tonight. Listen, don’t despair! This time tomorrow night, the Legion will have their hands full. They won’t know what hit them!”
Pinkus eyed him with a look of bitter skepticism. “Maybe! Anyhow, you’ve seen how our kids are fighting. It’s the civilians, Zev. I’ll try my best to keep them in line.”
“One more day, Motti.” Barak threw his good arm around Pinkus’s shoulders, and hugged hard. “Twenty-four hours.”
“I can’t promise anything. I’m doing what I can.”
In the dark outside the command cellar Shayna asked him, “Where is that big skinny fool with eyeglasses?”
“He went off with some soldiers to fight.”
The girl said, “A bigger fool than I thought.” She scampered off, Barak hurrying after her.
***
When dawn showed at the glassless window of his bedroom, Barak got up, still in uniform. Nakhama would have a fit, he thought, at the state of the flat. Shattered glass and blown-in rubbish were strewn all over the floor under layers of plaster dust. No electricity, no running water, no gas; appall
ing, yet they had been lucky. Across the street, a whole wall had blown off the building, and smashed furniture lay on the sidewalk or half hung out of wrecked rooms.
He had hardly slept. Visions of the embattled burning Quarter and concern about that crazy Don Kishote had haunted him, and the din of shelling had roused him whenever he dozed off. Had Kishote lived through the night? Such combat spirit in a fugitive Polish kid! Ben Gurion had been dead right about the Cyprus immigrants, setting foot on the soil of the Land did something to them.
Rapid hard knocks at the door broke into his reverie. He opened the door, and the first general of the Jews in two thousand years strode in bareheaded, still wearing his wrinkled khaki shirt and shorts, a rolled-up map under his arm. “Hi. Meeting laid on?”
“Yes, sir, 0730. Haganah headquarters.”
“Excellent. Beautiful flight up here, in a two-seater, just a flea hop!” Marcus unrolled the map on a dusty table, pushing off shards of glass. “I see you’ve had some bomb blast. All Jerusalem’s taking one hell of a beating, Zev. Breaks your heart to see it from the air. And say, Yadin commends your reconnoiter into the Quarter. So do I. Well done! Now look here, and speak your mind.”
Studying the map as Marcus talked, Barak had immediate strong doubts about the plan, a textbook encirclement of the entire Old City, requiring large forces and risking heavy casualties. He would have opted instead for a straight smash through the Zion Gate, only a hundred yards or so from the Quarter.
“Any comment?”
“No, sir.” Speaking his mind at this late stage could not improve the plan, much less reverse it.
“Good. I’ve turned B.G. around on the bypass, Zev, he’s going for it. The Seventh Brigade retook those two hilltop villages you pinpointed, and it’s shaping up for the next Latrun attack. Things are really moving.”
When they came out on the street Marcus paused at a sunlit board fence, where fresh placards were crudely slapped over older bills. “I barely remember the Hebrew from my bar mitzvah,” he said. “It’s damned frustrating. Tell me what those posters say.”