Isaac's Beacon

by David L. Robbins

  “Vince.”

  “What?”

  “Nothing. I like the sound of your name.”

  The camel carried Malik’s laughter away. Mrs. Pappel watched him vanish. She turned to the porch, arms crossed.

  She lowered her brow, visibly indicating Vince’s lap, where Rivkah’s hand rested in his. Mrs. Pappel cleared her throat. When neither Rivkah nor Vince offered an explanation, Mrs. Pappel faced the night again where Malik had ridden off. She left her arms crossed.

  “Vince.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  He squeezed Rivkah’s hand, then let go. Mrs. Pappel spoke with her back to them.

  “Would you like something before bed?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “Rivkah. Tea?”

  “No, thank you.”

  “Alright. I’ll put a blanket on the sofa. Vince, what time should I wake you?”

  “Any time.”

  Rivkah asked, “Can you stay tomorrow? I can show you more.”

  Mrs. Pappel walked past to enter the house. She lowered a hand to Rivkah’s shoulder for a quick pressure.

  Rivkah took the fedora off Vince’s head to stop the brim from shading his features. She tossed it into the empty chair. Elbows propped on her knees, Rivkah evened her shoulders to him. She could not say how afraid she was or how hopeful. Her first sight of Palestine had been like this, at the end of a sea so wide it might never have ended.

  Chapter 48

  Vince

  April 6

  Mrs. Pappel handed Vince a plate of bread drizzled with honey. He accompanied her to the porch.

  The clear spring made the horizon appear limitless. Nowhere else Vince had been in Palestine, not by the sea, in the desert, or the emerald Galilee, felt so swept clean by the sunrise as this hilltop.

  The settlers left their cottages to start the day. All the labor of the commune trooped by in hoes and picks, leather aprons, rolled-up sleeves, sun hats, wheelbarrows, and buckets. Before Vince had awakened on the sofa, Rivkah had left to milk the cows and tend the mule.

  Mrs. Pappel asked, “Will you spend the day? We can find you a ride back to Jerusalem this evening.”

  “What will I do if I stay?”

  “Work. There’s not much else.”

  “I’m not a farmer.”

  “We’ll find something suitable.”

  Vince cocked an ear to the first raps of the tools of Massuot Yitzhak. Chisels rang in the quarry at the bottom of the hill, axes and hoes clashed with the salted soil, and in the carpentry shop a handsaw hewed a plank. Mrs. Pappel took Vince’s finished plate.

  “You’re not a fool.”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “With all this going on. You and Rivkah.”

  “Did she say something?”

  “No.”

  Vince stroked the back of his neck. “Yes, ma’am.”

  Mrs. Pappel tapped the plate in her hands. “I see the water truck coming. Can you carry a bucket?”

  Vince hauled the bucket back and forth from the water truck to a dozen plum trees in the center of the kibbutz. When he’d finished irrigating the little grove, Mrs. Pappel switched him to the big stand of orange trees on the western slope.

  The orange blossoms’ scent followed while Vince slogged up and down the hill. A wiry lad took up a pail to join the work, into and out of the orchard. The boy spoke better German than English, but Vince had little breath for conversation. It wasn’t long before the boy quit tramping with Vince and passed him.

  The water truck filled Massuot Yitzhak’s cistern. Settlers gathered at the well to fill their buckets and lug them off to their work and homes. Vince touched the brim of his hat at the young Jews and kept working. Mrs. Pappel walked by many times.

  The shadows in the orchard shortened to midmorning. The orange trees wouldn’t mature for five more years; the water was needed to tempt the roots deeper, away from the dryness on the edge of the Negev. When the irrigation was done, Vince sat on his upturned bucket in a patch of shade beneath a powder-blue sky. A breeze tickled the branches on the hillside where he and Rivkah had strolled last night. The place still felt theirs, like a song danced to.

  She walked through the saplings, swinging her arms in a downhill gait. Vince didn’t stand for her arrival, to show how tired he was. Rivkah opened her hand. Vince took it, and she tugged him to his feet.

  “I don’t want you to go.”

  “That’s good.”

  “The driver of the water truck will give you a ride back to Jerusalem.”

  “It’s alright. I can go later.”

  “No.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “You’ll need to go.”

  “Did something happen?”

  “The driver heard it on the radio.” Rivkah blocked her mouth with both hands and spoke through her fingers. “They’ve hanged Dov Gruner.”

  Chapter 49

  APRIL 17

  RUSSIAN COMPOUND PRISON

  JERUSALEM

  BRITISH MANDATE OF PALESTINE

  By Vincent Haas

  Herald Tribune News Service

  WEDNESDAYS ARE THE TRADITIONAL day for hangings in Palestine. On April 16th, the British executed Dov Gruner.

  He was held at Acre Prison, a Crusader fortress outside Haifa. At 4 a.m., guards rousted Dov Gruner from his cot. They denied him a last breakfast, the comfort of a rabbi, coverage by the press, a visit from his sister who’d traveled from America, or any warning that this would be his last morning. Dov Gruner refused to stand in his cell while the order was read aloud. It took a clubbing to put him on his feet. On his way to the gallows through the damp stone halls of Acre, Dov Gruner sang Hatikvah.

  Who was he?

  A Hungarian. Dov Gruner emigrated to Palestine ten years ago, then left to fight alongside the British in Italy. He was wounded twice, twice a hero. He came back from the war to learn that his family in Hungary had been wiped out by Hitler. Dov Gruner fiercely believed in a homeland for the Jews, a place where the horrors could never again happen. He joined the Irgun; soon after, in a raid, a cop’s bullet shattered his jaw. Dov Gruner was arrested and spent eight months in the hospital. Then he was sentenced to death.

  He died before dawn, in the red burlap garb of the condemned, a sack over his head, a rope around his neck. Dov Gruner stood on a trapdoor which collapsed beneath him.

  The Irgun are calling the hanging of Dov Gruner a war crime. They insist he was a combatant and should be treated as a prisoner of war, not a criminal. For the past decade, the British have restrained from executing the Jews they arrest. Britain has changed its mind. The Irgun have sworn revenge.

  Dov Gruner died in secret and alone. That same Wednesday morning, three more Jews shared his fate.

  Yehiel Drezner, Eliezer Kashani and Mordechai Alkachi were arrested in December trying to shoot their way past a roadblock outside Netanya. In the trunk of their vehicle, police found two rawhide whips. The three Irgunists were part of a plot to flog British soldiers and police in return for the caning of a sixteen-year-old Irgunist named Abraham Kimchin.

  Like Dov Gruner, each of the three prisoners did nothing to contest his death sentence. They believed they could serve the Jewish revolt better as martyrs than alive in cages. At twenty-minute intervals, before the sun rose, they followed Dov Gruner to the scaffold, first Drezner, then Kashani, then Alkachi. None got breakfast, a visit, or a prayer.

  In four days, two more fighters will hang for what the British call crimes and the Jews call war. They are Moshe Barazani and Meir Feinstein. Secretly, the British have scheduled the executions for a Monday instead of Wednesday, in an attempt to hide them.

  Tomorrow, I intend to go to the jail at the Russian Compound in Jerusalem and refuse to leave. I will sleep in a cell, stay, and report on the executions
of Barazani and Feinstein. I will see to it, this time, that the public knows the details, and the men’s deaths won’t be in secret. Reporting from Jerusalem, Palestine.

  Chapter 50

  Hugo

  April 19

  Tel Aviv

  For three days, Hugo had heard nothing from Pinchus. He spent the time on his balcony where he nibbled cheese and bread, sipped beer into the sunny afternoons, and drew pictures in the rose-colored dusks.

  Hugo had long had a knack for drawing. He was glad to see his little talent hadn’t disappeared in the Leipzig ghetto or the camps where nothing wanted to be remembered.

  He began with an elevated view of his street, the parked cars through the trees. Soon he felt the urge for company in his drawings and so penciled in people, curious if he could catch them in mid-stride or standing still, in their hats or bare headed. He tried to capture the folds of women’s skirts, the beard-ringed lips of pious men. He emptied his apartment of blank paper, then walked to the market to buy a sketch pad, more food, and beer. On his only excursion out of the flat, Hugo knew no one and was known to no one.

  He knew Pinchus was busy. The Irgun had retaliated with ferocity for the execution of Gruner and the others. Bombs struck targets in Rehovot, Haifa, and Jaffa, killing two policemen. In Netanya, a medical station was blown up and one British sentry shot to death. In Tel Aviv, an attack on an armored car took the lives of a cop and a Jewish bystander. In Haifa, Irgunists fired on soldiers from a commandeered taxi. In Haifa’s harbor, British frogmen defused underwater bombs attached to three vessels being readied to deport a thousand more Jews to Cyprus. At the military cinema in Netanya, a bomb injured four soldiers.

  On Hugo’s third evening on the balcony, as the light slouched toward sunset, the blank pages of his pad asked not for something he could see from his perch but a scene from memory. Hugo drew a tree, a great straight oak. In front of the trunk, a sitting man, a heavyset figure in shorts and a dark-billed hat. The man held a pistol before his mouth as if it were a candle to blow out. Hugo left the man’s eyes open and his blouse unbloodied. He’d seen a hundred thousand dead; because this would always be the first he’d killed, Hugo chose to leave the cop among the living.

  Past sunset, he stopped drawing but sat with the pad and the cop in his lap. Curfew took hold and the street went vacant. A patrol walked past. The soldiers eyeballed Hugo, up on his balcony living his secret life.

  He drank all his beer above the quiet, anxious street. Toward midnight, Hugo shuffled off to bed.

  A note had been slipped under his door.

  Chapter 51

  Hugo

  April 20

  Russian Compound prison

  Jerusalem

  Barbed wire closed off the sidewalks; three soldiers and a candy-striped pole blocked the road. Morning sun reflected off windows of the Russian Compound to make the checkpoint a glaring hot place. Hugo waited while the sentries searched a car. They poked under the hood and trunk and used a mirror on a pole to scan the undercarriage. Beyond the checkpoint, police walked the grounds of the Jerusalem prison, past sandbag gun positions and spotlights on towers.

  The guards cleared the car to move on. Hugo handed over his ID booklet. One guard took it while another, a bullnecked young Brit, pointed at the sack of fresh oranges across Hugo’s shoulder.

  “What’s this, then?”

  Hugo shrugged off the sack. Before he could set it down, the big guard put out both hands. “Give it.”

  The mesh bag was heavy as Hugo extended it. He said to the guard what the vendor in the souk had told him. “Don’t drop it.”

  Hugo pocketed his returned ID booklet. The thick soldier shook the sack.

  Hugo said, “They’re oranges.”

  “I can see that, you git. We’ll have a few.” The other two sentries nodded.

  “Of course.”

  The British guard untied the drawstring. He rummaged into the center of the bag before tossing three oranges to his comrades and leaving the sack on the road.

  “Going to visit your friends?”

  “I’m just delivering.”

  The big soldier leaned in. “You figure these’ll be good for their health, do you, mate?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Trust me. They won’t be.”

  His tone was intimidating, as though he intended to remember Hugo.

  The soldier peeled his orange. He separated the crescents and flipped through them like playing cards, checking for razor blades, something. When he ate, the other guards followed.

  Hugo submitted to a body pat-down. Another car pulled up to the striped bar, too near; the heat of the radiator heated the checkpoint more. The burly guard sweat under his brimmed hat, he seemed to be fighting meanness and impatience. Another guard told Hugo, “Go on, now.”

  Hugo retied the sack and hoisted it across his shoulder. He passed the checkpoint, into the scrutiny of a dozen more police scattered around the compound. Their attention sloughed off Hugo; they saw him and looked away. He was nothing noteworthy, a Jew carrying a bag of oranges.

  Chapter 52

  Vince

  The younger prison guards, the ones who’d joined the Palestinian Police for the travel away from cold Britain, were heartbroken. They were boys who’d not fought in the world war. They held no brief that the Jews owed them anything. Their older brothers might have served with Monty or their fathers with Allenby, but these lads had not. A few were thugs, but they would’ve been thugs anywhere. The others, when Vince got them alone, felt Britain should leave the Jews and Arabs to figure it out between themselves. The young ones had little stomach for the killings and mayhem on all sides. They wanted to go home. A few called themselves good boys.

  Among the older guards, ex-soldiers made up a majority. They’d seen the lives and places that war had lain to waste, had tasted and dealt violence. They considered themselves honorable and despised the murderous tactics of the Jews. They loved their homeland and believed that where Great Britain went, virtue followed. Some were scarred, many were grey; they worried over their empire, leaving Egypt, losing India. They would be damned on their feet if they would see the loss of Palestine. An Englishman was born on a small island, but he might die around the world under the Union Jack. History had given them the back of her hand; this wasn’t the way of their fathers and grandfathers who’d controlled far greater lands with a fraction of the force.

  Vince promised not to use their names, though many asked to be identified; they wanted their names read back home. A few added greetings to their mothers, wives, or children, as if Vince might write them down.

  None of the guards in the Russian Compound wanted to hang terrorists in their prison; Barazani and Feinstein should be sent to Acre to be executed like Gruner. Their jail was in the middle of Jerusalem. Jew central.

  Vince spent the first night in an empty cell. The prison had once been a women’s hospice; the cells were roomy and white. Most of the five hundred inmates were Arabs; the seven Jewish political prisoners were held in a separate block. The Arabs were petty robbers and knife-fighters. Vince found little hatred among them for the Jews; these men had lived and worked alongside Jews. Mostly the Arabs complained that the Jews were sharp dealers.

  The warden was an academic gent. On the record, he told Vince that he found the treatment of Gruner, Drezner, Kashani, and Alkachi shameful, and none of that nonsense at Acre would be repeated at his facility. The condemned men under his care would have the last comforts every human deserved.

  Vince would be allowed to see Barazani and Feinstein, but only under escort. He could not speak with them; the two Jews had said their piece in court. It wasn’t the prison’s place to provide terrorists an additional platform. Vince mentioned the beating Gruner had taken at Acre when his executioners came for him; Vince wanted to be at the cell when the guards collected the condemned
men on the morning of their hanging and to stay with them to the gallows. The warden agreed but could not imagine why anyone, even a reporter, would want to watch such a thing.

  In the early morning Vince awoke to splash water from the sink about his chest and armpits, then shave. The Arabs clapped when he pushed open his bars to walk out freely.

  In the warden’s office, Vince asked for his first look at the two condemned men. They were to be hanged after midnight, at 2:00 a.m. The warden summoned a guard to accompany Vince.

  Skylights lit the long, plain plaster corridors. Arched ceilings gave the halls the look of white tunnels, like the passages people reported seeing while dead. The air was fresh and flowing. Debtors, crooks, and brawlers called messages for Vince to carry out of the prison. Tell my brother. Tell my wife. Tell my lawyer.

  The Jews’ block lay behind a locked gate. Seven condemned men occupied two side-by-side cells, both roomy and bright. Barred windows opened to a courtyard. The bars between Vince and the prisoners ran from floor to ceiling like a zoo.

  Five Jews occupied the first cell. Two were lithe, the others stubby and strong. Their prison clothes were rough, knotty red. None came to the bars at Vince’s approach. They sized him up, then returned to their writing or talking. They had a disdain about them, and a stubbornness. And something else, like they were ticking. Vince knew none of their names.

  In the next cell, Moshe Barazani and Meir Feinstein stood from chairs at a table. They drifted to the bars as Vince eased toward them. The young guard shadowed Vince but remained quiet. Inside the cell, a third man, older and bespectacled in a black suit and skullcap, sat at the table. A springy beard made his face large. He stayed seated before a Bible. When the two men came close to Vince, only three hands wrapped the steel rods.