Isaac's Beacon

by David L. Robbins

  He said, “I’m not wrong to be afraid for you.” Vince stepped close to have his arms around her. Rivkah lay her head against his chest.

  Downhill, the reporter watched. With no signal from Vince but seeing them embrace, he figured the deal was done, the goodbye said. He headed for the landing strip.

  Vince looked over the top of Rivkah’s head, to the blocked Jerusalem road. In the Wadi Shahid, the mule cart had been loaded. The pilot cranked his aircraft back to life.

  Vince took his coat. Rivkah returned to the trench to help it reach the defenders of Rock Hill. He walked up the slope with no glance back at the plane. Vince was going to go lay down on Mrs. Pappel’s sofa for two hours, to rest.

  Chapter 89

  Hugo

  March 10

  Massuot Yitzhak

  Red Yakob hadn’t grown up on a farm any more than Hugo. Both were the sons of teachers. Yakob was a sabra soldier, but this morning he marched happily into the apple orchard with a stepladder on his shoulder. Beside him, Hugo carried a rifle.

  The rains had done well over Gush Etzion, and some snows. Massuot Yitzhak’s swollen rivulet burbled, a glossy thread down the hillside. On some mornings the spring air unveiled the faraway sands of the coast, or on the opposite horizon the blue sprawl of the Dead Sea. The land sparkled. Beside the paths grew wild narcissi, cyclamens, and anemones; in the orchards the seedlings fattened. At breakfast, Yakob said he wanted to make something grow, to feel what that was like. He asked to join the orchard crew for the day and assigned Hugo to guard.

  On the ladder, trimming the top of an apple tree, Yakob talked.

  “You’ve got to make room in the tree, that’s what they said. Too many branches and the leaves will shade each other. It takes sun to make fruit, so you cut, here, see, and here. This one. Look here, Hugo.”

  Snipped twigs fell. Yakob narrated each cut for an hour of barbering the trees. Hugo picked up some twigs; they bled fragrance and would have blossomed had they not been cut. He stopped listening to Yakob and walked far enough from the orchard not to hear the shears of the others working the trees. Hugo fixed on the hillside below, the minefield, the wadi, and the Arab-held hills three miles off.

  He’d not stood there long when the small crump of an explosion drew his attention. On the rumpled plain to the south, across the Abu Rish, a powdery cloud boiled in the breezeless day. The dust hid the cause. Hugo edged onto the incline, careful to stay above the minefield. One mile away, a few tiny figures scurried, then disappeared.

  Vince had laid the mines; Hugo had built them. Yakob took both to go see what had happened.

  In the sharp noon light, red Yakob, Hugo, and ten Palmachniks followed Vince through the minefields. Yakob became a different man as a leader; he clamped his jaw and moved with a predator’s grace and hush. Hugo took long strides to stay in Vince’s footsteps.

  The southern rim of the Abu Rish rose to a low plateau, called the Mukhtar’s Saddle. A plum orchard grew on the tableland with views of Kfar Etzion and Massuot Yitzhak. The stand of fruit trees hadn’t been pruned, too far from either kibbutz, too dangerous to guard. At the base of the slope up to the Saddle, Vince stepped in front of Yakob and the patrol.

  “Careful.” He checked his notebook. “There.”

  Vince approached with caution, Hugo close on his heels.

  Three shallow craters marked where a string of mines had blown. Scorch marks stained the bottom of one of the holes, damp enough to tack Hugo’s fingertips. Someone, at least one, had been hurt here, maybe killed.

  Hugo asked Vince, “Was it the pliers?”

  “Yes.”

  Hugo had taught Vince how to lay a boobytrap. An Arab reconnaissance squad must have been lurking around the base of the Saddle, creeping close to the settlements. A pair of pliers left in plain view, picked off the ground, would trip a wire attached to three mines set to blow in sequence. The bloc’s settlers and Haganah fighters knew to stay on certain paths and touch nothing unfamiliar. This was why. A blood trail trickled westward.

  Yakob said, “They’re scouting.”

  The Palmachniks patted Hugo on the shoulder for the boobytrap, not Vince, then pivoted with Yakob to return to Massuot Yitzhak. Vince hung back. Hugo stayed with him.

  Hugo asked, “What are you thinking?”

  “I meant to ask you. Why pliers?”

  “They have a special significance for me.”

  Hugo wiped his wet fingertips in the dust. Vince didn’t look up from the blotches.

  “It’s been a long time since I’ve written anything.”

  “I don’t think you could get this into eight hundred words. I’ve meant to ask you something, too. You don’t carry a gun. Why not?”

  “So I can go on telling myself I’m a reporter.”

  Vince kicked dust over the bloody crater. Hugo let him determine how long to stare. When he turned away, Hugo followed at a distance. He wanted no more judgments on killing from Vince, who’d seen a great deal but done little of it himself. They returned to Massuot Yitzhak, dodging the mines.

  Hugo didn’t want to sit on Mrs. Pappel’s porch and rehash the day with her over tea. Vince needed tending, and Hugo left the women to it. His scars itched; he needed to walk. The evening stayed pleasant. With candles flickering in the settlement’s windows, the stars pulled Hugo into the open. On his own, he strolled for an hour.

  Mrs. Pappel found him overlooking the southern slope, gazing at Kfar Etzion on its hill a mile away. The big kibbutz looked spectral, candlelit too.

  From behind, she said his name. Hugo invited her to sit. They both wore pistols.

  “You missed the news on the Jerusalem radio tonight. They were talking about you.”

  “Really? What did they say?”

  “A group of Arabs was attacked today near Hebron. One was killed, two wounded.”

  “That would be me.”

  “Have I told you? You’re about the age of my son.”

  “You don’t talk about him.”

  “He’s in America, with a couple million other Jews.”

  A sparkle arched above the Mukhtar’s Saddle, too close to be a shooting star. A second flash left a similar trail. Both flamed out in the valley.

  Mrs. Pappel said, “Tracers.”

  More burning rounds sailed at dark Massuot Yitzhak but fell short on the slope. The bullets came out of the tiny village of Khirbat Safa a half-mile from the Saddle. Perhaps they were fired by mourners, or a mother with a rifle.

  More blazing bullets hit nothing. Hugo lay facing the real stars to make himself a smaller target. Mrs. Pappel did the same. He expected someone to ring the alarm, but no one did.

  The shooting from sad little Safa ended after ten minutes. Mrs. Pappel and Hugo went back to the porch. Rivkah and Vince greeted them with tea.

  In the starry quiet, neighbors passed the word from house to house. A massive convoy was scheduled to arrive from Jerusalem tomorrow, a column of fifty trucks. A low alert was in place; every fighter and kibbutznik was ordered to sleep in their clothes tonight. Vince grabbed a blanket, kissed Rivkah, and disappeared to the orchard, putting himself on duty. Rivkah went to her room. Hugo stayed on the porch with Mrs. Pappel so long that he dozed. When he stood to go to the guest house, the old woman was still sitting with him. He bussed her cheek and told her to go inside, that everything was fine. A giant convoy of soldiers and supplies was coming tomorrow to save them, and her son and the millions were safe in America.

  Chapter 90

  Hugo

  March 27

  Before daybreak, Yakob entered Hugo’s room. Hugo hadn’t time to sit up in bed, still in his clothes, before Yakob tossed his coat on top of him. Yakob found Hugo’s boots and arranged them for him to step into. Yawning on the edge of his mattress, Hugo tugged up his suspenders.

  “Do you sleep? Ever?”


  “I do. In my mother’s house. I’ll take you some day. You’ve never had latkes like hers.”

  “What are we doing?”

  “Going to the highway.”

  “What for?”

  “Sabotage.”

  Hugo laced up his boots sleepily, no match for Yakob’s wakefulness. Outside, five Field Force students waited with rifles and two ladders. The last dewy bits of night left them grey but still very young.

  “Why do I have to come?”

  “You’re Irgun. You’re Kharda. This is right up your alley. You’ll see.”

  With Yakob’s hand at his spine, Hugo fell in with the students. Once he had Hugo walking, Yakob patted his back. “We’re going to cut the phone lines between Hebron and Jerusalem. The big convoy’s coming. We don’t want the Arabs talking.”

  Hugo tramped down the road out of Massuot Yitzhak. Two students each carried the ladders; one walked with a coil of rope. The morning pinked as they passed the airstrip and set out overland below Yellow Hill.

  He worried about mines, how ironic it would be if he stepped on one and did himself in with his own handiwork. Yakob led the patrol like he knew where he was going. They passed foxholes and strongpoints in the Wadi Shahid and the bunkered houses of Hirbet Sawir; hunkered-down settlers and soldiers greeted the patrol keenly, excited for the arrival of today’s convoy. Fifty-one vehicles, with food, weapons, fuel, timber, concrete, reinforcements, enough to last Gush Etzion for two months.

  The walk to the highway took thirty minutes. Hugo’s legs held up well. The telephone poles beside the road were too tall for a single ladder. The students used the rope to lash the two together, making one twenty-foot span that sagged in the middle when they stood it on end.

  “You want me to go up that?”

  “You’re Kharda.”

  “Stop that. I’ll fall and break my neck.”

  “You won’t. It’ll hold you.”

  “That’s why you came and got me. I’m small.”

  “Well. You are.”

  “Sonofabitch.”

  A pair of wire cutters appeared in the redhead’s hand. “Latkes. The best in Jerusalem.”

  The conjoined ladders bowed worse when leaned against the pole. The Hebron highway was empty, but they had no guarantee that a truckload of Arabs wouldn’t race past at any moment. Hugo snatched the cutters.

  The students held the ladder. Hugo shinnied up the first rungs, climbed another ten, then hopped over the knotted joint, making the whole assembly sway frightfully.

  Reaching the top, he clung to the pole with one hand and tried to snip the wire with the other. The thick phone line called for both hands on the cutters. The ladder wobbled, an unconfident thing.

  Hugo called down to Yakob, “This is high enough to kill me. Just so you know.”

  Yakob rested his elbow on a shoulder of one of the Palmachniks, like men joshing.

  “A Nazi camp didn’t kill you. A British noose didn’t. The Arabs have tried it. You’re Kharda. Cut the fucking wire.”

  Using both hands, Hugo extended the cutters to the phone line. Yakob was wrong. Hugo was alive just as the warden had said he would be, as Pinchus had showed him, because he did not matter much.

  Squeezing hard, Hugo severed the wire. The black line recoiled from his clippers, springing away to collapse satisfyingly dead in the road.

  They cut the phone line in two more places to be sure the Arabs couldn’t repair it. Hugo pocketed the wire cutters; he might want them later for a boobytrap.

  Yakob led his saboteurs up Lone Tree Hill. From there, they’d be among the first to see the convoy.

  On the hilltop, ten Palmachniks huddled in a warren of holes and trenches. A lean-to kept the wind and moisture off them. A massive oak stood sentinel here, the tallest thing in all of Gush Etzion.

  Hugo found Gabbi on the hill. He’d not seen her in two months, since the funeral of the lamed hey. She seemed hungrier than before. The sinews in her neck stood out; a dusky tinge circled her eyes. The girl had slept too little, seen too much.

  After a cursory greeting, Gabbi gave Hugo her frank opinion on Rivkah. Her pregnant sister should be elsewhere, but Gabbi didn’t say Jerusalem. She said America, with Vince. She wanted to see her family sprout there, where it would flourish. In America, her papa and mama, and Gabbi herself, would always survive. Or else why had Rivkah left them in the first place?

  She asked Hugo not to tell Rivkah she’d said this; she was tired and shouldn’t have spoken. Hugo rested a hand on the rifle she held, the thing that never left the girl’s side and might keep her safe in Palestine. Hugo left Gabbi to her vigil.

  The first sign of the convoy came not on the road but in the air, an Auster scouting ahead. The little plane’s racket filled the morning valley, then it touched down on Hugo’s landing strip.

  The Jerusalem road came down from a high bend at Dheisheh into the valley of the patriarchs. Little Ein Tzurim, with a better view of the road than Lone Tree Hill, cheered first.

  An armored car of the Haganah led the way. Behind it lumbered a rolling behemoth, a roadblock-buster with a bulldozer plow affixed to its grille. Behind the battering ram rolled a procession of trucks, armored buses, and vehicles so lengthy Hugo and Yakob couldn’t see its end, even from atop the ladders the boys leaned against the great single oak.

  Chapter 91

  Rivkah

  A carnival mood arrived with the convoy. The settlers’ travails were banished, hunger forgotten, the graves put out of mind. Even without their children, Massuot Yitzhak danced and whistled at each laden truck.

  Rivkah waited with Vince beside the road. Eight supply trucks stopped on squealing brakes in Massuot Yitzhak, twenty transports powered up Kfar Etzion’s hill, three each went to the two smaller kibbutzim. Rivkah had no shyness over her glee, nor did Vince; both clapped and cupped hands to shout. Rivkah needed nutrition for the child; the settlement needed fighters and guns and concrete. This was a day of deliverance.

  In the wadi below, armored cars and buses disgorged a fresh company of reinforcements. One hundred and thirty-six fighters stepped off the buses; eighty-five swapped places to return to Jerusalem.

  In Massuot Yitzhak, the settlers reached for crates and boxes, an excited clatter. Planks were used as ramps to roll fuel drums to the ground. Vince joined Rivkah in line to carry supplies off a truck.

  The Haganah man handing down supplies swung a box to him, then to her. Vince turned away first, then froze looking over Rivkah’s shoulder.

  “I know you.”

  Rivkah pivoted, too. A tall Haganah captain knit his brows at her. A scar traced his jawline from behind one ear.

  Vince said, “You were Aliyah Bet. In Germany.”

  The captain nodded, not to Vince but to Rivkah.

  “Éva.”

  She set her box on the ground as if it were on fire and jumped at him, crossing wrists behind his neck. Rivkah laughed into the captain’s chest.

  “Oh my God.”

  In eight years he’d grown and broadened, been hurt and changed. Even so, she had her arms around the boy who’d pulled her out of the water.

  Rivkah left a hand around his waist. In German, she said, “Vince. This is Emile.”

  She’d never mentioned Emile to Vince, who set down his carton and took Emile’s hand. With them, he switched to German.

  “The Fulda train station. I was with the Buchenwald group.”

  “I remember. We put you on the Katznelson.”

  “You told us you’d make it back to Palestine one day. Here you are.”

  Vince and Emile, incredibly, had met before, even for a moment in all the world.

  Emile poked Rivkah. “The last time I saw you, you had no clothes on. You were running from the guards at Atlit.”

  “You, too.” Rivkah said to Vince, “Emile s
aved my life.”

  Here was Emile, returned. The long scar down his jaw warned her not to celebrate him just yet.

  “Where have you been?”

  “Let’s get the trucks unloaded. We can talk while we work.”

  Vince hefted his box. He eyed Rivkah with open curiosity, to hear more about how another man had saved her life, how the two of them were once running naked.

  Emile took a carton off the truck; Rivkah lifted hers off the ground. They joined the flow of settlers ferrying supplies to the dining hall and storage sheds, the fuel depot and shops. Massuot Yitzhak’s portion of the convoy was forty tons.

  Walking through the kibbutz, Rivkah pointed out her house, the front door she’d patched from bullets fired by British police. Quickly she gave Emile the highlights of her last eight years. She’d adopted the name Rivkah, left her by a woman who’d died in Atlit. Mrs. Pappel had taken her in. Rivkah showed the orchards and terraces; she tried to describe the work.

  They set their boxes outside the dining hall, then turned emptyhanded for the walk back to the trucks. Vince shadowed them, gracefully taking the rear. “Now you,” she said to Emile.

  From Atlit, he’d been sent to the internment camp on Cyprus. In 1943, after three years behind wire, he volunteered with five thousand others for the Jewish Brigade. He fought in the Italian campaign under the British Eighth Army. The scar was nothing special. A gift from a German.

  At war’s end, the Haganah assigned him to the Aliyah Bet. Emile stayed in Europe visiting Displaced Persons camps, recruiting able-bodied men and women to build, plant, and defend a Jewish homeland.

  When the civil war with the Arabs broke out, he was summoned to Palestine. Emile became Palmach and was given command of a unit defending convoys between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. The Arabs challenged every column, blocking the highways with debris, firing at them from the high ground.

  Emile said to Vince, “You made it here, as well. I heard the Royal Navy boarded the Katznelson with no time to spare.”