Near the rear of the monastery, they entered a minefield. Placards marked the path through the mines; in case of an attack, the signs would come down. All the signs were in Vince’s hand. Rivkah led the way.
Before she and the medics reached the rear of the stone building, the sky whistled. One of the medics dragged Rivkah to the ground. The whistle became a screech, the earth shuddered, and a shockwave roared over Rivkah and the medics. Had she been standing she would have been swept away. One explosion followed another as the mortar shell set off a series of mines. When the eruptions stopped, they leaped up to run into the monastery.
A Haganah fighter met them in a courtyard, then hurried them inside. The monastery was the Haganah’s headquarters in the Gush, the ideal spot for disrupting the Hebron Road; this was why the Arabs made the monastery their opening target. The structure was thick, two stories tall; inside was the natural chill of high archways and stone floors. Casualties were being collected in the dining hall. Tapestries and candelabra decorated the room. Three bleeding soldiers lay on a table that could seat fifty.
The four medics tended to the wounded. Another shell rocked the walls; dust spilled from the ceiling. The medics lay themselves across the wounded soldiers.
A fighter ran into the hall, blood on his young face. “Bring a stretcher.”
Behind this soldier Rivkah and a medic took the stairs two at a time. A balcony above the main gate had an unfettered view of the Hebron road, the firing line of tanks, and the tide of Legionnaire fighters rising in the Brakha Valley. On the balcony stood a Vickers machine gun on a tripod, covered in bricks and stones knocked out of the monastery’s façade. The weapon was unscathed, barely dusty, but slumped behind it lay a broken young fighter.
The boy moaned. One shoulder appeared out of joint. Coughed blood stained his chin. Rivkah eased him away from the ruined wall; bricks and concussion had caved the boy’s ribs. He’d dived across the machinegun to save it.
A half mile away, the trio of tanks idled on the slope. Their British commanders stood in the turrets, but the tanks fired no more. The British wanted only to make their point. Open the road.
Rivkah and the medic lifted the wounded boy onto the stretcher. Before they could lift, the medic shouted, “Down!”
Another shell whooshed from above, not from the tanks but from a mortar on the road. The Arabs had come to Gush Etzion with a different purpose than the British. They wanted not the road but the land.
Rivkah protected the boy on the stretcher. The mortar shell landed short of the monastery, to explode in the trenches and barbed wire defenses on Russian Hill. Haganah fighters down there shouted, “First aid!”
The medic bellowed, “Wait!”
He and Rivkah hustled the wounded machine gunner down the stairs and hoisted the stretcher onto the dining hall table. The boy screamed to be lain on his torn back.
The medic told Rivkah, “The trenches. Go.”
She ran out the monastery’s main door, into sunlight and battle haze, into the trenches to the calls for help.
She pushed her way to a downed officer, brushing aside his worried squad. Without a word, the officer gave Rivkah his combat knife to cut away his pants leg. Quickly she poured sulfa into a shrapnel gash. Rivkah wrapped his leg, left his squad a tourniquet in case the bleeding didn’t stop, and kept the knife.
The Arabs kept up a steady fire of rifles and mortars on the defenders of the monastery. Rivkah stayed in the trenches while medics darted back and forth to carry the wounded out. Mortar shells crashed around the Haganah boys; machine gun rounds and sniper bullets ricocheted off the stones or drilled into the dirt. In the Brakha Valley the Arab thousand smoked cigarettes while the monastery and defense posts were walloped.
Rivkah chased calls for help in the trenches; she ran through the earthworks and across a cratered field to reach wounded near the barbed wire perimeter. Twice she ran back to the monastery to refill her medical bag. One of the young fighters recognized her, and word spread of the pregnant angel in the trenches.
By midmorning, the shelling slowed. The British tanks lumbered west to lay siege to the Mukhtar’s Saddle. The fighters in the ditch lay grenades and full magazines at their knees, sorry to see the shelling end; now the ground attack would begin.
The Arab thousand roused themselves. Legionnaires tossed away cigarettes, and the villagers unleashed a single-throated roar. The armored trucks opened machine gun fire, engaging the monastery’s few automatic weapons. In the trenches, every Haganah gun fired. Rivkah could no longer hear cries for help.
Five hundred Legionnaires advanced in a broad front up Russian Hill. The monastery responded with all its firepower. The officer whose leg Rivkah had tended to shouted to her, “Get out!”
Rivkah hadn’t the voice to answer though the gunfire, but she shook her head.
The Haganah prepared to evacuate the monastery. The defenders spoiled every weapon they couldn’t carry away. Rivkah was with the last group to leave, into the Brakha Valley, making for Kfar Etzion. The last fighter through the minefield yanked down Vince’s warning signs.
Chapter 111
Rivkah
The Arabs captured the Mukhtar’s Saddle in the afternoon. The three tanks rumbled onto the plateau and crushed the orchard there, then began a duel with Gabbi’s mortars on Yellow Hill. The western side of the kibbutz, the rows of homes, the dairy barn, and the library, took a beating.
After an hour of tanks and mortars swapping shells with the defenders, two hundred Arab villagers grew impatient, wanting their own piece of victory. They charged at Kfar Etzion’s rifles. The dug-in settlers and Haganah laid them low, casting dead and wounded across the Wadi Abu Rish and down in the cemetery. Legion troops stayed back to let the bombardment do its work, as they had at the monastery.
Kfar Etzion’s children’s house had been turned into a post-surgery ward. While the battle raged, Rivkah worked there, holding hands with patients to distract their pain. She sat for some time with the officer who took the leg wound in the trench. Fuzzy from anesthesia, he asked about her child as if it were born. Rivkah let this be, gave herself a daughter, and told him the girl was safe in Jerusalem with her father.
At dusk, Rivkah joined a squad of Palmach as their medic on Kfar Etzion’s south slope. Twenty-five fighters took cover in the damaged houses. Jewish snipers rested rifles on sandbags.
A mile off, haze poured from the monastery’s windows; flames flashed inside them. The Arabs would burn it down to keep the Haganah out. Below the Mukhtar’s Saddle, a hundred Legionnaires advanced. They walked into a minefield and suffered. The guns of the Palmach added to their misery.
With the monastery ablaze, mines in their path, and the unsilenced guns of Kfar Etzion ahead, the Legion troops retreated to the Saddle, to brood over their next move.
In the failing light, the tanks withdrew. When the British turned away, the Legion and Arab villagers lost their appetite for pushing deeper into the bloc. As night touched down, the Legionnaires loaded onto the trucks that had brought them from Hebron; the villagers who’d come for plunder walked away home. No cheers went up while the Arabs scoured the battlefield for their dead and wounded.
There seemed little point to the assault. It was punitive, not much more. The settlers and Haganah remained on their hilltops; the Jerusalem road was still blocked. Palmachniks made their way through the dimming Brakha Valley to put out the monastery fire and reoccupy the remains. Another unit headed for the Saddle.
The fight had been costly on both sides. Twelve bodies lay in Neveh Ovadia, candleflames at their crowns. Forty Haganah and eight settlers had taken wounds. The Arabs lost over a hundred killed and injured.
Rivkah ate her evening meal in Kfar Etzion. They had won the day, but it did not show. The defenders finished their plates quickly, to ready for more guard duty, for the vigil and the Kaddish over their dead.
; In the dark, Rivkah walked to Massuot Yitzhak. Below the quarry road, the sighs of shovels rose from the cemetery under the glow of gravediggers’ lanterns.
Arriving home in the night, Rivkah dropped her medical bag on the porch and sat. She wanted to listen to nothing, no cannons or gunfire. She tried to stop the day from replaying in her head. Rivkah expected Mrs. Pappel to come with tea and the story of her own day. No lanterns were lit inside.
“Mrs. Pappel?”
She went inside to light a lamp. She checked Mrs. Pappel’s room, then sat at the kitchen table. The letter was gone.
Rivkah tore from the house to the dining hall where Mrs. Pappel had been assigned. In the kitchen eight young settlers prepared for the morning meal. No one had seen Mrs. Pappel since the afternoon. One said, “She wasn’t much help.”
Another said, “She packed a sack of food and left.”
“Where was she going?”
“To Yellow Hill. That’s what she said.”
“During the battle?”
“Yes, of course.”
Rivkah flew out under the stars, to rush to Yellow Hill and ask Gabbi what she knew. But Yellow Hill was a half-mile away, through darkness and mines. The Palmachniks and the sentries would not know she was coming. Rivkah changed direction, murmuring “No, no, no.”
She ran through the settlement to the last place she wanted to look, the clinic.
“She’s alright.” The nurse spread her arms the instant Rivkah burst in. “She’s alright.” Rivkah fought her off and flung open the door into the little ward.
Six beds were poorly lit by one kerosene lamp. An open window ushered out the fumes and the smells of bandaged boys and let in the trill of insects from the orchard. Rivkah inched down the row of wounded fighters. They eyed her without greeting.
Mrs. Pappel lay in the last bed. Rivkah stifled a gasp. Only one of Mrs. Pappel’s feet, the left, lifted the blanket. Rivkah braced herself on the mattress.
Mrs. Pappel said, “I’m so glad you’re safe. Now go find a chair, dear.” Rivkah hesitated to leave her bedside. “Go on. We can’t have you falling around in here.”
One of the soldiers called for Rivkah to take the chair beside him.
Rivkah sat, and Mrs. Pappel reached for her, a way to tell her to stay contained. Her skin had the pallor of the limestone hills. Mrs. Pappel’s teeth gritted when she moved and spoke, showing how wracked she was despiteher effort to hide it from Rivkah.
Mrs. Pappel said, “Look at you. Such a hero. You smell like blood.”
“What happened?”
Mrs. Pappel looked down at herself. She tried to shift her left leg to display it under the covers but caught her breath at some stab and left the leg still. The blanket should not have lain flat.
“I stepped on a mine.”
“My God. How? Where?”
“I told you, I hate cooking. By noon, I figured, enough. The one place I didn’t want to die was a kitchen. You were at the monastery. I was scared for you, but even from a mile away I could tell that was no place anyone should be delivering lunch. So I filled a bag for Gabbi and the boys on Yellow Hill. Halfway there, shells started to fly in and out, explosions all over the place. I didn’t know it, but I ran right into a minefield.”
Mrs. Pappel pointed. “Right below the knee.”
“I’m so sorry.”
“I think the mine was one of Hugo’s. Its heart wasn’t in it. Two lovely young men came down the hill with a stretcher. They carried me all the way to Kfar Etzion. The doctor did what he had to.”
“I was in the clinic. I didn’t see you.”
“I saw you, Liebling. Fearless. After the surgery, I asked to be brought back here. You were busy with others, and that’s as it should be.”
“No.”
“Yes. And I don’t want you slouching around here with me, either. You have work out there. The Arabs will come back. Stop in. Bring tea. Enough for these boys, too.”
Mrs. Pappel twisted the gemmed, silver band on her left hand.
“Do you think Malik will mind?”
Rivkah lost hold of her tears.
“Malik will put you on that mean camel and ride you to the sea.”
“We can swim.”
“You can swim.”
Rivkah laid her cheek on Mrs. Pappel’s good right leg. Against the blanket, she cried more. Mrs. Pappel lay her hand on Rivkah’s crown; a tremble in the fingers did not mask how much pain she was in.
“Go home. You had a day.”
“So did you.”
“But I’ve had a bath. Go. I’ll be here tomorrow.”
She kissed the grey top of Mrs. Pappel’s head. “Where is your letter?”
Mrs. Pappel patted her gown. “Yakob brought it to me. I’ll keep it for a while. How’s the baby?”
“Fine.”
“Then everything else is fine. Goodnight, Liebling. Give the young man back his chair.”
The night outside was different, deeper and blacker, perhaps colder. Rivkah did not go home but to the barn where the Field Force kept its radio. She asked the operators there to locate the Haganah commander, so he could keep his word and let her radio Jerusalem.
Chapter 112
Vince
May 10
Jerusalem
The radio room had space for one person at a time; Vince stood on the threshold. The basement of the Jewish Agency was quiet, just ten Haganah men and women on the late shift monitoring the radio frequencies of posts around Palestine.
At one minute past eleven, Vince grew concerned the call would not come through. Before he could lay a hand on the radioman’s shoulder, the soldier spoke into his headphone mic. “Jerusalem here. Just a moment.” He left the headphones on the table for Vince.
“Five minutes.”
“I need more.”
The radioman shook out a cigarette and did not offer one to Vince. They swapped places; he stood in the doorway. His black hair was slicked down; he seemed debonair, in no hurry.
Vince said, “Please.”
“I know who you are. The American reporter who took a bullet at Nebi Daniel. Do you know who I am?”
“I’m sorry, I don’t.”
“I’m a Jew with a brother at Kfar Etzion. I work this radio eight hours a day. I haven’t spoken with him in a month. That’s your time. Those are my orders.” The radioman closed the door.
Vince put on the headphones, aware of every second. He pressed the talk button.
“Rivkah?”
“How are you? We only heard you were wounded.”
“I’m fine. A bullet through my shoulder; it’s healed up. Got out of the hospital three days ago.”
“What happened?”
“Emile was in the blockbuster truck. They were taking fire. I tried to get to him.”
“I’m sorry. Thank you.”
“How’s everything there?”
“Mrs. Pappel was hurt. She stepped on a landmine during the attack. It took off her right foot. I’m trying to get her on a plane to Tel Aviv. You’ll go see her?”
“Of course. She’ll be alright?”
“Yes. Yakob and Gabbi send their regards. How is Jerusalem?”
“The Arabs are mostly gone. There’s an invasion coming. They’ll be back.”
“Hugo?”
“He was with the Irgun at Deir Yassin.”
“My God. Was it a massacre like they say?”
“Hugo says no. Either way, it was bad. Rivkah.”
“Yes?”
“Can we stop?”
The moments of humming silence were costly. “Alright.”
“I love you. You called to hear me say that.”
“I did.”
“I’ve been doing everything I can to find a way in. But there’s no traffic o
ut of Jerusalem going south. There are no planes out. I pulled every string I could. I even asked Hugo to check with Pinchus. There’s nothing. I can’t get to you. Can you get out?”
“No.”
Two minutes were gone.
“How’s the baby?”
“She kicks.”
“She?”
“I think a boy would be quieter.”
“Not my boy.”
“Then perhaps he. Malik says he wants a word with you.”
“You saw him?”
“He snuck in for a moment. Are you writing?”
“No.”
“Start. Hear me. We share this child. But we have different fights. Mine is not yours, so you cannot come here.”
“What do you want me to do?”
“I want you to report on the birth of our child into a free Jewish state. Tell me you understand.”
“I’m trying.”
“Please.”
“I miss you.”
“We’re not apart, Vince. In this, we are never apart. I will go now.”
“We’ve still got two minutes.”
“Let’s leave those minutes ahead of us, and know they’re there. Goodbye. I love you.”
“Don’t go.”
Vince listened to the static until the radio man opened the door.
Chapter 113
Vince
May 12
Jerusalem
In the morning shadow of the King David Hotel, the passenger door of a green Škoda opened.
“Climb in.”
Vince asked, “You’re my driver?”
Behind the wheel, Hugo looked around the old car. “One last joke from Pinchus.”
Vince tossed his duffel into the back, then squeezed in. Traffic was light on Julian’s Way, but the taxis were running again.
Isaac's Beacon Page 40