Zion (Jerusalem)

by Colin Falconer

  “They were armed. Unlike the women and children who would have been on the bus if you had not warned us.”

  “This wasn’t meant to happen!”

  Sarah produced a small packet, wrapped with brown paper, from the pocket of her coat. “You’ll find we have been most generous.”

  Majid snatched the package from the table as if it were a pornographic magazine. “This wasn’t mean to happen!”

  “What was meant to happen? The women were meant to be raped, the children mutilated?”

  “I am a good Arab. Four of those men were from my own village.”

  Sarah sipped her coffee. “You haven’t counted your reward.”

  Majid held the package under the table and tore it open. He put the contents in his pocket. He seemed calmer. “That’s a lot of money.”

  “There’s a lot more, if you are prepared to earn it.”

  Majid leaned in. “I didn’t know you were going to kill so many! May Allah burn me on the Day of the Fire if I lie!”

  I have a feeling He will burn you anyway, Sarah thought. I wonder if Rishou knows about this? I doubt it. “What did you think we were going to do? We have a right to defend ourselves.”

  “You could have just cancelled the bus.”

  “Then your friends would have attacked another one. Now they have gone to Allah as martyrs. Think of the innocent women and children you saved.”

  “They were only Jews,” Majid said, and then he realized what he had said and found something of particular interest on the floor.

  “There’s plenty more where that came from,’ Sarah said.

  “I cannot help you anymore. That’s it. I’m a good Arab.”

  Her superiors in Shai had anticipated this. They had told her what to do and it wasn’t pleasant. But what was there in Palestine right now that could be construed as pleasant?

  “I cannot let you do that. . . Majid,” she said.

  The sweat erupted on his upper lip as thick as dewdrops. His eyes widened. He realized he was trapped.

  “You little whore,” he said in Arabic.

  “Your real name is Majid Hass’an, you come from a village called Rab’allah, you own an olive press in the Muslim quarter. You see, we know everything about you. You may think you are a good Arab but I wonder what your comrades in the Holy Strugglers will think if they find out what you have done?”

  “You can’t. . .”

  “Don’t be so naïve. What do you think is happening here in Palestine? We are fighting for our lives! They killed millions of us in Europe and no one lifted a finger. If we lose Palestine we have nowhere else to go. This is a war, Majid, and we will do anything - anything - because we cannot afford to lose!”

  Majid stared at her. A war? For as long as he could remember there had been trouble between Arabs and Jews. It was like a tribal feud. He had never considered that there might be a day when it would be actually resolved, one way or another. But this girl was serious! She really thought the Jews could win, take Palestine away from them. The very notion made him feel sick to his stomach.

  He forced the thought from his mind to consider the more immediate threat to himself. The Haganah now knew who he was, and they were obviously prepared to expose him. He could not allow that to happen.

  Besides, he needed the money.

  Old City

  The Hass’an Olive Oil Company took up a rundown two storey building with a coffee house on one side and a brass merchant on the other. It was evening and the brass merchant was pulling down the shutters on his shop. A Sudanese hawker had set up a little brazier by the roadside and had begun roasting peanuts.

  A woman, covered head to foot by a black abbayah, only her eyes visible behind her veil, stopped to stare. Three men were working at the press in the gloomy backroom, their faces beaded with sweat. The woman watched them, unnoticed, then moved on, indistinguishable from the hundreds of other Arab women who walked the street that day.

  But she was different from all of them in a very fundamental way.

  She was Jewish.

  Sarah Landauer watched Rishou work the press. He had taken off his shirt and wore only a white vest, and sweat glistened on his back and shoulders. He has changed, she thought. The boy she remembered from the apple orchards had gone. He was a man now, his shoulders broader, his chest deeper. She felt something squirm inside her. She thought seeing him would exorcise his ghost from his mind. But she realized nothing had changed. She still wanted him.

  It was dangerous standing here. She must go. She had indulged a foolish whim. She promised herself she would never return.

  PART TWO

  PALESTINE, 1946

  Chapter 6

  Atlit

  Marie stared at the wire. It was like she had been staring at barbed wire all her life; the camp at Auschwitz, the DP camps in Europe, now here. But instead of the chill seeping into her bones off a flat Silesian plain, the gritty wind that blew her hair came from a grey Mediterranean ocean.

  Her stigmata were not as apparent on her, as on so many of the others. She had not yet given in to hollow-eyed despair. Because she was thinner, she looked taller, and the lines of her face were more sharply chiseled. Her hair had been shorn a few months before in a camp in Austria to prevent lice and it was still as short as a boy’s.

  It had taken almost a year to reach Palestine. She found herself a place on one of the Mossad Aliyah Bet’s blockade runners, the Theodor Herzl, but it had been intercepted and boarded by a British navy frigate, just off Haifa. Once again she was behind the wire.

  But in her mind she was free.

  In her mind, she was engaged to be married to a young German Jew named Netanel Rosenberg. And if she could only find her way out of this place, she was sure she would find him again.

  Tel Aviv

  There were seven men and four women standing around Mordechai Yarkoni’s desk in the Red House, studying the pencil-drawn map spread out on the desktop. It looked like a crudely colored tablecloth. Asher Ben-Zion was among the group, once again field commander of the mission they were planning. The rest were Palmach platoon commanders; they included Rebecca Orenstein, her left hand still bandaged from the wound she had received months before at En Josef; there was also a young and tough-looking camp survivor, leading his first command. His name was Netanel Rosenberg.

  Yarkoni leaned forward, the light from the single bare bulb making his large brown head gleam like polished oak. “. . . there are sentry towers here and here . . .” he said, stabbing his finger on the map, “. . . and each one has a searchlight. The camp is surrounded by ten-foot wire. Imprisoned inside are six hundred of our comrades from Europe, most of them taken from the Theodor Herzl two weeks ago. The British are threatening to send them back to Europe.”

  He looked around the table, his eyes bright and hard with anger. “That will not happen.”

  “How many soldiers?” someone asked.

  “Three hundred.”

  A low whistle. Three hundred! They would be outnumbered as well as outgunned.

  “But there is one vital weakness,” Yarkoni added, and the men and women grouped around the table leaned in. “Many of the soldiers are unarmed. Their weapons are stored here in the arsenal, under guard. If we can sabotage it, we can affect the escape without fighting a pitched battle.”

  “Which units will take out the arsenal?” Rebecca asked.

  “Yours and Netanel’s. You will be in overall command.”

  “Why don’t we just shoot out the searchlights in the towers and cut the wire?” someone asked.

  Yarkoni shook his head. “If we do that, we give the British too much warning. We have to get inside and sabotage the arsenal first.” He pointed to the map. “The main compound is here. We have arranged a diversion, enough to keep the watchtower busy while Rebecca’s and Netanel’s units go in.”

  Heads nodded agreement.

  “As you know a dozen of our comrades have infiltrated the camp over the last few weeks. At precisely
ten o’clock tomorrow night they will start a fire here on the far side of the tent compound. It will create a minor disturbance. Then they will throw a few rocks at the sentries, that sort of thing. Nothing to alarm the guards, just enough to keep them busy. While this is happening the rest of our people will shepherd two hundred of the prisoners towards the edge of the compound.”

  “The sentries on the watchtowers will see them,” someone said.

  “Of course. But they will think they are trying to escape the trouble. They won’t shoot providing they don’t get too close to the wire. While this is happening, Rebecca’s and Netanel’s commands will infiltrate the wire here and head for the arsenal. They will take what weapons they can and destroy the rest.”

  “It’s going to break my heart to blow up good ammunition,” Asher said.

  “Your job is to free prisoners, not to steal arms.” He looked at the others. “We will destroy the arsenal with explosives. As soon as they hear the explosion the remaining units will hit the sentry towers, while Asher takes a company of the Carmeli towards the compound. Each man will take two prisoners and lead them back through the perimeter to the trucks.”

  “That’s all right for the women,” Rebecca said, “but everyone knows what men are like. They’ll bump into each other in the dark.”

  Everyone laughed.

  “It’s a full moon tomorrow night,” Yarkoni said. “The forecast is for clear weather. It will give us enough light. Even the men.”

  “What about the two platoons at the arsenal?” Asher asked.

  “As soon as it is destroyed, they fall back and regroup with the units still inside the wire. They will then provide covering fire. There won’t be much resistance with the arsenal gone because the British simply won’t have the weapons to fight.”

  “If they’re not armed, why don’t we just go in and kill them?” someone asked. Every head in the room turned. Asher looked up to see who had spoken. It was Netanel.

  “We are there to defend our people, not to murder unarmed men.”

  “They are soldiers. They are here to murder us.”

  “That’s not the way we do business.” Yarkoni’s tone invited no further argument.

  Asher stared at Netanel. What he had just heard frightened him, and he wondered if he had made a wise choice in this particular recruit. Apparently he had impressed his father-in-law during his desert training, and Yaakov Landauer was not a man who was easily impressed. He had even selected Netanel for an additional five weeks’ training as a platoon commander.

  There’s a difference between us and them. We’re all Jews, but a sabra is hard and practical. Some of these men who came to them from the camps were different; they had a coldness about them that told him they were going to be trouble later on. Why don’t we just go in and kill them. Was that really what he’d said?

  “Any other questions?” Yarkoni asked.

  No one spoke. There was a chill in the room now. Asher could read the other faces: All right, some British soldiers are going to die if there’s a firefight that can’t be helped, but it will be in the heat of battle not cold-blooded murder.

  We’re not Nazis.

  The map was folded away and several of them went outside to fetch the Seder meal. Tonight was the first night of Passover. The matzo and herbs and roast shank of lamb were brought in, and some Mount Carmel wine was placed in a goblet by the door for Elijah. They all placed yarmulkas on their heads and Yarkoni picked up the Haggadah and began to read.

  “Why is this night different from other nights?” Asher said.

  Mordechai Yarkoni spread his hands, palm up, and read from the text before him. “This night is different because we celebrate the most important moment in the history of our people. On this night we celebrate their going forth in triumph from slavery into freedom ...”

  Chapter 7

  Jerusalem

  Captain James Talbot of the 6th Airborne Division sipped a glass of chilled chablis. The porcelain was Bavarian, the glassware by Mosar, the cutlery heavy Wilna silver. A piano played a soft but unidentifiable tune on the other side of the room.

  He noted that most of the restaurant’s clientele were either senior army officers or career bureaucrats. He despised the way they dabbed prissily at their lips with their napkins after every mouthful of prawn cocktail, continually sniffed the bouquet of their wine, how they never opened their mouths when they smiled. He hated them all. Except for his brother, of course.

  Well, perhaps.

  If there was a place to be seen in Jerusalem, Henry had told him, then it was Hesse’s. Hesse himself was a Berliner Jew, a round and garrulous man who had once been chief steward on a boat ferrying Jewish refugees to Palestine, back in the days when it was still a legal occupation. His restaurant was situated in a cobbled back street behind Jerusalem’s most expensive shopping district, Princess Mary Avenue. It had stayed open even through the worst of the rioting of 1936 and 1937, and the piano played constantly except on Friday evenings, the beginning of Shabbat.

  “So this is what you were doing while the rest of us were fighting Germans,” he said to his brother.

  Henry Talbot flushed. “It wasn’t my choice, you know, Jimmy.”

  “Yes, I know. Just joking.”

  “It wasn’t so funny if you were stuck here.”

  Of course, James thought. Must have been hell. But then everyone wants to be in a war once it’s over. “He also serves, and all that.”

  “You’re a little shit.”

  His cheeks flushed. He picked up his wine and pretended to concentrate on it. Henry had always been the kind of older brother you had nightmares about. At school he was hopeless at sport, a swot, and a complete wash-out in a fist fight. But at home he was overbearing and fastidious. James had tolerated it because he didn’t want to upset their mother. But there was no damned good reason why he should take it anymore.

  “Henry, if we weren’t in a rather fancy restaurant, I should have to ask you to take that back.”

  “Don’t be an ass.”

  “It’s ten years since you’ve been home. I’m not your little brother anymore.”

  ‘Just because you’ve got some pips on your shoulder doesn’t mean you’re all grown up. The Army’s a bit light on these days. If you can write your own name correctly two times out of three, they make you a brigadier-general.’

  Oh, fuck you, James thought. I earned these. I have a Military Cross for valor and you didn’t have to spell your name on D-day you just had to take out a German machine gun with two new recruits for Cornwall and a sergeant who still remembered fighting in a trench. He had last seen Henry in 1936, eight years ago. He was still at grammar school then. He was still too young to realize his big brother batted for the other team. Now he knew why some of the other boys laughed at him.

  “Here’s the food,” he said. A waiter brought two prawn cocktails - Hesse’s was famous for them - and they ate for a while in silence.

  “I imagine you’re rather glad it’s all over,” Henry said at last.

  “I wish it was.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning Palestine. I feel like a duck in a shooting gallery. At least when we were fighting the Germans there were rules.”

  “This will blow over, Jimmy. The Jews and the Arabs are always sniping at each other.”

  James put down his fork and leaned forward. “Blow over? It’s getting worse all the time. The bloody Jews are attacking forts and blowing up bridges and warehouses. The Lord alone knows what they’ll do next. In another couple of months they say there’ll be a hundred thousand British soldiers stationed here!”

  Someone dropped a tray in the kitchen. Everyone in the restaurant had turned pale. Like Talbot, they had all started at the crash, thinking it was a bomb. “The government will work something out,” Talbot said.

  “The government! How many fact-finding committees has Bevin sent over? No matter how many ‘facts’ they have, those clowns aren’t going to understand the
se fucking wogs any more than they do now.”

  “I suppose you have all the answers.”

  “Look, a few years ago we were supporting the Jews. Now we’re supporting the Arabs. We’ve twisted and turned this country so many bloody different ways it’ll take years to undo the knots! If ever!”

  A man Talbot knew from the Commissioner’s office glanced over at their table. “Keep your voice down,” Henry hissed.

  “It’s easy to be objective over here. None of you people saw the Nazis’ concentration camps.”

  “I didn’t know you had.”

  “Just one, a place called Belsen. That was enough.” He buttered his roll. The International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg had begun five months ago, and was still dominating international news.

  “Is it true? The things one reads about?”

  “This isn’t something I want to dwell on over lunch, but my one abiding memory is seeing a human skeleton in a striped uniform trying to cut flesh off a three-day-old corpse with the sharpened edge of a spoon. When our interpreter asked him what he was doing he said he was hungry. Form your own impressions.”

  Henry put down his fork. Suddenly the seafood was a little too raw and pink. He pushed the bowl away. “Thank God we won,” he said.

  “I don’t think it’s made much difference to the Jews. We don’t torture them or use them as slave labor but they still have to live in camps. We don’t want them, the Americans don’t want them, the Poles don’t want them, Russia certainly doesn’t want them. The only place that does want them they can’t get into.”

  “This isn’t their country,” Talbot said. “The Arabs lived here before they did.”

  “What difference does that make? We’ve only been here thirty years and we run the bloody place.”

  “That’s beside the point, the thing is - ”