Zion (Jerusalem)

by Colin Falconer

  “I mean, is there a statute of limitations on ownership? The Romans forcibly repatriated the Jews two thousand years ago. Right?”

  “What do you say to the Arabs who have lived here ever since?”

  “In 1937 the Peel Commission advocated partition. That’s always seemed like a good idea to me.”

  “That’s because you’re not an Arab and your home isn’t inside the proposed Jewish territory. How would you feel if the Americans came along and told you to move to Manchester so the French could take over Guildford?” He realized he had raised his voice and dropped it back to a whisper. “Look at it this way. Our family’s only lived in Surrey for forty years. Some Arabs can trace their roots in a village back to the time of Mohammed!”

  James stared at his older brother, surprised by the sudden passion the subject had aroused in him. So unlike Henry. “You’ve changed color, Hal,” he said.

  “I’ve been in Palestine a long time.”

  “I hope not too long.”

  “Don’t lecture me, Jimmy. At least my view of things coincides with my duty. A happy coincidence perhaps, but there you are. Don’t let your opinions allow you to forget what you’re here for.”

  “I know what I’m here for. To fight another damned war.” He leaned forward and said in a whisper: ‘I’ve seen the files. In the thirties the kibbutzim instituted a compulsory premilitary training program for all boys and girls between fourteen and seventeen. The CID think the Haganah now has a membership of forty thousand, including an elite professional paramilitary unit of fifteen hundred highly trained men and women, called the Palmach. If they want to make trouble, Hal, they’ve had plenty of time to learn how to do it.”

  “It won’t come to that.”

  “You seem very sure so maybe you know something I don’t. But the one thing I would like to avoid is surviving D-day and the Ardennes and then coming here and getting shot in some stupid little war I don’t want to fight.”

  “No one wants a war here.’

  ‘Really? Well I don’t know, I’m just new here. But if you ask me who wants a war? I’d say everyone does.’

  Old City

  The woman in the black abbayah stopped outside the Hass’an Olive Oil Company. She had passed the factory many times this particular evening, in order to familiarize herself with the location, but who would have noticed? A tool of enslavement, the veil also gave her the advantage of anonymity.

  She stepped into the alley beside the coffee shop, turned another corner into the shadows of the laneway behind the factory. A wooden staircase led to a door on the second floor. She hurried up the steps and tried the handle. It was open. She took a Beretta from the folds of her abbayah and went inside.

  Rishou Hass’an shut down the press and locked the doors. It was late, and no sign of his brother. He had hoped Majid might return so he could go home to Rab’allah for a few days but typically his brother had been delayed elsewhere. Probably with a mistress. Never mind. He would go tomorrow.

  Majid was dependable in other ways. Money, for example. Without Majid the Hass’an Olive Oil Company would not be possible. Who knew where all this money came from? Some of it was profit from Majid’s dealings on the black market, some the proceeds from the taxi lease. Allah alone knew what else he was involved in.

  It had been Rishou’s idea to use the olives from their orchards to start their own press. Now, at least, they would be able to leave something worthwhile for their sons even if the land around Rab’allah were swallowed up by the Jews.

  As their father had predicted, the old ways were dying. Zayyad's influence was waning; it was money that mattered now. Money bought cars and suits and cigarettes. Money bought respect.

  He looked at his watch. He would head upstairs to the office and write up the accounts and then he would go to sleep. He kept a mattress on the floor for such a purpose.

  He lit a hurricane lamp and turned off the electric light. He went upstairs, shivering. Majid had pilfered a kerosene heater from the British stores. He would need it tonight.

  He opened the door of his office and a draught of warm air met him. He stared at the glow of the heater, alarmed. Someone was here already! “Majid?” he said.

  The door clicked shut behind him.

  He swung around. There was a woman, an Arab woman, standing behind the door, holding a gun. He stared in astonishment.

  “Put down the lamp,” the woman said.

  Something familiar about that voice, he thought, even though it was muffled by her veil.

  He put down the lamp.

  The gun was pointing at his chest. “Just stay where you are.”

  For a moment he was too shocked to move. Wait a minute, he knew that voice. He grinned and stepped towards her. “Sarah ...”

  “I said stay where you are!”

  “I can’t believe you’re here ...”

  “I just want to talk. Don’t come any closer - ”

  He ignored her, pushing the barrel of the gun aside. He put his arms around her.

  “Don’t - ” she murmured.

  The Beretta fell to the floor. It wasn’t loaded anyway.

  Atlit

  The ruins of the Crusader fortress brooded on the promontory above the beach. A full moon hung over the Mediterranean, a stairway of silver descending from a star-studded sky. The vast tent city was silent, but from the skeletal watchtowers fingers of light probed the darkness.

  Asher looked at the luminous dial of his watch. Five minutes.

  “Ready?”

  Rebecca and Netanel lay beside him on the dune. “We’re ready,” Rebecca said.

  “Get as close as you can. The show starts right on twenty-two hundred. Go for the wire halfway between the two towers.”

  Rebecca and Netanel crawled away. Asher saw others follow them, slithering on their bellies, like black snakes.

  The minutes passed slowly. He wanted to urinate badly, though he knew his bladder must be empty. It was always like this. The waiting was the worst part.

  Shouts went up from inside the camp. A muted orange glow rose into the sky like a sunrise in miniature. They had started the diversion. He looked at his watch. Right on time.

  The searchlights on the watchtowers swung away from the wire. Asher started to crawl forward, his Sten cradled in his arms. The rest of his command followed; one hundred and thirty of them, spread out in a skirmish line, all in black jerseys and black drill trousers, invisible against the night.

  He heard the crackle of gunfire from inside the compound. Pray God the British are firing in the air! He peered towards the wire, at the spot where he knew Rebecca’s and Netanel’s platoons would be at work, but it all seemed quiet enough there.

  The fire formed a corona of orange on the night sky. He heard one of the guards on the watchtower shout a warning. By now he would have seen the first refugees start their run towards the wire. The sentry fired one quick burst from the Vickers, the tracers angled very low, urging them back.

  Hurry up, Rebecca.

  More shots from inside the compound. The searchlights continued to probe the rows of tents but from where Asher lay it was impossible to see clearly what was happening.

  Twenty-two o-three. They must be inside the wire by now, running towards the arsenal, taking out the guards. They would try to get inside if they could and carry away any automatic weapons and ammunition. Then use their grenades. Perhaps another five minutes to wait, less than three if Netanel and Rebecca ran into trouble.

  Asher dared not get closer to the wire.

  He smelt death on the wind. Whose turn would it be tonight?

  The fire was almost out, and the sounds of rioting had died down. The searchlight swung restlessly over the compound, then began to work inexorably back to the wire. Asher crawled closer to the perimeter, fifty yards from the base of the tower. He could see the holes where Netanel and Rebecca and their Palmachniks had gone through. He knew in a few moments the guards would see it too.

  He heard the s
taccato of automatic weapons, this time from further away, near the army barracks. The searchlight swung away again. The sentries shouted the alarm a second time.

  He waited.

  They must have located the arsenal. He listened to the sounds of the firefight, worried now. The battle went on too long. Perhaps they can’t get inside, Asher thought. Perhaps it’s too heavily guarded.

  A blinding white light was followed fractions of a second later by a thundercrack. Asher looked up, saw a fireball billowing into the sky, followed by a mushroom of smoke.

  “Jesus Fucking Ker-ist!” he heard one of the soldiers shout from the watchtower.

  Asher brought the Sten to his shoulder, aimed carefully at the light, and fired a short burst. A splinter of glass, a scream. More Sten fire from his right and the other light was extinguished.

  Men ran past him with wire cutters, and set to work.

  But as soon as they were inside the wire, everything went to shit.

  The prisoners rushed out around blindly in the darkness. The instructions the Haganah infiltrators inside the wire had given them had been instantly forgotten. They streamed away from the tents towards the perimeter fence.

  In the Red House, with Yarkoni, it had all seemed so easy. But now Asher was buffeted bodies in the darkness, his own commands lost under the shouts and screams. How would he and his men ever be able to extricate themselves and their charges from this chaos . . .

  He reached out, grabbed one of the running figures, a woman. “Palmach! Come with me!” he shouted.

  One of the guards on the watchtower opened up with his Vickers gun, firing blind. Asher’s leg went numb beneath him, and he fell. He tried to get up, couldn’t. Bullets raked the ground by his head, sand stinging his face. There was a roar as a grenade exploded at the base of the watchtower.

  The machine-gun fell silent.

  His thigh was sticky wet. His fingers found a jagged hole in his own flesh the size of a small coin. He pressed down hard with the palm of his hand to staunch the pumping blood.

  Someone knelt beside him, cradling his shoulders. “You’re hurt.” It was a woman’s voice, a refugee.

  “Get to the wire!”

  “But you’re hurt ...”

  The blood was still squirting between his fingers. Had to keep the pressure on, he remembered from his training.

  “Give me your knife!” the woman said. “Quickly!”

  He groped in his webbing belt and handed it to her. She cut through her skirt and pressed a ball of cloth into his hand. “Hold this on the wound,” she said. He plugged the bullet hole with it. He was starting to feel faint from the loss of blood.

  Palmachniks and refugees were stampeding around them. He heard another burst of gunfire. They were in the open, exposed.

  “You have to get to the wire!” he shouted at her.

  The woman bound the makeshift dressing in place with more strips cut from her skirt. “Can you move your leg? Is it broken?”

  “I can’t feel anything! Get away from here!”

  “Not without you.”

  Asher looked up at her through a red mist of pain. The face of a boy angel, choirboy-cropped hair, huge eyes, dark shadows in her cheeks. She draped an arm around his shoulders, helped him to his feet.

  Moonlight splashed over the bodies that littered the compound. We’ll never make it, Asher thought. The British will cut us down before we reach the wire.

  Suddenly three Palmachniks ran towards them and he saw the white flash of their Sten guns. Someone grabbed the woman and pushed her away. “Get to the wire! Hurry!” He heard Netanel’s voice. “Ash! Where are you hurt?”

  “My leg.”

  “Shit, you’re bleeding bad. Help me here!”

  Netanel and a fellow Palmachnik grabbed him under his arms and dragged him away. Asher heard the chatter of a Sten as a third covered their retreat.

  He blacked out.

  The trucks were waiting, engines idling, on the road beyond the dunes. The two Palmachniks ran down the sand, their guns slung across their shoulders, Asher supported between them in a chair lift.

  The lead trucks started to rumble away, their headlights switched off, heading for the turn-off road that would take them across the plain to a kibbutz twenty miles to the east. They had to be well clear before the British armored patrols arrived from Haifa.

  Asher was hefted into the back of the last lorry. Strong hands pulled him aboard.

  The woman pulled away from her escort and leaned inside. “Is he all right?”

  “Get away from here!” A Palmachnik grabbed her and pushed her in the back of another lorry, with the rest of the refugees. She saw the man’s face briefly in the moonlight. A shaven head almost concealed by a khaki balaclava, the glimpse of a scar under the blacking.

  She did not recognize Netanel Rosenberg, not even the sound of his voice.

  Tel Aviv-Jerusalem Road

  There were perhaps as many as twenty young men and women in the back of the lorry, dressed in blue denims, ostensibly Jewish laborers on their way to a kibbutz. The lorry rumbled past the barbed wire of the British army base at Sarafand, and headed across the coastal plain to the east. They travelled past vineyards and wheat fields and the towering minarets of Ramie to the maw of the Bab el-Wad, the Gate of the Valley, the twenty-mile-long gorge that guarded the road to Jerusalem.

  This was the way that the camel caravans had come in the time of Christ. Titus’s Legionnaires had built their forts along this road, and the Crusaders had passed this way as they rode against the Saracens.

  As they entered the wadi the bell of the red-tiled Monastery of the Seven Agonies reached them on the wind, accompanied by the delicate odor of orange blossom. They could see the Trappists at work in their terraced vineyards, and above them, the grey blockhouse of Latrun Fort where the British sentries would be watching them through binoculars.

  Then the walls of the valley closed in on them and they were inside the jaws of the Bab el-Wad, twenty miles of sinuous curves, the white cubes of Arab houses clinging to the steep walls of rock and pine. The Palmach men and women in the lorry fell silent and stared, and were glad of the Sten gun parts the women carried with them inside their brassieres and taped between their legs, grateful for the grenades concealed inside the potato sacks and the spare rifles taped underneath the boards of the lorry. They could feel hostile eyes watching them from every eyrie and they knew they were inside the lion’s mouth.

  Three hours later they reached the village of Kiryat Anavim and turned a left-hand curve in the road. As they looked down on Jerusalem, Netanel felt the tension drain from his body. He looked up at the glaring white tomb of the prophet Samuel, high on its mountain top. It was from here, legend had it, that Richard the Lionheart looked down at Jerusalem for the first time and wept. Netanel wept also, and he murmured the words of the Passover prayer he had said, a lifetime ago, at a glittering table in Germany.

  But the soft young man who had spoken those words in Ravenswald would not have recognized the hard-eyed Palmachnik who rode the lorry down the Jaffa Road towards the rose-colored walls of the Holy City.

  “Next year in Jerusalem.”

  Kfar Herzl Kibbutz

  The farm has come a long way in the last ten years, Sarah thought. Now there are lawns and flowers, swings and sandboxes; the school has Bunsen burners and micro-scopes; there is electric light and machines to milk the cows in the barns; we even have our own hospital. The cottages piled up the slopes in neat rows of red tiles and white walls, the gardens carefully tended.

  Around the, rippling in the heat haze of the afternoon, lay the Judean hills, brown and stark, the color of dung, a reminder of what the land was before they arrived. They had kept the promise Herzl and the Zionists had made; they had tamed the wilderness. But sometimes Sarah secretly longed for the way it was before, when they had first come here. In those days they had battled the wilderness for every inch, and she had not realized how sad it might seem when it was beaten.
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  She thought about Rishou. His heart must break when he comes here. Perhaps it is why he spends so much time in Jerusalem now. When he returns to Rab’allah he must look down at us and what he sees rebukes him twice; it reminds him how his ancestors’ land was taken away from him, and it demonstrates how much more advanced our European ways have become.

  Isaac was playing soccer in the playground with four other boys. A fine boy, she thought; tall and athletic and good-looking. He was nearly eleven years old. Where had that time gone?

  He had been six years old when Asher had joined the Jewish Brigade and gone to fight in Italy. She started work with the Histadruth in Jerusalem and spent less and less time at the kibbutz. Yaakov had virtually raised him since then.

  Asher limped on to the verandah and eased himself on to a chair beside her. Sarah maneuvered another chair so he could rest his injured leg on it. “Don’t fuss over me,” he said.

  “You’re a wounded hero.”

  “Sarcasm is not an attractive side of your personality.”

  “Talking of personalities, you’ve behaved like a goat with a thorn in its backside ever since you came back here. What’s wrong?”

  “I don’t like being an invalid.”

  “It’s better than being a corpse.”

  He shrugged. “I’m not going to apologize for being alive.”

  “Of course not.”

  “I can’t stand sitting round here like a cripple!”

  “It’s not my fault, or my father’s.”

  She watched him wrestle with his pride. He scratched at the dressing on his leg. The bullet had not broken the bone, which was lucky, but it had damaged an artery, which was not.

  He grunted, which was as close to an apology as she had ever got from him. Asher and his pride! He nodded towards Isaac. “The boy misses you. You should come back here to the kibbutz.”

  “You’re here with him now. Anyway, my work for the Haganah is just as important as yours.”