“Jew fighting Jew?” Herschel shook his head in disbelief.
“Begin exhorted us to be strong, to be proud, to train and to wait patiently for vindication,” Frieda continued.
“We revisionists have been patient, and behold, we have been vindicated. Since the Germans and Soviets signed their nonaggression pact, the Socialist-Zionists think twice before condemning us.”
Herschel’s voice sounded small. “Frieda, you have inspired me the way that fellow Begin inspired you. We are soldiers together for Zionism. We are lovers . . . I want to marry you, Frieda.”
There was silence for a moment. Frieda struck a match to light another cigarette. In the flare Herschel saw her furrowed brow—her frown.
“They say Begin will be Jabotinsky’s successor as leader of the movement,” she began, trying to change the subject.
“Frieda, I’ve asked you to marry me!”
“Oh, Herschel, how can we? You’ve told me you intend to return to Degania. Those kibbutz socialists would rather you bring home an Arab than my sort. They’d ask me my beliefs and I’d tell them. They’d blackball me.”
“Then to hell with Degania,” Herschel declared. “I’d renounce it for you.”
“You would, Herschel? Your home?” Frieda murmured. “You’re a sweet boy, but what of your mother? She despises me. You can’t give up your mother.”
“Frieda, I am all my mother has left,” Herschel began. “The day she admits that I am grown and ready to leave her nest is the day she must once and for all say good-bye to my father and the past. Surely you can understand what pain that will cause her”
“Yes, of course, but—”
“Nevertheless, I shall take leave of her nest. I already have,” he said firmly. “My mother has nothing against you but the notion you’ve stolen me away. When she realizes that my loving you does not amount to rejecting her, she’ll come to adore you.” He grinned. “How could she not?”
“That much I accept,” Frieda chuckled.
“So? It’s settled then?” He kept his tone light to control and conceal his anxiety. She could not abide uncertainty. “You accept, I presume? We will be married?” He held his breath.
“Herschel, in the Betar we took an oath. It went, ‘I devote my life to the rebirth of the Jewish state with a Jewish majority on both sides of the Jordan.’”
“So?”
“When I devote myself to something I do it totally, excluding everything else. When I marry my husband shall take precedence.”
“What does that mean?”
She embraced him. “It means that you have conquered me, Kolesnikoff.” Although he’d pared his surname down to Kol at his lrgun initiation, Frieda delighted in teasing him. “I thought I could twist you around my little finger, but I see that you have turned the tables on me. When our struggle is over, I will be your wife.”
The picture gallery connected to the university’s library was empty at this time of day. Students were either in class or studying. To be enrolled here was a great privilege. Few students would jeopardize their standing by wasting time looking at pictures at this hour.
Herschel walked the deserted marble corridors, gazing at his grandfather’s landscapes and desperately missing Frieda. It seemed that he could hear her ghostly laughter echoing in the still hallways, could remember exactly her comments about each painting.
If only you were here, he thought, you could tell me I did the right thing in the Arab quarter. You could tell me that destroying a terrorist headquarters struck a blow for our cause and brought us closer to marriage. If you were here I could feel like a hero.
But Frieda was not here. Three months ago the lrgun had ordered her to report to a cell somewhere along the Mediterranean coast; she was not allowed to tell Herschel exactly where.
Since the Nazi invasion of Poland, leaky, overloaded ships flying the Greek or Turkish flag had begun to transport desperate Jewish refugees to Palestine. The ships brought their cargo as close to shore as they dared; then lrgun boats ran the British blockades.
The Arabs were howling in disapproval and the British were increasingly determined to stop the influx. Frieda’s cell was doing all it could to keep the people from being drowned or sent back.
Herschel was at the mercy of his guilty conscience. Perhaps all the people in the coffeehouse were Arab terrorists, but what if they weren’t? What if that one fellow, the one in the suit and tie and the fez, was an innocent?
That poor man stared at me like he knew me, Herschel recollected. He saw his death in me, and in him I saw stark fear.
It was no good. He couldn’t live with the thought of more attacks like this one.
A particular painting by his grandfather caught Herschel’s eye. It was a view of Galilee. Herschel did not know if Erich Glaser had ever visited Degania, but he had captured the burnt umber of the pillowy hills and the cerulean blue of the sky. Herschel had heard the usual criticisms leveled at his grandfather’s work: that it was highly idealized, often saccharine. In some Herschel could see how such comments were justified, but with this his grandfather had succeeded. The almost fantastic pleasantness of the scene corresponded to the pride, affection and solicitude a son of Degania felt when gazing at the land he and his fellow members had tamed.
As Herschel took solace a childhood memory came to him. He could have been no more than ten. He and another boy were together in the schoolyard, which afforded a view similar to the one in the painting. This other boy was seven and was named Moshe in memory of the brave young halutz who in 1913 rode out alone to fetch medicine.
The more Herschel concentrated the more vivid his recollection became. He and the younger boy were arguing, Moshe bragging that he’d been named after a hero. Stung by Moshe’s boasting and still raw with sorrow over the loss of his father, Herschel reacted with a child’s ferocious intensity.
“That man Moshe was dumb to be ambushed. My father is the true hero. He fought in the war, facing the enemy man to man. He had a pistol—yes, he did! I remember he showed it to me.”
The younger boy was no match for Herschel’s fury. He apologized, agreeing with him. “A man who fought in the army is certainly a hero.” They shook hands and parted as friends.
“Shalom, Herschel Kolesnikoff.”
“Shalom, Moshe Dayan.”
A short while after that the Dayans, one of the original families of Degania, moved to another settlement with their three children, of whom Moshe was the youngest.
Herschel stared at his grandfather’s painting, musing on the memory it had evoked. Seven-year-old Moshe misunderstood and assumed that Herschel’s father was in the British army. “A man who fights in the army is certainly a hero . . .”
Herschel hurried out of the gallery and cut across campus to the bus for Jerusalem. He knew what he had to do to assuage his conscience.
It was three o’clock in the afternoon when Herschel Kol returned to the apartment he shared with his mother near the Western Wall. He steeled himself for confrontation as he climbed the dim stairs to the third floor. He hoped his mother had painted well that morning. When her time at her easel was profitable she was in a good mood.
Their rooms faced the rear courtyard and did not receive much sunlight after midmorning. The ceiling light was off in the living room as Herschel entered the apartment. He heard a chair creaking and saw his mother, bathed in shadows, sitting in a rocker in the far corner of the room.
Rosie reached out and clicked on a table lamp beside her chair. Herschel saw that her eyes were red-rimmed from crying, her lined face drawn and pallid. How old she looked. She was just fifty, but her years in Degania’s harsh climate had turned her skin leathery and her hair prematurely grey. What had become of his beautiful mother? Who was this haggard crone in a shapeless, paint-splattered frock? When had mother and son become such strangers to each other?
“It was you, wasn’t it Herschel?” Rosie’s trembling voice, husky from disuse, shattered the dark stillness. “You blew up th
at coffeehouse. Oh, I know it was you.”
“I don’t want to fight about it with you, Mama,” Herschel began.
“It’s that girl—she’s turned you into a murderer. I warned you about her, didn’t I?” She stood up. “She has made you a wild man. You grew up in Galilee, learning to use weapons just as you did farm tools. I remember how you cried, your head buried in my lap, that first time you had to kill to defend our settlement.” She shook her head bitterly. “You don’t cry now, though, do you, boy? Why are you here? Why don’t you rut with your whore to celebrate—”
“Shut up!” Herschel shouted. “What I did was for our people! I didn’t enjoy it!” His anger vanished. “How can you, Mama? How can you speak to me this way?”
Rosie’s shoulders sagged. She turned away from her son. “Are you safe at least? No one is chasing you, I hope?”
“No one. Mama, let’s not argue anymore. I love you.”
Rosie nodded. “I’m sorry, Herschel, but I can’t forgive her for transforming my beautiful, clever son into a terrorist. You had a future, but now it’s only a matter of time before the British arrest you. If not for this crime, for some other one that girl—”
“Frieda. You know her name, just as you know that she is away from Jerusalem. Don’t be this way.”
“All right,” Rosie said scornfully, “Frieda.” She shook her head. “I heard ten people were killed in that blast and six more injured. Your father would not have approved.”
“That’s not fair—”
“Your father would never have joined an organization like the lrgun.”
“But he would have joined the Allied Army,” Herschel snapped. “Wouldn’t he have joined to fight the Turks if he could?”
Rosie stared at her son. Something in his eyes frightened her. “I don’t understand,” she murmured. “Herschel?” Her fingers rose to her lips. “Herschel, what are you getting at?”
“On my way home I stopped at the Jewish Agency office. They are taking names for volunteers to join the British Army. Most Jews are having trouble getting inducted, but with my light features and my British ancestry, I should have no trouble, I was told. The agency people are anxious to get as many Jews into British uniforms as they can.” He smiled. “They think it will persuade the British to side with us against the Arabs later on. That’s what Papa thought. I guess history does repeat itself. Personally, I don’t care what the agency people think. I’m only joining so I can fight our enemies honorably. You see, Mama, I do care what you think and what Papa might have thought. I’m quitting the lrgun to follow in my father’s footsteps.”
Rosie said nothing. What could she tell him? He wouldn’t listen anyway. As her son retreated to his bedroom and shut the door behind him, Rosie thought that history did indeed repeat itself. The first war had taken her husband and this second would lay claim to her son.
Chapter 27
The grenades’ destructive power was contained by the thick walls, but the resultant panic made a shambles of the marketplace. Fleeing bystanders toppled the charcoal cooking brazier in front of a food vendor’s stall; the accident went unnoticed in the confusion. The scattered coals began to smolder in their nests of straw and sawdust and soon tendrils of blinding, acrid smoke were winding through the catacombs.
A pair of bodies lay where the twin explosions had flung them. A wounded man wandered in shock; others managed to stagger outside and lay sprawled in the narrow thoroughfare, moaning and crying. The explosions caved in part of the roof. Frenetic would-be rescuers shouted contradictory orders as they tried to dig out the crumbled masonry and toppled timbers.
The rug merchant across the way was one of those who hurried to lend a hand. He was unharmed except for the ringing in his ears.
The British police soon arrived, but there was little they could do except step gingerly about the rubble. The vaults of the marketplace could not accommodate motor vehicles. The ambulances idled an eighth of a mile away. Those too badly injured to walk would have to be loaded onto stretchers and carried up twisting passages out into the open.
“Who saw what happened?” one of the policemen bawled in Arabic. “Who has information about this mess?” He rocked on his heels, his thumbs hooked into his pistol belt. “Come on,” he shouted, “how do you expect us to catch the bloody Jews if you won’t help us?”
The rug merchant timidly approached the officer. He tugged at the policeman’s khaki sleeve. “He was not a Jew,” the rug merchant murmured after he’d garnered the officer’s attention. “He was an Englishman.”
“What’s that? English, you say?” The policeman chewed on the ends of his mustache as he thought it over. Just the other day his sergeant had lectured them on the possibility that certain British, sympathetic to the Zionists, might throw in with them. That sort of thing was certainly not unheard of. Why, Captain Orde Wingate of British Intelligence had thrown in with that Haganah lot, teaching the Yids things they had no business knowing. It was a short leap from advising the Yids to an active role in their operations.
“Perhaps you’d better tell me about it.” The officer pulled out a leather-bound notebook and a stub of pencil. “Start with a description.” He licked the point and began to write as the merchant spoke.
“Blond hair and blue eyes, handsome, very tall and well built.”
An Arab in suit, tie and fez listened as the merchant stammered his description of the attacker. He was seated on the cobblestones some yards away with his back against an overturned table. Directly in his line of vision was a severed arm in the blood-slick gutter. The hand lay palm up, the fingers curled. The Arab wished someone would take it away or at the very least cover it.
He had no need to eavesdrop on the rug merchant’s description. He quite well remembered what the attacker looked like; he’d taken a good long look at him just before entering the coffeehouse. The fellow’s haunting looks had lured him to the coffeehouse window for a second glimpse, and that saved the Arab’s life. His black eyes and the attacker’s blue ones locked for a moment; he saw the grenades clutched in the man’s hands.
The Arab did not utter one word of warning to the others in the coffeehouse; to create a panic might have blocked his escape route. He made a beeline for the side entrance, just reaching the threshold as the grenades exploded. The blasts hurled him against the opposite stone wall of the narrow alley, giving him a sound jolt. He’d fell to his knees, tearing holes in his trousers as he grazed his skull against stone. He blacked out for a moment, and when he came to, he felt dizzy. He crawled out to the street and sat down on the curb to rest against the salvaged table. He was unharmed except for a slight bump on his head. In a few minutes his dizziness would recede and he could be on his way.
Another Arab dressed in a long striped caftan and billowy trousers quietly seated himself next to the one in European garb. This newcomer’s name was Assiya; he had within the folds of his garment a pistol and a knife. He was ready to use either to protect the man beside him, who was his master.
“Forgive me,” Assiya murmured. “I was in position, watching as I was instructed.” As he spoke he looked straight ahead and hardly moved his lips. If any of the British policemen glanced their way the officers would have seen two mute, shocked victims of the attack.
“I saw him,” Assiya continued, “but I never suspected him; he was English.”
“He wasn’t.”
“Not English?” Assiya wondered if his master was injured worse than he seemed. “I tried to get a shot at him as he attacked, but there were too many people blocking my aim. Afterward I considered pursuing him, but I thought my place was here with you.”
The other man nodded. “The others are all dead?”
“All dead.”
“I would have died as well if I’d not recognized the attacker.”
“You know him?” For the first time Assiya glanced in his master’s direction.
The suited man smiled. I know his blond hair and blue eyes, he thought, I know his fac
e. Oh, it’s finer-featured, the nose less aquiline, the lips thinner, but of course the mother is Anglo, and that would cut the father’s Slavic blood. “I killed his father,” he said. “Don’t be fooled by his looks. He’s a Jew, all right.”
“Jibarn Ahmed, you are incredible.” Assiya breathed, so overcome with awe that he forgot himself so far as to call one of Fawzi Kaukaji’s operatives by his real name.
“Yes, he is a Jew. I want you to go over to that policeman and corroborate the rug vendor’s description—it is quite accurate. Only say that the attacker was not Anglo but a Jew. Say his name is Kolesnikoff, first name—” Jibarn Ahmed searched his memory—“Herschel. Tell the British policeman he wants a Jew named Herschel Kolesnikoff.”
“The authorities will want to know how I came by this information.”
“No. They will be so relieved that it was not one of their own that they will ask no questions. Assiya, you realize that after you testify at the Jew’s hearing you will be known to the British and accordingly of no further use to us.”
“I understand.”
“You know what must become of a man who leaves our services?”
“Do not worry,” Assiya assured him. “I long to receive my hero’s welcome in Paradise and take my place at Allah’s side. The day I send this Jew to his death will be the day I willingly embrace my own.”
“Assiya, will it be necessary for me to send someone to escort you to Paradise?”
“No. I will take myself there.”
Jibarn Ahmed nodded, satisfied. “Allah be with you, Assiya. Now do as I’ve told you.”
He sat awhile longer, listening as Assiya told the British officer his piece. Oh, how exquisite it was going to be! The British would surely hang the Jew responsible for such carnage. Herschel Kolesnikoff, Jibarn thought, the only sour notes are that your attack was so successful—my best operatives are dead—and that I cannot remain in Jerusalem to see you hang.
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