Traitor's Gate

by Charlie Newton

  Saba’s uncle called for his wife and daughter. A neighbor’s wife rushed to Saba and, with both arms, clutched Saba to her chest. The woman’s husband pulled the uncle away. The neighbor had information. His face was grim. Less than an hour ago, five men in hoods had descended upon Professor Hassouneh’s home. It was very bad there. The men in hoods were Haganah. The names of six murdered Zionists had been nailed to the fragments of Professor Hassouneh’s door. All inside were now dead: Professor Hassouneh, his wife, Saba’s two brothers, and her eight-year-old sister.

  Saba collapsed. Police arrived.

  The police took her to the British Colonial Police Service compound on Jaffa Road, not a hospital. For an hour Saba sat alone and immobile on a worn wooden bench. Flies dotted her face and the rags that had been her clothes. An officer of the Palestinian police put down the Koran he was reading, made notes in the ledger on his table, then called her to stand before him. Saba did not respond. He told her that her family was dead. He added that her uncle and his family were also dead, and that her promiscuity bore the blame.

  TWO YEARS LATER

  October, 1931

  Dawn’s first gusts blew cold and strong through the mountain pass near Dhār el Baidar, Lebanon. The sprawling refugee camp shuddered, its canvas tents worn thin and brown. A hazy sunrise breached the pass. The muck began to thaw, as did the open latrines and last night’s unburned dead. Saba moved toward the main gate, tracking a company of French soldiers as they slogged up the mountain road. The sun glinted on their buttons and bayonets. The military column protected a muddy truck and enough food for half the camp. Saba shivered at the outer edge of an anxious crowd queuing for a chance at food. The food she would never reach added to a hunger that drove many in the camp to stoop-shouldered madness. In this camp, the stronger ate first after fighting among themselves. They were elbowing past her to do that now. The weak died. Her education from sixteen to eighteen in the world’s realities had left little doubt on how the infirm fared cradled in the hands of the strong.

  Shouts erupted; men attacked one another, first with fists and feet, then the hungriest with crude weapons and hacking savagery. The soldiers fired level and just over their heads. Saba flinched and retreated to the camp’s fouled Palestinian quarter. She watched the day’s food divided, only the thin strip of her eyes visible, her head, face, and shoulders always shielded by a stained haik headdress. The hunger made her shake. She huddled with the older women warming in the sun, her arm and thin blanket wrapped around a frail woman trembling at her side. Saba had stopped crying after three months and stopped expecting to survive after a year and a half, now gripped by the slow death of starvation.

  In Arabic she whispered the lie that began every day, “We will eat tonight; I will see to it.”

  The old woman in her arm rocked slowly without opening her eyes.

  The camp was French-policed but self-segregated: Kurds from Turkey, Armenians, Assyrians, and Palestinians. The Palestinians were the least in number and mostly women and children. They bore the brunt of the camp’s cruelty and its worst geography, sandwiched between the open latrines and the cremation pits.

  Two men emerged from the fight bloody and empty-handed, both swearing oaths against the Kurds. They walked past Saba and the women, avoiding bog but staring at the group, searching for youth who could be sold or used. Finding none, they raised their soiled jellabas and straddled one of the slit trenches. Saba shrank into her shoulders and felt for the makeshift blade cold against her stomach. Shame had kept her once-proud face covered since she’d been dragged screaming into that dusty Jerusalem alley. The rage at the murder of her family still burned, providing bits of courage when there were food scraps to steal—when the hungry-eyed men roaming the camp were at prayer or the more violent disputes erupted. On the nights with the most violence, she would take the biggest risks, roaming the farthest. Twice she’d been beaten badly but had fed the entire tent and felt the strongest, remembering fragments of the girl she had been, the girl who would save Palestine.

  Midmorning brought more sun and an unsteady calm; the food was gone, the hungry again resigned to beg, steal, barter, or die. Saba and the old women retreated to their tent. A man yelled. Voices rose against one another. Saba half stood, sensing danger and opportunity. Uniforms blurred past. More voices, French and Arabic. A French soldier stooped at her tent’s missing curtain.

  “Up. The camp is being relocated.” He tore tattered canvas and cloth from the poles until only part of the frame remained, then slogged to the next tent and tore it from its rigging. Saba turned; the action was being repeated throughout the camp—men being roused in bunches—soldiers yelled and pointed them uphill into the rocks and mud. Arab men yelled back, shaking their fists; women huddled or bent to gather their men’s belongings. Saba glanced through the camp’s wood-and-wire gate to the steep road bordering the fence. The old women of her tent could not climb such a road; they would perish going higher into the Lebanon Mountains. These women had protected her, scenting her robes with their open sores and infirmities, hiding her under their bodies when the men came.

  Saba gathered those robes to her hips, knowledge and fear mixing with shame. There was a small chance she could save the women from the climb. Both hands trembled as she uncovered her hair and face. She dipped an unsoiled corner of her haik in their water jar and cleaned grime that hid an eighteen-year-old’s smooth olive skin. Bile bubbled in her throat. She swallowed and forced tangled hair under the headdress. Sweat seemed to drench her. She steadied, then tied the haik bold as a half scarf.

  The camp’s perimeter churned with arguments and confrontations. Saba drew sharp, hungry glances from the men. She kept moving until she located a French officer giving orders from a truck’s dented fender.

  “’Afwan,” she said, “the ermile, the old widows,” and tried to smile, to be bold like her scarf, and pointed downhill across the camp’s convulsions. “They cannot make the climb. You would please help them. Please?”

  The officer listened, inspecting her features with interest, then winced at the odor of her clothes. He shrugged, said it was in God’s hands, “Insha’Allah,” and pointed her away.

  “Please.” Saba added proximity in spite of her shame, her eyes completely in his, something French soldiers understood.

  The officer stepped back and around the fender, wrinkling his nose. He called two soldiers. Each cinched an arm and twisted Saba away. Saba clutched at her robe, raising its dirty hem. “Wait! There is more—”

  The soldier grabbed a handful of Saba’s tangled hair. She kicked and slipped, stumbling to a knee. The soldier fell with her into the mud. Saba fought her arm free. A bayonet sliced at her, chest-high. She raised both hands, trying to back away. “Wait. I can—”

  A rifle butt slammed above her hip, a fist into her chin.

  A rough hand woke her. A man’s hand. On her face, then on her body. The nightmare: rough beards on her cheek, meat breath and saliva on her neck. She jolted into the hand and it flattened her. She clawed for British eyes. A face blinked into focus, leaning away, not British: Arab. Not young, not old . . . The hand pressed harder. She couldn’t breathe—

  “Gentle.” He spoke in English. “No move. Injury.”

  Saba tried to fight but couldn’t. Pain radiated from her hip. Her face wasn’t covered.

  “No move.” The black eyes were squinting, furrowing already creased skin. Black wings were tattooed under the right eye. “Safe.” He added weight to his hand, then glanced over a wide shoulder, then back. “For now. Safe.”

  Saba patted for a rock. He stood, quick and athletic, now staring down at her from six feet. She crabbed backward, forgetting the pain, her eyes glued to his and the black wings. He remained stationary, robed in dusty black. She noticed the night, then the smell of lamb fat and sweet peppers—glorious scents she hadn’t tasted since . . .

  Her hand touched a heated stone. “Ough!”

  The Arab smiled. A British Army holste
r belted his tunic. A black keffiyeh covered his head and part of a muscled neck. Behind him, three horses stomped and whinnied. He spun, drew the pistol, and ducked. The black horse kicked. The Arab charged into the darkness, a dagger flashing in his other hand. He moved like an animal, so sudden that Saba did not consider escape until he reappeared with the pistol holstered, the dagger not. Her eyes jumped from face to dagger and back. She remembered her knife, reached for it, and found nothing. It would have to be the heated stone—

  The Arab opened his palm and shook his head, reading her mind. “Burn.” He nodded to the fire near her shoulder, but the dagger kept Saba’s eyes. He walked to the fire’s other side, then lowered to the ground using the strength in his legs. Saba jumped to her feet, staggered at the pain, and fell. He did not acknowledge her movements and served himself from an iron pot. Saba braced for a charge the Arab did not make, then registered that no tent sheltered him or his meal. She glanced fast past both her shoulders, then back at him now staring at her face, a small smile coming to his. She retreated, one hand rising to hide her features. She would make him pay for his pleasure, knife or not. The Arab did not move. If the black wings under his eye were true, she was doomed.

  Saba baited him from a crouch, succumbing to fear and temper. “You are a corsair, a raider?”

  He ate instead of answering the insult, his eyes glancing at the food, then her.

  “The camp . . . What happened to the women . . . to me?”

  “Ten French francs. I buy you.”

  Saba felt the soldiers on her again, felt power in the urge to kill him, hoped he would come closer now, wings or not. She shed fear for anger and new humiliation, and rose, keeping a small bend in her knees and a hand veiling her face. This corsair would remember this slave. She would mock him to her side of the fire, then rip out his eyes and eat them. “What happened to the old women? Did you not buy them, great Sharif? Were the mothers of the tribe not to your liking?” Saba spit in his fire. “You will not be the man who enjoys me, either.”

  The Arab nodded. “This I believe.”

  Saba glared, eager to kill him.

  He ate until no food remained, then cleaned the pot as if he had been raised Bedouin and without women. This was as the legend said. She watched him walk to the black horse, retrieve a goatskin bundle from the saddle, then return to the fire and sit.

  “You will not share my tent until you are clean. The river is behind the hill.” He tossed her the goatskin bundle. “Clothes. You will wear man’s clothes. Steal like a man, fight like a man. For you as a woman I have no use.”

  Saba caught the bundle and smelled the horse that had carried it.

  “Now. Then you and I raise my tent.”

  Saba was dry and cold from the river and inside the coarse goat-hair tent. The clothes were heavy, unfamiliar, and too large. A tied-rope belt held the pants above her narrowed waist, further supported by suspenders that bowed outside her breasts. A man’s keffiyeh covered her hair and face, draped across her nose. Saba was angry and frightened and hungry and it was the best she had felt in two years. The Arab had not transformed himself into the fierce black bird of legend. It was possible the wings under his eye were a lie.

  The Arab spoke English. “I pay ten francs. They say you read and write English. You will teach.” He threw her the last book her father had given her, one she’d managed to keep through the desolation of the camps. “I speak, not read, not write. I want read your book of . . .”

  Believing it lost, Saba fingered The Great Gatsby while he fumbled his words, then interrupted him in English, an insult in their culture. “You are Bedu?”

  He floated thick eyebrows above the searing black eyes. “I am Arab.”

  She frowned, her temper returning. The wings were a lie, the man wearing them a coward in masquerade. “You are a raider, a thief, an assassin maybe?”

  “This could be.”

  “And I am your slave?”

  He smiled and said nothing.

  “Do not close your eyes tonight, great Sharif, if I am your slave.”

  His neck curved against his shoulder. “I must fight with dogs in my tent?” The dagger was fast into his hand, across her throat and gone. Saba lurched away. The slash of light or blade had long passed. Only his words were still in the air. “For saving a kalb’s life? For keeping a dog from the cold and the French?”

  Saba felt her neck for the blood. Her fingers were dry; her neck uncut. She blinked, weighing an answer, stuttering between bluster and hope, fear and safety. The wings might not be a lie. No man could move that fast.

  The Arab remained cross-legged. Two rifles were behind his right shoulder, one matching those England’s soldiers had carried in Palestine, the other shorter and more menacing.

  “I am not whore or slave.” Saba raised her head and used her father’s name for the first time in two years. “I am Saba Hassouneh.”

  The Arab nodded and did not ask about father or husband. “Read.”

  She bristled at the command, remembered the book in hand, then opened it. “‘Before I could reply that he was my neighbor dinner was announced.’” She glanced at him, insuring his distance. “‘Wedging his tense arm imperatively under mine, Tom Buchanan compelled me from the room as though he were moving a checker to another square.’”

  “Is true.” He laughed loud. “The old women do not lie.”

  The guilt of a survivor washed over her and her clean clothes. “What . . . happened to them?”

  “The same as will happen to all Arabs in the invaders’ desert. Your fate, if not for my ten francs.”

  Saba’s hands closed the book. The Arab told her to open it, to read. Her eyes drifted to her knees crossed in the coarse wool pants. She said good-bye to the old women who had been her family, who had saved her, and wanted to weep.

  The Arab went silent, then acknowledged her loss. “Life is not separate from death.”

  Saba heard words her father had also used, suddenly too tired to be afraid. The book curled itself to her chest and she rolled to her side, already unconscious. She dreamed of revolutionary America and three-pointed hats and half-British, half-French soldiers dying in large numbers.

  They spent four seasons together before she knew his name, Khair-Saleh, and even then she was unsure. The wings were true, of that she was certain. And he was a man—a fearsome warrior man—but not the terrifying wraith of legend. At least she didn’t think he was. He learned English at a slow pace and she often believed this was deliberate. Saba learned faster, became lethal with a knife and pistol and better with a rifle. He said she had the eye and, more important, the heart. They stole together, kept their tent and camp together; and when they sold their booty in the souks of Damascus, Beirut, and Amman, she hid her hair, chest, and face. She was treated as a man; could fight like a man; and, when challenged, could kill like a man.

  Khair-Saleh’s preferred targets were European soldiers who patrolled the Damascus-Haifa Road near the Syrian and Lebanon borders, the soldiers’ British Enfield and French Lebel rifles bringing the highest prices, their deaths the most satisfaction. In Saba’s second summer with the Arab, they had celebrated such an event, drinking qumiz—fermented mare’s milk—under the canopy of gnarled oak trees, cooling their feet in the northern waters of Lake Tiberias, England’s name for the Sea of Galilee. A false dawn had risen in the east.

  “My homeland.” Khair-Saleh nodded at the dawn, then shared pieces of a brutal history.

  “In my eighteenth year”—his deep voice remained monotone—“I become a proud conscript of Transjordan’s Arab Legion—the army of Amir Abdullah and the first Arab state to govern itself. I serve this new state with honor but fall victim to a boy’s desire for promised glory, privilege, and money. When asked, I join England’s new and elite Frontier Force. We hunt Arabs who oppose the Crown and its policies.”

  Of this he was not proud. He had hunted his own, pacified warring Bedouin camps with truck-mounted Lewis and Vickers machine gu
ns, buried hundreds of Arabs for the good of England’s empire and a crisp uniform. “I am wounded near Wadi Rum and I lay in the red sandstone to die. A shooting star cuts long across my final sky. In the star’s light I see the great lie of my life—my need for embrace in the Europeans’ culture. Embrace that will never come for the Arab. And if somehow I am remade European, how little this embrace will matter.”

  Khair-Saleh did not look at Saba and went silent. When he spoke again, he told their feet in the water, “As the star crosses the desert, I see it shine in the dead eyes of a fellow Bedouin I have killed. Fever days follow, not death. I wrestle unconscious with the Bedouin’s eyes. Someone tends my wounds and gives me water. I awake protected from the sun with black wings beneath my eye”—Khair-Saleh touched his cheekbone—“and no dagger in my heart. Those who save me—only the Bedouin’s tribe could do this, I believe—leave me the star’s name: Minchar al Gorab—the Raven.”

  Saba sat silent, aware she was hearing the heart of the legend that no one else had.

  Khair-Saleh inhaled a slow breath to finish. “I stand that day with life in me I should not have. I disown the gods who bless all sides and vow that no Arab will die at the Europeans’ hand if I am witness. I promise to drive the invaders from the desert and share their spoils with those I have hunted.” He passed Saba the last of the milk-wine, then, unsteady, stood and disappeared into the night. It was the most he had spoken at one sitting in the entire time she’d known him.

  Another three seasons passed and they were once again camped above the rocky banks of the River Jordan near the northernmost tip of Palestine. Surrounding them was the mountainous confusion of French Lebanon and Syria, a forested safe haven for bandits and guerrilla fighters. Maronite Christians controlled the north, the Druze parts of the south and east.

  Saba was comfortable here in spite of the area’s violent population, maybe because of it. All this territory east of the Sea of Galilee and the River Jordan was called the Golan Heights. It remained under colonial French mandate but with only tacit French control outside Beirut and the main port cities, and then only when the occupying French army was patrolling at company strength. Saba trusted she could hear the feet of that many men even sound asleep.