'He had spoken of taking some food in the city, then going to the library, then he said he would be with you and with the others - with Isaac and Rebecca. He had said he would not be late home.
His bed hadn't been disturbed, and he has never before been out the whole night.'
David had half-listened and half-wondered to himself what had caused the delay. He was aware that only Rebecca and Isaac had joined him the previous evening, and remembered the talk that there had been among the three of them as they considered where Moses might be.
'Always he has been home for the night. And when he went out yesterday he had not taken his police book - his card was at home. That is wrong-not allowed. And without it, if he is in trouble, if he is in the hospital and hurt and cannot speak, then how will they .. .?'
So Moses had acted as instructed - acted as David had told them they all should. He could imagine Moses's mother rummaging in his drawers looking for a clue to his whereabouts and finding no satisfaction, only the card with its Cellophane wrapper with the head-and-shoulders photograph and the official stamp set across it. David had never explained the motive for his order, leaving the others to think for themselves: that if they were taken in - casually, without the link being forged between their activities and the police inquiry in hand - then it would be easier to explain away the absence of identification as a careless lapse. It was usual for the police to pick the Jewish boys off the streets, if they found them out late, if they were in a group - even if they just cared to exist. Not that there had ever been talk among the four of questioning, arrest, imprisonment. It was not a subject David would have tolerated: too chilling, too personal. And therefore it was not considered by the others.
It was impossible for it to happen if they were careful, and they had been careful - except for the balaclava and the policeman who had not died. Isaac had noticed, abrasively and impervious to feelings, as soon as they had gathered again with their breath still coming in a streaming torrent, and while Moses had hung his head, and while David had quietened him. And it was beyond the character of Moses to be away through the night. A steady boy, not likely to panic, not one to sleep in the park, not one for the girls, and David knew all their friends outside the cell.
'. . . without his card if he is injured no one will know to tell us..
'I will see Isaac and Rebecca, and I will ask them what they know,' said David. He was kindly and reassuring, sufficient to mask from the old lady the drumming fever he felt. Not fear, nothing as defensive as that, and not as strong an emotion as excitement, just a feeling that at last real battle was joined. The skirmishing was over. The patrol cars would be out. Guns issued, semi-automatic to augment the readily carried side-arms. Control rooms perspiring with the effort of pursuit. The beast had been angered and sought to retaliate. The wounds had gone to the quick, as had been intended. But it was not the time that David would have chosen, and his jaw stiffened, and his mouth quivered and he sought to hide it, and to play again the role of command and competence. Little to practise his mood on. Only an old woman who showed fear and confusion and who had come to him for help; whose darned stockings were twisted and sagging, and who had missed her place in the queues to seek him out, and who did not know where her son lay. From his own instinct David had already decided that Moses had been taken, arrested, even as the woman had spoken.
He sent her on her way, and closed the door after her, and told his own mother that it was just a friend who had called and that he was going out to walk and that he did not have to be at the plant for the afternoon shift. He needed to be alone, to think, to have a plan to put before the others. It was expected of him now, that he could produce an instant solution, but the initiative was absent. Perhaps it was they, the pigs, that held the high ground? It was not a dimension of the battle that he had ever considered. But what if they were consigned for ever to the valleys? It was immaterial. A battle there would be, and he must find the solution.
There was no pavement; he walked on the unmade road, rutted and pitted from the winter's ice, forsaken by workmen in the summer, and never adequately finished when they built the flats.
Further out of town were the show blocks of the Krushchev days, when accommodation rose to impress the people that they were at last remembered. But that was not where the Jews lived.
Mean little premises, these, that he walked past, where the rent racketeering was fiercer than in the capitalist West that he knew of from his radio. When you were Jewish, how could you get your name high on the housing list? That was the problem, and when you couldn't then you were in the hands of the landlords. Life was a shared bathroom and a shared kitchen and a shared toilet.
Inside what passed as the privacy of a front door were three rooms, and his mother and his father and his three sisters to share them with. Nearer into town there would be flowers in front of the small houses, but nobody bothered out here. There seemed no point; they would be covered with dust when the bus came down the road, suffocated, and the water pressure was too low to run a hose . .. and for what, anyway? It would take more than colour and the scent of pollen to brighten these homes.
So perhaps the bastards had Moses. Down in the town, that's where he'd be. Hadn't his card with him, which meant he'd have to talk for them to know who he was. And when he told them that then the short-cuts would begin - names of associates, addresses, rendezvous locations, dates. Identification? Not a difficult task, not for a body so efficient as the militia. How soon would he talk? That was the only question he needed to answer now. How soon? What was the boy made of? How much spunk, how much balls? The same courage as Israel had when the Syrians were traversing the Golan? Did Moses have the courage of the Israeli tank commanders?
But it was one thing to fight with your friends around you, on your own side. But what did Moses have now, in a police cell with the electric wires and the batons and the impatience of the questioners? David shivered in the sunlight. Not much that he would have going for him. Just loyalty - and what would that mean when the pain was intense?
Isaac was coming towards him down the road, hot and red in the face. He bad been running, and there were stains under his armpits. He was shorter than David, and not so muscled, his face strained and the sinews of his neck bulging.
He was blurting incoherently, so that David embraced him and quietened the boy and told him to get his breath and to begin again.
'It's all around the University. I heard it first in the canteen before classes, then again in the lecture room before the professor came. Everyone is talking of it They say there has been an attack on a policeman, and that last night the militia took a man, right in the centre of the city, and they say he is a Jew. One of the chemistry students started it - his uncle works there, in the files section - and he told the boy's mother last night, and there were celebrations last night in the headquarters - vodka in all the offices. And you remember that Moses failed to meet up with us last night.'
'He did not come home at all last night. His mother has been round to see us and asked for information.'
'Has nothing been said on the radio?'
'Nothing. How would they? It is not their way."
'What to do, David?'
'To be calm and to think, and then to fight them . .
'With what? How can we fight them? They will do things to Moses, things so that he will talk, and then they will come for us. How long will he last, if he can resist them at all? Not longer than this evening - and that's a whole day, a whole twenty-four hours - and they will come.'
Isaac had no more to say. Through all the time he had run from the bus that had carried him away from the University the thought of the four o'clock awakening, the time the militia always came, had buffeted and pummelled him. The boots, the guns, the hammering, the axes in the door timbers, the bedclothes wrenched back. Now he could wash it from his system. He had demonstrated his fear, exposed it in the street to David.
'Where is Rebecca?' David asked.
'Still at the University. Botany is an earlier start than chemistry. She won't come out till eleven, perhaps later if she has work in the library ...'
'Get her,' said David. 'Meet her and take her to the woods. To the hut. We will meet there, at two . . . you can get there by then . . . and do not be late.' And then the smile that the others so coveted. 'And don't worry: they won't touch us. Moses hasn't talked or they would be here by now. We have some time yet.'
He slapped Isaac on the back, and turned towards his home. There were creases of concentration and worry on his forehead, and his eyes were staring down at the stones and debris of the road. A mystery, and a confusion for him-if Moses had been taken, why were they not here? How much more time could the boy buy for them ...?
There was only one certainty. They were not going to be lying in their beds waiting for the police to come, rubbing the sleep from their eyes as they pulled on the bare essentials of clothing at gunpoint. Anything rather than that.
But if they ran how far could they go, and was there anywhere that was safe? And if they hid, for how long and with what future?
Rebecca and Isaac would come to the hut in the afternoon and expect him to lead them, would anticipate that he knew the solution. How to explain there was none, that he was incapable of providing an inspired answer? Rebecca would not see the weakness, would follow where she was taken, but
Isaac would see, would strip away the camouflage. And there was nothing in Mao, or Giap, or Guevera, nothing that offered solace, nothing relevant. David watched Isaac's long walk, rolling and round-shouldered, away down the street. A lone figure that skirted the few parked cars, a gesture once to a passing cyclist. David regretted his going, resented that there was no opportunity for Isaac to stay longer, to talk, to discuss, to share.
But you knew it would happen like this, David.
Not so soon, not at this time.
If anything it has been slow coming, David'
But we are not prepared ...
If you shoot policemen, David ...
We are in confusion, we do not hold any initiative.
Did you expect them to wait for your readiness, David?
Long strides, adrenalin spurred, he ran towards home.
At first the road followed the west bank of the Dneiper. That was the route out of the city. Then a left turn and the wide tarmac ran far and straight across the agricultural plain, passing by the occasional clusters of homes for the collective workers till the cultivated ground gave way to the forests. A dozen miles later was the bus halt to which each made their separate way. From the roadside they walked along the dirt path through the woods to the place where David had first taken them many months before.
The path led to the 'dacha' complex - neat log cabins built after the war for the Party bourgeoisie. the homes fronted on to a small lake, idyllic and beautiful and unlike anything the group had seen before; another world opened to them after the pretentiousness of the new building in Kiev.
The hut was short of the complex, reached only on foot and from a diversion from the main path, five hundred yards along an overgrown trail. Too far from the summer residences for the children of the privileged to stray upon it, and the undergrowth too thick for the adults to push their way to it in search of a remote picnic spot. Because of the density of the trees and the saplings and the bushes it would have been easy to walk straight past the single-storey building and not have noticed it.
There was no key to the door, just a piece of wood that they had propped against it and dug into the ground as a buttress to prevent the weather forcing a way in. David kicked it clear when he arrived, a savage and impatient gesture. First there, as he had wanted, and the others not due for ninety minutes, perhaps more.
This was where they had kept the policeman's pistol, up on a shelf, in a biscuit tin, but closely wrapped against the damp in a plastic bag from the vegetable market. David paced across the lone room, extracted the bag from the tin, the gun from the bag, and checked the mechanism to be certain there was no bullet in the breach. Satisfied that the gun was safe he removed the magazine from the butt. Six rounds only there. There was also the other magazine placed separately in a paper bag - thoughtful of Isaac to grab that, too: seven more shots. That meant 13 shots in all, and a pistol with an effective range of twenty metres. He should not have allowed Moses to be nominated - himself or Isaac, only they would have been capable. The girl had willed it, and he had listened to her, he did not know why. Should have ignored her, followed his instinct. He wondered why she had called for the game of chance to determine who went first, to give herself the possibility? You, Rebecca, you wanted it, sought the medal? And now catastrophe. No plan yet, only the unfamiliar feeling of helplessness, of near despair, that they had no power and that such an awesome strength was gathering its weapons with which to strike them. He thought of Moses - a cheerful, honest boy, a follower, without a mind of his own, who craved the companionship and the strength of the others, who had been asked to do one thing himself and who had not succeeded. A weak link in the chain he had set himself to forge, and when the chain snapped how long till the dogs were barking, the sirens crying in pursuit?
Isaac was next. He had travelled on the same bus as Rebecca, he in the front, she in the back, not acknowledging each other. He had hurried along the path closely flanked by the tall trees, she had dawdled. Isaac was twenty-two years old, studying chemistry. Quick, logical in his approach to problems - a 'good pupil' his professors had said when they offered him a place with a future in a government laboratory if he could acquire the right marks at the autumn examinations. He was pleased to be in front because that entitled him to hurry, and he was anxious to reach the hut because he believed he knew the solution to their problem. He had carved and chiselled it against his own self-appointed objections while scurrying across the white stone flags of the University's central precinct. As he approached the hut, using the codes of habitual caution and wariness, he thought of the reaction he would gain from David. Rarely that he was listened to. Not that it was David's fault, only that he seldom offered his opinions. He stepped on a dry branch and as the noise cracked in his ears he cursed the momentary carelessness. It was a good plan and carried the possibility of success. But he would not be the first to speak, he would hear what David had to say. He would evaluate that, and then if his own equation seemed better he would offer it. He was pleased with himself and hoped the others would be too. Not that he minded an existence in the shadow of David, not that he felt the requirement to assert himself, just that on this occasion and after his street meeting with David he had thought on the options, weighed them and was satisfied.
Rebecca came more slowly. Her flat soft-soled shoes were unsuitable for the pitfalls of the path, and her print dress caught in the brambles that trailed across the way. She had little regard for them; she too was thinking of Moses, and it was an effort for her to walk along the path such was the vividness of her image of the surroundings in which her friend was held. And he had been the nervous one, who would have wanted to be the last to shoot, and who would have fulfilled his wish if she had held her silence.
Her dark hair was swept back to the sides of her high- boned face, and pulled to the back by an elastic band before spilling pony-style to below her neck. Attractive lines on her body, small but firm breasts developed beyond the point of adolescence, tight waist, hips that swung as she walked, but all masked by the cut of the GUM store dress. But it had been cheap, and money mattered more than appearance; and since she had met David, and also Isaac and Moses, it was not appearances that were important. When David found her the 'Voice of Israel' on the radio she had listened to the programmes from the kibbutzim and thought to herself, 'Why should one need such silliness? The stupidity of frocks and dresses with raised and lowered hems and flowered prints, and waists that hug and hips that fall in flared lines: do they need those to pull a plough across new land?' A quiet and solitary person she had been before the spell of David wove close around
her. He had taught her much, she believed, of the Nation State of the Jews, leaving her unaware of the vacuums of her learning. No word of those who came from Russia to the railway stations of Vienna and Amsterdam and Rome, who had won their freedom with a promise that they travelled south to Tel Aviv and instead headed west for the new frontiers of the United States. That there were Jews who left Russia and who then refused to make the final journey to Israel would have dumbfounded her. That emigration from Israel was a subject covered by rigorous censorship laws passed by the Knesset in Jerusalem would have confused her.
Sheltered and suppressed, devoid of the trappings of sophistication. A product of the undrawn but actual perimeters of the Kiev ghetto. Twenty years old, she was like the others a Jew without the faith of Judaism, taking only that part of the heritage that imbued the separateness of the race, the pride of a wandering people, and the stubbornness not to falter again as in the past. She did not attend the synagogue for the Feast of Tabernacles, nor on the Kol Nidrei night. Too great a burden her people had stumbled under, she thought, for there to be a faith that she could follow.
David had taken her from the botany classroom, transported her to a battlefield where she herself could fight alongside her kith from the kibbutzim, and it had seemed brave and worthwhile, and the danger had seemed remote. It had hurt her to squash a spider on the kitchen floor, swat a fly on the plaster wall above her bed. She could not have endured the misery of the sight of a snared rabbit. Yet he had turned her, moulded her and guided her arm, caused it to rise, rigid and clamped on the pistol's handle, and influenced the squeeze of the trigger finger as he lectured her in the mechanism and technique of the one, taken weapon on the afternoon after they had possessed it. A terrible and beautiful and desperate secret he had given to her; a secret to be shared by only three others. And he had nurtured her strength, watering and feeding it over the years, till she was capable of participation. No boy, neither with love nor lust, could hold her as the other three had in the hut before they went to search out the policeman. Impossible to match and measure any sensation against the supreme shared orgasm of the cell at that moment of firing. And never a conversation, nor a moment, nor an oocasion when she believed she had taken the supreme step over the abyss. Just a logical progression. Then Isaac, standing outside her classroom door, arresting her as she hurried for the next lecture, waiting for her, waiting with the unspoken news. But in his eyes the message that there was catastrophe.
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