Stateless

by Alan Gold

  ‘Hide your lamp,’ warned Abram. ‘Listen. People.’

  Fear rising in her throat, Ruth hid the lamp inside the folds of her dress and they were plunged into darkness. They listened, their skin prickling in fear, and held their breath. Their hearts were thumping against their chests.

  But the more they strained to listen, the more they realised that the noise wasn’t coming from the tunnel but from somewhere else. It was the sound of footsteps, but it wasn’t just one or two pairs of feet. It sounded like a whole army of feet trampling above their heads. And in the mix of the sounds, they clearly heard people talking, laughing, coughing. The language wasn’t Hebrew. It was Latin.

  ‘It’s the city. It’s the streets of Jerusalem. We’re almost touching them. They’re on top of us,’ said Abram. He brought out his lamp from inside his cloak, and climbed a few more steps, walking upwards in the tunnel and further around the bend.

  As they edged forward they saw a brilliant thin ray of sunlight piercing the blackness and illuminating the tunnel wall above their heads. It was pure dazzling light. The sun was shining through a tiny crack in what must be the pavement above. Inside the roof of the tunnel was a corner of what was once one of the massive stone blocks that had been thrown down from the Temple of King Herod when the Romans were taking it apart, stone by stone. The block was now embedded for all time in the ground. When the Roman general Titus had destroyed the temple, this block must have been too big to move from where it had fallen.

  ‘Ruth, I’m going to find a crack in the rock, and put the seal inside it. Can you scoop up some mud and I’ll use that to cover and hide the seal so it’ll be secure?’

  Ruth bent down, and picked up mud from the floor of the tunnel. Walking upwards to where Abram was standing, she waited for him to push the seal into a small crevice in the roof of the tunnel. But before she was able to push mud into the crack Abram stayed her hand and looked at her.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ she whispered.

  He thought for a moment, and looked upwards as if he could see through to the Roman soldiers currently marching above. The shining light coming through the crack illuminated parts of the tunnel. He then looked downwards into black depths of the tunnel, where the water was flowing.

  It was then that he realised the flaw in what he’d been asked to do by the rabbi.

  ‘What if the Romans find this seal? What if they go to the bottom of the well and open the tunnel to find the source of this water, and they find the seal? They’ll destroy it. Then the Almighty One will never know the name of the builder.’

  Ruth nodded. ‘What shall we do? Take it back with us?’

  Abram shook his head. ‘No.’

  He sighed and continued to think. Then he saw the mud in Ruth’s hand and beamed a smile.

  ‘Give me some of that mud,’ he said. ‘I have an idea.’

  She put some of the mud into his hand. He smoothed it out into a level surface. Then Abram buried the seal deep inside it, pushing it in so that the impression of the seal was left in the mud. Satisfied, he removed it and on another lump of mud, which Ruth gave to him, he buried the other side of the seal. He carefully removed the engraved stone, rubbed it onto his tunic to clean it of mud, and slotted it into the wall. Abram took more mud from Ruth, and caked it over the entrance to the fissure.

  ‘This will dry soon, and become as hard as rock. Then the seal will be hidden for all time. And now we have impressions of the front and back of the seal, it’ll be easy for a metal worker to make a copy. I’ll give one to the rabbi, and I’ll keep one myself. Then, Ruth, if the Romans find the seal, we’ll have enough copies so that we can bring it back again.’

  The logic was clear to Ruth and she smiled at Abram and nodded. She couldn’t bring herself to tell him how clever he was, because that might have made him arrogant. But she knew and that was enough.

  As soon as they were convinced that the mud over the seal was drying hard and protecting it from falling out, they descended the steps, slipping and sliding as they went. Abram carefully nurtured the two pats of mud, which were now getting harder and harder in the warmth of his hand.

  It took them as long to negotiate their way down the tunnel as it did to ascend and by the time they emerged, cautiously checking that nobody was near to the overgrowing vegetation that hid the tunnel’s mouth, their oil lamps were almost exhausted. Any delay in descending and they’d have been plunged into the dangers of darkness.

  But they managed to complete their difficult climb out and walked away from the tunnel entryway to make their way downstream into the Kedron Valley to where the river narrowed and deepened.

  Ruth and Abram lay on the northern bank and looked up into the sunlit sky. Sweating, tired from the exertion, still tense from the dangers they’d faced, they remained silent for what seemed a very long time and sunset came.

  Ruth reached over and felt for Abram’s hand. She clasped it. ‘When I first saw you a few days ago, I thought you were a silly little boy. You were filthy, lost and nervous. You were Abram Nothing. But you were very brave climbing the tunnel today and that idea of making a mud copy so that the seal will be safe for all time . . . well, Abram, that was really very clever. Now I think that you’re Abram Something and no longer Abram Nothing. And I like you, Abram Something.’

  Abram’s tongue searched for words but found only the echo of Ruth’s voice in his mind.

  ‘And now you can kiss me. More than once if you like.’

  PART TWO

  Jerusalem

  1947

  Two years had passed since that day in the café when Shalman had sat entranced by the beautiful, confident young woman before him. Most Jews in Palestine had been fascinated by world events, like the carving up of the old Third Reich, and the growing tension between the Soviet Union and the West. But for Shalman, the two years had been a blissful time of falling deeper and deeper in love with Judit.

  They were rarely separate. Many times they sat in the theatre watching Hollywood stars in epic tales of adventure and romance. At the beginning, he sat very close to her, hoping their shoulders would touch, that he might smell her hair. Then the innocent simplicity of this gave way to holding hands as they watched the film and they continued to touch as he walked her home. And from hand holding to deep passionate kisses . . . and from kisses to staying overnight at her place, or his. He was besotted. And he knew that she was in love with him.

  He’d known young women before, but never one like Judit. The few other girls he made love to had been enjoyable and he’d sought them out until the relationship came to a natural end. But Judit was different from any other girl he’d known. She was superbly intelligent and worldly, knowledgeable and often profound in her understanding of things. But alone, in the privacy of their shared accommodation, she was at once a wife, a companion and the most passionate lover he could imagine. She would initiate their love-making; she would create an environment of lust and longing in their simple apartment. She would invent scenarios which excited both his mind and his body. She was everything he had ever dared hope could happen to him.

  He’d fallen in love with a woman who challenged, provoked and startled him on any given day and yet who was perpetually a mystery to him. For her part, Judit, too, seemed to find something in Shalman that she had never known. Here was a man who was not a target or a victim. A man who was soft-spoken yet determined, generous yet protective. He was superbly intelligent, yet pathetically unworldly.

  Judit found in Shalman a man so very far from the father-figure she had grown up with in Moscow, a distant cry from the officers and diplomats she’d spied on, manipulated or even killed. He was nothing like Beria and her Soviet commanders, yet at the same time he was nothing like their Lehi comrades – he was no Shamir or Yellin-Mor. Yet neither was he cast from the same mould as their refugee fighter colleagues. For her, he was an enigma, yet there was nothing she didn’t know about him. He was the opposite of all the men she’d ever known; yet he was everyt
hing she’d ever sought.

  Her Soviet handlers had readily approved her relationship with the young Jewish man, suggesting it deepened and strengthened her standing in the community and gave weight to her ‘future objectives’. Though exactly what they were she had yet to be told. She knew it was something to do with Soviet designs on Palestine, but she knew none of the details.

  The day finally came when Shalman found courage to ask Judit to be his wife. The words ‘Will you marry me?’ tumbled from his lips; they even surprised him, but once out could not be ignored. They married soon after and, for the first time since he was a boy playing on the beach, Shalman felt utterly happy.

  And he felt even more exultant when Judit returned from a visit to the doctor and told him that she was pregnant. He was so exultant at the thought of being a father that he could barely control his emotions. But Judit had a different slant on the sudden news. She was worried that their baby would affect her ability to build a young and strong Israel, and to carry out her sacred mission given to her by Beria himself.

  There was nothing she could do, though, and eight months later, she gave birth to a daughter, Vered. When he first looked upon his daughter, Shalman saw her as the most perfect fusion of the very best of his wife and himself, someone so beautiful, so flawless, that though she was tiny and defenceless, she would hold their love together for all time.

  But to Judit, the birth of Vered was a strange burden. Though he never doubted she loved their daughter, it was obvious to Shalman that her affiliation with Lehi took precedence over everything. As soon as she was fit after the birth, she returned to the Lehi command and demanded the same tasks she’d done before she was pregnant. Then a month later she told Shalman that she was going to express her milk into a bottle so that she could leave him with their baby at night, while she was engaged in operations for Yitzhak Shamir.

  She planned it like a military operation, and it became part of a parallel logistics plan. Judit would fill a bottle and leave Shalman with Vered while she was away. He raised only small complaints but she always countered with the importance of what she was doing. And in truth, Shalman relished the time alone with Vered and time away from the role of a Lehi solider. To earn money and pay their rent, Shalman spent those parts of the day when Vered was sleeping writing articles about Israeli archaeology for newspapers around the world, making them like detective stories; or he helped the local greengrocer nearby sell fruit to customers. He didn’t mind what he did, so long as he had Vered and Judit as his family. For her part, Judit often used to bring home purses full of Palestinian money and British pound notes, which, she told him, she’d taken from the bodies of Tommies or their officers she’d assassinated. And she made fun of him when he told her how amoral such theft was.

  ‘What?’ she said curtly. ‘They need to spend money when they get to heaven?’

  The world around Shalman and Judit grew steadily darker. The dream of a Jewish homeland now seemed a real possibility, but the realisation of the dream brought with it the deadly reality of war. Conflict was now a daily occurrence in Jerusalem and other cities in Palestine, filling it with gunfire and flame as Lehi and the other Jewish nationalist movements fought ever more fiercely – fighting that had the British on one side and the continually escalating violence with their Arab neighbours on the other. It seemed to Shalman that everyone around him had a gun pointed at someone else.

  Holding a weapon and wanting to fight had started to come naturally to Shalman. His initial reluctance to kill British soldiers or Arab mercenaries slowly disappeared, and he’d successfully assassinated several targets that had been selected for him. But unlike Judit and the others, he never celebrated such murders, and even though he’d done it a dozen times, he still didn’t find pulling the trigger easy. And now that he was a father, his world view had shifted.

  Several weeks had passed since he had last met with his Lehi comrades and found that the missions he was tasked with were ever harder to embrace. It had been a hot morning with the sun baking the stones of the old city. Shalman had been out with his tiny daughter snuggled closely in his arms and talking to her of the old city. He was looking for something of interest for an article he could write for an American magazine; they paid the best.

  Though she was a baby, Shalman whispered in her ears about their city, Jerusalem: its history, its peoples, its places and its stories. He rounded a corner and made his way up towards the Damascus gate, an ancient structure built and rebuilt by each of the occupiers of the ancient city. First a Roman gate under the emperor Hadrian in the second century CE and then later remade by the Christian Crusaders in the twelfth century. The gate that Shalman stood at had stones dating from 1537 and had been erected by workmen for Sulieman the Magnificent, Sultan of the Ottoman Empire. Shalman looked up at the stones and the tower and told his tiny daughter stories about their history.

  It was then that he heard his name. The voice was familiar and it carried across the square in urgency. It was Yitzhak Shamir, his boss from Lehi, standing at a distance across the throngs of people moving in and out of the gate. Shalman turned to wave but Shamir didn’t wave back as a greeting but rather beckoned him urgently to come towards him.

  Puzzled, Shalman looked intently at his friend, trying to see why he was so agitated. Yitzhak repeated the gesture and called again. Shalman looked around him to see if there was something he had missed; was there something Yitzhak wanted him to see? He looked back to the Pole and saw that Yitzhak was walking backwards away from Shalman, away from the gate, but still gesturing to him as if calling him urgently to follow.

  Shalman was confused but took a few slow steps towards Yitzhak. Conscious of the tiny Vered who was almost asleep in his arms, Shalman’s steps were slow and deliberate, trying to keep his movements smooth. He lifted his gaze back to the direction he was walking and scanned again for Yitzhak. He saw that the Pole had moved further away, almost running backwards, still looking to Shalman and still drawing him urgently on with his arm-waving.

  Where is he going? thought Shalman. He quickened his pace but still not enough to satisfy Yitzhak, who was now about to disappear into the shadow of a building and a street leading away. For a moment, just as he was about to vanish from view, Shalman could see Yitzhak’s face clearly through a gap in the crowd. What Shalman saw was panic and a gaze that looked not at him, but past him.

  Shalman stopped to turn and look back at the Damascus gate, then back again to Yitzhak ahead of him and then once more to the gate . . .

  Then Shalman started to run. He was an idiot; he was distracted by thoughts of his family; in the old days when he was still fighting with Lehi, he’d have known immediately where lay the danger. Shalman gripped Vered tightly and pushed his way forward as fast as his feet could carry him, lowering his posture, hunching his body, drawing Vered close to him, almost enveloping her.

  And then came the explosion. It bellowed through the gate and threw Shalman forward off his feet and onto the ground. Rather than throw his arms out to catch himself, he kept the baby wrapped tight against him and took the full force of the impact on the ground with his shoulder. Pain coursed through his arm but he didn’t let go, and remained curled in a ball around his child as debris rained down over him.

  He now sat opposite his wife in their small home, telling her this story as she bathed his badly bruised shoulder and strapped it with a white linen bandage.

  ‘If Yitzhak hadn’t seen me . . . If I hadn’t heard him . . .’ stammered Shalman as he looked at his hands and saw them still shaking – though whether it was from fear or anger he did not know.

  ‘That’s a lot of ifs, Shalman,’ was Judit’s curt reply as she pulled the bandage tight and he let out a small yelp.

  ‘How could they be so . . . ?’ He didn’t finish his thought because he wasn’t really expecting an answer.

  ‘The bomb went off prematurely. Nobody knew you’d be there.’

  Shalman spun around to face his wife. ‘Prematurely?�
��

  ‘Yes. It was planted in an Arab taxi. It went off too early.’

  ‘Why did it go off at all? Why there?’

  Judit looked at him strangely.

  ‘Your child, Judit!’ Shalman found himself yelling. ‘Your child was right there, in my arms, under the gate.’

  ‘You shouldn’t have been there,’ she said in a voice so calm it shocked him.

  ‘Did you know about this attack?’ demanded Shalman.

  ‘No,’ replied Judit matter-of-factly, before adding, ‘very few did. Shamir played it close. But we knew to stay away from the Old City. You would have known too, had you been at the operations meeting as ordered. But you were not . . .’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ Shalman shot back, but he didn’t wait for a reply. ‘Because you’re never here, Judit! Sometimes I barely see you for days. Or when you are here, it’s only to sneak off again in the middle of the night.’

  Judit didn’t answer. She picked up the scissors and the remains of the bandage she had used to strap Shalman’s shoulder and turned to walk away to the kitchen.

  Shalman called after her. ‘I was there, Judit! It could have been me . . .’

  Judit stopped but didn’t turn back. ‘But you’re alright, Shalman. Yitzhak warned you and you’re fine. And your shoulder will be fine.’

  Anger flared in Shalman’s eyes. ‘That’s not the point! God damn it, Judit. Who do we think we’re fighting?’

  Judit finally turned back, her arms crossed, and responded to Shalman with a voice so controlled it unnerved him. ‘No one will protect us, Shalman. We are alone in a sea of enemies. Europe, Arabia, we cannot live in these places anymore. So here we stand in this narrow strip of earth, surrounded by people who hate us and the British who control and manipulate us. Only when they are gone can we be free.’

  ‘I know this speech,’ spat Shalman, though hearing his own words in his ears, he was shocked by their anger. The image of his daughter in his arms as he ran from the exploding gate was still fire in his veins.