Stateless
Page 41
The Jew guard seemed to relax; he moved his head in a circular direction as though massaging his neck muscles, put down his rifle from his shoulder to his lap, and reached down to a Thermos; he poured himself a drink and Bilal saw the steam coming out of the cup. As the man lifted it to drink the coffee, Bilal slipped his knife from its scabbard, ran forward silently to cover the twenty-metre distance between himself and the Jew enemy, and before the man even knew that his life was in peril, Bilal put a hand over his mouth, pulled his head back and sliced his throat in a gash of crimson from ear to ear.
Bilal kept his hand over the man’s mouth so that he couldn’t scream and embraced his body firmly against his own to prevent him from struggling. Even though seated, Bilal could barely constrain the tough body flailing against imminent death. He felt it through the shirt. It was a hard body, a strong body. Not a body-builder’s physique with constructed muscles only good for posturing and lifting weights; no, this was the taut body of a man who’d done physical work all his life. Compact, tight, beautiful.
He put his face close to the Jew’s, smelling his sweat and fear and blood. And in the moonlight, Bilal saw that he wasn’t a westerner, but a Yemenite, a Moroccan or maybe even a black Ethiopian Jew — certainly a Jew with Arab blood but difficult to tell without the daylight sun. Bilal felt a moment of empathy with the man. It was different killing an Arab Jew from killing one from Germany or Russia or America. As he held the man’s increasingly limp body, he worried that he’d killed one of his own, but the man wore an Israeli Border Police uniform, and that made him the enemy, no matter where he’d been born.
With his hand still over the man’s mouth, Bilal held him closely until he felt no more struggling. Just a body, slumped in his chair, the stench of urine, coffee, blood mingling in the cold night air, making Bilal want to gag.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Alan Gold is an internationally published and translated author of fifteen novels, his most recent being Bell of the Desert, published in 2014 in the USA. He speaks regularly to national and international conferences on a range of subjects, most notably the recent growth of antisemitism. He was a delegate at the notorious United Nations World Conference on Racism and Xenophobia held in Durban, South Africa, in 2001 and has addressed UN conferences and meetings, as well as speaking throughout the world to universities and community groups.
Alan is a regular contributor to The Australian, The Spectator and other media as an opinion columnist and literary critic, as well as being a lecturer and mentor at the masters and doctoral degree level in creative writing at major universities.
Mike Jones is an award-winning writer who works across forms including books, screen and digital interactive media.
Also by Alan Gold and Mike Jones
Bloodline
STATELESS: BOOK II OF THE HERITAGE TRILOGY
First published in Australia in 2014 by
Simon & Schuster (Australia) Pty Limited
Suite 19A, Level 1, 450 Miller Street, Cammeray, NSW 2062
www.SimonandSchuster.com
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Visit our website at www.simonandschuster.com.au
© Alan Gold and Mike Jones 2014
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior permission of the publisher.
National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry
Author: Gold, Alan, 1945–author.
Title: Stateless/Alan Gold and Mike Jones.
ISBN: 9781922052889 (paperback)
9781922052865 (ebook)
Series: Heritage trilogy; Book II.
Subjects: Israel – Fiction.
Other Authors/Contributors: Jones, Mike, author.
Dewey Number: A823.3
Cover design: Blue Cork
Cover image: © Getty Images
Map by Ice Cold Publishing