Evergreen (73 page)

“You’re not supposed to see them!” Allon spoke impatiently. “But they are there.”

So there was a plan. Of course, of course there was. But suppose it hadn’t worked? If Dan’s men had been trapped or—?

Again there was silence in the hall, except for loud breathing. They waited. Waited.

“Where do you suppose they are?” Eric whispered to the man beside him.

“Who?”

“The Arabs.”

“I don’t know. How should I know? Everywhere.” Avram was frightened, pretending not to be, pretending to be experienced and expert. “They’ll try to rush us, thinking we’re all holed up in here for defense. Well mow them down as they come.”

There was faint scratching at the door, very faint. Allon, with readied gun, pressed himself against the wall, and opened it a crack. The dog Rufus dragged himself in, whimpered and fell: a pile of bloody, ragged fur, his belly slit open.

“Oh, my God,” someone said. “Then Ezra—”

They stood there, staring at each other. Someone called from a window at the front: “The south dormitory’s on
fire! Oh, Lord, they’re jumping from the win—” The voice was cut off with a shattering blow and then a pretty tinkle of glass. Arieh—

Allon crept to him on hands and knees and turned him over. “He’s dead,” he said flatly, without looking around. “He shouldn’t have been standing up.”

“How do you know?” Eric cried, without thinking. “Maybe he—”

“The top of his head is shot away,” Allon said. “Come and see for yourself.”

Eric thought, We played chess last night. Then he thought, I’m going to vomit. But I can’t be sick now.

“Listen,” Allon said, “we have got to get to town. I’ll go, and I need three, no, four with me. Who’ll come?”

“But if they got Ezra they must be guarding the road,” someone objected. “So how can you possibly—”

“Down through the orchard, and around to the road half a mile past the gates.”

“It won’t work, Allon! It’s committing suicide! The orchard’s where they must have got through in the first place!”

“Is there any other way?” Allon asked. Crouched there on his knees, wet with the blood of Arieh, he had immense authority. “Well, then, well have to chance it. Who goes?”

“I will,” Eric said.

“No, you don’t know the way well enough. Ben, Shimon, Zvi, Max, well go. If any one of us is hit the rest won’t stop for him. One of us has to get through. Marc, you take charge here while I’m gone.”

As if in reply another window was smashed out at the front; glass sprayed the floor, falling on Arieh, at whom none of them dared look.

Again they waited. Marc stood in the corner, flat against the wall, from which at an angle he could see through the farthermost window.

“They’re crossing the quadrangle,” he whispered suddenly.

“Who are?”

“I—it’s too dark. For God’s sake lower that gun!” he cried to Yigel. “They may be ours!”

They waited. Somewhere, in a history of the First World War, Eric recalled having read that the soldiers’ chief complaint was the interminable waiting. With dry mouth. Wet hands. Needing to pee.

He crawled to the window and peered an inch or two above the sill at the side. Yes, there were men walking through shadow, crossing the quadrangle. They were heading toward the nursery door. Some of ours? Dan’s men? Reinforcements? But then why so openly and upright? They can’t be ours—His heart lurched. They must be—

At the nursery door the men stopped. There were—he counted—five of them. No, seven? It was too dim to see. They were just standing there. Why? Who?

A bullet slammed into the room, then another and another, a fusillade. Marc screamed, shot in the thigh. David fell; dead or wounded? There was no time to find out.

“They’re on the roof!” Avram cried. “They’ve got up on the roof of the extension.”

The devils! The fiends! Now they could shoot in through the windows while no one could shoot back upwards into darkness.

There were only three whole ones left: Avram, Yigel and Eric. They crawled to the back of the room, dragging Marc with them out of reach of the bullets which were coming in now like rain.

Suddenly the rain stopped. Into total silence a voice rang, speaking in accented Hebrew.

“You in there! We have a proposition to make! Can you hear?”

Avram, Yigel and Eric stood gripping each other’s arms.

“Listen, we know you’re there! Will Allon the boss speak up? Answer! You don’t have to show yourself!”

“How do they know Allon?” Eric whispered.

“Arabs in town. Contacts across the border. Who can say?”

“Allon the boss! You’d better listen! Or well burn out
the rest of the place. If you give us what we want well leave you in peace.”

Avram whispered, “Shall we answer?”

“No,” Yigel said fiercely.

“Yes,” Eric argued, “if we can kill time talking back and forth maybe Allon will have got through to town and well have help.”

“What do you want?” Avram called then.

“Are you the boss Allon?”

“I am. What do you want?”

“Six children. Any six. We take them back with us and hold them until your government gives back our six freedom-fighters who are in your jails.”

“The freedom-fighters are the ones who attacked the schoolhouse two years ago,” Yigel said to Eric. And to Avram, “Tell them to go to hell.”

“You know we aren’t going to do that!” Avram called back.

“You might as well! Otherwise we can kill all the children, and the rest of you, too. Look, our men are already waiting at the nursery door.”

“You won’t get away with that!” Avram shouted. “There are over a hundred of us on this place …”

“Maybe there were. But there aren’t anymore.”

Silence.

“When we get in that nursery there won’t be one of them left alive. Allon boss! You’d do better to let us have six now. Any six.”

The little ones’ beds were painted with ducks and rabbits. Clowns and baby elephants danced on the walls. And Juliana slept there. My girl.

Somebody rattled the lock at the back door of the kitchen.

They jumped.

“Be careful. Don’t open it.”

“Who’s there?” Yigel cried, pointing his revolver.

There was a loud whisper. “It’s me! Shimon! Open up!”

Yigel opened the door enough to admit a young
Arab, with his hands in the air and a rifle, held by Shimon, in the small of his back.

“We got this guy coming up the hill with a knife in his hand.” Shimon handed the knife to Avram. “Zvi and Allon are dead. Max and Ben kept going. Maybe they’ll get through to town.”

“If we knew how many there were,” Eric said, “maybe we could—”

“Could what?” Avram demanded scornfully.

“Ask him how many there are anyway,” Eric said.

Yigel said something in Arabic and translated. “He says he doesn’t know.”

“Give me the knife,” Eric said, and took it from Avram. He held it against the Arab’s naked throat. The man pulled back in horror, gurgling, his eyes wild. “Yigel, tell him that if he doesn’t answer I’ll cut the way he cut the dog—and probably Ezra, too. Tell him.”

Yigel spoke. The man mumbled, and Yigel translated, “He says ‘four.’”

“There are at least six or seven in front of the nursery alone, and more on the roof. Tell him we want the truth,” Eric commanded.

“He says five. He had forgotten to count himself.”

Eric slashed the knife lightly over the Arab’s shoulder. The man screamed and Eric withdrew the bloodied knife. “Answer me,” he cried, “or the next time it will be your throat!”

The Arab trembled, cried out, and Yigel translated once more.

“He says there are two on the roof. He doesn’t know how many at the nursery door. The rest are dead.”

“All right. Tie him up,” Eric said. It surprised him that Avram and Yigel obeyed without argument.

“Allon boss! What are you waiting for? Until we set fire to the nursery?”

“You won’t get away with it!” Avram called back.

Christ, where were they, Max and Ben? And if they had
by some miracle got through, how long would it take to reach here from town with help?

Eric crawled to the front window. A torch had been lit at the nursery door, no doubt to fire the place. In its tossing light he could count them: five, no, seven, poised at the door and waiting. He could hear their screaming laughter. The ruffians, the savages. And those piteous women on the other side of the door. Juliana—It came to him that he had never known such anger, such outrage.

He stood up yelling, not recognizing his own voice, not knowing that he was yelling. “I’m going to get them! I’m going to get them!”

“Get down!” Yigel cried. “Eric, fool, get down!”

“The dirty, rotten, murdering scum!” Eric screamed.

Yigel pulled him down. “Shut up! You can’t do a thing! There are seven of them.”

“I have one grenade—”

“But it’s too far! They’d shoot you from the roof, those others up there! You’d never get near enough to throw it, don’t waste your life—”

Spots of red and yellow rage flickered before Eric’s eyes. The terrors of the world flashed through his mind as, it is said, in the instant before drowning a life flashes past. They knotted in his chest, all that were anguished, cruel and wrong: lost children, violence, corruption and early death. All of them, all of them—

His shirt ripped down the back, leaving a piece of khaki cloth in Yigel’s hand as he tore out the door and down the steps with the grenade.

The survivors told it this way: He spurted across the open space toward the nursery like a football player running for a goal. He dodged and darted while bullets slashed the earth around his feet. About five yards away from the gang at the nursery door a bullet tore into his back and he fell dead, but not before he had thrown the grenade into the middle of the gang and killed them all.

It was over. The two snipers fled in terror from the roof and were captured in the orchard. By the time help arrived
from town the fires were out and everything was quiet, except for the crying of the women, preparing the dead.

On the other side of the world, in America, a cablegram brought the news. It was a week now since it had come, and Joseph had aged ten years. He sat at breakfast, his first full meal in days. He finished his coffee and pushed away from the table, but didn’t get up, just sat there with his mouth hanging open. Like an old man. Anna hadn’t looked in the mirror at herself. God knew what she must look like! And what difference did it make?

And then (as though they hadn’t had enough), Celeste came in with the mail, bringing, among the piles of bills, advertisements and letters of condolence, a letter in Eric’s handwriting. It had been mailed ten days before.

Anna’s hand shook, but she spoke steadily. “I have to tell you, Joseph. There’s a letter from Eric.”

“Read it,” he answered in a flat voice.

She swallowed and obeyed. “Dear Grandpa and Nana, I have just come in from planting oats. From where I sit the dark, wet fields stretch away to the horizon; it is so beautiful.” He had sat at a desk, his hand had rested on this paper only a few days ago. No, not a desk, more likely a rough, unpainted table. There were fine wrinkles around his eyes; he strained them; he would need glasses early. His eyes were so light and brilliant when his face was tanned; he would have got quite brown, working in the fields. “I don’t want to seem affected or some sort of oddball, and I hope no one thinks I am, but if they do I can’t help it. It’s as if something were behind me, pressing me on to do something, really do something for a good cause. I hope you can truly understand.”

Joseph groaned and she stopped. “Go on,” he said.

“I can really feel I belong in this place. For the first time since I’ve been old enough to think about such things,” (since he came to live with us, he means) “I feel no conflict about who I am. I’m just another pair of willing, needed hands.… I know you hoped so much that I
would carry on your work and your name. Thousands of young men would be so grateful for a chance like that, and I
am
grateful, really I am. But it’s just not for me. Since I’ve come here, I’ve been sure it isn’t.”

“He wasn’t ever going to come back,” Joseph said wonderingly. “Not ever going to come back.”

Anna looked at him sharply, but he was sitting quite still.

She resumed, “You two, of all people, will understand that there’s something different about this country. It’s not charming or graceful like Europe, not rich and strong like our own country which I love so much. But come visit me here and see for yourself what I mean and what I’m doing.

“Also, I should tell you that I have a girl. I don’t know how we will resolve things between us, but I love her. She’s Dutch; you’d like her at once. You know how kind the Dutch were to our people during the war—”

She finished the letter and put it down. Then she opened a thin airmail envelope, addressed in a foreign hand.

“It’s from a girl, Juliana. She must be the one he meant.”

“Read it.”

“…     he had written to you, I think, only a day or two before it happened. But at that time he hadn’t known we were going to be married. Not that it makes any difference to you now—” Anna stopped and, steadying her voice, went on, “but still you might want to know what he was doing up to the end. He was very brave, which others have told you or certainly will tell you. But more importantly, he was happy. I wanted you to know that. Also that he spoke of you often and loved you so much.

“My first thought was of running home to my mother, to my people. Then I thought no, not while this evil flourishes. But I’m going to leave here to pioneer in the Negev. I’m going to the desert, to a harder place.”

There were a few more lines and good wishes.

“Poor girl,” Anna said.

“Yes—poor girl.”

So they sat unmoving. The morning paper and the coffee
cups lay on the table between them, as on any ordinary day. Then Joseph put his head down on the table.

God, God, where are you? Anna cried silently. Why do You torment this good man? To say nothing of all the rest of humanity! The world aches and crumbles; people are eaten by cancer, they scream in madhouses, machine guns are turned on children, the landlord takes half a month’s earnings for the right to live in his hovel. Tell me, why do You in Your wisdom permit all this?