Refiner's Fire (7 page)

One such officer, impressed deeply by the miraculous character of a small nation exploring, discovering, and colonizing what had been an unknown world; devoted to conceptions of quality, responsibility, and fairness; a man not unpleasant in his demeanor or in his speech; a good and often tender man, was Captain Keslake of the Royal Navy, of the British destroyer
Shackleton,
of the General Naval Headquarters in Palestine, of a small office in a huge fortress high on a hill in Haifa.

His windows overlooked the sea, which he was able to scan for many miles. Being on a promontory next to Stella Maris, he could see Syrian mountains, Jebel Druse, Jermak, and others, and the Lebanon to the north beyond a vast windy coast of rising dunes. To the south was a long white beach flanked by small mountains. The winds whistled around the radar and the wire. At night a huge light played over the sea to guide ships to the harbor. Servants brought him lemonade on a silver tray—the lemon juice, sugar, and iced water unmixed. He had a positive sense of well-being there, high up in the thin air, suspended in blue, clean strong sunlight like that of the mountains penetrating a light beige-colored room, and yet all within the precinct of the sea. If he listened hard he could hear the white waves below. His ship, manned and ready, rested in Haifa port.

When not aboard
Shackleton,
he chose to stay at a rest center for officers, a building south a little down the coast road. He was a good-natured man but he liked best of all to be alone. Mornings saw him on the porch having his breakfast early, looking out at the sea. He would often walk down the glassine sparkling beach, wandering in and out of the hills and dunes. Once, a Bedouin who had brought his flocks to lick salt asked Keslake the time. Keslake replied in Arabic, “Ten after eight,” at which the Bedouin was completely confused. Reacting quickly, Keslake corrected his answer to “Eight and a
quarter,”
which the old man understood. The low mountains were good for wandering. When occasionally he would meet an Arab or a Jew he did not act arrogantly, as he might have, but smiled and made a little bow, and there was some fellowship. He wandered in the cemeteries too, for many of his friends had fallen and even at home he had been drawn to tombs as small stories of lives, encompassments terribly inadequate and yet calling for homage, respect, and not a little thought.

In the Muslim cemetery across the road from the rest center he felt entwined by the tendrils of Arabic script. He read the inscriptions, but it was as if no one were buried underneath. It was the same in the Jewish cemetery—he could not even
read
Hebrew. All these people and their aspirations perplexed him, for he had been too shy to fall in love with one of their women and he had not had the time to become enveloped in their culture as he had felt enveloped by the mere script on the Arabic gravestones. He could only respect them, and no more.

But a quick leap across a young hedge into the Commonwealth War Cemetery transformed him. There, were his people, though they were not all English or even Australian or Canadian. Buried under the Union Jack in immaculate garden splendor, as opposed to the sensual free-flowing vines and aromatic flowers scattered loosely beyond the hedge, were English and Scots, Irish, Sudanese, Indians, Egyptians, Muslims, Jews, Poles, Greeks—all the Allies except the Americans, whose wealthy government had transported them elsewhere. These were his brothers, fighting on his side in the great wave of war, participants in fleets and armies and the global span of the English endeavor. There were inscriptions which moved him as he went from grave to grave: 8351
SOWAR RAFI MUHAMMED,
13TH
DUKE OF CONNAUGHT'S OWN LANCERS,
24
TH
OCTOBER,
1943,
AGE
22.
H. BELLEHE, SERGEANT MAJOR, GREEK ARMY
, 14
TH
SEPTEMBER
, 1944 (a Jew, with a great Star of David under the Cross of the Greek Army),
CAPTAIN M. C. KISSANE, THE ROYAL IRISH FUSILIERS, AIRBORNE,
29
TH JUNE
, 1946.

It was quiet in that cemetery. Once in a great while a truck went by on the sea road. A goat was tied up outside the hedge, his nibblings on the rich grass vaguely discernible. The sea shimmered beyond. Behind Keslake were rocky green hills, and palms where the water collected in basins and curvatures. At night he watched the sky from a wooden bench, standing guard over the fallen men, alone in the close-cropped darkness. They were young and would soon be forgotten. But under the night sky he knew that he would not forget, that he would be strong for them, that he would uphold that for which they died, that he would guide his ship through the waters traversing and cutting like a mighty hound. He would be ever faithful to the sea for them; he would be faithful to the quick flash of their wasted lives which he felt in the open air above them, and even though he stood in wide open night under a vast ocean sky, he felt suffocated.

The following day he was invited to ride with a convoy north into the interior. A young Irish major had asked if he did not want to see some of the country. “It's very beautiful up there,” he said, “quite like you've never seen before. We have fruit growing all over the place, and at this time of year there's a freshwater pool fed by the underground rivers from the winter rains. The water falls from ledge to ledge until it ends in another pool twice as large. Would you like to take a swim and have some good Arab food?”

Keslake could not resist, and they left the next day in a small group of armored vehicles, trucks, and jeeps. He and the Major shared an open car and traveled the whole way without a word. Keslake was in a beginning-of-summer reverie, when so much satisfaction is to be had from nature's luxuriant outpourings that the human voice and human needs seem thin, remote, and inconsequential. On the road up they passed under countless tall trees shadowing them as they went. The sky was entirely clear, and in the hills near the fort the sun beat down on blue-green brush in which wild boars crashed and plumed birds hopped from branch to branch.

Upon his arrival, Keslake went up on the roof to an open sleeping porch where he was to stay, and the Irishman joined him, bringing two gins and tonic, which they drank with enormous relief. The Irishman tried to broach the subject of home but Keslake would not hear of it. “This is home,” he said. “That's the penalty for being English, and I'm not sure that it's a penalty. I will never, never go back to Birmingham, never as long as I live. It would be a disgrace.” Then there was silence and they fell asleep in their chairs, the hot sun being tempered perfectly by a steady cool breeze. Through half-closed eyes Keslake could see Haifa miles away rising from the bay like a city of white castles and golden domes, which it was. It reminded him of Istanbul which he had seen as a boy when it was Constantinople, In a near dream the faraway white columns of Haifa became subject to a more youthful eye, wild and untutored as it had seen Constantinople from the sea; like a huge inverted roc's egg split and painted, Hagia Sofia had drowned in its own quiet and waited for the umpteenth sun.

That night there was a feast. Local Bedouins had been commissioned to cook lamb, rice, hommos, and other such things, which were then served on good British plate with napkins, flatware, and glasses. Everyone ate too much and drank too much. In a frenzy of eating, the Irish major said, “You see, we take off a lot this time of year. The springs only last about a week, oh, maybe ten days.”

“How do you know,” replied Keslake, wolfing down sizzling chunks of lamb between swallows of iced wine, “that it's not poisoned?” He spoke loudly above the din in the courtyard lined with rifles on ready racks. Indian Muslim sentries (who would not drink) paced the walls above. “It would be rather easy for the Arabs to do us all in with a side of lamb, wouldn't it?”

“Nonsense! They're our friends. They wouldn't do it. Besides, I'd hang every last one of them.”

“But you'd be dead.”

“Then it wouldn't matter a bit, would it?”

“I suppose not. But what if they attacked right now, when everybody's drunk and stuffed?”

“They wouldn't attack now!” said the Major. “They never attack when we're drunk! They never attack at all! And if they did the chaps from up the road would be here in no time. It's only ten miles. Don't worry. Eat your poisoned lamb.”

Keslake was always at the ready, or at least he tried to be. When the next day he swam in the clear pools, hardly able to tell them from the clear sky, his pistol lay on the bank, always within sight. If he turned he knew at what angle and distance he would find it. Even so, he would have lost himself in the thunderously cool cascades had not a Sikh summoned him from the most memorable bright water of his life to tell him that he was wanted in Haifa that evening, and a convoy was just leaving. The Sikh had been guarding when the message came over the radio on his jeep. It had come from the fort. They had heard by telephone from the Army Command in Haifa. The Army Command had heard by telephone from the Naval Command, which had heard from Suez, which had heard from Crete that another illegal immigrant ship was making its way to the Palestine coast, as straight as an arrow. Turning his back on the blue and white water, Keslake quickly dressed, holstered his pistol, and set out with dispatch for Haifa port.

O
NE MORNING
the passengers of the
Lindos Transit
awoke to find themselves in a dreamlike new land. The sea was azure and alert as they had never seen before, the winds warm and fresh. To the south were the mountains of Crete in steadfast order, swept back into a line of peaks which billowed like cloud, so white were they, a blinding white. Many of the passengers had seen the Alps, the Urals, the Appenines, but never had they seen mountains rising from the sea. Preparations had been completed: Levy's plan allowed several days of rest before the landing. The musicians were silent. Gulls wheeled and turned in smooth waves around the ship. The passengers were transfixed. They felt it possible that the gray mists of their lives, their dark cold histories, could be cured from them, lifted out of them by the sun. They looked at themselves—sunburnt faces, golden and dark hair, eyes green, blue, gray, brown, and black. Perhaps in such a place they could again make themselves whole. They had nothing. They were no one. Their fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, lovers, sons, daughters, and friends had been slaughtered like animals, their homes looted and burned. The things they had had on their bodies had been taken, their hair cut, their health stolen. But suddenly this landscape had arisen from the sea. Levy had deliberately turned his ship and taken it close to Crete. His charges fell in love with the abstract air above the mountains. They were resolute. A curtain of strength fell around them. No warship was going to take them to camps on Cyprus. They would die first—willingly.

But matching the artistry of their determination was that of the British. From the depth of the encouraging mountains they peered at the
Lindos Transit
through a telescope twenty feet long. The great elevation and clear air enabled a strange little detachment of Welshmen to scan a hundred miles of sea. Levy had held his vessel within a few miles of the coast. The Welshmen were able to see the ships name, and the white banner with the blue Star of David flying briskly from the mainmast. All seemed normal. The passengers were still and passive as they always were. The ships were invariably in shambles, and so was the
Lindos Transit.
Panels were missing, pieces of metalwork hung over the sides, and the windows were a crazy orange. The sergeant in charge of the post casually reported to his headquarters that the ship was in poor condition, overloaded, making only about ten knots. There were, to the surprise of the observers, quite a few sheep on board, standing on deck crowded up near the forecastle. Paul Levy had intended to slaughter them, but a delegation from the passengers had insisted that they be left alive, even were it to mean less food. And so it was that these Italian sheep were destined for Palestine, and they passed the time dreaming of the olive groves and bare meadows where they had been born.

Katrina Perlé slept on a hatch cover, the one on which the band had played in the more carefree days farther from the point of contact with the English. It was not the most comfortable place to sleep: the vibrations of the engines worked their way up hard and steady, and very often when the wind curled or backed, the stack exhaust settled amidships. A suffocating oily smell and taste in the air, familiar to mariners, was unwelcome to the twenty or so sleepers and sprawlers on the hatch cover, for its unpleasantness and for its associations. When Katrina opened her eyes she was shocked to see bodies lying around her, and she would not sleep again until she had seen some movement confirming that they were living men and women, and that therefore she herself was alive. But the sun had been of great help, as had been the views and the air. She was always partial to light and its various manifestations, messages, and tricks, and she could not help but share in the general good will and optimism. Her pregnancy was just beginning its seventh month.

At first she had wished to do away with the child, but then, like the magnificent rarity of a warship backing up, she reversed herself entirely and saw it as a great gift, comforting, the beginning of something better. She did not care that despite her beauty, which increased every day in the sun and air so that her hair was the color of burnished gold and her face roseate and dark, no one wanted her. It seemed not to matter. Though she believed the child's father to be dead, she was not alone.

A full day passed, during most of which Avigdor was at the helm—a strange new passion for him, of great utility to Levy. That evening as the sea got a little rough and the clouds broke into driven archipelagos, Levy was making his final plan. They would harry the boilers all night and through the following day when they would some time hit the coast. He knew that the radars on Mt. Carmel and on the destroyers could track him at night, but that in darkness no action could be taken short of blasting them from the water—something which caused him to be sure that they entered territorial waters during daylight. Besides, a night landing would be difficult for his passengers, too many of whom were old and sick. Everyone knew his station and job. The weather was off just enough to set them properly on edge. Levy wore his pistol almost ceremoniously, for he could not imagine how it might help. As the clouds passed, they called to mind all the geography of the wide world as he had always known and loved it. That night the ship made fourteen knots—the swan song of the old boilers.