Zion (9 page)

They must have located the arsenal. He listened to the sounds of the firefight, worried now. The battle went on too long. Perhaps they can’t get inside, Asher thought. Perhaps it’s too heavily guarded.

A blinding white light was followed fractions of a second later by a thundercrack. Asher looked up, saw a fireball billowing into the sky, followed by a mushroom of smoke.

“Jesus Fucking Ker-ist!” he heard one of the soldiers shout from the watchtower.

Asher brought the Sten to his shoulder, aimed carefully at the light, and fired a short burst. A splinter of glass, a scream. More Sten fire from his right and the other light was extinguished.

Men ran past him with wire cutters, and set to work.

But as soon as they were inside the wire, everything went to shit.

The prisoners rushed out around blindly in the darkness. The instructions the Haganah infiltrators inside the wire had given them had been instantly forgotten. They streamed away from the tents towards the perimeter fence.

In the Red House, with Yarkoni, it had all seemed so easy. But now Asher was buffeted bodies in the darkness, his own commands lost under the shouts and screams. How would he and his men ever be able to extricate themselves and their charges from this chaos . . .

He reached out, grabbed one of the running figures, a woman. “
Palmach!
Come with me!” he shouted.

One of the guards on the watchtower opened up with his Vickers gun, firing blind. Asher’s leg went numb beneath him, and he fell. He tried to get up, couldn’t. Bullets raked the ground by his head, sand stinging his face. There was a roar as a grenade exploded at the base of the watchtower.

The machine-gun fell silent.

His thigh was sticky wet. His fingers found a jagged hole in his own flesh the size of a small coin. He pressed down hard with the palm of his hand to staunch the pumping blood.

Someone knelt beside him, cradling his shoulders. “You’re hurt.” It was a woman’s voice, a refugee.

“Get to the wire!”

“But you’re hurt ...”

The blood was still squirting between his fingers. Had to keep the pressure on, he remembered from his training.

“Give me your knife!” the woman said. “Quickly!”

He groped in his webbing belt and handed it to her. She cut through her skirt and pressed a ball of cloth into his hand. “Hold this on the wound,” she said. He plugged the bullet hole with it. He was starting to feel faint from the loss of blood.

Palmachniks
and refugees were stampeding around them. He heard another burst of gunfire. They were in the open, exposed.

“You have to get to the wire!” he shouted at her.

The woman bound the makeshift dressing in place with more strips cut from her skirt. “Can you move your leg? Is it broken?”

“I can’t feel anything! Get away from here!”

“Not without you.”

Asher looked up at her through a red mist of pain. The face of a boy angel, choirboy-cropped hair, huge eyes, dark shadows in her cheeks. She draped an arm around his shoulders, helped him to his feet.

Moonlight splashed over the bodies that littered the compound. We’ll never make it, Asher thought. The British will cut us down before we reach the wire.

Suddenly three
Palmachniks
ran towards them and he saw the white flash of their Sten guns. Someone grabbed the woman and pushed her away. “Get to the wire! Hurry!” He heard Netanel’s voice. “Ash! Where are you hurt?”

“My leg.”

“Shit, you’re bleeding bad. Help me here!”

Netanel and a fellow
Palmachnik
grabbed him under his arms and dragged him away. Asher heard the chatter of a Sten as a third covered their retreat.

He blacked out.

The trucks were waiting, engines idling, on the road beyond the dunes. The two
Palmachniks
ran down the sand, their guns slung across their shoulders, Asher supported between them in a chair lift.

The lead trucks started to rumble away, their headlights switched off, heading for the turn-off road that would take them across the plain to a
kibbutz
twenty miles to the east. They had to be well clear before the British armored patrols arrived from Haifa.

Asher was hefted into the back of the last lorry. Strong hands pulled him aboard.

The woman pulled away from her escort and leaned inside. “Is he all right?”

“Get away from here!” A
Palmachnik
grabbed her and pushed her in the back of another lorry, with the rest of the refugees. She saw the man’s face briefly in the moonlight. A shaven head almost concealed by a khaki balaclava, the glimpse of a scar under the blacking.

She did not recognize Netanel Rosenberg, not even the sound of his voice.

Tel Aviv-Jerusalem Road

There were perhaps as many as twenty young men and women in the back of the lorry, dressed in blue denims, ostensibly Jewish laborers on their way to a
kibbutz
. The lorry rumbled past the barbed wire of the British army base at Sarafand, and headed across the coastal plain to the east. They travelled past vineyards and wheat fields and the towering minarets of Ramie to the maw of the Bab el-Wad, the Gate of the Valley, the twenty-mile-long gorge that guarded the road to Jerusalem.

This was the way that the camel caravans had come in the time of Christ. Titus’s Legionnaires had built their forts along this road, and the Crusaders had passed this way as they rode against the Saracens.

As they entered the
wadi
the bell of the red-tiled Monastery of the Seven Agonies reached them on the wind, accompanied by the delicate odor of orange blossom. They could see the Trappists at work in their terraced vineyards, and above them, the grey blockhouse of Latrun Fort where the British sentries would be watching them through binoculars.

Then the walls of the valley closed in on them and they were inside the jaws of the Bab el-Wad, twenty miles of sinuous curves, the white cubes of Arab houses clinging to the steep walls of rock and pine. The
Palmach
men and women in the lorry fell silent and stared, and were glad of the Sten gun parts the women carried with them inside their brassieres and taped between their legs, grateful for the grenades concealed inside the potato sacks and the spare rifles taped underneath the boards of the lorry. They could feel hostile eyes watching them from every eyrie and they knew they were inside the lion’s mouth.

Three hours later they reached the village of Kiryat Anavim and turned a left-hand curve in the road. As they looked down on Jerusalem, Netanel felt the tension drain from his body. He looked up at the glaring white tomb of the prophet Samuel, high on its mountain top. It was from here, legend had it, that Richard the Lionheart looked down at Jerusalem for the first time and wept. Netanel wept also, and he murmured the words of the Passover prayer he had said, a lifetime ago, at a glittering table in Germany.

But the soft young man who had spoken those words in Ravenswald would not have recognized the hard-eyed
Palmachnik
who rode the lorry down the Jaffa Road towards the rose-colored walls of the Holy City.

“Next year in Jerusalem.”

Kfar Herzl Kibbutz

The farm has come a long way in the last ten years, Sarah thought. Now there are lawns and flowers, swings and sandboxes; the school has Bunsen burners and micro-scopes; there is electric light and machines to milk the cows in the barns; we even have our own hospital. The cottages piled up the slopes in neat rows of red tiles and white walls, the gardens carefully tended.

Around the, rippling in the heat haze of the afternoon, lay the Judean hills, brown and stark, the color of dung, a reminder of what the land was before they arrived. They had kept the promise Herzl and the Zionists had made; they had tamed the wilderness. But sometimes Sarah secretly longed for the way it was before, when they had first come here. In those days they had battled the wilderness for every inch, and she had not realized how sad it might seem when it was beaten.

She thought about Rishou. His heart must break when he comes here. Perhaps it is why he spends so much time in Jerusalem now. When he returns to Rab’allah he must look down at us and what he sees rebukes him twice; it reminds him how his ancestors’ land was taken away from him, and it demonstrates how much more advanced our European ways have become.

Isaac was playing soccer in the playground with four other boys. A fine boy, she thought; tall and athletic and good-looking. He was nearly eleven years old. Where had that time gone?

He had been six years old when Asher had joined the Jewish Brigade and gone to fight in Italy. She started work with the
Histadruth
in Jerusalem and spent less and less time at the
kibbutz
. Yaakov had virtually raised him since then.

Asher limped on to the verandah and eased himself on to a chair beside her. Sarah maneuvered another chair so he could rest his injured leg on it. “Don’t fuss over me,” he said.

“You’re a wounded hero.”

“Sarcasm is not an attractive side of your personality.”

“Talking of personalities, you’ve behaved like a goat with a thorn in its backside ever since you came back here. What’s wrong?”

“I don’t like being an invalid.”

“It’s better than being a corpse.”

He shrugged. “I’m not going to apologize for being alive.”

“Of course not.”

“I can’t stand sitting round here like a cripple!”

“It’s not my fault, or my father’s.”

She watched him wrestle with his pride. He scratched at the dressing on his leg. The bullet had not broken the bone, which was lucky, but it had damaged an artery, which was not.

He grunted, which was as close to an apology as she had ever got from him. Asher and his pride! He nodded towards Isaac. “The boy misses you. You should come back here to the
kibbutz
.”

“You’re here with him now. Anyway, my work for the Haganah is just as important as yours.”

Asher was silent for a time. “Are you seeing anyone in Jerusalem?”

Oh well, you know, just one of my old Arab lovers. “What an extraordinary question for a husband to ask his wife.”

“I know things aren’t good between us.”

“I didn’t think you noticed these things.”

“I pick up little signals. Most men wouldn’t realize they hadn’t made love to their wives for a year but I’m very perceptive.”

“You’ve been in Haifa, I’ve been in Jerusalem. It’s hard to be intimate with the Samarian hills between us.”

“Why do you think I asked them to post me to Haifa?”

She let the question hang.

“When do you go back to Jerusalem?” he said.

“Tomorrow, after
Shabbat
.”

“Why don’t you find out if there’s something I can do with the
Shai
? I’m going crazy round here. The doctor says it will be months before I can rejoin my unit.”

Before she could answer, she heard someone calling Asher’s name. She looked up and saw Yaakov striding across the lawns towards them. A tall, gaunt figure loped along beside him.

“Ash, you’ve got a visitor,” Yaakov shouted.

Asher struggled to his feet. “Netya!”

“
Shalom
, Ash!” Netanel grinned. “How’s the hero of Atlit!”

Netanel sat on the veranda with Asher, smoking endless cigarettes. A vodka bottle was uncorked on the table, but only Asher was drinking. “Our unit’s been ordered into Jerusalem,” Netanel said. “Headquarters thinks that’s where the trouble will start.”

“We have to keep up the pressure on the British.”

“But there’s bound to be a backlash from the Arabs. We can’t let them get away with it again like they did before the war.”

He talks as if he was here then, Asher thought. How quickly he has absorbed our thinking, our ways. He scratched irritably at his leg. “I’m going crazy just sitting round here.”

“Does it still hurt?”

He shook his head. “It’s just the itching. It’s getting worse now the weather is warmer.”

“You were lucky. You could have bled to death.”

“If you hadn’t found me so quickly, I would have.” He took a swallow of the vodka. “We really shook them up that night. I would have given anything to have been in the High Commissioner’s office when he got the news.”