Mrs. Pappel’s hand tightened on Rivkah’s shoulder.
“It was too late. I never forgot you said that. Come before it’s too late. We’d given up all our travel papers. Mama and I were sent to Ravensbrück.”
Mrs. Pappel reached for Gabbi, who did not take the offered hand. Mrs. Pappel didn’t pull back. “What happened to your mother, child?”
Gabbi chose her words. The girl was sixteen now, the same age as many of the haverim of Massuot Yitzhak. Most had been in the camps, all had lost families. Gabbi seemed younger than them, paler and softer; she’d not had the years in Palestine to scour her. But in her sadness, she was the same as Rivkah, Mrs. Pappel, any of them; no one was older.
In the spring of last year, the war was collapsing around the Nazis. After surviving two years in Ravensbrück, Gabbi, their mother, and twenty-five thousand women were forced from the camp. Guards marched them north, away from the advancing Red Army, to keep them from bearing witness to what they’d endured. The women walked for a month without enough food, clothing, or shelter. Many died of malnutrition and exposure.
The girl dabbed her eyes on the backs of her wrists.
“Mama.”
Rivkah smeared her own cheeks dry. Mama and Papa were buried for tonight, for the arrival of Gabbi, and for the first moment of forever in Rivkah’s heart.
Gabbi said, “I couldn’t go back to Vienna. For a year I stayed in a displaced persons camp at Dachau in Munich, looking for a way to come here, to find you. I joined a Youth Aliyah group, then took a train with them to Italy. In La Spezia, I got passage on an Aliyah Bet ship, the Dov Hoz. Before we could sail, the British blockaded us. The Italians in the town contacted the press. Newspapers from all over the world got involved. There were a thousand of us on the Dov Hoz; we staged a hunger strike for three days. After that, the British let us leave for Palestine.”
Mrs. Pappel asked, “How did you find me?”
“We got to Haifa in May. In Éva’s letters, she said she’d come on the Atlantic. I went to the Atlit camp to check the records, to see if I could find where she’d gone after she left the camp. They told me about the Patria, how it sank. I got scared that you’d drowned. But you weren’t on the Patria’s manifest.”
“No.”
Gabbi dug into a pocket of her skirt, to hand Rivkah a small, creased paper.
“You were dead.”
Rivkah unfolded her old identification card, left in the Atlit barrack the morning the guards rousted everyone to board the Patria. She’d left Éva’s card inside papa’s opera coat, on her cot when the guard threw her out.
For the first time since she’d walked into the lantern light, Gabbi smiled.
“I asked to see the record of your death. You were found in the wrong barrack, you had no identification papers, and you died of old age.” Gabbi tapped Rivkah’s old card. “The British had a body with no identification. And an identification card with no body. So, they matched the body with your card and balanced their books.”
Before Gabbi left Atlit, she copied the names of the others in the barrack where Éva’s corpse was found. One of them lived in Haifa, running a hostel. The old woman said Gabbi would surely find her sister if she found Mrs. Pappel, recalling how the two had become inseparable. Gabbi’s search for Mrs. Pappel took her from Atlit to Haifa to Kfar Etzion, then a short truck ride over bumpy ground to Massuot Yitzhak.
Gabbi held both hands out to Mrs. Pappel. “And there you are. Hello, Mrs. Pappel.”
She leaned down to nuzzle her cheek against Rivkah’s. She whispered, “Hello, Rivkah Gellerman.”
Rivkah pressed a hand behind her sister’s head. “I’m so sorry.”
In the dark, off the porch, a patch of blackness eddied. Malik headed for his mewling camel and called over his shoulder.
“When I return, I will bring a poem for this. And I will teach the girl to shoot.”
Chapter 31
OCTOBER 5
KIBBUTZ SHOVAL
BRITISH MANDATE OF PALESTINE
By Vincent Haas
Herald Tribune News Service
YOM KIPPUR, the day of atonement, ended tonight at dusk.
I am in the Negev, holding on in the rear of a ten-wheeler truck, bouncing over rocks and sand. I sit on a stack of poles that shift as we bounce, threatening to pinch me.
My truck is the lead vehicle of five, all piled with construction tools, prefabricated walls, bags of concrete and gravel, water barrels, shingles, crossbeams, and two-by-fours.
Yom Kippur’s sunset saw ten more convoys like ours, secretly dispatched from Jerusalem to establish, before dawn, eleven tower-and-stockade settlements in the most remote part of Mandate Palestine: the desert.
British officials recently announced a map that will permanently divide Palestine into three sections: forty-three percent of the Mandate’s land, including Jerusalem, will remain with Britain; forty percent goes to the Arabs, and the rest, just seventeen percent, will belong to the Jews. All three areas will remain under British rule.
The Jews are not happy.
In response, the Jewish Agency is racing across the face of Palestine, even into the Negev, to create as many settlements as it can outside the area the British propose to allot them. When statehood comes, and the Jews are resolute that it will, these overnight colonies will anchor their case for different boundaries.
We’re headed for a windswept hill seven miles north of the Arab city of Be’er Sheva. The Jews will call the new settlement Shoval, after the son of the son of somebody in the Bible.
My thirty comrades are a rowdy bunch of survivors from a ship that sank six years ago in Haifa, the Patria. They’re young men and women, mostly teenagers, who’ve been training and waiting for two years for this first night in the desert.
After an hour of bouncing in burnished light through a bleak land, our convoy climbs a slight hill. We stop, jump down, and immediately begin building a three-story watchtower. Holes are dug while strong backs unload the supplies, all in the trucks’ headlights. I take a turn on a post hole digger. The ground fights me. But even as I hack at it while others roll away stones, I know this hardness is how the land makes you prove yourself. I quit digging before I get blisters.
The pioneers finish by sunrise. There’s an old Ottoman law that still holds sway in the Negev: any structure with a roof can remain. The Arabs respect this and the Jews take advantage.
After the watchtower stands on four legs, the Jews erect sheds at its feet and nail down their vital roofs. A perimeter stockade goes up next, six foot high, surrounding the settlement. Shoval now covers a single dunam, another Turkish holdover, that area which can be plowed by a team of oxen in a single day. About a quarter acre.
After my short shift digging holes, I only watch and take notes. The pioneers don’t mind; I was slowing them down. They’re friendly, high spirited, and on an adventure.
A red dawn paints the faces of the young Jews even ruddier. Exhausted, they drink cool wine and dance the hora inside their new wall. Shoval and ten sister settlements like her have been birthed on the same desert night.
An hour after sunrise, the Arabs arrive, camel-riding Bedouin from the village of Rahat. Settlers scramble for their guns. Emissaries go outside the wall to talk while armed farmers man the watchtower. Together, the Jews and Arabs strike a deal, that they will try to live side-by-side.
I’ve seen too few of these handshakes. But they must be happening. They must. No one in Palestine can ignore where all this is headed if Arab and Jew can’t share the land. Maybe, just maybe, that handshake was repeated ten more times in the same morning sun, out in the white wastes of the Negev.
It’s not enough to give me hope. It does, however, let me sleep. Reporting from Shoval, Palestine.
Chapter 32
Vince
December 27
Jerusalem<
br />
The police captain settled his bulk behind a desk in his small office. Vince slid into a hard-backed chair. The captain removed his billed khaki cap and set it in a spot on the desk that seemed reserved for it. Medals coated one side of his starched tunic, on the other hung a badge and a whistle on a chain. A gold clip held his tie. He smoothed a speckled hand over strands of carrot hair. The man was a Scot; he seemed a wall.
“Mister Haas, is it?” The captain’s watchband made a click when he flattened both palms on his desk.
“Yes, sir.”
“New York paper, right?”
The man’s hair was not matted; he’d not sweated. He lay ten fingertips lightly on the table, though he had heavy hands. Nothing about him hinted that he’d just come from a flogging.
“That’s right.”
“What can I do for you, Mister Haas?”
“I understand you were a witness to the beating.”
“The caning. I was there.”
“You whipped the boy on the Sabbath.”
“That was not a concern for the government.”
“Was it eighteen strokes?”
The policeman answered in the trained manner of a press release.
“Abraham Kimchin was taken from his cell this morning to the courtyard of the Jerusalem Central Prison. He was stripped to the waist and tied by the arms to a post. Two policemen administered punishment with bamboo rods, eighteen strokes as ordered by the Mandate court. What else?”
“How did he take it?”
“Defiant.”
“He’s sixteen.”
“He’ll see seventeen.”
“You think he got off light?”
The policeman tapped one finger on the table, the sole display of his impatience.
“Kimchin is Irgun. He was found guilty of three capital offenses. Possession of an illegal firearm. Five rounds of ammunition. He discharged a firearm in the robbery of a bank in Jaffa. Eighteen years in jail and eighteen strokes with a cane are better than one rope. Yes, Mr. Haas, the lad got off light.”
Vince dug out of his pocket a flyer he’d snared off a wall two days prior. He unfolded the blue page to lay it out before the captain.
“You’ve seen this?”
In Hebrew and English across the top, the poster declared: Warning!
A Hebrew soldier taken prisoner by the enemy was sentenced by an illegal British Military Court to the humiliating punishment of flogging. We warn the occupation government not to carry out this punishment which is contrary to the laws of soldiers’ honor. If it is put into effect, every officer of the British occupation army will be liable to be punished in the same way, to get eighteen whips.
The captain slid the page back to Vince. “I’ve seen it.”
“Would you care to comment?”
Beneath the freckles, the Scotsman turned one shade redder. “The Jews need to understand we mean business.”
“I think they’re saying the same to you.”
The captain pulled his hands off the desk, to knit husky fingers in his lap. Every focused movement seemed to help him contain some heat building within him.
“We know you have dealings with the Irgun, Mister Haas.”
“Is that so?”
“It’s rather clear from your writings.”
“And?”
“It would be helpful. It might save lives, if you would let them know that British restraint, while practiced over centuries, has limits.”
“I’m not your go-between.”
The policeman ignored this. “Tell them what is on the other side of our limits.”
“And what is that?”
“The noose.”
“Captain?”
“In this decade, not one Jewish terrorist on death row in Palestine has gone to the gallows. Over the past year alone, eighty-three Jews have been jailed for capital crimes. None have been executed. I am informing you that word has come down, from very high up, that our policy of leniency will be reconsidered. If things do not change.”
“Understood.”
“Do you know the name Dov Gruner?”
“No.”
“Keep it in mind.”
The policeman rested both palms again softly on the tabletop beside his neat hat. This called an end to the meeting.
“I know how to contact you. Anything else, Mister Haas?”
Vince stood while the cop kept his seat. The Irgun were going to retaliate for Kimchin; the cop knew it. Who was Dov Gruner? Was he the Jew already chosen to pay for whatever action the Irgun was going to take?
Outside the police station in the brightness of Jerusalem, Vince checked his watch. Ten minutes before eleven. He had time to make it to the YMCA patio.
Chapter 33
Hugo
December 29
Tel Aviv
Hugo finished a supper of brown bread and fig jam, white cheese, and a Jaffa orange. He stepped out onto his third-floor balcony to smoke. On days of wilder weather, the crashing of the sea and a trace of salt drifted to his open windows. Tonight, a gentle night, Hugo dropped ashes to the lawn. Below, after the shops closed, Arabs and Jews walked to their homes.
The Irgun didn’t pay Hugo enough to keep his own flat. For the rest of his rent, Hugo did small jobs in the building for his landlord, an old Czech. The man had offered Hugo work the day he’d rented the apartment, without Hugo mentioning anything about his skills. The money the old Czech gave him on Fridays was always a little more than Hugo’s invoice; that was the secret Irgun share. He did some carpentry, some patching of mortar, and no plumbing. A Škoda parked beneath his balcony at the curb belonged to the Irgun, left there for tonight. The key had been slipped under his door during the day while he’d been out.
Hugo tossed the nub of his last cigarette off the veranda. The old Czech hired a deaf Arab boy to sweep the grounds every morning. A young couple strolled beneath a streetlamp. The man was Hassidic in black hat and suit; the woman hid her head and arms under a wrap. She carried two mesh sacks of groceries. The man spoke too faintly for Hugo to catch his words in the cool night, but he seemed to be lecturing in Hebrew while his wife carried the groceries.
Hugo plucked the car key from his pocket and left the veranda.
Vince waited at the corner on Rothschild Boulevard. Hugo drove past twice, checking to see that no one was following Vince. On the third pass, he pulled over across the street.
Hugo rested his arm on the windowsill of the Škoda. On the sidewalk, Vince stood taller than anyone; he looked plainly foreign. Hugo whistled.
Vince crossed the street and got in. A sour mien seemed to get in with him. Hugo patted Vince’s shoulder, cheery as he drove off.
“You look worried.”
“I’m not sure this is a good idea.”
“Of course it is. A warm winter night, a breeze off the sea. A pleasant drive.”
“I know what’s going to happen. That makes me complicit.”
Vince still clung to fairness and rules. Hugo found it outmoded. In a small way, it made him sad for old Leipzig and the time in the world when those notions were not dead.
Hugo peeled back the hem of his coat. “I have a gun. Does that make you feel better?”
“Why would it?”
“You can say I’m making you come along. You had no choice. Would you like a blindfold?”
“I brought my own.”
“Oh, stop worrying. Everyone in Palestine knows what’s going to happen.”
They’d not seen each other in two weeks. Hanukah had come and gone, and Christmas. Neither mentioned the holidays; they didn’t speak of gifts or their time apart. They weren’t friends, a relief for Hugo because he was unsure how he might handle such an overture from Vince, to share a meal, talk between missions. Vince as a friend would keep playing t
he American, the moralist and caretaker. Hugo had no need for someone else’s morals or their morsels of concern.
He motored south from the city, skirting the minarets and alleys of Arab Jaffa. Four miles from Tel Aviv, in an open swath of scrub and sandhills, Hugo pulled into the parking lot of a ruined gas station. Two miles away lay the Jewish towns of Holon and Bat Yam. The gas station had been demolished in the riots of 1929, the fighting that once flared out of Jaffa. Hugo shut down his headlights. Vince didn’t fidget or look around, not nervous or frightened.
Hugo peered into the darkness between the two Jewish towns, beyond the lights of Jaffa to the stars over the sea. Dunes and weedy grasses seasoned the night with a briny smell, the oily odors of the old gas station leeched from the busted concrete.
From behind an aboveground fuel tank, three shadows came unstaked from the ground. They came to the Škoda, to crowd into the backseat. Hugo didn’t turn to greet them, the Irgun practice of anonymity.
Six miles south of Tel Aviv, Rishon LeZion was the second oldest Jewish farming settlement in Palestine, with seven thousand residents. The citrus orchards and vineyards had been established for half a century. Hugo drove through the long-cultivated plots, past clusters of fruit-blooming branches and rows of grape arbors.
Rishon LeZion had its own main street of office buildings, shops, cafes, a British police station, and a military headquarters. In the heart of the commercial blocks, Hugo pulled to the curb outside a well-lit café, the Theresa. The evening had grown late; few patrons filled the tables. Traffic on the sidewalks and street was thin.
Inside the dark Škoda, Hugo, Vince, and the three Irgun waited. The watches on every man’s wrist ticked audibly.
After ten minutes, a policeman exited the café. He trod the sidewalk toward the precinct building.
Hugo hadn’t spoken since the three fighters entered the car. He asked, “Why not that one?”
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