Zion (Jerusalem)

by Colin Falconer

“It’s winter. Any luck?”

  He nodded. “After he left you he took a taxi from Damascus Gate to a house in Katamon. He was there for a couple of hours. I made some enquiries. It’s owned by a woman, an Austrian. Her neighbors say she’s a prostitute. Could be they’re just jealous, I don’t know.”

  “So now we know how he spends his money.”

  ‘Well, maybe. Afterwards he got another taxi back to the Old City. He went into a small olive oil factory. That was where it got really interesting.”

  “An olive oil factory?”

  “I made some enquiries in the coffee house a few doors away. Don’t worry, I was discreet. The owner only needed a little encouragement; he told me about everyone in the whole street.”

  “What did he say about Ishmael?”

  “He thinks he’s a . . .” Levi stopped himself. “. . . he implied he engages in unnatural sexual practices. It also seems the olive oil factory is a family concern. Owned by the Hass’an family from Rab’allah, a little village about twenty miles outside Jerusalem.”

  Sarah felt the blood rush from her face. “Yes, I know it.”

  “Our friend’s name is Majid, Majid Hass’an. It seems he provides all the money, his brother does all the work.”

  “What’s his brother’s name?”

  Levi was puzzled by the question. He frowned, trying to remember. “Rishou, I think. Rishou Hass’an. Why? Is it important?”

  Sarah lay in bed, her hands behind her head, and watched the stars blink their cipher through the branches of the pines outside her window. The cold sheets and the aching loneliness of the bed depressed her. She wondered what Asher was doing tonight. After all these years she had almost persuaded herself that she loved her husband.

  And now, suddenly, that name again.

  Rishou!

  She had not seen him since the night of the ambush. The next day he had disappeared and she had heard nothing more of him until tonight.

  But if she closed her eyes she could still smell the apple trees and the soft desert wind; his skin, she remembered, had a dusty scent like cardamom and good tobacco. She thought about how he looked at her, those black eyes that seemed to look right into her soul. The devil had been in her when she was young. She had dared to cross borders, to touch the forbidden. It had liberated her, as nothing she had ever done since.

  Rishou!

  His face, his memory, his name; he was inextricably entangled with her youth, with feelings far more powerful than anything she had ever felt before or since. He was in her blood. In every way.

  She winced; she felt his loss like a physical pain in her chest. She could not sleep, it was hopeless. Instead she lay awake, long into the night, planning.

  Chapter 4

  There were only eight tables in Fink’s, but more rumors, lies and betrayals had been whispered over each of them than in all of Jerusalem’s other restaurants combined. Ever since it opened in the early thirties it had become virtually a private club for the British intelligence community.

  Major Ian Chisholm sat by the window, smoking cigarettes, nodding occasionally to colleagues entering or leaving by the street door. David Rothschild, the proprietor, welcomed him personally. He left a beer and a plate of schnitzels on the table.

  Despite his rank, Chisholm had the hard, raw-boned appearance of an NCO, his nose flat, his face seamed with scars. He looked like a street fighter; in fact, his nose had been broken playing grammar school rugby, and the scars on his face had been caused by flying glass during the Blitz.

  But otherwise the war had been good to Ian Chisholm. Without Hitler he would probably have spent most of his army career as a junior officer. His father had been a greengrocer; hardly the sort of pedigree his regiment was looking for. But breeding did not stop bullets or deflect shell fragments, and by the time of Germany surrendered the greengrocer’s son was a major.

  He looked at his watch. Late.

  A few minutes later Majid strolled in. He was wearing a pinstripe suit and a red silk tie. Chisholm groaned aloud. For God’s sake. He looked like a gangster.

  “Hello, old boy,” Majid said. “Sorry I’m late.” He sat down and clicked his fingers in Rothschild’s direction. “Beer over here.”

  Chisholm clenched his jaw. Who the hell did this little gyppo think he was? He hated wogs at the best of times, but a wog with an English accent affecting public school airs was, in his opinion, worse than a black or a bog Irish.

  “How are you today, Mr. Hass’an?” Chisholm said, forcing himself to be polite, if not pleasant.

  “Splendid. Just splendid.”

  “I’m pleased to hear it.”

  Rothschild brought Majid his beer. Chisholm raised his own glass and said, “Cheers.”

  The things he did for king and country. He had heard a lot of funny rumors about this one. There were whispers that he was dealing quartermaster’s stores on the black market; there were other stories too, nasty ones, about him and some toffee-nose on the High Commissioner’s staff.

  Still, orders from above were clear: fraternize with the Arabs, harass the Jews. Harass them! If the government let the army do their job properly they’d do more than just harass the bastards. It was a British Mandate, British territory, and if the kikes didn’t toe the line they should be given a few lessons at the sharp end of colonial diplomacy. What was it they said? “You can do anything with a bayonet except sit on it.” Still, orders were for a softly, softly approach. And fraternization. Yes, we must remember to fraternize.

  “What have you got for me?” he asked Majid.

  “Trouble,” Majid whispered.

  “Where?”

  “On the Bab el-Wad road. The morning Egged bus to Tel Aviv.”

  Chisholm nodded slowly. “When?”

  “Tomorrow morning.”

  “What is it? Ambush, bomb, what?”

  “Ambush.”

  “I see.” As far as he was concerned, the Arabs could do what they liked as long as no British soldiers were hurt and the process of government was not disrupted. As it was, the army sent a patrol up the Bab el-Wad every morning and every evening to ensure the road stayed open. But the morning patrol would be back in Jerusalem by the time the Egged bus reached the wadi. The wogs and the kikes could blow each other to kingdom come.

  “You will not send troops to intervene?” Majid asked him.

  “Intervene in what?” Chisholm said and he drained his beer.

  “Splendid,” Majid said. And he thought: Allah, help me in my sorrow! All this deception is a strain on the health! But what could he do? He was a loyal Arab; but good sex was so expensive these days.

  Judean Desert

  Netanel was less than fifty yards away when they saw him. The gazelle raised their heads, their ears twitching, and then darted away, skipping over the stones in the dry river-bed.

  Yaakov Landauer appeared at Netanel’s right shoulder. “Not bad. For a beginner.”

  “What did you expect? They’re wild animals.”

  “A good Palmachnik would have grabbed them by the tail and told me what they had for lunch.” Yaakov took off his khaki slouch hat and wiped the sweat from his forehead, exposing the mahogany brown skull and the fringe of white hair.

  How old is he? Netanel wondered. Fifty-five? Sixty? Older than my father was when he died, certainly. Yet look at him. No softness on him anywhere. Hard and gnarled like the trunk of an olive tree.

  The rest of the group was straggling over the rocks towards them. “Now we march!” Yaakov shouted. “When we reach the cliffs there, we’ll see how much you kids have learned about rock climbing!”

  Netanel had arrived at the kibbutz at Kfar Herzl over a week before. He had travelled with fourteen others, ten men and four women. Most of them were like him, veterans of the wire, smuggled in on the ships of the Aliyah Bet. Their new identity papers said they were farm laborers, and the driver had told the soldiers at the roadblocks they were travelling to the kibbutz to help with the harvest.

&n
bsp; Most of them were Polish, two were Hungarian and there was one other German like himself. They conversed with each other in Yiddish but as soon as they reached the kibbutz they were encouraged to use Hebrew, a language which until then had been only a written language, like Latin, the language of their scriptures.

  It had been dark when they arrived. Netanel was taken to a wine cellar under the communal dining hall and questioned in the semi-darkness by three men whose faces he could not see. He learned later that one of them was Yaakov Landauer, Haganah commander for the kibbutz.

  Two candles, an ancient Bible and a Beretta pistol were then placed on the table in front of him. With one hand on the scripture, the other on the cold metal of the gun, the men invoked what they called the supreme conscience of Zionism and invited him to swear his allegiance to the Haganah.

  Forty-three thousand Palestine Jews had served with the British forces during the Second World War, helping defeat the Germans. Afterwards combat manuals had been painstakingly pilfered from British army barracks all over the Middle East. They all found their way to the Haganah.

  Netanel and his fellow recruits were given a crash course in British soldiering. While the kibbutzniks were out in the fields Yaakov Landauer gathered the latest recruits in Kfar Herzl’s communal dining hall and gave them their basic training.

  Weapons were brought from the kibbutz’s cache - the kibbutzniks called it their slik - which was hidden under a concrete floor in the henhouse. They were shown how to break down and reassemble revolvers, pistols, rifles, Sten guns, even a Hotchkiss machine-gun.

  They were taught judo.

  They were taught first aid.

  They were taught intelligence-gathering.

  They were taught interrogation techniques. Some of the methods, Netanel thought, would not have been out of place in Auschwitz.

  They were taught the rudiments of signaling and map- reading.

  They were taught survival techniques.

  There was hardly any time to eat, let alone sleep.

  Then they were taken into the desert.

  “The first thing you have to learn,” Yaakov announced, “is how to jump out of a moving truck.”

  Every Haganah recruit was driven into the desert late in the afternoon and told to leap off the backboard. The truck would not slow down. They were then required to find their way to a rendezvous point using the night navigation methods they had learned in the classroom. It was a quick - and very dangerous - test of a new recruit’s abilities.

  But that was just the start.

  They learned to march through the night.

  They learned to patrol without compass or light.

  They learned how to stalk prey - first animals, then humans.

  They learned rock climbing.

  They learned how to throw grenades, using oranges stuffed with potatoes as dummy grenades.

  And when it was over, they marched again.

  Exhaustion, hunger, thirst; these were not new experiences for any death camp survivor. But it was the young sabra recruits who held up to it best. Their bodies were lean and hard and accustomed to the hardships of the desert. A new breed of Jew, Netanel thought; tough, arrogant, athletic. If they had fair skins and blond hair, they would be the kind of Aryans that Hitler dreamed about.

  The moon rose above the desert, impossibly huge, its seas and craters clearly visible. He had never seen any moon like this before. In Ravenswald he had never paid that much attention to it. But here in the wilderness, where his ancestors had once slept in goatskin tents, he felt in harmony with the rhythm of the natural world, as if he had travelled back in time to a moment in history when he was free of the sin of murder, when Amos Mandelbaum’s blood was not sticky on his hands because it was still yet to happen.

  He slept: Amos Mandelbaum stood behind the counter in the pawnbroker’s shop. “What do you have for me today?” he said.

  Netanel pushed a wheelbarrow up to the counter. In the wheelbarrow was a little girl, holding a truncheon. “I could give you more if you had a pair,” Mandelbaum said.

  The door swung open and Mendelssohn burst in. He pointed his finger at Netanel. “You lied to us! You’re a Nazi!”

  “No,” Netanel said, “you don’t understand.”

  “Come on, on your feet!” Yaakov barked, shaking him awake. “You’ve had your rest. If you boys want to be Palmachniks, you have to prove to us you have the belly for it!”

  Netanel staggered to his feet in the darkness.

  There were only six of the original group left now, plus four sabras. The rest had been broken by the regimen of forced marches and lack of sleep. But they won’t break me, Netanel thought. I’m already broken.

  He followed the silhouette of Yaakov Landauer down the rocky incline, his backpack and the weight of the Sten gun cutting into his shoulder through his black jersey. Amos Mandelbaum walked beside him, his silent companion.

  Twelve days.

  Twelve days with little sleep, little food, only just enough water. Every muscle in his body screamed for rest. His arms and legs had been tom on rocks and desert scrub. His feet were bleeding from the endless marches. He was dizzy from fatigue and thirst.

  But he had done it. It had all been worth it. The training was over and he was a Palmachnik now.

  Yaakov Landauer squatted down next to him and handed him a rifle. He nodded towards the tin can that had been set up on a boulder a hundred yards away. “One round,” he said. “That is all the ammunition we can afford. It is your graduation present.”

  They were in a wadi; the high walls around them would cushion the noise. A jackal patrolled the cliff top, looking for easy pickings.

  Netanel took the rifle, aimed.

  Missed.

  Yaakov grinned and slapped him on the shoulder. “Don’t worry, we want soldiers, not snipers. Tonight we go back to the kibbutz, you can rest up for a couple of days. Then we start again.”

  Netanel looked up at the cliff. The jackal was gone. No easy pickings here, Netanel thought.

  Not anymore.

  Bab el-Wad

  Izzat sat on his haunches, the ancient Mauser cradled between his knees, watching the road that wound through the hills from Jerusalem. The wadi could not have been more perfect if Allah Himself had created it specifically for the purpose of ambushing Jews. In fact, he decided, that was probably the very reason Allah had brought it into being. Even back then, before time began, He had foreseen that there would come a time when they would try to trespass on their land.

  Perfect hiding places behind the rocks and boulders, perfect sighting for a rifle down into the gully; a perfect trap between the high walls, no hope of escape.

  He looked at his wristwatch. Almost time.

  Jerusalem

  The blue and silver bus was about to leave the station when a Jewish police sergeant climbed inside, spoke softly to the driver, and then ordered everyone off. Half the passengers were women, the rest were half. They filed out of the door without complaint.

  Their places were taken by two dozen members of the Jewish Supernumerary Police, dressed in civilian clothes. Each of them was a member of the Haganah, and each of them was armed. As the police were the only individuals among the Jewish population who were allowed by law to carry weapons, they made no attempt to conceal their armory, which included rifles, Sten guns, and Beretta 9mm pistols.

  As soon as they were inside the bus, the driver started the engine and the morning service for Tel Aviv set off for the Bab el-Wad.

  Bab el-Wad

  Izzat grinned. This was going to be easy.

  He waited. His men had orders to wait until he fired the first shot.

  But one of his Strugglers became impatient. He saw a puff of smoke and heard a CRACK! echo around the rock walls. Idiots! Izzat thought. They have opened fire too soon! The gleaming windscreen of the bus shattered. Bullets punched into the metal sides from both sides of the gully.

  Izzat joined in, firing, reloading, firing again. Th
e bus swerved off the road and stopped.

  Easy!

  “Allahu Akbar!” Izzat shouted and he raised his rifle in the air and led the charge down the wadi.

  Something was wrong.

  Izzat stopped in his tracks. His Holy Strugglers streamed past him, robes flying, scrambling down through the pines, firing their rifles as they ran.

  Every window on the bus was smashed. Every window. Of course, he thought, they would have been smashed by our bullets.

  Or would they?

  Even in his most sanguine moments, he did not pretend that there was one of them who could hit a camel with a large melon at a range of three yards.

  Something was definitely wrong.

  Some of the glass had been smashed from the inside.

  Gun barrels appeared at the bus windows. It was trap.

  The air whined like a host of angry bees as someone fired a semi-automatic weapon. Rifles and revolvers joined in the fusillade and the stones around his feet kicked into the air like dust-devils. His Stragglers screamed and fell.

  By the hundred holy names of Allah!

  He turned and fled back up the wadi, followed by the bleeding, screaming survivors of the Mufti’s army.

  Chapter 5

  Jerusalem

  It was the evening before Shabbat, and the square around the Damascus Gate was packed: Hassidim in black hats shuffled off to prayer, sidecurls swinging; Arabs in black checked keffiyeh made their way to the mosque to answer the call of the muezzin; nuns with white wimples hurried to evening Mass.

  Majid was early. He was sweating despite the cold drizzle that had stained the shoulders and broad lapels of his suit. He mopped at his face with the purple silk handkerchief that he extracted from the breast pocket.

  “Hello, Ishmael,” Sarah said. “Congratulations.”

  “Six dead,” he whispered in English. “Another three wounded!”