Birthright

by Alan Gold

  “And now you can kiss me. More than once if you like.”

  PART TWO

  Jerusalem

  1947

  TWO YEARS HAD passed since that day in the café when Shalman had sat entranced by the beautiful, confident young woman before him. Most Jews in Palestine had been fascinated by world events, like the carving up of the old Third Reich and the growing tension between the Soviet Union and the West. But for Shalman, the two years had been a blissful time of falling deeper and deeper in love with Judit.

  They were rarely separated. Many times they sat in the theater watching Hollywood stars in epic tales of adventure and romance. At the beginning, he sat very close to her, hoping their shoulders would touch, that he might smell her hair. Then this innocent simplicity gave way to holding hands as they watched the film, and they continued to touch as he walked her home. And from handholding to deep passionate kisses, and from kisses to staying overnight at her place or his. He was besotted. And he knew that she was in love with him.

  He’d known young women before, but never one like Judit. The few other girls he’d made love to had been enjoyable, and he’d sought them out until the relationship came to a natural end. But Judit was different. She was superbly intelligent and worldly, knowledgeable and often profound in her understanding of things. Alone, in the privacy of their shared accommodation, she was at once a wife, a companion, and the most passionate lover he could imagine. She would initiate their lovemaking; she would create an environment of lust and longing in their simple apartment. She would invent scenarios that excited both his mind and his body. She was everything he had ever dared hope could happen to him.

  He’d fallen in love with a woman who challenged, provoked, and startled him on any given day and yet who was perpetually a mystery to him. For her part, Judit seemed to find something in Shalman that she had never known. Here was a man who was not a target or a victim. A man who was soft-spoken yet determined, generous yet protective. He was superbly intelligent, yet pathetically unworldly.

  Judit found in Shalman a man so very far from the father figure she had grown up with in Moscow, a distant cry from the officers and diplomats she’d spied on, manipulated, or even killed. He was nothing like Beria and her Soviet commanders, yet he was nothing like their Lehi comrades—he was no Shamir or Yellin-Mor. Yet neither was he cast from the same mold as their refugee fighter colleagues. For her, he was an enigma, yet there was nothing she didn’t know about him. He was the opposite of all the men she’d known, yet he was everything she’d ever sought.

  Her Soviet handlers had readily approved her relationship with the young Jewish man, suggesting that it deepened and strengthened her standing in the community and gave weight to her “future objectives.” Exactly what they were, she had yet to be told. She knew they had something to do with Soviet designs on Palestine, but she knew none of the details.

  The day finally came when Shalman found courage to ask Judit to be his wife. The words “Will you marry me?” tumbled from his lips; they surprised even him, but once out they could not be ignored. They married soon after, and for the first time since he was a boy playing on the beach, Shalman felt utterly happy.

  He felt even more exultant when Judit returned from a visit to the doctor and told him that she was pregnant. He was so exultant at the thought of being a father that he could barely control his emotions. Judit had a different slant on the news. She was worried that their baby would affect her ability to build a young and strong Israel, and to carry out the sacred mission given to her by Beria himself.

  There was nothing she could do, though, and eight months later, she gave birth to a daughter, Vered. When he first looked upon his daughter, Shalman saw her as the most perfect fusion of the very best of his wife and himself, someone so beautiful, so flawless, that though she was tiny and defenseless, she would hold their love together for all time.

  To Judit, Vered was a strange burden. Though he never doubted she loved their daughter, Shalman knew that her affiliation with Lehi took precedence over everything. As soon as she was fit after the birth, she returned to the Lehi command and demanded the tasks she’d done before she was pregnant. A month later, she told Shalman that she was going to express her milk into a bottle so she could leave him with their baby at night, while she was engaged in operations for Yitzhak Shamir.

  She planned it like a military operation, and it became part of a parallel logistics plan. Judit would fill a bottle and leave Shalman with Vered while she was away. He raised only small complaints, but she always countered with the importance of what she was doing. In truth, Shalman relished the time alone with Vered and time away from the role of a Lehi soldier. To earn money and pay their rent, when Vered was sleeping, Shalman wrote articles about Israeli archaeology for newspapers around the world, making them like detective stories; or he helped the local greengrocer sell fruit to customers. He didn’t mind what he did, so long as he had Vered and Judit as his family. For her part, Judit brought home purses full of Palestinian money and British pound notes, which, she told him, she’d taken from the bodies of Tommies or the officers she’d assassinated. She made fun of him when he told her how amoral such theft was. “What?” she said curtly. “They need to spend money when they get to heaven?”

  The world around Shalman and Judit grew steadily darker. The dream of a Jewish homeland now seemed a real possibility, but the realization of the dream brought with it the deadly reality of war. Conflict was a daily occurrence in Jerusalem and other cities in Palestine, filling it with gunfire and flame as Lehi and the other Jewish nationalist movements fought ever more fiercely—fighting that had the British on one side and the continually escalating violence with their Arab neighbors on the other. It seemed to Shalman that everyone around him had a gun pointed at someone else.

  Holding a weapon and wanting to fight had started to come naturally to Shalman. His initial reluctance to kill British soldiers or Arab mercenaries slowly disappeared; he’d successfully assassinated several targets that had been selected for him. But unlike Judit and the others, he never celebrated such murders, and even though he’d done it a dozen times, he didn’t find pulling the trigger easy. Now that he was a father, his worldview had shifted.

  Several weeks had passed since he’d met with his Lehi comrades, and he found that the missions he was tasked with were ever harder to embrace. It had been a hot morning with the sun baking the stones of the old city. Shalman had been out with his tiny daughter snuggled closely in his arms, talking to her of the old city. He was looking for something of interest for an article he could write for an American magazine; they paid the best.

  Shalman whispered in her ears about their city, Jerusalem: its history, its peoples, its places, and its stories. He rounded a corner and made his way up toward the Damascus gate, an ancient structure built and rebuilt by each of the occupiers of the ancient city. First a Roman gate under the emperor Hadrian in the second century C.E. and then later remade by the Christian Crusaders in the twelfth century. The gate where Shalman stood had stones dating from 1537; it had been erected by workmen for Sulieman the Magnificent, sultan of the Ottoman Empire. Shalman looked up at the stones and the tower and told his tiny daughter about their history.

  It was then that he heard his name. The voice was familiar, and it carried across the square in urgency. It was Yitzhak Shamir, his boss from Lehi, standing at a distance across the throngs of people moving in and out of the gate. Shalman turned to wave, but Shamir didn’t wave back. Rather, he beckoned him urgently.

  Puzzled, Shalman looked intently at his friend, trying to see why he was so agitated. Yitzhak repeated the gesture and called again. Shalman looked around to see if there was something he had missed; was there something Yitzhak wanted him to see? He looked back to the Pole and saw that Yitzhak was walking backward away from Shalman, away from the gate, still gesturing as if calling him to follow.

  Shalman was confused but took a few slow steps toward Yitzhak. Conscious of
tiny Vered, who was almost asleep in his arms, Shalman was slow and deliberate, trying to keep his movements smooth. He scanned again for Yitzhak. He saw that the Pole had moved farther away, almost running backward, still looking to Shalman and still drawing him urgently on.

  Where is he going? thought Shalman. He quickened his pace but not enough to satisfy Yitzhak, who was about to disappear into the shadow of a building and a street leading away. Just as Yitzhak was about to vanish from view, Shalman could see his face clearly through a gap in the crowd. What Shalman saw was panic looking not at him but past him.

  Shalman stopped to look back at the Damascus gate, then to Yitzhak ahead of him, and once more to the gate . . .

  Then Shalman started to run. He was an idiot; he was distracted by thoughts of his family; in the old days when he was still fighting with Lehi, he’d have known immediately where the danger lay. Shalman gripped Vered tightly and pushed his way forward as fast as his feet could carry him, hunching his body, drawing Vered close to him, almost enveloping her.

  And then came the explosion. It bellowed through the gate and threw Shalman off his feet and onto the ground. Rather than throw his arms out to catch himself, he kept the baby wrapped tight against him and took the full force of the impact on the ground with his shoulder. Pain coursed through his arm, but he didn’t let go, and remained curled in a ball around his child as debris rained down over him.

  • • •

  He now sat opposite his wife in their small home, telling her this story as she bathed his badly bruised shoulder and strapped it with a white linen bandage.

  “If Yitzhak hadn’t seen me . . . if I hadn’t heard him . . .” stammered Shalman as he looked at his hands and saw them still shaking—though whether from fear or anger, he did not know.

  “That’s a lot of ifs, Shalman” was Judit’s curt reply as she pulled the bandage tight and he let out a small yelp.

  “How could they be so . . . ?” He didn’t finish his thought because he wasn’t really expecting an answer.

  “The bomb went off prematurely. Nobody knew you’d be there.”

  Shalman spun around to face his wife. “Prematurely?”

  “Yes. It was planted in an Arab taxi. It went off too early.”

  “Why did it go off at all? Why there?”

  Judit looked at him strangely.

  “Your child, Judit!” Shalman found himself yelling. “Your child was right there, in my arms, under the gate.”

  “You shouldn’t have been there,” she said in a voice so calm it shocked him.

  “Did you know about this attack?” demanded Shalman.

  “No,” replied Judit matter-of-factly before adding, “Very few did. Shamir played it close. But we knew to stay away from the Old City. You would have known, too, had you been at the operations meeting, as ordered. But you were not.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” Shalman shot back, but he didn’t wait for a reply. “Because you’re never here, Judit! Sometimes I barely see you for days. Or when you are here, it’s only to sneak off again in the middle of the night.”

  Judit didn’t answer. She picked up the scissors and the remains of the bandage she had used to strap Shalman’s shoulder and turned to walk away to the kitchen.

  Shalman called after her. “I was there, Judit! It could have been me.”

  Judit stopped but didn’t turn back. “But you’re all right, Shalman. Yitzhak warned you, and you’re fine. And your shoulder will be fine.”

  Anger flared in Shalman’s eyes. “That’s not the point! Goddammit, Judit. Who do we think we’re fighting?”

  Judit finally turned back, her arms crossed, and responded to Shalman in a voice so controlled it unnerved him. “No one will protect us, Shalman. We are alone in a sea of enemies. Europe, Arabia, we cannot live in these places anymore. So here we stand on this narrow strip of earth, surrounded by people who hate us and the British who control and manipulate us. Only when they are gone can we be free.”

  “I know this speech,” spat Shalman, though hearing his own words, he was shocked by their anger. The image of his daughter in his arms as he ran from the exploding gate was fire in his veins. “Destroying airfields and railways, this I understand. But today our child was almost a victim of our own fight. How many other children were at that gate? How many innocent sons and daughters, mothers and fathers?”

  Judit looked at the face of her husband, the man she loved. Shalman had been on a dozen Lehi operations in the past six months, and his mood on returning had grown increasingly dark. But this was something more.

  “Don’t think I’m not distressed by what happened, Shalman. Vered is my child, too. But she’s alive. You’re alive. Reflecting on ifs and maybes serves no purpose.” This was the voice of Judit’s Soviet handlers, always prompting her to see the bigger picture and eschewing personal attachment. But Shalman knew nothing of that part of Judit’s life.

  Shalman shook his head in bewilderment. He loved her, he’d married her, he’d had a child with her, yet in this moment he felt he hardly knew her. “There has to be a better way.”

  “No, Shalman. There is no other way. History tells us there is no other way. It’s hard for you, I know.” She stepped forward and put a hand on his chest. “You didn’t come here on the boats. You didn’t flee horror to arrive here. You know the stories, but they’re not your stories.” Judit kissed Shalman on the cheek and said, “The answers aren’t easy, but they’re clear to anybody who opens his eyes.”

  Alexandria, Egypt

  184 C.E. (fourth year of the reign of Emperor Commodus)

  ABRAM THE PHYSICIAN felt no joy as the ship approached the famed harbor of Alexandria. But he did smile when he looked at his fourteen-year-old son, Jonathan, who was enraptured at the sight of the massive tower with its burning light on top of an island on the western shore.

  The boy turned to his father and asked what it was. Abram smiled and stroked the boy’s head. “It’s the lighthouse built by Alexander. The Greeks called it the Pharos. It’s said to be seventy times taller than a tall man.”

  “But why? What’s it for?”

  “It warns ships at night that the coast is near, and they have to be careful of rocks. As the sun descends into the distant western sea, far beyond the Pillars of Hercules, men climb the many steps with wood and kindling and set alight the pyre. To make the light more intense, when the wind is strong and in danger of blowing ships onto the rocks, they add oil to the wood, and it flares so brightly they say that it can be seen half a day’s sail distant. The fire burns all night.”

  Jonathan was astounded. “Every night? Men climb that tower every night?”

  Abram smiled and nodded. He reached across and kissed the tall, muscular boy on the cheek. For the past two years, since the death of his beloved Ruth from the heat caused to her body when her humors were out of alignment, he’d mourned her to the exclusion of their son. From the very first moment he’d seen her in the woods at the base of the mountain that housed the city of Jerusalem, he’d been in love with her. His love had grown as they climbed the tunnel and replaced the precious seal that the original builder in the time of King Solomon had written. It was confirmed when he first kissed her on the riverbank, and since then, since their marriage, he’d grown to love her every hour of every day.

  She had been the most beautiful, exquisite, feisty, annoying, faithful, loving, and challenging woman he’d ever known, and when, after years of trying, Ruth had gotten pregnant fifteen years ago and given birth to Jonathan, he knew that his life was complete.

  They’d traveled back to the village of Peki’in, where Abram had been born, and his parents had loved her as much as he. Even the elderly and nearly blind Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai, still hiding from the Romans in a cave above the village with his son, Rabbi Eleazar, had told him how excellent she was. It was Ruth who encouraged Abram to study medicine, and he had happily become a doctor, curing people and being a friend to many.

  But even his skills
hadn’t been able to cure his beloved wife when she’d fallen ill two years earlier and died of the fevers. He’d studied the Greek physicians and knew that her illness was caused by misaligned humors. He’d cooled her body, bled her, fed her the root of the beet and honey, and done everything in his power, all to no avail. And he’d made her a final promise just before she died, emaciated and exhausted from the violent coughing and the blood in her phlegm. She made him promise that he’d take Jonathan to Alexandria in Egypt so that he could be trained as an alchemist by Maria the Jewess, a woman reputed to be able to cure ills and ailments that caused great suffering. Ruth wanted her husband and son to be taught by Maria so that other husbands and sons didn’t suffer as Abram and Jonathan were suffering in her sight. Her words, among the last she ever spoke, still resonated in Abram’s mind. “My son will be an alchemist . . .”

  As their ship docked in the port in the failing light of the evening, Jonathan clung to his father and walked onto the dockside feeling insecure in the crowds of people, all of whom were wearing different styles of clothes, many of whom had different-colored skin and were speaking languages he’d never heard. Abram realized with embarrassment that this was the closest he’d been to Jonathan since Ruth had been buried.

  He’d distanced himself from everybody, continuing to treat patients, but his zest for life, his passion for anything other than his memory of Ruth, had evaporated. When he said goodbye to her in the burial cave in the foothills of the Mount of Olives east of Jerusalem, he’d placed her favorite amulet in the folds of her shroud, just above her heart. It was written in both Hebrew and Aramaic script. It said simply: “I am Ruth wife of Abram the doctor. I walk in the footsteps of Yahweh.” He’d bought the disc of the amulet from a trader in a caravan that came from Parthia, south of the Black Sea. He had employed a metalworker to carve the inscription, and he’d given it to her when Jonathan was born. She’d worn it ever since, and she would wear it as she lived the rest of her life at the right hand of God in heaven. He was going to place something else in the folds of her gown: the inscribed stone written by King Solomon’s tunnel builder, Matanyahu. Instead, he determined to retain it as a fond keepsake of their first days together. He remembered with warmth and aching fondness how they’d climbed the dank slippery tunnel all those years before to place the original at the top of the tunnel. So it was the amulet that would tell Yahweh who Ruth had been, and ensure that she was given pride of place in His heaven.