Birthright

by Alan Gold

  Her legs pumped as she sprang over the ground. The road swung a wide arc around the low hills. The car would have to pass around that arc while Ashira ran across country on a dirt path through shrubs and a small field. It was a straight line to the checkpoint.

  As she ran, she could hear the faint sound of a car engine in the near distance, but she had no way of knowing if it was the car carrying the tall woman. She ran on, holding the camera close to her body with one hand to stop it flapping about and slowing her down.

  Up ahead, in the fading light, she could see the checkpoint and hear the rumbling of a generator. The British imposed a curfew after dark, which added another pressure to Ashira’s task. She needed to be home before curfew began, or she was in danger of being dragged to a holding cell by British Tommies.

  She drew up to the checkpoint, her breath coming hard; she knew she couldn’t just enter the checkpoint. She’d scoped the area earlier that day and knew exactly the spot. The dim light of dusk hid her as she crept around the checkpoint, manned by only three British soldiers, and nestled between two large sandstone rocks that concealed her yet gave her a clear view of any car that approached the boom gate.

  It was difficult to steady her breathing, but she had to in order to still the image through the telephoto lens.

  And then she saw the car. With the tips of her fingers, she adjusted the focus ring. The woman she saw was dark and severe but beautiful, her hair pulled back in a tight bun like a ballet dancer’s. Ashira’s finger hovered over the shutter release, about to capture an image of that face. In that moment a soldier stepped between Ashira’s camera and the woman, blocking the view. Ashira swore under her breath and felt the urge to get to her feet and shift position, but there was nowhere to go that wouldn’t reveal her presence. She had to stay wedged between the rocks. She held the camera in position, kept the focal length the same, and prayed for the soldier to move.

  The boom gate rose, and Ashira swore again, trying to shift her body as far as it would go, attempting to see around the body of the soldier obscuring her view.

  Finally, he stepped aside and the woman came into sight through the windshield of the car. Ashira did not hesitate and squeezed the shutter release like a sniper executing a target. Her thumb dexterously wound the camera, and she took another and another. Three, four, five in quick succession until the car had passed by.

  The young woman waited, her breath slow and calm now, praying that she had what she needed to show Berin.

  When the soldiers returned to their smoking and banter, Ashira slipped away. She wound the film back into the canister and plucked it from the open chamber of the camera. If she was questioned by any soldiers as she made her way back to Jerusalem they would likely confiscate the camera, and she did not want to lose the film. She took the film roll and stuffed it into her underpants, securing it between her legs, and set off back to the city.

  • • •

  Late into the night, Immanuel Berin swirled the photographic developing fluid in the tray in front of him. The dull red glow from the safelights overhead washed the room crimson.

  He had been brought a message that something important had arrived, and he had ventured cautiously out of his home to the secret Irgun base to meet with Raffe. The thickset fighter, soft-spoken and stoic, leaned over to whisper into Berin’s ear as if afraid of being overheard, even in the underground base.

  “It’s from Ashira.” He pressed the small film canister into Berin’s hand without further explanation.

  The white paper began to darken into contrasts of black, gray, and white. At first he couldn’t make out the image. But then, slowly, detail began to etch into the paper—a car and windshield and figure behind the wheel. Then, slowly, a face.

  With a small pair of tongs, Berin lifted the paper from the bath and rinsed it in a second tray of water, washing the developing fluid from it and leaving it dripping as he pegged it carefully to a small wire line strung across the room. He reached up to maneuver the red safelight more directly onto the photo.

  He looked hard at the woman in the photo through his small round glasses. He took in her features, her tightly drawn hair, her face . . . And Berin knew who she was. The information from Golda Meir was confirmed. Berin knew now that T’homi had been right.

  Jerusalem

  January 27, 1948

  THE CAFÉ WAS quiet and ordinary. As she looked through the window at the people seated at tables, Judit pondered the word “ordinary” within the extraordinary world she lived. The increasing violence, the tension in the streets, turned each ordinary day into an anxiety-riddled existence. Wake up safe, get through the day, go to bed. These were the tidings of a good day for most of the citizens of Jerusalem. That a café would even be open to serve coffee and food as if everything were normal seemed strange to Judit. It was a thought that she had not previously entertained, and she wondered why she would be thinking these things as she prepared to execute the order she had been given by Molotov.

  She sat across the road from the café, observing with sharp eyes while she pretended to read the newspaper. At her feet was a leather bag that contained the costume and the hand grenade.

  The café was one sometimes used for meetings by the Irgun; the owner was a sympathizer, and he had an upper room where they could meet in secret. This also made it the perfect place for Judit’s plan as she watched for signs that Berin had arrived.

  As she waited, she looked at the other people lingering nearby. Four of them were fellow Irgun, but only Judit knew that they were also MGB agents working for Anastasia.

  The attack needed to be public, but Judit also needed to survive and remain disguised. For that she would need these four men to bundle her away.

  The road was becoming noisier by the minute with street sellers and traffic, but Judit tuned out all other distractions.

  She detected a sudden movement and tilted her head to see Immanuel Berin’s lean frame stride toward the café from across the square. He was flanked by two of his bodyguards. This was all she needed. She stood and casually walked into a small alley. Once in the shadows and out of sight, she pulled an Arabic woman’s full-length dress out of her bag. It had been carefully chosen. Different Arab nations wore different patterns and colors; it was important that Judit be identified as a woman from west of Jerusalem—from areas that aligned their population with Jordan.

  She threw the ankle-length dress over her head. Next a headband holding in place a long scarf that fell to her waist and covered her shoulders. She drew the scarf across her face, tucking it in to secure it.

  Last from the leather bag she pulled out Berin’s death warrant. It was what the British called a Mills bomb. The hand grenade had a round metallic pin and a timer set to explode in seven seconds.

  Seven seconds, thought Judit. Seven seconds to get away. Seven seconds to kill and not be killed. She quickly pushed the grenade into the leather bag and stepped back out into the laneway.

  No longer Judit, she stood at the edge of the square, clearly identifiable as an Arab woman of Jordanian descent. From above the veil, she saw Berin seated at the back of the café with a cup of coffee in his hand.

  The plan was simple—walk toward the café slowly and not in a direct line, then enter as though she were a customer. While she stood there, apparently looking for a friend, she would time the distance in seconds between herself and where Berin sat at a far table. From within the bag, she’d pull the pin from the grenade and count three seconds before rolling it along the floor and exiting immediately.

  Judit knew she’d have approximately four seconds to get away from the blast and knew she would be held firm by the four MGB agents, hurried away from the chaos of the ensuing explosion.

  Judit was aware of her boots on the cobblestones. They were not the boots of a Palestinian Arab woman, but she had been careful to ensure the dress was long enough to conceal them.

  She entered the café, her heart beating fast. She was perspiring underneath th
e heavy cloth. She saw Beria twenty feet away. Through the slit for her eyes, she saw many of the customers looking at her. There were other Arabs in the café, but most were western Jews.

  Berin noticed her but looked back at his companions, sharing a joke as he sipped his coffee. People moved around the edges of her vision, but Judit was focused behind her veil. She moved farther inside, moving her head as though looking for somebody. The café proprietor came toward her, an avuncular smile on his face.

  Judit put her hand in her bag and felt the grenade inside. And then she saw Shalman. He seemed to appear like an apparition at the edge of her sight. But his gait, his body, the way he moved and held himself were as familiar as her own shadow.

  Her hand, moving of its own accord, slipped around the grenade in the leather bag, and her thumb searched for the ring of the weapon’s pin. She had practiced a dozen times how to pull the pin with one hand. Even as she tilted her head to see her husband walking toward the café, muscle memory took over and her thumb penetrated the ring of the grenade’s detonator that would start the seven-second timer.

  Her heart stopped. Berin set down his cup. Outside the café, the four MGB agents tensed, ready for the signal. But Judit found she could not take her eyes off Shalman and the bundle on his hip: Vered.

  Her thumb was in the pin of the grenade, and with almost imperceptible movement the grease was dissolving the friction that held it in place as her thumb began to pull. She continued to look at Shalman coming nearer to the café. Oh dear God, the grenade’s blast would blow out the window, and its fire and shards would engulf her husband and daughter. She couldn’t do it. She turned and walked hurriedly out of the café.

  Behind her, Berin turned back to his coffee, thinking no more of the strange woman who had obviously thought better of entering a café frequented by Jews. One day, he thought, this might be a land where no such racial hatred existed. One day.

  Shalman walked with his daughter past the café and didn’t even notice the Arab woman striding rapidly away. Nor did he notice the way four men were watching her cross the road.

  Two suburbs away, Anastasia Bistrzhitska sat on a bench in a park and watched a young woman walk toward a bus stop to join half a dozen other people waiting for the arrival of an Egged bus. The young girl was Ashira.

  Anastasia looked at her watch. Years of patient practice forced her to remain calm. She sat there, pretending to read the newspaper, while her eyes were looking directly ahead at the bus shelter.

  She heard a car’s wheels squeal as a vehicle rounded a corner at high speed. She looked up cautiously from the paper at the car; it had been chosen carefully. An aging stolen Ford pickup with three men sitting cross-legged in the back, holding on to the sides as it rounded the corner and gathered speed.

  It screeched to a halt opposite the bus stop, blocking Anastasia’s view. But Ashira got to her feet in sudden horror as the three men, dressed like construction workers in red-and-white-checkered keffiyehs, dusty jackets, and trousers, pulled machine guns from underneath blankets. They fired volleys of bullets at the men and women waiting for the bus. The screaming from the nearby park joined with the screams of those at the bus stop. Men and women threw their hands up in a vain effort to defend themselves, but the bullets tore into their heads, chests, and stomachs. Before they fell to the ground, they shuddered like marionettes while the three men posing as Palestinian Arabs continued to shoot at them. The Israelis’ bodies twitched and trembled as more and more bullets hit them or ricocheted off the ground.

  As death overtook her, Ashira looked at the men shooting at her as a bullet wound in her chest pumped her lifeblood onto the ground and light dimmed in her eyes. As her blood mingled with the history of Jerusalem, the truck accelerated away.

  Only Anastasia knew where the truck was going. The problem of Ashira had been removed, and at the same time revenge attacks against the Arabs had been assured. Just as the British had taken control of chaos in Palestine after World War I, so, too, would Russia become the dominant power in the chaos of the war to come.

  Jerusalem

  February 2, 1948

  A GREAT SADNESS descended upon the young men and women Irgun fighters. Though daily surrounded by death and destruction, they had long held to being persistently upbeat and positive. But the North Jerusalem group, led by Immanuel Berin, had just attended the funeral of one of their own. Ashira had been cut down in a hail of bullets in a senseless attack by Arab gunmen on civilians at a bus stop. The fighters left the cemetery in a state of rage.

  Judit looked at the ground and tried to feel some degree of emotion. She told herself it was tragic that the girl had died. If only she hadn’t tried to be so smart, so inquisitive, she’d still be alive. Yet in the game that she and Anastasia and others were playing, individuals would suffer to ensure a better future for everyone. A future she could shape and control.

  As Judit listened to the words of the rabbi at the graveside, vapid words that in essence were meaningless, she thought back to her days in Leningrad and her lessons in Maxist philosophy. A person’s nature isn’t abstract, a characteristic of a particular individual; it is the totality of all the social relationships . . . so society and how its future was created were more important than any one person, even a young woman like Ashira. No matter how tragic Ashira’s death, all that mattered was the society Judit and Anastasia and her mentors in Moscow were trying to create for Israel and for the world.

  Judit had grown up in a home where violence was a nightly visitor; in the Soviet Union, it was so common to see starving people fall down dead in the streets that nobody bothered to glance down. She would make sure this never happened in the new Israel. She would create the future regardless of how many hapless people were hurt.

  Without the Soviet Union as Israel’s backer, the fledgling nation wouldn’t last ten minutes in this sea of enemies. Ashira was the price to pay for that future. Judit waited for Immanuel Berin to begin the Irgun meeting. He looked directly at her in the silence before he spoke. She had missed her opportunity, though he was unaware of the attempt. Ashira had died for the greater good, yet Judit had aborted the killing of Berin to save her own family. The cold logic of spycraft told her that she should have gone through with it. But how could she kill her own daughter and husband, regardless of what Anastasia or Molotov or others might think? Surely some individuals were more important than the future of society.

  Judit shrugged off such thoughts. She would rendezvous with her handler soon enough and would put forward her plan to try again for the death of Immanuel Berin. Judit kept her eyes on the floor and raised them only when Berin announced to the group that an assault was being planned on the recently militant village of Ras Abu Yussuf, in a quiet valley nearby. She knew this village, knew it was a place her husband often went to dig in the earth for his stupid statues and coins.

  “The village is in the back blocks, but the local Arabs have recently taken up arms and are leading terrorist parties against nearby kibbutzim. They’re firing from hillsides into the kibbutz, and Jewish children have been killed at kindergarten. There are good grounds to think that it was this village whose men killed Ashira,” Berin said.

  It took under half an hour for him to conclude the meeting, give instructions on what guard or assault duties each would undertake in the next few days, and clear the room. The twenty Irgun members left individually or in twos in different directions, keeping a close eye out for British troop carriers or the occasional tank that rumbled through the narrow streets close to the Old City of Jerusalem.

  Judit opted to walk alone, south and then east. She quickly doubled back on herself and, using the shadows cast by trees, walked ten blocks to the building where she had arranged four days earlier to meet with Anastasia.

  She walked along the side of the road, staying close to the garden fences, stopping often to glance behind to see if she was being followed. But at night in Jerusalem, people rarely came out on to the streets. Before she walked d
own the alley that led to the back lane servicing the gardens of the four terraces in the row, Judit checked again to see if she was being followed. She was the only person on the street. She slipped into the lane and quickly walked to the back of the safe house.

  It was when she entered the garden that she knew instinctively something was terribly wrong. The door to the kitchen, which led into the back rooms, was ajar. An agent of Anastasia’s pedigree never would have done something so careless. Judit weighed the situation: She could leave immediately, but then she’d never know how things were; or she could enter the house and risk whatever might be waiting. She drew a knife from inside her coat and held it by her side, ready to strike.

  Judit pushed gently on the door. Hiding behind the doorpost, she looked into the darkened maw of the kitchen. The moon illuminated only part of the room, but she could see well enough to know that the room was empty.

  And then the smell hit her. It was the smell of death, of decay. It was accompanied by the buzzing of dozens of flies. She had heard that sound, smelled that stench, a hundred times, passing bodies on the streets of her childhood in a Moscow summer. It was the acrid smell of dried blood, of body fluids that had leaked out of wounds, of trousers or dresses stained by piss and shit that had seeped out from terror.

  But Anastasia’s safe house always smelled of roses and irises and lilies or whatever was in season. Judit walked into the kitchen, gripping the knife tighter. The farther she walked into the house, the worse the smell became and the louder the buzzing of the flies.

  Keeping the lights off, her back close to the wall, she inched forward, feeling her way along the hall and into the front room. She knew all too well that there was a dead body in here.

  She stood stock-still on the periphery of the room, looking around, trying to get her eyes used to the darkness. The heavy curtains were drawn over the windows. There was no warmth in the room, no living presence, just the reek of decay. Hearing no movement, Judit hoped it would be safe to turn on the light. She felt for the switch, and the moment she pulled it down, she saw a gargoyle sitting in the armchair. Dead eyes staring perpetually at the drawn curtains, mouth—what remained of a mouth—just a gaping wound. Dried blood, once bright red and now a dun-colored brown, had dripped onto the woman’s chin and breast and stained her yellow dress.