Pursuit

by Robert L. Fish

  They bumped over the rough trail for fifteen miles before they came in sight of their objective, the remains of an old cluster of cement-block buildings built beside what seemed to be an oasis, although when they reached the trees the reason for the desertion was evident; whatever spring had once nurtured the trees had long since dried up and the occupants of those long-since erected buildings had taken their animals and gone off. The armored car was driven beneath the trees and the men from the truck instantly began spreading brush over it. The others removed their robes and kaffiyehs and stored them in one of the buildings, while from another, one of the men backed out an old touring car. Then the entire group got back in the truck, waiting for Lev.

  Lev took Brodsky to one side, but before he could speak, Brodsky got in the first word.

  “That was murder.”

  Lev Mendel shrugged. “That was an execution.” He studied Max’s face and then shook his head sadly. “We’re fighting a war; even the Haganah agrees to that. Shooting those men was essential. They had seen us; they could have described us. It was the only thing to do.” He went on before Max could say anything. “Do you remember the kibbutz Ein Tsofar, near Matzeda?”

  Max nodded, his face set, his eyes cold as he looked at the armored car with its dead set beneath the tree.

  “You’d better take your friend there,” Lev said. “Take the touring car; someone will bring it back, or you can bring it back yourself. Leave it at my house. Ein Tsofar isn’t an Irgun hangout, if that worries you; it’s simply a place I think your friend will be safe. The British seldom go that far from their fortresses, and they seldom bother settlements as far out as Ein Tsofar. Anywhere else he could be in danger, because they’ll really put out an all-points bulletin on him as the best way to find the rest of us. And he’s the only one they can identify.” He looked up at the sky as if looking for aircraft. “You have a few hours until they begin missing their armored car and crew. Don’t waste time getting there.”

  He turned and walked to the truck without waiting for a rejoinder, and climbed in. As the truck turned to head back the way it had come, he leaned from the cab, waving an arm, calling out:

  “Shalom!”

  Shalom. Peace. Lev had been right; the execution had been necessary. But it was still an odd word to hear, Brodsky thought, after that morning’s work.

  Life at Ein Tsofar was everything Benjamin Grossman had feared life at a Palestinian kibbutz would be, and worse. The kibbutz was set at the foot of a towering mesa quite similar to the cliff fortress of Matzeda, or Masada as the English called it, and less than five miles to the south of it. Like Masada it was about a mile from the Dead Sea. The kibbutz contained many buildings, bare white concrete or cement-blocks squares, fences in from any predators and with outposts at the corners of the compound for protection. It looked, in fact, much like a concentration camp, only one that had been established on the landscape of the moon.

  Yet Benjamin Grossman served a very useful function at Ein Tsofar, for in addition to the orchards and the date palms and the fig trees and the even rows of melons made possible by the freshwater spring from which the kibbutz earned its name, there were also caves in the mountain behind the farm, ancient caves which had been used by ancient tribes as cisterns for the capture of water when the rains came, and were now converted to small manufacturing areas, well hidden by camouflaged netting, by racks for drying clothes, and in these caves Benjamin Grossman’s ability as an engineer came in handy.

  But Grossman hated the place with a hatred that grew each day he was forced to stay there. Every morning he woke in his barren room—his cell, as he thought of it—to face the same monotonous view, the same unbearable hot weather, the same dry wind, the same burning sun; and after a poor breakfast, the same primitive machinery in the same damp caves making the same crude land mines and small bombs. Not even his ability at improving the inadequate operation gave him any satisfaction. He was a prisoner as effectively as he had been at Belsen, nor was there any more escape than at the camp. The British-controlled radio still offered its large reward for his capture; the few newspapers brought in by the rare visitors to the settlement still carried his picture together with the pictures of the armored car and its grisly cargo, which had been located almost a week after the killings. Every airport, every seaport, every bus station had his face on posters and engraved upon the minds of its armed guards. To show up at any one of them would have been suicidal. And to the east, had he been able to cross the Dead Sea or go around it, was the same continuing mountainous desert, and hostile desert tribes.

  He had always thought of the desert as rolling yellow sands, as in the films, or in the pictures they had been shown of Rommel’s victories. But here the desert was far more formidable. It was a prison of inconceivable and unclimbable cliffs, steep wadis with sharp jagged rocks to break the bones and rip the skin of anyone tumbling into one, stones to trip the unwary, gullies and cul-de-sacs to lead one into starvation or death by thirst, with no one within miles to hear a cry for help. It was the deepest pit of hell, and he was locked into it as effectively as if he had been chained to the very mountain behind them, facing vultures in Promethean fashion.

  Most of the couples at the kibbutz were married; the few singles were male and for the most part worked in the illegal cave-factory. They all wondered at the habitual silence of this newest member of their group. They recognized the position he found himself in, an innocent fugitive from the British and the hangman, but having found himself in that position they would have supposed he would have welcomed the safe refuge their settlement offered and would have been more appreciative. But he kept very much to himself, never acting as one of the members of the co-operative, never even coming into the community room in the evening to listen to the radio concerts, or to join in the discussions or the group singing; never attending their Saturday-night dances. Instead he would sit in his small airless room—cell—and stare from the window down the darkening rock-strewn slopes to the slate-gray surface of the sea, feeling as landlocked as the quiet mineral-laden waters, and wonder how and when he could escape. But even the formative action of starting to make a plan would be stopped by the very nature of the wilderness that surrounded and confined him. First, to get to Switzerland and freedom he had to get back to civilization, and as long as the British maintained their rule of Palestine this was going to be difficult. At least if the crude land mines and the small bombs he helped manufacture led to an end of that rule, he was doing something, however little, in his own behalf.

  He had been at Ein Tsofar for nearly three months when Max Brodsky came to pay a visit. With him was his fiancée, a girl named Deborah Assavar. The three sat in the community hall that evening after dinner, while Max spoke of his new assignment with the Haganah in Tel Aviv. There was justice for you! Grossman thought; Max in civilization—such as it was in a Jew country—while he struggled in the desert, and found himself studying the girl whenever he thought he was unobserved. She was certainly not his idea of the typical Jewess, although she did have dark hair cut short, and wide black eyes, smooth olive skin, and with just the faintest curve to her aquiline nose. But her lips were full and sensuous, her teeth white and even, her body full-bosomed, and he realized he was comparing her to Sarah, the last girl he had had at Maidanek. Suddenly he was picturing Deborah on a bed, unclothed, her lush body his, his hands upon her, his lips softly brushing her large nipples as he had done with Sarah, listening to her begin to gasp with pleasure. He became aware that Max was speaking to him. He looked up, startled, brought out of his fantasy with a jar.

  “What?”

  “I said I’d better go in and talk to the manager, Perez, about a place for us to sleep,” Max said, and came to his feet. “Entertain Deborah while I’m gone, will you, Ben?”

  “Of course,” Ben said. He watched Max leave and then fell silent, staring down at the floor.

  The girl looked at him curiously.

  “You’re not at all what I expect
ed,” she said quietly.

  He looked up, surprised. “No? What did you expect?”

  “I don’t know.” She smiled faintly; he noticed the smile brought out a small dimple on one comer of her mouth. “Max has told me so much about you, I suppose I thought it would be like meeting an old friend. But you’re different, that’s all.” She laughed. “I know it sounds silly, but I had formed a certain picture of you in my mind, and you don’t look like that at all.”

  “And what did I look like in that picture in your mind?”

  She became serious, studying him critically.

  “Well, to begin with, you were darker, more like Max; your hair and your eyes—”

  “You don’t like blond hair? Or blue eyes?”

  “I like them very much. And you were taller—”

  “Taller? I’m six feet tall.”

  “I know, but—Max has told me all the things you did together, how you met, how life was in the camps, how you came to his aid when that guard slashed Morris Wolf with his whip—”

  “I hated that guard,” Grossman said quietly, intently, and could almost feel the hate welling up in him again as he said it. “When you hate a man as much as I hated him, you don’t have to be tall or short or anything else to do what I did.”

  His intensity seemed to bother her. “Is hate that important to you?”

  Grossman thought about that a moment and then shrugged.

  “At times,” he said, and looked at her, interested in her thoughts. “Don’t you hate anything?”

  “I hate killing,” she said quietly. “I’m a nurse and I hate killing. I hate to see children hungry, or hurt. I hate to see people suffer. I hate injustice.”

  “Then hate is important to you.” Grossman couldn’t think of anything else to say on the subject of hate, and he didn’t want the conversation to end. “What else did Max tell you of me?”

  “He told me how you turned on the truck heater on the train, when you went from Germany to Italy, or you would have both frozen to death. He told me how you fixed that marine engine on the ship—”

  “I didn’t fix it; I merely started it. And you also don’t need to be tall to start a marine engine. Wolf could have started it if he had known what to do. Besides,” he added, suddenly irritated, “I’m not short. Possibly next to Max, but I’m not short.” He suddenly found himself on his feet, surprised to hear his own words. “Stand up. Let’s see how tall I am next to you.”

  She stood up and came to face him. Her eyes were even with his chin. He was aware that she was a tall girl; he was also aware that her breasts were almost touching him. She looked at him, laughing; then her laugh disappeared. They looked into each other’s eyes for several long moments; then suddenly she looked down.

  “You’re tall enough,” she said quietly, and went to sit down.

  He felt foolish as he also sat down. It’s been too long, he thought; it’s been many years since I was alone with a pretty girl, flirting, making light conversation, looking into her eyes. And this was a girl he could not flirt with, or, as it was turning out, even make conversation with, light or otherwise. Wolf, short and ugly, would have found the right things to say, the light things, the clever things. Still, looking into her eyes had brought back feelings he hadn’t experienced since he was a student at Munich. It made him feel young, and the fact was that he wasn’t young anymore. He was old, if not with years, with lost dreams and frustrations. Too old for any girl.

  Deborah was watching him, her face serious.

  “What did you expect when you met me?” she asked, as if she really wanted to know. “What did Max tell you about me?”

  “Max never spoke about you,” he said without thinking, and then realized how poorly that sounded. He looked apologetic. “He never did, to be honest, but the reason was that he didn’t want to share you, even to that extent. You would have to know the camps to understand that. You would have been demeaned, dirtied, by being spoken of in those places.”

  “Max is like that,” she said, and sighed. “He’s a lovely man.” She suddenly smiled. “Well, if Max didn’t tell you about me, then you can’t be disappointed.”

  “I’m not,” he said with a fervor that surprised him. “Oh, I’m not.” And looked up in profound relief as Max came back into the room. At least he had been saved the embarrassment of saying something he might well have regretted later. Although, he had to admit, it would have been good to say, regardless of the consequences. She was, indeed, a most attractive girl, and he had been alone a long time.

  Lucky Max!

  On September 4 of that year 1947, a certain Michael Wishnak appeared at Ein Tsofar kibbutz. That evening after work the people of the kibbutz, including Benjamin Grossman by direct request, were called together in the community hall. Wishnak spoke.

  “As you are undoubtedly aware from last night’s radio,” he said, “the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine, UNSCOP, has recommended in a majority report that the British mandate over Palestine be terminated, and that Palestine be partitioned into sovereign Arab and Jewish states. This morning, just before I left Jerusalem, we also learned that President Truman accepts this partition plan—”

  He was interrupted by a cheer; he took the opportunity to take a sip of water before raising his hand for quiet. When the room at last fell silent, he went on.

  “The UN General Assembly will vote on the UNSCOP recommendation, probably in two or three months. If they vote for partition—and we believe there is a chance that they will—then it will only be a matter of months after that before the British have to leave. The British, as we know, have not been any great protection against attacks on Jews and on Jewish settlements by Arab bands, but they have been helpful to a small degree. Once they are gone the situation will be much worse. The Arab states, all of them and officially, have said they will attack us and try to wipe us out. For once we see no reason to doubt their word; they will try. We have to start now, therefore, to prepare for those attacks.”

  He bent over his briefcase; this time the silence was intense as he took out a piece of paper, studied it a moment, and then looked up.

  “Up until now, the attacks on the settlements have been sporadic. Once the Arab armies begin to invade Palestine, the attacks will be concerted. This is certainly not to say that attacks on the kibbutzim and the moshavim will not continue while the British are still here; it simply means that we must be prepared for more concentrated and more vicious and better-armed attacks. The settlements are going to have to be prepared to defend themselves to a large extent; the cities are going to have their own problems. Certain settlements, such as Ein Tsofar, must be strengthened to act as bulwarks for the smaller and weaker settlements in their areas. They must be prepared to give these smaller settlements help, or to take in survivors or refugees from these settlements. Ein Tsofar is a natural choice in this part of the Negev; it is protected at its rear by the mountain; it has water, and it is now sufficient in food, or at least can manage to exist on its own food if it has to. And it has caves, and an arms-manufacturing facility of sorts, primitive though it be. Regarding the arms, we must enlarge the facility to provide better and more land mines and bombs, and if possible small arms. As to water, it must be conserved; old cisterns must be cleared and cleaned to store water during the rains. Food will have to be conserved, and additional stores of tinned foods sent here. Within a month we will establish at Ein Tsofar a hospital with a doctor and nurses to implement your small clinic. Our underground bunkers must be enlarged for the children—”

  There was an argumentative shout from one of the women. “Why must the children stay?”

  “Because, at present, they have no place else to go,” Wishnak said patiently. “Our cities may be overrun; it is almost a certainty that they will be bombed. There is going to be street fighting with the local Arab population. And where else can the children go? No country is offering us permission to send our children to them, any more than they offered the Jewish child
ren of Europe any escape during the holocaust. No country is helping us at all, as a matter of fact.” He shrugged. “When there is a safer place for the children, they will go there, but at present nobody has anyplace to go, including the children. Only into the sea.”

  He waited a moment for further argument; there was none. He went back to his paper almost wearily.

  “We must strengthen the defenses of the settlements, and particularly Ein Tsofar, which will be a key point in our defense. We have been in touch with the Irgun and the Stern people; we would expect in the case of an attack by the Arab countries they would be willing to submit to a central authority, that of the Haganah, because as the American Ben Franklin said, if we don’t hang together, we shall assuredly hang separately. I should like to see the men in charge of the defense, and the person responsible for arms building, together with Joel Perez the manager, as soon as this meeting is over.”

  Benjamin Grossman sat through the meeting discussing his requirements for additional raw materials and equipment to manufacture greater quantities of mines and bombs and begin to manufacture larger weapons with no expression on his face, and little attention to the discussion. His mind was on far more important things. The man had said that there was a good possibility that the UN might abolish the British mandate, and once the British were out of Palestine, he would be a free man! And once that happened, Ein Tsofar and their awful food and their pitiful little arms factory and their imprisoning desert would be a thing of the past. And this time nobody or nothing was going to stand in his way. He had waited too long as it was. Let the Jews and the Arabs battle to their hearts’ content; let them annihilate each other and blessings on both of them. He would be out of it.