The Source: A Novel

by James A. Michener

  Four Palmachniks leaped down the stairs, five, six steps at a time. With rifles ready they moved into the Arab quarter. Soon they fired, but in the air.

  “See what’s happened!” Teddy shouted. There was no need. From the Crusader ruins Bar-El cried down, “They’ve fled from all positions,” and from the direction of the stone house other Jews came running with news that the Kurdish quarter, the sites on the hill, all were empty.

  But the key position was not, and stubborn Arab shooting rang out from the police station, so that the Jews had to take cover down the stairs, and there Teddy Reich looked grimly at Bagdadi and asked, “Ready?” The plump Iraqi nodded, and with quick signals Reich sent many troops against the flanks of the building while he and Bagdadi ran zigzag to the front wall, where they tied down a massive charge of dynamite. Retiring to a corner of the building, where Arab bullets whined at them, they waited, and this time the fuse worked. There was a low, ugly, roaring explosion, after which Reich and Bagdadi darted boldly through the dust and into the gaping hole. Jews were at last inside the concrete police station.

  The fighting was brief and hideous. In one room a Jew and an Arab, having exhausted their weapons, scratched and bit each other until the Arab finally strangled his opponent, but Bagdadi came blazing in to spray the place. Then he and Reich, in a compelling partnership of German and Iraqi, went heavy-footed room by room, with one-armed Reich swinging his Shmeisser in deadly fashion, until at last Bagdadi stuck his head out the top window, bellowing, “It’s ours! All but the roof.” And in this manner the impregnable station fell.

  Only then could the Palmach believe that Safad was theirs. Men came running in from all quarters of the town to report, “There is no enemy,” and Reich led his leaders on a quick tour of the place to find it mysteriously deserted except for a few old Arabs too weak to run away. From one of these he pieced together what had happened. The old man said, “My son Mahmoud read about it in the paper.”

  “About what?” Teddy asked in Arabic.

  “Hashiroma,” the old man said. He didn’t understand the word, but he explained, “When the atoomi bomb fell at Hashiroma the rains came.” He moved his hand through the air, simulating a bomb. He mimicked the whining of the davidka and mumbled, “Don’t let the rain touch you, young man. It can eat right through your body.”

  The unbelievable had happened. The miracle that Nissim Bagdadi had hoped for had taken place. The Arabs of Safad, that powerful multitude, had heard the ugly whine of davidka, had listened to the unprecedented rain, and had recalled the Jewish children crying, “A new weapon …” In the darkness dilated eyes spread terror, whispers crashed louder than explosions, and finally some fool had cried, “Atoomi bomb!”

  “Where’s your son?” Reich asked the old man in Arabic.

  “He ran away.”

  “He left you? Like that?”

  “It was the atoomi,” the old man cackled. “Be careful of the rain.”

  From the safe homes by the mosque of Jama el-Ahmar the Arabs had fled. In the hours before dawn they had abandoned the strong points at the ends of the Heart-Purifying Bridge, where no Jews fought. From solid entrenchments the red-capped soldiers of Iraq, the black-and-white-crowned Lions of Aleppo and the warriors of the Grand Mufti fled. Out-numbering their enemy by more than forty to one, the Arab forces had constructed their own panic, and had then obeyed it.

  But Reich’s sense of victory was shattered when Vered Yevneski came crying, “Gottesmann’s gone out of his mind!” She said that at the edge of town he had found an abandoned English Land Rover and was now driving down the road to Damascus, pleading with the fleeing Arabs to come back to Safad. It was an act of lunacy and would surely get him killed.

  Reich sent Bagdadi to investigate, and the Iraqi Jew, trailed by Ilana and Vered, ran out of town, where they finally overtook the English car, and just as Vered had reported, Gottesmann was driving slowly along the road, pleading with the Arab refugees to come back to their homes. “We need you,” he said over and over in Yiddish, but the frightened Arabs continued their flight.

  Patiently Nissim turned the car around and drove the Jews back in triumph, but Gottesmann sat silent, for he knew that if the Arabs had left permanently, the triumph was somehow tarnished.

  In only one spot in all of Safad did the Arabs hold fast—in the great fortress on the mountain back of the town; and when Bagdadi and Gottesmann rejoined Teddy Reich they stared across the wadi at this ominous monster, and Reich could not repress a cry of triumph. “I told you!” he exulted. “Right now they’re the worried ones, not us,” but the Jewish lieutenants were also worried, for they knew that before long they would have to storm that final fortress, too.

  At seven that morning Reich and his leaders met at the head of the stairs, and Bagdadi confessed to Ilana, “You won your bet. Gottesmann took the plateau before I entered the station.” Then he asked, “How’d it go up there?”

  “You know Gottesmann,” she said with pride. “Start him down a trench …” Quietly she added, “He was responsible for the Arab collapse. Jumped into the middle of a headquarters area, blazing.”

  At this moment one of the Arabs who had been left isolated on the roof of the police station drew a fine bead on Nissim Bagdadi, and the men about Reich heard a soft ping, following which Bagdadi slumped to the ground. Ilana quickly bent over him as Jewish marksmen shot down the Arab, but as she drew her hand away from the unconscious Iraqi Jew’s chest, Gottesmann saw the fatal blood and cried, “No! No!”

  He fell on Bagdadi and began tearing away the fat soldier’s clothes, but the blood kept coming. “Nissim!” he cried in an agonizing wail. His hands were smeared with the blood and he shouted, “Nissim! We need you! The fortress …” He continued with incoherent phrases until Ilana persuaded two Palmach men to carry him home, where they placed him on a bed; then they returned to help celebrate the victory of 1,214 stubborn Jews over a final force of some 19,000 Arabs.

  For three days Isidore Gottesmann lay in physical and moral stupor. His body was worn out and his mind no longer tried to bring into clear focus the death of Bagdadi, who had symbolized the common destiny of Sephardim and Ashkenazim; the tall German sought the escape of sleep. But on the morning of May 13 Teddy Reich burst into the house, his eyes dancing with joy, whispering, “Lan! We’ve got to waken Gottesmann. Such news!”

  “Let him sleep,” Ilana replied, and little Teddy grasped her two hands in his one, danced giddily for a moment, then kissed her. She sat him in a chair.

  “It’s unbelievable, and I wanted Gottesmann to know,” the wiry leader whispered. “The fortress …”

  “What about it?” Ilana asked. Although she would not tell Teddy Reich so, she suspected that Gottesmann had fled reality because the prospect of assaulting that great stone monster was more than he could face up to.

  “Remember how the fortress terrified us?” Teddy looked at the sleeping man. “Maybe that’s what’s driven him to sleep.” Suddenly, out of compassion which he could not normally express, the driving commander of the Palmach lowered his head and placed his one hand over his face. An ordinary man would have had tears in his eyes. Teddy Reich merely wanted to cover the uncontrollable twitching of his chin. Then came a whisper: “This morning two boys from a village in the hills went to the great fort … door was open … nobody inside. They brought us secret papers … documents you wouldn’t believe. I went up there myself.” He started to laugh. He rose and walked with explosive passion about the narrow room. Then with his solitary hand he produced from his map holder a sheaf of papers which he spread before Ilana. They were secret orders to Arab field officers directing them to evacuate from Palestine all Arab civilians: “Command them to create maximum confusion and disrupt normal services. Assure them that within seven days Arab armies will capture all Palestine and they can then return to claim not only their old property but any Jewish holdings they desire.”

  Reich jammed the incriminating papers back into his pouch, mutt
ering, “It wasn’t the atom bomb that drove them away. It was their own corrupt leadership.” And he stood, feet apart, facing Ilana and swore, “You and I and Gottesmann could have held that fort for thirty days. But at the first sign of attack, they ran away.” He burst into idiotic laughter, the only time Ilana had heard him do so, and with disgust he pointed at himself: “The great general! For three days I’ve been biting my fingernails over that goddamned fort, and it’s been standing empty. It was finally occupied by my heroic troops … two little boys.”

  Possession of the fort brought Ilana a moment of elation, but it could not extend for long, for these were the culminating days when any local victory meant not termination but the beginning of some new responsibility, and Teddy came to the point of his visit: “They need us at Acre, Lan. We’re leaving after sunset.”

  Ilana, anticipating what was to be said next, protested: “Why Acre?”

  “Safad all over again,” Teddy explained. “A key point. Lots of Arabs. No Jews. We’ve got to take it quickly.”

  “You ordering us to help?” Ilana asked.

  “I must. Is Gottesmann equal to it?”

  “He will be,” she said, and when Teddy left she wakened her husband and told him, “Tonight we go to Acre.” He said nothing, but he was able to dress, and it seemed to his wife that his long sleep had restored his self-control. His nerves, at least, were steadier.

  That afternoon the lovers strolled through the town they had done so much to save. They climbed to the old Crusader ruins from which they could see the lake where they had first made love, and then walked down to the mosques which the Arabs had abandoned. The arts which the Muslims had used in decorating their holy places seemed finer than anything the Jews could show in their synagogues, and Gottesmann said, “We must preserve these buildings until the Arabs come back.” They sat for some time looking at the Galilee, and Ilana whispered, “I’ve only one regret, Gottesmann. I wish I were pregnant.” Her husband started to comment, but she said, “I’d like to leave Safad tonight thinking that while you and Reich were giving birth to a new state …” He tried to say that she and Vered were doing at least as much to win the new Israel, but he could not phrase his ideas, so finally they went back to the Jewish quarter to say good-bye to Rebbe Itzik, whom they had come to think of as their friend, “our difficult friend,” Ilana called him; but on the way they passed the plaza of the police station, and when Gottesmann saw this formidable building, when he recalled how Nissim Bagdadi had taken it by force of will alone, and when he stood at the spot where Bagdadi had fallen, he trembled and again lost coherence. Then, forming fists, he quieted himself and said, “We needed him so much,” and Ilana wondered if Reich would want Gottesmann at Acre; but after a while the storm subsided and they left the spot which had affected him so harshly.

  Rebbe Itzik bade the couple farewell. “Get married,” he said, still unwilling to look at Ilana directly.

  Ilana answered, “On one thing you were wrong. We took Safad.”

  The Vodzher Rebbe smiled. “God’s miracle did it. Well … miracle plus natural force.”

  “You mean the rain?” Ilana asked.

  “No,” the rebbe replied. “That God should come down to aid His Jews in the rainstorm was natural. The miracle was that so many Jews could fight together in a common cause.”

  “We shall see you again,” Ilana said. “In Israel.”

  “Then we shall begin the real battle,” the rebbe said. “For the soul of Israel.”

  That night Teddy Reich and a group of tested fighters rode out of Safad in a truck to reinforce Jewish troops trying to capture the important Arab stronghold of Acre, and they drove without lights lest they arouse Arab patrols operating between Safad and the coast. All went well until the truck approached the old tell of Makor, which for millennia had guarded this road, and there some Arabs were engaged in an assault on the kibbutz and turned to fire upon the truck. A lively skirmish ensued, at the height of which MemMem Bar-El cried, “They’re running. Knock them out.”

  The Jews fanned out across the tell, each shooting at the retreating Arabs, when one of the enemy whipped about and fired rapidly. He hit Ilana Hacohen and she pitched head-first down the far slope of the mound. When Reich got to her she was dead, and he said, “Fetch Gottesmann,” and two fighters overtook the German Jew, who was climbing back up the mound, his self-control restored by the skirmish.

  “Over here,” Bar-El’s voice called, and Gottesmann moved through the darkness to where his friends huddled over a fallen body.

  “You capture an Arab?” he asked. And when he came to the spot the silent figures separated, allowing him to pass, and he saw that the dead fighter was Ilana Hacohen, her hands still gripping her English rifle.

  A terrible cry rose from his throat, involuntarily, a long-drawn wail of anguish. He clutched his chest as if he were a madman and the accumulated passions of ten years broke over him. He rejected the self-discipline he had only just regained and threw himself on the ground beside the stalwart girl who now lay dead. He could not fully comprehend what had happened; the death of Ilana coming so soon after the death of Bagdadi was more than his distraught nervous system could tolerate: a man could bear ten years of war, absorbing one shock after another—family dead, underground partners betrayed, English companions shot by Germans, Jewish refugees drowned off Italy, smiling Bagdadi dead when needed most—a man could stand ten years of that, but not ten years and one day. His convulsive hands reached out to grasp Ilana, the perceptive, the lovable Ilana of Galilee, but all that his fingers could reach was the soil of the mound, the soil from which his ancient people had sprung; and as that earth sifted through his fingers, as he felt its cool impartial existence, he slowly gained strength, and a terrible fury—worse even than his initial wail of despair—possessed him, and he pushed himself up from the soil and turned his back on the dead. Shoving the others aside, impelled by an agonizing vision of the future, tormented and glorious, like the apocalyptic visions that Gomer and the psalmist had known on this mound, he cried, “I’m no longer Isidore Gottesmann. I’m no longer a German Jew. I’ll be the tree that was cut down. My name is Ilan. I’ll be God’s Man. My name is Eliav, and I shall fight for this land …”

  Mechanically he started down the steep side of the mound, firing his rifle idiotically, aimlessly, like some mechanized avenging angel gone berserk, and Teddy Reich said with cold calculation, “Let him go. At Acre we can use a hundred like him.”

  And so the Jew Ilan Eliav left Makor, blazing in fury and setting his feet upon a trail that would lead not only to Acre, but beyond it to Jerusalem and to definitions he could not then have foreseen, blinded as he was by incoherent pain.

  The Tell

  Schematic diagram of Tell Makor from the south on the afternoon of Monday, November 30, 1964, at the conclusion of the first year’s dig. Horizontal scale accurate; vertical scale extended. Solid lines indicate certain sites which will be excavated during subsequent campaigns of 1965-1973 C.E. Observe that the actual distances between levels vary considerably. (For example, as can be seen in the chart on this page, the distance between Levels XV and XIV is twenty feet, whereas the distance between Levels X and IX is only two feet.) Observe also that the monolith to El, perhaps the most significant of the remains buried in the tell, will be missed by the excavators.

  With the approach of November and its threat of rain Cullinane could feel the work at the dig grinding to a halt. His own thoughts were in Chicago, where Vered Bar-El was delivering her series of unnecessary lectures on “The Candlestick of Death.” Paul Zodman airmailed batches of news clippings showing Vered posed with the fatal menorah, accompanied by captions which explained that six of the king’s enemies had been slain and finally the king himself, because, in the timeless words of the Australian journalist, “he was his own worst enemy.” But when Cullinane read the articles he found that Vered had been honest enough to confess that the story was a fake.

  Nevertheless, the clippi
ngs disturbed Cullinane because they reminded him of how much he loved this delightful woman: when she peered at him from behind the menorah she was positively enchanting and he longed for her return. I’ll propose the minute she gets off the plane, he vowed, but his preoccupation with Vered was interrupted by a newspaper story which altered radically the course of the excavation, not only in 1964 but also for the years ahead.

  ILAN ELIAV FOR CABINET POST

  FOLLOWING KALINSKY RETIREMENT

  J’lem Sources Insist Appointment

  Certain If Religious Parties Agree

  When Cullinane read the news his first reaction was: This is what’s been keeping Eliav and Vered apart. But what the relationship was he could not guess and before he could ask Tabari to untangle it, Schwartz from the kibbutz appeared to ask if Cullinane would see one of the women who worked in the dining hall. It was big Zipporah, and Cullinane guessed that she was seeking his help in finding a job somewhere, for she was Rumanian and as such was apt to be ambitious. He doubted that he could be of much help, but against his better judgment he allowed her to enter.

  She was a handsome woman of thirty, strong and lively, and he recalled how vigorous she was in the kitchen, how rudely amiable in the serving. When she extended her large hand and smiled he knew he was lost. “What is it, Zipporah?” he asked.

  The pleasant woman sat down, pointed to the headline about Eliav and burst into tears, not feminine tactical tears but great sobs of perplexity and grief. “Oh, damn,” he growled so loudly that she heard him.

  “I sorry, Dr. Cullinane,” she sobbed. “I needing help.”

  “I’m sure you do,” he replied banally and even with sarcasm. But as soon as he said the words he felt ashamed and took a quick look at her arms to see if they were tattooed with German slave numbers. They weren’t. It wasn’t going to be one of those cases, thank God! Relieved, he rose, walked to her side of the desk and offered her his handkerchief. “I’m sorry, Zipporah. Now, what can I do?”