“Oh! Then you’ll see our apartment. Maybe if it’s not bombed out, you can use it.”
“I intend to.”
“Zev, I still feel rotten about running away. If not for Noah I wouldn’t have left.”
“He’s why I got you out.”
“But tell the truth, darling, are we really better off here? What about the Egyptians, the Iraqis? Two weeks ago we danced in the streets, and now it’s such a nightmare!”
“I didn’t dance, Nakhama, I knew all this was coming. So did the Old Man. I saw his face when he read the Declaration. Let’s go up and have a look at Noah.”
The boy, a skinny three-year-old naked but for shorts, lay perspiring on the bed. Nakhama put an arm around her husband. “He misses his friends,” she whispered, “but he’s been very good.”
“I heard he got into trouble in kindergarten.”
“Not so. He’s a new kid, so they torment him. He won’t tolerate it, he fights back. His father’s son. Now what? Where are you taking me?” He was leading her by the hand to their bedroom across the hall, his old room. “What is this, Zevi? No, no, not on your life! In broad daylight?” She dug in her heels.
“What’s the matter?”
“Your mother—”
“Why, where is she?”
“She’s in Ramat Gan, she won’t be back till dinner, but all the same—” Reluctantly she let herself be pulled into the bedroom, where a suitcase lay open on his bed, packed with her things. He stared at her and she stared back, half-guilty, half-defiant. “All right, I was going to tell you. I’m moving with Noah to my parents’ flat.”
“The devil you are! Why? They have no room for you there.”
“My mother always has room for me.”
“Nakhama, your brother sleeps on the sofa, and there’s no place else.”
“So I’ll sleep on the floor with Noah. Mama has mattresses. At least I’ll feel at home. Your mother can’t stand having me under her roof.”
Oh, God, thought Barak, that again. “Now what? You had an argument?”
“Your mother never argues, you know that. She doesn’t have to, I’m beneath her. Just the servant girl with your name and your son.”
This had been going on since the day they married. “Wolfgang, she’s wrong for you! I know she’s beautiful, I know you’re in love, but she has no culture, no background, you’ll live to regret it!” And in truth all the books and classical records in this house meant nothing to his wife, except to make her self-conscious. But words would not help on that topic. Nakhama had war nerves, nothing more. Barak closed the suitcase and slung it off the bed. She said, “Wait, wait, what’s the big idea?”
“Look, motek [sweet], the colonel’s no slave driver like B.G. I’ll try to come back and spend tonight here, how’s that?”
She widened glad brown eyes. “Truly? You will?”
“I will. I’ll try.”
“Then, if you’re really coming back tonight, why are you pulling down the shades?”
“Didn’t you object to broad daylight?”
“Oo-ah! So, it’s z’beng v’gamarnu [bang and finish], hah? Right this minute, hah? The army wife’s love life, hah?” Nakhama closed the bedroom door. “Zev, Zev, careful with that arm now! Easy, easy, darling!”
3
The Alamo
Two days later several jeeps, one with a mounted machine gun, went bouncing through brush and boulders on the dirt track hidden from Latrun by a wooded ridge. Dead ahead a dazzling white sun was rising. The vehicles halted at the brink of a broad ravine, and Sam Pasternak and Zev Barak got out. The descent to the rock-strewn bottom, which lay in deep shadow, was an almost sheer drop of broken stones and thick brush, with a footpath zigzagging down the slope. “When the Arabs first mined the main road,” said Pasternak, “their villagers used that trail for a while on donkeys or on foot. Not in recent months. So the Hulda kibbutzniks told me.”
Several soldiers from the jeeps began hurling stones out over the wadi, including Kishote in extremely ill fitting khakis, and Yael Luria, whose uniform fitted her a shade too well. Kishote pitched the farthest, with wide sweeps of a bony arm, but Yael made surprisingly strong throws.
“Well, what do you think, Sam?”
“I think we’d better take Latrun,” Pasternak said drily. The Seventh Brigade had already begun heavy drilling for the next assault.
“I’m supposed to report to Colonel Stone,” said Barak, “whether a bypass is feasible at all.”
“Well look, the road work could probably be done, Zev, though it’s a gigantic job. But is it practical? The Legion would sortie in short order and slaughter the road crews, wouldn’t they?”
Barak was peering down into the chasm. “Would they? Suppose we’d work only at night, Sam? Minimum illumination, minimum noise, no blasting? We’re a couple of miles from Latrun, deep in the wilds.”
“You mean build a paved road secretly? Hmm.” Pasternak’s eyes half closed, in a shifty expression familiar to Barak. Covert action was Sam’s specialty. “But you’ve got a four-hundred-foot drop right here, Zev. Lot of engineering! Three or four miles of rough country beyond. Hardly realistic.” He rubbed his chin, and added with a foxy little smile, “I tell you what, though! Think about mules, and maybe it gets interesting. What’s more, if the truce doesn’t come too soon—”
Shading his eyes from the brilliant sun, Barak stared out at the dry wash, crisscrossed with deep gullies and dotted with boulders, as Pasternak talked. “Look, Sam,” he said abruptly, “in the African desert my battalion crossed steeper drops than this in trucks and jeeps. If not for this elbow, I’d try going down right now.”
“I’ll take you down, Zev.” Yael Luria had quit the rock-throwing contest to edge up and listen.
“This girl sure will, if you let her, Zev,” Pasternak said. “Whether you’ll survive—that’s something else.”
“Come on,” said Barak, getting into the jeep. As Yael took the wheel Don Kishote leaped into the back. “Out, Yossi!” Barak jerked a thumb. “Out!”
“Suppose you roll over?” Kishote inquired. “Then I could help.”
“Good thought,” said Barak.
“But if you do reach the bottom alive, Zev, how do you get back up?” Pasternak inquired. “Thought of that?”
“One thought at a time,” said Barak. “Let’s go, Yael.”
The jeep crawled in low gear along the brink, then turned and crashed downward on the zigzag path. It struck a rock hidden by brush and nearly tumbled over, but Yael fought the wheel and righted it. Twisting this way and that to avoid stone outcroppings, she drove down and down, lost the path, and plunged the jeep straight for the wadi floor. Kishote clung to the side whooping wildly, evidently having the time of his life. Barak hugged his elbow and hoped for the best. After a very rough ride they levelled off and stopped. He cupped his hands to yell, “Not that bad, Sam!”
“What now?” Pasternak called, his voice echoing “now… now,” in the hills.
“Send that kid down, and I’ll phone Colonel Stone from Jerusalem. I’m going on.” “That kid” was one of the soldiers who had bypassed Latrun in a jeep. “And you,” Barak said to Yael, pointing a thumb upward, “back to headquarters.”
“What? No! Why? Who’ll drive?”
“On your way.”
“Oh, please do let me come.” Yael’s big blue eyes turned gentle and lustrous as she rounded them at Barak. “I have family in Jerusalem, you know, a sick aunt, and my mother’s so worried about her—”
“Yael, you heard me. Zuz [Move]!”
When Yael Luria jutted her jaw and scowled, the look on her face was no girlish pout. “Zev, you’re being ridiculous.”
“Sergeant Luria, get your behind up that slope.”
With a glare at him and then at Kishote, who blinked innocently through his glasses, Yael went climbing up, using her hands as well as long shapely brown legs.
Working the wheel one-handed, Barak drove slowly along the wash
. The soldier sat with his rifle across his knees, yawning; a swarthy youth with a heavy drooping mustache, and a small skullcap clipped to his thick black hair. He said he was from Tunis. Kishote had never before encountered a Jew who so much resembled an Arab. But then, everything on this journey was novel—the rifle in his lap, the jolting ride in a rocky roadless ravine, where behind a boulder or a clump of brush an enemy might be taking aim at him; above all, the exalting surprise that he was on his way to Jerusalem! Too dry and stony for Arab pasturing, far out of sight of Latrun, the wadi was a trackless no-man’s-land. Barak bore eastward, watching the sun, avoiding the biggest boulders, sometimes halting abruptly at a gully’s edge. In some places he was able to follow jeep tracks in the sand. They bumped and pounded uphill for a couple of miles, and came at last on a rutted dirt road wide enough for one vehicle and piled with animal droppings. “This has to be the Hartuv road,” Barak said to the soldier.
“Yes, sir, it is, and we got shot at here by snipers.”
“No doubt. The highway’s not far. Sharp lookout, both of you!”
Barak turned and followed the rutted road through rolling stony pastures and untended weed-choked farms where goats and sheep grazed. Of Arabs, no sign. When the jeep emerged on the empty two-lane blacktop it seemed to glide like a boat. From the melting asphalt, where grass sprouted in cracks, a tarry smell rose, and burned-out trucks and “sandwich” vehicles lay tumbled on the roadside. They continued uphill and trucks began to snort by, spewing dirty fumes: one carrying bleating sheep, another piled with hay, a third full of unshaven bored soldiers. On a long hill the jeep got stuck behind a groaning tank truck.
“Gasoline?” Kishote inquired.
“Water,” said Barak. “Drinking water for Jerusalem from the local cisterns.”
The tank truck went over the top and down the hill, and Barak pointed at a crest far ahead.
“Jerusalem, Kishote.”
“Really?” It was a decided disappointment, just a line of low buildings on a ridge. Still, he put a hand on his hatless head. “Then I have to make a blessing. Blessed art Thou, Lord our God, Ruler of the world, who has kept us alive, sustained us, and brought us to this time.”
“Amen,” said the pious Tunis youth and the agnostic Barak.
As the jeep came rolling into Jerusalem, Barak was sickened at the way the city had deteriorated. All the gardens and parks were overgrown. Main thoroughfares were filthy, barricaded, shell-pocked, wire-tangled. Buildings had been shelled to rubble. Again and again he had to detour around raw concrete barriers and streets closed off with barbed wire. Most shops were shuttered, and long queues stood outside the few that sold rationed food. At water trucks women were lined up around the block holding pails, jugs, or tin cans, many of them gripping little children by the hand or carrying babies.
But Don Kishote hardly noticed these things. Years in wartime Europe and refugee camps had accustomed him to barricades, barbed wire, roadblocks, bombed-out houses, long queues, and patrolling soldiers. This first glimpse inside the Holy City enchanted him. Now here was the Jerusalem of his visions! Wherever he looked he saw beauty, different and radiant; a stone city hewed of some lovely light-colored rock, not quite tan or rosy, but something of each. In all the pictures he had seen, this glow of Jerusalem stone had been missing. The translucent air, deep blue sky, and mighty sunlight, so different from Tel Aviv’s haze, brought out the glow. Everywhere flowers bloomed amid palm trees, blossoming trees, and tall old shade trees; Eden on earth, the City of God.
Yerushalayim!
With his first lisped parroted prayers he had prayed to return to “Yerushalayim.” Even after eating a cookie, there had been a long rote grace to say: We thank Thee for the produce of the field, and for the broad and pleasant land you gave our fathers…. Rebuild Yerushalayim the Holy City speedily in our days, and let us go up in its midst and rejoice in its rebuilding…. For just one bite of cake, he had had to recite all that. In the heder, the primary school, he had learned that Yerushalayim was the gateway of Heaven, where prayers went upward straight to God. Later in the Zionist scout troop there had been Yerushalayim songs, slides, and movies. And now here he was in the Holy City, in Zion, in Yerushalayim! The words of a psalm ran in his mind. “When God returned us to Zion, we were as dreamers…”
But they turned into Ben Yehuda Street, and Kishote was shocked out of the dream. Stopping them was an enormous crater ringed by smashed buildings, and blocked off with police fences and high coils of barbed wire. “My God, what happened here, sir?” he asked Barak.
“Big car bomb, months ago. British army deserters did it, paid by the Arabs.”
Slow-moving workmen were picking at the ruins, but from this old disaster the stink of broken buildings and torn-up sewer mains still rose, almost as on the day of the colossal explosion. Barak parked in a side street near the crater. The Tunis youth jumped out with his rifle and trotted off. “Wait here, Kishote,” Barak said. He went into a concrete building and groped up five dark flights; elevator not working, stairway unlit.
“Zev! You’re in Jerusalem? Since when?” The once jolly plump secretary of Hermann Loeb looked gaunt and nervous, as after a wasting illness.
“Is he in, Rivka?”
“He’s on the phone.”
“Then the phone’s working. Good.”
“His phone will work to the last.” A sad bitter laugh. “He’s in charge of food, you know.”
“Can you get through to Tel Aviv?”
“Sometimes. I can try.”
“Is this Zev I hear?” A lean small man in a black suit and tie bustled out of his office, and threw an arm around Barak. “What happened to your elbow? What are you doing here? How is Nakhama?”
“Hermann, I must speak to Tel Aviv.”
“Give Rivka the number, and come inside.”
By Jerusalem standards the office of Hermann Loeb was luxurious: heavy German furniture, abstract paintings, glass cases of Canaanite artifacts. He was an amateur archaeologist, and in peacetime a prosperous dealer in farm products; a Yekke, a Swiss-German Jew, never seen without a coat and tie, except possibly by his wife at bedtime. The telephone rang as he motioned Barak to a couch in his office.
“Loeb! Ja?” His expression hardened, and he barked in German, “Break the locks! Clear out the warehouse! Every last bag of flour…. What authority? On my authority.” Pause. “Why? Because it’s abandoned property, that’s why…. It’s abandoned because I say it’s abandoned! Tell him to sue the municipality after the war, if he’s still alive!” Crash of receiver. “Damned profiteer,” Loeb said to Barak, “biggest baker in Jerusalem, claimed he ran out of flour. Hoarding it and getting black-market prices, the swine. We knew where he had his flour. Is that elbow serious?”
The telephone rang again and Loeb got into a shouting match about sugar. Barak broke in. “My call is highest army urgency, Hermann.”
Loeb hung up and told the secretary to hold all calls and keep trying Tel Aviv.
“Hermann, what is the fuel situation for trucks here?”
“For trucks? Tolerable, since the convoys stopped coming and refueling. Why?”
“What about fuel for power? And where do you stand on food?”
Hermann Loeb responded with brisk figures. Jerusalem’s hundred thousand Jews, most of them in the New City, consumed about two hundred tons a day, he said, of fuel, food, ammunition, medical supplies, and such. Rations had been cut, and cut again. Electric power had been cut to a couple of hours a day. Shortages were becoming serious. Flour was the worst. Flour for “the daily loaf” for every inhabitant was down to an eleven-day supply. Thereafter the Jews of Jerusalem would begin to starve. They were being heroic, ten thousand shells had fallen on them and they were uncowed, but starvation could prove the finish of Jewish Jerusalem.
Barak knew this man well, for Loeb was Pasternak’s father-in-law. The marriage of Ruth Loeb to Sam Pasternak, the son of Mishmar Ha’emek pioneers, had been a big Jerusalem social event, b
ut now Ruth lived in London with her two kids, the marriage a bust. So much for suitable matches! Hermann Loeb had come to Palestine in the twenties, lived in Jerusalem and loved it, but spent most of his time travelling on business. Now, like all Jerusalemites, he and his family were trapped, and he was wielding an iron hand as food czar.
The man was absolutely honest and reliable, and he could keep his mouth shut, so Barak said, “Hermann, listen carefully. An alternate route bypassing Latrun is possible. I’ve just traversed it by jeep.” At Loeb’s excited exclamation, he held up a hand. “Not for convoys. There’s a long stretch that won’t take trucks. But the trucks could come from Tel Aviv to a point past Hulda and off-load onto mules. The mules could carry the stuff to the Hartuv road, where your trucks could meet them. I doubt that mules can transport two hundred tons a day on that trail, but it might help—”
Loeb nodded excitedly. “It would, it would! A big help, a godsend! Can we start this at once?” He picked up the ringing phone. “Here’s your call to Tel Aviv.”
Marcus’s buoyant American accents gave Barak an instant lift. “Hi, Zev! So you’re in Jerusalem, hey? That bypass really works?”
“Well, it’s no bobbeh-myseh. I hope we take Latrun, but we should start surveying and building the road, top priority.” He rattled off Pasternak’s interim plan for mule transport.
“Outstanding. Will do,” said Marcus. “All of it. I’ll talk to Ben Gurion when I hang up, and I’ll get the mule trains going tonight. That’s a splendid idea. Now listen, Zev. I’m goddamned glad you’re in Jerusalem. B.G. is in a frenzy. We’ve just got word that the Jewish Quarter in the Old City is considering surrender. Have you heard anything about that?”
“I just got here. I’m in the office of a municipal leader. Hold on.”
“I’m holding.”
Barak shot the question at Loeb, who mournfully nodded, pointing to a map of the Old City on the wall, a diamond shape with the small Jewish Quarter at the bottom colored in blue. Red hatching showed the Arab Legion holding all the rest, and streaks of red penetrated the blue area as well.