Stateless (16 page)

‘While the Nazis were destroying our people in Europe, it was the British who refused to let our people flee to Palestine. They are as much responsible for the deaths before our brothers and sisters reached our shores as were the Nazis. Had they allowed our people to enter Palestine, thousands, perhaps millions, could have been saved.

‘Now is the time to send the British this message: that there will be no peace until they are forced out. Now is the time for us to strike, when they're drunk on victory and distracted; now is the time for us to intensify our fight!'

Shalman sat in the back corner of the room watching Shamir make his speech. He knew he should have felt joyous at the news of the end of the war but for reasons he couldn't quite grasp, he felt a strange melancholy. These people around him were his brothers and sisters and yet they were not like him.

It had been his guardian, Dov, who had brought Shalman to Lehi. With the nightmare images of his father being taken away by the British, ‘the Stern Gang' had become his family. They had trained him and given him purpose when he felt aimless, given his anger a target and a name. But still he felt an outsider. These people all around him might be his brothers and sisters in the struggle to throw off the British, but he was different from most
of them. They were refugees and migrants while Shalman had been born here in the land of Palestine. The childhood memories of jumping off sand dunes at Shabbat beach picnics with his parents were ingrained in his mental landscape. When his comrades fought for the land, it was because of what they wanted it to be, for they had enjoyed no childhood here, no memories of this place. This made Shalman feel different from the others. What he fought for was for the homeland he loved, the landscape of his childhood. He was fighting for what he knew.

So why did he find pulling the trigger so hard?

These were the thoughts on Shalman's mind when, amid the noise of revelry, Shamir had taken him quietly and conspiratorially aside and introduced him to a beautiful young woman whom others called Judita, but who Shamir had renamed Judit after the Biblical heroine.

Before Shamir walked away to leave them together, he turned to Shalman, and whispered, ‘Be careful of this one; remember your Bible, and what Judith did to Holofernes . . .' And for the first time that he recalled, Shalman heard Shamir laughing.

An hour later, in the early morning, the streets were empty and pitch black. It was usually warm in May, but tonight in Jerusalem it was unseasonably cool and they were grateful for their overcoats that concealed the Sten carbines they carried beneath. The barrels were elongated with silencers but still the compact weapons were hidden from view.

Earlier, before they left the group celebrating the end of the War, Shamir had given Shalman and Judit a mission. The
official Armistice in Europe was a night of celebration for the British. With the Nazi menace now over, enlisted men and officers alike would be drunk and disorderly in the streets of the ancient city. And among them would be a specific trio of soldiers that Shamir had ear-marked.

When told of the order, however, Shalman had questioned it openly. Why these three men? What did they do? Why not bomb a train line, an airfield? Why three ordinary British Tommies?

Shalman had surprised himself with the questions and they seemed to come from nowhere. His beautiful comrade, Judit, eyed him quizzically but said nothing as Shamir answered. Bombing train lines and airfields hurt the British military machine, killing officers fractured the British command, but killing regular soldiers was about hurting the British soul. To blow up a train would make headlines, but to kill a conscript from Leeds or Birmingham or Manchester would send a shudder of disgust through the city; everybody in the city would identify with the dead soldier, his widow, his children. And soon the wails of anguish would be heard in London's parliament, where decisions were made. The British, Shamir told them, were exhausted from a six-year war. The idea of more deaths so far from home was more than they would be able to bear.

‘On this night when they are thinking themselves invincible, we need to show them just how personally vulnerable they are. Rot them from the inside,' Shamir had told them.

Now Shalman and Judit lay on the low roof of a closed and empty shop, surveying a narrow alley, preparing to cause that rot to happen. It was a precise location where Shamir seemed to know the three men would be heading at this particular time. A direct route from their barracks at the end of the duty shift to the enlisted men's recreation hall at the end of the alley.

Shalman and Judit had got here by skirting the shadows of the night-time streets and avoiding the King David Hotel, the epicentre of British control in Jerusalem.

The spot where they were now lying was ideal because the flat roof joined three other roofs in easy stages. When they'd completed their assignment, they could scamper across the rooftops and disappear into a street behind that would take them far away from the shooting. By the time an alarm had been raised, Shalman and Judit would long since be gone.

Shalman glanced at the young woman next to him. The mixture of beauty and focus in her face turned his glance into a stare, which soon drew her attention away from the street below. Shalman quickly stammered a question to explain his gaze.

‘Have you ever used a rifle before?' he whispered. It was a stupid question. The look Judit gave him told him that she had. Nervously Shalman elaborated. ‘I mean. Like this. To kill . . .'

In the moonlight, she was quite lovely. She wore no make-up, as was the habit of young Jewish women in Palestine, but her skin, her cheekbones, her deep-set eyes, her lustrous hair pinned beneath the dark brown scarf she wore, almost made the young man forget the reason he was there.

She smiled at Shalman, and gave him a reassuring nod. ‘I'll be okay. Thank you for thinking of me,' she said with a liberal hint of sarcasm to which Shalman was oblivious.

He continued to dig his hole deeper. ‘But if you become frightened, or nervous – '

Judit cut him off, more with a look than what she said. ‘I'll be fine, Shalman.'

Shalman retreated, feeling somewhat foolish. Judit sensed this and her voice softened as she said, ‘They're not innocent, Shalman. I know men like these. Not enlisted men, maybe, but the officers commanding them. You don't know them like I know them. And what they're capable of doing.'

‘What do you mean?' he asked.

She thought back to the time she'd landed in Haifa, when some awful little British nonentity of an officer had tried to rape her. But she kept quiet. She didn't explain further and at that moment he heard the distant sound of several men laughing and talking loudly. As Shalman and Judit listened, they heard the men walking nearer, their voices becoming more distinct. One was even singing.

Suddenly, the men stopped moving, even though the sound of voices continued. Judit strained to hear, and then turned to Shalman. ‘I think they're pissing against a wall. Men always grow quiet when their dicks are out. Why can't men piss and talk at the same time?'

Shalman looked at her in astonishment, having absolutely no idea what to say. Instead he turned back to look at the road. The noise of the men started up again and began to come closer to where they were stationed. Then, around a corner, they saw three men weaving around the pavement. They were carrying bottles of beer, drinking and stumbling and falling and laughing and shouting and singing. Shalman and Judit had been told that the Tommies would be on their way to drink, not drunk and leaving the barracks. Everything was out of kilter because of the end of the war. The news had prompted early celebrations and it would make their task all the easier.

Judit and Shalman readied their Sten guns for when the Tommies were close enough. They peered through the gun sights and held their breath. The noise of the men, fracturing the silence of the early-morning city under curfew, grew closer and closer. They slowed and swigged from their bottles, threw their arms around one another's shoulders, then continued to walk. They ambled closer and closer until they were opposite the low rooftop where the two young Jews were lying.

Shalman drew in his breath, squeezed his left eye shut, and
looked down the barrel of the carbine. At the end of the sight was a British solider who reminded Shalman of the day his father was taken away, of his mother's grief. He reminded him of Dov and what he had said to him two years ago: ‘If we're to keep this land, we have to fight for it; we have to take it, Shalman.'

The Tommies were close now, the line from his gun sight to their chests was clear and steady and the presence of Judit seemed to slip away, leaving Shalman in his own world. He lifted his finger to the trigger and could feel his hand twitch and shake as it drew close to the thin strip of metal. All he had to do was to press it, and it would unleash hell. As he held his breath, Shalman remembered the night with Yitzhak Shamir, when the Pole had taken the responsibility from him and shot the British officer when Shalman had hesitated. Shamir had been true to his word, telling others that Shalman had done the job. The Pole had given Shalman a wink and never mentioned it again.

Shalman wanted to kill. He had every reason to kill. But something inside weighed him down and slowed his response. And it was in this delay that Shalman heard a series of short, deadened pops in bursts of three. With his eye still down the barrel he saw the bodies of the men twitch like puppets whose strings were being pulled by some monstrous kid, and begin to fall to the ground. First to fall was the one that he had in his gun sights and who he was yet to shoot. His gaze and his rifle sight shifted to one of the other men but even before his eyes focused, he saw that man, too, stumble forward in the instant of the metallic bullet pops. He shifted his gun sight immediately to the third man and found him already face-down in the alley.

Amazed, he scanned the three bodies again. They were all splayed like animal carcasses on the ground or against a wall; two were still twitching, while one lay still. Shalman hadn't even had time to squeeze his trigger, and Judit had shot each and every one.

He turned to face her, but she was still looking down the barrel of her gun. She squeezed the trigger once more and fired into the body of a soldier on the ground and then the other two a second time each.

She turned to look at Shalman staring at her, his mouth open. Judit said softly, as though discussing a recipe for a cake, ‘Always make sure the job is done. A sniper must never be satisfied with the first shot. You can't tell from this distance whether you've wounded somebody, or killed them. Best to shoot once or twice more, just to make sure. Now, let's get the hell out of here.'

Shalman sat drinking orange juice in a café, waiting for Judit to arrive, and pondering the events of the night before. But it wasn't the bullets or the mission that was exercising his mind, rather the young woman who had been with him and who, truth be known, had surprised him with her attitude towards her job. Since joining Lehi, he'd killed a couple of British soldiers, but each time, it had made him feel sick to the stomach. When he killed it was always with the greatest reluctance; yet Judit killed with the clinical approach of a surgeon performing an operation.

Shalman still felt guilty about the night Yitzhak Shamir had covered for him and so he had been the first to tell the Lehi operations leader what Judit had done, how she'd killed three Tommies before he'd even had a chance to squeeze the trigger.

Shamir had simply laughed out loud and slapped him on the back saying, ‘She's quite something, isn't she?' Shalman had been expecting a reprimand but evidently Shamir saw the news as evidence of Judit's prowess rather than the young man's failure.

The café door opened and a draught of air blew into the room. Judit sauntered over to where he was sitting. He looked at her closely. She was very beautiful. Her features were fine, her face slender, her eyes deep-set and sparkling and as black as night, and she had a radiant smile.