The Drifters (29 page)

‘The child can opt for whichever citizenship he wants … at age twenty-one,’ Doris said. ‘I looked it up.’

‘Apparently you didn’t look far enough,’ I proceeded, ‘because what you say is only partly true. The child does elect at age twenty-one, but he is eligible to do so only if he had five years of schooling within the United States.’

‘Is that correct?’

‘I’m not positive about the exact number of years required—that’s what your father told me.’

‘Father gets crazy ideas. We’d better check into this,’ she said.

We drove to Tel Aviv, where an official at the American embassy had the exact law on his desk: ‘Any child born overseas …’

Doris interrupted joyfully, ‘That doesn’t apply to us. Yigal was born in Detroit and that makes him a citizen.’

The clerk confirmed this: ‘Any child physically born in the United States, regardless of the citizenship of his parents, is irrevocably an American citizen.’

Having heard this, Doris would bother with no more arguments and we returned to Haifa. But when she reported her findings to her father in Detroit, he wrote her a thoughtful letter, sending me a copy in Geneva:

The appeal was too strong for the Zmoras to resist; Dr. Zmora conceded, ‘I suppose Yigal ought to know America as well as he knows the Galilee. Perhaps his future does lie there.’ So the boy was loaded onto an El Al plane and shuttled back to Grosse Pointe.

Luckily, the Melnikoffs located a private school which had too few boys to field a football team and which therefore specialized in soccer. Bruce was the youngest member of the team and in many ways the best. At fourteen, a small boy with the reflexes of a coiled spring, he helped his school defeat teams from much larger institutions and was thus brought into the mainstream of both his school and his new country. When one of the Detroit newspapers carried his picture as an all-state forward—there being practically no schools in the state which played soccer—it was a kind of confirmation. Bruce Clifton was well on his way to becoming an American.

School had one curious effect on him. His fellow pupils were mostly gentile, and for the first time he began to understand what it meant to be a Jew, for as he told his roommate, a gentile from Grosse Pointe, ‘In Haifa everybody’s Jewish. It never occurs to you that there could be anything else—except of course Arabs, and they’re just as Jewish as we are. The Arab-Jewish trouble is more political than racial.’

But the fact he was a soccer star did not mean he was exempt from the normal prejudice of an American private school. He learned that the school had a quota and that he was lucky his grandfather had influence so that he, Bruce, could occupy one of the cherished Jewish spots.
He was also warned that certain of the colleges he might want to attend had de facto quotas. ‘They don’t put it in the catalogue, you understand,’ one of the other Jewish boys explained, ‘but they just won’t take too many Jews. I suppose they can’t.’

‘That’s no problem to me.’ Bruce laughed. ‘Where I’m going to college my father is dean and everybody’s Jewish.’

But there were other problems, inescapable ones. When the school had a dance, Jewish students invited Jewish partners and stayed somewhat to themselves. Also, Bruce had great difficulty keeping his mouth shut where the excellence of the school was concerned. He was apt to say, ‘At the Reali in Haifa we studied this kind of foolishness when we were ten.’ He made the comment so often that teachers got wind of his ridiculous boasting and cautioned him about it, whereupon he wrote to Haifa for the course outlines he had studied at age ten and proved that what he had said was right. Israeli schools were at least three years ahead of American ones, but at this point Mr. Melnikoff took his grandson aside and said, ‘A sensible man never brags about two things. How lovable his first wife was and how good his last school was. Shut up.’

So then Bruce turned to discussions of military life in Israel and told how girls little older than the ones in this school were soldiers and how he had trained with one of the army units and had been in charge of their communications.

‘I think he’s smoking hash,’ one of the soccer players said after an especially exciting yarn about being three days in the Negev desert, but at that same moment Bruce was telling his grandfather, ‘I find these American boys awfully young alongside the kids I knew in Haifa. You know the difference? They can’t do anything. They’re city kids. Put them ten miles out in the country, they’d be lost.’

Nevertheless, Bruce Clifton found himself becoming each day more American, and he was not entirely unhappy with the change. His grandfather took him to the Pontiac proving grounds, where even though he was too young to have a driver’s license, he was permitted to try out the new models and roar them at eighty miles an hour over simulated highways. His grandfather told his business associates, ‘It’s pretty clear the boy’s decided to live here
the rest of his life. He should, because this is where he belongs.’

But Bruce was far from making a decision. Each summer he flew back to Israel, and as soon as he saw the sun-swept hills of the Galilee, or accompanied his older friends on their maneuvers in the Negev, he felt himself drawn tremendously toward the Jewish state. His two younger sisters also attracted him to Israel; he liked the way they fitted in, their lack of pretense or affectation. Young men in Israel were not much different from young men around the world, but the young women were something quite new and he found he liked them much more than their American prototypes.

‘You haven’t met any first-class American girls yet,’ his mother argued. ‘Wait till you go to college and see what they have waiting for you at Vassar and Smith.’

‘I’m going to look into that when I get back this year,’ he had told her in the late summer of 1965, but the next year proved no more conclusive than the preceding one. He still found no American girls he liked; he still bored his friends by telling them how much better the school in Haifa was; and he still outraged them with his accounts of military maneuvers in the desert. The only thing that changed was that his grandfather installed in their home in Grosse Pointe a sensational radio station with a retractable antenna, and when his schoolmates saw how proficient Bruce was with the equipment, and how he knew operators across the world, they began to wonder if perhaps he had been telling the truth about his experience with the military.

Then came his excursion to the Red City, and everything was changed.

Children in Haifa sang a song which struck terror in the hearts of their parents. It was called ‘Ballad of the Red City’ and told of a midnight expedition of the Negev. When Doris Zmora first heard her son Yigal singing this song quietly, whispering the words,

she cried, ‘Yigal! You must never sing that song again. Never!’

He laughed at her fears, and two days later was caught singing the provocative song again. This time his mother summoned his father, and Dr. Zmora said, ‘Your mother’s right. Don’t get that song into your blood.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because it leads to death. Meaningless death. And any death that has no meaning is a terrible thing.’

‘I’m not afraid.’

‘It’s not terrible to the one who dies … only to those who are left behind.’

But Yigal kept singing the song to himself, as did many other young people throughout Israel, and one morning in the summer of 1966 he was waiting in his yard in Haifa when a black automobile drove slowly past, carrying two young men, one of whom nodded gravely to Yigal as the car passed on. Without creating suspicion, Yigal slowly finished what he was doing, went indoors, grabbed a jacket, and wandered aimlessly down the street. His young sister Shoshana met him on her way home and noticed the jacket thinking it strange that he should be carrying it on so hot a day. She turned to look in the direction her brother had gone and saw him jump into a black car that had apparently been waiting for him, but when she got home she said nothing. However, when Yigal did not show up for dinner, the truth came to her like a light flashing in the darkness.

‘He’s gone to the Red City!’ she cried. ‘I know it!’ There was an exultation in her voice that terrified her parents, for they knew that she had guessed right.

At that moment Yigal and his friends were approaching the historic city of Beersheba, at the northern end of the Negev. Without slowing down, they sped through the section of that city where the camel market was held each Thursday and entered upon the stony desert that separated them from their goal.

When they were well into the Negev they turned east over a road that one of the young men had scouted the previous summer, and after a while, as they had anticipated, it ran out, so they cut across the desert itself, driving without lights and speaking only in whispers. To the north there was a good road, leading more or less to where they wanted to go, but similar adventurers had learned
at grievous expense not to use that road, for it led to death.

Finally they halted the car, descended, and began to walk purposefully to the east, so that before long they had left Israel and had entered the Jordanian sector of the Wadi Arabah, that great and desolate depression which cuts south to the gulf. They moved swiftly across the emptiness, for they would be most vulnerable if enemy rifle fire were to catch them there, and in time they lost themselves in the safety of low rambling hills.

Now they had to depend upon the excellence of their maps, for a wrong turn might throw them either into enemy arms and certain death or into some cul-de-sac from which they would be unable to reach the Red City. Their maps were good, and toward two in the morning they checked off the various signs which assured them that they were on the way to the city.

They now instituted a rule of total silence, and the two older boys produced revolvers, which they had before them as they crept through the grass. They had proceeded in this manner for about an hour when they faced a steep, rugged slope festooned with boulders, any one of which might be hiding an Arab guard. It was on this slope, when Jewish boys suddenly came upon a waiting patrol, that most lives were lost, for it was understood by both sides that infiltrators trying to reach the Red City would be shot on sight, and would in turn shoot down any guards who tried to stop them. Sixteen Israeli boys had been killed in the last two years playing this appalling game; more than three hundred had negotiated the perilous terrain, whispering to themselves as they crept along,

At the end of a tiring climb this particular trio reached a small plateau, and in the dusky moonlight they could see that some yards ahead it terminated in what would probably a steep cliff leading down to a valley below. With his revolver the boy in the lead indicated how he proposed to guide them across this plateau, and silently they fell in line behind him.

Wriggling like snakes across a desert, they crept through
the shadowy darkness, and as they came to the edge of the cliff they caught their breath, for below them unfolded one of the supreme sights of the world—the ancient rose-red city of Petra, its towers and promenades shining in the dark night like dusky stars of immortal radiance.

‘Oh!’ Yigal gasped.

They lay there for some fifteen minutes, drinking in the grandeur of this city, carved into the face of the cliff years before the birth of Christ. It was deserted now, a red metropolis that once had housed a half million people, but its ghosts still lingered, for in the pale moonlight the three Jews could see the vast temples, the curious treasury, the seats of administration and all the other appurtenances of power which the builders had once enjoyed. It had been like no other city on earth, for none of its buildings had stood free … by itself. All had been carved from standing rock, so that the back of each continued to be that living rock. It was a city eternally coming into being, never completed. In the age of St. Paul it had commanded all the territory north to Damascus, but it had perished for lack of water. So dry did the atmosphere become that erosion had damaged none of the buildings; they stood as they had two thousand years ago, filling the night with majesty.

‘I have seen the Red City,’ one of the young men said, and with these words he constituted himself a Jew apart. Many sang of making the perilous journey to Petra but only a few risked it, for if they were detected at any point of the way, dogs were set upon them and they were tracked down and shot.