Leon Uris (54 page)

“But the day must come that we commit ourselves, Avidan. We have an army or we don’t.”

Avidan took some sheets of paper from his desk drawer and pushed them over toward Ari. Ari thumbed through them:
ORDER OF BATTLE, 6TH AIRBORNE DIVISION
.

Ari looked up. “They have three parachute brigades?”

“Keep reading.”

ROYAL ARMORED CORPS WITH KING’S OWN HUSSARS, 53RD WORCESTERSHIRE, 249TH AIRBORNE PARK, DRAGOON GUARDS, ROYAL LANCERS, QUEEN’S ROYAL, EAST SURREY, MIDDLESEX, GORDON HIGHLANDERS, ULSTER RIFLES, HERTFORDSHIRE REGIMENT
—the list of British troops in Palestine ran on and on. Ari threw the papers down on Avidan’s desk. “Whom are they fighting, the Russian Army?”

“You see, Ari? Every day I go through it with some young hotheads in the Palmach. Why don’t we raid? Why don’t we come out and fight? Do you think I like it? Ari ... they have twenty per cent of the combat strength of the British Army here. One hundred thousand troops, not counting the Trans-Jordan Arab Legion. Sure, the Maccabees run around shooting up everything, grabbing the limelight, accusing us of hiding.” Avidan slammed his fist on the desk. “By God, I’m trying to put an army together. We haven’t even got ten thousand rifles to fight with and if the Haganah goes, we all go with it.

“You see, Ari ... the Maccabees can keep mobility and hide with a few thousand blowhards. We have got to stall and keep stalling. We can’t have a showdown. We can’t get Haven-Hurst angry, either. One British soldier here for every five Jews.”

Ari picked up the list of British troops again and studied it in silence.

“The British dragnets, cordons, screenings, raids get worse every day. The Arabs are building strength while the British turn their backs.”

Ari nodded. “Where do I go from here?”

“I am not going to give you a command, yet. Go on home, take a few days’ rest then report to Palmach at Ein Or
kibbutz.
I want you to assess our strength in every settlement in the Galilee. We want to know what we can expect to hold ... what we are going to lose.”

“I’ve never heard you talk like this, Avidan.”

“Things have never been so bad. The Arabs have refused even to sit at the same conference table and talk with us in London.”

Ari walked to the door.

“My love to Barak and Sarah and tell Jordana to behave herself with David Ben Ami home. I am sending him and the other boys to Ein Or.”

“I’ll be in Jerusalem tomorrow,” Ari said. “Do you want anything?”

“Yes, dig me up ten thousand front-line troops and the arms to outfit them.”

“
Shalom
, Avidan.”

“
Shalom
, Ari. It is good to have you home.”

Ari grew morose as he drove back to Tel Aviv. Long ago in Cyprus he had told young David Ben Ami that many things are tried in the Haganah and Palmach and Aliyah Bet. Some plans work and some fail. A professional should do his work and not become entangled emotionally. Ari Ben Canaan was a machine. He was an efficient, daring operator. Sometimes he won, sometimes he lost.

But once in a while Ari Ben Canaan looked at it all with realism and it nearly crushed him.

Exodus
, the Haifa refinery, a raid here, a raid there. Men died to smuggle in fifty rifles. Men were hanged for smuggling in a hundred frantic survivors. He was a little man fighting a giant. He wished, at that moment, he could have David Ben Ami’s faith in divine intervention, but Ari was a realist.

Kitty Fremont waited in the little bar off the lobby for Ari’s return. He had been so decent that she wanted to wait up for him and talk some more and have a nightcap or two. She saw him walk into the lobby and go to the desk for his key.

“Ari!” she called.

His face showed the same deep concentration it had showed that first day she saw him on Cyprus. She waved to him but he did not even seem to see or to hear her. He looked directly at her, then walked upstairs to his room.

T
WO BUSES CARRYING FIFTY
of the
Exodus
children drove past the
tel
of the ruins of Hazor and into the Huleh Valley. All during the drive from Haifa through the Galilee the travelers had been hanging out of the window cheering and waving and pointing in wonder at the sights of their long-promised land.

“Dov! Everything is so beautiful!” Karen cried.

Dov’s grumble Karen interpreted as meaning that he didn’t see so much to make a fuss about.

They drove deep into the Huleh to Yad El, the home of Ari Ben Canaan. Here a road branched from the main road and ran up into the hills toward the Lebanese border. The children saw the road sign pointing to Gan Dafna; they nearly exploded with anticipation, with the lone exception of the morose Dov Landau. The buses worked up the winding road and soon the Huleh expanded into full vista, carpeted with green fields of the
kibbutzim
and
moshavim
. The rectangular fishponds made a dozen small lakes around the larger swamplands of Huleh Lake.

They slowed as they entered the Arab village of Abu Yesha halfway up the mountains. There was none of the coldness or hostility at Abu Yesha the children had noted in the other Arab villages. They were greeted with friendly waving.

Past Abu Yesha they climbed beyond the two-thousand-foot elevation marker and then on to the Youth Aliyah village of Gan Dafnathe, Garden of Dafna. They stopped before green lawn measuring fifty by a hundred yards in the center of the village. The whole place sat on a large plateau. The center green was surrounded by administration buildings and was the hub of the village, which ran off in all four directions. Flowers and trees and green were everywhere. As the
Exodus
children debarked the village orchestra greeted them with a rousing march.

In the center of the green stood a life-sized statue of Dafna, the girl after whom the village was named. The figure was cast in bronze with a rifle in her hands, looking down on the Huleh, much the same as that day at Ha Mishmar when the Arabs had killed her.

The village founder, a tiny man with a slight humpback named Dr. Lieberman, stood by the statue of Dafna, smoking a large-bowled pipe as he welcomed the new youngsters. He briefly told them that he had left Germany in 1934 and founded Gan Dafna in 1940 on this land which had been generously given to Youth Aliyah by Kammal, the late muktar of Abu Yesha. Dr. Lieberman went to each youngster to speak a few personal words of welcome in a half dozen languages. As Karen watched him she had a feeling that she had seen him before. He looked and acted like the professors at Cologne when she was a baby ... but it was so long ago she could not really remember.

Each new child was attended by a member of the village.

“Are you Karen Clement?”

“Yes.”

“I am Yona, your new roommate,” said an Egyptian Jewess a bit older than Karen. The two girls shook hands. “Come, I will show you to our room. You will like it here.”

Karen called to Dov that she would see him later and she walked beside Yona past the administration buildings and the schoolrooms to an area of cottages set in a shrubbed pathway. “We are lucky,” Yona said. “We get the cottages because we are seniors.”

Karen stopped a moment before the cottage and looked at it with disbelief, then entered. It was very simple but Karen thought it the most wonderful room that she had ever seen. A bed, a desk, a wardrobe and a chair—her own, her very own.

It was evening before Karen had a free moment. After dinner the children were to be given a welcoming show at the outdoor theater.

Karen met Dov on the green near the statue of Dafna. For the first time in weeks and weeks she felt like dancing. The air was so crisp and wonderful and the village was heaven! Karen trembled with happiness. She stood by Dov and pointed to the white clustered houses of Abu Yesha below them in a saddle of the hill. Above them was the Taggart fort, Fort Esther, on the Lebanese border, and down at the floor of the valley were the fields belonging to the village, adjoining the fields of the
moshav
of Yad El. Along the hilltops at the far end of the Huleh was Tel Hai, where Trumpledor fell, and across the valley was Mount Hermon and Syria.

Karen was dressed in olive-drab slacks and high-collared peasant’s blouse and she wore new sandals on her feet. “Oh, Dov! This is the most wonderful day of my life,” she cried. “Yona is lots of fun and she was telling me that Dr. Lieberman is the nicest man on earth.”

She rolled in the grass and looked up in the sky and sighed. Dov stood over her, wordless. She sat up and took his hand and tugged at him to sit beside her.

“Cut it out,” he said.

She persisted and he sat down. He became nervous as she squeezed his hand and lay her head on his shoulder. “Please be happy, Dov ... please be happy.”

He shrugged and pulled away from her.

“Please be happy.”

“Who cares about it?”

“I care,” Karen said. “I care for you.”

“Well ... care for yourself.”

“I care for myself, too.” She knelt in front of him and gripped his shoulders. “Did you see your room and your bed? How long has it been since you’ve been in a room like that?”

Dov flushed at the touch of her hands and lowered his eyes. “Just think, Dov. No more displaced persons’ camps ... no more La Ciotats, no more Caraolos. No more illegal ships. We are home, Dov, and it is even more beautiful than I dreamed.”

Dov got to his feet slowly and turned his back. “This place is fine for you. I got other plans.”

“Please forget them,” she pleaded.

The orchestra played and the music drifted over the green.

“We had better get to the theater,” Karen said.

Once Ari and Kitty left Tel Aviv and drove past the huge British camp at Sarafand she felt the tension of Palestine again. They passed through the all-Arab city of Ramle on the road to Jerusalem and felt angry Arab eyes on them. Ari seemed oblivious of the Arabs and oblivious of Kitty. He had not spoken a dozen words to her all day.

Beyond Ramle the car turned into the Bab el Wad, a snaking road that twisted up into the Judean hills. Young forests planted by the Jews pushed up from the earth on ravines on either side of the road. Deep into the hills stood ancient terracing that stood out from the denuded earth like ribs of a starving dog. Once these very hills and terraces supported hundreds of thouands of people. Now it was completely eroded. The hilltops held Arab villages clustered in white clumps above them.

Here in the Bab el Wad the magic pull of Jerusalem gripped Kitty Fremont. It was said that none could pass through the Judean hills for the first time and escape the haunting power of the City of David. It seemed strange to Kitty that she would feel it so intensely. Her religious training had been in matter-of-fact midwestern Protestantism. It had been approached with a basic sincerity and a lack of intensity. Higher and higher they drove and the anticipation became greater. She was with the Bible now, and for the first time, in these silent and weird hills, came the realization of what it was to be in the Holy Land.

In the distance a dim outline of the citadels of Jerusalem jutted on the horizon and Kitty Fremont was filled with a kind of exaltation.

They entered the New City built by the Jews and drove down Jaffa Road, the principal commercial spine that passed crowded shops, toward the wall of the Old City. At the Jaffa Gate, Ari turned and drove along the wall to King David Avenue and in a few moments stopped before the great King David Hotel.

Kitty stepped from the car and gasped at the sight of the right wing of the hotel sheared away.

“It was once British headquarters,” Ari said. “The Maccabees changed all that.”

The hotel was built of Jerusalem stone. It was grandiose in the overburdened European manner, with its lobby an alleged duplication of King David’s court.

Kitty came down to lunch first. She waited on the terrace in the rear of the hotel that looked over a small valley to the Old City wall. The terrace was opposite David’s Tower and was set in a formal garden. A four-piece orchestra behind her played luncheon music.

Ari walked out to the terrace and stopped in his tracks. Kitty looked lovely! He had never seen her like this before. She wore a flouncy and chic cocktail dress and a wide-brimmed hat and white gloves. At that moment he felt far away from her. She was all the lovely women in Rome and in Paris and even Berlin who belonged to a world in which women acted in a way he could not quite understand. It was a light year from Kitty to Dafna but she was beautiful, indeed.

He seated himself. “I have spoken to Harriet Saltzman. We will see her right after lunch.”

“Thanks. I’m very excited about Jerusalem.”

“She has mysterious powers. Everyone is excited on his first visit. Take David Ben Ami ... David never gets over Jerusalem. Matter of fact he will be sight-seeing with you tomorrow. It is the Sabbath. He wants to take you into the Old City.”

“He is sweet to think of me.”

Ari looked at her closely. She seemed even prettier now than when he entered the terrace. He turned his eyes away and signaled for a waiter, then stared off into space after giving the order. Kitty had the feeling now that Ari had committed himself and was anxious to complete his obligation. No word passed between them for ten minutes.

She picked at her salad. “Do I bore you?”

“Of course not.”

“Since you came back from your engagement last night you’ve acted as though I haven’t existed.”

“I’m sorry, Kitty,” he said without looking at her. “I guess I have been rather bad company today.”

“Is there something wrong?”

“There’s a lot wrong but it doesn’t concern you or me or my bad manners. Let me tell you about Harriet Saltzman. She’s an American. She must be well over eighty years old now. If we conferred sainthoods in the Yishuv, she would be our first saint. See that hill beyond the Old City?”

“Over there?”

“That’s Mount Scopus. Those buildings make up the most modern medical center in the Middle East. The money comes from American Zionist women that Harriet organized after the first world war. Most of the hospital and medical centers in Palestine come from her Hadassah organization.”