Leon Uris (97 page)

Ari started at the mention of her name.

“She has become a saint. She visits us when she is in the Huleh. It is too bad you haven’t seen her.”

“Father ... I ...”

“Don’t you think I see the hunger in that woman’s eyes for you? Is this the way a man gives love, by hiding in the desert? Yes, Ari! Let’s have it all out now. You’ve run and hidden from her. Say it. Say it to me and say it to yourself.”

Ari got off the edge of the bed and walked away.

“What is this terrible thing in your heart that keeps you from going to this woman and telling her your heart breaks for her?”

Ari felt his father’s burning gaze at his back. He turned slowly with his eyes lowered. “She told me once I would have to need her so badly that I would have to crawl.”

“Then crawl!”

“I cannot crawl! I don’t know how! Can’t you see, Father ... I can never be the man she wants.”

Barak sighed sadly. “And that is where I have failed you, Ari. You see, I would have crawled to your mother a million times. I would crawl to her because I need her in order to live. She is my strength. God help me, Ari, I have been a party to the creation of a breed of men and women so hard they refuse to know the meaning of tears and humility.”

“She once said that to me,” Ari whispered.

“You have mistaken tenderness for weakness. You have mistaken tears for dishonor. You have made yourself believe that to depend on another person is to retreat. You are so blind that you cannot give love.”

“So, I cannot do what I cannot do,” Ari cried.

“And I am sorry for you, Ari. I am sorry for you and I am sorry for myself.”

The next day Ari carried his father in his arms to his car and drove him to Tel Hai, to the very spot at which he and his brother Akiva had crossed to Palestine more than half a century before.

The graves of the Guardsmen were there at Tel Hai, the first Jews to bear arms at the turn of the century in a roving defense of Jewish settlements against Bedouins. It was as a Guardsman, Barak was remembering, that he had met Sarah at Rosh Pinna.

The stones of the dead formed two lines, and there were a dozen plots waiting for those Guardsmen still alive. Akiva’s remains had been removed from Elijah’s Point to this place of honor. The plot next to Akiva was reserved for Barak.

Ari carried his father beyond the graves to where the huge stone statue of a lion stood looking down upon the valley, the symbol of a king protecting the land. On the base of the statue they read the words: “IT IS GOOD TO DIE FOR ONE’S COUNTRY.”

Barak looked down at the valley. Settlements were everywhere. A town was springing up below them with thousands of new settlers. The father and the son lingered at Tel Hai until darkness fell and they watched the lights go on, ringing the valley with a fortress of determination. Yad El—the Hand of God—stood in their center. A settlement of tough new youngsters had just broken ground at Gonen far below; they lived in tents just a few yards from the Syrian border. The lights of Gonen went on too.

“It is good to have a country to die for,” Barak said.

Ari carried his father down from the hill.

Two days later Barak Ben Canaan died in his sleep and he was taken back to Tel Hai and buried next to Akiva.

I
N THE LAST STAGES
of the War of Liberation, Dov Landau joined the army of Israel and took part in Operation Ten Plagues against the Egyptians. His bravery in the storming of Suweidan won him a field commission. For several months he stayed in the desert as one of Colonel Ben Canaan’s Beasts of the Negev. Ari recognized the boy’s obvious talents and sent him north for tests. The Army then asked Dov to go to the Technical Institute at Haifa and study specialized courses for the ambitious water projects being planned for the redemption of the Negev. Dov proved to be a brilliant scholar.

He had completely burst out of his former darkness. Now he was warm and filled with humor and showed uncommon understanding for those people who suffered. Still rather slight in stature, with sensitive features, Dov had become a handsome young man. He and Karen were deeply in love.

The young romance was plagued with constant separations, uncertainty and of course the eternal tension. The land was in a turmoil and so were they; each had his separate serious duties. It was an old story in Israel, it was the story of Ari and Dafna and the story of David and Jordana. Each time they saw each other the desire and the frustration grew. Dov, who worshiped Karen, became the stronger of the two.

When he reached his twenty-first birthday he was a captain in the corps of engineers and was considered one of the most promising officers in his field. His time was spent studying at the Technical Institute and at the Weizmann Research Institute at Rehovot.

Karen left Gan Dafna after the War of Liberation and also went into the Army. There she continued nurses’ training. She had gained valuable experience in working with Kitty and was able to finish her basic training quickly. Nursing suited Karen. She wanted someday to follow in Kitty’s footsteps and specialize in caring for children. She was stationed in a hospital in the Sharon. It was convenient, for she was able to hitch a ride to Jerusalem to Kitty when Kitty was there and to get to Haifa frequently to see Dov.

Karen Hansen Clement grew from a beautiful girl into a magnificent woman. She was striking perfection, with the tenderness and kindness which had characterized her youth following her into maturity.

In the depths of Kitty’s mind the thought sometimes rose that Karen might come with her to America, but it was pure wishful thinking. In more realistic moments she knew that Karen did not need her. She had done her job for the girl just as she had done it for Israel. Karen was a part of Israel now, too deeply rooted to be torn away. And Kitty knew that she did not need Karen now. Once she believed she would never be able to part from the girl. But that void, the emotional starvation in Kitty, had been filled by years of unselfish devotion to “her children.”

Kitty not only knew she could leave Karen, but she dared hope that normalcy and true happiness awaited her somewhere, sometime, again.

No, for Karen and herself, Kitty had no fears about leaving Israel. But there was one fear—a fear for Israel itself.

The Arabs sat at Israel’s borders, licking their wounds and waiting for that day they would pounce on the little nation and destroy her in their much-advertised “second round.”

The Arab leaders handed their masses guns instead of plowshares. Those few who saw the light of Israel and wanted to make peace were murdered. The old harangues poured from the Arab press, from its radio, its leaders, and from the Moslem pulpits.

The Arab people, already bled dry by willful men, were bled even dryer to pay for hundreds of millions of dollars in arms.

The refugee situation was distorted so as to be made insolvable.

Nasser, the one-time army captain who sat in the pocket at Faluja under siege, inflamed the Arab world like a would-be Hitler.

The Suez Canal was blocked by Egypt to Israeli ships and ships of other nations bringing cargo to Israel, in violation of international law.

The Gulf of Akaba was blockaded to keep the Jews from operating a port at Elath.

The Legion of Jordan blatantly ignored the truce agreement whereby Jews were to have free access to Old Jerusalem for worship at their holiest shrine, the Wall of Solomon’s Temple.

All Arab nations refused to recognize the existence of Israel; all Arab nations sworc to destroy Israel.

Then came the most vicious move. The Arabs, mainly the Egyptians in the Gaza strip, organized
fedayeen
gangs for the purpose of murdering Israelis. These gangs crossed the border nightly to kill, to burn fields, to cut water-pipe lines, to destroy. Tormented Palestine refugees were used in these gangs, goaded by hate-spewing leaders.

Israel, with all of her other burdens, had to adopt an axiom of reality: “When Hitler said he was going to exterminate the Jews, the world did not believe him. When the Arabs say it, we in Israel believe them.”

Military training in Israel was compulsory for girls as well as for boys. They learned at early ages to handle arms. All men received training one month out of each year until the age of forty-five. Israel became the most efficiently organized and largest—in proportion to population—standing militia in the world.

The notorious
fedayeen
continued to commit atrocity after atrocity. They reached a new depth by the bombing of children’s houses on the border settlements.

At last Israel had no choice but reprisal. The army of Israel swore to kill ten for one. Unfortunately, reprisal seemed to be the only language that the Arabs understood, the only thing that might stop them.

One of the defensive measures used by Israel was the creation of Nahal. Nahal was a militarized intensification of settlements in strategic places. Many youth groups of boys and girls went into the army to take their training as a unit. After basic training they were sent out to the borders to build combined farming and defensive settlements. To build a wall of flesh on the Israeli borders was a partial answer to
fedayeen
terror. The settlements of these youngsters in their late teens were only yards from the frontier; they lived in the jaws of the enemy.

The conditions on the frontier were brutal. The pay rate of the young soldier-farmer was thirty dollars a year. Death lay on one side of them, unfertile land on the other. Yet—still another of the nation’s miracles—Israel’s youth volunteered to spend their entire lives in border settlements. They went quietly and without heroics. Like Jordana and Ari and David and Joab and Zev ... it was their job. They lived with no thought of material gain for themselves, but only of Israel and tomorrow.

The toughest of these frontiers was the Gaza Strip, the finger of land which was left jutting into Israel as an aborted border at the end of the war. Ancient Gaza, where Samson had lifted the gates, had new gates now, the gates of the Palestine refugee camps. The victimized Arabs were allowed to wallow in listlessness and become wards of world charity while they were pumped full of hatred by Egyptian administrators. Gaza was the principle base and training ground of the Egyptian sponsored
fedayeens
.

It was in this place, less than ten kilometers from the enemy nest, that twenty-two boys and sixteen girls came to build a Nahal settlement.

It was named Nahal Midbar—the Stream in the Desert.

Among the sixteen girls was their nurse, Karen Hansen Clement.

Dov had finished his studies at the Weizmann Institute and was transferred to a water project in the Huleh Valley. He achieved a five-day leave before reporting to his new post so he could hitch a ride to Nahal Midbar to see Karen. They had been separated for six weeks, since she had left with her group.

It took Dov all day to travel to the remote spot in the Negev Desert. A dirt path branched off the main road along the Gaza strip and ran some four kilometers to the settlement.

Most of Nahal Midbar was still canvas. Only a dining shack, a tool shed, and a pair of guard towers had been built. The water tank and the irrigation pipes were nearly in. Those few buildings stood in the center of a wind-swept, bleak and desolate, sun-baked corner that seemed to be the end of the earth. It was, indeed, on the brink of nowhere. On the horizon could be seen the sinister outline of Gaza. Emplacements of barbed wire and trenches faced the enemy.

The first
dunams
of land were under the plow. Dov stopped at the gate and observed for a moment. Nahal Midbar was depressing. Then, suddenly it turned in his sight into the most magnificent garden on earth, for he saw Karen running toward him from her hospital tent.

“Dov! Dov!” she cried, and raced over the bare brown knoll and flung herself into his waiting arms and they held each other tightly, their hearts pounding in excitement and joy with the feel of each other.

They held hands as Karen took Dov to the water tank; he washed his sweaty face and took a long drink. Then Karen led him away from the settlement to a path which led beyond the knoll where some Nabataean ruins stood. It was the forward outpost, right on the border marker, and the favorite meeting place of the single boys and girls.

Karen gave a signal to the guard that she would take the watch and the guard left knowingly. They picked their way through the ruins until they came to the enclosure of an ancient temple and there they waited until the guard was out of sight. Karen peered out at the field through the barbed wire. Everything was quiet.

They both leaned the rifles they carried against the wall and embraced and kissed.

“Oh, Dov! At last!”

“I’ve almost died from missing you,” he said.

They kissed again and again ignoring the burning midday desert sun, ignoring everything but each other. Dov led her to a corner and they sat on the earthen floor, Karen lying in his arms, and he kissed her and caressed her and she closed her eyes and purred with happiness.

And then his hands became still and he just gazed lovingly.

“I have some wonderful news,” he said.

She looked up. “What could be more wonderful than this minute?”

“Sit up,” he commanded teasingly.

“What is it, Dov?”

“You know about me being transferred to the Huleh Project?”

“Yes, of course.”

“Well, I was called in yesterday. They want me to stay up there until the end of the summer only ... then they want me to go to America for advanced studies! The Massachusetts Institute of Technology!”

Karen blinked her eyes.

“America? To study?”

“Yes ... for two years. I could hardly wait to get here and tell you.”

She forced herself to smile—quickly. “How wonderful, Dov. I am so proud. Then you will be going in about six or seven months.”

“I didn’t give them an answer,” he said. “I wanted to talk it over with you.”

“Two years isn’t forever,” Karen said. “Why, by the time you get back the
kibbutz
will all be built up. We’ll have two thousand
dunams
under cultivation and a library and a children’s house full of babies.”