Raquela (36 page)

“You—you prostitutes.”

Her huge bosom rose and fell inside her starched white uniform.

“It was a perfectly innocent swimming party,” Raquela said through her teeth.

“I can imagine how innocent.”

“What's wrong with swimming with our friends? You know how hard we're working. We're entitled to some relaxation.”

The matron's cheeks were purple, apoplectic.

“You don't even look remorseful. Your own Jewish women are in labor—and you go whoring with sailors in the middle of the night.”

Esther drew herself up tall. “We'd never have been arrested if it weren't for your Englishmen. They'd arrest mermaids, if they could, and call them frogmen.”

“I don't know how they bring you up in Palestine. No English nurse would ever behave like you.”

Raquela and Esther stared at her, their faces impassive.

“I ought to have you fired. And I would, if I didn't need nurses so badly. The two of you—
ugh
—you're a disgrace to the profession.”

She dismissed them with a wave of her hand.

Outside the matron's hut, Raquela and Esther looked at each other. “I thought it would be worse,” Raquela said.

Esther was worried. “We still have to see Dr. Gordon.”

They hurried to Mary Gordon's quarters.

Her face was sad. “Maybe someday I'll understand this crazy young generation.”

Events began tumbling over one another.

In Washington, President Truman recognized Israel eleven minutes after Ben-Gurion's Proclamation of Independence. The United States thus became the first nation in the world to recognize the new state.

The Soviet Union followed. And the third was little Guatemala, whose ambassador to the United Nations, Dr. Jorge Garda-Granados, had been a pivotal member of the historic U
NSCOP
committee whose recognition of the rights of the Jews had started these wheels turning.

U
NSCOP
had hoped the state could be born in peace. The Jews had accepted partition. The Arabs declared war.

Egypt, Transjordan, Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq, with troops from Saudi Arabia and Yemen—seven Arab states—crossed the borders, invaded Israel, and attacked. The War of Liberation began.

And even as she fought for her life, Israel began to take in new immigrants, sometimes a thousand a day. For was not this the reason she had been created?

When would the men imprisoned in Cyprus be allowed to join her Army? Every man who could hold a gun was desperately needed.

Each day, the refugees in the camps, Ike and Gad on their ships, Raquela and Esther and the staff in the hospital, waited for word from London.

Why the delay? The state had been declared. On the Hill of Evil Counsel, in Jerusalem, Sir Alan Cunningham, the British high commissioner, had closed the door of Government House behind him. The British soldiers and police sailed back to England. British power was ended.

But Bevin had one last card: Cyprus.

He gave new orders.

“
The Jews in the camps and aboard the impounded
Pan York
and
Pan Crescent
are guilty of having attempted illegal entry into Palestine. As such, they are still internees under our jurisdiction on the British Crown Colony of Cyprus
.”

In the tents and metal huts the people reacted first with disbelief, then with outrage.

No one could leave: no men, women, or children. Nor Gad and Ike. Nor would Raquela and Esther and the hospital staff leave so long as they were needed for the thousands who were now beating their fists against the barbed wire. How dare the British hold them prisoners when they had their own state.

Two weeks had passed since Israel's birth; battles were raging on every front; the Arabs were attacking isolated kibbutzim; Jerusalem was under heavy fire; and the gates of Cyprus were still sealed.

The island temperature rose to one hundred degrees Fahrenheit, and the rage of the people mounted.

For Raquela, surcease came on her evenings off with Gad. But he, too, was restless and angry.

On a boiling afternoon she saw him hurrying toward her across the hospital compound. She ran toward him, trying to read his face.

“You've had word,” she said. “You're free to leave.”

He shook his head. She had read him wrong.

“I came because I couldn't stand another day without seeing you.”

She nodded. “I need you, too. Even my maternity ward has lost its calm. The women are ready to scream every minute. These last days have made them wild, as if they're unhinged. I don't know how much more they can take. Or how much more I can take.”

“Come on the ship,” he said. “Let's be together tonight.”

At seven, Raquela fled the hospital grounds.

Gad met her on the dock in Famagusta. Soon they were pacing the deck of the
Pan York
under the watchful eyes of the British patrol.

Gad put his arm through hers. “If we don't get out of here soon, Raquela, I swear Ike and I will explode.”

Raquela held her hand to her hair, feeling the wind run through it.

“Sometimes I wake up in a sweat,” she said. “I dream you and Ike have somehow managed to sneak out past the British. And I'm not sure whether or not I want you to be gone.”

“You would miss me, Raquela?”

“I would miss you very much, Captain Gee. I love coming out here. I love being with you on your ship. Out here on the water, everything seems timeless. I wish all the clocks in the world would stop ticking. In camp, in the hospital, I have such a sense of urgency; I'm as restless as all the prisoners. I must get back to Jerusalem. I must help there. I must help in the war. Time is like something breathless. But here…”

She put her face to his and kissed him.

He held her tightly. The dark night and the dark sea bowled around them.

She looked out at the water. Across the sea lay Jerusalem…and Arik.
Two souls dwell, alas! in my breast
.

They returned to Nicosia and the hospital compound.

A letter from Arik lay on her bed.

Dearest Raquela,
     Not a day passes that I don't think of you. We've had to give up the hospital on Scopus. We've moved down to the old English Mission Hospital on the Street of the Prophets. We call it Hadassah A. You'll be working here with me when you come back.

When you come back
. She looked around the hut. When? When would Bevin allow the twenty-five thousand remaining refugees to leave? Could she go before then? She went on reading:

     I know you worry about us, but with all my superstitions…

She smiled, remembering the red thread he had sewn into her “new look” dress to guard against the Evil Eye.

     …with all my superstitions, I am a fatalist. I think we're all inscribed in God's Book—who shall live and who shall die.

May 28,1948, the Old City of Jerusalem fell. Starved out of food and ammunition, seventeen hundred people in the Jewish quarter huddled into cellars and ancient synagogues, to save themselves from the bullets and shells of Transjordan's Arab Legion. Most of the historic synagogues were already rubble. Only the great Hurva Synagogue, its cupola a landmark in the Old City, held out until it, too, was captured. Two rabbis, defying the pleas of the handful of Haganah defenders, walked with a white flag toward the Arab Legion's headquarters in a school in the Arab quarter, and surrendered.

The Old City, Raquela mourned, where she had walked those quiet Shabbat mornings with Arik. The Old City, where Papa's family and untold generations of Jews had lived and borne babies and worshiped and died.

The Legion allowed some thirteen hundred women and children to pass through the gates of the crenellated wall into new Jerusalem. But the Arabs took the men, young and old, to a prison in Transjordan. Three were Hadassah doctors.

Anger and sorrow at the loss of the Old City tore through the Cyprus camps.

“If we were there!” Some of the men beat their fists in the air. “We're eleven thousand young men who could be fighting! We might have saved the Old City!”

The refugees, moving in mobs, brandished sticks at the British soldiers in the watchtowers. Raquela saw their anger turn to violence; their frustration, to hostility and rage.

Each night a handful of men escaped through the tunnels where trusted Cypriots drove them to little fishing boats waiting in Famagusta and Larnaca. They sailed to Haifa and from the dock went instantly into battle. But most of the men were trapped in the furnacelike huts and tents of the May inferno.

On every front the newborn state was battling for its life. In the south and west the Egyptians crossed the Suez Canal, cutting the Negev off from northern Israel and driving on to Tel Aviv.

In the north the Syrians and Lebanese, and the Iraqi Arab Liberation Army, led by the pro-Nazi Fawzi el-Kaukji, marched across the Galilee, attacking the kibbutzim.

From the east King Abdullah's Arab League crossed the Jordan, and now, along with the Iraqis, they battled for the cities on the West Bank and, most of all, for Jerusalem.

Word came on Gad's radio. New Jerusalem was on starvation rations of food, water, fuel, and ammunition. Yet, one hundred thousand Jerusalemites and units of the Israel Army were still holding off the soldiers of the Arab Legion.

The road to Jerusalem, the single lifeline from Tel Aviv, was immobilized; the Arab Legion, steamrolling from the towns they captured on the West Bank, surrounded Latrun, in the foothills of the Jerusalem corridor.

To save Jerusalem, a secret road was built through a steep wadi. Mickey Marcus, an American Jew and a West Point graduate, who had flown over to help the fledgling state, planned the road. Hundreds of elderly men built it in the darkness, carrying sacks of dirt on their backs. The old “Murder Road” harassed by Arabs was bypassed; on the new road of dirt and gravel, dubbed the “Burma Road,” trucks from Tel Aviv, raising clouds of dust, reached Jerusalem just as it was down to its last two days of bread and flour.

The siege of Jerusalem was over.

In New York the UN Security Council was meeting in endless sessions. Some of the members sought earnestly to arrange a ceasefire, but so long as the Arabs were winning, the Security Council failed to reach agreement.

Now the Arab offensive began slowing down; kibbutzniks were hurling Molotov cocktails at Arab tanks trying to conquer the kibbutzim. The tanks blew up; the men inside, if they were lucky, jumped out and ran away. Most were burned to death.

Information that the Jews were going on the offensive reached New York. The Security Council agreed to a four-week cease-fire. It would last from June 11 to July 9.

It gave both sides a breathing spell. Instructed by the UN to do nothing during the truce to improve their positions, both sides paid no attention. They regrouped their forces and brought in more arms.

Mickey Marcus, tragically killed by one of his own sentries who mistook him for an enemy when he walked out of his tent one night, was flown to the United States and buried with full military honors at West Point. Colonel Moshe Dayan accompanied the body, and then rushed home.

Golda Meir barnstormed America describing the war; she raised fifty million dollars.

Golda's dollars bought arms and planes from the only country willing to supply the new state: Czechoslovakia. Local pilots, like Ezer Weizmann, who had fought with the RAF—the Royal Air Force—in World War II and volunteers from abroad ferried the planes and armaments to Israel.

The Arabs bolstered their numbers and planned their strategy of attack to be used as soon as the cease-fire ended.

And Bevin relented a little.

He made a new announcement; all refugees—
except men of military age
—could leave the camps.

The joy at being freed was poisoned. But Britain, Bevin explained, must remain evenhanded. They could not allow Jewish soldiers to create an imbalance.

Imbalance! Raquela shook her head in disbelief. Fifty million Arabs against fewer than a million Jews was no imbalance. But eleven thousand young men of military age might tip the scales.

The
Pan York
and the
Pan Crescent
were freed. They would begin ferrying the refugees,
all except men of military age
.

Gad sent Raquela a message. “Can you come at once? We're sailing today.”

She switched shifts and rushed to the ship.

Lines of women and children and old people—erstwhile prisoners of the Empire—overflowed the dock. Many were sobbing or staring blankly ahead.

A woman carrying a baby stood forlornly. Raquela approached her.

“They're separating us.” The young mother's eyes were flecked with fear. “God knows when I'll see my husband again.”

Raquela put her arm around the frightened woman's shoulder. “They can't keep the men here forever. You'll see; he'll join you soon in Israel.”

Raquela looked up at the two ships. Some of the happiest hours of her life had been spent aboard the
Pan York
.

But it was no longer the
Pan York
. Fresh white paint spelled out its new name:
KOMEMIYUT
, a Hebrew word for “independence.” The
Pan Crescent
had become the
Atzmaut
, another word for “independence.”

On each ship Palmach sailors unfurled the blue and white flag of Israel and hoisted it to the top of the masthead. On the dock the people lifted their faces to the flags and sang “Hatikvah.” The minute they set foot on the ships, they would be on the soil of Israel.

Raquela climbed the gangway of the
Komemiyut
and hurried to the bridge. Gad, dressed in summer whites, every inch the commander, was bending over charts, talking to his first mate, giving orders to his bosun. Raquela waited.

At last he looked up. “Raquela!”

He pressed her into his arms. “I thought they'd give us a little notice. That we'd have at least one last evening together. But the moment word came to sail, all hell broke loose.”