Raquela (40 page)

He was rushed to Hadassah A and died within minutes, before the surgeons could remove the bullets. The Jewish community recoiled with shock and horror.

The provisional government of Israel issued an ultimatum: the dissident groups must disband. Four days later, the Irgun accepted the ultimatum, the leaders of the Stern Group were arrested. In the aftermath of the tragedy the new state was united.

October 10, the second truce ended. The battlefields were blazing again. On October 15, the Arab Legion launched a dawn attack on Mount Zion, just outside the Old City wall, the biblical mountain with King David's tomb and the room of the Last Supper.

The battle was mercifully short; the Israel Army was determined to hold every inch of Jerusalem. They drove the Legion back to its old lines.

In Hadassah A, Raquela prepared a brutally wounded young soldier for surgery.

“Nurse,” he pleaded, “lift me up. Let me take one last look at my Jerusalem.”

Ben-Gurion faced a dilemma: whether to drive the Arab Legion out of the Old City and off the “West Bank or the Egyptians out of the Negev.

Steeped in the Bible, Ben-Gurion, always a dreamer and prophet, saw the Negev as Israel's future. Here in the empty desert were Solomon's copper mines, gold and minerals, and, maybe, oil. He opted for the Negev.

The Egyptians controlled the road that cut the country in half. Under Yigal Allon, the Palmach commander, the Israel Army went on the offensive and with the air force and navy attacked King Farouk's legions.

They cleared the roads, took command of the sky, and on the Mediterranean, near Gaza, sank the
Emir Farouk
, the flagship of the Egyptian navy.

Four
A.M.
, October 21, they entered Beersheba.

Eight
A.M.
, the Egyptians raised a white flag on the roof of the police station.

Nine-fifteen
A.M.
, ancient Beersheba, where Abraham had dug his wells, was captured. It would become the capital of the Negev, Ben-Gurion's dream.

October 31, the UN Security Council proclaimed the third cease-fire. Just before the deadline, Kaukji's Arab Liberation Army and his mercenaries were routed. The entire Galilee was open.

There was no stopping now; both sides breached the truce.

On November 9 the Israelis encircled the Egyptian stronghold in the Negev, called “the Faluja Pocket.” Among the Egyptian soldiers was a young major named Gamal Abdel Nasser.

On November 30, 1948, Colonel Moshe Dayan, now commander of the army in Jerusalem, and Colonel Abdullah el-Tel, the representative of all the Arab forces, met in Government House, on the Hill of Evil Counsel. Under the supervision of the UN Truce Commission, they signed an agreement for a “complete and sincere” cease-fire in the Jerusalem area.

On the first quiet Shabbat of the “sincere truce,” Arik asked Raquela to go walking. They could walk freely at last; no more huddling against walls, no more dodging in and out of doorways to escape bullets and mortars.

The day was warm and balmy; thousands of people thronged the streets in Shabbat clothes. Young fathers, still in uniform, wheeled their babies in carriages. Young mothers walked proudly, clutching their husbands' arms, as if they were telling themselves, He's mine; he's alive; he's whole.

But the joy in Jerusalem was tempered. Six thousand young men and women had died to give birth to Israel. And the Old City where Raquela and Arik had spent so many Shabbat mornings was denied them.

Instead they walked through the quiet streets of Bet Hakerem. Finally, in a tree-shaded playground where they could watch children playing, they rested on a wooden bench.

“I've neglected you all these months, Raquela,” Arik said.

“Nonsense, Arik. Many times in that operating room, when I saw your eyes red from no sleep, I was afraid you might collapse. God knows where you found the strength to go on operating.”

“And where did you find your strength? Don't think I was blind, Raquela.”

He took her hand and caressed it.

His warm hand sent currents of electricity through her body.

“We can be together again,” he was saying. “Take up where we were before you went to Cyprus.”

Where we were
. But Cyprus had changed her. And Gad had entered her life.
Do you ever go back to where you were?

Gad had promised to find her when the war was over. All these months of the fighting, she'd had no word. Was he still ferrying refugees from Europe—coming in now at the rate of ten thousand a month? Where was he now?

She looked at Arik. Impulsively she stroked his cheek. She loved this man; she loved his strength, his gift for saving lives. The Jerusalem sunlight seemed to come from behind his eyes, deepening their compassion.

And Gad? Memories of the
Pan York
, of the moonlit sea, of the snow in Troodos, and of the nocturnal swim kaleidoscoped in her mind.

In her bedroom at home that night, she stared at herself in the mirror.
Look at yourself, Raquela. Look at your own strengths and weaknesses. What is it you want? What is it you need? What's best for Arik? What's best for Gad? What's best for you?

She tossed on her bed, unable to find answers, unable to sleep.

*
King Abdullah was the grandfather of the late King Hussein of Jordan.

TWENTY-ONE

FEBRUARY 1949

A
t long last the gates of Cyprus opened.

Late in December 1948 with Israel now seven months old, Britain had ended its private war against the Jews and recognized the Jewish state.

A month later the restless, angry men on Cyprus, deprived of the right to fight for their nation, were allowed to leave. The first shipload left Famagusta on January 24, 1949, aboard an Israeli passenger ship, the
Galila
.

Raquela devoured the newspaper photos of the throngs of people meeting the men in Haifa. Flags and banners. Young wives, middle-aged mothers, weeping with joy as they embraced their men.

Early in February Raquela was in the nursery in Hadassah A when a cable was brought to her.

BRINGING HOME LAST REFUGEES FROM CYPRUS. CAN YOU MEET ME TONIGHT AT JEWISH AGENCY OFFICE ON HAIFA DOCK? GAD.

She folded the cable carefully and tucked it into her pocket. She asked a nurse to cover for her, wrapped her cape around her shoulders, and walked out of the hospital toward the post office.

The streets were crowded with people holding umbrellas, lashed by the rain and a fierce wind. She walked blindly, trying to think.

This was the moment of reckoning.

She could go to her superior and say, “I've worked without rest. I need a few days off—to go out of town.”

She would see Gad again; she saw him now, tanned, blue-eyed, in his white captain's uniform, standing at the wheel. She could feel his kisses on her lips.

She sat down on a park bench near City Hall, hardly aware that the rain was drenching her hair and her cape.

Gad was romance and youth and escape. Escape from the grim reality of Cyprus.

But is it Gad I really love?

Then why am I sitting here?

Why am I not in a
sherut
already on my way to Haifa? Remember
—she heard Señora Vavá's voice—
you are a ninth-generation Jerusalemite
.

She looked around her in the winter rain. She was only a few blocks from the Old City, the turreted walls and Jaffa Gate a stone's throw from where she sat.

She shook her head; the frontiers between Israel and Abdullah's Legion were bizarre: sometimes the frontier was a street or an ugly aluminum fence; the most famous was the “Mandelbaum Gate,” the war-wrecked house of Abraham Mandelbaum with its ugly corrugated-iron shed that separated East and West Jerusalem.

The city was obscenely truncated, and she felt the separation physically, as though part of her had been amputated.

Closing her eyes, she saw Mount Scopus…the hospital…the nursing school…her first delivery…the birth fluid drenching her like a geyser…Arik at her side…Arik, teaching, guiding, making her feel her own strength.

The rain had turned to hail; stones pelted her face. She hardly noticed. Did she love him as teacher? Or man? Or both?

The answer was suddenly clear. Raquela ran across the street to the post office. She sent a cable:

HAVE DECIDED TO STAY IN JERUSALEM. GOOD-BYE DEAR GAD. RAQUELA.

She walked swiftly back toward Hadassah A. Thunder rumbled through the streets; streaks of light tore open the sky over the great Romanesque hospital.

Arik…she began to run, tears mingling with rain on her cheeks…Arik, it's you I want…you I need…you and Jerusalem.

On the island of Rhodes a gifted black American, Dr. Ralph Bunche, the UN mediator, began meeting with Arabs and Jews in armistice negotiations on January 13, 1949.

Wise and shrewd, Dr. Bunche brought the erstwhile warring factions together in a technique of diplomacy so simple, so obvious, it was conceded that only a genius could have developed and implemented it.

First he met alone in a room with each country's delegate. Then, when he sensed some movement toward agreement, he brought a delegate from one of the Arab states and the delegate from Israel face-to-face. When they reached agreement on armistice terms, he handed them the papers to sign.

His secret of success was twofold: face-to-face, and one Arab country at a time.

The Egyptians signed first, on February 24. Jordan signed next, on March 4; Lebanon, on March 23; Syria was the last to sign, on July 20.

Thus, on the twentieth of July, the War of Independence ended. Twenty months—nearly two years—since that day in November 1947 when the UN had voted to partition Palestine and the Arabs had marched out of the UN and declared war.

Twenty months. Six thousand dead. One out of every ten Jews dead on the battlefield.

The nation born—like all births—in blood.

On a warm October day in 1949, Raquela and Arik rode out of Jerusalem. They were bound, some seventy miles south and inland, for Beersheba.

Ben-Gurion had already begun implementing his dream of opening the Negev. He turned to Hadassah. The frontier needed a hospital. Would Hadassah establish a first-rate hospital in Beer-sheba?

Arik had spent most of September converting a group of houses the army had turned over to him for his department of obstetrics and gynecology. Now he was returning with Raquela; she was to set up the maternity ward and the delivery room.

They sat in the back of the
sherut
, talking to some of the passengers. The middle-aged couple in the jump seats were scientists: he, a government ecologist; she, a government botanist. Beersheba was to be their headquarters, but they were headed for a mountainous region forty miles farther south. With twelve others, including a cowboy from Texas, two meteorologists, and a zoologist-soldier in case they were attacked by Arabs, the couple were searching for water and grass to feed the pioneers who would someday live here.

The slim brown-bearded young man in die front seat was an archaeologist on his way to dig for the wells of the ancient Nabataeans, who had farmed and cultivated this land two thousand years ago.

Raquela looked out the car window at the empty rolling steppe-land.

Not a tree, not a plant. Only sand dunes and bareback hills, broiling sun and thin translucent light.

The archaeologist was talking. “The Old Man,” he said, speaking of Ben-Gurion, “sees this whole desert filling up with pioneers and cities. ‘Go south, young men and women,' he says, the way the Americans used to say ‘Go west.'”

In the shimmering light the colors of the sand were changing from yellow to reddish brown. Was this lunar landscape with its own strange beauty Ben-Gurion's dream?

Who lived here? Who would come to this hospital? She knew there was a chain of kibbutzim in the Negev. The first three had been started in 1943; then, defying the White Paper, a small army of young men and women, in one dramatic nighttime operation, had established eleven new kibbutzim in the Negev on Yom Kippur, October 6, 1946, as the Day of Atonement ended.

The kibbutzim were little islands in the desert, but what would life in Beersheba be like these next months?

Happy, but a little apprehensive, she looked at Arik. He was smiling. “There's a sense of peace here,” he said, “a kind of eternal serenity, despite the constant tug of war between man and the desert. It was only after I began to work here that I really understood what Ben-Gurion meant when he asked us to open up a hospital for the whole Negev.”

“What did he say?” Raquela asked.

Arik spoke slowly. “He said, “If the state doesn't put an end to the desert, the desert will put an end to the state.”

An end to the state?

The yellow arid desert enveloped them, another challenge to survival, another enemy.

The only sign of civilization they saw for miles was the narrow road they were traveling, the artery that was to pump life-giving blood into the desert.

Suddenly against the horizon they saw the silhouettes of camels moving in a straight line in the yellow shimmering sunlight. A Bedouin nomad in a flowing black robe and white
keffiyeh
, stark and one-dimensional, followed the camels on a donkey. Behind him walked three women, black-gowned and veiled, with baskets on their heads. Across the sea of sand two barefoot boys shepherded goats. A little girl with enormous kohl-rimmed eyes stopped to stare curiously.

The car sped past them.

Again the desert, unpeopled, limitless, empty to the horizon.

They were approaching Beersheba.

Raquela had expected to find a small town; instead she saw a sleepy desert outpost with dirt streets, Arab houses in shambles with broken shutters, a single mosque, and a police station.

“There's Abraham's Well,” the bearded archaeologist said as they drove on the main street.

“Can we stop for a minute?” Raquela asked. “I've heard about this well all my life from my father.”