The Gates of Zion (26 page)

Dov nodded. “Poetic justice, eh? There he rotted until the end of the war. Five months among his avowed enemies.”

“And now?” Moshe asked, his uneasiness growing.

“He was traced heading south through Yugoslavia. The Americans believe he may try to pass himself off as a Jew to get onto one of our ships and smuggle himself into Palestine. Not that it matters, because he’s sure to take an alias, but his name is Fredrich Ismael Gerhardt.

Tattoo number 346686. If you see anyone resembling him, check the tattoo.”

Moshe passed the photograph to Ehud, who studied it closely, then grunted and pitched it back to Moshe. “How do you know he is not already in the country?”

“We don’t. But we are assuming he will make for the heart of Jerusalem and the Mufti’s good graces. He had a friend, an Arab that he attended commando school with. I am certain you must remember him from the ’38 uprising, Moshe.”

Moshe leaned forward and rested his arms on the table. “Who is it?”

“Ibrahim Hassan.”

17

Ellie’s Decision

Tears of joy rose in Yacov’s eyes as Ellie told him about Shaul. “… and Miriam scolds him, but I see her sneak scraps of meat to him when she thinks no one is looking.”

“Like Grandfather!” he said with a delighted laugh. “Always he scolds, but then he pats him and scratches his ears.”

Ellie saw Yacov grimace. He had told her how homesick he was.

That all he wanted was to see Grandfather and Shaul once again. Just to see.

“It won’t be long, you know, and you’ll all be together again. The doctor ought to be here in a while, and you can get the straight story from him. He told Moshe and me that it’s looking good.”

A white-coated English doctor with a thin mustache pulled the curtain back and said cheerily, “Quite good, actually.”

Yacov turned his head in the direction of the crisp British accent.

“They found Shaul, Doctor!” he said excitedly. “He is at Miss Ellie’s house.”

“No doubt eating you out of house and home?” he asked, switching the overhead light off and turning on a dim bedside lamp. “Today we change the bandages and give you a few minutes to look about while we check your progress.”

Yacov flinched as the doctor gently cut away the bandages covering his eyes. “Relax, my boy,” said the doctor. “Things may be a little fuzzy at first.”

Ellie reached over and took his hand. “It’s okay, Yacov. I’m here.”

He squeezed her hand. Ellie knew he was fearful that when the bandages were finally taken off, he would see only darkness. “I am afraid.”

“The room will be dark,” intoned the gentle voice of the doctor. “A little later we will lighten your surroundings so you will have a chance to read just a bit at a time.”

“If I am blind, it is God’s punishment,” Yacov said quietly.

Ellie drew her breath in sharply. “Don’t say that, Yacov.” She gripped his hand tighter and kissed his fingers. “God didn’t do this to you.” She heard herself echo Uncle Howard’s words. “Men did.”

“And very evil men at that,” added the doctor as he unwound the bandages.

“But I looked at the graven image. I sinned against the law of Moses.”

Ellie exchanged concerned looks with the gray-haired physician as he took away the last of the long bandage, leaving two cotton pads over the boy’s eyes.

“What do you mean?” she asked, feeling the same sense of isolation she had felt when Moshe had prayed with Yacov.

“The picture―
Young Girl Reading
—I looked upon it and have broken the Law. I have thought through these days that it must be my punishment to be blind.”

The doctor stroked Yacov’s pale cheek. “I would think that if I were God, Yacov, I would do everything possible to give you sight. I am only a doctor with the heart of a man, yet have I not done everything I could to help you?”

Yacov nodded slowly.

“It is now most certainly in the hands of God,” said the doctor. “But do not judge His heart until I lift the bandages.” He smiled and winked at Ellie.

Grateful for the doctor’s sensitivity and understanding, Ellie patted Yacov’s hand. She remembered the story of Jesus healing the blind man. For the first time since she was a child, she prayed that the tender heart of God had worked through the hands of the doctor.

Gentle hands lifted a corner of the gauze pad. “Do not open your eyes until I say you can.” The doctor switched off the bedside light, leaving the room in a soft gloom as he removed the final layers and dropped them into a metal pan. As he washed away a layer of crust covering the eyelids, Ellie stroked Yacov’s arm and silently prayed.

“All right, young man, open your eyes.”

“But I have sinned in other ways as well,” he said, beginning to panic.

“Open them slowly. It may be a bit painful.”

As if they were too heavy to lift, Yacov’s eyelids fluttered, then opened a crack.

The doctor held a tiny pencil of light above the boy’s eyes and moved it slowly to the right and left. “What do you see, Yacov?” he asked. “Tell me what you see.”

“A little light. A small candle moving in the darkness very far away.”

Ellie sighed with relief.

“Excellent!” exclaimed the doctor. “Perhaps God has a tender heart even when we sometimes have sinned?” he asked, medicating Yacov’s eyes, then covering them with fresh bandages.

“Grandfather says He is slow to anger and ever merciful.” Yacov smiled.

“Your grandfather sounds like a wise man.”

“He is a rabbi. At the Polish Yeshiva in the Old City.”

The doctor glanced at Ellie. “And has he been to visit you, Yacov?”

“They say the Old City is cut off. I should like very much to talk with him about all that I am learning.”

“Soon, perhaps. And do you have family in the New City with whom you could stay if we were to allow you to leave?”

“No one,” he answered sadly. “Except Shaul.”

“Ah, yes.” The doctor nodded. “The dog?”

Ellie caught the doctor’s eye. “We could help make arrangements, Doctor. Don’t make his stay here any longer than is necessary.”

“I would say by Christmas, anyway.” He squeezed Yacov’s shoulder. “Hanukkah for you, eh?”

“I should like very much to spend Hanukkah with Shaul and Grandfather.” Yacov turned his freshly bandaged head toward Ellie.

“Hanukkah is called the Festival of Lights, you know. It shall be good if I can see the lights, shall it not?”

***

The broad headlight of the ancient Harley-Davidson cracked the cold darkness before Moshe, illuminating the road back to Jerusalem and Ellie.

The motorcycle would have to do; he would not wait for the Jewish Agency’s sputtering Piper Cub to lift him over the danger that lurked by the roadside―not since he had heard about Gerhardt and Hassan.

His uneasiness about Gerhardt’s photograph had transformed into the brutal awareness that he knew the terrorist’s face not because he had seen him, but from Ellie’s detailed description of the man who had broken her camera and knocked her to the sidewalk. Gerhardt was not, Moshe had realized, on his way to Palestine. The man was already in the service of the Mufti and walking freely about the streets of Jerusalem.

Three times Moshe had tried to reach Jerusalem by phone, only to learn that the phone lines were down. He had sent Ehud and the
Ave
Maria
out alone for the pickup and borrowed Dov’s motorcycle for the midnight trip back to Jerusalem. He did not know how much danger Ellie was in at this point; he could only guess that Gerhardt and Hassan had followed her because of his relationship with her.

Undoubtedly they had sought to locate Haganah bases throughout the city and had marked them as targets. At any rate, no Jew was safe in the Holy City now, not with the likes of Gerhardt working for Haj Amin. That was, after all, the nature of terrorism: strike where least expected, mutilate and murder the innocent until, in the end, terror defeats the morale and determination to stand and fight. Jerusalem, Moshe feared, stood on the brink of another kind of holocaust.

The biting wind tore at Moshe’s face and fingers as the heavy cycle roared past the ghostly white stone of the ancient village of Beit Dagon, named after the ancient fishing god of the Philistines. Six miles farther along, an icy rain fell, soaking through his jacket and trousers as he passed Sarafand, Palestine’s largest British military base. Just beyond Sarafand, a tall minaret marked his passage into the hostile Arab territory.

All the kingdoms and governments that have sought to possess this
land, where are they now?
As the cold numbed Moshe’s cheeks, he remembered a saying he had learned from the old rabbis when he was a child skipping through the streets of the Old City:
As dust
outlasts iron, so Israel shall outlast her oppressors. Someday our
Messiah will come, and once again we shall have a nation. Then
we shall be truly free.

Moshe could not remember when he had stopped looking for the Messiah. Perhaps it had been the day the British officer had come with the news that his older brother, Eli, had been killed by the men under command of Ibrahim Hassan. “There must be another way for Jews to live in freedom,” he had told his grief-stricken mother. “If God will not send the One to bear our burdens, then maybe we must learn to bear them ourselves and make a homeland that is a refuge for every child of Abraham.” Thus the establishment of a nation of Israel had become Moshe’s dream, his messiah.

It was a dream, he knew, that would be purchased with the blood of many. As he neared Latrun, he passed the burned-out hulk of yesterday’s bus from Tel Aviv, the coffin for thirty-two precious lives.
Was it only yesterday?
Already their blood had been washed from the road by the rain. Only thirty-two more Jews, the world would say―what was thirty-two compared to millions? He despaired as he realized that each life lost would soon be washed from the world’s memory. “They don’t know,” he told their ghosts as he passed, “that each of you had a name.”

Ahead lay Bab el Wad and the contorted agony of mountain gorge that led to Jerusalem. Moshe gripped the handlebars as the cycle reared back and he began the ascent. By now he was completely soaked to the skin, but still he thanked God for the rain that slashed against him. The cold, brutal night had driven the Arab peasants who guarded the pass into the warmth of their villages. The smell of rain-soaked pines filled his nostrils, making it hard to believe that danger lurked so near to him.

Five miles outside Jerusalem the friendly lights of Kibbutz Kiryat Anavim glistened from the hillside to his left. Just beyond, on the right, stood the medieval remains of a Crusader castle, and ahead the lights of Jerusalem sparkled a welcome.

It was hours past curfew when, at last, Moshe passed the dark, squat building of Egged bus station and then the brightly lit building that housed the
Palestine Post
, where printers were setting tomorrow’s news. For once, the headlines would be tame when the morning paper hit the streets. But, Moshe knew, that wouldn’t last long.

He turned on Ben Yehuda Street and roared past the Atlantic Hotel, where David Meyer shared a room with Michael Cohen, and where half a dozen other members of the Haganah lived. Moshe wiped the rain from his goggles and squinted up at the third floor, where the lights of several rooms still burned.

When at last he turned onto King George Street and passed the Jewish Agency building, he could see that the Old Man’s office was still lit up. He was tempted to stop and share his information with David Ben-Gurion, but there would be time enough for that in the morning. Right now, all he wanted was to see Ellie’s face smiling up at him, to hear her say she understood why he had not been able to tell her of his secret life. He turned onto Rehavia and idled up the street, his eyes searching the shadows for someone who might be watching the Moniger home. The street seemed to be silent and empty. Every window was dark.

Moshe turned off the engine and coasted on the heavy machine, balancing with his legs as the cycle rolled to a stop in front of the Moniger home. Moshe lifted off his goggles and hung them from the dripping handlebars. Stiffly he dismounted and set the kickstand. He stood staring up at the sleeping house before he walked slowly toward the front door.

Suddenly the hair on the back of his neck prickled as he heard the rapid scuffing of feet rushing toward him from behind. He whirled around to face two unidentifiable black forms. Instantly they leaped on him, hurtling him to the wet sidewalk. Moshe swung a hard right, knocking one of his assailants away. The other hit him hard on the side of his face with the butt of a pistol.

The world seemed to swim around him, but still Moshe fought, placing a well-aimed kick into the man’s groin. The man fell back with a groan and rolled in agony on the sidewalk. His comrade rushed forward again and jumped on Moshe. Moshe felt cold, wet steel against his temple and heard the hammer of a pistol lock into place.

“One word, mate, and you’re a dead man,” said a menacing voice.

“Get your ’ands behind your back, and roll over on the sidewalk.”

Without another word, Moshe complied, feeling a stab of pain as the man kicked him in the back. Then handcuffs clicked firmly onto his wrists. “Are you okay, Smith?” the man called to his companion.

“Did ’e ’urt you, lad?” The accent was decidedly English.

Smith groaned again, climbing to his feet with the aid of the wrought-iron stair railing. “Kill ’im!”

“Forget that, lad. Rouse the professor and we’ll call HQ with word we’ve captured someone lurking about.” The man pressed the gun to Moshe’s temple once again. “Get up,” he demanded.

Awkwardly Moshe struggled to his knees, the handcuffs biting into his wrists as Smith limped up the steps and banged on the door. After a minute the porch light came on, revealing that Moshe’s two assailants were, in fact, two miserably wet British soldiers. The door burst open, and a disheveled Howard Moniger peered unhappily out the door. “What is it?”

“We got your man.” Smith snapped to attention―with some difficulty, Moshe noticed―then turned his gaze on Moshe. “ ’e gave us quite a fight, you might say, but ’ere ’e is. We got ’im.” Pride filled the voice of the man with the gun.