The Gates of Zion (5 page)

Moshe glanced up toward the wheelhouse, where Ehud held the little ship steady. Seconds more and they would be discovered. The
Ave
Maria
chugged bravely ahead. The lights from the gunboat were now a mere four hundred yards behind them.

“God of Abraham—God of Zion,” Moshe whispered. Then he was hit from behind with the force of someone bursting through the hatch and onto the deck. He stumbled forward, spilling his coffee and falling over a rope coil.

“I will not be taken!” cried a desperate voice. “I cannot! Let me die!” It was the young woman. She clambered over Moshe’s prostrate form and ran to the railing.

“Stop!” shouted Moshe, fighting to regain his footing. “Don’t jump!”

But the young woman didn’t even pause as she threw herself over the side of the boat.

“Oh, God!” Moshe cried. Then, without thought, he, too, was over the rail and in the water.

Cold blackness engulfed him, instantly filling his boots and dragging him downward. He knew he could not be more than a few feet from the young woman. Struggling to the surface, he gasped for air. Then, awkwardly treading water, he fought the heaviness of his boots and clothing as he searched for her. Her body would struggle to survive, he knew, even though her mind longed for death.

Three yards from him he heard her choke as she battled the seas that sought to claim her. He plunged beneath the surface and pulled off his boots. Then, with one more breath, he swam through the foaming wake of the
Ave Maria
to her side.

She flailed wildly against the pull of death, striking Moshe hard across the cheek. He went under and grabbed her around the waist.

Then he burst up for air, pulling her into a hammerlock as he kicked his powerful legs to stay afloat.

“Stop fighting, you idiot!” he shouted. “You’ll kill us both!” She lay still in his arms. Had she slipped into unconsciousness?

“Let me die,” she moaned, coughing and spitting out seawater. “Oh, let me!”

“Shut up, or I’m liable to.” Moshe’s left arm circled under her chin and kept her head above water while his right arm worked to keep them afloat. She struggled briefly as a wave slapped her across the face, filling her mouth with brine.

“Relax!” he shouted angrily. What in heaven’s name had he done?

Jumping into the sea after a lunatic two full miles from shore?

The
Ave Maria
chugged farther away to his left, the fishing boat’s engine stuttering as she dipped down behind another wave. To his right, the gunboat loomed. Moshe didn’t relish the idea of ending his life beneath a British gunboat as chopped fish food.

“God of Abraham!” he shouted against death’s whirlpool. There was no time to swim away from the path of the gunboat. No time unless he left the young woman to die alone. “God!” he called again.

“Let me die!” screamed the woman. “Please. Save yourself!”

“Shut up!” he demanded, treading water as death approached.

“Swim away,” she pleaded. “This was my choice, not yours.”

Her dark, wet hair floated around him like seaweed and clung to his face. He did not want to die. Not like this.
“Hear, O Israel …”
He began to recite the Shema:
“The Lord our God is one …”

“Save yourself!” she cried again.

“
The Lord our God …”
He struggled to swim, but his burden weighed him down. He held tight to the young woman as the bow of the gunboat loomed only a hundred yards from where they waited in its path. So this was what it meant to die.

“
Hear, O Israel … ,”
Moshe shouted louder. “Say it with me,” he demanded. “Say it!”

“
Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is one,”
they gasped together.

Then, as they gazed in disbelief, the gunboat began a slow turn away from them, away from the path of the
Ave Maria
. Shafts of light skated across the swells like water spiders, passing within a few feet of where Moshe and the young woman bobbed helplessly. If they were trapped in the light, they would be dragged from the water to the relative safety of a British prison.

The lights moved nearer, sweeping inches from them.

“Let me go.” The young woman struggled feebly. “I cannot be taken.”

In an instant Moshe knew that, for this woman at least, death would be more merciful than the detention cages.

“Be still!” he shouted as the drumming engines covered his voice.

“When I say
now
, hold your breath.”

She nodded desperately, eyeing a bright circle sliding directly toward them.

“NOW!” shouted Moshe, filling his lungs and pulling her under with him. The spot passed over them, illuminating the water in an eerie green wash, then sweeping back again over the place where the young woman’s hair fanned out on the water’s surface.
“It’s nothin,’

sir,”
Moshe imagined a sailor saying.
“Nothin’ but a bit o’kelp.”

The gunboat slid by, a mere fifty yards from where they surfaced, filling their lungs with precious air. The dim outlines of sailors moved across her deck, little suspecting that they were passing only seconds from a catch. The strong wake of the gunboat swept toward them, pushing them hard through the three-foot swells toward shore.

“Ride with it!” Moshe yelled, holding tight to his charge. “Kick your feet! Kick them, I say, and we both might live!”

The gunboat continued her wide sweep, shutting down the searchlights one by one as Moshe watched. He began a slow crawl toward the lights of the harbor.

What was it that had made the British ship turn away when she was so close to her quarry? Moshe glanced back at the gunboat’s retreating hulk as she cut a broad semicircle back to Tel Aviv. She had simply not known what lay a few yards beyond her probing lights.

Moshe thought of the
Ave Maria
. With the gunboat safely away, Ehud might try to look for the two of them. The “crew” had no doubt witnessed her dramatic leap into the sea.
God, don’t let him turn
back to search. Tell him it is hopeless,
prayed Moshe.

The weight of the young woman’s skirt pulled him down and wrapped itself around his rapidly tiring legs. He stopped his slow crawl toward shore to tread water as she lay back against him in misery.

“You’ll have to take your skirt off,” he instructed. “I cannot fight the sea and that, too.” He felt her stiffen in a protest of fear.

“I’ll drown,” she choked.

“Oh, so now she wants to live!” he mocked. “Take your skirt off or we both drown.”

As Moshe supported her, she awkwardly unbuttoned the heavy wool skirt and kicked it away. Choking on saltwater, she struggled to pull her arms free. Her lightweight slip floated about her body, and she immediately felt more buoyant.

Finally she relaxed in Moshe’s grip, exhausted. “I can’t go any farther,” she moaned.

“You fancy burial at sea, eh?” he said sarcastically. “Kick your legs, woman. I’m going to let go for a moment.”

“No!” she cried, clutching at his arms.

“I have to take my trousers off. My sweater.” He shoved her hard away from him, confident that she would still be thrashing when he took hold again. His head slipped beneath the surface as he pulled his sweater over his head and kicked off his heavy trousers. Careful not to let go of them, he pulled them to the surface. In one strong stroke he swam to her side and grabbed her hair, pulling her to him.

“Relax,” he demanded, “or I let you go again.” She coughed and sobbed in protest, but he felt her slender body go limp.

Moshe swung his heavy trousers through the water in front of her.

“Your hands are free,” he instructed. “Knot the legs at the cuff.”

With some effort, the young woman worked on the trousers, obeying his commands. “Finished,” she finally said.

Stopping to tread water once again, Moshe took the trousers from her and opened them at the waist, trapping air bubbles solidly inside the water-saturated fabric. He wrapped the trouser legs beneath her arms, holding the waist beneath the water so the air would not escape. “There. A life preserver.” Moshe tucked his arm around her.

“Now kick,” he demanded, “or I’ll turn you over to the British myself.”

3

Yacov

Nine-year-old Yacov Lebowitz opened his eyes and stared into the darkness of the basement room. The kerosene stove had long since stopped sputtering and popping with warmth, and the room had reverted once again to the damp chill of Jerusalem’s early winter. He shuddered and gathered the ragged woolen blanket tighter around himself.

Reaching his hand to the floor beside his iron cot, he felt for the warm, shaggy dog sleeping beside him. “Psst, Shaul!” He snapped his fingers and was greeted by a soft whine as the dog shook himself to his feet and licked Yacov’s hand expectantly. “Come on,” Yacov whispered. “Up.” The huge animal jumped onto the cot, causing the rusty springs to groan and sag. He lay squarely across his young master, grateful to be off the cold stone floor.

Grandfather had forbidden Yacov to sleep with the dog, and during the summer months he had obeyed, since the old man’s bed was only an arm’s length away. But tonight Yacov’s bones ached with the steadily dropping temperature in the tiny one-room apartment they shared.

He hoped Grandfather would not wake up and throw Shaul out on the street as he had threatened. Yacov listened to the even cadence of the old man’s breathing. It had not changed. The dog nuzzled close, and Yacov was thankful for the living, furry blanket that shielded him from both the chill of the night and the loneliness of his existence.

“Jackal!” Grandfather had called the filthy puppy Yacov had found cowering among the discarded crates and garbage near the Dung Gate. “Hiding among the baggage like King Shaul, eh?” And so the name stuck.

He had been lost, Yacov guessed, by some careless shepherd who brought his sheep to the Old City markets for sale. Half starved and afraid, but mostly alone, the puppy had shivered when Yacov had gathered him up to go begging for scraps at Solomon’s Kosher Butcher Shop in the New City. “So,” Grandfather had said, “this jackal is eating better than we are? Tell him, Yacov, he must eat his soup bones. We will not share our soup!”

That had been two years ago. Shaul brought home the bones from Solomon’s, Grandfather made soup, and they all ate well. “So we’re not starving anyway,” Grandfather would say.

Shaul had grown into a strange-looking mix of every stray dog in the city. He had a sharp, wolflike muzzle that could look vicious when he showed his teeth. But his light brown eyes were kind, almost human when he gazed at Yacov. His coat was a mosaic of gray and black and tan, the length and texture of a collie’s, over massive shoulders and narrow hips. Shaul had no tail. Occasionally he would cower and slink, but that was only when Grandfather growled at him, “You son of seven fathers! I’ll sell you for Arab stew meat!”

For Yacov, the dog became the brothers and sister he had lost, the sweet comfort of a mother and father vanished in the smoke of Auschwitz crematoriums.

Yacov stroked the dog’s broad head and tried again to remember the face of his mother. “Such a beautiful girl she was,” Grandfather had said tenderly as he showed Yacov a faded photograph of his daughter, Etta, a young Orthodox girl. She had married Aaron, one of Grandfather’s Yeshiva school students, a bright boy from a good Jewish family in Warsaw. He had come to Jerusalem to study, and Etta had returned to Poland with him.

Grandfather had showed him her letters, carefully penned in Yiddish.

She had been a scholar herself, unusual for a young woman. Her letters spoke of happy times, a good life in Poland, and the birth of a daughter and three sons, of whom Yacov was the youngest. Together he and Grandfather had gazed for a long time at the picture of his mother, father, sister, and brothers, with the baby Yacov sitting properly on his mother’s lap.

Yacov had studied the face of his father: dark, serious eyes, full beard, high cheekbones and a large, straight nose.
Handsome,
Yacov thought,
but not at all like the face I see in the mirror each day.

However, David, his oldest brother, who was nine years old then, as Yacov was now, seemed a reflection of himself: curly hair, small and fine-boned features. Grandfather often said that the boy’s clear gray blue eyes were just like their mother’s. And the older sister was more beautiful still. Even in the photograph, though there was no color, Yacov had seen the resemblance and longed to reach out and touch the faces that were so much like his. Tonight he wondered again why he alone, among those six precious human beings, had escaped.

After the Nazis had come to Poland in September 1939, the happy letters had stopped. Nine months later, in June of 1940, Yacov had been smuggled into Palestine under the noses of the British, then into Jerusalem, into the basement room, and into Grandfather’s impoverished life. Yacov remembered nothing of the days before Grandfather. But sometimes at night, with Shaul smuggled onto his cot and breathing against his cheek, Yacov thought that he could
feel
what he had forgotten. Once again the pretty young woman in the picture held him on her lap and sang to him. He must never have been cold then … or lonely.

Grandfather was a rabbi and an Old City Yeshiva schoolteacher who delighted in the law of Moses and whose daily hope was the coming of the Messiah to restore Israel. He resented these new Jews who had invaded Palestine with programs and politics of Zionism, demanding a Jewish homeland without a Messiah.

Years of endless study and prayer had stooped his frail shoulders and streaked his once-black beard with gray. For Grandfather, the needs of this life were minimal, the needs of a small boy incomprehensible. He survived, as many others of his vocation, on the charity and donations of others—threadbare coats, cabbage soup, and the Torah. It was not enough. Never enough.

So Yacov survived by becoming a thief.

Selective about whom he robbed, he targeted mainly the British soldiers who roamed through the marketplace souks of the Old City looking for souvenirs to take home. Yacov picked their pockets without conscience and quickly passed the booty to Shaul, who faithfully trotted home as Yacov escaped over the rooftops.