Establishment (15 page)

Bernie remembered the name vaguely, a slight, dark boy with curly black hair.

“He was at the kibbutz with us in thirty-nine. He was killed three days ago. He was with a convoy trying to break through to Jerusalem. The Arabs put a log blockade across the gorge below Bab el-Wad, and then they slaughtered them. Maybe three thousand Arabs and a handful of our guys. And that's every day. How in hell can you walk away from it?”

“I was never in it,” Bernie said. “I'm not in it now. I'll be forty-two next birthday. I'm a middle-aged garage operator from San Francisco. I'm married. I have a wonderful wife who isn't Jewish and who puts up with my insanity for reasons beyond my understanding. At this point, I don't even know exactly how I got into this. I guess I couldn't face the thought of spending the next ten years running a garage. But I paid my dues. I got up the money for the planes, and I stayed with it. I'm done. I got a wife and child to go back to. I had enough of war to fill my gut.”

He and Brodsky and a woman called Lena Polda were sitting at a table in an outdoor cafe on Dizengoff in Tel Aviv. The sun was shining. The air was warm and gentle. Men in shirtsleeves and women in summer dresses walked by. Children played in the street. There was no sound of war, of guns firing. Lena Polda was a dark, intense woman in her middle twenties. She was a fourth or fifth cousin to Brodsky and worked as a bookkeeper in Tel Aviv. Brodsky's mother, who still lived on the Grand Concourse in the Bronx in New York, had telephoned her to find out whether her son was alive or dead; surprisingly, she had gotten through, something of a miracle in Palestine in March of 1948. Lena had gone to the airfield and was there when the nine planes landed; two days later, she met them for lunch, and until now she had said very little. Her English was adequate but heavily accented. She had been born in Poland, in Vilna, put in a concentration camp by the Nazis when she was seventeen, watched her mother and father, in the same concentration camp, go to the gas chamber, and had then been used as a prostitute by the camp officers. She had survived and had come to Palestine in 1945.

Now, somewhat unexpectedly, she said to Bernie, “What dues have you paid, if I understand you, Mr. Cohen, if dues are like, like an obligation?” It was her first contribution to the conversation.

“More or less. It's just an expression.”

“So tell me.”

“What Bernie meant,” said Brodsky, “is that he fought in two wars, in the Spanish war and in the last war.”

“Oh?” She stretched out her hand to reveal the number tattooed on her forearm. “So. Have I paid my dues?”

Bernie nodded slowly.

“Should I go home?”

“This is your home. It's not my home.”

“No? No, I am sure not.” She rose. “I must go back to work. Thank you for the lunch.”

After she had left, Brodsky said, “Don't let that get under your skin. She's strange. They all are after they've been in the camps.”

They sat in an uneasy silence for a while. Then Bernie said, “It's funny, but when I was a kid, all I ever dreamed about was coming here. I hated Hitler, but I didn't join the brigade because I was antifascist. I joined to train for this, and even when we got here first in thirty-nine, it was ‘Home is the sailor, home from the sea.' And now all I want is to get back with Barbara and the kid. I can understand the way Lena feels. It's not the way I feel, so it's no use arguing with me, Irv.”

“Well, what are you going to do? You can't get a plane out of here this week. It's impossible.”

“I know. I booked passage on a ship out of Haifa for Naples. I can get a flight from Naples to London, and from there home.”

“When?”

“Three days from now.”

“All right. Look, we're driving up to Haifa. They're dropping me off at the old kibbutz, so come along, and you can spend an hour at the place and see all the improvements, and then get to Haifa in plenty of time.”

“Who are they? Who's driving you up there?”

“Dov Benash and Zvi Kober. They're both attached to a Haganah unit up there. They're leaving tomorrow morning.”

Waking the following day in the small room he shared with Brodsky in the rickety stucco house on Allenby Road that called itself the Hotel Shalom, Bernie had a momentary difficulty recalling where he was. The room was hot, the windows uncurtained, the sunlight pouring in, and some twist of memory flung him back to the months he had spent in North Africa. He had a moment of panic; life and time reversed itself, and for that moment all of his life with Barbara was a dream. Still not fully awake, he moaned in agony.

“Are you all right?” Brodsky called out. He was at the sink, shaving.

“Yeah, I'm all right.”

Too much had happened too quickly. It was like a dream—the airfields in Kansas and New Jersey, the airfield in Panama, the airfield in the Azores, the fat Czech, Lovazch, cheating them on the price of the guns, and then the end, so flat, so unemotional, a man called Yigal Allon, tall, slender, blond, youthfully aloof, shaking his hand in an almost noncommittal manner, “Good work, Cohen,” and then seeming indifferent, as if it were a perfectly ordinary and expected thing that a man in San Francisco called Dan Lavette should put up a hundred and ten thousand dollars to buy ten old airplanes, and that he, Bernie Cohen, should direct their flight across half the world and bring them into Palestine loaded with guns and Messerschmitts. But it fitted in with the rest of it. Where else in time or place would two million dollars packed in two suitcases be treated in such a manner, as if the suitcases held shirts and pants and coats? There was a convulsive thing of the spirit happening here, and it reached out to touch people in every corner of the earth, and for a day or a week it changed them, the way he had been changed, or perhaps regressed to adolescence and catapulted off in search of romance and all the golden dreams of youth. But now he felt used up and let down. His necessity to the adventure was of his own invention. It was true that Brodsky had pleaded with him to head up the operation, but he could have refused, and Brodsky could have carried it off just as well. What had he expected of Yigal Allon, who commanded the Palmach, the front-line striking force of this tiny, desperate nation that would soon be fighting for its very existence? That Allon would embrace him and make a speech, declaring that they had been rescued by Cohen the savior?

“Are you sure you're all right?” Brodsky asked. “Better get your ass out of bed, because they said they'd be downstairs at seven, and it's almost seven-thirty now.”

He dressed and shaved and packed the flight bag that contained two shirts, both of them dirty now, underwear, and socks. Brodsky saw him pause, holding the revolver that Kramer, the accountant, had given him in the Azores. Then he handed it to Brodsky.

“What's this?”

“Kramer gave it to me. The little guy who met us in the Azores. He felt the money needed protection. I have no use for it. Out here, any weapon's something.”

Brodsky put the gun in his pocket. They went downstairs, and while Brodsky settled their bill, Bernie went outside. The jeep was parked in front of the hotel, and Benash and Kober sat in the front seat, eating fried fish out of a greasy paper bag and breaking pieces off a loaf of bread.

“Have some,” Kober said. “Fish and chips without the chips. Not as good as London, but quite worthy. The bread is first rate.”

Bernie reached into the bag, and Benash tore off a piece of bread for him. With his first bite, he realized he was ravenously hungry. “Enough for all,” Kober said. The fish was cold but good. Brodsky came out of the hotel and joined them and accepted fish and bread. Bernie pointed to four wooden boxes in the jeep.

“Our share of the boodle,” Kober said. “Forty Mausers and two cases of ammunition. We deliver it to Haifa. We may have a bit of trouble along the road, so I suggest you both take guns and fill your pockets with ammo.” Benash had two rifles in front and a pistol in his belt. “That case is open.”

They started off, Kober driving, Bernie and Brodsky in the back seat. The Mausers were thick with grease. Bernie took a T-shirt out of his bag, and he and Brodsky wiped the guns and loaded them.

They drove north along the coastal road, turned inland at Natanya, and continued north to Hadera. So far, the day had been peaceful beyond belief. They did not even encounter a British patrol; the only signs of war were three burned-out trucks on the wayside. To the east, the hills were still hazy in the morning mist. Men and women working the fields with guns slung across their shoulders waved to them, and burnoosed Arabs tended their goats and sheep, lazily indifferent. The whole aspect of the land, so calm, so peaceful in the sunshine, filled Bernie with a sense of déjà vu, a feeling that he had never left this strange, haunting place. Once out of the stucco turbulence of Tel Aviv, it became timeless.

They stopped at Hadera for lunch, then they turned northeast on the dirt-surfaced road that led through the foothills of Carmel to Nazareth. From where they crossed the rail line it was no more than fifteen miles to Kibbutz Benyuseff, where both Brodsky and Bernie had worked in 1939, and where Brodsky had lived since then. In 1942, Brodsky had been briefly married; a month later, his wife was killed by an Arab sniper, and he had not married again. He spoke about it now for the first time. “She said once,” he told Bernie, “that she knew you like an old friend. Just from what I had told her. We talked about you a lot. She was sure she'd meet you one day. Well, that's the way it goes. Anyway, you won't recognize the place. Two hundred orange trees, seventy acres of wheat and barley. And cows, we got over forty cows. Nursery, school. And me, I'm the agronomist. Would you believe it—Irv Brodsky, Grand Concourse and One Hundred and Sixty-third Street in the Bronx, the agronomist? They sent me to school in Tel Aviv for six months, but mostly I get it out of books. Sit up half the night reading Weber and Batchelor.”

“Who are Weber and Batchelor?”

“Top experts on citrus growing, from your part of the world, California.”

“And what, pray, is the Grand Concourse, old chap?” Kober asked him. “Sounds like one of those debutante affairs they have in the States.”

“Just a big, ugly street in the Bronx.”

It was slow going after they crossed the railroad. The road was rutted, washed out by the spring rains. At times Kober had to put the jeep into low gear and crawl almost at a walking pace.

The countryside had changed to a region of low, rolling hills dotted here and there with Arab villages of mud and stone huts. The land had not been reclaimed here. White rocks jutted out of the stony hillsides. Goats had eaten the vegetation to the roots, and the starkness of the hillsides was relieved only by an occasional olive grove. They passed the ruins of some ancient building, a single pillar jutting from the pile of stone. When they were seen from a village, men, women, and children disappeared into their houses.

“I don't like it,” Brodsky said. He picked up his Mauser, worked the bolt, and checked the load.

“Can't you go any faster?” Bernie asked Kober.

“Not without wrecking this job. It's old and venerable. Just keep your eyes peeled for snipers. We're four of us and armed, so I don't imagine they'll try anything rash. How much farther?”

“Ten miles or so.”

They didn't hear the shot. A hole with a spider web of cracked glass radiating from it appeared in their windshield. The bullet rang off the metal between Bernie and Brodsky. Kober braked to a stop.

“Why are you stopping?”

They heard the second shot. It whined past, missing the jeep entirely.

“Dead ahead,” Benash said. “Eight, nine hundred meters.” He pointed to the hole in the windshield.

“Any closer, it wouldn't crackle,” Bernie agreed. “Rotten shooting.”

“They may get better.” He pulled the jeep off the road to the right, lurching into the shelter of a rocky spur of hillside. They heard at least five more shots, only one of which found its mark in the jeep. Then they were sheltered. Kober turned to face Bernie. “Well, old chap, you're the mavin on tactics. They're bloody poor shots, but who isn't at eight hundred meters? That one”—he nodded at the windshield—“could have taken your head off. Mostly these beggars have old single-shot Lee-Enfields or Martinis, so I'd say there's at least half a dozen of them, and that's only the beginning. Every nasty within hearing will come prancing in for the kill.”

“Then I'd say we turn around and head back to that last kibbutz.”

“And how do I get home?” Brodsky demanded.

“You come to Haifa with us,” Kober told him. “I'm glad Cohen is more sensible than heroic. I detest arguments.” He turned the ignition key. Nothing happened.

Bernie leaped out of the car and raised the hood. “Oh, Jesus,” he said. A bullet had pierced the radiator and found the battery. The radiator was draining, the lead on the battery shattered.

“Can you fix it?”

“Two or three hours, maybe.”

“Can we start the damn car?”

“No way.” He looked around. On top of the rise of the hill, about a hundred yards from them, was an Arab herdsman's shelter, a tiny hut of mud and stone, roofless, abandoned. “Up there, that's defensible.”

“We might beat them back to the kibbutz on foot,” Brodsky speculated. “They're on foot. It's a long run, but we've still got a lead.”

“Never!” Kober snapped. “After that shooting, every beggar with a gun will be out potting at us. All it takes is a couple of gunshots. Trying to make a run for it, we'd be sitting ducks.”

“I don't leave the guns,” Benash said. “Do what you want; I don't give them these guns.”

“Then let's do it,” Bernie said, “before they're on top of us.” He slung the rifle over his shoulder and hefted one of the boxes of ammunition. It weighed at least a hundred pounds. He picked it up and started off for the hut. The others followed. Brodsky managed the second box of ammunition, but it took both Kober and Benash to carry one case of the Mausers, leaving the other case in the jeep. The moment they were out of the shelter of the hill, bullets began to kick up the dust around them. With their load, they couldn't quicken their pace, and it was all uphill. Bernie felt that his feet were weighted. An eternity seemed to pass before he had climbed the hundred yards and dropped, panting, inside the ruined hut. The only casualty was Benash. A bullet had torn a shred of flesh from his arm. He protested that it was nothing. Bernie made a bandage of his handkerchief and stopped the flow of blood, then Benash started out of the hut.