Exile: a novel (50 page)

An attentive host, Ellon served coffee in china cups, insisting that Ernheit and David sample his fresh pastries. Troubled by his deception, David reminded himself of his obligations to Hana. “You’ve made this a beautiful place,” he said. “How did you come to live here?”

“Me, personally?” Ellon gave a small, ironic smile. “As with so many of our stories, it began with the Nazis. When I was a fourteen-month-old baby, in the Ukraine, they came to our village with an invitation for all Jews. We were to assemble in the square at daybreak, to be given a loaf of bread, a ration of sugar, and transportation to a ‘friendly camp.’ My father was already serving in the Russian army; when my mother discovered I had a fever, she refused to expose me to the cold. All the other Jews from our village, of course, were shot.

“What followed is a paradigm of Jewish denial. My mother fled with me, spreading the word to other villages. They refused to believe her— when the Germans came, the Jews followed orders, showing up for transit to that ‘friendly camp.’ How those Nazis must have laughed.”

The story, David understood at once, was defining for Akiva Ellon. “How did the two of you survive?” he asked.

“My mother spoke flawless German; I was a blond, blue-eyed baby, a
virtual copy of the picture of the German child published by Rosenberg, Hitler’s arbiter of Aryan perfection. So we settled in another village, where no one knew us, masquerading as gentiles. Fortunately, no one but her ever saw me nude.” Ellon’s voice grew soft. “After the war, my mother told me, ‘Every day, I thought you would be my executioner.’ But she clung to me, her only child, waiting for my father to return. He never did. And so she brought me here to Israel, our refuge.”

David heard a quiet bitterness in Ellon’s last words. “And after that?”

“From the first, I gave myself to our new country, body and soul— worked on a kibbutz, fought in the wars of ’67 and ’73, then moved here to help secure the future of our nation and our people. And now the State of Israel has no use for us.”

Ernheit glanced at David. “Tell David how Sha’are Tikva came to be,” he suggested.

Ellon spread his hands, a graceful gesture of sadness and self-deprecation. “It is such a typical story, really. Many of us are kibbutniks— for us, settling in this place, the biblical Samaria, was a normal part of repopulating the land of Israel. Nor did we steal this hilltop. A quarter century ago, we simply bought it from an Arab and came here to live in trailers, eight families with no roads or schools or electricity. Now we are eight hundred families, five thousand of us in all, who have no other home. In fact,” he added softly, “my mother is buried here.”

David paused, taking in the shaded garden, Ellon’s freshly painted villa. “The government, Zev tells me, claims Sha’are Tikva would be difficult to defend.”

“Defend?” A trace of anger crept into Ellon’s tone. “The defense of Israel was why the government encouraged us to come here—we were heroes, the new pioneers, embraced by politicians of every stripe.
We
did not change. Men like Amos Ben-Aron did, bandying about Orwellian phrases like ‘the Palestinian people,’ as if such a people ever existed.” Ellon shook his head in wonder. “And what of
our
people? We are parents who love our children and our neighbors, wanting nothing but to live on the only land God ever gave us, made home to us by our own labors. Yet we may be sacrificed to the Arabs’ need for ethnic cleansing. Perhaps Hamas or Al Aqsa will remove us to a ‘friendly camp.’ ”

A thought struck David. Though they had driven past Arab villages, he had seen no Arabs; the bypass road they had taken was for Israelis, rendering the Arabs invisible. “So what would you do,” David asked, “with the Arab population of the West Bank? You are a quarter million; they are maybe twelve times that.”

Ellon shrugged. “Give them back to Jordan, I suppose—ethnically, that is what they are, Jordanian. It is not simple, I know. But history never gave the Jews a choice between good and bad, only bad and worse. Worst of all would be giving up this land.” Punctilious in his role as host, Ellon stood up and refilled David’s coffee cup. “Ben-Aron was a tragedy. He began as a soldier and ended as a coward—the pathetic caricature of history’s sub-servient Jew, made the most dangerous man in Israel by the witchcraft of his rhetoric.

“Why this transformation? Like so many others, his mind crumbled under the weight of Jewish history.” Sitting again, he looked at David intently. “No other people have been the target of extermination throughout history; no other country wonders how long it can continue to exist. So how do Israelis react to an unbearable reality that, except for the strongest of minds, is psychologically crushing? By inventing ‘peace’ where there is no hope of peace. By denying that those who dispatch suicide bombers to murder us would kill us all if we let them. And by turning their backs on us, their brothers and sisters. We settlers were to be Ben-Aron’s initial sacrifice on the altar of denial.”

For this man, David thought, the certainty that his fellow Jews were gripped by a mass delusion must be close to unbearable. “How do you live with this?” he asked.

Ellon gave a wistful smile. “By writing poetry, and translating Shakespeare’s sonnets and plays. Anything but
The Merchant of Venice
.”

Above Ellon’s roses, a small bird hovered in delicate suspension. “But now Ben-Aron is gone,” David ventured.

Ellon regarded him closely. “A reprieve,” he said at last. “But others like him will arise. Within Israel, the Jewish disease flowers anew—politicians who believe that the Arabs who hate us will be seduced by kindness, intellectuals for whom the suffering people are Palestinians, not Jews. Two years ago, the six-year-old daughter of one of our leaders, Barak Lev, was shot by an Arab sniper. No politician spoke of her, no poet commemorated her in verse. She had become that unremarkable thing, a murdered Jew. Now I look at this barrier and wonder how many more of us will join her among the anonymous dead.”

“If that is what your children face, why stay here?”

“Where, in all the history of the world, do we go? Where will this not happen to us?” Ellon’s tone hardened. “This is our land. That is why some will take up arms rather than abandon it. If I were younger, I would join them, and fight our enemy to the end. Whether Arab or, God help us, Jew.”

David felt a chill—in an hour, in the lovely garden of this civilized,
tormented man, he had come far closer to grasping why Ben-Aron might have died. “Perhaps David should meet Barak Lev,” Ernheit suggested, “and see Bar Kochba.”

Ellon considered this, his eyes shaded. Then he looked at David with a level gaze that, despite his feeling of betrayal, David returned.

“Excuse me,” Ellon said courteously. “I will make a call.”

As the road took them gradually higher, the landscape became even more stark. Turning a corner, they encountered the rudiments of Jewish civilization: trailers, goats, a wine press, a modest synagogue. To David, the settlement of Bat Ein looked like a trailer court in the Mojave Desert, except that it was perched atop a jagged landscape with a harsh and contested history. Following the directions provided by Ellon, they passed a ram-shackle school and stopped beside a vineyard with a stirring vista of the Judean hills. In the distance, David could see the wooded Green Line, a measure of how far they had traveled beyond what had once been the border of Israel.

Amid the vines a burly, red-bearded man in overalls leaned against a tractor. As they approached on foot, David saw that he wore a yarmulke, and that a prayer shawl was tucked under his overalls. His gray eyes were keen, his face weathered, and his high forehead had the sheen of sun and sweat. Smiling, he extended his hand to David. “I’m Noam Bartok. You’re the American who’s looking for Barak.”

“That’s right.”

“I’m his spokesman, as the need arises. I’m also an American—or was.” Turning, Bartok gestured at the landscape. “
This
is my home now, a long way from Newark. For all twelve of my kids, there is no other place.”

“It’s certainly not Newark,” David said. “Or like anywhere I’ve been before.”

Bartok smiled again. “Let’s sit. You’ve come a long way, too.”

He led David and Ernheit to a bare pine log. Together they sat gazing at the vineyard as Bartok passed a thermos of tepid water. “Most evenings,” Bartok said, “just before I go home, I sit and look out at these hills. When Leah and I decided to help redeem the land that is truly Israel, we came to the place that is ours. Not as defined by any government, but by God.”

He spoke with the clarity and conviction of a man who had found truth. “I saw the barrier,” David said after a time. “It’s many miles from here.”

“And the Green Line even farther.” Bartok gazed down at the red earth. “Men like Ben-Aron mutilate our land with lines of their own devising— drawing ‘borders,’ telling us what places to live are ‘legal’ and what are not. As if that’s for men to say.

“God gave this land to our people—our children, our grandchildren, and
their
children—for the rest of time. Land is not an office, or a desk.” Leaning forward, Bartok lowered his shoulders, as if bearing history’s weight. “The only way for Israel to save itself is to return to God. Those who sacrifice His land for ‘peace’ will only cover it in blood.”

Ernheit was watching the settler’s face. Almost gently, he said, “I’m Israeli. And still I wonder what happens if the army comes to evict you.”

“Then I send away my wife and children.” Briefly, Bartok closed his eyes. “If God requires it, I will die here.”

David and Ernheit shared his silence. Without looking at David, Bartok slowly exhaled. “I can direct you to Barak,” he said at last. “But I don’t know that he’ll speak to you. He has just lost a friend, he told me—almost a brother. This is a day for him to pray.”

The trip to Bar Kochba was like a journey to the end of the earth.

The roads became dirt, the terrain rocky, the barrenness of land without water reflected in the stunted, scrubby oaks. Here and there an irrigated swatch of ground yielded grapes or peaches or cherries. But the hills on which Bar Kochba sat, ringed by Arab villages, were, from a distance, desolate, the only sign of humanity a desultory string of trailers.

At the crest of the first hill, David and Ernheit found a scene surprising in its ordinariness: on a patch of grass overlooking the desert, four young mothers sat watching their children play on a plastic swing and slide. But for the setting, and the fact that the women’s heads were covered in scarves,
it could have been anywhere in the world. “Let’s check our directions,” Ernheit suggested.

Parking, they approached the group. A round-faced young woman in glasses glanced up at them with mild curiosity. Ernheit squatted beside her, looking out at the desert. “A remarkable place,” he said.

The woman shrugged. “It is our home.”

The other women’s faces betrayed no understanding; David guessed that they spoke only Hebrew. Nodding toward the children, Ernheit asked, “Which ones are yours?”

For a moment, the woman looked down. “We have only the one,” she said softly. “The dark-haired boy with glasses. But I imagine you are looking for someone else.”

“Barak Lev.”

A shadow crossed her face. “I am his wife,” she said at length.

David considered her anew, the mother of a child murdered in this place, the sweet-faced wife of a fanatic who, quite possibly, had facilitated the murder of Amos Ben-Aron. She asked no questions; perhaps she had learned not to. “Just follow this road,” she said. “At the end, you will see a man. He will tell you where to go.”

The road traced the ledge of a jagged cliff, which plummeted to form one wall of a deep canyon, its wind-seared expanse a multicolored brown. On the other side, a string of trailers squatted on the scarred, rocky earth; far across the canyon, more trailers stood like sentinels. “Grim,” Ernheit said. “But this is how Sha’are Tikva began.”

Gazing at the cliffsides hewn by the wind, David spotted dark holes in the orange-brown rock. “Are those caves?” he asked.

“Yes. Centuries ago, Benedictine monks dwelt there. This is a good place for ascetics.”

David felt his apprehension grow. “Think Lev will talk to us?”

“Maybe. From what I’ve seen on television, he has his prophetic moods.”

At the end of the road a man with an assault rifle stood beside a jeep. Pulling up, Ernheit rolled down his window. “We’re looking for Barak Lev.”

The man peered inside the car. “Get out,” he commanded.

Facing the canyon, David and Ernheit stood beside the car as the man circled behind them. Ahead, a thin trail led through scrubby brush to the edge of the cliff. “Take that path,” the man directed. “I’ll be at your back. But first give me your handgun.”

Expressionless, Ernheit handed over his gun and began walking, David behind him. For all he knew they were walking off the cliff.

Two feet from its edge, Ernheit stopped.

Standing beside him, David saw a wooden platform jutting from the cliffside. At the end of the path, steps had been hacked downward into the side of the canyon. Gingerly, Ernheit took them, then David, conscious that a misstep, or a push from behind, would send them to oblivion. To one side of the last step, David saw, a plateau in the face of the cliff was sheltered by the platform. In its shadow were books, provisions, a bed, an oil lantern, and several boxes of ammunition. To David, it felt less like a refuge than a place to die.

Barak Lev stepped from the shadows, holding a semiautomatic rifle. He was tall and bearded, the austere contours of his face as harsh as the terrain. Though he could not be over forty, he had the fierce aspect of a patriarch, and his gaze was unnaturally bright.