Leon Uris (73 page)

“You people have ways of obtaining information about things you want to learn.”

“If I knew I wouldn’t tell you, Mrs. Fremont. You see, I want nothing to stand in the way of your catching your plane out of Palestine.”

“It would be much nicer if we could part friends but it doesn’t look as though you are even going to give me a chance for that.”

She turned quickly and left the office and walked out to the main door. Kitty could hear whooping and cheering coming from a football game on the athletic field. Out on the center green some of the younger children played tag and some of the older ones lay on the lawn studying.

The flowers never stopped blooming at Gan Dafna, Kitty reflected, and the air was forever filled with their scent.

Kitty walked down the steps of the administration building and crossed the green, past the trenches. She stopped by the statue of Dafna. This time she did not feel jealous of Ari’s dead sweetheart. She looked down on the Huleh as Dafna always looked down on it and she felt a sudden twinge of loneliness.

“
Shalom, Giveret
Kitty,” some youngsters called to her as they ran past. One of them ran up to her and threw his arms around her waist, and she mussed his hair and sent him along.

As she walked to the hospital she felt very depressed. Leaving Gan Dafna was going to be more difficult than she had thought.

In her office she began to go through her files, discarding some, sorting others.

It was strange, she thought; she had not felt this loss in leaving the orphanage in Salonika. Kitty never really tried to become a “friend” of the Jews at Gan Dafna. Why was it all catching up to her at this moment?

Perhaps it was because it was the end of an adventure. She would miss Ari Ben Canaan and she would think about him for a long time, maybe forever. But in time things would become sane and organized again and she would be able to give Karen all those things in life she wanted for the girl. There would be good times and wonderful vacations together and Karen would start her dancing lessons again. In time, the picture of Ari Ben Canaan would grow dim as would the memory of Palestine.

It was natural to feel badly, Kitty reasoned. There is a certain regret in leaving any job and moving from place to place.

She began reading through her personal notes on some of “her” children. Were they impersonal objects of prescribed therapies or were they little lost human beings who were dependent upon her? Did she have the right to take them up and just drop them, or did she have a further duty to them beyond her own personal desires?

Kitty quickly shut her mind to this line of thought. She opened her desk drawer and took out her passport. Karen’s British passport was beside her own. There were two tickets—Departure, Lydda—Destination, New York.

Mark Parker was coming in from the Orient to meet them in San Francisco. Dear Mark ... was there ever a more devoted friend? Mark would help Kitty get situated around San Francisco. Kitty loved the Bay Area. They could live in Marin County over the Golden Gate Bridge or in Berkeley near the university. They would be near the theater and ballet and the wonderland of San Francisco.

Kitty shut her desk drawer.

She picked up the files again and started to replace them in the cabinet. Of course it was right for her to go ... of course it was. Even Dr. Lieberman said so. What did she owe these children? It was a job; nothing more, nothing less.

Kitty closed the drawer to the file cabinet and sighed. Even as she justified it to herself, the shadow of doubt began to creep into her mind. Was she really doing this for Karen or was she going because of her own selfish love for the girl?

Kitty turned and gasped! An Arab was standing in the doorway. He was dressed oddly. He wore an ill-fitting western suit of pinstriped worsted. On his head was a red fez bound in white cloth that gave his head a square look. His black mustache was enormous and waxed to fine points.

“I did not mean to frighten you,” the Arab said. “I may come in?”

“Certainly,” Kitty said, surprised to hear him speak in English.

She surmised that he was from a nearby village and that someone was sick.

The Arab entered and closed the door behind him.

“You are Mrs. Fremont?”

“Yes.”

“I am Mussa. I am a Druse. You know of the Druses?”

She knew vaguely that they were an Islamic sect that lived in villages on Mount Carmel, south of Haifa, and that they were loyal to the Jews.

“Aren’t you a long way from home?”

“I am Haganah.”

Kitty sprang to her feet instinctively. “Ari!” she said.

“He hides in my village of Daliyat el Karmil. He led the raid at Acre. He asks that you come to him.”

Kitty’s heart pounded wildly.

“He has been badly wounded,” Mussa said. “You will come?”

“Yes,” she said.

“Do not take medicine. We must be cautious. There are many British roadblocks and if they find medicine they will be suspicious. Ari says to get the truck filled with children. Tomorrow there is a Druse wedding. We tell the British we are bringing the children to the ceremony. I have a truck. Get fifteen children right away and have them pack bedrolls.

“We will be ready in ten minutes,” she said, and rushed out for Dr. Lieberman’s office. It was eighty kilometers from Gan Dafna to Mussa’s village, mostly over narrow mountain roads of northern Galilee. The dilapidated truck made slow progress.

The children in the back, delighted with the unexpected holiday, sang at the top of their voices as the truck chugged through the hills. Only Karen, sitting in the front cabin with Kitty, knew the real nature of the journey.

Kitty pumped Mussa for information. All she was able to ascertain was that Ari had received a leg wound twenty-four hours ago, was unable to walk, and was in great pain. He knew nothing of Dov Landau and said nothing of the death of Akiva.

In spite of the instructions, Kitty had packed a small first-aid kit of sulfa, bandages, and iodine, which would appear innocent enough in the glove compartment.

She had known real deep fear only twice in her life. She knew fear in Chicago in the waiting room of the polio wing of the Children’s Hospital during the three days and three nights of Sandra’s crisis. She knew fear once again as she waited in the Dome Hotel for news of the hunger strike on the
Exodus
.

She knew fear now. She was oblivious to the children’s singing or to Karen’s efforts to keep her calm. She was dazed with anxiety.

She closed her eyes and her lips moved and she said the words to herself over and over ... “Whoever this God is who watches Israel, keep Ari alive ... please, let him be alive.”

An hour passed and two and three.

Kitty’s nerves had brought her to a state of near-exhaustion. She laid her head on Karen’s shoulder and closed her eyes.

The truck rattled into the turn at Kfar Masaryk, using the roads that Ari had taken in his escape from Acre. As they moved toward Mount Carmel the roads came alive with troops.

They were stopped at a roadblock.

“These children from Gan Dafna. We have wedding at Daliyat tomorrow.”

“Out, everyone,” the British ordered. They combed the truck. All the bedrolls were untied and searched thoroughly; two of them were ripped open with knives. The underneath of the truck was searched and the spare tire torn off the rim. The motor was looked over and the children were searched. The shakedown took nearly an hour.

A second British search took place at the foot of Mount Carmel. Kitty was played out by the time Mussa began the drive up the winding turns along the sides of Mount Carmel.

“All Druse villages are built very high places. We are small minority and need high places to defend against Moslem attacks,” Mussa said; “we will be in Daliyat in few minutes.”

Kitty pulled herself together quickly as they approached the outskirts and slowed in the narrow streets.

Daliyat el Karmil seemed to sit on the roof of the world.

It was sparkling white and clean in comparison to the filth and decay of most Arab villages. Most of the men wore mustaches and many wore western clothing. Their headdresses were somewhat different from those of other Arabs, but the most dramatic difference was the carriage of dignity and outward pride and the look which suggested that they could be fierce fighters.

The women were exceedingly handsome and the children were bright-eyed and sturdy. The women were dressed in wild colors with white cloths over their heads.

Daliyat teemed with hundreds of visitors. They had come for the wedding from all the Carmel Druse villages, and in addition there were Jews from the
kibbutz
and as far away as Haifa.

The truck inched past the village reception house where solid lines of male guests gathered to congratulate the groom and the village elders. Alongside the reception house a veranda was built over the hillside. It held a twenty-five-yard-long table filled with fruits and rice and curried lamb and wines and brandies and stuffed marrows. The women, balancing dishes of food on their heads, kept a steady stream moving to and from the table.

Mussa stopped the truck beyond the reception house. A half dozen villagers came up to greet the children. The children unloaded the back of the truck and marched off with their bedrolls to their camping area to set up their camp and then return to join the festivities.

Mussa, Kitty, and Karen drove on down the center street. Here, Druse dancers wearing silver silk shirts and multicolored embroidered skullcaps were in the middle of a wild performance. They were lined up, each with his hands on the next man’s shoulders. Keeping the line straight, they continuously bounced from the ground, holding their bodies rigid, using only their feet as springs. In front of the line the finest Druse dancer in Palestine, a man named Nissim, went through wild gyrations with one knife in his teeth and a pair of knives in his hands.

Nearby, at the sanctuary, a verse maker told a story by calling out extemporaneous chants. Each line of the chant was repeated by a hundred men around him. As his story unfolded, each new line was repeated louder and louder, and as he came toward the end of his legend half the men drew pistols and fired them into the air.

Mussa turned the truck off the main street and took a narrower street down a steep incline. He jammed the transmission into low gear and held his foot on the brake as the vehicle slid down.

At the bottom of the grade, Mussa stopped the truck. The next road was too steep to attempt. The three of them got out quickly. Kitty took the small first-aid kit and followed Mussa down past a block of houses until they were far from the frenzied town activity.

At the last house in the village they stopped. It was closely guarded by a small band of fierce-looking armed Druse men.

Mussa held the door open. Kitty took a deep breath and entered. Inside another pair of guards stood before an inner door. She turned to Karen.

“Stay here. I’ll call you if I need you. Mussa, come in with me please.”

The bedroom was almost dark, and it was chilly because of the altitude and the concrete floors. Kitty heard a groan. She walked quickly to the window and threw the shutters open, admitting a stream of light.

Ari lay on a double bed with a brass headboard. His fists were clenched around two of the rungs, which he had bent out of shape as he writhed in agony. Kitty threw the cover from him. His clothes and the mattress were dark with blood.

“Help me take his pants off,” Kitty ordered.

Mussa straightened up with amazement.

“Never mind,” she said. “Just stand out of my way. I’ll tell you when I need you.”

She carefully ripped away his trousers and examined him. His color seemed good and his pulse was relatively strong. She compared the two legs. The bad one did not seem to be unduly swollen nor did it appear that he had lost an excessive amount of blood.

Kitty’s manner was brisk efficiency now that she knew Ari was alive and did not appear to be in critical danger.

“Mussa, bring me some soap and water and some clean towels. I want to take a closer look at the wound.”

She washed her hands and wiped around the wound carefully. His thigh was discolored and the blood oozed from the puffy spot where the bullet had entered.

Ari fluttered his eyes open. “Kitty?”

“Yes, I’m here.”

“Thank God.”

“What have you done for this thing?”

“I put some sulfa on it yesterday. I had a pressure bandage but it didn’t seem to be bleeding too much.”

“I’m going to poke around. It’s going to hurt.”

“Go ahead.” He grunted and broke out in a cold sweat as she felt the lump. He gripped the brass rungs and shook the bed. Kitty took her hand away quickly. Ari trembled for three minutes. She wiped his face with a wet towel.

“Can you talk to me, Ari?”

“It’s going away,” he said. “It comes and goes. This is a lot of fuss I’m making for a leg wound. Did your Cook County training include this sort of thing?”

Kitty smiled that he should remember. “Oh, every once in a while somebody’s husband caught the boy friend in the act and he was dumped at the emergency door.”

“What is it?”

“I can’t say for sure. Bullets do funny things. There’s no accounting for the way they twist. Your pulse and breathing are good, no shock. Your leg isn’t swollen except around the immediate area of the wound.”

“What does that mean?”

“I would say it means you haven’t had an internal hemorrhage. The bullet missed a main artery. I can’t see any infection, either. I’d say you were rather lucky ... although I’m worried about this pain you’re having.”

“I’ve been passing out every few hours,” he said.

“Hold on. I want to feel around again.”

Ari braced himself but was only able to take the probing for a few seconds. He cried out and bolted up to a sitting position and then gasped and sank down.

“The sonofabitch is killing me!”

He clutched the sheets and rolled over on his face and shook.

He convulsed in pain for ten minutes, then fell limp. “Kitty ... what is it? ... for God’s sake, I can’t take much more ...”