Leon Uris (98 page)

“Wait a minute ...” Dov said. “I’m not going to America or anywhere else without you. We will get married right now. Of course, it will be difficult in America. They can’t give me much of an allowance. I’ll have to work after classes but you can study nursing and work too ... we’ll make it.”

Karen was very quiet. She looked out and saw the rise of Gaza in the distance and the guard towers and the trenches.

“I can’t leave Nahal Midbar,” she whispered. “We have only started here. The boys are working twenty hours a day.”

“Karen ... you’ve got to take leave.”

“No, I can’t, Dov. If I go it makes it that much harder on everyone else.”

“You’ve got to. I’m not going without you. Don’t you understand what this means? I’ll come back here in two years and I’ll know everything there is to know about water tables and drilling and pipes. It will be perfect. We’ll live in Nahal Midbar together and I’ll be working around close by in the desert. The
kibbutz
will have my salary. Karen ... I’ll be worth fifty times the value I am now to Israel.”

She stood up and turned her back to him. “It’s
right
for you. It’s important for you to go to America. I’m more important here, now.”

Dov turned pale and his shoulders sagged. “I thought I would make you happy ...”

She faced him. “You know you have to go and you know I have to stay.”

“No, dammit! I can’t be away from you for two years! I can’t even take it for two days any more.” He stood and seized her in his arms and covered her mouth with kisses and she returned kiss for kiss and both of them cried, “I love you” over and over and their cheeks were wet with perspiration and tears and their hands felt for each other’s bodies and they slipped to the floor.

“Yes! Now!” she cried.

Dov sprang to his feet and stood trembling. He clenched his fists tightly. “We’ve got to stop this.”

It was still except for Karen’s soft sobbing. Dov knelt behind her. “Please don’t cry, Karen.”

“Oh, Dov, what are we going to do? It is just as though I’m not living when you are away. And now, every time we see each other it ends up the same way. When you leave me I am sick with wanting you for days.”

“It’s just as hard on me,” he said. “It’s my fault. We’ll be more careful. Nothing is going to happen until we marry.”

He helped her to her feet.

“Don’t look at me that way, Karen. I don’t want to ever hurt you.”

“I love you, Dov. I’m not ashamed or afraid of wanting you.”

“I’m not going to do what’s wrong for you,” he said.

They stood still, eyes shining with love and bodies taut with insistence.

“We had better go back to the
kibbutz
,” Karen said at last, with desolation in her voice.

Kitty had traveled over most of Israel and she had seen the most rugged of the settlements. She knew when she traveled to Nahal Midbar that it was the brink of hell. Yet in spite of preparing herself for the worst her heart sank at the sight of Nahal Midbar, a bake furnace planted in the path of angry Arab hordes.

Karen showed Kitty around with obvious pride over what had been accomplished in three months. There were a few new wooden shacks, a few more
dunams
of land plowed, but it was a heartbreaking sight. It represented boys and girls working agonizing hours during the day and standing guard during the night.

“In a few years,” Karen said, “there will be trees and flowers everywhere, if we can only get enough water.”

They walked out of the sun into Karen’s hospital tent and each had a drink of water. Kitty looked through the tent flap. Barbed wire and trenches. Out in the fields, boys and girls worked in the sun while others walked behind them with rifles, guarding them. One hand on the sword and one on the plow. That was the way they rebuilt the walls of Jerusalem. Kitty looked at Karen. The girl was so young and so lovely. In a few years in this place she would age before her time.

“So you are really planning to go home. I can hardly believe it,” Karen said.

“I told them I want to take a year’s leave. I have been terribly homesick lately. And now, with you gone ... well, I just want to take things easy for a little while. I may come back to Israel, I am not sure.”

“When will you leave?”

“After Passover.”

“So soon? It will be dreadful with you gone, Kitty.”

“You are a grown woman now, Karen. You have a life of your own.”

“I can’t think of it with you away.”

“Oh, we’ll write. We will always be close. Who knows, after living in this volcano for four years, I may find the rest of the world too dull for me.”

“You must come back, Kitty.”

Kitty smiled. “Time will tell. How is Dov these days? I hear he has finished school.”

Karen avoided telling Kitty that Dov had been asked to go to America, for she knew Kitty would take Dov’s side.

“They sent him to the Huleh Lake. They are planning a project to dig channels and lower the whole lake into the Sea of Galilee and reclaim it for farmland.”

“Dov has become a very important young man. I hear tremendous things about him. Will he be able to get here for Passover?”

“It doesn’t look like it.”

Kitty snapped her fingers. “Say! I have a splendid idea. Jordana has asked me to come to Yad El for Passover and I promised I would. Dov is working close by. Why don’t you come up to Yad El?”

“I really should stay at my
kibbutz
for Passover.”

“You’ll be here for many Passovers. It will be a farewell present to me.”

Karen smiled. “I’ll come.”

“Good. Now, how is that young man of yours?”

“Fine ... I guess,” Karen muttered glumly.

“Did you have an argument?”

“No. He won’t argue with me. Oh, Kitty, he is so damned noble sometimes I could scream.”

“I see,” Kitty said raising her eyebrows. “You are quite the grown-up woman of eighteen.”

“I just don’t know what to do. Kitty ... I ... I go crazy thinking about him and then every time we see each other he gets noble. They ... may send him away. It may be two years before we can get married. I think I’m going to break open.”

“You love him very much, don’t you?”

“I could die for wanting him. Is it terrible for me to talk this way?”

“No, dear. To love someone that way is the most wonderful thing in the world.”

“Kitty ... I want so much to love him. Is that wrong?”

Was it wrong? Kitty remembered standing over a bed and implying to Ari that Jordana was a tramp for the moments she had stolen with David Ben Ami. Was that wrong? How many times she had regretted her words. David had been dead for three years and Jordana still grieved deeply. Even with that tough shell of
sabra
aggressiveness she would take a broken heart to her grave. Was it wrong? How many tomorrows would Dov and Karen have? That angry host of people beyond the barbed wire—would they let them live?

Karen ... her precious baby ...

“Love him, Karen,” Kitty said. “Love him with all the love that is in you.”

“Oh ... Kitty!”

“Yes, dear. Love him.”

“He is so afraid.”

“Then help him not to be afraid. You are his woman and that is the way it should be.”

Kitty felt empty inside her. She had given her Karen away forever. She felt Karen’s hand on her shoulder.

“Can’t
you
help Ari?”

Kitty’s heart skipped a beat at the mention of his name. “It is not love when one person loves and the other doesn’t.”

They were both silent for a long time. Kitty went to the tent flap and looked outside. The flies swarmed around her. She spun around quickly and faced Karen. “I can’t go without telling you I am sick about your coming to this place.”

“The borders must be defended. It is easy enough to say let the other fellow do it.”

“Nahal Midbar is three months old. Already you have a boy and a girl in your graveyard, murdered by
fedayeen
.”

“We don’t think of it that way, Kitty. Two are lost but fifty more have joined Nahal Midbar and another fifty have come to build a settlement five kilometers away—because we came here. In a year we will have a children’s house and a thousand
dunams
of land under cultivation.”

“And in a year you will begin to grow old. You will work eighteen hours a day and spend your nights in the trenches. All that you and Dov will ever have out of this is a single room eight by ten feet. Even the clothes on your back won’t belong to you.”

“You are wrong, Kitty. Dov and I will have everything.”

“Including a quarter of a million kill-crazy Arabs at your throats.”

“We cannot be angry at those poor people,” Karen said. “They sit there day after day, month after month, locked up like animals, watching our fields grow green.”

Kitty sagged down in a cot and buried her face in her hands.

“Kitty ... listen ...”

“I can’t.”

“Please ... please listen. You know that even when I was a little girl in Denmark I asked myself why I was born a Jew. I know the answer now. God didn’t pick us because we were weak or would run from danger. We’ve taken murder and sorrow and humiliation for six thousand years and we have kept faith. We have outlived everyone who has tried to destroy us. Can’t you see it, Kitty? ... this little land was chosen for us because it is the crossroads of the world, on the edge of man’s wilderness. This is where God wants His people to be ... on the frontiers, to stand and guard His laws which are the cornerstone of man’s moral existence. Where else is there for us to be?”

“Israel stands with its back to the wall,” Kitty cried. “It has always stood that way and it always will ... with savages trying to destroy you.”

“Oh no, Kitty, no! Israel is the bridge between darkness and light.” And suddenly Kitty saw it all, so clearly ... so beautifully clear. This then was the answer. Israel, the bridge between darkness and light.

O
NE NIGHT ABOVE ALL OTHER
nights is the most important for a Jew and that is the religious holiday of Passover. The Passover is celebrated in memory of the deliverance from bondage in Egypt. The Egyptians, the original oppressors, had become the symbol of all the oppressors of all the Jews throughout all the ages.

The high point occurs on the eve of Passover when the Seder—the Feast of Liberation—is held to give thanks for freedom and to offer hope for those who do not have it. For the exiles and the dispersed, before the rebirth of Israel the Seder always ended with the words: “...
next year in Jerusalem.
”

The Haggadah, a special book of prayers, stories, and songs for Passover, parts of which were written three thousand years ago, is read. The story of the Exodus from Egypt is recited by the head of the house.

The Seder was the high moment of the year. The woman of the house had to prepare for it for a month. All dirt had to be chased. Special Passover foods and decorations had to be prepared. All over Israel half-frantic preparations for the Seders took place. In the communal settlements the Seder table would hold hundreds. Other homes had small and simple Seders. As the eve of Passover drew near, the air of anticipation of the great feast grew and grew to a bursting point.

The Seder this year at the Ben Canaan cottage at Yad El was to be a relatively small affair. None the less, Sarah had to carry out the prescribed traditions and rituals to the letter. It was a labor of love and she would not be robbed of it. The cottage, inside and out, was made spotless. On the day of the feast the rooms were filled with enormous Galilee roses. The Menorah—the ritual candlesticks—had been polished to a dazzling gleam. Tens of dozens of special Passover cookies and candies had been made. All the special foods had been prepared and Sarah herself was dressed in her finest.

On the day of Passover Eve, Kitty and Sutherland drove from his villa to Yad El.

“The idea of your leaving Israel is wretched,” Sutherland grumbled. “Can’t make myself get on to it.”

“I’ve given it a lot of thought, Bruce. It is best. In America we always say, ‘leave them laughing.’ ”

“Do you really feel that immigration has passed its peak?”

“Well, let’s say the first flood is over. There are many small communities of Jews, like the Poles, locked in Europe who want to get out. We suspect the roof may fall in on the Jews in Egypt at any time. But the main thing is that we have personnel and facilities for any emergencies.”

“You mean for little emergencies,” Sutherland said. “What about the giants?”

“I don’t understand.”

“The United States has six million Jews and the Russians have four. What of them?”

Kitty thought deeply. “Most of those few Jews who have come from the United States are either one of two things; they are either idealists of the old pioneer days or neurotics seeking a false haven. I do not believe that the day will ever come that American Jews must come to Israel because of fear or persecution. If the day does come, I do not want to be alive to see it. As for the Russians, there is a strange and haunting story that not many people know.”

“You have me curious,” Sutherland said.

“Well, you know that they have tried to integrate the Jews by swallowing them up in theories and in evolution. They have tried to make them lose their identity by letting the old ones die out and indoctrinating the young ones from birth. Of course you know that anti-Semitism still rages in Russia.”

“I’ve heard.”

“It was on the last high holy days that this fantastic thing happened. It proved that the Soviets have failed miserably. The ambassador from Israel went to the only synagogue they permit in Moscow. After thirty years of silence, thirty thousand Jews appeared on the streets just to see and touch the ambassador! Yes, there will be a great
aliyah
from Russia someday.”

The story struck Sutherland deeply and he was silent. It was the same old story, the concept that arose so often in his mind: ...
the Jew never loses his identity
. And ... there comes that day of truth when he must stand and declare himself. He thought of his own beloved mother ...

They turned from the main road into the Yad El
moshav
. Sarah Ben Canaan rushed from the cottage to meet them. There were hugs and holiday greetings.