Raquela (25 page)

Outside Jerusalem, he braced himself, racing his car past the Arab village of Kastel. Its white stone houses sat ominously atop the highway. Raquela knew that Arab snipers chose Kastel to lie in ambush, hidden by the trees and houses, sniping at the cars. This road was Jerusalem's lifeline. Virtually everything the people needed—food, drugs, clothing—was trucked up this winding highway to the Holy City in the hills.

No one spoke in the cab. Arik clutched Raquela's hand.

There were no shots from the trees above them. No Arab ambush. Kastel was behind them. The tension lessened. But the danger was not yet over.

A roadblock of military cars loomed ahead. Yitzhak spoke swiftly. “If any of you have guns or grenades, hand them over to the women.”

The taciturn man at Raquela's left slipped two hand grenades into her lap. She placed them carefully inside the cups of her brassiere and draped her nurse's cape over her shoulders.

At the roadblock soldiers surrounded the car.

“Everyone out!” they commanded.

Two soldiers searched the men, but they did not touch the women passengers. Other soldiers poked their heads under the hood of the car. They tore apart the seat-cushions and ripped up the floor mats. Then they unlocked the trunk of the car. Raquela watched as they opened her suitcase, rummaged through her uniforms and her party dress. She blushed as they held her underwear to the light.

“What do they think,” she whispered to Arik, “that I'm smuggling a Haganah message in my panties?”

The soldiers found nothing. “You can shut everything now,” they said abruptly.

Raquela spoke under her breath. “Arik, you close the suitcase. I'm afraid to bend down.”

The passengers helped Yitzhak push the lacerated cushions and the floor mat back into place. They stood aside to let Raquela enter first. When they were all in, Yitzhak put his foot to the throttle. With a roar and a cloud of black smoke, the cab pulled away.

Everyone began to talk at once, brought close by the narrow escape. Discovery of the grenades could have led to their imprisonment.

“Someday, maybe they'll search Arabs instead of Jews,” one of the men said.

Yitzhak concentrated on the road. The sky had turned slate gray. “We're running into rain.”

Arik put his hand out the window to feel the first drops. “Welcome,
yoreh
, the first rain.” He turned to Raquela. “It's good we have a name for every first, as if every day were Genesis.”

Raquela rested her head on his shoulder and napped. She woke as they neared Haifa. She gazed up at the white city of stone, terraced on biblical Mount Carmel.

They entered the city. Yitzhak drove through the port area. Kingsway, the broad crowded avenue, was alive with buses, trucks, people hurrying in and out of freight offices, ships' handlers, and navy supply stores. The air smelled of the sea.

The taxi pulled up at a curb. Surreptitiously, Raquela drew the grenades from her brassiere and returned them to the silent man. He slipped them into a briefcase.
Where was he taking them?
she wondered.
What was he planning to blow up?
She could not ask him.

On the street, Arik said, “We'd better get you some sandwiches for the flight. I know that plane you're going on. They don't even serve you water.” He turned back to Yitzhak. “Would you have time to become a ‘special' and drive us to a place where we can get some food and then take us on to the airport?”

“Get back in the car,” Yitzhak commanded. “After what your lady friend did, I'll drive you for nothing. Haifa's my town.”

He stopped at a small sandwich shop. “You stay right here.” He jumped out, smoothed the ends of his mustache, and entered. Soon he emerged with two cheese sandwiches wrapped in a paper napkin and handed them to Raquela. “Consider this a war medal.”

Raquela laughed. “You're right, Arik. It's a day of firsts. My first war medal. My first airplane trip. My first journey abroad.”

“I'll show you another first,” Yitzhak said. “When is your plane leaving?”

“At four.” She looked at her watch. “We've still got a couple of hours.”

Yitzhak turned the cab down the narrow side street to the waterfront. They drove past British tanks, trucks, and jeeps lined up near the harbor. In the turrets of the tanks helmeted soldiers looked around warily, primed for action.

He parked the car unobtrusively. “Come with me.”

The rain had petered out. They followed him to an isolated area of the wharf, strewn with rocks and debris. Yitzhak motioned them to crouch behind the rocks. Raquela looked at Yitzhak, wondering if he might be a Haganah commander on whose head the British had a price.

A shabby wooden vessel, its prow smashed, pulled by a British tug, hove into sight. Weary and shattered people stood on the deck, their eyes riveted on Mount Carmel.

“A first for them, too.” Yitzhak said in a bitter voice. “Their first view of the Promised Land.”

The crushed vessel was tied to the dock. The voices of people floated down to them; they were singing
Hatikvah
, their “Song of Hope.”

Somewhere a loudspeaker boomed. “The commanding officer wishes you to disembark quietly. Women and children first.”

Red-bereted British soldiers affixed a gangway and ran up to get the people. First came the stretchers with the wounded from the battle at sea. Then women and children followed by their men came down, their faces dark with fright and hunger.

Surrounded by troops to prevent escape into the city, they made their first step on the so-long-promised land. They breathed the air deeply and tiredly.

Raquela heard screams. The British were separating the men from the women. Separation in the concentration camps always meant death! They disappeared into search pens made of sackcloth, and then reappeared, some buttoning their blouses or adjusting their pants. British soldiers now sprayed them with DDT, shooting the white flourlike powder at their hair, into their clothes, and over their legs.

Raquela tasted blood. She realized her teeth had been clenched over her lower lip.

The soldiers herded the people single file down the wharf, onto a ship with the name, printed in bold white letters,
RUNNYMEDE PARK
.

“Only the British would name a prison ship,” Yitzhak said, “for the spot where the Magna Carta was signed.”

Raquela stared at him, now certain he was not just a taxi driver.

The soldiers sped the people up the gangway; they looked unreal, covered in white powder, their faces bleak. The rain had resumed and was pelting them.

“They're going to the same place you are,” Yitzhak said shortly. “Come on, let's go.”

A tiny four-passenger plane was poised on the runway in the makeshift airport on the right curve of the bay.

Arik pointed to the plane.

“Your
‘primus,'
” he said. The
primus
was the one-burner kerosene stove Mama and most people cooked on: small, unsteady on three spindly legs, but serviceable; the plane looked just as fragile.

He kissed Raquela. “I'll see you in six weeks.”

She ran through the rain, climbed the shaky ladder, fastened her seat belt, and waved to Arik through the rain-streaked window. The pilot opened the throttle. The little plane shook like a machine gone mad. She felt it taxi down the runway, grow light, swerve sharply, and then ascend over the Haifa harbor, above the British naval ships and the graveyard of broken hulls on which the Jews had desperately sought to enter Palestine.

Now they were in a blanket of ominous clouds. The little “primus” was lashed by heavy rain. Raquela tried to control her fear as the plane bounced in the black sky. She heaved and put her hand to her mouth. She was grateful she had no food in her stomach; the cheese sandwiches lay uneaten in her bag. She took out her knitting needles to begin a new sweater for Arik. The passenger beside her opened his prayer book; in a singsong voice he intoned the Prayer for Travelers. She hoped he was praying for her, too.

Flying blind in the storm, the “primus” took three hours to make the two-hundred-mile trip. It was dusk; the rain had stopped when they crossed over the island. In the vague light Cyprus looked like a green and brown fish with a long tail rising unevenly out of the sea.

The plane landed in a small airport outside Nicosia. Passport Control, Immigration, and Customs took a few minutes. A young man approached her. “Miss Levy?”

She nodded, relieved that someone had come for her. He was tall, painfully thin, somewhere in his mid-twenties.

“I'm Yakov, from the Joint,” he said. The Joint—also called the JDC—was the familiar name for the Joint Distribution Committee. Part of the United Jewish Appeal, it was the largest and most famous Jewish overseas welfare organization in the world; its function was to help all Jews in need. The British had allowed the JDC to come into the camps to run the health and welfare services, set up schools, and bring in relief supplies. Raquela, on temporary loan from Hadassah, was to be part of the JDC team.

Yakov picked up her bag. “It's too late to take you to camp. You're spending tonight in a hotel.”

A taxi drove them across the island, to the Palace Hotel in Famagusta. Yakov promised to return in the morning.

Alone in the hotel room, Raquela felt small and frightened. The strange wide bed, the nondescript chest of drawers, the heavy damask drapes, the sense of total aloneness, unnerved her.

“Arik, it's another first,” she whispered, trying to cheer herself up. “The first time in my life in a hotel.”

Remembering she had not eaten, she washed her face and descended to the dining room. She stopped in the doorway. It was a huge salon with formal tables covered with white linen and sparkling goblets. British army officers and haughty-looking women in formal evening gowns sat at the festive tables, eating and drinking. She felt like a country girl from the provinces.

The smells from the kitchen pervaded the air, food fried in rancid oil.

The maître d' approached. “Would you like a table, madam?”

She fled up to her room. Slowly she munched one of her cheese sandwiches. She would save the second one for breakfast.

Yakov returned the next morning, took her bag, and helped her into a taxi. They drove through the sleepy white streets of Famagusta down toward the harbor. The stone seawall rising above the Mediterranean reminded her of the Old City walls of Jerusalem. She fought off a wave of homesickness.

“The Greeks call Cyprus ‘Love's Island,'” Yakov told her, “because Aphrodite rose, not as a child, but full grown, out of the waves.”

She looked out the window at a stone turret, the remains of an old castle. “That's Othello's tower,” he said, “where Othello killed Desdemona in jealousy. It's a romantic island all right; Richard the Lion-Hearted was married on it.”

“Romantic? With a concentration camp?”

“That's only a small part of the island. Remember, this is a British crown colony; the English love to come here for their holidays.”

Raquela listened as she wiped the sweat under her eyes, grateful she had changed into a cotton dress. The rain had ended, and the day turned fiercely hot.

“You can boil in Cyprus, even in November,” Yakov said, “and you can also freeze.”

“Sounds just like Jerusalem.”

Was everything to remind her of home? Time to put Jerusalem out of her mind.

“We're getting close to the Caraolas camp,” Yakov said.

From the dusty road near the bay she saw barbed wire. Endless miles of barbed wire. Ten-foot walls of barbed wire.

Nineteen forty-seven
, she thought bitterly,
and Jewish history is still written in barbed wire and prison camps
.

The taxi pulled up before the barbed-wire entrance gate, where a contingent of British soldiers sat at a table outside the camp.

“This is Miss Levy,” Yakov said. “The new nurse-midwife from Jerusalem.”

The officer hardly looked up as he scribbled a pass. “This is for today only. She'll have to get fingerprinted, give us two photos, and then we'll give her her ID card.”

Raquela looked through the gate into the camp compound. Thousands of people in rags and tattered blue shorts moved in and around a giant maze of green tents clustered together in uneven rows; some of the tents were arranged in circles. A prison city on sand.

Still outside the barbed wire, she followed Yakov to a metal hut on whose side the letters
JDC
were painted in white. He set down her bag, introduced her to the director, and hurried out, his assignment completed.

“I'm Morris Laub,” the director said in an American accent. He looked like a Jewish scholar; of medium height, in his late thirties, dark-haired, with dark glasses, with a strong, sensitive face. He reminded her of Arik.

“I can't tell you what your coming means to us, Miss Levy. We've got lots of pregnant women ready to deliver; and more come with every batch the British intercept and bring here on their prison ships.”

Raquela nodded. “I've already seen a few pregnant women inside the gates. Where will I be working?”

“We have a prison wing in the British Military Hospital in Nicosia. That's where we want you to set up the maternity ward.”

A small, wiry man in a white shirt and khaki shorts entered the office. “This is Josh Leibner, my associate, also an American. Now you've met the only two ‘outsiders' on the staff. All the rest are recruited Palestinians like you, or IJIs, as the British call them.”

“IJIs.” She tried to figure what the letters stood for.

Laub helped her. “Illegal Jewish Immigrants—that's the British name. To me, the first initial stands for ‘Intercepted.' You'll find we have among them famous doctors, writers, musicians, great teachers. But in the hospital, even in the prison wing, the British won't let us use our IJIs except as aides.”