Raquela (37 page)

“Will you be coming back?” she whispered.

“We'll keep making the run to Haifa until we get everyone out of here.”

“Even the young men?”

His handsome face grew sober. “As soon as they're released. Would you believe this?”

He showed her a document. “Its the bill of health the British gave us to clear out. Read it.”

She read: “The flag flown by this vessel is not recognized by the British Government.”

She laughed. “Will Bevin never give up? His government still hasn't recognized the state of Israel.”

The first mate waited anxiously for Gad. The people were already lining the decks.

“Good-bye, Gad.”

“Good-bye, my darling.”

She hurried down the gangway.

In the hospital Raquela worked feverishly, delivering the babies of women too close to term to risk sailing. By now twenty-five hundred babies had been born on Cyprus.

Gad returned every few days. But they had only minutes together. The moment the ships hove into sight, the lines of women, children, and old men queued up to board.

A few young men managed to hoodwink the British officers at the checkout table. Some dressed as women with wigs borrowed from Orthodox women; some lined their faces with black-crayon wrinkles; some had fake casts on their legs; some wore dental overlays to look like toothless old men.

A few hundred escaped and made their way to Israel to join the army. But most of the eleven thousand young men watched the long processions file out of the camps; they were lonely, bitter, enraged. The camps took on the air of an all-male prison, like the male sections of Hitler's concentration camps. The women and children had made internment tolerable. Now, in Bevin's final anti-Semitic stroke, he inflicted the last indignity, the one act that conjured up death: separation. Separating them from the wives who had survived the Holocaust, or the new wives they had found and married in the camps, separating them from the babies who had given them back their manhood.

The four-week truce continued; so long as there was no war, Gad and Ike could ferry the people safely to Haifa.

The day came—a day, in early July, so hot it blistered the huts—when Raquela got word. “Come quickly. This is my last trip.”

On the bridge Gad looked drained.

“Others will finish cleaning out Cyprus. They're sending Ike and me to Europe to reoutfit our ships. From now on we'll be sailing back and forth from Naples with refugees from the DP camps and thousands of other Jews pouring into Naples from all over Europe.”

Already she felt a sense of loss.

He seemed to understand. “This is not good-bye, Raquela. I'll come to Jerusalem. I'll find you wherever you are.”

She clung to him. Would Arab planes bomb him? Would Arab submarines slide through the waters and rip his ship apart?

“I'll come back, Raquela.” They kissed passionately.

He walked her to the gangway and stood watching her descend.

On the dock she turned around. She waved. “Good-bye, Gad.” She looked at the handsome captain.

Would she ever see him again?

A few days later, her replacement arrived. She boarded the plane for Haifa.

TWENTY

JULY 1948

T
he engines revved, and within minutes the plane rolled down the Nicosia airstrip.

Cyprus fell away; below lay the Mediterranean, turquoise in the morning sun. In an hour Raquela would be landing in Haifa.

The plane flew smoothly through the blue cloudless sky, but Raquela's mind was in turmoil. Who was she? What did she want of life?

Love. Fulfillment. Fulfillment as a woman. Fulfillment in the field she had chosen.

Marriage? Yes. She wanted a man to hold her in his arms. She wanted marriage and her own children. But marriage to whom? Gad, or Arik?
Does every young woman
, she wondered,
discover herself through the eyes of the men who love her?
For she was beginning to see herself as the two men saw her.

Gad made her aware of her sexuality, of herself as a passionate and warm-blooded woman. Arik made her proud of her career—life-loving, life-giving, life-nurturing. Under his tutelage she would move to the top of her profession. Arik, too, made her aware that she was a desirable woman.

Married to Gad, she would probably have to move to Haifa, waiting and watching for his ship to come in. Her life with him would be like the sea that was his life—uncertain, stormy, with days of great beauty and calm, and weeks, maybe months, of loneliness. A life forever fraught with danger.

As the wife of a sea captain in Haifa, she would be the outsider. Her roots, her background, everyone she loved, was in Jerusalem. The city was almost human, like a beloved person in her life.

Were her feelings for Gad strong enough to overcome her apprehensions?

Married to Arik—she would live in Jerusalem. She would work at his side. She would never be alone; he would be her constant companion.

Arik's life was the life she knew and had loved before Cyprus. It would be more serene, more even-keeled, than Gad's. Did she love Arik enough to compensate for the excitement that Gad stirred within her?

The plane landed in Haifa. A sign greeted her:

WELCOME TO ISRAEL

Israeli soldiers guarded the airport. Israeli officials sped her through Immigration. Israeli customs men inspected her suitcase. She wanted to fling out her arms and embrace them. She was home. In Israel. And the British were gone.

On the street corners of the broad main avenue the old name, Kingsway, had been changed. The street signs, in Hebrew and English, bore the words
REHOV ATZMAUT
—“Street of Independence.” Even the air seemed to breathe the word “independence.”

She walked past shipping offices and small warehouses until she found the office of the Jewish Agency.

A young man glanced up from a cluttered desk. “What can I do for you, miss?”

“Can you tell me—is Captain Gad of the
Komemiyut
in Haifa?”

He looked at her. “He sailed an hour ago for Naples.”

Raquela taxied to the Street of Independence and pulled up at a curb where an intercity
sherut
waited with a sign on its windshield:
TO TEL AVIV
. She climbed into the front seat of the seven-passenger cab. It filled up almost immediately; the driver turned the ignition key, stepped on the gas, and maneuvered his way through the port city.

Circling the harbor, Raquela saw the graveyard of “illegal” ships and the famous American steamboat, the
Exodus 1947. “The Mayflowers of our State,”
Dr. Weizmann had called them.

Soon the white stone houses of Haifa and the biblical Carmel Mountains lay behind them; they were driving along the Mediterranean coast.

Raquela looked out the window as army trucks and jeeps filled with Israeli soldiers rolled by. In some of them the men were singing Palmach songs; they waved to the people in the
sherut
. She waved back, her joy tinged with apprehension. The truce was holding, but the soldiers made her realize the war was far from over.

“
Shelanu!
” The driver pointed proudly to the soldiers.

“
Ours
.”
That's the word, she thought. Our soldiers. Our cities. Our country. No longer owned by the Turks. No longer ruled by the British. Ours
.

The road suddenly looked familiar; it was the crossroad to Athlit.

She turned to the driver. “Do you know if all the refugees are out—if Athlit has been closed?”

“But of course. As soon as the state was born. They're citizens already. The first act of our Provisional Council of State was to end all restrictions on immigration.”

She stared straight ahead. Athlit was closed, but not Cyprus. Judith Steiner's brother, Joseph, and all the able-bodied men who had been imprisoned in Athlit were probably in the army. In a few days, on July 9, the truce would end. Unless the Security Council could prolong the cease-fire, the war would erupt again on every front.

Arriving in Tel Aviv, Raquela was stunned. She discovered there was no passenger traffic to Jerusalem: only convoys of jeeps led by the UN or the International Red Cross were allowed to make the journey. She sat on a café veranda on Allenby Road, sipping iced coffee, trying to figure out how to get home.

All around her Tel Aviv shrieked, honked its horns, ground its brakes. On terraces women beat their carpets with a
rat-tat-tat
like machine-gun fire. It was nearly noon. The sun beat fiercely on the concrete street. Yet the Tel Avivians moved along urgently, purposefully, carrying briefcases or newspapers under their arms.

How different our three big cities are
, she thought, still worrying how to get transport to Jerusalem.
Haifa is a morning city—workers hurrying to their jobs in the harbor, the factories, the oil refineries. Tel Aviv is high noon, the city of frenzied commerce and even more frenzied traffic. Jerusalem is the sunset city. Jerusalem is the eternal “going home.” Every trip to Jerusalem is a pilgrimage, a going up, a return. Jerusalem is my city. But how am I to get there?

She was beginning to panic. An army jeep drove slowly down Allenby Road. From the cafe veranda she caught sight of the driver, an officer in uniform. “Ze'ev,” she called out. He was a good friend of her brother Jacob's.

He stopped the jeep.

She ran down the stairs to greet him. “Can you help me?” she said. “I've got to get up to Jerusalem.”

“Hop in,” he said. “I'm just on my way.”

“God, Ze'ev. Somebody up there sent you to me.”

She ran back for her suitcase. Ze'ev tossed it in the back of his jeep and helped her climb up into the high front seat.

Soon they had joined a convoy of jeeps at the outskirts of Tel Aviv. Ze'ev, preoccupied, hardly spoke as they drove along the coastal plain through Jewish settlements, vineyards, and fruit orchards. A few miles before the approach to Latrun—the police-station roadblock from which Israel had failed to dislodge the Arabs—the convoy swerved onto a dirt road.

It was the “Burma Road”—the road that had been built at night, the secret lifeline that had broken the siege and saved Jerusalem.
Our road
, she thought.

It was steep and unpaved, winding through a wadi along the foot of the hills.

The line of jeeps churned up a cloud of dirt and dust. Her hair, her face, her clothes, were covered with dust. She smiled, even as the dust entered her nostrils.
Our dust. Our dirt
.

Near Bab-el-wad—the Gate of the Valley—they drove past coils of barbed wire. The “Burma Road” ended. They turned sharply left back to the old highway she knew. They were beginning the ascent, climbing the ancient Hills of Judea, the steep hills the Arabs had controlled during the winter war that had begun in November 1947.

Now the road was safe; the Arabs, defeated, had run away. But the sides of the road were a monument to war, a cemetery of burned-out trucks and cars that had failed to reach Jerusalem.

They drove past the village of Abu Ghosh, whose Arabs had chosen to stay with the Jews, past fertile kibbutzim in the hills, winding through the hills to the crest. Jerusalem lay ahead. Raquela could see its skyline. Her breath was short.

Separated from the convoy, they were driving now down Jaffa Road. She knew every shop, every kiosk, every house. The signs of war were everywhere; glass and rubble littered the streets. She saw gaping holes in stone buildings, and pockmarks where bullets had entered. Some of the buildings were stained ugly black from fires. But the city of stone had withstood the shelling.

A few women walked quickly, carrying string bags through which she could see a loaf of bread or a tomato and a cucumber.

The jeep drove up Ben Yehuda Street. She saw the bombed-out Vilenchik Building, the collapsed Amdursky Hotel, the apartment building where Esther's family had lived. The buildings looked like London in the blitz.

“I have to drop something in an office,” Ze'ev told her. “If you can wait a few minutes, I'll take you home. You'd have a hard time trying to find a cab. Gasoline is harder to get than…than blood.”

“Of course I'll wait.”

He returned in a few minutes and drove toward Bet Hakerem. The early-afternoon traffic was light; it was siesta time. Did people still take siestas these hectic days?

The jeep stopped in front of her tree-shaded stone cottage. She thanked Ze'ev, picked up her suitcase, unlatched the garden gate, and ran across the little patio, shouting, “Mama! Papa!”

“Raquela!” They flung open the door. Her mother reached her first and lifted her arms to embrace Raquela. Papa folded her in his strong arms.

“My child,” he whispered.

“Are you all right?” Mama asked. “Let me look at you. You're covered with dust. Are you feeling all right? Even your face is all gray, like a mask. I can't see what you look like.”

Raquela laughed. “I'm fine, Mama. Especially now that I'm home. All I need is a good shower.”

“Come on inside,” Mama said, businesslike. “Now I know why I saved all my water today. I must have felt you were coming home.”

As they entered the house, Papa explained. Jerusalem had no running water. The Arabs controlled two of the pumping stations that brought water to Jerusalem—at Latrun and at Ras el Ein. They had cut off the water supply, hoping that thirst might make Jerusalem surrender. But Israel held two other stations—at Babel-wad and, not far from it, at Saris, and was already beginning to lay pipelines. Meanwhile, the little water they had was brought in by trucks and horse-driven carts and was carefully rationed.

“We use the water five ways,” Mama said. “Drinking, cooking, bathing, sponging the floor, and finally the toilet. Today is so special we'll celebrate. You'll have the water.”

“I can't let you do that,” Raquela protested. “You can't be without water.”