Stateless (46 page)

When the fighters were departing, Berin noticed Judit seated at the back of the room. He watched her stand and turn to leave with her comrades but their eyes met for the briefest of moments before she turned quickly away. It was her look that Immanuel Berin now pondered as he sat at his desk and watched Ashira
walk towards him and sit down. They were sitting in a schoolroom on the western side of the city, abandoned now because of the fighting, but a convenient and usually overlooked part of the city where British troops or Palestinian gunmen rarely ventured.

The nervous trepidation she had once displayed so prominently now seemed gone. She had changed. The tasks he had set her had instilled a confidence previously latent. And yet he felt profoundly saddened as she sat down because she reminded him of his wife when they were first married, now long dead in the Nazi concentration camp of Maidenek. Some women, young and older, reminded him of his wife, but he had long resigned himself to this burden.

‘Well?' he asked.

‘Since she returned she's not put a foot out of step.'

‘She's met nobody?'

Ashira shook her head.

‘Not in Tel Aviv when she went there? She didn't meet up with anybody?'

Again, Ashira shook her head.

‘Phone calls?'

The young woman shrugged. ‘Maybe from her apartment; I wouldn't know. She goes to Irgun meetings . . .'

Berin nodded. ‘Of course.' He paused. There had been many deaths in recent weeks but no one important . . . No one extraordinary. Perhaps his suspicions were misplaced. Perhaps Ashira was wrong.

‘Why don't we just deal with her? We need to act,' said Ashira, and her confidence and coldness worried him. Immanuel shook his head. When she'd first come to him a few weeks ago she was an ingénue, an innocent, an impassioned but naïve kid. Now, she was suggesting murder as though it was an extension of the life she led, a part of her normality.

‘We do not yet have facts . . .'

‘I have facts, Immanuel. I saw her shoot that man in his home. In front of his family. I saw what she did. I know what I know.'

Berin put a calming hand on Ashira's. ‘I understand. But I must be certain; another agency could have instructed her; there might have been something about the professor which we don't know . . .'

She nodded but her anger didn't subside.

Later, Immanuel Berin drove towards Tel Aviv to meet with someone he believed might provide insight. The questions raised about Judit were pointing in a dark direction, one which terrified him, but there was little proof.

Since Ashira had come to him and told him about Judit's killing of the professor, he'd done his own investigations of recent violent Jewish deaths. Why had so many prominent Jewish leaders, intellectuals, militant politicians, and journalists suddenly died, many violently? Their murders had been blamed on the British army's extra-judicial way of removing troublemakers, or else rogue Arab gunmen targeting those who spoke out publicly. Even in a world of violence and a cacophony of gunfire, those who had been killed had not been gun-wielding members of the Jewish paramilitary, but civilian firebrands, speaking to crowds, their only ammunition being microphones and typewriters.

Berin had examined all the cases he could find, all those that stood out since Ashira had alerted him to what she had seen. And he had begun to see a pattern in the information. He'd
managed to confirm at least six instances that put Judit in the vicinity or, at the very least, where her whereabouts could not be verified.

Before too long, Berin was sitting in the smoke-filled apartment home of Avraham T'homi, an old mentor to him. T'homi was once a senior commander in the Haganah but now had little to do with the Jewish paramilitaries, angered as he was at the politics of the organisations. He was none the less a man who understood the dark subterranean world of spies and spying.

T'homi believed in direct and immediate action, and was called a wildcat by his colleagues. Some years earlier, he'd murdered the Jewish Dutch poet Jacob Israel de Haan, because the man spoke out against violence and wanted a negotiated settlement between Arabs and Jews. Berin rarely agreed with T'homi's hard-line approach but he respected his insight and experience enough to ask what might motivate such a woman as Judit, and whether he was right in thinking that she was behind the murders.

T'homi's initial question to him was: ‘Where does she come from, where was she born?'

Immanuel told him she was Russian. T'homi laughed. ‘Then she's working for the NKVD, or the MGB as they call themselves now. Put a bullet in her head,' he said bluntly.

Immanuel was shocked. ‘But . . .'

T'homi waved away his protests. ‘I'm not being irrational, Immanuel. And I'm not leaping to wild conclusions. You're just not asking the right questions. No one does. It's why everything has turned to shit! How did she get to Palestine? Who did she come with? Was she alone, or did her family accompany her? When she arrived, did anybody on the ship know her previously? Was she invited to join Lehi or the Irgun, or did she just turn up one day and volunteer out of the blue? Has she been suddenly absent for any amount of time without her colleagues
knowing where she was? Has she had meetings with people you don't know and recognise? Have you been following her and seeing with whom she associates? If the answer to these questions is that you don't know, find out. If the answer is “yes”, then put a bullet in her head.'

The village of Ras Abu Yussuf

17 January 1948

B
leak-faced, frightened, breathless from walking eight miles through valleys and scrubland to avoid being seen by British patrols or Arab insurgents, Shalman Etzion finally crested a hill and saw the village ahead of him. He stood there for a few moments, drinking from the canvas-covered flask he'd stolen from a dead British Tommy in the days when he was in Lehi, and tried to see who was moving in the valley below.

It was the height of the day, and although the air was cold for January, the sun still had a radiating heat. He took off the Kova Tembel hat he was wearing, and wiped his brow. It was such a stupid shape for a hat, like a pointed cone, yet it had become the national symbol of Israeli farmers, and now everybody wore one.

A few days earlier, not far from the village he now surveyed, a massacre had occurred.

Arab fighters besieged the kibbutzim at Gush Etzion, blocking all food and supplies in and out of the settlement. The remaining British forces were under orders not to intervene and so sat and watched. The settlements were on land that was due
to be ceded into the Palestinian–Arab state after the UN vote. And this created a ripe target for Arab anger.

In truth, Shalman knew, it was one of many such places – communities of Jews on land that was soon to be Arab, and Arab villages soon to be deemed on Israeli land. A complex patchwork of people deeply and irreversibly intertwined, now politically divided by invisible map lines.

The Israeli paramilitary group Haganah sent a troop of thirty-five men and women to carry supplies of food and water to relieve the kibbutzim. These men and women walked on tracks through the night so that they weren't observed by British or Arab patrols. But the path was more difficult than they thought, and they were delayed. They were still on open land when the sun came up, and they were spotted by Arab patrols, who raised the alarm.

Residents from the local Arab villages, men and women, poured out to block their path and prevent the supplies getting through.

And that's when the fighting started.

Hundreds of Arab fighters from a militant training base arrived in trucks and cars. A pitched battle erupted. The Haganah fought until they ran out of ammunition, and then they were hacked to pieces.

Shalman had convinced himself that he had come to try and stop the fighting, to speak to the people of the village once more and urge them not to participate. But this seemed an entirely futile, even childish, notion.

The real truth was that Shalman had come to see Mustafa. It had been some time since he'd seen his friend, since he had last gone to the caves and the dig site. But now that war was surely upon them he knew they would soon be viewed as enemies. This was perhaps his last chance.

It took Shalman just ten minutes to descend the hillside and walk into the middle of the village. Arab men and women came out of their houses to see who the stranger was. None smiled. He had been tolerated before, some even liked him or respected the hospitality offered to him by Mustafa's father, but things were different now.

Shalman stopped and waited. He knew word travelled fast in villages and Mustafa soon appeared down the road and walked up to him. The two young men stood and looked at each other for what seemed a long time until finally Mustafa spoke.

‘Why have you come here, Shalman?'

Shalman didn't have an answer. Not one that was easily expressed.

‘There is no place for you here.' The words were blunt and cold and they hurt.

‘I heard what happened . . . at Gush Etzion . . . It wasn't you, was it?' said Shalman calmly.

Anger flashed across Mustafa's face, an anger Shalman had never seen before in the young man.

‘And what if it was? What if it had been my rifle? How would that change anything now?'

‘It doesn't have to be like this. I came to beg you not to be a part of this bloodshed. The talk in Jerusalem is of reprisals. If you make yourself a target, they will come for you . . .'

‘And are we not a target now? Have we not always been a target? Your target!'

‘What are you talking about? You're my friend,' insisted Shalman.

‘You lied to me!'

Shalman did not have to ask what Mustafa meant. He knew it in his bones.

‘You lied to me,' Mustafa repeated, his voice lower, resigned
and filled with a strange sadness. ‘You lied. It was you. On the airfield. It was you . . .'

Shalman's mind scrambled for words. ‘You have to understand –'

‘I understand very well.'

Shalman pressed on desperately. ‘When you first brought me here, I spoke to you of Gandhi, the Indian man who said that an eye for an eye will leave the whole world blind.'

‘Gandhi is not an Arab. Nor a Jew. We don't think in this way. Our way is to fight. An eye for an eye . . . And we all have to take sides. We all have to be true to our blood.'

‘But, Mustafa, our blood is the same! Isn't that what we were learning in the cave, digging treasures from the earth? My blood is the same as your blood. Can't you see that?'

‘It doesn't matter. You have your people. I have mine. There can only be trust, and how can I trust you when you murdered one of our children and lied to me?'

Antioch

1098

T
he pus oozed from the infected boils on the duke's penis and, though he took great pride in its enormity, it seemed to shrivel and retreat from Nimrod's probing before he put on the bandage.

The doctor had long been treating the duke's afflictions but now, on the Crusade, on open roads where hygiene was unknown, Nimrod's skills were insufficient. The duke let out a bellowing cry but the Jewish doctor's hands were steady as he cleaned the infection and applied an unguent to the wounds.

‘Dear God! This suffering had better be at an end when we take Jerusalem or so help me!' the duke yelled.

Nimrod ignored his master. It was no longer the physical health of the duke that worried Nimrod so much as the state of his mind. The itching from the disease he'd caught from the prostitutes was causing him madness at night. In France, Nimrod ensured that the prostitutes took a vaginal lavage before they were introduced to the duke, and that he used a specially concocted oil before he entered the women. This had kept him relatively pox-free since he had been acting as the duke's physician. But since the duke had been in the company
of all the other nobles, sharing God knows how many camp whores, and because of the lack of water with which to wash adequately on the road, hygiene had deteriorated and his health was suffering. Now the consequences of the whores he'd lain with after they crossed the Alpine Mountains into the lowlands of the Italian people were evident to see. And God only knew what fresh diseases he'd picked up since they'd entered the land of the Turk and raped all of the women who prayed to Mohammed for help. Nimrod had no idea of what diseases such women would carry in their bodies, and daily he prayed that he could make the itching in the duke's penis disappear.

‘Give me wine!' roared the duke.

Nimrod handed Henri the wineskin from beside the bed and watched as the big man greedily swallowed, partly out of thirst and partly out of pain.

The campaign had, as Jacob predicted, started with great excitement and song. But such enthusiasm quickly dissipated once thirst, hunger, and blistered feet took hold. Some of the soldiers and camp-followers had barely lasted more than a few weeks before drifting off in the night, presumably to return to their homes, or to settle into a nearby village where they'd met some wench.