The Gates of Zion (16 page)

“Did you not hear?” Kadar asked the quiet coppersmith. “A gang of Jews raped two young Arab women only this morning at Jaffa Gate.”

10

The Riot

It was nearly noon by the time Ellie passed through the gate with Yacov and his dog. The smells of roasting chicken and grilling lamb drifted through the air of the New City Jewish commercial district, and Ellie
’s
stomach rumbled. She wished she had taken Miriam up on her offer of Belgian waffles this morning.

“Are you hungry?” she asked Yacov as he and Shaul in unison lifted their noses to the aroma.

The boy nodded vigorously.

“Me, too―starving!” Ellie said. “So where’s a good place to eat around here? Lunch is on me.”

“There is a falafel shop not far.” He licked his lips at the thought.

“The best in the New City.” Then he added, “You have falafel in America?”

“Something like it.” She put her arm around his shoulders. “Back home we call it a hamburger, but it’s not half as good as falafel, Yacov.” Her mouth watered. If there was one thing Ellie could write home about, it was the Jewish food.

The café was a tiny place wedged between a tailor shop and a linen shop. It was crowded with black-coated merchants and shopgirls shouting their orders over a tall counter to the harried couple behind.

Two men seated at a rickety table in front of the window stood up as Ellie and Yacov entered.

Ellie sat down and pushed the empty plates and wadded napkins into a heap at the edge of the table. Yacov pulled up the chair opposite her and sat down, then peered out the window at Shaul, waiting patiently by the door.

“Looks like everybody in Jerusalem but me knew about this place,”

Ellie shouted over the din of clattering plates and bantering customers. “What is good to order?”

“Everything,” said Yacov enthusiastically as a stoop-shouldered old waiter scraped the dirty dishes onto a tray and bustled off. He returned a moment later with a pencil behind his ear and a pad of paper to take their order.

The waiter spoke kindly in Yiddish, so Ellieie told Yacov, “Order for me.”

When Yacov finished, the old man bowed politely and said to Ellie,
“Sehr gut,
liebchen,”
as he replaced the pencil behind his ear and plowed through the standing customers to deliver their order.

“What am I having?” she asked Yacov.

“Chicken. And I, lamb. And do you know about a drink called Coca-Cola? A new invention in Palestine.”

“Pretty good stuff, is it?” asked Ellie wryly.

“I have had it but one time, but it is most wonderful,” assured Yacov.

Outside the window, Shaul leaped to his feet and began to bark.

Yacov craned his neck to see the dog, who seemed to be eyeing someone across the street.

“Is he hungry, too?” Ellie asked.

“No. It is something else he sees.” Yacov watched his dog with disturbed interest. “Or hears.”

Ellie searched the faces of the pedestrians who passed in front of the window, then turned her attention to the strange menu before her.

Without Yacov, she would not have had the slightest idea what to order. When she looked up again, Yacov was standing at the window, frowning as he scanned the street and studied the barking dog.

“Sit down, Yacov,” she urged. “Lunch will be here in a second.”

“But look,” he said, almost in a whisper, “do you not see?”

With alarm, Ellie gazed in the direction he was staring. Far up the street, people seemed to be running toward them. A man on the sidewalk directly in front of them stopped to stare at the same time.

Ellie watched his face fill with horror and fear.

He turned on his heel and crashed through the door of the café, knocking another man down. “It is a riot!” he cried. “The Arabs have taken to the streets. Close your shops! Everybody return to your homes.”

A woman screamed. Men cursed in Yiddish as they pushed through the door en masse. Ellie and Yacov jumped from their chairs and crowded back in the corner, still able to see the panic in the street.

Ellie pulled out her camera and began snapping pictures as Jewish men and women rushed by. A plump older woman in a blue flower-print dress ran past with her arms raised high in the air and her mouth open in incomprehensible screams.

“Come on,” Yacov said as he jerked Ellie’s sleeve. “We must run.”

He pulled her toward the door as the café owner pushed her from behind. His wife stood behind the counter weeping and wringing her hands.

For an instant Ellie stood on the sidewalk in the midst of the confusion and gawked. Everywhere anxious merchants cranked down heavy metal shutters over the doors and windows of their shops. Only a block away the thunderous cry of “Jihad! Jihad!

Jihad!” mingled with the cries of the Jews as they fled before the mob or fought the fires that engulfed their shops.

As the Jewish merchants ran past her and the angry mob approached, Ellie saw the figure of the same Palestinian police officer who had interviewed her only this morning. He nonchalantly leaned against the wall with his arms folded, watching with indifference.

Three young Arab men stood a few yards away from him, just out of Ellie’s view. All of them gazed steadily at her. With a nod from the police officer, one of the three pointed at her and began to cut through the fleeing crowd in a deliberate path toward where Ellie stood.

Filled with rage that a man with government authority could stand in the midst of such carnage and never lift a finger, she raised her camera and photographed the policeman. Then she turned to Yacov, whose pleas for her to run with the others were now being made in panicked Yiddish.

Only minutes after the howling mob had entered the district, Princess Mary Avenue and Mamillah Road were littered with injured Jewish shopkeepers and the loot from their stores.

Ellie stood riveted to the sidewalk, helpless to stop the violence exploding around her. The smoke that swept along the street like a thick gray fog stung her eyes and engulfed everything in a dreamlike darkness. Her cheeks were wet with tears. Shaul’s frantic barking mingled with the sounds of crashing glass and anguished cries.

Workers, peasants, and adolescents in black-and-white-checkered keffiyehs swung clubs and iron bars in frantic, inhuman rage.

“Come on, lady!” urged Yacov. “Please!” He pulled hard on her arm, then was pushed, still reaching and calling for her, into the flow of the crowd.

“It’s a nightmare!” she shouted. “God, a nightmare!”

The three Arabs shoved their way toward Ellie as she tried to reach the boy. Just in front of her a sobbing tailor cranked down the shutter of his shop. The three men emerged from the crowd near him and stood in a defiant line, waiting for Ellie. The tailor lunged at them but was cut down by a blow to the back of his head with a pipe.

Then, as Ellie raised her camera with trembling hands and snapped the shutter once again, the tallest of the three Arabs plunged a long, curved knife deep into the tailor’s back. Ellie screamed as the man’s life ebbed away on the sidewalk. She felt her stomach revolt at the sight and turned aside to be sick. The world spun violently around her as she braced herself against the half-closed shutter of the tailor’s shop.

Trapped, she stared blankly at the three Arabs who stood before her.

Then her eyes fell to the knife of the murderer. Blood dripped from the point onto the toe of his shoe.

The three Arabs took another step closer. For the first time, Ellie saw the leer on the face of the man with the knife as he reached out and grabbed the collar of her shirt. Pressing himself against her, he pinned her to the wall with his weight and the force of his rage.

The murderer tore at Ellie’s blouse, ripping away the buttons and shoving her to the sidewalk and under the shutter into the darkness of the shop. If two Arab women were raped, then a thousand Jewish women would pay. And the Arab would begin the retribution with this red-haired woman.

***

Yacov turned and, through the undulating flow of the mob, saw Ellie pushed against the wall. “They will have her!” he cried. “Shaul!” he screamed to the dog. “Stop them!” He pointed toward the men and Ellie as he fought his way back toward her.

The dog dodged and ran through the legs of Jews and Arabs. Then, lips curled back in a snarl, he leaped at the face of the murderer as he ducked into the shop. As Shaul’s wolflike teeth tore a jagged hole in the man’s cheek, the Arab screeched curses and flailed wildly against the force of the attack. Startled, his companions stepped back long enough for Yacov to slip past them and the body of the tailor into the shop, where Ellie scrambled to find a place to hide.

“They will come for you, lady. Come on!” Yacov grabbed her arm and bolted for a stairway at the back of the shop.

Just as suddenly as he had attacked, Shaul turned away from the whimpering man and followed Yacov and Ellie.

Ellie and Yacov bounded up the dark stairway. The cries of the riot seemed unreal to her. Her ears were filled only with the sounds of her heart beating and short sobs that she knew must be her own.

Yacov held her arm and led her, stumbling, toward the door at the top of the stairs. She clutched at the camera still dangling around her neck.

“It’s okay, lady,” he said softly. “We will make it.” Then, as Shaul bumped his heels, he ordered, “To the butcher shop, Shaul!” In instant obedience, the dog turned and headed for the street.

***

Watching the event from an alcove across the street, Hassan left his post and started after Ellie and the boy while his henchman struggled to his feet, wiping blood from his face. As Hassan and the three men passed beneath the shutter, a shaggy mutt rammed into their legs.

“I shall kill the dog!” screamed the murderer as Shaul disappeared into the crowd.

“Forget the animal!” Hassan snapped. “It is the woman and the child we need. They have no way out. Set a fire, and let us be done with it.”

Hassan took a can of gasoline from a teenage boy, sloshing the volatile fluids through the open door of the falafel shop. The three Arabs poured a stream of gasoline into the tailor shop and struck a match. With a roar, hot flames devoured the fabrics and suits that filled the tiny, cluttered shop.

***

Yacov turned the doorknobs, throwing himself against the door. As heat and light rushed them, they fell into the tailor’s apartment. With a sense of unreality, Ellie noticed the dead man’s lunch still on the table. A half glass of wine waited where he had left it.

Deftly, Yacov found the narrow ladder that led to the rooftop. “Come on, lady. They will roast us like chickens!” he yelled as he pulled her near the ladder.

“What’s up here?” she asked, panicked.

“It is the only way!” he cried, shoving her up toward the trapdoor, then onto the roof as flames crackled behind them. Black smoke followed them as the fire quickly devoured the interior of the shop and licked the apartment. Yacov slammed the trapdoor closed and ran to the edge of the roof. He peered over and called back to Ellie, “There is a policeman standing by the men who tried to harm you!

Come see. Perhaps he will stop them.”

Crouching low, Ellie scrambled to Yacov and peered over the edge.

Wafts of black smoke poured from the trapdoor and drifted by as Ellie tried to make out the features of the policeman. In one clear instant she recognized the upturned face of Hassan. “It’s the same one we’re supposed to talk to this afternoon. I saw him a while ago, too.”

“Come, we must go. The fire.” Yacov tugged at her arm and led her to the edge of the roof closest to another building. Although the space between the two buildings was only four feet, to Ellie it looked like a yawning chasm. “We must jump.” Yacov climbed to the lip of the roof.

“I can’t.” Ellie looked down at the rough earth thirty feet below her as the fire burst through the trapdoor.

“Now!” Yacov jumped to the opposite roof, rolled a few feet, then jumped up. “It is not too far, lady! Jump!” he urged.

The fury of the fire raged behind her, warming her back as she teetered on the edge of the roof trying to gather the courage to jump.

Below her she could hear the crash of timbers as the second floor of the apartment began to fall through.

“Hurry!” Yacov cried. “Please, lady. Please jump!” He held his hands out.

She focused on his hands. Such small hands, yet she somehow felt as though they were trying to lift her over the gulf that stood between her and safety. Her knees felt like water; she turned in time to see the tar of the roof catch fire and race toward her.

She crouched and jumped with all her might, reaching Yacov’s outstretched arms. Landing on her feet, she held tightly to the boy as the roof of the tailor shop, where she had stood only seconds before, collapsed.

Scanning the ground below, she noted that Hassan and his men followed their progress as Yacov led Ellie to another rooftop leap and yet another.

A volley of gunfire ripped through the crowd below, silencing the screams of nearly a dozen Jews. Ellie recognized the body of the woman in the blue-flowered dress who had run in front of the café.

Slouched against the side of a building was the Yiddish-speaking waiter who had taken their order. His white apron was drenched with blood, but the pencil was still lodged behind his ear.

Hassan and the three Arab men continued to follow them, their eyes turned upward, as if the death and destruction around them were an everyday occurrence.

“The policeman is one of them!” Ellie shouted. “He’s leading them right for us.”

Suddenly a bullet richocheted off the dome of the roof, just inches from Yacov’s head. Plaster sprayed his eyes as the force creased the wall. He dropped to his knees and cried out, clutching his face.

“Are you hurt?” Ellie cried, rushing to his side. She pulled his hands away. His face was pitted with plaster, and his eyes were swollen shut.

“I can’t see!” the boy sobbed. “My eyes!”

Another bullet ripped into the structure behind Ellie. “Yacov, is there another way off these roofs? We’re like ducks in a shooting gallery up here.”