Chapter 2

“They picked him up,” Wolf said quietly. “I saw him. He started to run along the beach after a couple of people who were running that way. Then he stopped and all of a sudden two soldiers came out of nowhere and knocked him down. They handcuffed him, slapped him around, and dragged him away.”

“He had a gun,” someone else added.

They were at Yakov’s house, a mile from the beach, on Remez Street off of Arlozoroff. Yakov had pulled on a pair of old trousers over his swimming trunks and now wore a white shirt open at the throat. He ran his hand through his thick black curly hair in despair and then looked up at Brodsky standing over him.

“They’ll hang him, you know. Several soldiers were killed tonight …”

“Eight of our people were killed,” someone else said.

“And they started it,” another voice said.

“I know they started it,” Yakov said patiently, “but they’re running the country, not us. Soldiers were killed. Anyone caught with a gun—” His shrug completed his sentence more eloquently than words could.

“We can’t let that happen,” Brodsky said flatly. “If he hadn’t shot out that radar scanner and the spotlight, none of us would be here now. We can’t let them hang him.”

“It’s happened before.”

Brodsky stared at the floor, thinking. He looked up. “Where will they take him?”

“To the station on Dizengoff for fingerprinting and photographing and questioning, tonight. Then to Acre Fortress tomorrow, probably. That’s where they usually hang them.”

“What about a trial?”

“He had his trial when he was picked up with a gun.” The voice was bitter. It was the same person who had said that eight of their people had died on the beach that night. “He was found guilty and sentenced, all in that one moment.”

Brodsky looked at the man who had spoken. It was Lev Mendel, Yakov Mendel’s younger brother. Max hadn’t seen the boy since he was fourteen; now, at nineteen, he stood almost as tall as Yakov. Max considered him a moment and then turned back to Yakov.

“You mean he won’t have a trial at all?”

Lev answered before his brother could.

“Oh, he’ll have the formality of coming up before a military court tomorrow afternoon at Acre,” he said disdainfully, “and he’ll undoubtedly be hanged at dawn the following morning.”

“Really efficient, aren’t they?” Wolf said sardonically.

“On things like that, yes.”

Brodsky’s jaw hardened. “Yakov, we have to stop them.”

“Max,” Yakov said quietly, “what do you suggest we do? Get eight more people killed trying to save just one? You know as well as I do who was responsible for the people who were killed tonight. We asked the Irgun for co-operation as far as the ship and getting the passengers ashore was concerned. We wanted numbers. But we specifically asked that nobody carry arms—”

“You mean we should have sat there like ducks in a shooting gallery?” It was Lev Mendel; he turned to Brodsky. “Max, if you want to help your friend, don’t waste your time with Yakov. He’ll still be laying the blame for what happened tonight a week after your friend is dead and buried; in fact, in a week he’ll have convinced himself it was all your friend’s fault. You come with me and maybe we can help him.”

Brodsky looked at Yakov questioningly. Yakov shrugged.

“Do what you want, Max. We just can’t sacrifice our people that way. This isn’t Robin Hood we’re playing, going into a castle to rescue the lady. You’ve been gone four years; things have changed. Except, unfortunately, the Irgun hasn’t changed. They still react like angry children—”

“An eye for an eye is reacting like angry children?” Lev said hotly. “A tooth for a tooth—?”

Yakov disregarded him.

“Max, we’re going to be a nation someday; someday soon. We have to start acting responsible—”

Lev snorted derisively.

“There’s a war on, the British are killing our people, they’re about to hang a man whose only crime was trying to reach Palestine, and Yakov says we should start to act responsible! Does Yakov tell the British not to come to the beach with guns? Oh, no! He saves that for Jews.” Lev looked as if he wanted to spit. “Max, make up your mind. If you want to help your friend, come with me. If not, let him hang. I certainly don’t care; we lived without him until tonight. But I’m on my way.”

He walked to the door and looked back.

“Wait!” Max said, and turned to Yakov. “I didn’t agree with the Irgun when I was in the Mossad before I went back to Poland, and I doubt I would agree with them today. But one thing I know—Ben Grossman is not going to hang if I can help it.”

“A very fine attitude—” Yakov started to say, but Brodsky had already followed his younger brother from the room.

Wolf sighed in disgust.

“For Grossman, of all people—!” he said to no one in particular, and hurried to catch up with Brodsky.

The cells were in a row facing the corridor; there were no outside windows through which articles might be passed. Grossman sat on his hard bunk and tried to comprehend the thing that had happened to him the night before.

The man in the truck who had spoken of hanging obviously didn’t know what he was talking about. Who hung men for no reason? Even at Maidanek they had reasons; possibly not reasons that would stand up in court, looking back on it, but reasons, at least. No; that part was nonsense. Nobody was going to hang anyone. But what was not nonsense was the fact that they had impounded his passport and his money and it didn’t look as if he would get them back. Certainly not the passport. At his interrogation the officer conducting the questioning had had the interpreter ask him a question in Spanish and when he could not answer the officer laughed and said something in English he did not understand. The translator had told him the officer said you would think at least they would have the intelligence to give a Venezuelan passport to someone who spoke Spanish; and then the officer had tossed the passport into a drawer. That, Grossman was afraid, was the end of that.

He looked up as an unarmed soldier came down the corridor, unlocked the cell door, and motioned him to follow. He frowned; it seemed very early in the morning, not even light, for anything to happen. It was only an hour or so since his interrogation had ended. But then a possible explanation came to him. He stood up, holding out his handcuffed wrists.

“I’m free to go?”

“I haven’t the foggiest notion what you’re trying to say, chum,” the soldier said in English, “but whatever it is, let me say to you may God have mercy on your soul, because the car is here to take you to Acre.”

Grossman shrugged and followed the soldier. They passed through the room where he had been interrogated and he looked about to see if possibly the translator might be around to help explain things, but the room was deserted. The soldier led him outside to a cobbled courtyard; drawn up beside the door was an armored car. There was an armed soldier seated next to the driver, and an armed soldier in back. Ben was pushed into the back seat; a second soldier instantly got in the near side of the rear seat, sandwiching their prisoner between them. The car started off, its headlights on bright, passing the gate into Dizengoff Street and accelerating. It crossed Ibn Gvirol into Kaplan with Grossman trying to read the street signs.

It was still dark and the streets were deserted. The car turned into Petah Tikvah Road with a squeal of tires and accelerated further. Grossman turned to the soldier on one side.

“Do you speak German?”

“Shut up, you bloody murderer! One of the lads who bought it last night was a pal of mine!”

“I do not speak English. Does anyone here speak German?”

“Another word out of you and we’ll finish you off here and claim you tried to escape!”

The words were unintelligible, but the attitude could not be mistaken. Grossman moved back in his seat, a cold feeling beginning to clutch his stomach. Was it possible the man in the truck the night before had been speaking the truth? Could he possibly be taken out to be hanged? No, that was nonsense! Still, he was still handcuffed and there were three armed soldiers and a driver taking him someplace in an armored car; they certainly didn’t treat all illegal immigrants in that fashion. But he had had no trial, and the British were sticklers for proper form. Hanged? It was ridiculous. He turned to the man on the other side of him, tapping him on the knee, pantomiming his query by pointing his handcuffed wrists to himself, then to the car, then to the road ahead, and finally raising his shoulders in a questioning gesture.

The soldier on the near side had been watching. He laughed and tapped Grossman on the shoulder. When Ben turned around, the soldier grinned and drew his hand across his throat, then jerked it upward. The implications were unmistakable. The soldier on the far side looked disgusted.

“Leave the poor sod alone,” he said somberly. “They’ll be hanging him soon enough.”

“Fuck the bloody bugger,” said the second viciously, and settled back, smiling grimly.

It was true! They were taking him out to be hanged! Why? Why? It was all because he was here in this filthy miserable country. He looked out at the passing landscape. The dawn had broken as they passed the limits of the city and took to the open country and all he could see in every direction was sand and little clumps of brush and an occasional stand of trees. God, what a desolate place! And how had this nightmare come about? He started to go back over his troubles ever since that fateful night when he had heard on the radio of Hitler’s escape from the coup, that night he had been so stupid as to go to Schlossberg for plastic surgery—then he gave it up. What difference did it really make? Much better than to dwell on the past would be to try and use the remaining minutes or hours to see if there was any solution to his problem. Was there the slightest chance of escape? He glanced at the soldier beside him and knew there was none. This one would enjoy nothing better than shooting him in the stomach and watching him suffer. What an end to a useful life! What a waste! And the money in Switzerland—it would lie there and rot, even as he would lie someplace in this horrible land and rot!

They came around a bend in the road; ahead of them a truck had stopped half in the road and half off it. Its cargo of Arab laborers, identified by their kaffiyehs, waited at the side of the highway while two of their members struggled over a tire that occupied the other half of the narrow highway. It was not an unusual sight at that early dawn hour.

“Bloody idiots!” the driver, and slowed down, blasting his horn.

“Asking to be rapped in the arse, the lot of them,” said the soldier beside him. “Suicidal beggars, them Arabs.” He raised his voice, joining it to the horn. “Get off the road, you bloody black bastards!”

The Arabs looked up at all the noise, quite as if they had been totally unaware of the presence of the armored car until that moment. The two men in the road dutifully started to drag the tire back and then left it; there was still not room enough to pass. The driver leaned on his horn again, while the soldiers waved their guns, using them to point to the tire, yelling at the men to get the unspeakable tire out of the way or have it crushed by the armored car. The Arabs crowded around the armored car, jabbering; suddenly the soldiers were each facing a revolver held in a steady hand. Lev Mendel brought a submachine gun from under his robe.

“The guns first,” he said, and picked the rifle from the hands of the nearest man. There was the briefest of pauses as if the soldiers were temporarily considering resistance, but it was impossible. The rest handed their guns over and sat silent.

“Down.”

They climbed down uncertainly, angrily, and stood together, glaring at their captors, staring around for some witness to this further disregard for British authority, but there was not a car or a truck in sight at that early hour on the deserted road. Ben Grossman, looking in amazement at the robed figures with the swarthy skin and odd headdress, suddenly recognized Wolf among them, and then Brodsky, who was trotting toward the armored car. He jumped down and went to join Wolf while Brodsky raised the hood of the armored car and reached for the rotor.

“Leave it!” Mendel commanded.

“It’ll hold them,” Brodsky said, surprised.

“This will hold them better,” Lev said, and raised his machine gun.

“No!”

“Yes,” Lev said, and pulled the trigger. The machine gun stuttered; the four British soldiers were still staring in disbelief, their hands held before them as if to ward off the bullets, when they died. The men in the group moved in instantly, each taking his proper part in the operation as if it had been well rehearsed. The bodies were tossed back into the armored car and a young man moved into the driver’s seat, swinging the wheel, bringing the car behind the truck. The rifles and the tire were piled into the truck and the remaining men jumped aboard, pulling the handcuffed Grossman up beside them. Lev Mendel climbed up into the cab beside the driver, and the truck, followed by the armored car, turned from the highway onto a barely discernible track that led into the barren dunes and rock. The entire operation had taken two minutes from start to finish.

They bumped over the rough trail for fifteen miles before they came in sight of their objective, the remains of an old cluster of cement-block buildings built beside what seemed to be an oasis, although when they reached the trees the reason for the desertion was evident; whatever spring had once nurtured the trees had long since dried up and the occupants of those long-since erected buildings had taken their animals and gone off. The armored car was driven beneath the trees and the men from the truck instantly began spreading brush over it. The others removed their robes and kaffiyehs and stored them in one of the buildings, while from another, one of the men backed out an old touring car. Then the entire group got back in the truck, waiting for Lev.

Lev took Brodsky to one side, but before he could speak, Brodsky got in the first word.

“That was murder.”

Lev Mendel shrugged. “That was an execution.” He studied Max’s face and then shook his head sadly. “We’re fighting a war; even the Haganah agrees to that. Shooting those men was essential. They had seen us; they could have described us. It was the only thing to do.” He went on before Max could say anything. “Do you remember the kibbutz Ein Tsofar, near Matzeda?”

Max nodded, his face set, his eyes cold as he looked at the armored car with its dead set beneath the tree.

“You’d better take your friend there,” Lev said. “Take the touring car; someone will bring it back, or you can bring it back yourself. Leave it at my house. Ein Tsofar isn’t an Irgun hangout, if that worries you; it’s simply a place I think your friend will be safe. The British seldom go that far from their fortresses, and they seldom bother settlements as far out as Ein Tsofar. Anywhere else he could be in danger, because they’ll really put out an all-points bulletin on him as the best way to find the rest of us. And he’s the only one they can identify.” He looked up at the sky as if looking for aircraft. “You have a few hours until they begin missing their armored car and crew. Don’t waste time getting there.”

He turned and walked to the truck without waiting for a rejoinder, and climbed in. As the truck turned to head back the way it had come, he leaned from the cab, waving an arm, calling out:

“Shalom!”

Shalom. Peace. Lev had been right; the execution had been necessary. But it was still an odd word to hear, Brodsky thought, after that morning’s work.

Life at Ein Tsofar was everything Benjamin Grossman had feared life at a Palestinian kibbutz would be, and worse. The kibbutz was set at the foot of a towering mesa quite similar to the cliff fortress of Matzeda, or Masada as the English called it, and less than five miles to the south of it. Like Masada it was about a mile from the Dead Sea. The kibbutz contained many buildings, bare white concrete or cement-blocks squares, fences in from any predators and with outposts at the corners of the compound for protection. It looked, in fact, much like a concentration camp, only one that had been established on the landscape of the moon.

Yet Benjamin Grossman served a very useful function at Ein Tsofar, for in addition to the orchards and the date palms and the fig trees and the even rows of melons made possible by the freshwater spring from which the kibbutz earned its name, there were also caves in the mountain behind the farm, ancient caves which had been used by ancient tribes as cisterns for the capture of water when the rains came, and were now converted to small manufacturing areas, well hidden by camouflaged netting, by racks for drying clothes, and in these caves Benjamin Grossman’s ability as an engineer came in handy.

But Grossman hated the place with a hatred that grew each day he was forced to stay there. Every morning he woke in his barren room—his cell, as he thought of it—to face the same monotonous view, the same unbearable hot weather, the same dry wind, the same burning sun; and after a poor breakfast, the same primitive machinery in the same damp caves making the same crude land mines and small bombs. Not even his ability at improving the inadequate operation gave him any satisfaction. He was a prisoner as effectively as he had been at Belsen, nor was there any more escape than at the camp. The British-controlled radio still offered its large reward for his capture; the few newspapers brought in by the rare visitors to the settlement still carried his picture together with the pictures of the armored car and its grisly cargo, which had been located almost a week after the killings. Every airport, every seaport, every bus station had his face on posters and engraved upon the minds of its armed guards. To show up at any one of them would have been suicidal. And to the east, had he been able to cross the Dead Sea or go around it, was the same continuing mountainous desert, and hostile desert tribes.

He had always thought of the desert as rolling yellow sands, as in the films, or in the pictures they had been shown of Rommel’s victories. But here the desert was far more formidable. It was a prison of inconceivable and unclimbable cliffs, steep wadis with sharp jagged rocks to break the bones and rip the skin of anyone tumbling into one, stones to trip the unwary, gullies and cul-de-sacs to lead one into starvation or death by thirst, with no one within miles to hear a cry for help. It was the deepest pit of hell, and he was locked into it as effectively as if he had been chained to the very mountain behind them, facing vultures in Promethean fashion.

Most of the couples at the kibbutz were married; the few singles were male and for the most part worked in the illegal cave-factory. They all wondered at the habitual silence of this newest member of their group. They recognized the position he found himself in, an innocent fugitive from the British and the hangman, but having found himself in that position they would have supposed he would have welcomed the safe refuge their settlement offered and would have been more appreciative. But he kept very much to himself, never acting as one of the members of the co-operative, never even coming into the community room in the evening to listen to the radio concerts, or to join in the discussions or the group singing; never attending their Saturday-night dances. Instead he would sit in his small airless room—cell—and stare from the window down the darkening rock-strewn slopes to the slate-gray surface of the sea, feeling as landlocked as the quiet mineral-laden waters, and wonder how and when he could escape. But even the formative action of starting to make a plan would be stopped by the very nature of the wilderness that surrounded and confined him. First, to get to Switzerland and freedom he had to get back to civilization, and as long as the British maintained their rule of Palestine this was going to be difficult. At least if the crude land mines and the small bombs he helped manufacture led to an end of that rule, he was doing something, however little, in his own behalf.

He had been at Ein Tsofar for nearly three months when Max Brodsky came to pay a visit. With him was his fiancée, a girl named Deborah Assavar. The three sat in the community hall that evening after dinner, while Max spoke of his new assignment with the Haganah in Tel Aviv. There was justice for you! Grossman thought; Max in civilization—such as it was in a Jew country—while he struggled in the desert, and found himself studying the girl whenever he thought he was unobserved. She was certainly not his idea of the typical Jewess, although she did have dark hair cut short, and wide black eyes, smooth olive skin, and with just the faintest curve to her aquiline nose. But her lips were full and sensuous, her teeth white and even, her body full-bosomed, and he realized he was comparing her to Sarah, the last girl he had had at Maidanek. Suddenly he was picturing Deborah on a bed, unclothed, her lush body his, his hands upon her, his lips softly brushing her large nipples as he had done with Sarah, listening to her begin to gasp with pleasure. He became aware that Max was speaking to him. He looked up, startled, brought out of his fantasy with a jar.

“What?”

“I said I’d better go in and talk to the manager, Perez, about a place for us to sleep,” Max said, and came to his feet. “Entertain Deborah while I’m gone, will you, Ben?”

“Of course,” Ben said. He watched Max leave and then fell silent, staring down at the floor.

The girl looked at him curiously.

“You’re not at all what I expected,” she said quietly.

He looked up, surprised. “No? What did you expect?”

“I don’t know.” She smiled faintly; he noticed the smile brought out a small dimple on one comer of her mouth. “Max has told me so much about you, I suppose I thought it would be like meeting an old friend. But you’re different, that’s all.” She laughed. “I know it sounds silly, but I had formed a certain picture of you in my mind, and you don’t look like that at all.”

“And what did I look like in that picture in your mind?”

She became serious, studying him critically.

“Well, to begin with, you were darker, more like Max; your hair and your eyes—”

“You don’t like blond hair? Or blue eyes?”

“I like them very much. And you were taller—”

“Taller? I’m six feet tall.”

“I know, but—Max has told me all the things you did together, how you met, how life was in the camps, how you came to his aid when that guard slashed Morris Wolf with his whip—”

“I hated that guard,” Grossman said quietly, intently, and could almost feel the hate welling up in him again as he said it. “When you hate a man as much as I hated him, you don’t have to be tall or short or anything else to do what I did.”

His intensity seemed to bother her. “Is hate that important to you?”

Grossman thought about that a moment and then shrugged.

“At times,” he said, and looked at her, interested in her thoughts. “Don’t you hate anything?”

“I hate killing,” she said quietly. “I’m a nurse and I hate killing. I hate to see children hungry, or hurt. I hate to see people suffer. I hate injustice.”

“Then hate is important to you.” Grossman couldn’t think of anything else to say on the subject of hate, and he didn’t want the conversation to end. “What else did Max tell you of me?”

“He told me how you turned on the truck heater on the train, when you went from Germany to Italy, or you would have both frozen to death. He told me how you fixed that marine engine on the ship—”

“I didn’t fix it; I merely started it. And you also don’t need to be tall to start a marine engine. Wolf could have started it if he had known what to do. Besides,” he added, suddenly irritated, “I’m not short. Possibly next to Max, but I’m not short.” He suddenly found himself on his feet, surprised to hear his own words. “Stand up. Let’s see how tall I am next to you.”

She stood up and came to face him. Her eyes were even with his chin. He was aware that she was a tall girl; he was also aware that her breasts were almost touching him. She looked at him, laughing; then her laugh disappeared. They looked into each other’s eyes for several long moments; then suddenly she looked down.

“You’re tall enough,” she said quietly, and went to sit down.

He felt foolish as he also sat down. It’s been too long, he thought; it’s been many years since I was alone with a pretty girl, flirting, making light conversation, looking into her eyes. And this was a girl he could not flirt with, or, as it was turning out, even make conversation with, light or otherwise. Wolf, short and ugly, would have found the right things to say, the light things, the clever things. Still, looking into her eyes had brought back feelings he hadn’t experienced since he was a student at Munich. It made him feel young, and the fact was that he wasn’t young anymore. He was old, if not with years, with lost dreams and frustrations. Too old for any girl.

Deborah was watching him, her face serious.

“What did you expect when you met me?” she asked, as if she really wanted to know. “What did Max tell you about me?”

“Max never spoke about you,” he said without thinking, and then realized how poorly that sounded. He looked apologetic. “He never did, to be honest, but the reason was that he didn’t want to share you, even to that extent. You would have to know the camps to understand that. You would have been demeaned, dirtied, by being spoken of in those places.”

“Max is like that,” she said, and sighed. “He’s a lovely man.” She suddenly smiled. “Well, if Max didn’t tell you about me, then you can’t be disappointed.”

“I’m not,” he said with a fervor that surprised him. “Oh, I’m not.” And looked up in profound relief as Max came back into the room. At least he had been saved the embarrassment of saying something he might well have regretted later. Although, he had to admit, it would have been good to say, regardless of the consequences. She was, indeed, a most attractive girl, and he had been alone a long time.

Lucky Max!

On September 4 of that year 1947, a certain Michael Wishnak appeared at Ein Tsofar kibbutz. That evening after work the people of the kibbutz, including Benjamin Grossman by direct request, were called together in the community hall. Wishnak spoke.

“As you are undoubtedly aware from last night’s radio,” he said, “the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine, UNSCOP, has recommended in a majority report that the British mandate over Palestine be terminated, and that Palestine be partitioned into sovereign Arab and Jewish states. This morning, just before I left Jerusalem, we also learned that President Truman accepts this partition plan—”

He was interrupted by a cheer; he took the opportunity to take a sip of water before raising his hand for quiet. When the room at last fell silent, he went on.

“The UN General Assembly will vote on the UNSCOP recommendation, probably in two or three months. If they vote for partition—and we believe there is a chance that they will—then it will only be a matter of months after that before the British have to leave. The British, as we know, have not been any great protection against attacks on Jews and on Jewish settlements by Arab bands, but they have been helpful to a small degree. Once they are gone the situation will be much worse. The Arab states, all of them and officially, have said they will attack us and try to wipe us out. For once we see no reason to doubt their word; they will try. We have to start now, therefore, to prepare for those attacks.”

He bent over his briefcase; this time the silence was intense as he took out a piece of paper, studied it a moment, and then looked up.

“Up until now, the attacks on the settlements have been sporadic. Once the Arab armies begin to invade Palestine, the attacks will be concerted. This is certainly not to say that attacks on the kibbutzim and the moshavim will not continue while the British are still here; it simply means that we must be prepared for more concentrated and more vicious and better-armed attacks. The settlements are going to have to be prepared to defend themselves to a large extent; the cities are going to have their own problems. Certain settlements, such as Ein Tsofar, must be strengthened to act as bulwarks for the smaller and weaker settlements in their areas. They must be prepared to give these smaller settlements help, or to take in survivors or refugees from these settlements. Ein Tsofar is a natural choice in this part of the Negev; it is protected at its rear by the mountain; it has water, and it is now sufficient in food, or at least can manage to exist on its own food if it has to. And it has caves, and an arms-manufacturing facility of sorts, primitive though it be. Regarding the arms, we must enlarge the facility to provide better and more land mines and bombs, and if possible small arms. As to water, it must be conserved; old cisterns must be cleared and cleaned to store water during the rains. Food will have to be conserved, and additional stores of tinned foods sent here. Within a month we will establish at Ein Tsofar a hospital with a doctor and nurses to implement your small clinic. Our underground bunkers must be enlarged for the children—”

There was an argumentative shout from one of the women. “Why must the children stay?”

“Because, at present, they have no place else to go,” Wishnak said patiently. “Our cities may be overrun; it is almost a certainty that they will be bombed. There is going to be street fighting with the local Arab population. And where else can the children go? No country is offering us permission to send our children to them, any more than they offered the Jewish children of Europe any escape during the holocaust. No country is helping us at all, as a matter of fact.” He shrugged. “When there is a safer place for the children, they will go there, but at present nobody has anyplace to go, including the children. Only into the sea.”

He waited a moment for further argument; there was none. He went back to his paper almost wearily.

“We must strengthen the defenses of the settlements, and particularly Ein Tsofar, which will be a key point in our defense. We have been in touch with the Irgun and the Stern people; we would expect in the case of an attack by the Arab countries they would be willing to submit to a central authority, that of the Haganah, because as the American Ben Franklin said, if we don’t hang together, we shall assuredly hang separately. I should like to see the men in charge of the defense, and the person responsible for arms building, together with Joel Perez the manager, as soon as this meeting is over.”

Benjamin Grossman sat through the meeting discussing his requirements for additional raw materials and equipment to manufacture greater quantities of mines and bombs and begin to manufacture larger weapons with no expression on his face, and little attention to the discussion. His mind was on far more important things. The man had said that there was a good possibility that the UN might abolish the British mandate, and once the British were out of Palestine, he would be a free man! And once that happened, Ein Tsofar and their awful food and their pitiful little arms factory and their imprisoning desert would be a thing of the past. And this time nobody or nothing was going to stand in his way. He had waited too long as it was. Let the Jews and the Arabs battle to their hearts’ content; let them annihilate each other and blessings on both of them. He would be out of it.

The hospital contingent came to Ein Tsofar in mid-October, trucks rumbling along the dirt road that skirted the Dead Sea, churning dust, led by a jeep with armed men, for the Arab attacks on outlying settlements and small traveling convoys had increased greatly, not waiting for any vote on partition in a land thousands of miles from their own. Ben Grossman heard of its arrival but paid little attention; by the time he had finished his day’s work and had cleaned up for supper, most of the equipment for the hospital had been unloaded and temporarily stored in the cave that had been selected for the enlarged clinic. Unlike the other members of the kibbutz who had come from their chores to watch and help with the unloading, Grossman had no interest in the activity. Instead he waited for the supper hour sitting in his room, staring as usual at the slopes leading to the waters below and the mountains beyond that completed the walls of his prison.

There was a diffident knock on his door and he looked up in surprise; as a general rule he was left pretty much to himself.

“Come in.”

The door opened; he stared as Deborah smiled at him. He came to his feet in confusion.

“Is Max here?”

“No,” she said. “I’m alone. Or rather, I came with a doctor and three other nurses, but not with Max. I’m with the hospital.”

“But—” He stopped, still surprised to see her.

Deborah smiled at his expression. “Aren’t you even going to say hello?”

“I’m sorry. Of course—hello. It’s just—well, I’m rather surprised. I didn’t expect to see you again. I mean, not alone. I thought by now you and Max would have been married.”

Deborah looked at him steadily.

“Max and I are not going to get married. He’s a fine man, a strong man, a wonderful man, and I suppose I even love him in a way. But not in the way you should love a man to marry him and spend your life with him.”

He didn’t know what to say. He had never in his wildest dreams expected to see Deborah appear at Ein Tsofar, with or without Max, even though he had pictured her in his dreams often enough. He looked about his little room, trying to think of some words.

“I—well, I hope you like it here.” He seemed to see his room for the first time. “I’m afraid the accommodations aren’t very luxurious—”

Deborah smiled. “I was raised on a kibbutz in the north. Ein Tsofar is far better than the one I knew as a child. We started from nothing, bringing water miles. This is heaven by comparison. And as for accommodations—” Her smile broadened. “I imagine the quarters for married couples are a lot better than this.” Ben felt his face getting red. Deborah took pity on him. “It’s nearly time for supper. Shall we go?”

They made love for the first time one week later. Ben had spent the evening watching Deborah play chess, sitting on the arm of her chair in the community room; in the background the radio played softly, a concert from Jerusalem. For that moment, at least, he felt peace. It was an odd feeling, a rare feeling. It was even a pleasant feeling, but it was also in a way a disturbing feeling. He could not allow this feeling of well-being to take him from his ultimate goal of reaching Switzerland and his money there; not after all the sacrifices he had made to reach that goal. But still, it was a welcome feeling from those of frustration with which his life had been filled before the arrival of Deborah.

When the game ended—and he had not paid enough attention to even know who won, only that Deborah’s arm was pressed familiarly against his leg and that her hair smelled clean and fresh—he walked her to her room. She opened the door and then turned to him, pulling him to her, reaching up to brush her lips against his cheek. They kissed; the kiss grew in intensity as he tightened his grip on her; then she pulled away and took his hand, leading him into the room, closing the door behind them, not bothering to put on the light. They lay on the bed in the darkness, just holding each other tightly, and then he slowly started to unbutton her blouse and free her breasts, and felt her fingers opening the buttons of his shirt one by one.

They made love slowly, deliciously, and when at last it was over Ben Grossman realized that it was the first time since he had lost his virginity at the age of fifteen that he had made love without comparing the woman beside him with some previous woman someplace, sometime. He felt sure he was not falling in love, because he had never fallen in love, but he also knew it was important to him to be able to repeat the wonderful experience, to enjoy again those exquisite sensations. Deborah turned to him and stared at him in the dark, her hand softly rubbing his chest. Her voice was low, warm.

“‘I’m sure we can get larger quarters together without getting married. I’m sure Joel Perez would understand. Would you like that?”

For a moment his gratitude at her understanding, together with the emotion brought on by being next to her and still feeling the euphoria of love-making, nearly made him say that marriage was what he wanted, but some inner caution held him back.

“Yes,” he said softly and held her tightly, kissing her cheek, then her neck, feeling himself begin to get excited all over again. “I would like that very much.”

Deborah Assavar was born of Iraqi-Jewish immigrant parents in the small town of Hadera, almost exactly halfway between Tel Aviv and Haifa, on the Mediterranean. When she was two years old, her father decided that the life of a fisherman was not for anyone both accustomed to the land and unaccustomed to seasickness, and the family joined others to form the kibbutz of Ramat Mizrah in the Galilee. Deborah was too young to remember Hadera on the sea, but as she grew up she was sure there had to be a better place than Ramat Mizrah, or a better life than being hustled into a shelter to avoid Arab raids every week or so, or carrying water miles from the time she was old enough to handle a full bucket. The settlers of Ramat Mizrah had all been farmers at one time or another in their lives, but none had been fully prepared for the hardship that lay in trying to wrest a livelihood from the inhospitable desert, which had been the only land they could afford for their project.

One by one they succumbed, either to the Arabs or to the sun or to the endless toil of working the harsh land without proper tools. Deborah’s father had simply laid down his hoe one day, lay down beside it, and ceased to breathe. Her mother had grieved for a short time and had then taken her husband’s place in the fields, to die two months later in giving birth to a dead brother for Deborah.

Nursing was a natural career for anyone raised in such circumstances. There were no doctors nor any hospitals nearer than Haifa, and the settlers had to learn to take care of themselves. Those too young for the field took care of those even younger. The application of bandages, or the dosing of the sick, had to be handled by those who did not contribute to the other labors of the kibbutz, or by those with the stomach to face gunshot wounds without fainting. By the time Deborah was thirteen she was dividing her time between teaching the younger children their alphabet as she had been taught, taking care of the small dispensary that had been established, and taking her turn with her rifle at the guard station at night.

Her ambition had been to become a doctor, but this was clearly impossible under the circumstances; her education was lacking in many respects. But when the settlers finally admitted to themselves that not every kibbutz had to become a success story for the visitors from America, when Ramat Mizrah was finally abandoned, Deborah knew that at least she could and would become a nurse.

She did not return to Hadera with the others but went to Haifa to enter a hospital and work for her room and board, doing the most menial jobs while learning her profession. It was a hard life, but she was used to a hard life. It left little time for friendship and none for love, other than the compassionate love she felt for her suffering charges. But it built a strong woman, a woman strong enough to face the fact that the only man who she had ever felt anything for until that time, Max Brodsky, was not for her; but that a man named Benjamin Grossman, a quiet, at times even sullen man, had something for her that she needed. And that she had something for him that he needed, whether he recognized that fact or not.

She looked at the profile of the man sleeping beside her and smiled. No, she had not been wrong in asking for the assignment to Ein Tsofar. She had not been wrong in falling in love with Benjamin Grossman.