Exodus - Leon Uris [13]
David was not listening. He squinted in the half light and slowly read the words of a woman who missed and longed for her lover. He folded the letter tenderly and carefully placed it in his breast pocket to be read again and again, for it might be months before she could send another. “How is she?” David asked.
“I don’t see what my sister sees in you. Jordana? Jordana is Jordana. She is wild and beautiful and she loves you very much.”
“My parents ... my brothers ... how is our Palmach gang ... what ...”
“Wait a minute, wait a minute. I’ll be here for a while—one question at a time.”
David pulled out the letter and read it again, and the two men were silent. They stared out of the french doors at the ancient wall across the road. “How are things at home?” David whispered.
“Things at home? The same as always. Bombings, shootings. Exactly as it has been every day since we were children. It never changes. Every year we come to a crisis which is sure to wipe us out—then we go on to another crisis worse than the last. Home is home,” Ari said, “only this time there is going to be a war.” He put his arm on the shoulder of his smaller friend. “We are all damned proud of the work you have done in Caraolos with these refugees.”
“I have done as well as can be expected, trying to train soldiers with broomsticks. Palestine is a million miles away to these people. They have no hope left. Ari ... I don’t want you antagonizing Mandria any more. He is a wonderful friend.”
“I can’t stand people patronizing us, David.”
“And we can’t do the job here without him and the Greek people.”
“Don’t be fooled by the Mandrias all over the world. They weep crocodile tears and they pay lip service to our millions of slaughtered, but when the final battle comes we will stand alone. Mandria will sell us out like all the others. We will be betrayed and double-crossed as it has always been. We have no friends except our own people, remember that.”
“And you are wrong,” David snapped back.
“David, David, David. I have been with the Mossad and the Palmach for more years than I care to remember. You are young yet. This is your first big assignment. Don’t let emotion cloud your logic.”
“I want emotion to cloud my logic,” David answered. “I burn inside every time I see something like that convoy. Our people locked up in cages like animals.”
“We try all sorts of schemes,” Ari said; “we must keep a clear head. Sometimes we are successful, sometimes we fail. Work with a clear mind, always.”
Even now they could still hear the sound of sirens over the breeze. The young man from Jerusalem lit a cigarette and stood for a moment in thought. “I must never stop believing,” he said solemnly, “that I am carrying on a new chapter of a story started four thousand years ago.” He spun around and looked up at the big man excitedly. “Look, Ari. Take the place you landed tonight. Once the city of Salamis stood there. It was in Salamis that the Bar Kochba revolution began in the first century. He drove the Romans from our country and re-established the Kingdom of Judah. There is a bridge near the detention camps—they call it the Jews’ Bridge. It has been called that for two thousand years. I can’t forget these things. Right in the same place we fought the Roman Empire we now fight the British Empire two thousand years later.”
Ari Ben Canaan stood a head taller than David Ben Ami. He smiled down at the younger man as a father might smile at an overenthusiastic son. “Finish the story. After the Bar Kochba revolution the legions of Rome returned and massacred our people in city after city. In the final battle at Beitar the blood of murdered women and children made a crimson river which flowed for a full mile. Akiva, one of the leaders, was skinned alive—and Bar Kochba was carried off to Rome in chains to die in the lions’ den. Or was it Bar Giora who died