Exodus - Leon Uris [180]
Shouts arose: “The oil refinery!” ... “They’ve got the refinery!” ... “Maccabee raid!”
Ari grabbed Kitty’s hand. “Let’s get out of here. In ten minutes the whole Carmel Valley will be crawling with British soldiers.”
The café was emptied in seconds. Ari led Kitty out quickly. Below them oil was flaming madly. The entire city screamed with the frantic siren shrieks of speeding fire trucks and British patrols.
Kitty lay awake half the night trying to comprehend the sudden violent things she had seen. She was glad that Ari had been with her. Would she get used to living with this? She was too bewildered to think about it, but at the moment she felt her coming to Palestine was a sorry mistake.
The next morning the oil refinery was still blazing. A pall of thick smoke hung over the entire Haifa area. The information spread that the raid was Maccabee terrorist work. It had been led by Ben Moshe—Son of Moses—the Maccabee field commander under Akiva, and formerly a professor at the Hebrew University before he rose in Maccabee ranks. The raid was part of a double-pronged Maccabee action. The other strike was against the Lydda airdrome in another part of Palestine, where the terrorists destroyed six million dollars’ worth of Spitfire fighter planes on the ground. The action was the Maccabees’ own way of welcoming the Exodus.
Ari had been able to acquire a small Italian Fiat, a 1933 model. The drive to Tel Aviv took only a few hours under normal conditions. Inasmuch as he had never known conditions to be normal he suggested they depart Haifa early. They drove down from the Carmel and took the coastal road along the edge of Samaria. Kitty was impressed by the greenness of the fields of the kibbutzim near the sea. Their color showed more brilliantly by contrast to the drabness of the hills and the dulling glare of the sun. A few minutes’ drive from Haifa they met the first roadblock. Ari had warned Kitty to expect it. She watched his reactions. He was apparently not at all annoyed, despite the fact that many of the soldiers knew him and taunted him with the reminder that his amnesty was only temporary.
Ari left the main road and drove to the Caesarea ruins on the sea. A lunch had been packed for them at the pension and they ate it on the ancient sea wall. Ari pointed to the Sdot Yam—Fields of the Sea—kibbutz where Joab Yarkoni lived and where he had spent much time with the Aliyah Bet when they beached the illegal runners during the 1936–39 riots. Ari showed Kitty how the Arabs had built their town on ruins, some Roman, some Crusader. The Arabs were experts in building on other people’s civilizations and had, in fact, constructed only one wholly new city in all of Palestine in a thousand years. Some of the magnificent Roman statuary and columns had been dragged off from Caesarea and could be found in Arab homes throughout the Samarian and Sharon districts.
After lunch they continued south toward Tel Aviv. The traffic was light. There was only an occasional bus load of either Arabs or Jews or the ever-present donkey cart. Every now and then a speeding, siren-screaming British convoy raced past them. As they passed Arab sections Kitty noticed the contrast of these villages and lands. The Arab woman toiled in the fields and the Arab fields were stony and drab. The women walked along the roadside encased in cumbersome robes with enormous loads balanced on their heads. The coffeehouses along the road were filled with listless men sitting motionless or lying down playing backgammon. Below Zichron Yakov—Memory of Jacob—they passed the first barbwire-enclosed ominous-looking Taggart fort. At Hadera, a bit farther, they came to another, and thereafter they seemed to pop up at every town and crossroad.
Beyond Hadera the land around the Plain of Sharon was even more lush and fertile. They drove between enormous archways of Australian eucalyptus trees.
“Everything you see was waste just twenty-five years ago,” Ari said.
In the afternoon they entered Tel Aviv—the Hill of Spring.
Along the