Exodus - Leon Uris [185]
Karen was dressed in olive-drab slacks and high-collared peasant’s blouse and she wore new sandals on her feet. “Oh, Dov! This is the most wonderful day of my life,” she cried. “Yona is lots of fun and she was telling me that Dr. Lieberman is the nicest man on earth.”
She rolled in the grass and looked up in the sky and sighed. Dov stood over her, wordless. She sat up and took his hand and tugged at him to sit beside her.
“Cut it out,” he said.
She persisted and he sat down. He became nervous as she squeezed his hand and lay her head on his shoulder. “Please be happy, Dov ... please be happy.”
He shrugged and pulled away from her.
“Please be happy.”
“Who cares about it?”
“I care,” Karen said. “I care for you.”
“Well ... care for yourself.”
“I care for myself, too.” She knelt in front of him and gripped his shoulders. “Did you see your room and your bed? How long has it been since you’ve been in a room like that?”
Dov flushed at the touch of her hands and lowered his eyes. “Just think, Dov. No more displaced persons’ camps ... no more La Ciotats, no more Caraolos. No more illegal ships. We are home, Dov, and it is even more beautiful than I dreamed.”
Dov got to his feet slowly and turned his back. “This place is fine for you. I got other plans.”
“Please forget them,” she pleaded.
The orchestra played and the music drifted over the green.
“We had better get to the theater,” Karen said.
Once Ari and Kitty left Tel Aviv and drove past the huge British camp at Sarafand she felt the tension of Palestine again. They passed through the all-Arab city of Ramle on the road to Jerusalem and felt angry Arab eyes on them. Ari seemed oblivious of the Arabs and oblivious of Kitty. He had not spoken a dozen words to her all day.
Beyond Ramle the car turned into the Bab el Wad, a snaking road that twisted up into the Judean hills. Young forests planted by the Jews pushed up from the earth on ravines on either side of the road. Deep into the hills stood ancient terracing that stood out from the denuded earth like ribs of a starving dog. Once these very hills and terraces supported hundreds of thouands of people. Now it was completely eroded. The hilltops held Arab villages clustered in white clumps above them.
Here in the Bab el Wad the magic pull of Jerusalem gripped Kitty Fremont. It was said that none could pass through the Judean hills for the first time and escape the haunting power of the City of David. It seemed strange to Kitty that she would feel it so intensely. Her religious training had been in matter-of-fact midwestern Protestantism. It had been approached with a basic sincerity and a lack of intensity. Higher and higher they drove and the anticipation became greater. She was with the Bible now, and for the first time, in these silent and weird hills, came the realization of what it was to be in the Holy Land.
In the distance a dim outline of the citadels of Jerusalem jutted on the horizon and Kitty Fremont was filled with a kind of exaltation.
They entered the New City built by the Jews and drove down Jaffa Road, the principal commercial spine that passed crowded shops, toward the wall of the Old City. At the Jaffa Gate, Ari turned and drove along the wall to King David Avenue and in a few moments stopped before the great King David Hotel.
Kitty stepped from the car and gasped at the sight of the right wing of the hotel sheared away.
“It was once British headquarters,” Ari said. “The Maccabees changed all that.”
The hotel was built of Jerusalem stone. It was grandiose in the overburdened European manner, with its lobby an alleged duplication of King David’s court.
Kitty came down to lunch first. She waited on the terrace in the rear of the hotel that looked over a small valley to the Old City wall. The terrace was opposite David’s Tower and was set in a formal garden. A four-piece orchestra behind her played luncheon music.
Ari walked out to the terrace and stopped in his tracks. Kitty looked lovely! He had never seen her like this before. She wore a flouncy and chic cocktail dress and a wide-brimmed