Exodus - Leon Uris [195]
“Son, you had better go to Abu Yesha and see Taha.”
“I was surprised he wasn’t here tonight. Is something wrong?”
“Just what is wrong with the whole country. We have lived in peace with the people of Abu Yesha for twenty years. Kammal was my friend for a half a century. Now ... there is a coldness. We know them all by first names, we have visited their homes, and they have attended our schools. We have celebrated weddings together. Ari, they are our friends. Whatever is wrong must be righted.”
“I will see him tomorrow after I take Mrs. Fremont to Gan Dafna.”
Ari leaned against the bookcases filled with classics in Hebrew, English, French, German, and Russian. He ran his fingers over them a moment and hesitated, then spun around and faced Barak. “I saw Akiva in Jerusalem.”
Barak stiffened as though he had been struck. In reflex his lips parted for an instant, but he stopped the words that would have asked how his brother was. “We will not discuss him under my roof,” Barak said softly.
“He has grown old. He cannot live too much longer. He begs for you to make peace with him in the name of your father.”
“I do not want to hear it!” Barak cried with a quiver in his voice.
“Isn’t fifteen years of silence long enough?”
Barak stood up to his towering height and looked into the eyes of his son. “He turned Jew against Jew. Now his Maccabees are turning the people of Abu Yesha against us. God may forgive him but I never will ... never.”
“Please listen to me!”
“Good night, Ari.”
The next morning Kitty said good-by to the Ben Canaan family and Ari drove her from Yad El to the mountain road leading to Gan Dafna. At Abu Yesha, Ari stopped for a moment to have someone inform Taha he would be back in an hour or so.
As their car moved high into the hills Kitty grew more and more eager to see Karen, but at the same time she was apprehensive about Gan Dafna. Was Jordana Ben Canaan playing the role of a jealous sister or was she the forerunner of a kind of people who would be hostile because of their differences? Harriet Saltzman had warned her she was a stranger with no business in Palestine. Everyone and everything seemed to point out this difference. Jordana unsettled her. Kitty had tried to be sociable to everyone but perhaps underneath she was drawing lines and too thinly disguising the fact. I am what I am, Kitty thought, and I come from a place where people are judged for what they are.
As they drove into isolation she felt alone and glum.
“I must leave right away,” Ari said.
“Will we be seeing each other?” Kitty asked.
“From time to time. Do you want to see me, Kitty?”
“Yes.”
“I will try then.”
They turned the last corner and the plateau of Gan Dafna spread before them. Dr. Lieberman, the village orchestra, the staff and faculty, and the fifty children from the Exodus were all clustered around the bronze statue of Dafna on the center green. There was a warm and spontaneous welcome for Kitty Fremont, and in that moment her fears vanished. Karen rushed up to her and hugged her and handed her a bouquet of winter roses. Then Kitty was engulfed by “her” Exodus children. She looked over her shoulder long enough to see Ari disappear.
When the welcoming ceremony was over Dr. Lieberman and Karen walked with Kitty into a tree-studded lane holding the neat little two-and three-room cottages of the staff. They came to a halt halfway down the dirt road before a white stucco house which was deluged in blooms.
Karen ran up on the porch and opened the door and held her breath as Kitty walked in slowly. The combination living room and bedroom was simple but tasteful. The draperies and the spread over the couch bed were of the thick Negev linen weave and the room was almost buried under fresh-cut flowers. A paper cutout was strung from one side to the other: “SHALOM KITTY,” it read, and it was from her children of the Exodus. Karen ran to