Exodus - Leon Uris [225]
“You’ve asked for a race.”
Kitty dropped her robe and put on her bathing cap. Ari inspected her frankly just as she had measured him. Her body had not the angular sturdiness of a sabra girl. She was more of the softness and roundness one would expect from an American woman.
Their eyes met for an instant and both of them looked a little abashed.
She ran past him and dived into the water. Ari followed. He was surprised to find that it was all he could do to catch her and get a few strokes ahead. Kitty swam with a graceful crawl and a steady stroke that pressed him to the utmost. They climbed on the raft breathless and laughing.
“You pulled a fast one on me,” he said.
“I forgot to mention it but ... “
“I know, I know. You were on the girls’ swimming team in college.”
She lay on her back and took a deep breath of contentment. The water was cool and refreshing and seemed to wash her bad spirits away.
It was late in the afternoon before they returned to the hotel for cocktails on the veranda and then retired to their rooms to rest before dinner.
Ari, who had had little rest in recent weeks, was asleep the instant he lay down. In the next room Kitty paced the floor. She had recovered from much of the agitation of the morning but she was tired of this emotional drain and she was still actually a little frightened of the mystical power that this land held. Kitty longed to return to a normal, sane, planned life. She convinced herself that Karen needed the same therapy more than anything else. She made up her mind to face the issue with Karen without further delay.
By evening it had turned pleasantly cool. Kitty began to dress for dinner. She opened her closet and considered the three dresses hanging there. Slowly she took down one of them. It was the same dress that Jordana Ben Canaan had picked from her closet the day of their argument. She thought of Ari’s look on the pier today. Kitty had liked it. The dress was a strapless sheath which clung to her body and emphasized her bosom.
Every male eyebrow in the hotel lifted as Kitty drifted by, and nostrils twitched with the scent of her perfume. Ari stood like a man stunned, watching her cross the lobby. As she came up to him he suddenly became aware of the fact that he was staring at her and quickly found his voice.
“I have a surprise for you,” he said. “There is a concert at the Ein Gev kibbutz across the lake. We will go right after dinner.”
“Will this dress be all right to wear?”
“Uh ... yes ... yes, it will be excellent.”
Most of the full moon of the night before was left for them. Just as their motor launch left the pier it rose from behind the Syrian hills, unbelievably huge, sending a great path of light over the motionless waters.
“The sea is so still,” Kitty said.
“It is deceptive. When God gets angry He can turn it into an ocean in minutes.”
In a half hour they had crossed the water and landed at the docks of the kibbutz of Ein Gev—the Spring of the Mountain Pass. Ein Gev was a daring experiment. The kibbutz sat isolated from the rest of Palestine and directly below the mountains of Syria. A Syrian village hung above it and its fields were plowed to the border markers. It had been founded by immigrants of the German Aliyah in the year of 1937 and strategically commanded a view of the Sea of Galilee.
The kibbutz was set near a basin formed by the Yarmuk River, the border between Syria and Trans-Jordan, and the basin was the site of a cradle of man. Everyday the farmers plowed up evidences of human life, some prehistoric. They had found crude plows and pottery thousands of years old, proving the area had been farmed and there had been a community life even there.
Right on the border between Ein Gev and the Syrian hills stood a small mountain shaped like a column. It was called Sussita—the Horse. Atop Sussita were the ruins of one of the nine Roman fortress cities of Palestine. Sussita still dominated the entire area.
Many of the German pioneers had been musicians in former life and they were an industrious lot.