Exodus - Leon Uris [247]
“Bad ... very bad.”
Akiva was conscious. He pulled Ari close to him.
“Ari,” he said, “am I going to make it?”
“No, Uncle.”
“Then get me to some hidden place ... you understand.”
“I understand,” Ari said.
The escape car reached Kfar Masaryk where a dozen kibbutzniks stood by ready to hide the car and provide a truck to continue the escape. Akiva was gory and unconscious by the time they pulled him from the car. Ari took a moment to pour sulfa into his wounded leg and put a pressure bandage on it. The two Maccabees with him pulled him aside.
“The old man is not going to make it if we go any farther. He must stay here and receive medical treatment.”
“No,” Ari said.
“Are you mad?”
“Now listen to me, you two. He has no chance to live. Even if he did the British would find him here. If we leave him and he dies here it will be known all over Palestine. No one but us must know that Akiva did not escape. The British must never know he is dead.”
The two Maccabees nodded their understanding. They jumped into the front of the truck and Ari got into the rear with his uncle. Ari’s leg was beginning to hurt.
The truck streaked south below Haifa. It ascended the narrow roads working up the side of Mount Carmel. Ari held his unconscious uncle in his lap as they bounced on the dirt roads and swayed around treacherous turns, sending up a trail of dust and jolting them unmercifully. Higher and higher into Mount Carmel they drove until they were in the territory where only the Druses lived in isolation.
Akiva opened his eyes. He tried to speak but he was unable to. He recognized Ari and he smiled and then sagged in Ari’s arms.
The truck pulled into a clump of brush a mile before the Druse mountain village of Daliyat el Karmil. Mussa, a Druse Haganah soldier, waited with a donkey cart.
Ari crawled from the truck. He rubbed his leg. He was drenched with the blood of Akiva.
Mussa rushed to him.
“I’m all right,” Ari said. “Get Akiva. He is dead.”
The tired old body of Akiva was carried from the truck to the cart.
“You two men are Maccabees. You are not to reveal Akiva’s death to anyone but Ben Moshe or Nahum. Now get the truck down from here and get it cleaned. Mussa and I will bury my uncle.”
The truck sped away.
Ari got on the donkey cart. It bypassed the village and moved to the highest point on Mount Carmel, the south ridge. At twilight they entered a small forest that held the altar of the greatest of all the Hebrew prophets, Elijah. It was on this ground that Elijah had proved the power of God against Jezebel’ s priests of Baal.
The altar of the prophet Elijah looked down on the Jezreel Valley. The valley below stood as an eternal reminder that the land had not been forgotten.
Mussa and Ari scratched out a shallow grave near Elijah’s altar.
“Let’s get that red suit off of him,” Ari said.
The British hanging clothes were removed and Akiva was rolled into his grave and it was filled up and the spot covered with branches. Mussa returned to the cart to wait for Ari.
Ari knelt for a long time over Akiva’s grave. Yakov Rabinsky had been born in anger and he had died in sorrow. After so very many years of torment, he could at last find peace. He could find here a peace that had avoided him in life and he could sleep eternally looking down upon the land of the Jews. Someday, Ari thought, all the world will know where Akiva sleeps and it will be a shrine of all Jews.
“Goodbye, Uncle,” Ari said. “I didn’t even get a chance to tell you that your brother forgives you.”
Ari stood up and began to sway. Mussa rushed over to him as he cried out in pain and pitched to the ground in a faint.
Chapter Seventeen
KITTY AND DR. LIEBERMAN were both glum as she went over some business in his office.
“I wish I knew the words that would make you stay,” Dr. Lieberman said.
“Thanks,” Kitty said. “Now that the time is here I feel very empty. I didn’t realize how attached I had become to Gan Dafna. I was up most of the night going through these files. Some of these youngsters have made remarkable progress in light of their histories.