Highlander - Donna Lettow [62]
“Why is this night different from all other nights?” Avram whispered to himself after a long period of silence.
“Avram?”
Avram looked up at him. “Do you know what Passover is, MacLeod?”
MacLeod laughed. “I may be goy, but I’m not stupid.” Then he saw the look on Avram’s face and realized this was not a time for joking. “It’s the night the angel of death slew the firstborn of the Egyptians but passed over the children of Israel. It commemorates God delivering His people out of slavery in the land of Egypt.”
“When I was young,” Avram reminisced, “my father and I would go to the Great Temple at Pesach. We would sacrifice a lamb as the scriptures prescribed, and then we would keep vigil there with the other scholars, discussing Torah until the sun rose. Then the Romans destroyed the Temple. And now Pesach is celebrated in the home. In secret, in hiding.” He paused for a moment, thinking, remembering, reliving. “In the middle of the fifteenth century, my brother-in-law and I were stoned to death at Passover. The enlightened citizens of Rome said the wine we drank was the blood of young Christian boys.” He set the cup down hard and wine sloshed out onto the ground, onto the blanket, putting out the sputtering candle. “Three thousand years later, we’re still slaves, MacLeod. If it’s not Pharaoh, it’s Caesar. Or Tsar Nicholas. Or Hitler. If we’re not forced to make bricks in Egypt, we’re making bombs in Poland. When does deliverance come? Look at us, still waiting for the angel of death. When does Elijah come to give us back the Promised Land?”
Suddenly, MacLeod hushed him with a raised hand and a look. Noise on the stairs. Avram stood and pulled his pistol as MacLeod moved to the door. “Vo?” MacLeod called out.
“Jan-Warsaw,” a woman’s voice answered.
The correct password. MacLeod opened the door, and Miriam came out onto the roof. “You’re looking better,” MacLeod noted. After briefing the ZOB leadership, she’d had a chance to wash and change. But it was obvious the shirtdress she wore buttoned firmly from chin to ankle was from some earlier lifetime—the short sleeves only emphasized how reed-thin her arms had grown. She had to belt it tightly at the waist to keep it from gapping open.
She went directly to Avram. “Anielewicz has called a unit commanders’ meeting in half an hour, Tzaddik. I’m to take your watch with Der Alte.”
MacLeod never could get used to that nickname—the Old One. The first time he’d heard the name, at a strategy meeting not long after returning to the Ghetto and throwing his lot in with the ZOB, he’d glared at Avram accusingly, but later, after the meeting, Avram had sworn he wasn’t behind it. “Hey, I wanted schmuck, but they voted me down.” Almost everyone in the organization had a pseudonym, Avram had explained—Antek, Kazik, Green Marysia—it was a safety measure. “You get used to it.”
“So what’s Tzaddik mean?” MacLeod had asked Avram at the time, his Yiddish getting better but still not quite that good.
“It’s a kind of a wandering holy man with …” he had trailed off into a mumble.
“With what? I didn’t quite hear you, ‘holy man,’” MacLeod had pressed.
Avram had looked a little sheepish. “With, ah, mystical powers.” MacLeod raised a critical eyebrow. “I had a few close calls, they think I’m lucky, that’s all,” Avram had said defensively. He pushed a sleeve back, indicating his smoky-dark arm. “And it’s pretty obvious I’m not from around here.”
“So how did I get to be the Old One? You’ve got a good fifteen hundred years on me.”
“Look at yourself, MacLeod, and then look at them. Most of these kids are barely out of school. They should be studying algebra, not carrying guns. You look old enough to be their father. Hell, you look old enough to be my father.” MacLeod had speared him with a look that promised violence, and Avram quickly backpedaled. “Adoring older brother?”
Wherever the name had come from, he was Der Alte now in all official ZOB communications, and even people like Miriam, who also knew him as Duncan MacLeod, abided by it. She continued her message.