The Haj - Leon Uris [128]
‘You can’t go back to Tabah,’ Mr. Gideon Asch said.
‘I do not care if it means my own death.’
‘Well, you have something to live for. Your dreams of revenge should keep you going for a long time, Haj Ibrahim. Tabah has little left. We moved Haganah in when you abandoned it. The same night the Jihad attacked and threw us out. When we returned, we had to blow up most of the houses. There is little left.’
‘My house?’
‘Farouk moved into it.’
The road came to an abrupt end at a roadblock that led into Arab territory. Mr. Gideon Asch took us to a small woods nearby and waited until dark. My father allowed me to go with him as he bid farewell to Mr. Gideon Asch. Money was pressed into my father’s hand. He wished to refuse but was unable; we were nearly penniless.
‘Too bad we didn’t have a chance to solve our problems,’ my father mumbled, as if in a trance.
‘I don’t know,’ Mr. Gideon Asch said. ‘You warned me a long time ago that things would have been different if your hand had been on the water valve instead of ours.’
‘That is true,’ my father said. ‘You would have died of thirst.’
Mr. Gideon Asch laughed.
‘Now that we go into different worlds, I want you to tell me who the informer was in Tabah.’
‘I had many. None better than your brother.’
‘He is not my brother,’ Haj Ibrahim said. ‘You are my brother.’
The dark was suddenly pierced by the blinking of a flashlight. Mr. Gideon Asch returned the signal and I gathered the family. After a brief introduction to Said, they moved out behind him.
‘Well,’ Mr. Gideon Asch said, ‘keep your ear to the ground. In addition to Said, I have many contacts everywhere on the Arab side. They’ll know how to reach me. Shalom.’
‘Shalom.’
My father and I walked quickly to catch up to the family. Already we could see the distant lights of Tulkarm. I stopped suddenly. ‘I forgot to give Mr. Gideon Asch his wristwatch back.’
‘No, Ishmael,’ my father said. ‘He wanted you to have it.’
A few days later, Jaffa fell to the Haganah and Irgun. Of the Arab population of seventy thousand, only three thousand remained when the final assault was made.
On May 14, 1948, David Ben-Gurion read the Declaration of Independence of the State of Israel. Within hours, the entire Arab world attacked.
END OF PART TWO
Part Three
Qumran
1
WE WALKED BRISKLY TOWARD Tulkarm. Mr. Said was made nervous by our presence. He apologized that he was merely an impoverished apprentice pharmacist who lived in a single room with his wife and five children in the home of his father. He gave us directions to the center of town, told my father not to contact him unless there was a dire emergency, and disappeared.
We reached the market town in a matter of minutes to find a flash flood of humanity had inundated it with thousands of homeless families.
‘We will find shelter in the mosque tonight,’ Ibrahim said, ‘and tomorrow we will see what there is to be seen.’
He had spoken too soon.
So great was the crush of people, we could not get within a hundred yards of the mosque. A black wave of mourning women lay on the ground, trying to enfold their children. The men walked about in circles. We were part of a nameless and faceless lost human herd.
Ibrahim stood rudderless in the midst of this sea of agony. ‘Let us get out of here,’ he ordered, but it was the first time I ever saw him visibly denuded of some kind of command of a situation—or of himself.
We drifted away until the crowd thinned out and then we poked about the streets on the outskirts, looking for a covered shed, an abandoned building, anything with walls and a roof.
Then came the shocking realization that the houses of Tulkarm were padlocked against us. Chickens, goats, and livestock had been removed from the yards and corralled away against theft. Bony dogs stood hostile guard with teeth bared and hackles up as we passed. Behind every dimmed window one could sense a man with a gun watching our moves.
Beyond the town, where the farms began, many people were sleeping in the ditches along the road as