“To what?”
“To see you. To talk to you. May I have a cigarette?”
“Yes. Will you have a drink?”
“Thank you.”
She poured him a whisky and he lit a cigarette with none too steady a hand. They both felt confused, ill at ease. She sat down opposite him and said sharply:
“If you have come to ask me to return to Ras Shamir…
“I haven’t,” he said shortly. “This is business.”
“How business?” she said.
David inhaled deeply and expelled a long column of blue smoke which hung in the air between them.
“Haganah business,” he said. “I was ordered here to Jerusalem by the resistance. The build-up of arms is almost complete. It won’t be long before the balloon goes up…
“Balloon?”
“Well, we’ll have to take our case to UNO, since the British do not seem to want to pay attention to it. We are planning a few demonstrations in order to reach the headlines.”
“Demonstrations?”
“I was using the politest word I could find. There will be quite some trouble here.”
“David,” she said. “This sounds mad.”
“It may,” he said setting his jaw in a stubborn jut.
“But if you get rid of the British you will be facing the Arabs without their help. They will march in.”
“They must be faced too. Israel must become a reality, a sovereign state, not a rest camp where the victims of anti-semitism can live on the sympathetic handouts of the world. A place of our own is what we want, we must have.”
“But the British were prime movers in this business. You will have your sovereign state; but must you have it this weekend?”
“They are hesitating, placating Arab opinion.”
“They have to; think of the oil. In the long run this will concern you also, no?”
“Israel must be born,” he said obstinately.
She sipped her drink. “You men are all the same,” she said at last.
David stubbed out his cigarette and smiled wryly. “Did you come here to give me a political lecture?” she asked.
“No. I’m sorry,” he said. “I came here on behalf of the Haganah to ask you to — co-operate.”
“In what sense?”
“Provide us with information. You are admirably placed to do so, in fact at the heart of the cobweb — British military intelligence. I was asked if you would keep us informed of everything you hear and see.”
“Of course not,” she said equably.
“You don’t care,” he said.
“I care,” she said, “but I think you will get what you want in the long run thanks to the British; why jump the gun?”
“You don’t believe in Israel.”
“I don’t believe in fanatics,” she said. “The last experience I had of the jackboot brought me here; I don’t want to see us Jews inherit the fanaticism from which we have been trying to escape.”
He drained his drink and stood up. “I see,” he said coldly.
“I wonder if you really do.”
“I think I do,” he said sadly. “I wish it weren’t mixed up with my own feelings for you — but it is. It is the old difference, of course. I am a sabra, was born here, belong here, will die rather than be thrown out of here. This is my land, not only in the religious and historical sense but in the sense of contemporary politics. But you, like so many others, are only here to evade persecution; you want to hide; but you don’t want to throw off the whole complex of Jewishness to escape from your past, to start a new world. At the first opportunity you would be off to Germany again.”
“Only for one reason,” she said. “If there were a chance of my child being alive still, yes, I would go. I care more for that than for all these windy theories. You will end by sickening your British friends and being abandoned by them to the Arabs. That is not a pretty prospect.”
“But that is precisely what we are preparing for,” said David. “I like the British as much as you do. It hurts me to go against their wishes. But we must. Our policy dictates it, and it is right.”
“I think now,” she said, “I’ve had enough.”
He sighed heavily. “I am sorry,” he said again. “It turned out so completely different from my original idea of it, this conversation; you know how one plans conversations in one’s mind — the questions and answers fit so beautifully. But this time we are all at odds. Nothing I say matches anything you think.” He looked at her intently, sorrowfully, for a long moment. Then he took a step forward and clasped his hands, pressing them together until the knuckles stood out white against the sunburn.
“I’m so deeply sorry,” he said in a low voice full of emotion. “I had so much to say to you and now it is all unsayable. I feel that I’ve lost you forever, Grete.”
He walked slowly to the door and she heard his weary steps on the stairway outside. It was only when she heard the front door bang shut that she suddenly cried “David,” like someone wakening from a bad dream. She ran lightly down the staircase, but by the time she reached the front door it swung back to reveal an empty street.
14. A Visitant
The visitations of Donner always occasioned the sinking feeling which Bovril was invented to prevent — for, during some years before he reached the dizzy eminence of his present post, he had been in charge of the arms raids; these enabled him to pay off any number of petty scores or imagined slights, purely in terms of the destruction of kibbutz property. Consequently, his appearance at Ras Shamir early one morning came as something of a surprise, as he had not been seen for some months anywhere north of Galilee.
Pete saw the self-assured figure from the roof parapet, where she was busy discussing a deal with the two settlements at the end of the line — the ones they called “Glasgow” and “Brisbane” because of the nationalities of the overwhelming mass of their inhabitants. She went down to meet him, muttering “Here’s a bird of ill omen. I hope it isn’t a raid.” But Donner was alone, walking with an air of preoccupied nonchalance and tapping his knee with his swagger-stick. He was even disposed to be waggish in his earthbound way, spreading out his hands as he saw her and saying: “This time I come in peace, Miss Peterson. Honour bound. Cross my heart.” He crossed his heart and cast his eyes up to heaven like some grotesque doll. Then, nonchalantly, as if to assert his official power by a calculated rudeness, he picked himself a fine rose. She watched him stonily. “I am glad to hear it,” she said. And truthfully she was, for recently they had received quite a lot of automatic weapons and some boxes of industrial dynamite, out of which Aaron had plans to build… “I am very glad.” The last time Donner and his party, with a lot of infantry, had spent four hours going over the settlement with a fine-tooth comb in a hunt for arms, they found nothing; but it was really a miracle that they did not. Old Karam had put their hand-grenades under the chickens in their boxes; now he claimed that the hens had tried so hard to hatch them they had become neurotic. With these thoughts turning over in her mind, she shook hands gravely with the policeman.
“I came,” said Donner, “more or less to say goodbye, Miss Peterson, as I am going for a soldier shortly — a Syrian posting. You won’t see my ugly face around here any more.”
“I am glad,” said Pete absently, “of course I mean sorry.”
Donner gave an awkward laugh, rather louder than it should have been, and not as self-assured as he would have liked it to sound.
“You must have your little joke,” he said.
She nodded. They walked side by side back to the office where, dismissing the supernumeraries working there, she placed a chair for Donner and settled behind her desk with the air of one who awaits the oracle. But the oracle did not know quite how to begin; it was difficult, like trying to pick up a crab. He cleared his throat and said: