Джеймс Миченер - The Source

“We go!” Bagdadi whispered, and they cut quickly across the exposed road and disappeared into the brown hills on the northern side, where Bagdadi kept his team running up the steep incline that would lead them eventually to the hills behind Safad.

It was now three in the morning, the eighth hour of their march, and Ilana was nearing exhaustion, but she took a small drink from a canteen that Bagdadi carried and shifted her rifle … “I’ll take it,” Gottesmann offered, but she grabbed it fiercely, bent forward and continued up the hill.

“Keep together,” Bagdadi warned. “Arab villages all around.” And for an hour, till his watch showed four, he maintained his killing pace. Even Gottesmann was finding it difficult to stay up with the astonishing Iraqi, but to fall behind would be fatal, and they pressed forward as behind them the first gray light of dawn began to break.

Now Bagdadi’s judgment became crucial. Somewhere ahead lay the village held by the Palmach, but in between stood others filled with waiting Arabs, and to pick an accurate track through the intervening land, to avoid alerting Arab sentries and at the same time to prevent Palmach scouts from firing random shots, required delicate skill. The Iraqi moved slowly, testing the route, until Gottesmann, whose nerves were almost out of control, snapped, “God, man! Move!”

Gently, as if he were rebuking a child, Bagdadi said, “This is the time when we dare not choose wrong,” and like a clever fox smelling out the terrain he picked the only path that would take them between the waiting villages.

But as they reached a spot in the center of the Arab holdings an ugly period came when the sun, weary of night, began reaching for the horizon. It was four-twenty and twilight was about to begin. It was a moment of terror, for each of the three Jews could see the visible shape of the others … far too clearly. Ilana, wanting nothing more than to rest where she was, grew frightened as she saw her husband’s face looming out of the vanishing darkness: it was the face of a man who had driven himself to the edge of endurance, and he stopped running. He could go no more.

“We must go,” Bagdadi warned.

Gottesmann refused to move. He could drive his legs no farther, and he intended staying where he was, within the nest of Arab villages.

“We’ve only fifteen minutes!” Bagdadi pleaded.

Gottesmann could not respond. He saw a depression among some rocks and sat down, while the growing dawn formed a silhouette around him.

“Get him up,” Bagdadi pleaded with Ilana. Tired as she was she went to Gottesmann and pulled on his arm, with no success.

The leadership of the venture now rested solely in Bagdadi’s hands, and emotionally he was ill equipped to exercise it, for his life had been spent, it seemed, in following directions laid down by Ashkenazi Jews: as a boy of two, the son of a large Iraqi family living in Hebron, he had watched the unbridled massacres of 1929, when Arabs had swept over that town, slaughtering all Jews in an apocalyptic fury. In the room where he lay hidden under the bed seven of his family had had their throats cut and their bodies mutilated, and although he was mercifully spared from remembering precisely what had happened, he did vaguely recall pools of blood across which he had crawled when the screaming ceased and Ashkenazi Jews came to rescue him.

He had grown up an orphan in Tel Aviv, where the superiority of the Ashkenazim went unchallenged, and of the older boys who thrashed him on the city dumps, all had been from the superior group. When he applied for jobs he found that Ashkenazim had them, and the few vacancies in schools went to them, too. In the Palmach he had received orders only from Ashkenazi officers, but now, with death imminent, responsibility for one segment of Israel’s future had passed to him.

Realizing that Gottesmann was determined to commit suicide, Bagdadi pushed Ilana away and with two sharp blows struck the fallen German Jew across the face. “You’ll run!” he said. With one jerk of his powerful arm he dragged Gottesmann to his feet and gave him a shove that started him staggering zigzag across the final half-mile separating them from the Palmach village. Turning to Ilana he barked, “Follow me,” and he twisted his way through the last of the Arab territory.

Gottesmann’s irrational behavior had wasted precious minutes and now sunrise was upon them. A shot rang out from the hills, frightening Ilana but awakening her husband, and in the next minutes his clearing eyes began to see puffs of dust as bullets struck ahead of the running Jews, and he thought: Maybe they’ll keep missing. He was not aware that it was his near-breakdown that had thrown his team into this predicament, and a bullet came close to his head, whining in protest as it missed, and ricocheted among the rocks. His lungs were heavy and his legs grew increasingly difficult to manage. He thought: This must be hell on Ilana. He looked ahead to where she was running and saw something which brought him fully back to reality. Ilana, determined to reach the village, was running as fast as she could, but in a straight line. A series of bullets was beginning to zero-in on her, and in a few more steps she was sure to be hit.

In this brief second of agony Gottesmann remembered a man named Pinsker in the German underground. Effective, cold, he had been a little man who expected to fight Nazis the rest of his life. “So when you’re running you will think yourself a rabbit,” he instructed all his men. “For the rest of your life you’re a rabbit and must run as if you knew that someone was looking down a rifle at you. You cannot imagine how a dodge to the left, a dodge to the right, will upset that man looking down the rifle. Gottesmann!” he had screamed. “You’re a rabbit.”

“Nieder!” Gottesmann himself now screamed, but to his horror Ilana kept running straight ahead. A bullet kicked dust at her left heel. He felt sick, then realized that he had intuitively used the German command nieder and not the English “take cover!” He panicked. What he wanted was the Hebrew artza! But before he could call again, Bagdadi looked back, instantly sized up the situation, and with a slight flicking of his hand indicated to Ilana what she must do. As soon as she saw his signal she threw herself flat, rolled over three times and resumed running on a new course. The next bullet struck where she would otherwise have been, and the three darting, dodging, twisting Jews escaped the Arabs and approached the village held by the Palmach.

Now it was Bagdadi’s turn to know anxiety, for in the uncertain light the chances were good that some Jewish soldier would begin firing at anything that was moving; so as he ran Bagdadi unfurled a small white flag containing a hand-stitched blue Star of David and began shouting at the top of his voice, “Palmach! Palmach!”

A quick-thinking sentry in the village sized up the situation and launched a barrage of fire at the Arabs along the ridges. The enemy was driven back and the three messengers from Kfar Kerem staggered the last hundred yards without any Arab bullets coming close to them.

When they approached the rude headquarters, gasping and pressing their ribs together, the sun was well up and they cast clear shadows on the earth. Gottesmann freed one hand and grasped Bagdadi by the Iraqi’s wet shoulder. “You know land,” he said, and before he had finished reporting to the local commander Ilana had found a place on the floor and had curled up like a little animal. After an hour’s talk he and Bagdadi lifted her, and without waking her carried her to a real bed. She slept all day.

At dusk on the afternoon of Tuesday, April 13, the Palmach men roused Ilana and her two well-rested companions. In the small village there was an air of commitment. Teddy Reich’s command to move forward, infiltrate Safad and take over the local defense forces had been so thoroughly discussed, and its difficulties so accurately assessed, that excitement and fear were pretty well spent. Now everyone knew that a platoon of thirty-three men and girls would creep through the countryside at midnight, crawl on its belly for about three miles and try to sneak into the town through Arab patrols. If the maneuver degenerated into a pitched battle, the Palmach were to return fire but to keep moving forward.