Zion by Colin Falconer Read Free Book Online Page B

on his upper lip as thick as dewdrops. His eyes widened. He realized he was trapped.
    “You little whore,” he said in Arabic.
    “Your real name is Majid Hass’an, you come from a village called Rab’allah, you own an olive press in the Muslim quarter. You see, we know everything about you. You may think you are a good Arab but I wonder what your comrades in the Holy Strugglers will think if they find out what you have done?”
    “You can’t. . .”
    “Don’t be so naïve. What do you think is happening here in Palestine? We are fighting for our lives! They killed millions of us in Europe and no one lifted a finger. If we lose Palestine we have nowhere else to go. This is a war, Majid, and we will do anything - anything - because we cannot afford to lose!”
     
     
     
    Majid stared at her. A war? For as long as he could remember there had been trouble between Arabs and Jews. It was like a tribal feud. He had never considered that there might be a day when it would be actually resolved, one way or another. But this girl was serious! She really thought the Jews could win, take Palestine away from them. The very notion made him feel sick to his stomach.
    He forced the thought from his mind to consider the more immediate threat to himself. The Haganah now knew who he was, and they were obviously prepared to expose him. He could not allow that to happen.
    Besides, he needed the money.
     
     
     
    Old City
     
    The Hass’an Olive Oil Company took up a rundown two storey building with a coffee house on one side and a brass merchant on the other. It was evening and the brass merchant was pulling down the shutters on his shop. A Sudanese hawker had set up a little brazier by the roadside and had begun roasting peanuts.
    A woman, covered head to foot by a black abbayah , only her eyes visible behind her veil, stopped to stare. Three men were working at the press in the gloomy backroom, their faces beaded with sweat. The woman watched them, unnoticed, then moved on, indistinguishable from the hundreds of other Arab women who walked the street that day.
    But she was different from all of them in a very fundamental way.
    She was Jewish.
     
     
     
    Sarah Landauer watched Rishou work the press. He had taken off his shirt and wore only a white vest, and sweat glistened on his back and shoulders. He has changed, she thought. The boy she remembered from the apple orchards had gone. He was a man now, his shoulders broader, his chest deeper. She felt something squirm inside her. She thought seeing him would exorcise his ghost from his mind. But she realized nothing had changed. She still wanted him.
    It was dangerous standing here. She must go. She had indulged a foolish whim. She promised herself she would never return.
     

PART TWO
     
    PALESTINE, 1946
     

Chapter 6
     
    Atlit
     
    Marie stared at the wire. It was like she had been staring at barbed wire all her life; the camp at Auschwitz, the DP camps in Europe, now here. But instead of the chill seeping into her bones off a flat Silesian plain, the gritty wind that blew her hair came from a grey Mediterranean ocean.
    Her stigmata were not as apparent on her, as on so many of the others. She had not yet given in to hollow-eyed despair. Because she was thinner, she looked taller, and the lines of her face were more sharply chiseled. Her hair had been shorn a few months before in a camp in Austria to prevent lice and it was still as short as a boy’s.
    It had taken almost a year to reach Palestine. She found herself a place on one of the Mossad Aliyah Bet’s blockade runners, the Theodor Herzl , but it had been intercepted and boarded by a British navy frigate, just off Haifa. Once again she was behind the wire.
    But in her mind she was free.
    In her mind, she was engaged to be married to a young German Jew named Netanel Rosenberg. And if she could only find her way out of this place, she was sure she would find him again.
     
     
     
    Tel Aviv
     
    There were seven men and