Free Zion by Colin Falconer Page B

from the Arabs. We can’t let them get away with it again like they did before the war.”
    He talks as if he was here then, Asher thought. How quickly he has absorbed our thinking, our ways. He scratched irritably at his leg. “I’m going crazy just sitting round here.”
    “Does it still hurt?”
    He shook his head. “It’s just the itching. It’s getting worse now the weather is warmer.”
    “You were lucky. You could have bled to death.”
    “If you hadn’t found me so quickly, I would have.” He took a swallow of the vodka. “We really shook them up that night. I would have given anything to have been in the High Commissioner’s office when he got the news.”
    Netanel nodded, but did not smile. “It’s only the beginning.”
    Only the beginning of the Haganah’s war, Asher thought, but nearly the end of mine. He had spent three days after the raid delirious with pain and barely conscious, hidden on a kibbutz a few miles from Atlit. When they were able to move him they brought him back to Kfar Herzl in the middle of the night in a covered lorry. At first the doctors in the hospital thought he might lose the leg. Asher told Yaakov he would prefer they put a bullet through his head.
    He kept the leg.
    A few weeks later Yarkoni himself had travelled to the kibbutz to congratulate him in person; the final tally had been one hundred and eighty-six of the refugees freed, just four Palmachniks dead. But Rebecca Orenstein had been one of them.
    “She was hit in the first skirmish,” Yaakov told him. “Rosenberg took command. You chose well, Asher. He led them superbly, and his platoon adores him. They say he’s not afraid of anything.”
    Not afraid of anything.
    “Have you heard the news?” Netanel said. “The Mufti has reappeared. He’s in Cairo, the guest of King Farouk.”
    “Shit!”
    “You can imagine what they are saying in Jaffa and Nablus. To listen to the Arabs you’d think Mohammed had been reborn.”
    “I thought the British had shot the bastard in Berlin.”
    “It seems they were saving their bullets for us. You had better get well quickly, we are going to need you.”
    “We are going to need more Rebeccas too, but where will we find them?” He reached for his walking stick. “Let’s not talk about it anymore. The vodka’s given me a headache. Want some coffee?”
    Netanel got up. “I’ll get it,” he said, and he went into to the kitchen.
    Asher stared at the hills. I wonder who you really are, Netanel Rosenberg? You talk as if you have been here all your life. You never mention Germany, or Auschwitz, any of it. You never talk about women, you never tell jokes, nothing at all except the struggle for the Jewish state.
    We are all committed. But with you, it’s something else.
    Netanel came out carrying a coffeepot and two large enamel mugs. He poured the steaming black liquid into the cups.
    “Where were you from in Germany?” Asher asked him.
    It was as if a dark cloud had passed across his face. “I don’t want to talk about it.”
    “It’s just that I’m German too. Did you know that? I was sixteen when I came out here. My parents were from Bavaria, a little town near München.”
    “What was the name of the place?”
    “Ravenswald.”
    Netanel said nothing for a long time. “Never heard of it,” he said finally.
    “Last letter I got from my parents was 1941. I don’t know if they’re still alive. I’ve tried to find out. I don’t suppose there’s much chance.”
    Netanel sipped his coffee.
    “How long were you in Auschwitz?”
    “Too long. Why?”
    “It’s just that we have a couple of people here in the kibbutz who survived it. I thought you might like to meet them.”
    “Like old school chums, Ash? A class reunion? Being at Auschwitz is not quite the same. What do you think we would do? Swap funny stories about the gas chambers?”
    Asher shrugged: fair enough. Then he looked into Netanel’s eyes and saw something that Mordechai Yarkoni had said did