Striking the Balance

Petrol was in short supply all over the world. Colonel Easter hardly needed to be polite in mentioning its absence. He ignored politeness at a much more basic level: neither he nor any of his men made any move to take the duffel bags from Moishe and Rivka. You worried about whether guests were comfortable. Tools-who cared about tools?

The buggy was a black-painted English brougham, and might have been preserved in cotton wool and tinfoil for the past two generations. “We’ll take you to the barracks,” Easter said, getting aboard with the Russies and an enlisted man who picked up the reins. The rest of the officers climbed into another, almost identical carriage. Easter went on, “We’ll get you something to eat and drink there, and then see what sort of quarters we can arrange for the lot of you.”

If they’d cared about anything more than using him, they would have had quarters ready and waiting. At least they did remember that he and his family needed food and water. He wondered if they’d remember not to offer him ham, too. The driver flicked the reins and clucked to the horses. The wagon rattled away from the harbor district. Whatever the British had in mind for him, he’d soon find out about it.

He stared wide-eyed at the palm trees like huge feather dusters, at the whitewashed buildings of mud brick, at the mosque the buggy rolled past. Arab men in the long robes he’d already seen and Arab women covered so that only their eyes, hands, and feet showed watched the wagons as they clattered through the narrow, winding streets. Moishe felt very much an interloper, though his own folk had sprung from this place. If Colonel Easter had the slightest clue that God had not anointed him to rule this land, he gave no sign of it.

Suddenly, the buildings opened out onto a marketplace. All at once, Moishe stopped feeling like an alien and decided he was at home after all. None of the details was like what he’d known back in Warsaw: not the dress of the merchants and the customers, not the language they used, not the fruits and vegetables and trinkets they bought and sold. But the tone, the way they haggled-he might have been back in Poland.

Rivka was smiling, too; the resemblance must also have struck her. And not all the men and women in the marketplace were Arabs, Moishe saw when he got a closer look. Some were Jews, dressed for the most part in work clothes or in dresses that, while long, displayed a great deal of flesh when compared to the clothes in which the Arab women shrouded themselves.

A couple of Jewish men carrying brass candlesticks walked by close to the wagon. They were talking loudly and animatedly. Rivka’s smile disappeared. “I don’t understand them,” she said.

“That’s Hebrew they’re speaking, not Yiddish,” Moishe answered, and shivered a little. He’d caught only a few words himself. Learning Hebrew so you could use it in prayer and actually speaking it were two different things. He’d have a lot to pick up here. He wondered how fast he could do it.

They passed the market by. Houses and shops closed in around them again. At bigger streetcorners, British soldiers directed traffic, or tried to: the Arabs and Jews of Haifa weren’t as inclined to obey their commands as the orderly folk of London might have been.

A couple of blocks past one thoroughfare, the road all but doubled back on itself. A short young fellow in a short-sleeved shirt and khaki trousers stepped out in front of the wagon that held the Russies. He pointed a pistol at the driver’s face. “You will stop now,” he said in accented English.

Colonel Easter started to reach for his sidearm. The young man glanced up to the rooftops on either side of the road. Close to a dozen men armed with rifles and submachine guns, most of them wearing kerchiefs to hide their faces, covered both wagons heading back to the British barracks. Very slowly and carefully, Easter moved his right hand away from his weapon.

The cocky young fellow in the street smiled, as if this were a social occasion rather than-whatever it was. “Ah, that’s good, that’s very good,” he said. “You are a sensible man, Colonel.”

“What is the point of this-this damned impudence?” Easter demanded in tones that said he would have fought had he seen the remotest chance for success.

“We are relieving you of your guests,” the hijacker answered. He looked away from the Englishman and toward Moishe, dropping into Yiddish to say, “You and your family, you will get out of the buggy and come with me.”

“Why?” Moishe said in the same language. “If you are who I think you are, I would have been talking with you anyhow.”

“Yes, and telling us what the British want us to hear,” the fellow with the pistol said. “Now get out-I haven’t got all day to argue with you.”