Levy thought for a while, as if he needed to remember precise details. “Dark,” he said. “Black hair and deep brown eyes. She’s tall, slim. She graduated two years before me.”
“Graduated?”
“She’s a teacher-we both are.”
Karen pulled away to scrutinize his face. “It suits you better… better than being a man with a gun, I mean.” She felt a satisfaction at having been right about him. And at the same time-inexplicably-a disappointment. Was that what had originally attracted her to him, the fervent radicalism Richard had once had but now lost? She pushed the thought away, unwilling to make the comparison.
“Were teachers,” he corrected. “Not anymore.”
“Why not?”
“Can’t be,” he said. “Not allowed.”
Levy had moved away from her now, his body still close enough to touch but his mind far distant. “We were in Beersheba, in the south. It was a good school; we had a good house. The children hadn’t come of course, not Shimeon or Yatzik. Then the war happened in ‘73. It’s strange. I’m a Sabra, born in Israel, but until then I’d never been into Sinai. The Negev but never the Sinai…” He reflected for a moment. Karen remained silent beside him, not wanting to intrude. “It was beautiful, so beautiful, even through the eye-slit of a tank. I couldn’t get over the stillness and the size and the peace…” He laughed at the word. “Peace, even when we were fighting a war.” There was another pause. “The Egyptians made it across the canal but we pushed them back… right back, right out of the desert. The Sinai was ours…”
Karen was conscious that his voice was charged with an intense excitement.
“It became government policy to resettle the areas. Make new homesteads. I persuaded Rebecca to give up our safe home and trust me and to come with me into a wilderness. I felt liberated, like a pioneer, the sort of settlers my parents had been, from Poland. Lots of places were developed… Yammit… Haruvit… that’s where we made a town, near Haruvit.” He laughed, but there was no mirth. “Not a big town… a large village, I suppose. But it existed. We built houses and a school where Rebecca and I taught, and we planted and we made the desert grow. Shimeon was born there. Yatzik too… the only home they’ve ever known…” Levy caressed her, and she settled into the crook of his arm.
“And then came the peace talks,” he said. “Camp David, with Carter and Sadat and Begin playing world statesmen. Resettlement land suddenly became occupied territory. Not the Golan, of course. Begin needed to seem strong, so he seized the Golan. But the Sinai was different. It didn’t matter about all the people who had put their faith in the government; for the greater good, the occupied territories had to be returned…”
“For recognition, surely?”
“What recognition!” he said. “Israel is there on all the maps. And always will be. Israel will never gain anything by weakness. What about the Saudi Arabian plan to get official Arab acceptance of the country? They couldn’t even start the bloody conference in Morocco because Libya, Syria, Algeria and Iraq treated it as a joke.”
“The Sinai has been cleared,” reminded Karen.
“Temporarily,” insisted Levy.
Karen wondered if Levy would accept the analogy that what had happened to the Sinai settlers was almost exactly what had happened to the dispossessed Palestinians. Perhaps a discussion for later, she decided, not now.
“What are you going to do?” she asked softly.
“Fight. Like we’ve always had to.”
Karen felt a great sadness envelop her.
“We fought the Arabs and won. Now, if we have to, we’ll fight the Jews,” he said.
“You intend to fight your own people!”
“There’s a monument in Israel which will always be identified with resistance. It’s called Masada.”
“I know,” Karen said. “The Jews put themselves to the sword rather than be captured by the Romans. They didn’t fight other Jews.”
“This will be our Masada,” he said stubbornly.
“Oh, my darling,” she said. “My poor darling.”
“You’re patronizing me!”
“No I’m not,” she said anxiously, feeling up and putting her finger against his lips. “Really I’m not. I’m just frightened for you.”
“You needn’t be,” he said with schoolboy bravura. “We’re going to have weapons enough to fight a war.” She felt him turn to her. “That’s what we’re going to get from Azziz. A whole boatload.”
“How many are there of you?”
“Enough.”
“But you know how good your people are, your army and your security forces,” she said. “It won’t matter what sort of weaponry you’ve got; they’ll destroy you.”
“Maybe, if it was just us… only our settlement,” conceded Levy. “But it won’t be. Once the other settlers see what’s happened, the resistance will spread. Throughout the Sinai and onto the West Bank: even Jerusalem. They won’t be able to ignore that.”
They will, thought Karen; oh, my darling, they will. Just as all strong, determined regimes always crushed any irritating resistance, whatever the morality of their argument. She had studied it, been involved in it for what seemed a lifetime. She knew the arguments, catchphrases, the cliches; and the message was always the same. The smaller sacrifice for the larger good: the justification for every general in every war. David and Goliath was a fairy story, nothing more: in real life the roof only ever fell in upon the weak and the innocent.
“I should see how the boy is,” said Levy checking his watch. “And I’ve got to go to make a telephone call.”
“Not yet,” said Karen.
This time their lovemaking was slower, without any desperation, and they came together ecstatically. When he kissed her, Levy found her tears and said, “Me too, darling, it was beautiful for me.”
“I’m glad,” said Karen. She would let him think she cried from pleasure, she decided.
Deaken was comparing the photograph and the brochure like a man unable to accept he had the winning ticket in a fabulous lottery. “No doubt!” he said. “No doubt at all!” His excitement swept away the depression of his conversation with Underberg.
“So we can get them out,” said Azziz quietly.
“ We?” queried Deaken.
“We have some men,” said Grearson. “They’re already flying to Strasbourg. I made contact with them an hour ago while you were ashore.”
“What’s wrong with the police?”
“How long do you think that would take?” Azziz spoke dismissively. “Days of dreary explanations, then time to assemble their antiterrorist squads. I want my son back now. Like I thought you wanted your wife back.”
“Of course I want her back,” said Deaken angrily. “But what if anything goes wrong?”
“It won’t,” said Grearson.
Now that the opportunity had come to take the sort of action he had wanted ever since Karen’s kidnap, Deaken felt a curious reluctance to act. He was still frightened, he realized. “What about the negotiations with Underberg?”
Grearson laughed contemptuously. “You heard what he said. All in good time. We’re not going to get them back through any negotiation, any payment… You surely didn’t think we intended letting those arms go to waste, did you?” he quoted again. “They haven’t made all their demands yet, it could be weeks before we even get into the position of negotiating.”
Deaken couldn’t dispute the logic. “What have you arranged?” he said.
“The nearest town of any size to Rixheim is Mulhouse,” said Grearson. “There’s a hotel there called the Parc. That’s the assembly point.”
“For whom?”
“I’m flying up.”
“I want to come too,” said Deaken.
