because David said they must be cleverer, with better grades, better diplomas than those they sought to emulate. But they were being prepared for a life of conformity and inaction, inevitable in its way, until the day that David had come to Rebecca's house with the radio set.
They were teenagers now, but isolated from the outside world until the radio flitted into their lives. The Voice of America, the World Service of the BBC, Radio Liberty broadcast by an emigre staff in Munich and beamed from a massive transmitter across Central Europe. The curtain was pulled back, a shaft of sunlight brought in. There was contact with the forbidden, excitement and stimulation at the illegality of it all. David said he'd purchased the radio, and smiled. They knew it was beyond his means, and he'd also said they had no need to learn more of its acquisition, only to listen and to understand.
It became a secret thing, special and precious with its expanded short wave band, and a door through which they followed the June War of 1967, and the War of Atonement of 1973. They heard of the tribulations endured by those of their faith who sought to emigrate from Russia to the State of Israel, were told of the trials of those not permitted to leave the Motherland that they wanted to forsake. They knew of international protest at the lot of Soviet Jewry, they suckled themselves on what they believed to be the strength of world opinion. Heady and intoxicating drink for the four teenagers…
And David was their leader.
Nothing had ever been formally decided. It had never been talked over, but the time came when he made all the decisions for the group. At first there had been discussions, followed always by inevitable agreement to David's point of view, till within the last two years the pros and cons were no longer argued. David announced what they would do, and there was immediate concurrence. And as he assumed command so David's personality seemed to grow, and he took on a mantle in the minds of the other three of new strength, new influence. Yet when Moses submitted to the men in khaki, with their instruments and their drugs, when he gave the names, then David would follow to an identical cell, a fashioned and geometric imitation of the one that Moses lay in now, and his future would be as strongly etched as was that of Moses. The torture would be the same as he would have endured, and the culmination too – perhaps the same dawn, perhaps the same prison yard. All of this would be David's if Moses talked when his interrogators came for him, all of this and an equation of betrayal. Was he any more fitted, better equipped, to confront them in the interrogation basements? David with his smiling face, who could conjure up passion into his words, communicate the life in his eyes. Did he possess a threshold that would protect him from the fear and terror of pain? And Moses realized that he had never known David to experience helpless and uncontrollable stress, had never seen anguish screw up his cheeks, or known him exchange his confidence for confusion and hurt. It hastened a chilling shudder through him; what if David were no better, no stronger, no more resolute than he, Moses, the follower? He clasped his arms across his chest, digging his uncut fingernails through the fabric of his shirt. What if the leader were no better able to withstand the pigs, had no defiance, no arrogant obscenities? That would be betrayal too: to expose him to them, to leave him weak and vulnerable and screaming.
How many months ago it had been that David had found the woodman's hut amongst the birch forest near the 'dachas' north of the city Moses could not remember. Time had travelled fast since then, much had been compressed into the days till they had seemed to run together without shape or pattern because of the new stimulus of what they called the 'programme'. Moses had allowed his work at the new chemical factory near his home to become subordinate to the meetings that the group held inside the darkened and damp shack, which they reached separately, making their own way at David's behest. Bare walls, only the rough-cut timbers to shield them from the spring rain that followed the snow and that preceded the summer heat and the flies. It was here that David had talked and the others had listened. The irony was – and it was not lost on them – that the doctrine he preached was available for all in the Ukraine to find; there were histories, tomes of them, of the partisan warfare against the Germans who had occupied the area, and treatises of the tactics of Guevera, and for those who had stored them and who had not thrown them away when they were suppressed there were the works of Mao, and there were the thoughts of Giap who had conquered the invincible Americans. That was what David talked to them of. On one fundamental only did he depart from the text and bible of the guerrilla fighter. There would be no
'first stage', there would be no 'infra-structure period', no creation of an 'indoctrinated population base'. They took too long, took too many people, and the circumstances in which they found themselves could not be likened to the paddy fields of Asia. The Jews of Russia had spoken of the ills so often they had no need for more words, only for action. And if the action were successful then his movement would develop as a sapling does under the spring light, but first there must be the root, deep in fertile soil. He told them of the revolutionary warfare that would hit back at the oppressors of the Jewish people. 'Like a flea-bite at first,' he had said. 'But a flea that cannot be found, that cannot be hunted out, that comes back and wants more. That turns what is first an irritation to anger. When their anger is aroused then we know that we are hurting them, then we know that we have vengeance. There has been a great wrong here, too great a wrong for us alone to erode. But it is a gesture that is needed. How many walked in submission to the German shower chambers? How many now walk in submission to the camps at Potma and Perm?'
David had been persuasive, but there was no necessity for it. All in the group knew the fighting ground. Isaac said that he had met a youth who had met once with Yuri Vudka who had seven years at Potma to think on his application for leave to emigrate to Israel. David had chipped in, not allowing him to finish – but then he seldom did, and it was not resented -'Vudka from our own Kiev, and seven years to think of his city, and his crime that he had wanted to leave, and had written things down, that he had books from the West and in the Hebrew language.' David had talked of the new Jews of Israel, hardened and fashioned in their own sun by the rigours of their own land and their own freedom. He called them 'sabras', men who had washed away the placidity of the former generation that had marched to the cattle trucks with not an arm upraised.
So how placid, docile, unquestioning were their people? There was enough evidence to make him believe it, enough that he had heard to verify the belief that they were supine, incapable of self- help. But often they had wondered whether there were other groups that met in bare and shadowed rooms, that came to darkened and pathless woods, that sought shelter in the same nameless anonymity and that talked of a struggle, of hope and revenge, however trivial. David had heard on the radio of the bomb detonated on the Moscow Inner Underground, and had told them of protest and disobedience among their people in Novosibirsk – and in the main square at that – and of a man who was executed in the prison at Tbilisi and who had set off six explosive devices. He had heard it on the radio, where the word carried biblical validity. Not all Jews, he had said, and smiled, but at least others of different faith and aspiration who were burrowing at the edifices, chipping and hacking. Others who rejected the required submission as totally as they, and who stood back from the fly-swat resistance of the press conference, and the smuggled letter to the West, and the complaint to the Foreign Power. 'Words, words, stupid and ineffective,'
David had said. 'As valuable as lying in the sand in the path of a steam-roller. It is action that will change them, that will achieve something.' They had wondered how many other tribes shared their jungle and ate the same fruit, but they had no way of knowing. As the group became more daring and more cohesive so too their dread of breaking the precious security was augmented.
There was no consideration given to widening the size of the cell – too dangerous. Heighten the walls, strengthen the locks, repel recruits even should they be found. An island, aloof in a battle sea, that was how they had decided they should remain.
They had followed David through each step as he prepared the ground for the movement that lifted their course from the level of conspiracy to action, accepting every stage of his logic, not disputing his argument. Moses thought of the long weekend days and the mid-week summer evenings they had spent, the four of them, in the hut. How they had talked of what they would do, sometimes all shouting together and laughing and hanging on to each other's shoulders and imagining how a grateful people would bow to their courage, acknowledge the standard- bearers, feel a pride in their bravery. David had decided when they were ready, and none had queried him, only become quiet in the elation of knowing that the moment had arrived. They had talked in whispers that evening, subdued to the droned harassment of the mosquitoes, and clung to each other before the time to go to their homes, and memorized the route to the rendezvous the next evening. It had been wonderful for Moses as they had held each other close, the male smells unable to counter the softer, more gentle trace of the girl's scent. So much strength, so much power, nothing they could not do because they were together. Later had come the chilling loneliness for the boy, when he left the warmth of the group, to walk back on his own on the forest path towards the road. David had said he would be the first to kill, Isaac had argued till Rebecca had found the compromise.
