Early that morning, many hours before Moses had died, his mother had bicycled to where David lived. It was a long journey in the fast-forming heat for a woman suffering the first pangs of arthritis, and the fact that she attempted it indicated the anxiety she held for the overnight absence of her only son. When she arrived it was David who answered her knock, and they had talked at the front door, David blocking her from going inside, determined once he had heard the germ of the news that she carried that she should not meet his own parents.
'He had spoken of taking some food in the city, then going to the library, then he said he would be with you and with the others – with Isaac and Rebecca. He had said he would not be late home.
His bed hadn't been disturbed, and he has never before been out the whole night.'
David had half-listened and half-wondered to himself what had caused the delay. He was aware that only Rebecca and Isaac had joined him the previous evening, and remembered the talk that there had been among the three of them as they considered where Moses might be.
'Always he has been home for the night. And when he went out yesterday he had not taken his police book – his card was at home. That is wrong-not allowed. And without it, if he is in trouble, if he is in the hospital and hurt and cannot speak, then how will they.. .?'
So Moses had acted as instructed – acted as David had told them they all should. He could imagine Moses's mother rummaging in his drawers looking for a clue to his whereabouts and finding no satisfaction, only the card with its Cellophane wrapper with the head-and-shoulders photograph and the official stamp set across it. David had never explained the motive for his order, leaving the others to think for themselves: that if they were taken in – casually, without the link being forged between their activities and the police inquiry in hand – then it would be easier to explain away the absence of identification as a careless lapse. It was usual for the police to pick the Jewish boys off the streets, if they found them out late, if they were in a group – even if they just cared to exist. Not that there had ever been talk among the four of questioning, arrest, imprisonment. It was not a subject David would have tolerated: too chilling, too personal. And therefore it was not considered by the others.
It was impossible for it to happen if they were careful, and they had been careful – except for the balaclava and the policeman who had not died. Isaac had noticed, abrasively and impervious to feelings, as soon as they had gathered again with their breath still coming in a streaming torrent, and while Moses had hung his head, and while David had quietened him. And it was beyond the character of Moses to be away through the night. A steady boy, not likely to panic, not one to sleep in the park, not one for the girls, and David knew all their friends outside the cell.
'… without his card if he is injured no one will know to tell us..
'I will see Isaac and Rebecca, and I will ask them what they know,' said David. He was kindly and reassuring, sufficient to mask from the old lady the drumming fever he felt. Not fear, nothing as defensive as that, and not as strong an emotion as excitement, just a feeling that at last real battle was joined. The skirmishing was over. The patrol cars would be out. Guns issued, semi-automatic to augment the readily carried side-arms. Control rooms perspiring with the effort of pursuit. The beast had been angered and sought to retaliate. The wounds had gone to the quick, as had been intended. But it was not the time that David would have chosen, and his jaw stiffened, and his mouth quivered and he sought to hide it, and to play again the role of command and competence. Little to practise his mood on. Only an old woman who showed fear and confusion and who had come to him for help; whose darned stockings were twisted and sagging, and who had missed her place in the queues to seek him out, and who did not know where her son lay. From his own instinct David had already decided that Moses had been taken, arrested, even as the woman had spoken.
He sent her on her way, and closed the door after her, and told his own mother that it was just a friend who had called and that he was going out to walk and that he did not have to be at the plant for the afternoon shift. He needed to be alone, to think, to have a plan to put before the others. It was expected of him now, that he could produce an instant solution, but the initiative was absent. Perhaps it was they, the pigs, that held the high ground? It was not a dimension of the battle that he had ever considered. But what if they were consigned for ever to the valleys? It was immaterial. A battle there would be, and he must find the solution.
There was no pavement; he walked on the unmade road, rutted and pitted from the winter's ice, forsaken by workmen in the summer, and never adequately finished when they built the flats.
Further out of town were the show blocks of the Krushchev days, when accommodation rose to impress the people that they were at last remembered. But that was not where the Jews lived.
Mean little premises, these, that he walked past, where the rent racketeering was fiercer than in the capitalist West that he knew of from his radio. When you were Jewish, how could you get your name high on the housing list? That was the problem, and when you couldn't then you were in the hands of the landlords. Life was a shared bathroom and a shared kitchen and a shared toilet.
Inside what passed as the privacy of a front door were three rooms, and his mother and his father and his three sisters to share them with. Nearer into town there would be flowers in front of the small houses, but nobody bothered out here. There seemed no point; they would be covered with dust when the bus came down the road, suffocated, and the water pressure was too low to run a hose… and for what, anyway? It would take more than colour and the scent of pollen to brighten these homes.
So perhaps the bastards had Moses. Down in the town, that's where he'd be. Hadn't his card with him, which meant he'd have to talk for them to know who he was. And when he told them that then the short-cuts would begin – names of associates, addresses, rendezvous locations, dates. Identification? Not a difficult task, not for a body so efficient as the militia. How soon would he talk? That was the only question he needed to answer now. How soon? What was the boy made of? How much spunk, how much balls? The same courage as Israel had when the Syrians were traversing the Golan? Did Moses have the courage of the Israeli tank commanders?
But it was one thing to fight with your friends around you, on your own side. But what did Moses have now, in a police cell with the electric wires and the batons and the impatience of the questioners? David shivered in the sunlight. Not much that he would have going for him. Just loyalty – and what would that mean when the pain was intense?
Isaac was coming towards him down the road, hot and red in the face. He bad been running, and there were stains under his armpits. He was shorter than David, and not so muscled, his face strained and the sinews of his neck bulging.
He was blurting incoherently, so that David embraced him and quietened the boy and told him to get his breath and to begin again.
'It's all around the University. I heard it first in the canteen before classes, then again in the lecture room before the professor came. Everyone is talking of it They say there has been an attack on a policeman, and that last night the militia took a man, right in the centre of the city, and they say he is a Jew. One of the chemistry students started it – his uncle works there, in the files section – and he told the boy's mother last night, and there were celebrations last night in the headquarters – vodka in all the offices. And you remember that Moses failed to meet up with us last night.'
'He did not come home at all last night. His mother has been round to see us and asked for information.'
'Has nothing been said on the radio?'
'Nothing. How would they? It is not their way.'
'What to do, David?'
'To be calm and to think, and then to fight them..
'With what? How can we fight them? They will do things to Moses, things so that he will talk, and then they will come for us. How long will he last, if he can resist them at all? Not longer than this evening – and that's a whole day, a whole twenty-four hours – and they will come.'
Isaac had no more to say. Through all the time he had run from the bus that had carried him away from the University the thought of the four o'clock awakening, the time the militia always came, had buffeted and pummelled him. The boots, the guns, the hammering, the axes in the door timbers, the bedclothes wrenched back. Now he could wash it from his system. He had demonstrated his fear, exposed it in the street to David.
'Where is Rebecca?' David asked.
'Still at the University. Botany is an earlier start than chemistry. She won't come out till eleven, perhaps later if she has work in the library…'
'Get her,' said David. 'Meet her and take her to the woods. To the hut. We will meet there, at two… you can get there by then… and do not be late.' And then the smile that the others so coveted. 'And don't worry: they won't touch us. Moses hasn't talked or they would be here by now. We have some time yet.'
