Rivka went back to reading. Moishe walked up to the bow of theNaxos and watched Haifa draw near. The town rose up from the sea along the slopes of Mount Carmel. Even in winter, even in cold, the Mediterranean sun shed a clearer, brighter light than he was used to seeing in Warsaw or London. Many of the houses and other buildings he saw were whitewashed; in that penetrating sunlight, they sparkled as if washed with silver.
Mixed among the buildings were groves of low, spreading trees with gray-green leaves. He’d never seen their like. When Captain Mavrogordato came up for a moment, he asked him what they were. The Greek stared in amazement. “You don’t know olives?” he exclaimed.
“No olive trees in Poland,” Moishe said apologetically. “Not in England, either.”
The harbor drew near. A lot of the men on the piers wore long robes-some white, others bright with stripes-and headcloths.Arabs, Moishe realized after a moment. The reality of being far, far away from everything he’d grown up with hit him like a club.
Other men wore work clothes of the kind with which he was more familiar: baggy pants, long-sleeved shirts, a few in overalls, cloth caps or battered fedoras taking the place of the Arabs’ kerchiefs. And off by themselves stood a knot of men in the khaki with which Moishe had grown so familiar in England: British military men.
Mavrogordato must have seen them, too, for he steered theNaxos toward the pier where they stood. The black plume of coal smoke that poured from the old freighter’s stacks shrank, then stopped as the ship nestled smoothly against the dockside. Sailors and dockworkers made theNaxos fast with lines. Others dropped the gangplank into place. With that thump, Moishe knew he could walk down to the land of Israel, the land from which his forefathers had been expelled almost two thousand years before. The hair at the back of his neck prickled up in awe.
Rivka and Reuven came out on deck. Moishe’s wife was carrying one duffel bag; a sailor had another slung over his shoulder. Moishe took it from the man, saying,“Evkharisto poly — thanks very much.” It was almost the only Greek he’d picked up on the long, nervous voyage across the Mediterranean, but a useful phrase to have.
“Parakalo,”the sailor answered with a smile: “You’re welcome.”
The uniformed Englishmen walked toward theNaxos. “May I-may we-go to them?” Moishe asked Mavrogordato.
“Go ahead,” the captain said. “I’m coming, too, to make sure I get paid.”
Moishe’s feet thudded on the gangplank. Rivka and Reuven followed closely, with Mavrogordato right behind them. Moishe took one last step. Then he was off the ship and onto the soil-well, the docks-of the Holy Land. He wanted to kneel down and kiss the dirty, creosote-stained wood.
Before he could, one of the Englishmen said, “You would be Mr. Russie? I’m Colonel Easter, your liaison here. We’ll get you in contact with your coreligionists as soon as may be. Things have been rather dicey lately, so your assistance will be most welcome. Having everyone pulling in the same direction will help the war effort, don’t you know?”
“I will do what I can,” Moishe answered in his slow, accented English. He studied Easter without much liking: the man plainly saw him as a tool, nothing more. That was how the Lizards had seen him, too. He liked the British cause better than he had that of the aliens, but he was sick of being anyone’s tool.
Off to one side, a British officer handed Panagiotis Mavrogordato several neat rolls of gold sovereigns. The Greek beamed from ear to ear. He didn’t think of Moishe as a tool: he thought of him as a meal ticket, and made no bones about it. That struck Moishe as a more honest approach than the one Easter showed.
The Englishman said, “If you’ll come with me, Mr. Russie, you and your family, we have a buggy waiting down past the end of the dock. Sorry we can’t lay on a motorcar for you, but petrol is in rather short supply these days.”
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.