The Legacy (44 page)

Rachel pinned an armband onto Sam's sleeve. It had a Star of David sewn onto it. “Now you're a medic,” Rachel said. “You're a very quiet, angry, sullen medic, but you're a medic nevertheless:”

“I'm overwhelmed,” he said in English.

“Talk Hebrew. You're still in Israel. As a matter of fact, your Hebrew is very good, hardly any accent.”

“You said you wanted to talk to me.”

“I am talking to you, my dear beloved friend.”

“Damn you!” he snapped at her. “Do you think I'm made of iron? We said goodby once. How do you think I feel?”

“Possibly the way I feel, possibly not. All afternoon I've been in that room, waiting, praying that Dr. Reznik would find you and bring you back with him.”

“Why? Why?”

“I'm not sure. I love you, Sam, but not only for that. We said our farewells. I accepted it. But now it's either the end of something or the beginning of something. Either our country will die or Jerusalem will be free. I wanted you with me. When we each had a whole life ahead of us, it was different. I would make my life. You would make yours. That's what we decided and we were right. But now ——”

“Rachel,” he said, taking her hand, “I don't want to be cruel or unfeeling. You're the only girl I ever loved. But this isn't my country and this isn't my war. No war is my war. No war, no cause is worth the murder it entails ——”

“Murder! Is it murder to defend ourselves? Should we die the way we died in the Holocaust? Don't we have the right to live?”

“Rachel, we've been through this. I won't argue it.”

“Then why did you come back?” she demanded angrily. “We don't need you. Why did you come back?”

“Because I thought I could help.” She didn't pull her hand away. It remained there, warm and alive under his own hand. She shifted slightly toward him, so that her thigh pressed against his.

“I make no claim on you,” she said softly. “You think I want to make a prisoner of you and keep you here. I don't. I only want you next to me now. Don't fight with me now. Don't argue with me. Just for a little while stay next to me. We'll both be quiet.”

“All right,” he agreed. “All right, my dear one.”

They sat silently as darkness fell. In the east, star shells began to explode, lighting up the sky like a fireworks display. Then there was a high-pitched shrieking sound, and at the end of the street, fifty yards from them, a shell exploded. The concussion flung Rachel against him. It was the first time Sam had ever been close to an exploding artillery shell, and the blow of the compressed air, the air sucking at his breath and ripping at his clothes like something palpable, was new and terrifying. Rachel recovered first and ran down the street toward the place where the shell had exploded. After a moment, Sam leaped to his feet and raced after her.

The shell had exploded against a house, crushing a wall and shattering the windows. A man lay bleeding in the street, and from inside the house, Sam heard cries of pain. “See to him,” he told Rachel, pointing to the man on the street. The door of the house had been torn from its hinges. Sam rushed inside, pushing through people coming from the other apartments. The door to the ground-floor apartment was open. A girl of ten years or so lay on the floor, bleeding profusely from a bad gash in her arm, crying in pain, two women echoing her cries and trying vainly to stop the blood. “Let me!” he said sharply, pulling one woman away from the child. He took his handkerchief, made a tourniquet for the arm, and drew it tightly.

“All right, darling, all right, now.”

And to the women, “Get me a bandage, a clean napkin, anything. And antiseptic, whatever you have, peroxide, alcohol. Anyone else hurt?”

Apparently not. They ran to do his bidding, and he stroked the child's hair, soothing her.

“It hurts,” she whimpered.

The whole length of her forearm was gashed and there were small glass cuts on her face and throat. Someone handed him a bottle of peroxide, and he poured it over the wound. The child screamed in pain. He heard Dr. Reznik's voice: “Bring the flesh together and hold it.” The old man bent over him, laying a dressing on the wound and binding it. “We suture it back at the station. Clean out the cuts on her face,” handing Sam a wad of gauze.

“She should go to a hospital.”

“I know, I know. The ambulances are all at the front. We do what we can. She'll be all right,” he told the women. The child was screaming again from the pain of the antiseptic in her cuts. Sam lifted her in his arms.

“Where are you taking her?” one of the women cried.

“To our first aid station. Right down the street at the Liebermans'.”

As they came outside, Rachel and Ari were covering the man on the street with a sheet someone had given them. Bystanders helped them move the body to the sidewalk, where a woman kneeled beside it, weeping and striking her face with her hands. Sam carried the child to the station and laid her on the couch. Sarah had the instruments ready, and Reznik went to the bathroom to scrub his hands. The two women had followed them, and with the two women other neighbors.

“Please,” Sam told them, “it's a small room. Please wait outside. Your daughter will be all right.”

“Why is she crying like that?”

“Because it hurts.” He went to the bathroom.

“Wash your hands,” Reznik said. “Tell Mrs. Lieberman we need more towels. No anesthesia. I feel helpless. I haven't sutured a wound in twenty years.”

Mrs. Bergan, the child's mother, owned a car and said she could drive the child to the hospital. With a sigh of relief, Reznik closed the wound with adhesive butterfly strips, and Sam carried the little girl to where the car was parked. When he returned, there were two women and a man in the Liebermans' living room, all of them with superficial fragment wounds from a shell that had landed in Mussaief Street; two blocks away. Ari and Sarah attended to them. Rachel was sitting on the front steps and Sam joined her.

“I saw a man die,” Rachel said bleakly. “His whole belly was torn open. He was an old man. He looked at me and smiled, and then he died. How could he smile with his whole belly torn open? It was terrible.”

The old man's family had carried the body away, and the street was empty, except for two policemen with flashlights who were looking at the shell damage. The streetlight had been shattered by the explosion, and the street was dark except for flickers of light from windows in the houses. One of the policemen shouted for them to black out the windows, and the lights began to disappear.

“How do you feel?” Rachel asked Sam.

“I don't know yet.”

“Are you afraid?”

“No. Not yet.”

“I was never afraid at the kibbutz. We were attacked once, and I wasn't afraid. But here in the city—”

“I know. It's being home, and being away from home.”

“I'm lonely.”

“We're both of us far from home, aren't we?”

“I never thought of it that way,” Rachel said.

The two policemen walked back toward them. They carried Uzi guns.

“What's going on?” Sam asked them.

They paused, glad to have someone to talk to. One of them lit a cigarette. The other said, “Fine. You yell for them to black out, and you light a cigarette.”

“Who sees a cigarette?”

“Are you kids medics?”

“We're medical students from Hebrew University,” Rachel told them. “He's an American. I'm a kibbutznik. We have a first aid station inside the house. Dr. Isador Reznik is in charge. We took care of the little girl who was wounded when the shell struck and we tried to help the old man who was killed.”

One of the policemen took out a small notebook. “Did you get his name?”

“No. But his people took his body into that house, four houses up the street.”

“Can you tell us what's going on?” Sam asked them. “There's a war going on a kilometer away, and no one seems to know what's happening. Are the Jordanians attacking?”

“Not yet — not our boys, not the Jordanians. Just the shooting and a few shells.”

“We're cops. We don't know any more than you do.”

They moved off into the darkness. Dr. Reznik came out of the house, stuffed his pipe, lit it, and sat down beside Sam and Rachel. “Well, children,” he said, “we're at war again.”

“There's always been war,” Rachel said sadly.

“The existence of our people is a historical affront,” Reznik said. “No one is willing to tolerate it. Yet with God's help ——”

“He hasn't been too helpful,” Sam said with annoyance. “Here we are within shouting distance of the Jordanian side of the city, and these houses are filled with women and children. Why don't we do something to evacuate them?”

“To where?” Dr. Reznik asked softly. “Where can we go, Shmuel? We live in a country the size of a postage stamp. Half of our holy city is held by our enemies. Wherever we go is the front. For my part, I welcome a danger that is not reserved to the young men. If we must have war, the old should fight it, not the young.”

Rachel touched Sam's hand and smiled wanly. Dr. Reznik puffed on his pipe. To the east and the north, intermittent explosions, star shells in the sky, and the chatter of small-arms fire. A jeep turned into the street, driving slowly with dimmed headlights. It pulled up in front of them, and the driver, a soldier, asked them, “Where's the aid station?”

“Right here. I'm Dr. Reznik.”

Two bespectacled young men sat in the back of the jeep, each with a medic armband. “We're picking up medics — whatever the first aid stations can spare,” the driver said. “We had a lousy break at the casualty clearing station. A shell hit an ambulance. We lost three medics and we were short already.”

“Where?” Reznik asked him.

“Between Sanhedria and Fago. Dr. Leventhal and Dr. Kahanski are running it.”

“Let me go,” Rachel said.

“No women.”

“I'll get Ari,” Reznik said.

“What in hell good is Ari?” Sam demanded. “He's crippled.” He went around the jeep and climbed in next to the driver.

Dr. Reznik made no move to stop him. Rachel was staring at him. What a bastard I am, Sam thought. Whan an unmitigated bastard. Her face, as it was at that moment, would stay with him.

The driver took the wrong turning. He was from Tel Aviv and was new to the twisting Jerusalem streets. “Beautiful fucked-up war,” Sam muttered in English, and in Hebrew, aloud, “Turn right here on Fischel to the end and then left on Samuel.” The screaming sound, and a shell exploded against a house in front of them.

“Isn't there some other way?” the driver asked. “They're shelling up ahead.”

“You can get lost in these streets. All I know is that if we stay on Fischel we hit Samuel and if we turn left, it leads to Sanhedria. What's the difference? We don't know where they're shelling.”

The driver increased his speed, and a minute or two later, they were at Samuel the Prophet Street, facing the barrier of wire, pillboxes, and trenches that divided Israeli Jerusalem from Jordanian Jerusalem. In the darkness, the barrier was invisible, but the street itself was crowded with military vehicles and troops on foot. The driver edged his way into the road and turned left. The shelling from the Jordanian side was intermittent, the shells screaming overhead to land in the Jewish area. In the distance, suddenly there was a rumbling roar of artillery, the shells exploding in the darkness on the Jordanian side.

“Ours,” the driver said.

“Wonderful,” Sam said bitterly, in English.

They were stopped by a military policeman, who was informed by the driver that they were looking for Dr. Leventhal's casualty clearing station.

“They've moved to the Dushinski Yeshiva. Do you know how to get there?”

“I think so,” Sam said.

A few minutes later, they reached the Yeshiva, which appeared to be ringed in with exploding shells. In the street in front of it were the burned-out shells of an ambulance and two cars. An ambulance had just pulled up, and they were moving the casualties into the Yeshiva building. “That means the attack has started,” the driver told Sam. A medic came out of the Yeshiva and asked the driver what he had.

“Three medics.”

“Follow me,” the medic said. He led them into the building and downstairs. The basement was crowded with pale, bearded rabbinical students, intimidated by the chaos around them. Through an open door to another part of the basement, Sam could see an improvised operating room, blazing lights over the tables and doctors and nurses at work. The three medical students stood there for a minute or so, watching, fascinated. Then a man in a bloodstained white gown approached them, and the medic who had guided them there explained that they were volunteers from the aid stations.

“What are you — medical students?”

They nodded.

“Can you treat superficial wounds, flesh wounds, burns, cuts?”

They nodded again.

“All right. Wash your hands. There's a bathroom at the end of the hall. Supplies are in that small room down there. They do triage at the entrance, and they put the ambulatories in that big room over there. Deal only with what you can handle. Anything else send to one of the physicians.”

A hand shaking him awakened him. He looked at his watch. It was a few minutes after four — in the morning or in the afternoon. He was confused, and here in the basement there was no way to tell. Then, bit by bit, the events of the previous night slid into position in his memory. He had been asleep only for an hour, and until then it had been the endless line of wounded. Now he looked up into the face of an old, bearded Orthodox Jew, who was offering him a cup of tea and a piece of coffee cake.

“Eat, sonny. It gives you strength.”

He stared dumbly for a moment, then took the tea and cake. With the first bite of the cake, he was ravenously hungry and he wolfed the rest of it down.