Pursuit (27 page)

“There! One man putting his weight on this will do more good than all you idiots trying to push against the ocean. If you take turns, changing every five or ten minutes, you should be able to contain that leak.”

A man had already taken his place at the pry and was leaning against it, forcing the plank and the blankets tightly against the ship's curved side. Grossman went to the leak and studied it. The water had reduced itself to a small, unsteady ooze. If the ship didn't founder from some other reason, Grossman thought, at least it won't from that leak. God, what idiots! Trying to push back the sea! King Canute, were you Jewish by any chance?

He flashed his flashlight about the room. The sea seemed to have abated somewhat, the water running down the companionway was nowhere near the deluge it had been minutes before. The bilge pumps seemed to be winning the battle against the torrents; the water in the cabin had gone down, and with it the whimpering of the frightened people. Grossman raised his voice.

“All right!” he said to the wondering faces staring at him. “The worst is over. We're not going to sink. Let's start cleaning up in here.”

The lashing sea had eased and then given way to calm waters almost as if some unseen barrier had passed, or as if in apology for the roughness of their previous passage. They chugged into a night full of moonlight, with both sides of the narrow strait clearly visible. While those below worked to clear up the debris and move the stove back into place, and while Pincus and his first-aid kit worked on the cut and the bruised, there was another meeting in the deckhouse. This time Grossman attended. Ben-Levi took the wheel while Cellotti pointed to his charts. By unspoken consent nobody mentioned the passage through the straits.

“Catania,” Cellotti said. “It's probably the only place this side of the island that has a small dry dock where we can fix the ship's planking. We obviously must repair it before we get out into the sea again.”

“I don't like it.” Ben-Levi was speaking over his shoulder, his eyes fixed on the buoys through the channel. “Maybe the British don't expect a ship like the
Naomi
to attempt these waters, but they still have patrols in this area, as well as informers, I'm sure. Catania is too big to put into without a good chance the British will hear about it. After all, two hundred people, many of them women and children, climbing out of a small fishing boat? They'd know in an instant what we were and where we're heading. We'd all end up behind barbed wire in Cyprus.”

Cellotti frowned. “We still have to repair the damage.”

“I know,” Ben-Levi said unhappily. “I didn't say we shouldn't do it. I just said I don't like it.”

Grossman had been looking at the chart. He looked up from it, curious.

“What's the tide around here?”

“It varies with the time of year, of course,” Cellotti said. “I've got the tables here.” He reached into a drawer, bringing out a thick book, opening it and running through the pages. “It's fairly high, I know, not as high now as in the spring, but high. It's supposed to be the main reason for the whirlpool effect in the straits. Why?”

Grossman pointed to the detailed map of Sicily.

“We could bring the ship in, almost run it aground, at some beach nowhere near a town or village. It looks as if there's a lot of deserted area around here. We could bring it in at high tide, anchor it to shore, and wait for the tide to run out.”

“How do you know she'd tip the right way?” Brodsky asked.

“We use the davit pulleys to make sure she tips the way we want. Then we replace the damaged planking and let the tide float her again.”

“Cellotti nodded. “It's a good idea if we can do the job between tides …”

“We'll have to.”

“Then let's do it!”

Oddly enough for Jews, they didn't even take a vote on it.

They repaired the
Naomi
on a Saturday, on a shingle beach in a deserted cove wall beyond Aciriale, under Grossman's direction, despite the objection of the more religious Jews who felt that labor on the Sabbath should be avoided. These even refused to watch, but marched off over the hills to stare out at the rolling countryside and act, unconsciously, as lookouts against unwanted intrusion. And the following day the
Naomi
was refueled in Augusta, the water tanks filled and additional food purchased and stored aboard. And once they sailed, Wolf brought out the guns that had been hidden in the bilges, wrapped in oiled silk, cleaned them until they polished, and mounted them in a makeshift gun rack set on the wall of the wheelhouse, proud of his work.

There was a holiday mood on board once they cleared Augusta harbor and were out of sight of land. They had come almost four hundred miles without being discovered by the British, and while the closer they came to Palestine the greater the danger, there was always the hope that as long as they maintained their appearance as an innocent fishing vessel, they might continue the deception successfully.

As if to compensate for the rough waters in the straits, the sea turned beautifully calm. When no ship was in sight, which was most of the time, since Cellotti took advantage of the charts to avoid popular sea lanes, the passengers took turns on deck, spelling each other every few hours day and night, luxuriating in the warm fresh sea breeze and the restful motion as the ship chugged its way through the small waves. When a ship was sighted only the men dressed as fishermen occupied the deck and the deckhouse; once the danger had passed the children would swarm back on deck, hanging over the bow despite the warning cries of mothers, or draped over the rail, staring down into the depths of the sea as if searching for some meaning to their odyssey in the green-blue dimness there. The trawls had been stowed, since they slowed the speed of the ship, but many of the men fished from the deck using makeshift poles, shouting with delight on the rare occasions when they caught something.

Ben Grossman's position on the ship had changed. From being a pariah, albeit a self-imposed pariah, he had become a person to be considered in the daily functioning of the ship. As they sailed from the Italian waters into the Aegean Sea, he pointed out that it was possible the British might believe the missing
Naomi
had gone to the bottom, and it would not do to be reported five hundred miles from Nervi; the following day, rigged on ship's cradles, he helped change the name to the
Ruth
. In the hot Aegean winds he had shown the men on board how to install simple air scoops made of cardboard, so that the ventilation in the cabin was immeasurably improved. He had rigged up a small air hose to act as a blower on the stove, pushing the fumes up the jerry-rigged chimney and out of the cabin. And every day he checked out the diesel, making sure its efficiency remained high, watched the generator and the air compressor, and made sure the batteries had plenty of water.

Nor did he mind. It was evident to him that he could not leave the ship before they reached Palestine, but he did have a valid passport, albeit a forged one, and once ashore it would only be a matter of time before he would manage to leave the country and get to Switzerland, because if Brodsky or any of the others thought he had forgotten his resolution, they were crazy. He would need more than the fifty dollars he carried, but they said everyone in Palestine was armed, and an armed man could arrange money. And of course they expected him to forfeit his passport once they were on Palestinian soil, but what they expected and what they got were two different things.

It felt good to be planning again, using the time to stare out to sea as they chugged their way east, laying out a plan in all the detail he had always enjoyed. Banks had money; he would locate a bank and study its operation. And leaving the country should be no great problem in a place where the pressure was on people trying to get in. There were undoubtedly ships for commerce, and if worse came to worse he could always try to ship on as a seaman. Or as a ship's engineer; after his experience on the
Ruth
—he should be able to handle such a job with ease. A pity Switzerland didn't have a seaport.

And so they chugged on, all eyes constantly straining to the east, as if they could see their destination across all the hundreds of miles, through the dark and mist and the sea fogs they encountered. Palestine! Each had his own dream, his own picture of the future.

BOOK II

Prologue

The history of Palestine is one of violence. Its land has been won and rewon a hundred times, and the price has always been death. One might think its soil would be fruitful with the constant gift to the earth of the rich protein of human flesh and the valuable minerals of human blood, but a large part of it remains a desert, the few oases torn from its arid soil only by great determination. Sitting as it does across the main trade routes between Africa and Asia, it has been the target for greedy invaders since recorded time. The Israelites ruled it; the Assyrians and the Babylonians ruled it; Alexander of Macedonia ruled it; the Ptolomies ruled it; the Romans ruled it; Islam ruled it; Napoleon tried to rule it and failed; the Ottoman Turks ruled it, and in between many others ruled it, and each left the mark of his hand upon the land and the people.

Now, in 1946, the country is ruled by the British under a League of Nations mandate approved in 1922, a mandate which incorporates within it the Balfour Declaration of November 1917, promising British support for the establishment of a national home for the Jewish people in Palestine. Still, the British white paper of 1939, which restricted Jewish immigration to 15,000 persons per year is, in this year 1946, still the official British policy, despite the toll of the holocaust, despite the desperate plight of the Jews of Europe. But in the interim six years the Jews of Palestine fought with the British Army on many fronts and were an important factor in the struggle against Rommel and the Afrika Korps. Egypt and the other Arab forces behind the Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin el-Husaiani, on the other hand, actively supported Hitler and the Nazis. As a result, the Jews feel they have a right to expect a relaxation in British immigration policy as the minimum they should receive for their sacrifices.

In November of 1945 an Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry is formed to examine the status of Jews in former Axis-occupied countries and to discover how many are impelled by their conditions to migrate. After all, almost a year has passed since liberation of many of the camps in Europe, and many if not most of the survivors are still living in so-called assembly centers—camps in the very communities where they had been made to suffer. The committee recommends that all countries join in offering a new home to the survivors of the holocaust, and that as part of this program, Palestine permit the immediate immigration of 100,000 Jews. Although Britain has been instrumental in the formation of the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry, she refuses to follow the recommendations of the committee. The British detain thousands of persons attempting to run the British blockade, stopping their ships even on the high seas, returning the ships and their crews to the ports from which they originally sailed, and interning the passengers, men, women, and children, in detention camps both in Cyprus and in Palestine itself, camps which are simply British-style concentration camps, barbed wire and all.

Britain is neither cruel nor inhumane. They need Arab oil, and to assure themselves of it they accede to almost any Arab demand, including the severe restriction of Jewish immigration. The Arabs honestly fear the immigration of Jews, feeling that the intrusion of Jews on any scale represents a threat to their own national aspirations. And the British have promised all things to all people, Jew and Arab alike, and are now in the uncomfortable position of being unwilling or unable—or both—to fulfill their promises to either side.

In their frustration, the British increase their repression, and the answer of the Jews is disregard for the authority of the crown. The Haganah, the defense forces of the Jews in Palestine, together with its elite striking force, the Palmach, as well as the Mossad, the intelligence arm of the Jewish forces who are responsible for helping the illegal immigrants reach Palestine in defiance of British restrictions, turn their full efforts toward overcoming these restrictions. The Irgun Zvai Leumi and the Stern Gang, underground armies dedicated to violent reprisal for each British act of repression, become more active. The Irgun and the Stern Gang are not particularly popular, nor are their methods approved by many Jews either in Palestine or in the rest of the world, but emotions are high and both underground armies have little trouble recruiting. Buildings are dynamited with large loss of life, Jews are caught and hung, British soldiers are hung in reprisal.

History is repeating itself in Palestine.

Chapter 1

Naval Lieutenant Dudley Arthur Mullins, commander of British Naval Patrol Vessel
Portland
-3 stationed in Yafo, was a man of singular emotions: he hated everything. He hated Jews, but he hated Arabs equally. He hated the weather and he loathed the food; he abominated his quarters on land and he execrated the confines of the ship. He hated his superiors and he hated his subordinates; he hated the girls Mustafa Kamal sent him for his pleasure and he destested Mustafa for selecting them. In short, he hated Palestine and his duty there. Not that he wanted to return to England; he hated that as well.

Mullins was a sour-faced, dyspeptic, overweight man of forty years of age and he should never have been a sailor, since he hated the sea. If it could be said that he abhorred one thing less than anything else, it was the fact that his duty allowed him to take people from illegal ships and see to it they went behind barbed wire.

The night of December 4 was foggy—Mullins detested fog—and the
Portland
-3 was doing a routine patrol between Yafo and Ashdod. At the radar station of the ship, the new invention that had been developed and perfected during the war and had now been installed on all ships of His Majesty's Navy including minor patrol vessels in the Palestine sector, was Seaman-First John Wilburson. At his dials in the radio-communications room behind the bridge was Chief Petty Officer George Enderly. Seaman-Second Jonathon Martingale stood yawning beside the 40-mm Bofors gun mounted on the prow of the neat ship; the spotlight over his head was turned off in deference to the impenetrability of the fog as well as the fear of advertising their presence in the area. Eight of the other fourteen-man crew were in their bunks; the other six were about their various duties. It was a normal patrol night in every respect, including the dour looks Mullins cast at his crew as he made his final inspection round of the evening before retiring to his quarters to read a new book of pornography given him by Mustafa which Mullins suspected was intended to lower his resistance to the latest batch of girls Mustafa had brought in from Said.