Ten Years Gone полностью

Because Mira knew Esther Grunewald and Willie Ackerland. They had been on that ship. In a few minutes I would know whether, by some fluke or miracle, they were still alive today.

"So," I said, "where are Esther Grunewald and Willie Ackerland?"

I was seated on a sofa in Mira's living room. It was a nicer room than mine. Yellow curtains hung at the windows. Small potted cacti stood on a windowsill. Photographs of the Dead Sea, the ruined mountain fortress of Masada, and the Old City of Jerusalem adorned the walls. In the middle of a colorful rug squatted a low wooden table. Mira had taken a chair on the opposite side of it. She had not offered me anything to drink, and I would have declined had she done so. I desired nothing but answers, and I think she desired nothing but supplying them. I found myself literally at the edge of my seat, and my skin felt as if it were vibrating in anticipation.

"In Nahalat Yitzhak Cemetery," Mira said. Her tightly controlled expression and flat tone made it clear that this was a woman who had had much experience with death.

"Dead?" I asked, feeling foolish the instant the word left my lips. The vibration had faded, leaving a bleak void in its place.

A curt nod.

No miracle. In fact, it was worse than that. A mother parts with her only child to save him from the horrors of Nazi Germany. Against all odds that child and the woman who agreed to care for him make it to the shores of the Promised Land, only to be killed on the cusp of safety. Fury welled up inside me, followed by immense sadness. What sort of God allows for something as sacrilegious as that?

"They were murdered," Mira said, and this time there was a current of anger in her tone.

"By the British, you mean."

She shook her head. "Esther and Willie weren't killed by the British. They were murdered on August 26, 1939, in their apartment in Tel Aviv."

I asked her to repeat what she'd just said. She did. Then she told me the rest of the story. She spoke haltingly at first, as if she had to talk herself into uttering each new word in her narration. Once she got into it, though, her speech smoothed and normalized.

"I met her on the Salonika. The ship wasn't much. It was old and patched up, and the engine rattled the whole way from Greece. But it was the best we were able to find. We arrived a little after dawn and began ferrying passengers ashore. We only had two boats, so we had to make several trips back and forth. We had people on the beach with cars ready to drive the new maapilim away. Then the British came."

Her face darkened with the memory. She had strong features—high forehead, pronounced cheekbones, ruler-straight nose, full eyebrows, wide mouth with thin, almost severe lips, and a well-defined jawline. Her hair seemed to be the only part of her appearance that she actively cultivated; it fell in vibrant tresses to her trim shoulders. She wore no jewelry or makeup. The lack of added color just placed more emphasis on her eyes. They bounced back whatever light hit them. Her face was too linear to be beautiful, but there was something about it that arrested the eye.

She was five foot eight and athletic. Long limbs, narrow waist and shoulders. Small high breasts. A body made for running and jumping. A tomboyish figure, but attractive nonetheless, and it seemed to fit her character like a glove. She had on a pair of black shoes with a negligible heel and a pearl-colored shirt, which was tucked into the waistline of a blue skirt that showed her knees and calves. I found myself staring at her exposed legs.

"Unlike what the papers said at the time," Mira continued, "there was no battle. Neither I, nor any other Irgun member, was on board at the time. We were all on the beach, getting the maapilim already ashore into waiting cars and trucks. The British simply began firing as soon as they had the Salonika in range. Some of the passengers who were still on the ship died then and there; the rest—ten of them—were taken into custody. Esther and Willie were among them."

She began pacing the room. It was clear by the set of her jaw how upset reliving that day made her. No wonder the Irgun proved to be such a thorn in the side of the British. They had ample stores of motivation to draw from.

"The British took the prisoners to a makeshift prison camp near Haifa. It was nothing much. A few shacks, some fences, a guard post. A decision was made in the Irgun: we were going to storm the place and get the prisoners out."

"Shmuel Birnbaum told me the raid was a fiasco," I said.

She snorted without humor. "That's mild compared to how it was portrayed by the Hebrew press at the time. We were called terrorists, insane, a danger to Zionism. We were to be shunned. That's why I didn't want to talk about all this at the hair salon. My boss and clients, none of them know I had anything to do with that raid. I wonder how Shmuel Birnbaum knows about it."

"He has good contacts. What went wrong?"