As the Lonely Fly by Sara Dowse

Author:Sara Dowse [Dowse, Sara]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780994448583
Publisher: For Pity Sake Publishing
Published: 2017-09-12T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 24

They were out on the streets now. She went to the factories, to the building sites, in the middle of the morning or in the afternoon, whenever there was a break— meeting with workers, talking, collecting money. And although much of this took place in the daytime, she moved in a twilight world. She felt a kinship with the slinking stray cats she saw at the worksites, outside cafés.

The Party had divided into sections, each with its own tasks and orders; none of them privy to what the others were doing. Only sometimes would she see a sign of them, a leaflet in a worker’s hand, a look, a phrase: something that assured her that she wasn’t alone in this, but was part of a secret, ubiquitous network stretching across the Mandate and beyond, in every conceivable land. Being conscious of this buoyed her, blunted emotion, took the edge off her fear. Yet she found that fear absorbing, was inflamed by it, for it wasn’t fear exactly, more a forfeit of fear, at least as she had known it. This was a fear that somehow engendered its opposite, a fear too strong to go on with, forcing its own abandonment, replaced with a calculated daring. She moved through the land on Ha-Kohen’s sandals. Flying, as he had said.

She rarely saw Dov or Elie or Galila, she had been separated from them, their contact reduced to a look across a square, passing in a street, or one of those palpable signals: a glance, a word, a curious ruffling in the air after one of them had left just before she’d arrived. Her nights were promiscuous: she would spend one at the flat of an official, the next in an Arab village, then in a bookbinder’s house; her movements so quick and purposeful that she remembered the smells of these places only in snatches after she had gone. The pungency of mule and sheep scat; the binder’s glue; a thin, burning smell from wherever the riots had erupted. The Arabs were rioting, she was supporting them, the violence leaping from settlements to towns, jumping like the flames along the roofs of Odessa. She felt like a flame herself, sweeping from place to place.

She stood one night at the window of a Jerusalem apartment as Arab protesters ran through the street below, shouting ‘Death to the Jews!’ and beating their clubs against the windows. The apartment was bathed in darkness, empty save for herself and one other comrade, a clerk from the university. All the other people in the neighbourhood had fled and the rioters were swarming the buildings. ‘Praise be to Allah! No more Jews!’ This one was marked, so they would know that it housed Arabs, Christians, but they too had fled, and still the two of them breathed quietly in the dark as the flames leapt past. It was astonishingly hot, even here in the hills; a boiling pot, the fires in the streets infrared. When the shouts died she could hear her heart pounding.

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