Green City in the Sun (59 page)

     Now he realized that it wasn't. David decided that the smartest thing he had ever done was to stay on in Uganda after Chief Muchina, ill and dying—from a
thahu
, people whispered, placed on him by Wachera—had dropped all charges against David and had declared the arrest a false one. David had been free to go back into Kenya, but he had opted to stay in Uganda and attend Makerere University, from which he had graduated three years later with a degree in agriculture.

     He had learned farming and farm management. Now he was ready to take back his land from the Trevertons.

     
But when will that be?
he asked himself as he left the barracks, rifle slung over his shoulder. For years his mother had been promising the reinstatement of his lands. Had she not placed a
thahu
on the Trevertons? And didn't Wachera's curses always work? But not quickly enough for David. "The Treverton coffee estate is doing well," Wanjiru had written in her last letter. "The white girl Mona is running it herself." This was not what David had joined the King's African Rifles for—to waste his time in a dry, godforsaken country where the people were determined to annihilate one another, with him in the middle, the target of both sides because he was a British soldier, while the Trevertons grew fat on his land!

     David was overcome with misery.

     What was there to love in this arid Palestine? In the summer the heat was killing, and hot winds seared one's lungs; in the winter there were gray, relentless rains and a biting cold he had never felt back in Kenya. David's heart was heavy for his homeland. He yearned for the forests, for the clean mists of Mount Kenya, for the songs of his people, for his mother's cooking, and for Wanjiru's love.

     Wanjiru...

     She was more to him now than just the woman he loved and hoped to marry; Wanjiru had come to personify all the things he was homesick for. Wanjiru was Kenya. He longed for the comfort of her embrace.

     When David saw the large transport trucks starting to line up, their headlights filling the compound with unnatural brightness, he realized that
a massive search was being organized. Where would it be this morning? he wondered as he walked over to one of the trucks and struck up a conversation with the driver.

     "Petah Tiqva," the man said, referring to a small town not far from Tel Aviv.

     David nodded and leaned against the fender. The mandatory authorities were fond of saying that "bloody Petah Tiqva is a nest of terrorists." And they weren't wrong. British intelligence was well aware that the groves and woods surrounding Petah Tiqva concealed armories and were the secret training grounds of rebel forces. It was a dangerous area to search; British soldiers didn't like going into Petah Tiqva.

     It seemed to David that this was all his duty ever consisted of these days: searching for the elusive Menachem Begin. If David wasn't manning roadblocks and inspecting every car coming into and going out of Tel Aviv, then he was searching through hotels or interrogating pedestrians in the street or knocking on doors at midnight and getting people out of bed. The search for Begin was escalating; the British were frantic to find the man who was sabotaging their communications and civil offices. And now that David Ben-Gurion, leader of the Jewish Agency and Begin's archrival, had as much as declared war on Begin, cooperating fully with the British in their search, all Palestine was being turned upside down.

     There was even a reward posted: fifteen thousand dollars to the man who delivered Menachem Begin to the authorities.

     He must be a fierce warrior, David Mathenge thought, to have thoroughly confounded British intelligence for four years, to have pulled off so many successful acts of sabotage, to maintain such strong leadership over his underground army, the Irgun, and all without having once been caught. To be constantly on the move, always one step ahead of his searchers, was, in David's opinion, the work of a clever and brave man. In fact, the British had only a vague idea of what Begin looked like. When they conducted house-to-house searches, David and his men were told to look for a "Polish Jew, in his thirties, who wears glasses and who has a wife and small son."

     "I hope they find the bastard this time," the truck driver said as he lit a cigarette. "That bloody Begin thinks all we're good for is target practice.
And I don't like going into Petah Tiqva. One of these days it's going to be booby-trapped. You mark my words. Begin's going to start a bloody civil war. The Arabs will sit back and laugh while the Jews kill one another off, doing Hitler's work for him."

     David looked at the driver, a ruddy-faced man who spoke with a Scots accent. It was only on such occasions as this, when mustering for duty or manning a post, that white soldiers talked to the men of David's regiment. Otherwise, there seemed to be an invisible barrier or some strange, unuttered law against racial mingling.

     It had surprised the Africans, when they had arrived in the mandate, to discover they had separate quarters and a separate mess from the rest of the battalion. Back in Kenya it was accepted that the Africans didn't mingle with the white settlers—that was simply the way it was and always had been—but they had expected the army to be democratic. After all, they all wore the same uniforms and served the same cause, didn't they? Only last week David had learned that African soldiers received less pay than their white counterparts.

     This had come as a shock. A few of his comrades had complained about the discrepancy, declaring that a private was a private, black or white, and should receive the same pay. But the officers, all white, had reminded the African grumblers that they were better off than their countrymen back home and should be thankful that the army took them instead of leaving them behind to toil like women on the farms.

     David watched the trucks line up, the armored cars and tanks, the machine guns, and road-blocking equipment. He knew that they were going to surround Petah Tiqva entirely, penning in the unsuspecting inhabitants, and that his regiment would be sent in to conduct a search for Begin.

     He recalled now an incident in Haifa in which three soldiers had encountered a booby trap. He himself had been just a few steps behind them and had narrowly escaped being killed.

     Was Begin waiting for them right now in Petah Tiqva? David wondered. Was this an Irgun ruse? Would today bring his Palestinian tour of duty to an abrupt, bloody end?

     David didn't want to die. He wanted to go home. To Kenya. To Wanjiru.

     Sitting down on the bumper, he pulled her letter out of his pocket and
read it in the beam of the headlight. She had written:

     
We are praying for the rains. Last week I had leave from the hospital. I went up to visit your mother. We went into the forest and found an old fig tree, where we prayed together for rain.

     
Your mother is well, David. I read your letters to her, over and over. But I do not read the newspaper to her, the accounts of the war in Palestine. We read of the bombings, David, of the land mines, of the torture and murder of British soldiers. What is this fight all about? Why are you there? If Masai and Wakamba were fighting, would Kikuyu step in between? No. Let Arab and few work out their differences. This is not your fight, David. I do not understand why you are there.

     David looked up from the letter and gazed at the horizon, which was streaked with the orange promise of dawn. Was the sun rising over Kenya right now? he wondered. Was his mother fetching water from the river? And Wanjiru—was she stirring in her bed, thinking of him?

     
What
am
I fighting for?

     Another incident came back to him now, one that had also taken place in Haifa and had haunted him ever since.

     It was six months ago, and David was on patrol. During a routine search of a hotel he had come upon a man who had so stunned him that both he and his partner, a Luo named Ochieng, had stopped and stared.

     The man was wearing an American uniform and had the rank of captain. But he was
black.

     "Excuse me, sir," David had said to the American. "Just a routine check."

     They began talking. Because of David's accent, the captain had thought he was from England. "From Kenya, sir," David had explained. Finally, he had gotten up the nerve to say, "I beg your pardon, sir. But how is it that you are a captain? In the British Army there are no black commissioned officers."

     The American had smiled and said, "Well, Private, it's because I have a college degree."

     "So have I," David had said, and it was the American's turn to stare.

     The look on that captain's face had followed David in the subsequent
months; he saw it everywhere: in his sleep; in the desert; in the faces of the Jews he interrogated. It would not leave him for even a moment. The American had not said another word, but his eyes had said,
Shame....

     But for whom—for the young private or for himself—David could not guess.

     There was suddenly a lot of activity. The men were falling into rank, orders were being shouted. David saw a Jeep pull up; Captain Donald stood to address the troops. He gave a familiar speech but this time peppered it with strong words. The thrust of it: to find Begin at all costs before any more British lives were lost.

     As David climbed into the transport truck, he translated the commanding officer's speech for his partner, Ochieng, who spoke only his native Luo and Swahili. As David explained their orders, that they were to conduct a house-to-house search in the Hassidoff quarter of Petah Tiqva, he considered the unfairness of the situation.

     Here was Ochieng, illiterate, a peasant from the Lake Victoria region who barely understood anything he was told to do but who placidly followed orders, who liked to look at himself in his uniform, and who would, after the war, like the eighty thousand other African troops, return to Kenya to his former primitive and unquestioning life. And there was David Mathenge, one of the very few educated Africans in the regiment, the only one with a college degree, a man full of ambition, who would receive not one iota of recognition as being different from Ochieng. It brought back to David's mind the look in the American captain's eyes. The utter
shame
of it.

     But if, David started thinking as the trucks pulled out, he was indistinguishable to his white officers because of his color, then he must make himself different in another way. There was a hefty price on Begin's head and a medal for the soldier who found the terrorist and brought him in.

     David Mathenge was going to find Menachem Begin.

     HASSIDOFF WAS A workers' district surrounded by orange groves. The tanks and armored cars of the occupation army, working with the Palestine
police, circled the area, while soldiers went up and down the streets, calling through loudspeakers, "Curfew! Stay in your houses! Anybody who leaves risks his life!" The men jumped down from the trucks, wished one another "good hunting," and the search began. As David and Ochieng headed down the road toward the first house, an Arab shepherd boy with his flock waved to them.

     Within minutes prisoners were being rounded up and pushed into the trucks; many still blinked from sleep, for dawn had only just broken. These were suspects who were to be taken to police headquarters for questioning. It was a surprisingly quiet and cooperative operation. People watched from their windows; they answered their doors and showed their papers. Although the soldiers were outnumbered by the inhabitants—several of whom, it would be later learned, were indeed members of Begin's Irgun— the soldiers had the weapons and the people were unarmed.

     David did the questioning while Ochieng stood guard with his rifle

     It was not easy to search for a man whom they only suspected was here and whom no one had ever actually seen. But David was determined. The wanted poster on the wall of the barracks displayed an old photograph of Begin. It showed him in a Polish Army uniform, standing next to a pretty young woman, his wife. David had memorized every detail of that blurry picture: Begin's hairline; the shape of his eyes; the thrust of his mouth. And the woman's too, Aliza Begin.

     David encountered nervous young Jews, whom he sent to the waiting trucks, and men whose papers were not in order and a few who protested. Most of them, he knew, would be released by the day's end, with little or no information gotten from them.

     David knocked at each door while Ochieng stood with rifle raised. Each door, they knew, could be a trap, could open with gunfire.

     The morning wore on. David's anxiety mounted. Captain Geoffrey Donald toured the streets in his Jeep, questioning his men, directing them. Ochieng became jumpy. He expected any moment to hear the crack of bullets, the thunder of a bomb.

     David knocked on the door of a modest little house, and it was opened by a short, smiling man.

     "Hands up," David said. He searched the man. Finding no weapons, he said, "Your papers," and the man complied.