Prince of Fire

green blanket of an orange grove. The unusual building, Gabriel knew, was the children’s memorial at Yad Layeled, a museum of Holocaust remembrance at Kibbutz Lohamei Ha’Getaot. The settlement had been founded after the war by survivors of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. Adjacent to the edge of the kibbutz, and barely visible in the tall wild grass, were the ruins of Sumayriyya.
    He turned onto a local road and followed it inland. Dusk was fast approaching as they entered al-Makr. Gabriel stopped on the main street and, with the engine still running, entered a coffeehouse and asked the proprietor for directions to the house of Hamzah al-Samara. A moment of silence followed while the Arab appraised Gabriel coolly from the opposite side of the counter. Clearly he assumed the Jewish visitor to be a Shabak officer, an impression Gabriel made no effort to correct. The Arab led Gabriel back into the street and, with a series of points and gestures, showed him the way.
    The house was the largest in the village. It seemed several generations of al-Samaras lived there, because there were a number of small children playing in the small dusty courtyard. Seated in the center was an old man. He wore a gray galabia and white kaffiyeh and was puffing on a water pipe. Gabriel and Yaakov stood at the open side of the courtyard and waited for permission to enter. Dina remained in the car; the old man, Gabriel knew, would never speak forthrightly in the presence of a bareheaded Jewess.
    Al-Samara looked up and, with a desultory wave of his hand, beckoned them. He spoke a few words to the oldest of the children and a moment later two more chairs appeared. Then a woman came, a daughter perhaps, and brought three glasses of tea. All this before Gabriel had even explained to him the purpose of his visit. They sat in silence for a moment, sipping their tea and listening to the buzz of cicadas in the surrounding fields. A goat trotted into the courtyard and gently butted Gabriel’s ankle. A child, robed and barefoot, shooed the animal away. Time, it seemed, had stopped. Were it not for the electric lights coming on in the house, and the satellite dish atop the roof, Gabriel would have found it easy to imagine that Palestine was still ruled from Constantinople.
    “Have I done something wrong?” the old man asked in Arabic. It was the first assumption of many Arabs when two tough-looking men from the government arrived uninvited at their door.
    “No,” Gabriel said, “we just wanted to talk to you.”
    “About what?”
    The old man, hearing Gabriel’s answer, drew thoughtfully on his water pipe. He had hypnotic gray eyes and a neat mustache. His sandaled feet looked as though they had never seen a pumice stone.
    “Where are you from?” he asked.
    “The Valley of Jezreel,” Gabriel replied.
    Al-Samara nodded slowly. “And before that?”
    “My parents came from Germany.”
    The gray eyes moved from Gabriel to Yaakov.
    “And you?”
    “Hadera.”
    “And before?”
    “Russia.”
    “Germans and Russians,” al-Samara said, shaking his head. “Were it not for Germans and Russians, I’d still be living in Sumayriyya, instead of here in al-Makr.”
    “You were there the night the village fell?”
    “Not exactly. I was walking in a field near the village.” He paused and added conspiratorially: “With a girl.”
    “And when the raid started?”
    “We hid in the fields and watched our families walking to the north toward Lebanon. We saw the Jewish sappers dynamiting our homes. We stayed in the field all the next day. When the darkness came again, we walked here to al-Makr. The rest of my family, my mother and father, my brothers and sisters, all ended up in Lebanon.”
    “And the girl you were with that night?”
    “She became my wife.” Another puff on the water pipe. “I’m an exile, too—an internal exile. I still have the deed to my father’s land in Sumayriyya, but I cannot go back to it. The Jews confiscated it and never bothered to compensate me for my loss. Imagine, a kibbutz built by Holocaust survivors on the ruins of an Arab village.”
    Gabriel looked around at the large house. “You’ve done well for yourself.”
    “I’m far better off than those who went into exile. It could have been like this for all of us if there’d never been a war. I don’t blame you for my loss. I blame the Arab leaders. If Haj Amin and the others had accepted the partition, the Western Galilee would have been part of