The Ascent of Eli Israel Read Online Free

ground and crawled behind a pile of stones, closing his eyes. His heart beat hard behind his eyelids.
    With his face pressed into the dry earth, Pirkl thought of Hannah. He once told her he would die if he didn’t touch her there. And now he was sure he would die.
    â€œYou won’t die,” she had said, her lips against his, her words disappearing into his mouth.
    He spoke back into her mouth, “I will!”
    â€œNo you won’t. If I let you touch it now, what is there to look forward to?”
    â€œLots of things,” Pirkl said, kissing her dry lips.
    â€œNo,” she said. “You will have to live. So you can touch it later.”
    â€œPlease.”
    â€œNot now,” she said, placing his hands on her behind and pulling him closer. She smelled of kerosene and sweat.
    Pirkl wanted to tell Hannah that he loved her, he loved her so much, but said, “When do you think my father will come home?”
    â€œI don’t know,” she said. “Stalin took my father when I was three. His father died in a pogrom in Dokszyce. But don’t worry,” she said. “You can get a new father.”

    What would happen if he died in no-man’s-land? Would Hannah cry for him and call him brave and wish she had let him touch her, Pirkl wondered. Sweat poured down his neck, tickling him, the way Hannah’s fingers did. His mouth was full of soot, he didn’t dare raise his head. Would his mother know the moment a bullet ripped through his body? Would she feel his last breath fade away the way she felt his first breath when he came into the world?
    Some dried apricots spilled out of the satchel onto the ground. “My last meal on earth, and I don’t even like apricots.” Then a horrifying thought crept into Pirkl’s mind: If my father is dead, would I know? He is defending the Old City and bombs are falling. Can he walk between a million raindrops and not get wet?
    The sniper must have thought he had hit his target, for the ricocheting bullets stopped, as did the bombing within the Old City. Only the odd report of machine-gun fire echoed from within the walls. Pirkl removed the awkward Thompson magazine from his bag and laid it beside the pile of rocks, pushed himself up off the ground and ran as fast as he could back toward the barricade and the breach he had slipped through. Not a shot was fired.
    Down by the Yemin Moshe neighborhood he decided to try again. Of course Jaffa Gate, the main gate in the west, would be heavily guarded. It was stupid to try, Pirkl thought. And Zion Gate, too, was a fortress. But the little gate! He peered up at the city and he could see fires burning from within the Jewish Quarter. The bombing had stopped.
    In the winter his father had taken him to Montefiore’s Windmill at the top of Yemin Moshe, which offered a majestic view of the Old City and the valley below. To the south, his father pointed out the British High Commissioner’s “Government House” on a gray hilltop. He chuckled at the irony that the seat of the mandatory government would be located on the Hill of Evil Counsel. They looked out on the walled city that seemed to be almost buried in the mountains, and down below, the Hinnom Valley, or Gehenna. His father told him that in ancient times, pagans had built a shrine to Moloch, an angry god hungry for human flesh. Children were sacrificed in that valley, and their blood flowed all the way to the Dead Sea. Pirkl asked his father if children were still sacrificed. He said, no, not if they were good.
    Now he was in that valley, making his way across the burnished earth to the Old City, and the Union Jack was gone from that gray hill, replaced by mortars and cannons. He imagined walking over the bones of children burned in the bronze arms of Moloch. Down he went and he heard goats bleating in the distance and he heard the mournful clanging of their bells. Across the valley he counted ten white dots moving slowly