The Masada Faktor Read Online Free Page B

neighbor’s house. They were Arabs and seemed religious and friendly enough, having a lot of family gatherings.
     
    An older man, possibly the grandfather, was coming over to their place every day. I saw that he was always digging in the large steel garbage container on the street. I started thinking of him as the dumpster diver. It is no wonder that he often wore a neck brace. Was I surprised to see him driving a brand new BMW? Slightly.
     
    I started dumping my garbage late at night so that he couldn’t go through the intimate details of my life. Luckily, in Israel the garbage trucks come every day, excluding Shabbat .
     
    But the most intriguing thing on this street wasn’t the dumpster diver. It was the big house up on the hill, across the street from me. A beware of dog sign in Hebrew on the wrought iron gate warned you but during the day you didn’t see the dog.
     
    It was at night that I became aware of him. The sound of that dog’s vicious barking echoed through my place as if it was a gigantic beast. And when he started you just knew that it’d continue and the ear plugs had to be inserted.
     
    I was told by a Jewish Israeli friend, a Haifa native, that the house belonged to the Gid’on family, a very wealthy Arab Christian clan who had some sort of power or authority in this section of Hadar for many years.
     
    The street in English is Gideon, in Hebrew Gid’on, and in Arabic pronounced with a J sound. My friend told me that the woman of the house died in recent years quite unexpectedly under suspicious circumstances.
     
    Since jackals and wild pigs are known to roam the streets and valleys in Haifa and the surrounding areas, the guard dog from the house on the hill was probably barking at them, too.
     
    Pedestrians using Gid’on Street as a thoroughfare to Masada Street also made some noise. The ones that were drunk woke me up at night, or caused car alarms to go off. I could hear animals baying, crying, mating or they could be human. At night my imagination could go crazy.
     
    In 1948 when the British left Israel, there were some battles going on right on the streets of Hadar and the stories evoked in me what it might have felt like living in Haifa then. I had read that there was a particularly bloody battle right on Gid’on Street.
     
    Perhaps what I was hearing were ghosts. Haifa’s past and my destiny howled in the night.

CHAPTER SIX
    I was interested in writing a book and thought that Mother’s conspiracy might make the basis of it. I was telling anyone that asked why I was here that I was writing a book. I always said that I was a Zionist but it was never enough of an explanation for Israelis. But I wasn’t speaking about Mother’s request.
     
    If I told the truth, that my dying mother asked me to stop the annihilation of the Jews on the seventieth anniversary of the end of World War II, what would they think? Not that I gave a damn what anyone thought of me at this point but I didn’t want to land in a padded cell.
     
    Maybe the lie had become the truth. If I couldn’t find a conspiracy, the least I could do was try to write a book. This would give my wanderings a purpose. And isn’t a purpose what I was conditioned for? Born for? Yes, a purpose was what I needed.
     
    I became tired of Ulpan . The teacher seemed to be pandering to the Russian students. Half the time I didn’t know if the words were Hebrew or Russian. I became distracted and lazy in my homework.
     
    My friendship with Monique seemed to be a little strained. I wasn’t sure if it was due to our experimentation or if she was worried about her fiancé finding out.
     
    We hadn’t talked about what happened between us, but when our eyes met, the connection between us was still definitely there. At least I thought so. She said she was very busy and would tell me later what she was up to. We didn’t go to the beach again.
     
    I kept busy, too, looking for household items and furniture. There was a good flea market