Blood Rules Read Free Page A

young man’s hunched shoulders. That’s the way things are, what can we do?
    He did not take the obvious route to Heathrow. Partly that was out of a sense of caution inbred over the years, but mostly it was because he knew this would be his last visit to London and he wanted to make a little pilgrimage.
    He turned down Charing Cross Road and parked opposite the churchlike facade of St. Martin’s School of Art, which he contemplated silently for a moment or two. There were no cars, no people. After a while he delved into an inside pocket of his houndstooth jacket and took out a leather wallet. From this in turn he extracted a photograph.
    He’d had the snapshot heat-sealed in plastic, because he wanted this humble pictorial record to outlive him. He studied the photo briefly—a needless exercise for one who knew its lineaments by heart—before again raising his eyes to the college opposite. At this time of morning, no students milled around, no one sat on the steps Sara’d been sitting on when the photograph had been taken all those years ago: her right leg tucked up, the left fully outstretched, both hands raised to extend long black hair to either side of a narrow, smiling face. Sara, Raful’s only child.
    He could still remember the day of her graduation, summa cum laude, in Hebrew studies. Raful had stood side by side with her mother, tears streaming down both their faces, while the strains of “Hatikva” floated beautifully, gravely, above the throng; dinner afterward; the stunning blow she had delivered over nightcaps in the Baka apartment: no government service, not one hour on a kibbutz, no boyfriends, no life in Israel … but to London! She would go to London, there to study fashion design and spend the rest of her life making clothes for rich goyim.
    The war between them had been long, one of the few Raful ever lost.
    He smoothed the plastic a couple of times before putting away the photo. These were mortal memories: the fight, while his wife, Esther, stood miserably on the sidelines; the reconciliation; the slow coming to terms with a grown-up daughter’s assertion of independence. All those things had led, like the long straight road linking Jerusalem and the West Bank, to death.
    Sharett had been forced to accommodate death too often. In the old days, yes, as Yigal said: running around and blowing people up and getting hanged by the British … though that had been different because it was
other
people who were blown up,
other
people who got hanged. But then the cast had changed. Then family and friends started to vanish, permanently, from Raful’s landscape. A certain friend called Ehud Chafets—oh, yes, he was dead, his brains shot out of his skull on the road to Beirut airport. Esther—she had died of barbiturate poisoning, they said, but that was only because doctors shied away from certifying “broken heart” under cause of death ; doctors tend to ignore what they cannot cure.
    Sara’s certificate was even less informative. “Massive terminal trauma” had always struck him as an odd way to describe the effects of being blown apart by a bomb.
20 JULY: 0200: OXFORD
    “Voilà!”
said Robbie.
“Le
breakfast
en lit, pour un.”
    Colin pretended to struggle out of sleep, rubbing his eyes. “Whass’ time?”
    “Deux heures. De bonne heure, encore.”
    Colin sat up. His son stood beside the bed with a tray in his hands, grinning broadly.
    “Le café de Nes,
from a jar purchased, in a single lot, from one of our most exclusive
supermarchés,
and opened, personally,
par moi. Les oeufs, frits. Et le. .
. I dunno what bacon is, Dad.”
    He lowered the tray onto Colin’s lap. Toast, juice, eggs and bacon, coffee. “What’s all this, then?” Colin asked suspiciously. “What are you after?”
    “As if I would ask the aged P for anything! Who,
moi?”
Robbie laid a hand across his breast, looking pained.
    Colin sniffed. “Wallet’s on the dresser,” he growled. And then, “Thanks, son. You