A dark Legionnaire appeared at the head of his mattress, whispering in his ear between machine-gun fire and the incessant boom of the big guns sounding off throughout the city. "The Grand Mufti himself sent me." Flares and tracers from the sky flashed across the stranger’s beard, his black eyes burned electric green. "The Quarter has been sacked," the Arab said.

Pirkl closed his eyes tight, go a-way, go a-way, don’t come back ’til Judgment Day.

"Beautiful boy," the stranger said, stroking Pirkl’s cheek with an empty shell casing. There was blood on the Legionnaire’s chest, and Pirkl touched a dark stain on his uniform shaped like the Shield of David. "His brave blood," the stranger answered and a tear rolled from his cheek. Pirkl drank the tears down as they poured from the stranger’s face and the Ras-el-Ain pipeline was flowing again with cool spring-water.

He awoke to his Mother stroking his hair. "Shhh," she said, mopping sweat from his brow. Only a small kerosene lamp burned against the early morning darkness. Her eyes were ringed in black. She was as gaunt as a baby bird and wore a blue bandanna around her neck. A soldier with a bandaged head groaned from a stretcher not five feet away. "Shhh," she repeated, holding a small tin cup to Pirkl’s lips. "Drink."

He sat up in bed as a whistling shell fired from the Katamon neighbourhood crashed in a nearby street. "I’m going to find Abba," Pirkl said.

• • •

When the Jewish State was declared two weeks earlier, Pirkl had followed his Mother to the sixth floor of their apartment house, where an Arab Legion shell had crashed through the roof of a neighbour’s flat. The shell did not explode but had smashed a large jagged hole in the ceiling. White moonlight poured in through the opening, lighting the room with a silvery glow. Pirkl watched his Mother step through the shattered glass and plaster and thought she looked like an angel. The air was thick and hot and smelled of crushed stone as Pirkl kicked up the white dust into clouds, imagining heaven.

Someone’s wireless set crackled loudly from a lower floor and echoed through the darkened stairwell and the now-abandoned apartment. "This is Kol Hamagen HaIvri, the broadcasting service of the Haganah, calling on a wave-length of 35 to 38 metres or 7 to 7.5 megacycles. Here is our English transmission . . ." His Mother pulled a bookshelf up to the hole and climbed the shelves, disappearing a moment later through the twisted steel into the hot night air. "Come, Malchyk," she called. Pirkl bristled at the childish nickname that had been his since he was six years old, and began to climb, careful not to step on the leather-bound Commentaries. The broadcaster read from David Ben-Gurion’s Declaration of Independence, his voice catching on the words, "By virtue of the natural and historic right of the Jewish people and of the resolution of the General Assembly of the United Nations hereby proclaims the establishment of the Jewish State in Palestine, to be called Israel . . ." Pirkl repeated the word "Israel" as he pulled himself out onto the rooftop.