Come To The War

by Lesley Thomas

  This time I made a determined turn into the room and the party again. 'Patriotism has become devalued,' I assured him. 'It is not what it was. With the Bomb and one thing and another we've given war a bad name.'

  We walked into the room. It was like entering a new layer of warmth. A tall, tanned woman in a long red dress leaned towards me and said, 'It was brilliant. So beautiful.' I would have liked to have stopped near her but Tobin was still worrying at my side.

  'Patriotism, you say, may be old-fashioned. But not for the Israelis, unfortunately,' he went on. 'To be a person of this country you must fight. It is part of being a citizen. And I don't like it.'

  I was introduced to a stony-looking archaeologist who took me to meet a seedy horticulturist who knew the woman in the red dress and introduced me to her. Her name was Selma Haydn. She was in her forties but good, taller than me, leisurely; a woman who was used to having time to care for herself, to dress herself with concern and finesse. Her tan was a sunbathing tan, gentle layers of it, not the harsh sun-brown of the outdoor working woman of Israel. She had careful make-up and veneered nails. Her fingers were slim and soft and she had a well-tended smile. This one had never worked on any kibbutz.

  'Our friend Tobin has been worrying you about the war,' she suggested at the outset. She had a firm English accent.

  'A trifle,' I agreed. 'But he is one of millions.'

  She was drinking a Martini. She sighed. 'The war, the war. Everyone talks about it as though it were an accomplished fact, as though it were all definite and done. By one side or the other. I find it very tiring.'

  'You're English,' I said. I grinned at her. 'Let me see - perhaps a girl ambulance driver in the war. Singing while the bombs fell.'

  She looked at me quietly. Then she smiled: 'I'm a bit disappointed that you pinned down my age so quickly.'

  'I am sorry,' I said.

  'Oh, it's fair if it shows,' she protested holding her hands forward. 'I'm "White Cliffs of Dover" vintage, all right. But you got the other thing wrong. The bombs. Jesus Christ, you wouldn't have got me in that business. I spent the whole time in Bermuda. Every last day of it. I remember watching the Duke of Windsor playing golf in August 1940. I was having a lesson at the Mid-Ocean Club from the professional. In those days I was something of a golfing girl wonder. And that was while brave old Britain was standing alone. She was standing without the duke and without me, just to name two.'

  'He couldn't help it,' I said. 'As I remember.' She wasn't being loud about it, talking quietly and not rattling it off like someone who has told it many times as a joke.

  "No, it was none of his fault,' she agreed reasonably. 'It must have been nasty for him to be playing golf in Bermuda while all that bombing and suchlike was going on. He holed out from a bunker at Riddells Bay I remember. There was a picture in the paper.

  'But I could help it. And I wasn't going to budge. My father had gone scurrying back to the old country to do his bit, whatever his bit was. He was put on cutting up ration books and he got killed by a fire engine one perfectly peaceful lunchtime in Birmingham. I suppose that's counted as a war death, isn't it?'

  I laughed. Her dress was low, over one shoulder and her right breast was swollen out half clear of the downward slope of the material.

  'My father was something like that,' I admitted. 'He deserted from the Army two weeks after war was declared. He simply cleared out, and then dropped dead from a heart attack in our front parlour. The War Office, through some strange process, sent my mother a telegram informing her of his death, just as if she didn't know. In a way we were quite proud of him. He was one of the first British soldiers to go.'

  She laughed like a girl. Then she became quiet and said: 'It was splendid tonight. Quite superb.'

  I nodded my thanks. 'Something happened to everyone,' I said. 'It was like going for a ride.'

  'If you had been a Jew I would have thought it was the emotion of this immediate time,' she said. She spoke now very correctly, not lightly as she had done while talking about Bermuda. 'The audience was full of it. Just exploding. And it caught the orchestra too.'

  I smiled my agreement. 'There was a feeling,' I said. 'And I don't have to be a Jew to know it. Are you Jewish ?'

  'Christ no!' she said quite loudly. 'I'm an Israeli, I suppose. I married one of the buggers. He's a reserve officer, a colonel this week, I think, and tonight he's out on the Golan Heights waiting for the Syrians. He's a soil engineer, always picking up bits of dirt and running his fingers through it treating it like gold. He's very nice really. A bit Jewish though. Not that he can help that. He can't wait to get into Syria just so that he can start stealing the earth from their back gardens. He says it's unique around Damascus.'

  'People want to fight for odd reasons,' I observed.

  'Ah, he wants to fight for the fighting too,' she said. 'They all do'. Her fingers took in the room. 'They're all so bloody effervescent. They're like the damned sixth form. All in love with somebody, and then somebody else. Can't wait to get out of school to have a battle with the kids next door.'

  'And the kids next door also want a fight,' I pointed out.'That's the damn pity. Typical too. That's another lousy school.'"What will you do if it starts?'She pouted. 'I'll tell you what I'll be doing,' she said determinedly. 'Playing golf.''Like nineteen forty,' I said.

  'Right. I shall go up to Caesarea and I'll play golf through until either the Jews win or the Arabs arrive to rape me or whatever.'

  I laughed but then I thought she was serious. 'Why don't you go home to England then ?'

  'Home ? England ? God, I couldn't stand it. Not Haywards Heath in June. I'd rather stay. If the Arabs have me then they have me.'

  'You concentrate on your golf,' I advised. 'There's nothing like holing a few long putts to help the war effort.'

  'How long will you be in Tel Aviv ?' she asked.

  'Always excepting Acts of War, Acts of God, and that sort of thing, I shall be here for three more days. When the tour was arranged I had some idea of making it part-holiday. Then, of course, I didn't know everybody would be sharpening swords. After that I go down to Eilat with the orchestra and then to Jerusalem and to Haifa. And then home to England in June.'

  From the edge of her eye she saw the worried Tobin coming towards us. 'Please come to my house for lunch tomorrow,' she said. 'At twelve. I will send a car to the hotel for you. Which is it?'

  'The Dan,' I said. 'Let's hope they don't start shooting before then.'

  'It's the Sabbath,' she assured me. 'It won't be on the Sabbath.'

  Tobin had heard. He, as host, had ostensibly abandoned his depression in the company and now said to Mrs Haydn, 'War! Which war is this?' He laughed, his smile splitting unconvincingly under the ugly mop. Igor, who was sharing the car back to the city, stood by. Tobin laughed again, even less reassuringly. 'It is all just noise and propaganda,' he said. 'Symbols and cymbals.'

  Igor raised his Russian eyebrows at me. I shrugged.

  Three

  It was one in the morning when we reached the Dan Hotel but the city was still brimming with light and people. Igor went to his room, but I changed my clothes and went out again walking in the cool air up through some streets of trees until I came once more to the Dezingov.

  The clamour and the activity were not slowed. Now I was no longer in the car I knew there was music everywhere along the broad channel of the street, threaded between the people's voices and the coughing and blowing of the cars jammed under the blatant white street lights.

  Newspapers flapping like birds around the café£ tables went from hand to eager hand, were pointed at and discussed. The man bowed over the terrible old fiddle was still there, scraping at it tenderly, as though trying to nurse some sweetness, some life, into it. The boyish soldiers in their uniforms of green and brown, or splashed with camouflage like an animal skin, still lounged at the tables laughing with dark girls. One table was littered with sub-machine-guns. The soldiers wore ungainly long boots, laced high, and shape
less little hats. They did not look smart or alert. They looked tired, untidy, and not very tough.

  I sat with a cognac for twenty minutes, watching it all. No one recognized me and I was, for once, grateful. They were too occupied with their arguments and discussions, their plans, their newspapers. They seemed like massed swimmers jumping in and out of a pool. Two young, brown women with cherubic faces leaned back in their chairs, their strong, long legs bridging to the table before them, singing quietly in fine unison. The soldiers were examining marked out battle maps on the stained cloth with the interest and enthusiasm of hikers. On the other side of me six deaf and dumb people talked excitedly with whirling fingers.

  There was a flashing sign in red Hebrew and blue English across the road, a hundred yards up the vibrant thoroughfare. I realized that I had come out of the streets with the trees to within a short distance of the newspaper office where Shoshana worked.

  I finished the cognac and walked among the promenaders to the corner building. From open windows on the first floor the office fights flew into the street. People were standing thickly about the ground-floor windows reading news bulletins. I went by them and up the stairs to the first floor. The rooms there were full of yellow hazy lights, and men in white shirts, sweating in the night heat, were hung over desks and typewriters, or moving about carrying wet printers' proofs delicately between fingers and thumbs as though they were fly-papers. The building began to shake, a long noise above the claustrophobic din of the people in the office. The presses in the basement were moving.

  I walked through the activity, unquestioned but hesitant, unwilling to speak to anyone in case I intruded on something momentous. There was a sharp bend in the big room and I went around it like a stray cat. Immediately I saw Shoshana wearing khaki shirt and trousers, which made her look small. She was with some white-shirted men around a coffee machine, left hand on her hip, right hand lifting a paper cup. She had her back to me, but two of her companions looked up at me and she turned and saw me. The men looked pale against her. Her skin was deep and dark, far more than I remembered it, and her hair was much fairer, and tied behind her neck with a small band.

  The coffee was near her mouth. She stopped it there and put it down, then laughed and turned towards me, glad to see me. Her face was strong and striking, but she looked hung with tiredness. Christopher she smiled. Then, 'Mister Hollings! Ha! How strange to see you here. So far from England's cold.'

  'It's not cold there now,' I said. She had a sheen of oil on one side of her face. 'Have they turned you into a mechanic ?' I smiled at her, thinking how weary her eyes looked.

  She let out a half-laugh, her teeth showing quickly against the dark of her skin. 'Not yet. But there is time. I have been away.' She took my arm. 'Let us go and have a drink, if you have time. I am so tired.'

  We went down to the street again. In the few minutes I had been in the newspaper office the people and the cars had thinned. She took me along the pavement, holding my arm still, almost dragging herself, not saying anything, until we came to some steps dropping to an open basement door. The door was almost round, like the end of a big pipe, and from the hollow came some indefinite jazz and a sulky fight.

  'It won't be too bad,' she said. 'I would like to get somewhere inside. It will make me feel better. I have been in the open too long these days and nights.'

  The cellar was crowded but quiet, the people listening to a man playing the vibes, leaning over the instrument lovingly, curiously like a carpenter making something intricate at a bench. There were two somnolent guitarists and a drummer like a shadow in the smoke at the extreme of the room. We found a table at the back near a whitewashed wall. The musicians were putting together something of their own, wandering about with the music, trying things, fitting bits together, unhurried, lost in it.

  'I knew, of course, that you were coming to Israel,' she said watching the vibes player intently. 'But so many things are taking place . . .' She spread her hands and looked at me smiling. She was a Sabra, a third generation Israeli, the people they call after the prickly thorn of the desert, as she once told me. Her nose always looked to me as though it was spoiling her. It was not an ugly nose, but it seemed that it belonged to someone else, with a different face to hers. She had truly magnificent eyes, but that night the rings beneath them looked like the imprinted heels of two shoes.

  'Who have you been fighting today?' I asked gently. 'You personally, I mean.'

  She giggled quietly. 'I fight no one today,' she said. 'Maybe I look that way, but no fighting. Travel, travel, travel. They say this is a little country. Do not believe them. It is plenty.'

  The waiter came through the haze with our drinks. It was close and sticky in the little place. 'What have you been doing?' I asked.

  She drank. 'No, you first,' she insisted. 'Your concert was a magnificent success. Already I hear that in the office.'

  'It went well,' I said seriously. 'Everyone wanted it to go especially well. The people, the audience, were unbelievable. And the orchestra - boom? I made an explosion with my hands.

  'And the soloist?' she smiled.

  'Never played better. Magnifique!

  She laughed now and ran her fingers across her cheek leaving tracks in the thin oil. 'That is better,' she said. 'That is more like you. This modesty is not becoming.' She looked closely at her hands and screwed up her nose in annoyance. 'Oil,' she said. 'Oil on my face. Like you say, maybe I am a mechanic'

  The musicians came to the end of their journey and stopped, I applauded with the others but Shoshana lit a cigarette. They began again, slipping easily into the subdued music, the vibes thinking and hesitating as they sounded, the drums moving the piece along, but very slowly.

  'You like this music?' she inquired as though surprised.

  'Yes. I enjoy hearing them put it together. It is a luxury I would like myself.'

  I like that one,' she said pointing to the vibes. 'So much like a slow musical box.'

  'Where have you been?' I asked again.

  'Everywhere,' she said wearily. 'I am tired so to cry. I have been in Gaza and along the borders of Sinai, and last week in the Golan Heights, where the bastard Syrians have been shelling the people gathering the crops and also in the villages. My driver was killed there on Friday. He was an old friend. There was a land mine and he was driving the jeep back to Tiberias to send something I had written for the newspaper. I had only left him a few moments before and he had gone two hundred metres along the road and the road exploded and the car was thrown off and he was killed in a moment.'

  The vibes player was leaning close, nose over his keys as though seeking some small fault in them. His soft touches resounded deftly through the room. The drummer seemed to have fallen across his drums, the guitarist nodded at his fingers finding the strings and the bass player held the neck of his instrument like a man loving an ostrich.

  'That must have been terrible,' I said inadequately.

  She pushed the root of her hand across her cheek as though to push the surface oil away. 'My God this is going to be such a war,' she said. 'I have seen them all these days and nights lying in the hills and among the sand dunes. Lying there like dogs. Our side and their side. Waiting to get to each other.'

  Her voice was slow. But she took a decisive drink. 'We cannot lose,' she said. 'We will not lose. That is not possible. They think they can come in and take us, but they will never do that. We will give them a war to remember.'

  Inadequately again I said: 'Perhaps nothing will happen. There have been plenty of times when things have become as hot as this.'

  She shook her head. 'If you had seen it all you would know that you don't speak any sense,' she argued. She did not say it roughly. It was her way of framing the words. 'You see, if they do not attack us we must attack them. We cannot have them sniffing beneath our doors and windows all the time. In Israel we cannot afford to have the battle on our own ground. There is not enough of it. One sweep across the Negev and we are cut. Then we have o
nly two halves of a country. That is no good. The battles must be outside our doors - in the Sinai, on the far bank of Galilee, around Bethlehem and Jericho.'

  There was a hardness in her voice now. She was gazing into the misty smoke, towards the veiled jazz players. Her dark face, with her Sabra-fair hair pulled so sternly back to her neck, looked as set and lined as a man's. She spoke as though I were not there. 'Then there is Jerusalem,' she muttered. 'The matter of the City of Jerusalem.'

  She turned to me, as though recalling my presence, and a wry smile softened the unaccustomed set of her face. 'I'm sorry,' she said shrugging. 'Propaganda. And to a neutral.' She pulled away and regarded me from a new distance. 'Maybe I have been writing too much about it for my newspaper. I am too much part of it.'

  We got up and went out. The night was much cooler now and almost empty. Many of the lights in the street had gone out and the cafes were closed. Some taxi drivers stood by their cabs at a corner, still arguing over a newspaper spread open on one of the bonnets. I thought, if they don't get a war they'll talk themselves into one. A group of young Jews were still around a table at one of the cafes that remained lit. Some dogs walked the pavements and a lately arrived moon was now dangling over the metallic inland hills.

  We walked by the group at the cafe. Two of them were soldiers. Their chairs were pushed back from the tables and tilted as they pushed their boots against the cafe walls. There were some beer bottles on the table and two sub-machine-guns. One of the soldiers had his arms around the waists of two girls. The other laughed in argument, wagging his finger at another youth. One of the girls turned to look at us, but not the others.

  'Your young people should not be up so late,' I said. "They'll be too tired to fight.'

  For a moment I thought she was going to pull away from me, but abruptly she relaxed and shrugged her shoulders. 'Everyone will fight,' she assured me. 'You see.'