Come To The War

by Lesley Thomas

  'To the man from the front line,' I nodded at the phone.

  She said: 'With the lunch all laid out and everything.'

  'I know that. My back is just starting to burn. He made me sit in the sun all the time, the bastard.'

  She said: 'That's my husband you speak of.'

  'Indeed,' I agreed. 'Why did you ring?'

  'I don't know,' she replied. 'What are you doing?'

  'Sleeping,' I said. 'What else? I was dreaming I was riding a dromedary to a desert of ice-cream.'

  "That's Freudian,' she said. 'Very nasty. Particularly on a dromedary.'

  'Probably, but I'm going back right now.'

  'To the dromedary?'

  'Of course.'

  'I'll bow out then. I'll pick you up at ten to take you to Jerusalem.'

  'The Golden,' I said. 'All right. At ten. Goodnight, Selma.'

  'Erav tov, Christopher. Happy dromedaries.'

  She arrived at ten with her Mercedes. She was driving and we went off together out of Tel Aviv towards the jumped-up hills, first through the Vale of Sharon and then on to the gradually rising country to Jerusalem. All the hills were brown and strewn with white boulders as though some primitive battle had been joined and finished and all the ammunition left lying around.

  She looked very young again that morning. She wore a multi-patterned shirt and white slacks, flared at the bottom which was an advanced fashion then for a woman in Israel. Her shirt was silk and her breasts stuck out like prim pyramids under the material. All the time she drove she smiled to herself as though she had some specially good secret, but when I asked her about it she replied that she enjoyed driving before noon and the prospect of going to Jerusalem always pleased her.

  'Do you know many women in Israel?' she asked as we were going through Ramla, by the prison where they kept Eichmann before they executed him. She half-turned, moving the car expertly around the backside of a donkey in the street. 'Or is that a rude question?'

  'It's a rude question,' I said. 'But I'll tell you. I know two women here - to talk to that is. You and a young lady called Shoshana Levy who works for a newspaper in Tel Aviv.'

  She said: 'She writes a column in one of the morning papers. It's usually rubbish. It's in Hebrew, but I get someone to read the papers for me.'

  'Well, I know her,' I said. 'She came over to England to write some articles about me. I had a drink with her the other evening, after going to the party.'

  'She works late,' Selma said.

  I said: 'That's correct, she works late.'

  'I remember the articles,' she said. She did not drive like most women, having to look at the person with whom she talked. Her eyes were on the road. 'I got someone to read them to me because I was interested in your visit here. They were pretty shitty.'

  The road was sunlit, then clouded with shade in parts by the piled hills of rock on either side. It ran at one place around the lip of a gradual crater and beyond, on the opposite rise, were the square-eyed houses of a village.

  'Abu Gosh,' she said. I had made no reply to what she had said about the articles.

  'Who lives there?' I asked.

  'It's an Arab village. Integrated Arabs. The Jews are very proud of their integrated Arabs, you know. They show them off like we show off the Tower of London.' When she chose, I noticed, she would suddenly claim her Britishness. Especially when she talked about the Jews. 'It's a sop to their conscience for driving all the others out,' she said. 'They point to this lot and a few thousand subjected others and ask you to realize how democratic Israel is, at the same time thanking God under their breaths that there are no more of the rotten bastards about. I hate to think what will happen to Abu Gosh and the other places when the real Arabs come up this road.'

  'You think they will come up this road?' I asked.

  'Certainly,' she replied. 'As soon as the Jordanians get on the move they'll cut straight through here and join up with Nasser's army coming the other way.'

  'The Israelis don't believe that,' I said.

  'No,' she admitted. 'It keeps them happy not to believe it, I suppose. You wait and see.'

  'Are you still going to play golf throughout the war?' I smiled.

  'Of course. Caesarea golf course will be the safest place to be. I shall wear a bright red shirt so that everyone can see I'm not one of the military and I shall have my British passport in my golf bag along with my scorecard. I always keep a scorecard, you know. It's good discipline, even when you're going around by yourself.'

  'And when the Arabs arrive?'

  'I shall wave my putter and my passport to the nearest officer. I think it's better to wave a putter than, say, a five iron. A putter doesn't look so aggressive.'

  'Where are we now?' I asked. We had run down through a steep valley with the road in its gully, the sides crowded with rocks and pines. It was cool and enclosed.

  "This is the Corridor,' she replied. 'The Jerusalem Corridor. Where they made all the fuss in 1948. The Jews got convoys through to the city and the other lot were shooting from up there on the hills. See along here. They left some of the casualties as mementoes.'

  On the flank of the road, blind, dead, hollow, were some armoured trucks, wheel-less, rust-red, garlanded with flowers, some alive some dead, lying peacefully beneath the pine branches. They were struck at grotesque angles like small shipwrecked vessels, strewn out at intervals along two miles of the Corridor road.

  'They left them where they were hit,' she explained. 'It was very unhealthy down here, as you can see. But they hung on to Jerusalem, or half of it anyway.'

  She drove the Mercedes elegantly around the painful bends of the road, now rising all the time. We passed struggling buses and huge gasping lorries, and were passed ourselves by frantic cars.

  Eventually she said quietly: 'There it is. The city.'

  It lay like a lion across the stony hills, tawny in the sunlight, a fine amber, brightening to gold, its towers and walls beautiful, assured, with all the calmness of four thousand years.

  'The prettier part is theirs,' she said. 'That is, the Jordan i ans. This side, the New City, is dowdy to say the least and not even very ancient. The Jews on this side sit out in the evenings and watch the wall and the roofs of the other side and think how much they would like to be there.'

  'You're very anti-Jewish,' I said. 'For someone who lives in Israel.'

  'Perhaps that is the reason,' she said. 'Sometimes they're okay. Yacob is okay at times. But they make you a bit sick, too. They're like kids playing with a pile of building bricks.'

  The road widened and eased as though encouraged by the nearing end of its journey. We ran into the first streets, humped across the bending of the hills, lined with gritty open shops, hung blinds, people squatting in the dust, and animals in the road. 'That is the YMCA,' she pointed. 'That tower. I always thought how funny it was to have that stuck in the middle of a place like this. And this is the King David. Shall we have lunch.'

  It was a firm statement. She took the car into the curved gravelled drive and we lunched in the cool dining-room. 'They blew this place up, of course,' she said.

  ‘I remember.'

  'Bloody fools the British. They even had a telephone call to warn them but they pooh-poohed it, and went on drinking their gin and tons. And then bang. Half the place fell down. They were lucky too, it was only half, because it's not often the Jews short change themselves.'

  Her house was not far from the Jerusalem Railway Station looking towards Pentecost and Mount Zion. There were cars parked at meters in the main street. We went through them and down an overhung alley and then beneath an arch into a little walled garden, the sunlight dulled by vines and figs. There was a formed hole like a grave under the figs, lined with stones, which she said was an ancient wine press. In this, its neck sticking up like a curious bird, was a clay jar. Selma felt into the neck and produced a Yale key. We went up the white steps towards the fine wooden door, held by brass hinges and ecclesiastically arched at its top.
r />   "There's a housekeeper here normally,' she said pushing the key and turning. 'But she's gone off to the Navy or some . other worthy cause. What with my husband and all my servants, it seems I'm providing the bulk of the bloody armed forces for this country.'

  Inside the house was dim. She began moving about, elegantly, raising shutters and opening doors. One door overlooked another garden with a running view of the Old City Wall, the capped heads of its towers peeping over like people overwhelmed with curiosity, and the shelving land of the Jewish sector on our side, and the wire-tangled frontier. There was a terrace outside and then a drop into the green branches spread like the arms of dancers in the garden. Sunlight came strong and white into the house and Selma walked about drawing light, cloudy curtains to filter it.

  I was on the terrace and she came out and stood beside me. She was only a few inches away and I knew that it would not be long. I realized that with her height she would lie almost exactly alongside me in the bed, like one ship moored against another.

  'There is some lime juice,' she said. 'Would you like a glass, Christopher?'

  I said I would. She went and returned with the pale drinks. 'That is my house,' she said pointing across the garden, across the untidy wire of no-man's-land. 'My other house, you remember.'

  I followed her eyes to the Jordanian houses piled in the other sector. 'The one with the two cypresses and the little round tower. It is no distance, is it?'

  'Just like living next door to yourself,' I said. 'Does it make you unhappy to see it ?'

  'Sometimes,' she admitted. 'There is a short flagstaff on the little tower. You see it? My mother and my stepfather used to make a great joke about flying flags from there. On St George's Day we always had the Union Jack run up and on the Greek Independence Day the old man used to have his flag flying.

  'But I'm not a sentimental person. I am happy enough to watch the house. I used to purloin Yacob's military binoculars and sit here spying on the house and the people who live round about it. Most of them I remember well. Abdullah the postman with his red racing bike. He must be eighty now. Then there's Hassan the watchmaker who owns the house across the way. That bugger lets his goats graze in my garden. I've stood here and watched him open the gate and push them in there. So I wrote to him via a friend in London and told him not to do it. That must have given him a hell of a shock. He's probably been sniffing around trying to find out who shopped him.'

  I laughed with her. 'What's the golden egg?' I asked pointing beyond the castellated wall, over the crammed roofs of the Old City.

  'The Dome of the Rock, in the Temple area,' she said. 'Beautiful isn't it. It's dazzling in the sun, but in the evening when the light is richer, it is so magnificent.'

  She turned back into the room. 'But the Wailing Wall is just a wall full of old birds' nests, and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre is such an ugly damn place, and a lousy package deal at that...'

  'How is that?' I asked. I had remained on the terrace viewing the lion-coloured city, dusty under the bitter afternoon sun.

  'Oh,' she said from within the room, 'it's all buttressed up with bits of wood, for a start. It's a bit unsteady after an earthquake. But it's full of touts and nasty Greeks with beards.' She laughed. I could hear her moving about in the room so I turned and went in to her. It would not be long now. She was standing in the filtered sunlight by one of the curtained windows.

  'They show you quite blatantly where the Cross was stuck into the ground, and they obligingly push aside a floorboard to show where the earth cracked on Good Friday, and then they trot you across a few yards of the place and ask you to have a squint at the Tomb. It's all nicely parcelled up. Quite laughable really.'

  She had been talking hurriedly, as though she were nervous. Now she stopped and we stood, half a room apart, me with the empty lime glass in my hand, her looking half away from me through the fine curtain. I put the glass down on a side table.

  'Are we going to bed, Christopher?' she asked. I heard some birds quarrel suddenly in the vines in the garden.

  'Yes,' I said to her. 'I think it would be worth doing.'

  'So do I,' she said. 'I've been looking forward to it.'

  I walked to her and we kissed, almost formally, without passion, as though sealing some bargain which we had negotiated and understood. It was then I became aware of her smell. It was an English sort of smell. My mother smelt like it, fresh and unsubtle. It wasn't a young odour. It was strange to find it there in a city of spices and hot aromas.

  Until then I had not touched her. I drew away a little when I smelled her and she now turned towards me and we smiled knowingly at each other. I had never before made love to a woman older than myself. My hands went to her breasts, but she quietly encircled my wrists and brought them down.

  'I want us to undress separately,' she said. 'The bedroom is down that little flight of stairs and immediately through the doors. You can see Pentecost from the window. Wait for me for a few moments.'

  She went up a companion flight of stairs to the set which went down to the bedroom. I watched her go, tall, good carriage, slim backside, and then walked down through a white door and into a fine bedroom with white furniture and a lime-green bedcover. It had a french window letting out on to another, lower terrace, and I stood and watched Arab soldiers moving along the great crusted walls of the Holy City, and a windmill sitting in the middle of the low buildings on the Jewish side.

  It was brimmed with mid-afternoon heat out there, but cool where I stood. I pulled the light curtains and undressed, casually, easily, full of anticipation for the next hour. I dropped on to the bed and felt it give. Then I lay there, watching the egg and dart moulding around the ceiling, until I heard her bare feet coming down the short run of steps and into the room.

  When she had gone off I had thought that she wanted to put on something conventionally glamorous, some silk or filmy thing that would hide some of the imperfections of her approaching middle age. But she came into the room naked. She stood by the bed.

  There was no sagginess about her. She was tall and brown and composed. She smiled at me lying across her bed and put out the extremes of her right-hand fingers to me. I touched them then held them lightly. It was the first romantic thing we had achieved. I am always held by a woman's breasts. These were medium and quite firm with only a little ham-mocking. They were white against the brown of her trunk like some fruits deprived of the sun. Her nipples were small and pinched and redcurrant-red.

  'Does your back hurt?' she asked kneeling forward on the lime counterpane. 'The sunburn ?'

  'It's all right when I remain still,' I said looking at her steadily. 'It feels very raw when I move against something.'

  She laughed and lowered herself towards me, kneeling like an animal on the bed, her breasts hanging down. When I see a woman in this position it always reminds me of the statue of the female wolf in Rome, her dugs dangling, standing over Romulus and Remus. I pushed my entire arm out, my hand like the head of a snake, thrusting it in the soft channel between her legs. She remained on all fours and I pushed my fingers along the warmth of the crease and held her backside in my hand so that my wrist was against her tender parts. I could feel her place pounding like a beating heart. There was a fly on the egg and dart moulding. Selma moved over me. I removed my hand and with both sets of fingers began tugging gently at her nipples like an apprentice bell-ringer. I watched the tight red nipples soften and flower with my touching.

  'Put it back, please,' she said.

  'What back?'

  'Your hand, and your arm, for God's sake.'

  'I forget where it was now,' I said.

  'You're a bastard, Christopher. You're playing about with me. Put it back. Here.' She caught my hand and threaded it like a cable through the tunnel of her legs again pushing the end of my fingers into the culmination of her backside. 'Like that,' she said. 'Under and through... and then up.'

  'I remember,' I said.

  'I'm so glad you do.'


  She moved on to me now, careful though not to press her weight into me because of my sunburned back. Her tongue went to my forehead and touched it as though in some sort of benediction. She began to run it down towards the centre of my eyebrows.

  I said to her: 'What's that windmill doing in the middle of Jerusalem ?' She was right. I'm a bastard.

  Her tongue stopped at the bridge of my nose.

  'Do you want to know now!’

  'Well I saw it from the window and it seemed a bit strange having a windmill in the middle of Jerusalem. I could understand it in Amsterdam.'

  She brought her tongue down my nose, let it spread itself across my nostrils for a while and continued to my mouth. We kissed very passionately then, for a long time. Her hand had gone down to me and she had hold of me like an Arab holding a donkey. I was feeling explosive.

  'Why is it there?' I asked.

  'Because I chose to put it there.'

  'The windmill, I meant.'

  'Oh, it was built to ...'

  'Yes?'

  'To grind corn for the people around here. Years ago.'

  'Who built it?'

  'You bastard. Sir Moses Montefiore. I know because I've read it all up. Eighteen fifty-eight. Turn over and he on top of me now. Please.'

  I did. As I thought, we were exactly the same size. My eyes were an inch away from hers. I was complete with her j now. She closed her eyes and when she opened them again I a minute later mine were still an inch away and still looking j at her. - 'Who was he?'

  'Christopher, I feel terrible.'

  'So do I. Think of something else. Like the windmill. Who was this Sir Moses Monty...'

  'All right,' she muttered. 'Montefiore. An Englishman. A philanthropist. Oh, my Christ. Gently baby. He built a settle ment for Jews ...'

  'Called?'

  'Christopher,' she pleaded.'... Christopher...'

  'Called?'

  'Bastard. You really are. I've met some, but you are the biggest... It was called ... oh, what the hell. History at a time like this. It was called Yemin Moshe...'

  I said: 'What's that!’ I couldn't go on much longer. Not the first time.