Come To The War

by Lesley Thomas

  There was a Volkswagen van from the airstrip outside the hotel, a bright German-blue, and Metzer pulled himself into the driving seat and called me in beside him. Zoo Baby lumbered into the back of the vehicle and called out in Hebrew from there. Some of the musicians waved him away and laughed. One called in English: 'When the war begins we see all the Arabs we want, Zoo Baby!'

  But half a dozen moved towards the van, two of them still clutching their fish as though they would not trust anyone else with them. They hunched into the back and Metzer set off across the road that went like stitching between the Negev desert and the sea.

  We were pointing directly at Jordan and the evening grew redder across the powerful mountains. A small high-winged aeroplane, its landing lights spearing the uncertain evening in front of it, did the obligatory banana turn over the gulf and floated into the airstrip. I watched it cross us, its silver turned orange by the sunset. Then the road turned for a short distance at right angles along the peninsula and I was able to watch the plane run in across the sea, down the beach and touch with a playful bounce on to the airstrip.

  'Our conductor for tonight has arrived,' said Metzer. "The noted Herr Scheerer of Munich.'

  'And no Wagner on the bill?' I said.

  'An accident,' said Metzer unconvincingly. 'We Israelis, of course, are great lovers of Wagner. I am glad Herr Scheerer's plane was on time at Lod. The pilot of the little aeroplane is not very good at night.'

  'Herr Scheerer is very brave to risk his neck,' I said.

  'He did not know.' Metzer gave his round-shouldered shrug, turned the Volkswagen off the peninsula road again and pointed it towards the growing lights of Akaba. The headlights of the cars moved in the distant streets like fireflies and there were yellow haloes about the masts of the ships in the port.

  'I didn't know either,' I pointed out. I still did not know whether I liked him, I never expected to be transported down here in a clapped-out grandfather of a plane and then have to perform on the beach like a seaside concert party.'

  He laughed over the almost horizontal steering wheel. 'They all say that,' he admitted. 'That is why we never tell them. We just say we are making all arrangements.'

  'And you do,' I nodded.

  'You are not enjoying it, this tour?' he asked as though he was worried.

  'Let's say I would bring my own camel next time.'

  He laughed to himself again as though that was a cliche too. Then he butted his head at the gloomy sand to our left and said: 'They've brought your camel.'

  'Arabs?' I whispered. I realized how low my voice had become so I said more firmly: 'Are they Arabs?'

  'Bedouin,' he nodded. A short caravan was coming across the low broken hills of the hem of the desert, dark and riding, coming towards us slowly but then veering away and moving out of our view. Metzer said: 'They come, they go. Camels, humans and goats, moving from Jordan to Israel and Israel into Egypt, as they have always done.'

  'What about the frontiers, the defences ?' I said.

  'Defences!' he snorted. 'You cannot guard a desert. We know that and so do the other side. The Bedouin go from one watering place to the next, from one patch for their goats to another. They smuggle drugs from Amman to Port Said, but it is too difficult to stop them. They are neither for us or the Arabs, they are for themselves.'

  'So you leave them alone.'

  'Everybody does. There is no other way. They cut the telephone lines between Eilat and Beersheba and used the wire to make copper bracelets to sell in Damascus. We went after them and some got shot, so they waited a month and then ambushed a bus coming across the Negev. Six people were killed. So now we don't fight them any more. It's too much difficulty. Our trouble is all around us without it is right in our belly too. So we just tell them to not cut the telephone lines and we let them take their camels across the country, out of Jordan into Egypt without trouble.'

  Zoo Baby grunted from the back of the wagon. He said heavily: 'When they cut the telephone cables they said they thought it was okay because they only cut five of the six. They left the other one for us.'

  It was rougher going now, with the van throwing stones and grit from its wheels. We slowed and stopped and Metzer said: 'Here we are. This is the border.'

  I climbed down. I could hear the sea washing close by, but it was over a low parapet of dark amber rock and out of sight. The musicians were climbing from the back door, and came around to the front, one still holding his personal tuna fish, to look at the pathetic single strand of barbed wire which bisected the barren place. Most of Akaba was shut out by the surrounding rock, but now it was getting close to dark its lights were thrown up into the sky. The blood red of the mountains had diminished like a dying coal and some stars, early and cool, were showing.

  Dov Haran, who was the leading oboe, stood by me and pointed to a tree, alone and unkempt as an urchin, standing on a flat of the desert to the north. He was a quiet, informed man, as I learned, and he liked telling things. 'That tree,' he said in slightly American English. 'You see it? It is the final tree of Asia, so they say. It is a palm of a species that grows only in Asia and that is the last one. The story is that the place where the tree has its roots is the dividing place between Africa and the Orient.'

  'And you have your foot in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan.' It was, astonishingly, an Irish voice. It came across the dull dunes and after it came a stumbling man in a police-blue uniform, shorts, and a peaked cap like a park keeper.

  'United Nations ?' I guessed.

  'Wrong,' said Dov. He had a graceful moustache and he pulled at it. 'Israeli Border Police. We have many types, Arabs, Druzes even. And English.'

  'Don't tell him he's English,' I whispered. 'He's Irish.'

  Metzer had gone forward and was offering explanations. The border guard listened and then walked sharply towards us. 'A party of musicians, you might be,' he said. 'But this is no time of the night for strolling players.' Only Dov laughed. 'And that man ...' he pointed directly at me, 'still has his right foot in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. Will he please withdraw it. There could be what are called repercussions.'

  Metzer became surprisingly pompous. 'This, officer,' he announced, 'is the very distinguished English concert pianist, Christopher Hollings.' He and the frontier guard looked towards me, Metzer with his hand outstretched towards me like a conjurer after a trick. The guard walked forward. He had his hands around a little machine gun and he now slipped it by the sling across his shoulder.

  'I'm glad to see you've moved your foot, anyway,' he said. 'I'm pleased to meet you.'

  'I was glad I moved,' I said. 'I didn't know I was trespassing.'

  'I'm Richard O'Sullivan, Segan-Mefakeach, Border Police, some time of Wexford and Liverpool. We speak the same language,' he smiled.

  We shook hands. 'What is Segan? ...' I fumbled.

  'Segan-Mefakeach,'' he repeated. 'Deputy-Inspector, that's all. Lowest rank in the force. I think Segan-Mefakeach sounds better. Deputy-Inspector sounds like someone who examines drains.' He was very thin, with hard-edged bones pushing at his face skin. It was difficult to see his eyes under the sinister peak of his cap, but he smiled with a disarray of teeth, and his hand was rigid with bones.

  'The Irish in Israel,' I said. 'And in the frontier force.'

  'They'll have anybody,' he retaliated amiably. 'It's steady too. I'm glad to meet you. I am off duty at seven and I'll be over to the concert. A lot of the lads will be across there tonight.' He looked about at the others and released a separate small smile for each. He also gave a nod to Zoo Baby, smiling at him, acknowledging his size as an Irishman does.

  There was a movement from the top of a sand pile a hundred yards away and the lights of a motor vehicle were flashed. They were low and I could see it was a jeep. A voice shouted in Hebrew.

  'Coming. I'm coming,' called O'Sullivan. He turned to us. 'See you all soon. But get back now because at this late time of the day there's liable to be misunderstandings along here. You could get
shot and it makes a lot of paperwork for us and for the UN boys and the Arab border lads on the other side.'

  When we returned to the hotel by the sea I saw Shoshana standing in the tiled entrance hall with Herbert Scheerer, the conductor. Scheerer, a blancmange German, round and pink with hair apologetically combed forward over his fat forehead, was fussing over the aeroplane trip.

  'She go bump, bump, bump,' he was complaining to Haim Mendel, the leader of the orchestra, who had waited to meet him. Metzer walked in and Mendel gratefully introduced him to Scheerer. Metzer in turn introduced me, but he knew that we had already met. I remember doing the Tchaikovsky Number One in Hamburg once and Scheerer conducting, fatly and fussily, and bowing all over the place with a big white cloud of talcum powder on his trouser fly where he had powdered himself, been to the urinal and had forgotten to brush himself off.

  'The plane go bump, bump, bump,' he told the impassive Metzer. 'Up and down, all der time. Also it was very small. This I did not expect.'

  'It's the heat that goes to the sky from the desert,' explained Metzer. 'It makes the aircraft bump, bump, bump. But you are here, Herr Scheerer, and we are very glad.'

  Shoshana was looking at me across the people and I smiled towards her. She was more feminine now wearing a blue skirt and white sweater. Her neck looked very tanned against the roll of the sweater neck and her arms and legs slender and brown. I walked towards her and said: 'Where did the war go ?'

  She looked at me seriously. 'It is hiding for a small while,' she said. 'Everybody in Tel Aviv thinks it has gone away for good. But I think it will be back.'

  'Down here ?' I said thinking of the Strait of Tiran down the gulf and the motor torpedo boats of that afternoon. 'Is that why you have come ?'

  Now she smiled. 'No,' she corrected. I am not here for any battles. Only to hear you play.'

  'Your editor sent you ?'

  I suggested it, since I came to England to write about you. How do you feel about playing in such a place ? It is like the last piece of the world, is it not ?'

  I grinned. 'The end of the world.'

  She seemed embarrassed. 'This is correct. The end of the world. Sometimes my English goes a little away from me.'

  I thought I had offended her by my correction because she turned abruptly from me and began conversing with Zoo Baby. She obviously knew him well because she pushed her long index finger into his thick waist and he admonished her in quick laughing Hebrew. But then she turned and continued her conversation with me.

  'Dayan,' she said putting a mimicking hand over one eye, 'has become the Minister for Defence. Not everybody would have that, Eshkol the Prime Minister for one example, but he is a leader and we need a leader. He is a fighting man, Dayan. This is why I could never understand how they once made him the Minister for Agriculture. A warrior has little to do with chickens.'

  'But the situation has quietened,' I affirmed.

  'Oh yes, there is a small quiet. But now that Dayan is one of the Cabinet I am certain that a war will follow. You don't put a man of war in a possibility - no - a position, like that and expect him to make peace. We will be fighting in a short time that is without doubt.'

  'Perhaps the Arabs will not attack,' I argued. She wanted to fight, I could see that. There was something in her lovely eyes. She sniffed like a schoolgirl. 'It matters nothing if they do not attack,' she said quietly arrogant. 'I have told you that we cannot afford to have the battle on Israeli soil. We may have to make them fight. It is enough that they threaten us.'

  'You are foolish,' I said with offhand anger. We had walked from the main group of the musicians and the fluffy protests still coming from the German. 'How can you hope to win in the long run?'

  'Of course we shall,' she answered. 'And it will not be a long run, Mr Hollings. I do not wish to argue tactics with you, because you would not understand. I will discuss the war with you when it is over. Then I will have more time. What are you playing tonight?'

  'Rachmaninov,' I said. I was surprised how she was able to terminate a conversation, particularly with me, on her own terms. 'Prelude Number Three.'

  She produced a tiny note book and wrote it down. 'In C Sharp Minor,' I added and she wrote again. Then I said, 'Opus Three,' and she wrote that too. 'What else ?' she asked as though accumulating evidence.

  'Grieg,' I said. 'The concerto.'

  'Has it got a number?'

  'Number One. He only wrote one.'

  I did not know,' she said, writing. 'Music I know little about.'

  'But the newspaper sent you to England to do the interviews with me, and they sent you down here.'

  She looked up. 'I had a free airline ticket to England,' she explained without spite. I was travelling there in any case. I had to do some work so I wrote about you because you were coming to Israel. I also did an article about a small bear that was being sent from London to the Tel Aviv Zoo.'

  'You are very adaptable.'

  'Of course. And they sent me down today not because I am full of the knowledge of Grieg or Rachmaninov, but because I have had much hard work and experiences recently, and everybody else is too busy.'

  If that had been my final public performance as a concert artist, and it very nearly was, then there could have been no more dramatic a stage for it. An orchestra and a soloist and the works they fashion can occasionally be lifted and enhanced by their physical surroundings like a stone in the setting of a ring. In Tel Aviv the atmosphere and the emotion had brought the experience to fullness, but sometimes it is the landscape which lends character and fineness.

  A year after all this happened I sat on a damp deckchair in Holland Park, London, with two thousand people under the evening trees, listening to the London Philharmonic. There was a pale, late sky, washed clear by rain in the afternoon, and the airliners going into the airport were dropping down every few minutes in the sky behind the orchestra. The breeze was blowing their sound away from the music and they were silver, silent and slow, cutting cleanly like scissors through blue satin. It was strange how, although their paths were direct and unfaltering, their descent was in time and sympathy with the feeling of the orchestra.

  On the beach at Eilat that evening it was the same, the sky littered with loitering stars and the sea all black and silver avenues. The land on all sides had backed away and only the lights of the two ports, one each side of the bay, broke the night below the level of the stars.

  People had come in from the town, walking in hundreds down the hunched road that topped the airstrip; rough quiet people in odd clothes, pulling black-eyed children with them, walking but hardly speaking. They were quite unlike the alert and lively audience of Tel Aviv, the urban Jews, for there was about them something of the desert, something formed, I suppose, by winds and harsh sun and the living in that lonely place.

  Others looking like dusty gypsies came in from the desert villages and the kibbutzim aboard trucks and half-track vehicles, rough people again with hard expressions, carrying rifles and sub-machine-guns as casually as walking sticks. Their clothes looked as though they had come immediately from the fields and although they were noisy enough among themselves they appeared to have no contact, no communication with the other people from the town.

  No one needed marshalling to their place. They formed about the orchestra in concentric circles growing out to the fidgeting edge of the sea, and then farther along the beach each way in a long oval. O'Sullivan, the border guard, told me afterwards that his friends who were on duty that night, together with some Swedish and Indian United Nations soldiers, and the Jordanian platoon from the other side all stood along the barbed wire half a mile away and tried to listen to the diminished concert in the subdued night.

  Everyone seemed very quiet; either that or the sound of an indoor audience was completely dissipated in the open night. I looked down from the balcony while I was dressing. Metzer had said that the orchestra would dress with complete formality, so I was in a ruffled evening shirt and tails, with the silver cuf
f-links that Malcolm Sargent had given to me. I stood feeling the freshness of the shirt and watched the audience gather about the orchestra.

  It was like primitive tribesmen coming in from a desert for a meeting, sitting rough and quiet, waiting for the proceedings to commence. Power cables had been run from the hotel to the beach for the orchestra lights, but around the perimeter of the people were flaming brands fixed into metal horns. They threw sheets of orange light across the audience, sitting like a patient herd, contrasting with the steady white lights that held the low stage built for the orchestra.

  The orchestra first performed Till Eulenspiegel. I stood on the hotel balcony, in a curtain of shadow, looking out over the beach and the sea and over that quiet, settled, powerful cloud of people squatting on the sand and listening to the music. This, again, was a different experience. The little fable of Richard Strauss rose up out of the close night and hovered over the place. The sky was choked with stars and from my place I could see the glow of the lights on the resting ships in the harbours, Eilat on the one hand and Akaba on the other. The dark air added a new sound to the music, as though an additional instrument had been added and from the hills across the desert came the mewing of the wind in the large mountains.

  Metzer knocked and came into the room behind me, walking fatly through the yellow light and out on to the subdued balcony beside me. 'I think the news is good,' he whispered as though afraid to disturb the orchestra even at that distance. 'Kol Israel has just broadcast a statement by Eshkol who is back from London and America, saying that there will be settlement in a peaceful way.'

  'Good,' I said tapping my fingers on the balustrade of the balcony, working them through the exercises I had done since I was a child. 'I told you so. Everything will be fine.'

  He grasped on to my encouragement like a man who fears he is incurably ill holds on to any words of hope, no matter how thin, from a surgeon. 'Yes, yes,' he answered, his big head nodding like a hammer. 'Many of the troops who were mobilized have been sent on leave. Tel Aviv is full of them.