The beaches were very crowded today, they say, and everybody is having a good time. Yes, it is all right. I think.'
All the week the radio station had been broadcasting sly little messages in between records by Ray Charles or Sandie Shaw, calling men to Army units throughout the land. In Tel Aviv Metzer had translated them from Hebrew for me. 'Green Dragon and Wishing Well report to border unit by twelve noon tomorrow. Benji the Yemenite is waiting in his grocer's shop. The Rose of Sharon is picked in the fields of Dan.. . Now, for your pleasure, the Number One record in America, Aretha Franklin and Respect.'
'The military messages have stopped,' said Metzer. 'They are giving weather reports too, even for the Galilee and Sinai. They would not do that if they were expecting a war.'
Till Eulenspiegel came to its jovial end and a momentary cloth of silence fell over the scene below to be flung wildly aside by the swelling applause of the Jews sitting all about the beach. It was not like the applause in Tel Aviv, not stamping, whooping acclaim, the enthusiasm of a city audience. It was the hard applause of a different people, desert people, with sand in its throat, unused to demonstration. I looked at Metzer and he smiled. 'It is not often they have a chance to hear anything,' he said. 'Tomorrow they'll be back at their work.'
I walked from the room into the corridor and down the resounding concrete steps. At the entrance to the hotel there were some young waitresses and other staff and when I walked through the foyer out towards the beach it was they who turned and began to applaud. I felt very good that night, strange, but very happy. Strange because of the way I was dressed in the fine dark blue tailed suit and the white ruffled shirt, going out to play to those Negev people, those steely Jews, waiting in their rough clothes. The applause ran ahead of me like a rapid fuse, spluttering through the people at the door and those outside it under the hotel lights, and then igniting the great crowd waiting on the sand under the flaming brands and the low stars.
I had the impression of walking through the shallows and then into the deeps of a powerful sea, the waves thrown up all around. The sound of the hands was extraordinary even to someone like me who has known acclaim for a long time. There were no raised voices, only the hands, clapping, clapping, seeming to reach out to me as I walked through them. Then I mounted the few wooden steps to the platform, under the brilliant square of light, and I had lost them.
It was like stepping into a boxing ring. The sound still rose, but the forms and the faces had gone, all but those immediately about the fringe of the platform; gone, submerged into that applauding ocean. I could sense them, even when I was on the stool and they were quiet; sense them encircling me, people and people and people, going out in a rippling pattern far across the beach and into the Jewish night.
Six
Inland from the Gulf the road drags across the desert. It is a road only in the sense that it is a way, an access. It is bitter red, scarred, rutted and turned, littered with torn tyres and fractured wheels. The lorries that traverse it journey from Jerusalem and the northern towns to Beersheba and then to Eilat, carrying all the goods that life needs, for there is no railway. They make their own bonfires of dust as they work their way through the miles and the mountains. The telephone wires, the same that the Bedouin use to make copper bracelets and bangles, sag on poles forced into the hard desert. They straggle, each one alone yet attached to the pole in front and the one behind by their thin wires, some straight, some crooked, like a desolate chain gang or a party of men lost in the wilderness and strung together in case they stray.
Dov Haran was going to a kibbutz where his brother worked and lived. It was the day before the war began, a bright, hot forenoon at Eilat, and hotter inland. 'I will take you to King Solomon's Mines,' he offered. 'You have the whole day to fill.'
Shoshana came out into the white sunlight. She was wearing her khaki denims, clean but rough, with her hair tied back severely behind her neck. I thought then that people like her, particularly Jews like her, have to be soldiers all the time. If there is no war they will hope for one, and see in it an opportunity to fight and die for something they believe is bigger than the whole world. The Germans were like that.
She was wearing squat boots, dusty and wrinkled like tired hunting dogs, and her baggy trousers were tucked into the boots. Her shirt was wide at the neck like a navvy's collar, and the skin over her breastbone was hard and almost black with the sun. The only tenderness in her hard little frame came in the something she was unable to deny; the full circle of her breasts under the squared pockets of the shirt.
Dov had apparently already told her he was going up the desert road. She said to me: 'We will see the diggings of King Solomon,' and jerked her head with a man-like motion telling me to get into the jeep which Dov was about to drive away.
Starting a car on that surface of grit and dust was like opening a jet engine. The red clouds gushed from behind the jeep and trailed us as we took the track into the Negev, puffed and rising immediately behind the back wheels of the vehicle and then thinning and trailing out and finally dropping back, dust to dust.
Shoshana sat in the front with Dov, leaving me alone in the rear seat. She sat straight like a shotgun guard on an old Western stage coach, looking sometimes left or right but returning to straight ahead.
'It was very fine last night,' she called over her shoulder.
She was so unemphasizing about it that I was undecided if she meant the concert or the weather.
'Splendid,' 1 grunted covering both eventualities. I wondered why she always made me, Christopher Hollings, feel that I was riding back seat. The track was bumpy and the whirls and whorls of the violent desert rock were reaching higher. Dov was driving quite fast, but he began to brake abruptly, and eventually brought the jeep to a halt slightly to one flank of the track. We sat while a tribe of Bedouin rode from the sandstone crevices, blanketed people, as disdainful as their camels; their goats and other animals were layered with rusty dust. They made no sign that they had noticed us but filed across the track, silently and without fuss like a group of mysterious but well-behaved nuns embarking on an exotic outing.
Neither Dov nor Shoshana moved or made any comment. The whole incident unfolded and passed as though it had been well rehearsed. When they had gone, slipping again into a crack in the rocks, Dov put the jeep into gear and we stuttered forward. A boy, a goat-herd, driving half a dozen skinny and wall-eyed animals before him, appeared three hundred yards farther on the road, heading in the same direction as the camels and humans. Dov stopped again and motioned him and his herd across the track in the suburban manner of a driver at a school crossing.
When we moved again I said: "There's a lot of traffic this morning.'
Dov laughed deeply. 'They always have the right of way. At least they believe that, and it is as well to go along with them. They were here before us. That boy, he could have been Moses or Benjamin.'
Shoshana said coldly: 'They are a weight on Israel. They do no good, but make many incidents. They are diseased and smelling and all trouble.'
Dov laughed: 'They're Bedouin,' he said as though that explained it all.
'They are spies,' she alleged obstinately. 'And drug smugglers, and they have killed Israelis, even down here in the desert. And yet they walk from country to country as they please.'
'Perhaps they are setting a good example,' I suggested.
She became very angry, biting, but containing her voice. I could see her shoulders shaking under the shirt. I thought she was going to turn on me, but she remained looking to the front.
'Beasts,' she said. 'They treat their goats better than the women. The goats eat first, then the women.'
'Feminism!' exclaimed Dov turning to me for confirmation. 'Feminism, that's what it is called, correct?'
'Correct/ I laughed. 'And from Shoshana.'
Dov was laughing at her anger as he drove the jeep, now fast and kicking, along a straight stretch of the road.
'Nothing! That is nothing!' she shouted,
then, unable to get enough meaning into her English, she attacked him in Hebrew. He still laughed, heaving the jeep around a bend in the road, almost scraping a hanging wall of rock, rising on one side and falling on the other. Shoshana returned to English and this time turned about to face me. Her eyes were magnificent. 'Because the women eat after the goats,' she shouted, 'when they come to bear children only half the children five.'
'It happens with all primitive people,' I said aloofly.
Shoshana let her annoyance escape, 'and,' she screamed, 'and, mister Hollings, the dyings of those children are used on the Israeli figures to the United Nations regarding infant mortality! These foul Bedouin are officially Israeli citizens!'
I faced her seriously. Dov was crouched over the wheel and watching a now straight road as though it were heavy of booby traps.
Shoshana reduced her voice but her back was hunched like a nasty-tempered cat. 'Arabs,' she grumbled. 'Israel is full of Arabs. Jaffa, Nazareth, all Arabs. Why do we have them? Do they have Jews in Jordan?'
Dov shrugged at her childishness. He joked: 'We will build a kibbutz right outside King Hussein's palace.'
She whispered: 'One day perhaps we will.'
The sky was like a deep plate with the rising desert brilliantly red against it. The sun was getting towards its noon height. I could feel it burning through my hair. There was a khaki cap on the floor of the jeep, one of those tureen-shaped Jewish caps, and I put it on my head. From behind us, from the sun, at that moment issued three jet fighters, searing noisily across the wide chest of the desert, flying their low shadows over our vehicle and then arching spectacularly into the sky with the surprised grace of birds shot in the belly. I had only time to squeeze my shoulders to my neck after the first sound and the planes were away and curving far off.
'Ours,' I laughed unconvincingly.
'Ours', confirmed Shoshana indicating with the same expression that she meant to add 'not yours'. She sniffed at the sky like a mongrel investigating a temporary smell. 'Mirages from the north,' she added. She turned to me, facing me with sudden enthusiasm. 'They are stronger and faster and have better pilots than any of the Arabs.'
'So there,' I joked. Her English was not adequate enough to appreciate it.
'Of course, the Arabs have more,' suggested Dov patiently. 'But we have what's good in little parcels, as you say.'
'It will seem like we have more,' asserted Shoshana.
Dov did not reply. He had turned the jeep off the choking road now and driven it, frisking like a goat, up a lesser track going towards the mountains that guarded Egypt and the Sinai. 'Did you see the stick the Bedouin boy carried?' he asked suddenly as though the goat-herd had just crossed the track and was not ten miles back. 'That is a hollow tube which he pushes down into the desert waterholes. The water of the Negev is so bitter with minerals that it is not possible for drinking. We had some soldiers in a camp here and all their hair fell out because they drank the water.'
Shoshana unexpectedly giggled. 'They are the oldest young men in Israel,' she said. Then quickly serious: 'But very good soldiers.'
'Of course!' I shouted.
Dov said: "The shepherd boy pushes the hollow stick far down into the waterhole, beyond the water heavy with minerals, and he sucks through it the sweet water that is below that.'
'An old Bedouin trick,' I suggested.
He agreed: 'Very old, Mister Hollings. It is the same magic trick... How do you express it? ... A con...'
'A conjuring trick,' I said.
'No, a word I know. Con ...'
'Confidence trick, then.'
'That is true. My English grows every day don't you think?'
'It's excellent.'
'Yes, the same confidence trick that Moses did here in the Negev to impress the Children of Israel. You read in the Bible that he struck the rock and out came the fresh water. All he did was push his staff down through the bad water to the good spring underneath.'
'And so saved Israel from being a nation of bald heads,' I suggested.
Dov laughed but Shoshana did not react. She could never take a joke about Israel. Dov brought the jeep around, a dusty tail curling behind us, and stopped in the middle of a flat red area of desert where columns of sandstone heaved themselves vertically into the hard and brilliant sky. They were chiselled and carved by winds and age, fat fingers of rock spread wide, and then another, a hand clenched and fisted, the knuckles bulging out over the hot bare flat area below.
Shoshana had jumped from the jeep and was walking about, looking up, arms spread, with a sort of staged holy excitement, like someone walking in a beloved cathedral. She walked fifty yards away from the jeep, her tied hair touching the back of her khaki shirt, her trousers baggy where they were pushed into her boots and tight around the backside. It was like watching a film where the star wanders into some wondrous place, spreads her hands and begins to sing. Shoshana shouted: 'The mines of King Solomon. Is it not great!'
Dov and I remained at the jeep. He was going to drive five miles farther into the desert to the kibbutz where his brother lived. At one moment we both found ourselves staring at this girl in the uncompromising male clothes, standing gracefully on high toes, tiptoeing about like a dancer.
'King Solomon!' She turned and called the words to us. 'This is his place. Do you like it, Mr Hollings ?'
Dov said to me: 'You had better say you like it, Mr Hollings. This girl is a patriot.'
‘I like it!' I shouted back to her. I like it very much.' The strength of my voice rustled rocks and segments on the crumbling sandstone ledges, dry from years without rain, and brought them chuting down to the foundations. Dov returned to his driver's seat and revved the engine bringing wider avalanches tipping from the crevices.
The jeep turned like a circus animal going around a ring and made for the narrow exit that led out to the desert and the road to Beersheba. Shoshana was still standing theatrically, her face bright in the sun and raised towards the tops of the cliffs. I walked to her.
'You like this place?' she repeated as though we were buying a house. 'You do with no doubt ?'
'With no doubt,' I smiled. I did a complete slow circle, eyes straining up, running along the frayed hem of the rocks and the sky. Red and orange, brown, sliced and spliced, layered and latticed rock.
'We have further places,' she enthused with all the gush of a bad salesman. 'So many. Even outside the famous towns. Israel is full of history. It has been here such a long time.'
I almost said: 'Most countries have,' but I restrained it because of her obvious happiness. She caught my hand. Her palm was unexpectedly soft. I wondered why I thought it would be hard. 'In this area - over here -' she said leading the way, 'this is where the fires would burn. Here the slaves would ... how is it? ... boil the metals for the making of the bronze. See the ground is still black. It was not a good job for employment.'
'He was a hard man that Solomon,' I said. We had begun walking up the crumbling path that projected like a dry tongue from the straight column formations. 'Cutting children in half...'
'Nonsense,' she interrupted seriously. 'It was only a suggestion.' We walked farther and higher. It was difficult under the sun and my shirt was sticky on my back. The heat was going through the material of the little Jewish cap I still had over the back of my head. 'Imagine,' she said with unconscious poetry, 'how it was when the Queen of Sheba in her lovely ships came to Eilat and King Solomon there to welcome her. What a day that was for Israel.'
'A different Israel,' I pointed out.
'No. The same Israel,' she argued. 'But we were bigger then.'
I laughed and the sound started red nuts of stone tipping down from a great bulb of rock just above us. She walked a little behind me and we reached the top of the rock and sat on its flat cap. From there we looked out across the boiling desert to the steely sea showing in the far south. Egypt was almost at our shoulder, Jordan rose to the left and beyond the gulf the dusky mountains of Saudi Arabia.
; 'We are surrounded by enemies - the poor bastards,' Shoshana observed. Her hand remained quietly in mine.
There was tuna for dinner again that evening. The Italian fisherman's catch had to be eaten by as many people along the gulf as possible so that it should not waste. It was baked and light brown, like veal or venison. Some of the musicians of the orchestra had gone back to the north that night leaving about twenty of the party at dinner at one long table near the window that was by the sea.
It was a good evening, full of benevolence, because the threat of the war had, they said, now reduced. Metzer was saying jovially that everyone would forget it soon and that Dayan could go back to his archaeology or even to his former job of looking after the nation's chickens as Minister of Agriculture. It was strange how they wanted the hooded general as their saviour when they felt they needed a saviour, but now they wanted him eliminated because he was a man of war as soon as the danger had apparently died. Zoo Baby dominated one end of the table, his bulk hardly contained in his huge white shirt, his thick neck thrusting like a trunk from his open collar, his eyes screwed up against the light of the table candles, his firm but soft voice moving in and out of the conversation. I had watched him carefully the previous night at the concert on the beach. A pianist and the man behind the drums have a lot in common for their attitudes to music both physical and emotional are alike, the crouch over the instrument, the waiting and watching for the moment to move into the work, the solitary feeling among the ranks of pipes and strings. There is a sensation too of ministering to the instrument, of leaning over and working it. The others hold their instruments to themselves like babies, kissing them or stroking them, but the pianist and the timpanist are as separate from theirs as a doctor over an operating table or a housewife over her kitchen board.
All the men were in clean white, open-necked shirts that evening at the table. They have this attitude to collars and ties in Israel which believes that nothing constructive is ever accomplished by a constricted neck. They also roll their sleeves up, or have short sleeves, with the open-air readiness of Boy Scouts, but most of the musicians about the table had their shirt sleeves long and cuff-linked indicating some sort of refinement allowed for men of their artistic stature. Herbert Scheerer, the conductor, and I alone wore jackets, demonstrating that we were foreigners from more northern and less workmanlike parts of the world.
Come To The War Page 8