Come To The War

by Lesley Thomas

  There were few other guests at the hotel for any tourists had flown with rumours of war. In the dining-room were four Israeli naval officers from the little motor torpedo boats I had watched putting out from Eilat. It was they who stopped their laughter and talk first when Shoshana entered the room and walked towards our table. There was an awkward coughing of chairs as we all stood up. There was a place waiting for her between myself and Dov and she smiled all around and made her apologies for being late in Hebrew and then in English. Then she sat down.

  She had tried to do something about herself and had failed. She wore a white dress of some material like lace, but not lace, which was a size too small for her. The buttons across her breasts were dragging at the buttonholes, and when she moved as she ate the material stretched all over like a series of hawsers. She had nail varnish clumsily applied and uncomfortable make-up sitting on the natural smoothness of her face. Her lipstick was odd enough to make me remember that her lips were full and lovely when she was not wearing it. She sat hunched and complicated in the dress, trying to stretch and be at ease, blinking her eyes under the black geometry she had drawn over them. When she had walked into the room I had noticed her walk and the graceless open-toed white shoes she wore. She looked and moved better in denims.

  She had washed the red desert dust from her hair. It was magnificent, full and falling naturally in fair runs over her shoulders, and the skin of her arms and shoulders was even and fine.

  Zoo Baby smiling with fat from the deep end of the table said: 'Shoshana, tonight you look like the Queen of Sheba.' The others laughed and clapped in their Jewish way because they knew he meant it. I clapped too with only disguised politeness and was closest to the look of pleasure in her eyes and the heightening of the colour under the make-up. With intended grace, but with the buttons on her dress forcefully trying to escape their holds, she turned to Zoo Baby and thanked him. 'Toda raba, dear Zoo Baby,' she said quietly. 'And you tonight are like King Solomon.'

  There was extra laughter and clapping, with the naval officers from the other table joining in, and only Herr Scheerer and myself, although giving lip and hand service to the acknowledgement, catching each other's expressions of minor puzzlement over the huge acclaim for such a small joke.

  Zoo Baby said: 'I am glad there is no war. My Army uniform is getting tight in many places. Today I tried it in front of the mirror. It was not a good experience.'

  He stood at his end of the table and amused us by demonstrating the various soldierly poses which he had adopted before his mirror. He amused the others well, but immediately I realized again that I was on the outside of a private joke. Zoo Baby stood and pretended to throw a grenade, use a submachine-gun, and then gave a great murderous jab with an imagined rifle and bayonet. With each movement he made a rubbery comic face and examined the cloth beneath his armpits and across his chest portraying the man who finds he is splitting at the seams. I was looking towards him, away from Shoshana, but I sensed her pulling at her own tight clothes. Dov and the others in the room laughed at the military mimicry, especially when Zoo Baby held the seams of his shirt together while he tossed another grenade towards the roaring naval officers.

  Unfortunately I suddenly became aware of what it was all about. I think Scheerer did too. He glanced at me for the second time in a few minutes; he the product of a generation of invaders, and again with that puzzled, disturbed expression. Zoo Baby going through his battle drill, the others all laughing, suddenly looked very businesslike to me. Perhaps I missed the point because of my lack of Hebrew because occasionally he made exasperated remarks and was answered by the others. They all called at once on occasions, Shoshana immediately in my ear, and I had that sensation of swimming in the carrying current of an unknown language. It was the ungainly man's obvious proficiency in what he was about that was so startling. Despite the laughter and the voices he had in his movements a killer's intention, the decisive mobility of a trained and dedicated soldier. When he threw the supposed grenade you could see the fat fingers tugging the pin away expertly and know that the broad forearm had pitched it sixty yards away killing the crew of an Arab machine gun. His spraying fire with the sub-machine-gun was intense and determined and the 'glug' as the bayonet was forced home made me push away what remained of my dinner. Zoo Baby was an Israeli soldier.

  He ended the act by throwing his hands in the air, with eyes rolled once more down to the shirt under the armpits, and surrendering in a loud Hebrew, and then fearful Arabic, tongue. All the musicians, the naval officers and Shoshana, collapsed laughing across their food on the table. There were shouts in Hebrew and applause. Scheerer and I, once more turning our loyal glance towards each other, strange aliens that we were, applauded the display also.

  Then Zoo Baby, still surrendering, pretended that the Arabs had shot him. He collapsed to the table like a felled elephant and lay there, but with occasional, exaggerated examinations of his tight clothing. It was a splendid act, full of the rare expansive talent that only fat men seem to know and possess. When he had finished and raised himself, beaming, from the table, everyone applauded again. I turned to see Shoshana and Dov streaming with

  laughter tears. One of the violins was asking Scheerer what he thought of the performance and the puzzled stubby German was nodding seriously and saying: 'Goot, goot. I like very much. Kamerad! Kamerad!' He threw his hands in the air and imitated Zoo Baby's surrendering act. Once more all the Jews threw themselves upon the table and howled their laughter. I prodded at my tuna fish.

  Seven

  The plane taking us back to the north was due to leave at eight the following morning. Most of the musicians, and Scheerer before anyone, decided to go to bed after dinner. The last one to go was Zoo Baby who stayed with Shoshana and me in the hotel lounge while we drank coffee with cream, which we couldn't do in the dining-room itself because it was kosher. Then Zoo Baby stood and stretched himself. It was like a hippo stretching.

  When he had gone Shoshana and I, as though by some tacit agreement, stood and walked out of the hotel, turning along the dust road that cut between the sand and rock of the beach and the rock and sand of the desert. There were some eggs of light on the airstrip and another clutch at the port. There was a breeze now coming in airily from the gulf, a flat current that pushed its way unhurriedly through the thick hot daytime air lying over the land. Big unsubtle stars dangled over the reclining hills towards Egyptian Sinai. There was a complaint of wind in the mountains on the other horizon, in the desert hills behind, reaching north from Akaba.

  For the second time that day I reached out for her hand and it responded to mine, curling within my palm like a small comfortable animal.

  'Zoo Baby, he was very funny tonight,' she said.

  'Hilarious.'

  'That is a good English word,' she said. 'Say it again please.'

  'Hilarious,' I said.

  'Hilarious,' she repeated carefully and then again. 'Hilarious. Yes, it is a good word. It means laughing?'

  'Yes.'

  'It sounds laughing.'

  I said: 'There is a lot of sand here. It's different from all the rock.'

  'Yes, it is soft beneath the feet, is it not? And warm.' She kicked off her ugly shoes and pushed her feet into the sand. There was no moon but the low stars made it light. I watched her feet going into the comfortable sand. 'It is like putting on a different pair of shoes each step. Old easy shoes,' she said.

  We stopped. I brought her near to me with both arms and she stood, wrapped in me, quietly, her chin on my shoulder, her face next to my neck, her breasts full against my chest. I was facing the port and the airstrip and the ghostly lights were suspended in the night, just a little above the earth. She would be able to look across the desert, shortened because of the night, towards the ships in the Arab harbour, and see the stiff backs of the hills in which the wind still sang. The lights and the sound gave us some measure of navigation, an assurance, some means of knowing that we were not lost. The hotel, some of
its lights still yellow, was sitting by the sea only four hundred yards away. But the desert was complete immediately around us, the daytime heat still rising from the valley of gentle sand into which we had walked.

  I will take this dress away from myself,' she whispered without moving from me. 'It was borrowed from a friend and the friend is a size smaller than I am. All tonight it has been tight.'

  'No one would have noticed that.' I said.

  'I have felt like being in a trap with it,' she answered. She moved a pace from me and without shyness unbuttoned the white dress and dropped it from her. She stood looking at me, close enough for me to see details of her face. She pushed back her hair nervously. I moved towards her and took the other clothes off her, feeling her skin as I took them away from her body. It seemed then like no skin I had ever touched, delicate, fine, warm, alive. Her breasts were full and sleepy and as I bent forward to kiss them at their roots I felt her heart moving. As I lifted my 'head her lips were there and we kissed fully, her naked body soft and also hard against my clothes.

  Her hands went to my crease and she closed them over the immediate swelling there, pressing against the material of my trousers. She kneaded at the swelling and then rubbed it with little movements of her palms. Then she ran the flat of her hands up my stomach and beginning at the bottom shirt button undid the measured row, not looking into my face, but murmuring like a child: 'Hilarious. Yes, very good. Hilarious. Zoo Baby was hilarious.'

  My hands were under the fat of her breasts and my lips went from her face to her somnolent nipples, and then my tongue to them. Immediately her hands were back at my swelling and she rubbed it again still repeating. 'Hilarious. Oh, yes. Hilarious.' She seemed to be talking through sleep; through a dream or a trance. I dropped my fingers to my zip and released the hardness, pulling my trousers away and kicking them backwards in the sand.

  She dropped in front of me, eyes almost closed, right hand now hooked on to my neck and pulling me down upon her. We collided on the sand, my hands going quickly out to each side so that I would not fall heavily and wind her.

  The sand shifted as we shifted, hurrying in its million

  panicky parts to get out of our way, tumbling in little drifts

  from beneath us. It was very strange making love in the

  desert. There was about us a huge void, that somehow in

  itself was enclosing, covering, comforting. I entered her, the

  distant moaning of the mountain wind accompanied her own little moans. Her arms were working all around my neck and about my chest. Her breasts and the strip of flesh about her navel were tanned but more lightly than the rest of her body. Against her brown skin my white English carcass glowed strangely.

  I moved at her carefully at first, watching the effect of the intrusion reflected in the reactions of her face. Her agony was as immediate and real as though it was the first time for her. Every advance, prepared though we both were, hurt her.

  'You split me, Christopher,' she whispered. Her face turned away in the sand and her eyes and mouth screwed up. But her hands and arms pulled at me like hawsers demanding that I stay, and not merely stay but go into her farther. Then we were fully together, the last piece of me sunk into the final, deepest cavity of her. She relaxed her arms and her face and I went forward on top of her feeling the foundation of her remarkable body, feeling the sand about my knees and along the line of my forearms, wallowing in her hair and hard against her face and then her complacent breasts. My tongue ran up them like a puppy lapping spilt milk. Then something happened. We felt it at the same moment, a startling truth, an undeniable, uncomfortable fact. I stopped.

  'Christopher,' she said sleepily. 'We have some little pieces of sand in there.'

  'I know darling,' I said miserably. 'I can feel it too. Maybe it will go.'

  'Where to can it go ?' she asked logically. Her passion was immediately replaced by relaxed composure, but she did not seem discomforted or angry.

  'It will go somewhere,' I assured. 'We will lose it.' I began to move into her again. But the grains remained there, big as boulders they seemed, biting into the smoothness of our love-making, annoying as fleas in a soft bed.

  Embarrassed I withdrew from her and she ran her finger over me trying to find the grains of sand. I was kneeling in front of her and she was kneeling too, but lower. Her finger was running across my peninsula and her sombre eyes were upon my face.

  'I cannot feel those little devils,' she said. Her finger was driving me mad.

  'Perhaps it is still in you, Shoshana,' I suggested.

  'That is possible,' she agreed her eyes steadily upon mine. 'No. Here it is! I have it!'

  She was as delighted as a schoolgirl twinning a prize. I looked down at myself projecting towards her. She used her fingers like delicate tweezers and nipped at me once, twice, half a dozen times, bringing her face very close to my loins like a scientist conducting an experiment.

  'It is well,' she said sweetly. She held up her tweezer fingers, the tips tight together. 'I have the last small piece.'

  She threw away the grain with great ceremony as though it were a great rock at the same moment shifting her weight so that accidentally I was momentarily pitched forward. I half-stopped myself with one hand, but the lower parts of me collided with the warm thick sand.

  'My God,' I whispered. 'Now I am covered.'

  She began to laugh, a sweet loud laugh, that bounced over the desert. Her hands went to her face and she shook her head from side to side, making her shoulders swing and her hair dance.

  'Oh Christopher!' she said in a laughing whisper. 'Tonight in the desert it is not to be.'

  I stood up and tried to brush some of the adhesive sand from myself. She kissed me fondly and then put her clothes on. I dressed too and we walked arms about each other, still laughing, back down the desert track towards the hotel.

  'Our love,' she whispered her mouth almost under my armpit. 'Was it not hilarious?'

  'Hilarious,' 1 agreed kissing her forehead. I looked at my watch. It was two-twenty. At seven forty-five the first Israeli aeroplanes were dropping bombs on the Egyptian airfields at El Arish, Bir Thamada, El Minya, Luxor, and other places.

  She had been with me all night, wandering about with me in the great old-fashioned feathered mattress of my bed. It was very hot in the mattress and we sweated among its folds, not sleeping for a moment, until the day was an early red outside the window. My eyes were sore with salt by then. My body was wet outside and drained within. I watched the daylight enlarging and I could hear shouts, single and spaced, from the beach. The Italian fisherman and his Abyssinians probably. Shoshana, who had been pretending to sleep, but kept moving her firm body regularly into the bends of mine, suddenly rose from the ruffled bed and stood naked and stretching.

  The lower part of her trunk was smeared with the traces of our love, the thick part of her legs too. She slowly extended her arms, with that occasional elegance which, when revealed, was contrary to her other movements, then lowered them and now, without grace, wiped the inside planes of both legs with the flat of her right hand. It was the practical, unrefined movement of a soldier wiping oil from the butt of a weapon. She did it without embarrassment, looking away from me lying on the bed. Then she lifted her browned arms again raising the strong snouts of her breasts, which looked sharp and upturned like the noses of hedgehogs.

  I put both hands out, lazily but demandingly, and caught her first at the round of her waist and, as she leaned and looked at me, at the sleepy lump of her breast. Her eyes came to me and she dropped on top of me. I did not want to make love to her again then and she did not want it either. Instead we lay thickly together.

  'It is like we are cooking,' Shoshana whispered.

  'Stewing,' I suggested.

  'What is that?'

  'Cooking, but a sort of wet cooking. Like soup would be.'

  She giggled. 'You are not English sometimes. You are too low.'

  'I think to say we are stewing h
ere is very apt,' I claimed, 'even poetic'

  'What have we cooking?' She turned her potent, childish eyes to me to show me that she had caught on to the game and was pleased that her English understanding was enough to play it.

  'Oh, let me see.' I kissed her ear. 'Little bits of cabbage.'

  Then her hair. 'Some of those thin straggly onions.' I felt her laugh.

  I rolled half clear of her, feeling our gathered sweat clinging as I did so, and kissed her down from her brown neck.

  'And some turnips.'

  I sensed her protest. 'Melons, then ?'

  'Yes,' she agreed. 'We will permit melons in our stew.'

  I rolled down her, bending myself almost double like a dreaming cat.

  'Here is some meat,' I said running my tongue over the firm area of her belly. 'And this ... this is the spice and the seasoning.'

  Games like this always pleased us, from then on. We used and amused each other.

  'You must put something to the stew,' she said brightly, kneeling up and leaving me lying. 'Your nose, for a beginning. It is like something, some vegetable, but I do not know the name.'

  'You're the sort who throws anything in a stew,' I said. She kissed my nose. Then my neck. 'That tastes good also. It will be a good stew,' she said.

  She moved down my body, pushing her impudent tongue into my navel and decided it was some Hebrew vegetable, something I had never heard about, and then lower, muttering about egg-plant and carrot and finally lying with her face buried between my legs and laughing.

  'It is no good,' I said. 'Not kosher.'