She raised herself on her hands. She looked magnificent like that, her face open towards me, which was the best way to see her, her shoulders and arms shaped and brown, her trunk arched away and her breasts hanging full.
'The game is finished,' she announced. 'I must go to my correct room. It is too early to make stew.' She raised herself to the side of the bed and then bent and kissed me primly. I touched her, one final contact, and then she dressed and went.
It was ten past five and I meant to sleep until breakfast, but I only drifted into uncomfortable shallows, and then was awakened by further noise from the beach. There was, finally, a round of excited shouting from below the window. At first I imagined that the Italian and his Abyssinians had gathered around another netful of fish and I thought that I was glad I was returning to the eating of the northern cities that day. I was still conscious of the smell and the feel of Shoshana, moving about the expansive and untidy bed feeling for her in half-sleep and then knowing that she had gone.
The noise outside did not diminish, but seemed to spread itself. I rose tiredJy from the bed and rubbing at my sore eyes went to the window and looked out upon the exquisite morning. The land on either side was sitting calmly upon the warm sea, the air clear blue and settled, and the small currents of the gulf nudging waves upon the beach in front of the hotel.
There were rounds of people standing before the hotel and on the beach, everyone talking. I had a momentary thought that they were the musicians and others waiting for the bus for the airstrip and that I had overslept and would have to hurry. Then I saw Metzer and he saw me at the same moment, pulling himself away from the group in which he had been talking.
'War!' He called the word up to me, hoarsely, half whispering, as though he were giving news of someone's death. 'The war has commenced, Mr Hollings.'
I did the instinctive thing. I looked immediately across the radiant sea towards Jordan, towards Akaba, clear in the early sun. Perhaps I expected to see great guns protruding from it or to see black fires burning there. But it was not changed. I could see the cars moving in its streets. Then I turned to Eilat, on our side (I thought: 'our' side) and looked for the motor torpedo boats but I could not see them.
Instead, sitting in quiet brightness on the shingled edge of the sea was a blue and white amphibian, a lumbering water-vehicle which, Zoo Baby had told me, was used to give tourists a ride in the desert and then a trip in the bay. I was to see more of that.
Zoo Baby was standing with his meaty hands on his hips talking with Dov. I had a thought about Zoo Baby now having to get into his tight uniform.
Dov had said that usually the Israeli reserve troops were only permitted to retain their boots in normal times, receiving their uniforms when they were called to service. But the musicians, who often travelled, kept their soldier uniforms with them.
The men gathered below began looking towards the Jordan border, where we had been at the wire the day before, and calling in Hebrew to each other. A moving bloom of dust was travelling towards us. From my place on the balcony I could see it was a single vehicle coming along the road between the shore and the desert. I went back into the room and got into the shower. I talked to myself.
'You've got to get out of here, son. And very smartly. Dinner in London tonight, I fancy.'
There was no point, of course, in me, a neutral, becoming involved in any shooting between two alien enemies. 'Yids versus Wogs,' I recited quietly as I towelled my legs. 'Wogs and Yids. Imagine being stuck here now. "Will you play for our troops, Mr Hollings ?" '
Shoshana came to the door, arriving at the entrance to the bathroom briskly and with a stony face. All the softness was gone.
'Did you come back for some more stew?' I tried.
'We are at war.' She sounded very hard.
'So I gather. Serious?'
'Our Air Force has bombed many Egyptian bases,' she answered. 'We have had great success already.'
'Naturally,' I said. I was still naked. I walked into the bedroom and began to dress. 'Tomorrow you will be in Amman and in Cairo.'
'It is possible,' she nodded. 'Perhaps a day or so more.'
I laughed directly at her. I was nervous myself and her confidence seemed preposterous. 'What will you do for the rest of the week ?' I asked.
'You make too many jokes, Christopher. The war is only an hour started. You will see.'
'Not if I can help it.'
'You will go?'
'Of course. It's not my war.' Then I added lightly: 'Some of my best friends are Arabs.'
"That is not true!' She screamed it angrily.
'How the hell do you know it's not true?' A sharp anger took over from my nervousness. 'I have played in Beirut and in Cairo. Why should I not have friends there ?'
Her face had stiffened. 'I did not know this,' she said.
'Oh come, Shoshana. You cannot expect all my concerts to be kosher.'
'This is not hilarious!' she bawled at me. She used her new words whenever she could. I had noticed before, when we were playing at making stew and I said it was not kosher, how she had iced a little. 'Why do you make these jokes about Israel?'
I calmed her. I was dressed now. 'Who started it?' I asked her taking her arm. "The war, I mean, not the jokes.' Even her arm seemed to have hardened. She was wearing the khaki denims she had worn the previous day, but her shirt was clean. I looked at the shirt's fullness at her bust and imagined her breasts lying enclosed there.
'The war?' she asked. 'Who started it?'
'Yes.'
'It was started many years ago, by the Arabs.'
I insisted: 'Who started it today?
'Our aircraft are raiding the enemy because of provocation and threats. It was on Kol Israel - on the radio.'
'So you started it. You have struck the first blow.'
'It matters nothing.' She stopped on the stairs and, suddenly full and human again, pressed herself against me. 'Just think, Christopher. We could have all of Jerusalem again. I want to see it for my newspaper.' She sounded like a selfish child coveting a toy.
I kissed her. 'And you may have none of it.'
She remained very tender and close to me. 'That cannot happen,' she said. 'The city will be for Israel. You see, Christopher. I am going there today. I am going there for my newspaper. It will be something for history, my Englishman, something for history.'
Suddenly I felt very sorry for her. To me patriotism, when I had thought about it at all, had seemed like wearing underpants; a fact, but a properly concealed fact. I was on nodding terms with my country's requirements of her sons, but reasonably sure that I would never be equal to these requirements or even desire to be equal to them.
But here was Shoshana, the warm, wet Shoshana of the night before, striding now eagerly down the stairs, her arse tight in her denim trousers, longing to be off to the war, desperate for her country, urgent to follow the call to bloodshed in the sacred city of Jerusalem. And she was going gladly as a child going to the fair.
A few steps behind her I followed. Her hand trailed seeking mine, but I kept mine away. Her brown face shone like a coin, her eyes were loaded with joy, her smile was wide and happy. I felt old myself. I wanted to get to Lod, or any other airport, and get on the nearest BO AC jet heading for London. I did not want any part of Jerusalem. They could keep it. Either of them could keep it.
O'Sullivan, the border guard we had met down at the barbed wire the day before the concert, had arrived in a big truck. He had made the mushrooms of dust I had watched from the balcony. The nine o'clock sun was making the first sweat run down the well-used channels of his face. The skin over his protruding cheekbones was white at the tightest spots. He was sitting crookedly at the wheel of the truck and looking out to sea as though he expected an enemy fleet or a shoal of fish.
"Morning, Mister Hollings,' he said. When he said 'Mister' he said the whole word, elongated it, not making it into a polite abbreviation.
'Where's the war?' I asked. I tried to be bre
ezy. Zoo Baby and Dov and some of the others were loading suitcases into the back of the truck.
'We're going in the general direction,' said O'Sullivan. He grinned and his awry teeth seemed to be hanging on to the very parapet of his gums.
'It's very peaceful,' I said turning a half-circle. Down there by the beach the gulf was spread out like a beautifully worked bib, the sand and the mountains looked firm and settled and Akaba and Eilat were crouched under the sun, waiting for its full heat. The Italian fisherman and the Abyssinian boys were moving along the beach carrying nets, slowly, as they would do any other, quiet, hot morning, as though the fish could wait or they knew there were no fish swimming in that part of the sea. The amphibian squatted like a bulky toy.
A skein of jet fighters, Israeli jets, suddenly exploded across the desert and then the sea, curling impudently over the Egyptian mountains far out to the west. They were low over the water when they first passed us standing before the hotel. Then they rose a little in the fine air as though they had sudden pains in their guts and then drove on until they became small as currants in the remote sky.
iSharm el-Sheikh,' murmured O'Sullivan. The Irish voice was careful with the Eastern vowels. 'That's where they'll be having the action, Mister Hollings. And which side will you be playin' your piana for?' I caught his eye. He had said it purposely like that - 'piana' - and he looked at me with eyes as crooked as his teeth.
'I'm getting out,' I explained firmly, logically. 'I'm not playing the piana for any side, old friend. I'll be on the first seven-o-seven going towards peace and tranquillity. The first one out of Lod.'
'That's if there is any Lod,' he said. The sweat from his hands had smeared about the rim of the wheel and he wiped at it with the same hands, as though it would make the surface better. 'Maybe it will be bein' bombed at this very hour, Mister Hollings. Maybe you won't get an aeroplane to your peace and tranquillity.'
'I shall try,' I said. 'Is there nothing at all flying from here? From Eilat?'
He made as though to crane his neck to look across the mile of red rock and sand to the airstrip. 'Well, not unless they could get that old lorry in the sky,' he said. 'There's nothing with wings though. I think maybe they cleared all the aeroplanes away so that the Arabs won't drop things on them and maybe to use it as an emergency landing place.'
'Nothing there?' I said.
'No. Not a thing to fly. Exceptin' a few birds of the desert.’
He leaned forward towards me. The remainder of the luggage was being humped into the rear of the truck. I could see my suitcases going in. 'They're very methodical, you know,' he said. 'These Jews. They like everything to be good and businesslike, even a war.
'In Ireland, now, if we'd gone about our little troubles with the British in the same way, we'd have been far better off. We went on in little dribs and drabs, a few bombs and a bit of an uprising, for years. But these boys! It's all or nothing, mister. Take it from me, it'll be all over by the end of the week. One way or another.'
Zoo Baby and Dov and some of the other musicians came into the sunlight from the deep shadows of the hotel. They were now in their Army uniforms, self-conscious and joking about them, and carrying sub-machine-guns. Zoo Baby had not exaggerated about the fit of his uniform. As he walked it tugged at him at every joint and cavity. The others had to pull him up to the back of the truck and he was muttering in Hebrew as they did so. 'My God,' he said to me when I went around to the back. 'If this war does nothing else it will get me something more big to wear.'
'If you had been on the other side,' I said. 'In the Arab Legion. Then they would have given you some nice flowing robes and things and you would have fitted.'
He laughed, but only a half-laugh - you had to be careful then about mixing Arabs and Jews even in jokes - and said: 'My father chose to be Jewish and he chose a Jewish wife. So we have the lousy clothes.' He spread his arms and laughed a full, real laugh now. 'Are you coming?' he asked.
Shoshana climbed about the truck and held down her hand to me. Dov and Zoo Baby helped me up like a child. I might as well come,' I said. O'Sullivan started the rattling engine. I said: "The nearer I get to an international airport the better. My luggage is on board anyway. I don't feel like staying down here to be massacred by the Arab Legion. I'm a neutral, remember.'
In the truck with us now was Haim Mendel, the orchestra leader, a desperately quiet man, looking very old and comical in a scruffy uniform. I asked him what he was.
'For the bombing,' he answered hesitantly and glumly. 'In case.'
'He is an air-raid warden,' said Dov with a straight expression. Mendel's doomed face was apparently a joke in the orchestra.
'He stops air raids,' said Zoo Baby pretending he had misinterpreted.
'On Tel Aviv,' added Mendel sincerely. 'That is where I now go.'
Zoo Baby and Dov were going to report to their Army units in the north. 'Two weeks all the others have been taken into the Army,' said Zoo Baby holding up a fat pair of fingers. 'But the Government let us play the music for the people.'
"They thought the concert tour was important for morale,' explained Dov. 'But now we must get to the Army. My wife has joined her unit, already.'
'Mine is digging a bombing shelter. Also my children,' said Zoo Baby. 'Also I must get to the Army.'
Shoshana said: 'And I must get to somewhere where I can see the fighting for my newspaper.'
'Just drop me at the airport,' I said.
Metzer was also squatting in the truck, heavy with thought. Once he moved to the back to look out over the sweet and placid sea, as though seeking some comfort from it.
There were two other musicians whose names I cannot now recall, one was a french horn I remember; middle-aged men being tugged off from their lives to the violence of conflict.
The truck stopped abruptly after a few yards and crimson-faced, Herr Scheerer, carrying a pathetic little case, emerged from the hotel and puffed after us.
'Another neutral,' announced Dov as everyone helped the breathless German into the back of the truck. He reminded me of a puffer-fish I once saw in Brighton Aquarium.
'Neffer hav I know anything zo like this,' groaned Scheerer. His eyes seemed twice their normal size and he was cascading sweat. 'Neffer in all my conducting days.'
'Another neutral,' repeated Dov. He looked at me steadily. He held his sub-machine-gun like a seasoned soldier not like a musician. He smiled, a hard smile. 'We'll have to make sure those naughty wicked Arabs don't get hold of you,' he said.
Eight
Ten Israeli air strikes had that early morning attacked Egyptian airbases in Gaza, south into the Sinai Desert, along the Nile Delta, and even as far as Luxor. Israeli armoured columns and eager infantry were, within an hour, forcing their way into the Egyptian soldiers entrenched in the Gaza Strip and in the sand fortresses of the Sinai. In Jerusalem nothing had happened.
As our truck moved up along the desert road from Eilat, Dov was helped up on to the khaki canvas roof and lay up there under the clean sky with a transistor radio. Kol Israel was babbling its sweet Hebrew into the desert air. Sometimes they played a few minutes of music and Dov turned temporarily to Radio Amman.
'The bastards!' he called down over the edge of the truck canvas. 'They shelled our cornfields in Gaza today.'
The other Jews in the bouncing truck looked at each other and nodded their consciences clear. 'They shelled our cornfields,' repeated Shoshana to me as though I could not understand Dov's English. 'They started it.' I wondered why he had called out in English instead of Hebrew. Then I knew it was because even he, the liberal Dov, wanted to be sure that Scheerer and I, the neutrals, received the information.
I stood up and, catching on to the metal stanchion at the back of the truck, I looked on top of the canvas to Dov. He was lying relaxed as a sunbather, the small radio held high with one hand, like a prize, so that he could capture the best reception. 'Who is winning?' I called. The sun struck me in the face and the hot Negev wind blew at me. Th
e canvas of the canopy smelled oily.
I went back into the interior and sat in the close air. The truck bounced and I could feel Shoshana's thigh move against mine. I could feel how hot her leg was under the trousers.
'Radio Amman says the Arabs are winning,' shouted Dov. His head was comically lowered below the top fringe of the truck and his upside-down face was lined with desert dust. 'Kol Israel says there is no information at the moment. That means we are winning!'
The others half-laughed, half-cheered. That handful of Jews in the jolting back of the truck did not seem like yet another generation of their race facing extinction.
'Jerusalem,' called Shoshana up at the roof. 'What news of Jerusalem?'
Dov's inverted head magically appeared again. 'No news of the city. All fighting is in the south and the west.'
Zoo Baby made a large rubber face. 'Perhaps the Jordanians will not fight,' he said. They were all speaking in English now because of me and because of Scheerer. 'The other time, in 1956, they would not fight. They were still. It is a sad thing. If they do not fight we have no chance to fight them back and to take Jerusalem.'
Metzer, who had been silent, watching the desert road scurry beneath the lorry, turned and said something in Hebrew. Shoshana nodded and affirmed in English. 'This is correct. Hussein and Nasser have kissed at Cairo Airport.'
'May thirtieth,' mumbled Zoo Baby. His wide face closed into mine.
Shoshana nodded strongly: 'And they did not kiss because they were in love. This time the Jordanians will fight.' She suddenly turned upon me, looked quickly at the uncomfortable and bewildered Scheerer sitting opposite, and gathered our attention like a teacher explaining an awkward problem. 'Our large difficulty,' she said seriously, 'would be if the Jordanian and the Iraq troops in Jordan came across the middle of Israel to join up with the Egyptians from the other side.' I could see her full breasts hanging in the shirt. She turned and saw me looking at them and some anger flushed into her face. She raised her voice a little and it hardened, while she was continuing to look sideways at me. Tanks and soldiers and some Migs could do this.' She wriggled her finger on the dusty floor of the truck. 'You understand, this is Israel. Here is Jordan and the Egyptians would attack from here. If they have many forces coming across the desert from that side and this side, you understand, they would cut our small country in half.' She said 'small' in a pleading sort of way, directed immediately at Scheerer. He nodded with embarrassed agreement. Shoshana continued: 'They would remove our head from our belly. Tel Aviv and Haifa would be in one half and Jerusalem, Beersheba and this desert would be in the other. We would be apart. It would be hilarious.'
Come To The War Page 10