'I'm Segan Mefakeach O'Sullivan,' said O'Sullivan. The exotic title again sounded strange from him. He moved over a few inches so the boy could see me. 'And this is Mr Hollings, the English concert pianist.'
I was surprised by his formality and the strange deference which came into his tone when he introduced me. I know Mr Hollings,' said Solen respectfully. I was at the concert. It was most fine.'
He whirled the big steering wheel and we took a slow corner like a great, stiff armadillo. 'The colours are not good for the desert,' he admitted returning to the matter of camouflage. 'They are good for the Gulf of Eilat, for the sea, but not good for the desert.'
I should think not,' said O'Sullivan. 'This contraption can be spotted miles away.'
The young man looked hurt. 'Cont... contrap?'he asked. 'What is that? You mean it is not good?'
O'Sullivan said: 'Sure, the thing's all right. But I don't go a lot on the colours. The blue and white stripes, patriotic though they might be.'
'We want to be seen,' answered Solen patiently. 'We are out here waiting for Arab jets. Perhaps the ones which hit your truck. Who was killed ?'
'Herr Scheerer,' I said. "The conductor of the orchestra the other night.'
Solen shook his head in a strangely elderly fashion. 'It is bad to be killed in another man's fighting,' he said solemnly.
'How are you waiting for the jets?' I asked. Every time he turned the ungainly vehicle around another bend in the desert way the sweat oozed freshly from his thick face and big body.
'He means we're a decoy,' explained O'Sullivan. 'We're out here so that they'll attack us.'
'Jesus Christ,' I said.
'That's my sentiments,' said O'Sullivan. 'But it's a long walk to Beersheba and it's a hot day. Let's hope they don't notice our beautiful bright blue and white stripes in the middle of this red desert.'
I looked around. Shoshana and Dov were looking in detail at the old machine gun mounted behind us. Metzer and Zoo Baby were leaning against the vibrating hull of the amphibian, Metzer looking apprehensively at the sky and Zoo Baby as relaxed as a day-tripper. Mendel and the other musicians were squatting like a trio of monkeys at the rear arguing about music. They waved their hands, made rising and falling movements with their fingers and hummed and sang snatches.
'Surely we're not attracting Egyptian jets in the hope of shooting them down with that thing are we ?' I asked nodding at the gun.
'It is possible,' said Solen seriously. 'But up in the sky also - somewhere - we have an Israeli jet fighter, a Mirage, which is waiting for Arabs to find us and attack us.'
'Only one?'
'One only,' he smiled. 'It is enough. The others are killing the Egyptian Air Force on the ground. The news is good from the war. We have had many victories this morning.'
'I can tell you two Egyptian jets they didn't get on the ground,' I grumbled.
'Ah,' he sighed happily. 'Some got away. From Luxor they came, those two. Perhaps they will find us.'
He sounded as though he had the entire conduct of operations of war completely in his seventeen-year-old grasp. He grinned at my consternation. That's how they all were.
'Every night for two weeks I have driven this road in this boat,' he said. 'Two big tank carriers, some other trucks and me in this. With kilometres of chains and other things making a noise. I know the road very well by now.'
'They've been pretending to be an armoured column,' explained O'Sullivan. 'Christ, the noise they made you'd have thought it was a Panzer Division. And the Arabs have been listening to it and concluded it was a big armoured movement to the gulf. So you can bet they've shifted some of their stuff down to the south to be ready for this phantom army.' He laughed quietly. 'You've got to go along with them, these Jews,' he said. "They're a weird bloody bunch, but they do have ideas,'
'Like sending this thing out as a decoy,' I said. 'When you come to think about it, O'Sullivan, this isn't much of a life for an international concert artist, is it?'
He laughed. 'You should have stayed in Eilat,' he said. 'Though things might be very hot there by now.'
'Especially with a Jewish Army made up mostly of ghost noises,' I replied. 'My God, I could have been at the Winter Gardens Bournemouth this week.'
'Aye,' he agreed sagely. 'And we might all be paddlin' by the sea, or doing something else. But we're not, Mister Hollings. We're in the middle of a desert and a war, both of them bloody hot.'
Shoshana screamed, 'There!'
Her voice sounded girlish and excited. I knew it was the jets. I could hear them immediately but I couldn't see them.
'There!' Shoshana called again. She was pointing and the two exhilarated boys were swinging the wobbly machine gun about. I still couldn't see anything. The sky was full of midday glare.
'Do we jump out?' I asked O'Sullivan. I was surprised to find my tone weary, unemotional.
'You bet your sweet arse we jump out,' he said. He turned about and called: 'Hachutza! Hachutza!' the word Dov had used before. Solen was still driving the amphibian at its full ten knots. The two boys were swivelling the gun ambitiously towards the line of the approaching jets. I caught hold of Shoshana's arm and pulled her towards the side, but she shook herself free. We jumped independently. I struck the broken road heavily and rolled in the way they taught me in the British Army, which was not the right thing. It is fine in English mud but damaging among stones and outcrops of a painful desert. I felt my face cut and my lip split. I tumbled to my feet, frightened now, and began running for the cover of some elder rocks. Shoshana and Zoo Baby were scrambling away at an angle to me. I couldn't see the others.
I heard the old machine-gun fire before the planes used their cannon. It was obviously much too early, but the boys couldn't wait. Then the planes were on all of us, their cannon fire spitting ahead of them.
I was very afraid that time. Like some burrowing creature I kicked and wriggled into a narrow crevice, realized that it was too shallow and, in panic, tried to wriggle out again. But the first of the Migs was homing in on us then, very low, cannons clattering and the shells bouncing and bursting among the outcrops and the gullies. I cringed back into the rocks, hands beseechingly over my head, waiting for the dreadful second when I would die. I thought of them dropping another canister and this time it would explode.
The second Egyptian pilot held back behind the first, by about a minute, and then came screeching in firing as he descended. Even between the fire and the explosions I could hear shouts from those about me. The first jet had merely swung down and fired indiscriminately at the general area, but the second.went for the blue and white striped amphibian, standing invitingly, blatant as a target in the red road. I realized this because none of the second salvo of cannon shells hit among the rocks where we were lying. Then I heard the amphibian blow up with a fearful noise and the plane wheeled away like some joyriding bird.
My head was buried, first by my hands and then by an avalanche of loose sand and grit thrown and disturbed by the explosions. I pushed this debris away and squirmed around so that I could see the vehicle. The body of the young man who had driven it, Solen, was hanging over the snout, his naked back and his hanging head like a carcass ready for the hook. I could not see the two enthusiastic youths who had been behind the machine gun. The explosion had torn the metal plates of the strange truck and it was spread open like an ugly tin box. It was burning sedately, being worked over by the smaller pedestrian flames that follow an explosion and the first fierce fire.
I saw Zoo Baby, Dov and then O'Sullivan run from their cover towards the road. I looked about for Shoshana and saw her walking briskly in the same direction, holding her forearm and with thin blood running between her ringers. Scrambling up from my place oddly reminded me of being half buried in playing on some childhood beach, forgotten until then. My face was stiff with blood, not serious blood, merely gashes and scratches from my rolling, running and hiding.
Shoshana looked at me as I stood and I thought a small scornful ex
pression came to her face as I, automatically, brushed myself down.
'Are you hurt?' I went close to her.
'A small thing,' she said continuing to walk towards the three men and the amphibian. Metzer was not there and I looked about for him. Two of the other three musicians were helping the third out into the open from a place where he had hidden. It was Haim Mendel, the doleful orchestra leader and reluctant air-warden. They moved towards us and he hung on to their shoulders as he walked between them.
'Let me see your arm,' I said to Shoshana.
'It is a small thing,' she repeated sullenly. 'Why do you want to look? Are you a doctor?'
I said nothing more to her. I felt my anger coursing through me; anger at her and at myself for being stuck here at all. Zoo Baby, Dov and O'Sullivan stood in a group, away from the burning amphibian like gardeners disposing of rubbish. Shoshana called something to them in Hebrew, but Zoo Baby without turning around made a hopeless sign with his hands.
'Hem mechusalim,'’ he said to her when we got there. Then to me. 'Finished. All finished.'
'Where was your wonderful Air Force ?' I asked. 'Weren't they supposed to be up there to deal with the Migs? I thought that was the whole idea.' Then I said to myself sardonically, but only to myself because I did not want to elaborate on their failure, their hopelessness: 'The decoy, the hunter and the hunted.'
At that moment I could not help feeling how pathetic they were, these Jews. Standing in that deathly and isolated place, with O'Sullivan whispering, 'Shit. Shit. Shit,' to himself, I looked at the others, at their helplessness after their bombast, and I felt sorry for them. For the first time I thought, I felt certain, that they would all be wiped out by the end of the month. The Arab would accomplish what the Nazi had failed to do. Finish them.
Metzer had remained back, meeting the two men who were helping Mendel across the dusty place. The group stood for a moment in the sun while Metzer looked at Mendel's dragging leg. Then the three men stood around, discussing the leg, and eventually carried on towards us in a shambling echelon.
From the sky came the noise of jets again. This time it was a lofty noise, one plane fighting with another, very high. They trailed about the sky and I remembered how I, as a boy, used to watch battles like this from a field of gold stubble. Their whines floated down to us, and the coughing of their weapons.
They were very close to each other, twisting like interesting insects in a bright blue bottle. Their sounds varied. The whine sometimes built into a howl, and they howled up there in their immense bowl of battle. Then they fell low over the desert and it was easy to distinguish the Israeli Mirage from the Egyptian fighter, but when they drove up into the sky again they became indistinguishable insects once more. They were fighting at this top altitude when one burst into colours like one of those trick photographs showing the opening of a flower. First yellow then red blossoms and eventually a slender stem of smoke as the aircraft began to fall from its high place.
No one standing on the road said anything because it was not possible to distinguish which plane was the victor. The three musicians and Metzer were with us now. We stood in a fixed group in the hot sun, fifty yards from the dead amphibian. It was like waiting for an important football result. Then the winning jet dropped behind the gracefully spiralling vanquished plane, following it down until they had both descended low over the distant burnished hills. Then it was the Mirage, curling in a victory roll, which came jubilantly over the rising ground to our right, only a hundred feet from the ground, flying across us in triumph. At the first sound of it every one of us crouched, but then, as its friendly shadow flew across us, we were on our feet again. The others cheered like people at a sports meeting. I looked up, grateful anyway, that we would not have to face more cannon fire, but then glanced again at the sadly burning amphibian and felt sick. I felt much more over the deaths of those youths than I had over poor old Scheerer. It was almost as though they had been persuaded and convinced of the joys of suicide.
'We seem to be running out of transport today,' I said to O'Sullivan.
'It's accident prone we are,' he agreed. 'Maybe there'll be an O'Connell Street bus along in a minute.'
'Did you see how our pilot shot down the Arab?' said Shoshana coming to my side. 'The Mirage was superior, is it not so ?'
'Oh certainly,' I agreed. 'The Mirage was the best.' I nodded at the amphibian. 'Shame really that thing couldn't fly. They might have had more of a chance.'
She dropped her expression. Her face was covered with small cuts and bruises and Dov was tying some strips of Metzer's shirt around the flesh wound on her forearm. Mendel was receiving similar treatment for the minor wound in his calf. 'It is a war,' Shoshana shrugged. But she took her eyes away. 'We expect people to be killed.'
'They were very young,' I said. I wasn't going to dispute with her.
'Young people, babies, get killed in war,' she said.
I felt very angry with her. I wanted to tell her what a lot of shit this was. The whole terrible situation and the way they talked about it as though it were some sort of pastime. But I did not. We stood together on the road, nine of us, and O'Sullivan said we ought to bury the three corpses if the fire burned through in time. I had not seen the bodies of the two youths on the machine gun and I did not want anything to do with them. I got the meaty cooking smell of Solen's body, but the flames were still all around and under the vehicle and it was no use taking more risks now.
We walked back to the shelter of the rocks. The sun was at its top now and there were only thin bands of shade. Nobody had anything to drink. For the first time it occurred to me that we could be left in the desert for days. I said this to Zoo Baby.
He shook his large head. 'No. No,' he said. 'The Mirage pilot. He will report. Somebody will come for us.'
'Just think,' I said to Shoshana. 'If the Egyptians and the Jordanians do their thing about cutting Israel in half- as you said they might - we shall be the sole defence force for this part of the Negev. That should make them think twice.'
She either let my humour pass or she did not understand it. Perhaps she could not be troubled to understand it. 'The most serious thing,' she said in her stern way, 'is not to know what is happening to our war. Being here is bad. If there was some way to contact Tel Aviv I would be able to send my report to my newspaper.'
'I can see it,' I said. 'Graphic stuff it would be. Girl reporter in desert battle. They'd give you a rise next week.'
'Arise? What is a rise?'
'An increase in your wages, dear,' muttered O'Sullivan. He looked in an annoyed way at me. 'You could do the report of how the great English pianist was attacked by Egyptian planes. Now that would be a fine one.'
'I only came for the publicity,' I said.
He laughed. 'All right,' he agreed, the sharpness gone. 'It's not your war. But it's hers. Try to understand, Mister Hollings, if she doesn't win she might just as well cut her throat. And that goes for all of them. But especially her. You understand ?'
"The brutal soldiery,' I said. "They're not always the best ambassadors.'
Suddenly the Irishman stood up. 'Here's a chopper,' he said. "They've come to get us.'
The noisy chop-chop of the helicopter sliced through the heavy noon air and it came around the corner of the rocks, flying very low, like an inquisitive dragonfly on an afternoon foray.
It alighted delicately a hundred yards away, its rotors at first flailing the air and churning choking clouds of ochre dust from the desert floor. Then they slowed and died, hanging impotently above the machine like the broad, bladed leaves of a banana tree.
Before they had ceased swinging two crouching figures dropped out of the machine's dark belly. They ran across the sand to us, two pale young men in battledress, one with an officer's epaulettes and an untidily hanging revolver. Two weeks before, I supposed, they were clerking in the Leumi Bank in Haifa.
They stopped, called out in Hebrew as though a trifle uncertain of us, and the second of the pa
ir cocked the catch of his Uzzi. O'Sullivan called back in his outlandish Irish-Hebrew, and Shoshana corrected what he had said, shouting harshly at the men. It is a strange language. In conversation it is liquid, poetic, like Italian. But shouted it becomes hard, hoarse, not far from Germanic. That is how Shoshana sounded then. Although she had been hostile to me all through that long, stifling morning, she pointed at me as she called a second time to the helicopter men.
'She's trading on your reputation,' muttered O'Sullivan with a smile. 'They're not anxious to take us to Jerusalem or even Beersheba because they say there's a war going on and they've got a lot to do. But the lady wants to get to Jerusalem to do her stuff for her paper so she's telling them how important and famous you are, and hoping that they'll take you. And if they take you they've got to take the rest of us.'
The two young men had walked back towards the machine. When they were almost at the hatch of the helicopter again the officer wheeled about and beckoned us. He climbed into the cocoon of the thing and we trooped after him. He had taken notice of Shoshana's strategy, because he called me on first and I climbed up into the machine, was guided along to the tail end and pushed firmly down to the floor. The others came after, each popping up from the hatch like miners emerging from a coal gallery.
We crouched in a bunch on the floor and Metzer began saying something to me when the engines turned the blades again and the frantic noise filled the close cabin. The hatch was kept open and the young officer knelt by it, looking at the red ground wheeling away as we flew. It veered spectacularly sideways and we fell against each other. I smiled at Shoshana and she smiled in return and nodded as though to thank me for the ride.
Once we were away from the enclosing cliffs of the Negev, up into the wide sky, the sound of the blades diminished a little. But conversation had to be shouted. The Israeli officer glanced at the minor wounds of Mendel and Shoshana and then turned and curled his finger at me. I moved towards the open hatch and he pointed to the brown horizon. I felt Shoshana moving and she crouched close beside me because she had guessed what the young man was showing me.
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