He was showing me the scene of battle, stretched across a great spread of the Sinai. It was miles away, but we were now at about two thousand feet and I could see. Smoke exploded in great distant puffs and then lazed across the sand dunes; there were bright buds of fire flowering against the yellow and the red of the land.
The young man shouted in Hebrew into the back of the helicopter. Then he turned and translated quietly for my benefit: 'We are winning the war already. This morning almost all of the Egyptian Air Force was destroyed before it could even take off from the earth, you understand. We caught them, how do you say in England, with their knickers down ?'
I was getting fed up with this. 'If that is so,' I said, 'we had a nasty experience with a couple of bare-arsed flies this morning.'
'Flies?' he asked, not comprehending. Shoshana, not understanding either, leaned forward to catch my words over the noise of the rotor blades.
O'Sullivan, who had moved up and was now looking out of the hatch to the distant battle, put his arm on mine. 'Forget it, Mister Hollings,' he said. "The jokes aren't appreciated. You're just here through bad luck. Okay, that's understood and is fine. But you're in this mess with the rest of us just now. So even if it's not your war, if I were you I'd temporarily adopt it. When you get to Eastbourne or wherever it is, then you can raise your two fingers in this direction.'
Shoshana was doing her best to keep up with the conversation, but anything sly or idiomatic missed her. She shook her head. 'What is happening in Jerusalem ?' she asked in English. 'What about the fighting there ?'
'One hour ago there was no fighting,' said the young man. He looked at her obviously sharing her regret. 'The Jordanians have started nothing, so we cannot go into the Old City. Maybe they will later. Maybe we shall have luck.'
In ten minutes I saw Jerusalem again, yellow in the sunlight, gracing the hills, spreading into the long shadowed valleys; walls and towers and ramparts. The city of cities, so they say. The sun lay lovingly over it as though it were the favourite place on earth. The towers and domes cast shadows and the walls smaller shadows. As we dropped we heard gunfire from below and the young officer and Shoshana glanced at each other and smiled as though they had conceived and successfully carried out a conspiracy.
"The guns,' she said, again in English which I suppose could only have been for my benefit.
'I hear them,' he replied. He hung acrobatically over the hatch looking down on to the roofs of the streets. Pulling himself up he said: 'It looks very good down there today. It is a good day for a battle. Tomorrow, or perhaps upon the next day, we shall be at the Wailing Wall.'
Ten
The helicopter dawdled across Jerusalem, drifting west. There was hard firing in parts of the city below and smoke stood up like little grey trees on the wall and among the buildings. But we could see no men.
An orange-coloured puff, like a bright dandelion clock, appeared almost alongside the aircraft, making us rock drunkenly to one side. Then another formed quite slowly and beautifully at its side.
'They seem to be shooting at us,' I said, attempting to keep a traditional British calm in my voice, although God knows why.
'Unless these are the fireworks of victory,' smiled the young officer. 'Perhaps it is that we have already won and we celebrate!' He rocked back on his heels by the open hatch laughing, well pleased at his joke in English. He seemed disappointed that I only managed a brief and cold smile.
But the Arab gunfire had moved us on. We speeded now towards the west, to where the Jerusalem heights fell away to the Corridor through which Selma had driven me a few days earlier. I found myself searching for her house, marking it from the windmill which I had immediately picked up. But before I had sorted the house from all the others in the roads and alleys we were moving determinedly away from the city and towards the road to Tel Aviv.
The helicopter hung, then dropped like a large insect through some pines and into a clearing. It flapped away grumpily, bending the light trees with the force of its wind, until the pilot switched off the rotors. First the young officer climbed down and then helped Shoshana and myself to the ground. The others followed.
Under the trees, spread out like some concealed circus, was a formation of military vehicles, camouflaged tents, and caravans. Radio aerials stood up straighter and higher than the fine trunks of the conifers. There were sentries below the trees and other men moving about, bent and mysterious, through the woods.
The young officer from the helicopter said to us, as though addressing a group of tourists, which I suppose we were: 'We are near the command post of General Narkis, the Commander of the Central Front. I will tell someone I have brought you. Please stay here by our chopper because if you walk someone may shoot you. They are wanting to shoot people very badly today.'
'Preferably Arabs, but they're not particular,' I suggested as he moved off. The pilot was fussing around wiping the nose of his helicopter with a piece of rag as considerately as a patient mother tending a snotty child. We stood in a close group by the aircraft. I felt awkward, in the way a prisoner must feel awkward, standing about waiting for something to happen.
Shoshana was smiling and looking about her. Zoo Baby was wriggling in his sweated uniform. His eyes were closed up like a hippo's eyes. Dov considered the sky through the trees as though a military establishment was not to be spied upon and it would be cheating or presumptive to look. O'Sullivan and Metzer stood together with the two other musicians and the injured Mendel who was sitting unhappily on the ground.
From the dark tents our officer reappeared with a tall, thin, yet oddly military looking figure. There was no wind, hardly a breeze among these trees, but his wide Army shorts flapped like flags about his knees, as the man walked briskly to us.
'This is Captain Harris,' said our officer. 'He will speak with you.'
'I think perhaps under1 the trees,' suggested the new man in English with a fine Sandhurst accent. 'Bloody warm out here for a start and we don't want any damned aeroplanes prying on us do we ? Come along.'
We went below the trees, Harris ushering us along fussily. We stood there, again like an awkward group of prisoners. O'Sullivan saluted and introduced himself first, bringing a mild raising of the officer's white eyebrows with his Irish accent, and then everyone else.
Harris looked around benignly. He had a ragged white moustache and a tight face. His military cap was pushed back of his fair hair and he kept scratching the exposed area. 'Christ knows what we're going to do with you people,' he said easily. 'We're likely to have a bash at Jerusalem in an hour or two, we're getting the tanks and things up from Ramla now, so we're all pretty busy here.'
Shoshana said: 'I want to go to Jerusalem. To the war.' She flapped her hands around inside her handbag like a woman looking for a bus ticket and brought out a pass in a perspex shield and some other documents. 'Correspondent,' she pointed to the pass firmly. 'I can go with the Army.'
He looked at her doubtfully. 'There are some newspaper people assembled down near the Mandelbaum Gate,' he said. 'Waiting for the balloon to go up, perhaps you could get some transport down there. Can't say I remember seeing any ladies there.'
I almost laughed when he said 'waiting for the balloon to go up'. He was so dated, so angular in every way that he could have been in one of the old films about our war. He checked that Mendel was not suffering from his wound. Then he considered Dov and Zoo Baby and a pleased expression broke on his thin face. 'You two fellows can go as escort for the young lady,' he said as though he had conceived a master tactic. 'That takes care of you. And you, sir, Mr Hollings, what are your plans ?'
'For the duration ?' I asked.
'For the duration,' he affirmed, acknowledging the cliche of the Forties.
'Well, I'd rather like to get back to London,' I said offhandedly.
'I expect you damn-well would, too. Well Lod is shut down for business, old man, as you might expect. I imagine BOAC have shifted their route through Beirut, but I can't get you there
unless we advance a bit bloody quicker than I think we will. I think the best thing would be to get you to Tel Aviv. There's been a bit of odd shelling up there this morning, the Jordanian big guns from Kalkilya; and some silly bastard dropped a bomb on Natanya, obviously thinking it was Tel Aviv. But it was his last mistake.' He looked around at us. 'Right then,' he said, as though coming to a sudden decision. 'We'll try and rustle up some transport for you. It won't be much - but there's a war on you know!' He glanced at me again because of the expression. I nodded a smile.
'Mr Hollings, you will go along with the lady, er ... Miss Levy ... and with Mr Metzer and with these three gentlemen as escorts.' He indicated Dov, Zoo Baby and O'Sullivan. 'You can drop all five at the Mandelbaum Gate and then the driver will take you on to Tel Aviv. It will only be a jeep, but it is the very best we can do on a Monday.'
Metzer said: 'Because I am in the company of Mr Hollings, I have arranged his tour here, I should go to Tel Aviv with him.' He was looking very fat and worried that afternoon. He was very anxious to get out of Jerusalem.
Harris said: 'Good idea, too. You'll have to squeeze up in the jeep, but four will be getting out so it should be more comfortable for the rest of the way.'
The other two musicians were to remain at the command post with Mendel who was to have his leg wound treated. Harris gave a little chicken nod to each of us to check we understood, then turned his heel in the dust and strutted thinly away.
He called back over his shoulder: 'It might be half an hour before I can arrange anything. I'll get someone to fix you with food. You don't know when you'll be eating again, that's the bloody trouble with war.'
'He is British?' asked Shoshana doubtfully. 'He says strange words. What means "rustle up" ?'
'It means he's going to obtain a jeep,' I said. 'He's British all right. Home Guard, I'd say, Sevenoaks, nineteen forty.'
'You can tell that sort an ocean away,' muttered O'Sullivan quietly. 'So we'll be saying goodbye to you, Mr Hollings. Off across the sea, are you.'
'As soon as I get something to cross it in,' I joked. At that moment I found myself looking first into the solemn face and then the full eyes of Shoshana. She was like she had been before the war. Her face had all the softness of the previous night and I remembered and felt her again, moving in love under the sheets of my bed in Eilat.
I suppose it was then at that moment that I let myself slip into love with her. When afterwards everyone thought I had gone off my head, my agent and my manager and all those others in England and in Europe, this was the time, I told them honestly, when it started. Her hand, now a gentle, small hand, moved out shyly to me, away from the others so they would not see. I moved mine two inches to meet her and they docked for a moment. 'Shalom, Christopher,' she whispered. 'Shalom, shalom.'
But it was not until an hour later, when the tanks from Ramla were lining up for the first Israeli push into Jordan, that I made the mad move. Now, today, I still cannot account for it. Nothing in my life until then had ever motivated me except that it was for my own good and benefit. No person, certainly no woman, had ever turned me from the path I had decided to make and take. No person had ever taken any real love from me or given it to me. But when we reached the road junction, the turning one way to the Mandelbaum Gate and the other the road back to rejoin the Tel Aviv highway; at that point, I decided to go with her. She and Dov and Zoo Baby and O'Sullivan had climbed from the jeep. They had shaken hands with me and with Metzer. We all laughed and Shoshana had pressed a wet face and then her wet lips to me, and I was left sitting in the jeep with Metzer and the driver. The four moved off like a little patrol towards a group of tanks hiding beneath some tamarisk trees, turning and waving cheerfully to me. Then I called to them and got from the jeep and ran across the sunUt road after them. I heard Metzer, in English, and the driver, in Hebrew, caU out behind me and the four in the front shouted and told me to go back. But I didn't.
I ran down the sloping road to them like a schoolboy running towards his friends. God knows what I was thinking about. But I had done it and that was sufficient. I didn't care a bugger about the war or who was fighting or why. But I wanted to be with her. I could not leave her in Jerusalem.
'Forget something?' asked O'Sullivan wryly.
'Nothing. I merely thought it would be better to come along with you. I can't get out of the flaming country tonight anyway and I might as well be here than in Tel Aviv.'
Shoshana was staring at me. 'Christopher,' she said throatily. 'You must go. There will be fighting here in one hour.'
'They're shelling Tel Aviv,' I shrugged with new bravado. 'You heard Harris say so. Big guns from Kalkilya or somewhere. And they might move across the border any moment and cut the road or bombard it. I'll stay. I have a personal escort.' I nodded at the three odd soldiers, O'Sullivan, Dov and Zoo Baby. Then I said: 'Besides, I like Jerusalem.'
Metzer, his thick body turned around in the jeep as far as it would go, bawled something in Hebrew to Zoo Baby and then I heard him call angrily to Dov by name.
'He says you've got to go to Tel Aviv. You have not the insurance to get killed in a battle,' said Zoo Baby. 'Maybe I go tell him to fuck off. I have not liked this man very much.'
Dov interrupted, calling something to Metzer who was red with fury. The tank men, waiting for the big battle and peeping like calm mice from their armoured holes, watched the exchange with avid concern. Their heads went from our group to the jeep and back again, and then returned to us.
"We'll go,' decided Dov. 'Leave him to shout.' The five of us turned and ran down the road towards the Mandelbaum Gate. I half turned and saw Metzer apparently about to get out of the jeep. Then the artillery from the Jordan sector began shelling us. The explosions seemed to bounce up the road, blowing us sideways, leap-frogging among the tanks and the men. I felt Zoo Baby's huge protective arm over my head as we cowered in a ditch at the side of the road. It only lasted about a minute. When we looked up, with the air rolling with bitter smoke, two of the tanks were burning and there were soldiers lying dead a few yards away under the tamarisk trees.
The jeep had overturned and Metzer was lying on his back in the road about ten yards from it. I could see that the driver was trapped under the jeep. As we started back towards Metzer the vehicle blew up with the explosion of its petrol tank. It began to burn heavily.
There was a lot of shouting going on. Hoses were being brought up to the burning tanks and the prostrate men were being quickly carried off. An officer in the leading tank was shouting orders and the column began to move off noisily like some crocodile rudely disturbed.
Metzer was stretched out as though he were enjoying a nap. O'Sullivan touched him and then half turned him on to his side and grimaced at the great hole in his back. Some stretcher bearers lumbered to us and O'Sullivan gave them a small nod. Civilians apparently got priority because there were still some soldiers lying around. They picked up the dead man and put him on their litter. We continued down the road. I did not feel so badly about Metzer as I had done about Scheerer or Solen the young man in the amphibian, although I had known him since the moment I left the plane at Lod. But this had been a long day and there had been a lot of dying so far. And it was only late afternoon.
A military policeman farther down the road directed us to the house where the correspondents had assembled. Despite the shelling he was standing in the centre of the thoroughfare with that fireproof look of policemen everywhere. He was briskly directing three jeeps carrying long-nosed bazookas into a concealed turning, his hands flapping the signals. He paused when O'Sullivan approached him, smiled and pointed the direction.
The house had been previously fortified by the troops as part of the defences at the Mandelbaum Gate, which until that time had been the accepted crossing point between Jewish and Arab Jerusalem. Pilgrims and people with special passes used to go through that way from one country to another with the United Nations soldiers keeping a watch.
The house had not been used for ordi
nary living for a long time. We went into a cavernous, whitewashed downstairs room, empty except for a disabled table against the wall at one end. There were perhaps fifteen men in khaki Army fatigues in there and two other women wearing the same sort of clothes. Some of the men looked too old to be preparing to go into a fight. They had cameras and torches and a couple had portable typewriters. Since they were mostly Jews there was a lot of arguing going on, apparently about the distribution of some armbands with the word 'Press' in Hebrew, English, and prudently in Arabic. Several of the men and one of the women greeted Shoshana, but briefly and Shoshana said the other woman knew her but never spoke to her because of professional jealousy.
A squashed, fussy, Army major came through the crowd and came to us near the door. He spoke to Shoshana, whom he at once recognized, and then, having looked at me with some doubt, ushered both of us into a smaller room where a clean selection of fatigue uniforms was lying across a table, the jackets and the trousers joined and stretched out stiffly like steamrollered men. The officer said something else in Hebrew and left us, closing the door.
Shoshana began to take off her clothes. 'We have come too late for the briefing,' she said, supporting herself with one hand on the table. I remained standing there, not moving, looking at her. She realized this and stopped with her trousers around her brown knees. Her white pants were a stretched triangle.
She bent towards me. 'Christopher, I love you, too,' she said kissing me. 'With all trueness, mottek.' She motioned towards the battledress dungarees. 'You must dress too,' she said. 'If you still want to be with me. I told the officer that you are a British journalist. I was afraid he would want to see your papers, but he trusts me.' She laughed. 'You are all over with earth and dust. You do not look like a piano player.'
'That is possibly because I am not a piano player,' I corrected a little huffily. 'I'm a concert pianist.'
'That is how I meant,' she smiled. I moved over and put two fingers tenderly on the fatty rise of her bust. She put her fingers across mine and pressed them into her flesh watching me carefully while she did it. Then she pulled the battle fatigue jacket about her and buttoned it. I had some trouble with my buckles because the last time I did this it was with British infantry webbing. Eventually we were ready and we tied our 'Press' armbands like stewards preparing for a cross-country marathon. Then she kissed me and said: 'Good luck to us, Christopher.'
Come To The War Page 13