We went through the little forest, the firm smell of the pine, the eucalyptus and the olive mixing with the wandering smoke that was everywhere in Jerusalem that night. Among the trees of the forest squatting like trogs and woodland gnomes were the paratroops who had come from the north and were waiting to go into the battle for the Old City. They sat quietly eating and drinking from their mess cans, stoic, their guns and their helmets on the ground. They were within the boundary of the zoo, sitting on the grass of the picnicking area and on the tree-shaded benches.
'Feeding time,' said O'Sullivan.
We drove on and then we heard the moans and roars of the animals coming through the dark. Dov said: 'The guns, maybe, have upset them.'
We pulled into an area near the pay-box at the entrance, left the jeep and walked into the noise of the zoo. I was unprepared. That day I thought I had seen every form of violent death. But this was different. The place was lit by dim flares and oil lamps. Two weeping men were carrying a dead ostrich on a wide stretcher. It lay more grotesque in death than any human, its ancient, wrinkled eyelids closed, its beak pleadingly half open, its great legs and feet crumbled like cables.
'Jesus,' I whispered. I felt myself grow sick. We stood and let the men with the ostrich go by. All around us caged animals were howling in the dimness.
"They bury their heads in the sand, of course,' said O'Sullivan nodding at the ostrich. 'That never was much of a way.'
We walked a few more paces. The zoo had been devastated. The cages and the trees were burst and wrecked. The animals which had survived were crying with fear and with the smell of blood.
'The main Arab shelling was in this area today,' said Dov soberly. 'It seems maybe we suffered some casualties.'
A giraffe, itself like a felled tree, lay in the ruins of its cage. There were birds lying about the place under the flares and lamps, their feathers grimed with the dirt of death. Four set-faced paratroopers marched by with a litter piled with the bodies of black, white and coloured birds. It looked like the rack at a butcher's shop before Christmas.
'Even the vultures,' said O'Sullivan sombrely.
We walked through the debris of the cages towards a clear area beyond some fig trees where another group of paratroops were squatting and eating apparently undisturbed by the unique devastation about them. Three foxes lay in their own blood at the bottom of their cage. On the cage, in Hebrew and underneath in English was, 'Take us the foxes, the little foxes, that spoil the vines'.
Dov said: 'The song of Solomon, you will recall. The zoo was meant to be a collection of animals mentioned in the Bible, but it has grown, or it had grown until this.'
Zoo Baby and Shoshana had said nothing while we had been there. O'Sullivan pointed a finger at a torn and empty cage. 'As a roaring lion and a greedy bear, so is a wicked ruler over an ... indigent people,' he read with difficulty in the poor fight. Then he spat and said: 'T'isn't much of a day to be going to the zoo.'
Shoshana stopped the two men who had carried the dead ostrich. They were returning with the stretcher. She asked them to sit for a moment and they sat wearily on the grass by the side of the zoo path. They wore their zoo attendants' uniforms which seemed strange among all the soldiers. The older one, a gentle, helpless sort of man in his sixties, spread his hands to Shoshana's questions and began to weep again as he answered her.
She glanced at me and asked him if he spoke English. He replied in Hebrew, but said the words, 'For the tourists.' He then wiped his tears with the flats of his hands, as a child smudges them away, and continued in good English.
'One hundred animals die,' he sobbed. 'All the time the Arabs kill them. Bang, bang, bang. The lion, and the giraffe, the high one, the bear and the lion....'
The other keeper, a younger man, grey in the face, put his arm on the old man's shoulder. The first keeper looked at me. 'Sir,' he said, 'we have loved these. In the war of 1948 we could not feed them by day because of the Arab snipers who shoot at us, you understand. We creep and crawl to feed them in the night.
'Then we put them to live at Mount Scopus, and the Arabs were around us. We took them from there, sir, in armoured cars, and buses, and all the monkeys in ambulances.'
The noise of the creatures and the movements of the soldiers continued around us. The keeper put his eyes into his hands, but then wiped them resolutely and got up from the grass. 'But some we save today. I show you, sir.'
We followed him to a compound with a high wall. The cages there were untouched and the animals were fretful but making no great noise. On a table beneath some shredded eucalyptus trees in one corner using an oil lamp for illumination, two women dressed the wounds of a patient monkey. It sat woefully while they bandaged its foreleg. In the cages immediately about them other small animals, and two childlike donkeys stood and watched the bright lamp and the unusual activity.
'All these have been a little wounded and will be living,' said the keeper. 'But most were dead or we had to kill ourselves because of their wounds. Now we have to collect the giraffe with a truck and the foxes and some others. We have a big hill of dead creatures, sir.. . A mountain.'
We could say nothing. When we were nearly clear of the wrecked cages and the torn trees, and into the untouched area of the little forest, away from the animal howling, where more paratroopers were feeding, Shoshana held my hand and said: 'You see, Christopher, what they do to the poor Israeli animals.'
Dov said to me: 'It is very interesting, the zoo. One day you should return and see it again. When everything is okay. When the animals were on Mount Scopus it was a lunatic situation. Maybe it could only happen here. The troops had to be fed, but so did the monkeys. In the end they let all the harmless small animals - the ones that could survive by caring for themselves - they let them free and brought the rest back here, just as the old man said, in a convoy protected by the United Nations. The lions were brought down in an armoured car and the birds in double-decker buses. Most strange.'
The Army had a cookhouse established beneath the trees and we waited for ten minutes in a line with some of the fresh paratroops and some weary tank men who had come back from the battle with the Jordanian gun emplacements to the north of the Old City.
Zoo Baby was talking to one of the tank men, nodding his great head understandingly as he listened to the story. We collected our food in mess tins, a hot mass of meat and vegetables and went away under the trees to eat it. Dov was missing for a while and reappeared happily holding a bottle of red wine. He sat with us. Shoshana pushed a piece of meat on her fork under my nose. I bit at it as though we were enjoying a picnic. Dov said: 'The wine is not much, but just enough for five.'
I said: 'Last evening we were eating our dinner at Eilat. It's been a long twenty-four hours.'
"There is more,' said Zoo Baby. I talked to the men from the tanks. It was very bad they said because of the mines and the deep trenches. Men had to pick the mines from the ground before the tanks could go through.'
'There were no flails to fit to the tanks,' said O'Sullivan his face in his mess tin. "The flail pulls the mines up before the tank goes over them, but they're all in the south. The tanks were all right, but it seems we were caught a bit short of flails. Sounds more like Ireland than Israel.'
Shoshana said, through her food: 'In Sinai and Gaza it is good. The Egyptians are being defeated and are running for the canal. Also in the south of Jerusalem the Government House, which was of the United Nations before today, is now taken by Israel from the Jordanians. We have crossed the road to Bethlehem but there is still much fighting there.'
I suddenly thought of Selma then and her coveted house in Jordan, of the cypress trees and the strange little turret, and the postman with the red bicycle. I remembered watching it across the frontier through the binoculars and how proud of it she was.
'Was there much shelling about the windmill?' I asked casually. It would be strange I thought if the Arabs destroyed Selma's house in Israel and the Israelis her house in Jordan.
'At Yemin Moshe below Mount Zion,' said Dov. 'There was a big battle going on there. We went across to get Government House and Sur Bahir which was an Arab strong-point. The windmill is useful. In the war before we used it as an observation point and there was much shelling there.'
'Don Quixote,' said Zoo Baby. 'This is what they called the battle. Yes, it was Don Quixote. Because of the windmill, you understand.'
I agreed that I understood. Again I wondered about Selma and if she had kept her word to play golf.
We returned to the jeep as they were lifting the dead giraffe on to the truck, using a block and tackle. It looked an awkward way to handle such a gentle creature. With its spread wooden legs the loading equipment itself looked like a giraffe. The old keeper was directing the loading and the paratroops were helping. The keeper's eyes were still streaming and his voice, as he called to the men, was thick as mud. He seemed very anxious that they should not drop the giraffe.
There was still fighting in the South, beyond the windmill, and some small-arms fire from the dark hills behind Gethsemane and the Mount of Olives. But the heavy Judean night had settled in with what I came to know later as its overpowering effect. It falls in summer upon everything like a hand, keeping it, containing it. It is a time for sleeping in Jerusalem, or for lying in helpless wakefulness. It is not good for fighting.
"There will be an attack on the Police School in a few hours,' said Shoshana. 'This I have been told also.'
'And you want to be there,' I said tiredly.
'Of course,' she said. 'But you may stay in your bed.'
'Where is bed?' I asked.
Dov answered; 'My brother has a house not far away, near the President Hotel. We will go there for a time. He will be with his Army unit, but maybe his wife is there. I tried to telephone but the telephone is not working too well in Jerusalem today.'
I found Shoshana lolling in sleep against my shoulder before we reached the house of Dov's brother. She was full against me, but light, like a child exhausted after a busy day. I woke her softly when Zoo Baby turned the jeep into a steep lane and stopped halfway down the slope. It was dark but quiet. The crickets were even active here, clicking in the walls and the hanging vines. The place was clean and clear for there had been little shelling in that area.
We went to the house, but there was no answer to the door. Dov walked around the enclosed garden to a window. He unfussily broke a pane of glass and opened the casement door. We walked into the deserted house.
'Breaking and entering,' I smiled at Dov. 'And your brother's house too.'
He shrugged. 'One more pane of glass won't make a lot of difference in Jerusalem today,' he said. He pulled all the shutters and put on one lamp. It was a small house, but very clean and sweet smelling. There were some children's books on a table in the corner. Batman and Robin, Mickey Mouse and Yogi Bear, all in Hebrew.
'How many children?' I asked.
'Three,' said Dov. 'Rachel has probably taken them to Ramat Gan, to her mother's house.'
Shoshana had gone to the bathroom to shower. Dov poured some arak for each of us and we sat and drank it. He said: 'When we have the Old City you must see the Garden of the Tomb. As a Christian it should very much interest you.'
'Why is that?' asked O'Sullivan. The remark had been addressed to me, but he came in quickly, as though anxious to be identified as a Christian also. Dov smiled because he realized this.
Zoo Baby said: 'It is without the City wall.' He said 'without' because of his unfinished English, but it sounded like the Sunday school hymn about a green hill far away. 'It is just into the Arab territory. There was fighting there today.'
'It is very convincing,' said Dov. 'I have seen it, though many years ago, during the last fighting in Jerusalem, and, as a Jew, it seems to me that it is more convincing as the resting place of Christ than the official place at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.'
He was an extraordinary man, this Dov. We sat in dust and weariness, waiting to witness more dust and bloodshed, and yet he had time and enthusiasm to explore a small avenue of history. He poured some more arak all round. 'The garden is very quiet, just below an old Jewish cemetery on top of a rock that I think you will agree is shaped like a skull. Golgotha, the Place of the Skull. That's what they called Calvary, of course. Golgotha. There is a hill, a place like a skull, and known as a place of execution in ancient times. And within the garden there is a rock tomb, one which had a great stone in front of it at one time. You can still see the channels of the stone.'
Drawing with his finger in some arak which had spilt on the table he showed how Christ, bearing His cross down the Via Dolorosa, could have come to the place quite as easily as He could arrive at the spot where the Church of the Holy Sepulchre stands.
'It is simple,' he said as though explaining some battle logic. 'Christ turned left, not right, and came out of the gate and up to Calvary. The other way you go down. There is no rising hill.'
I could hear the shower running upstairs and Shoshana singing some military-sounding Israeli song. The guns were deadened from here. We sat and helped ourselves to more arak and listened to Dov. He went through his whole theory, how Christ coming out of the gate of the city met Simon of Cyrene, detailing the movements while 1 tried to remember the story forgotten since childhood. Then Dov described how at the Place of the Skull criminals were crucified or thrown down to death on the rocks below. When I lived with Shoshana in Jaffa Road, Jerusalem after the Six Day War I got to know the rocks where they threw the ancient criminals very well because the Israelis built a bus station there.
Shoshana came down the stairs wearing a pink towelling bath robe belonging to Dov's sister. It was a good deal too big for her, but she had washed all the grime away and had tied her splendid fair hair back behind her neck. She came and sat down, her brown feet nosing out from beneath the hem of the garment and her neck and face looking clean and tanned. All four men sat looking at her for a moment, without saying anything, then Dov suggested that I should go and shower. Shoshana said she would make some coffee.
I went up and let the cooling water run over me like a river. I had a look at my hands. A great many pianists make a big thing about their hands, insure them for major sums and that sort of thing. My manager, Eric, always told me I did not worry enough about mine. If he could have seen them after one day of war he would not have been pleased. I doubted if an insurance policy on a pianist's hands would allow him to take part in a war anyway.
I had to put the same clothes on and I did not shave. My luggage had been left in the jeep which was destroyed when Metzer died. When I had jumped from it to run towards Shoshana and the others I had left the cases there. All my clothes, even my tails. I grinned when I thought about the improbability of my tails being blown up on a street corner in Jerusalem. But for the impulse of getting out then I would have been killed too. On the other hand the jeep had only waited because Metzer had been calling me back. Otherwise it would have been on its way with me beside the driver. It had only been there, in that deadly spot, because of me. I had not thought of it like that before.
I went downstairs and O'Sullivan went to the bathroom. When Shoshana bent to pour the coffee the front of the robe eased out and I could see the clean lumps of her breasts, brown and then the inner band of white. She looked up and saw me looking at her.
'They have fixed two searchlights on top of the Histadrut building,' said Dov. 'I heard at the zoo.' 'What's that?' I asked. "The Histadrut. ..' 'Oh, what would you say it was? It's the sort of Association ... no ... the Federation, that is right... of Labour,' he said.
I smiled at Shoshana as she passed my coffee. 'Federation is a better word when it is connected with Labour,' I said. 'Association is a bit upper class. It's for people like antique dealers.'
"The difficulties of the English language,' shrugged Shoshana.
'What about Hebrew?' asked Dov. He looked at me: 'What do you think of a country where they called a scrambled egg "a confused egg"?' 'Or s
ay the same thing for "hello" and "goodbye",' I said. 'Shalom means "peace" not any of those things,' said Shoshana huffily. 'It is like they say ciao in Italian. That is also for meeting and parting.' 'When will they use the searchlights ?' I asked. 'For the School of Police,' said Zoo Baby. He was always glad to come in when the English did not become too quick for him. He was sitting by Shoshana and he looked an oddity, mountainous, grimed, sweated, but passive, alongside her cleanness. I could see the oily imprint of his submachine-gun on his palms. 'Tonight,' he said, 'in a few hours they will go for the school. It will be a bad battle there. They have the fights for the jet planes.'
Dov said: "This is the particular thing about fighting in a city. It is so familiar. Even their side is familiar for we see it every day. It is not a war over many miles. It is just over a little space with the enemy country at the next block. In London it would be like fighting from Big Ben with the other army in Trafalgar Square, or in New York like shelling the lake in Central Park from the Plaza Hotel. In this sort of war you have no distance to travel.'
O'Sullivan had come down and was sitting on a bare wooden chair taking some coffee from Shoshana. Zoo Baby made his way up the stairs. O'Sullivan said: 'When the Irish patriots were going to attack Dublin Castle in the 1916 Rising they went on a tramcar, forty at a time. And they all paid their fares.' 'They would,' I said.
Once the house was quiet I went to her. Zoo Baby was sleeping like a balloon on the other bed in the room I was given and I did not wake him. While I waited I almost drifted to sleep myself, but I kept myself conscious by watching flashes of the battle in the south of the city through the window and the fanned branches of a tree in the garden.
I knew she would he awake for me because I touched her hand before we had left the room downstairs and she had gently pulled my middle finger out to its full length then sweetly closed her fingers around it. She was in a room belonging to the children. There was a Donald Duck on the outside of the white door with some Hebrew inscription underneath it. It looks strange to see Hebrew in that sort of context. It always looks in shape as though it should be preserved for religious, elevated things.
Come To The War Page 16