She had left the door only touching the jamb, so I did not have to turn the handle. I pushed it and went in to her.
In all the time since, I can never think about her without thinking of how she was when I saw her that moment.
She was lying full on her back, not asleep, on one of the children's small beds. There was a little nightlight, shaped like a lantern, burning on a table. The bed was against a wall and she was stretched, without her clothes, her hands behind her head, looking towards the pale, still flickering, light of a window. There were two other little beds in the shadowed room, toys on the shelves and big simple pictures on the wall. I could see, although the room was dim, a large painting of Popeye, a doll in a green dress, three wooden soldiers about a foot tall, Shoshana's breasts lying as quiet as the toys, her hair over the pillow flowing out over her arms; a baby's rocking-chair, a cuckoo clock, Shoshana's brown leg, her knee raised; the other leg, the nearest to me, flat like a plain lying below the high mountain of the first one. On a tray an assembly of model tanks and armoured cars, aeroplanes and ships of war. Shoshana's stomach looked flat and glistening in the same light.
As I came through the door she turned her head quietly to me and smiled. 'I am a child again,' she said.
'Oh, Christ,' I thought. 'Look at her. Just look at her sweet and naked there, lying among the toys.' Then I could again see her as she had been in the Negev that day looking at the bodies of the Israeli boys in the amphibian and hear her cold voice saying that all sorts of people die in war. I was clean but weary. All I wanted was to lie by her and feel her. The guns kept exploding, but they were to the south, towards Bethlehem. The sky flicked and occasionally flashed at the nursery window.
I closed the door cautiously behind me, then went to the little bed on which she lay. Beneath her she had a woollen rug, and it was rough against my skin. She moved over and I lay beside her knowing immediately the splendid touch of her beautiful skin, cool and warm at the same time, pliable, firm, painful but luxurious.
'Christopher, come to me,' she whispered. 'All day I have been so afraid.'
I could not believe her, but then, immediately, I did. She held me desperately, close to her, my nose and my wet mouth to her waiting breasts.
'What is that called ?' she asked.
"What called, darling?'
'When you do that, like a small animal, pushing your nose.'
'Like this?'
'Yes, like this.'
'Nuzzling,' I said. 'Rabbits do it and moles and things.'
'Nuzzling is a beautiful English word,' she said. 'Nuzzling. It is about the nose and it sounds so soft.'
I put my nose to the cone of her nipple and began to work them together. All the time I could feel my tiredness seeping away from me, my strength growing; the tiredness did not go reluctantly for it would be back. But the temporary strength that comes to the body with desire was flowing within me now. I remember a schoolteacher telling me, her pupil, about some little glands which we have which give us extra energy in times of emergency, such as being chased by a bull. I suppose that these, or some other glands, work at times of love too. Something was waking me and making me.
Gently I moved above her. There was not much room on the child's bed. I realized how urgently she wanted me too. She was gasping and her face and her mouth were urging me on.
'Christopher,' she said suddenly and simply. 'We may die today.' And her hands went down to me, discovered me and drew me to her. She moved my point against her open underneath. 'Nuzzling,' she said. Her eyes were shut tight now. 'Nuzzling.' I needed to wrap myself around her and within her then, but I let her play us to and fro for a while until she stretched her flanks and coupled us with her hands. After that, despite our urgency, we loved quietly. There was none of the rhino play that we had enjoyed in the bed at Eilat the night before, that night now a year away in history. We made love as though we were dancing to the decorous melody of an old-fashioned music box. We took a long, long time. When we thought it was getting too much for us and we would have to climax we would he, stiff at first but gradually relaxing, until the passion had been subdued, and we could safely continue on our journey.
While we rested in mid-love, in mid-stream as it were, we would lie, holding each other, our fingers and thumbs just touching the other's flesh in some comforting place. I turned my head to the wall and saw the three-foot-high wooden soldiers regarding us from their shelf with something approaching shock. Popeye considered me archly. I said to Shoshana: 'Popeye is watching us.'
She gave a giggle which I felt deep in her cavern. 'He looks like he winks,' she said.
'That eye,' I said. 'He looks like General Dayan.'
'Love me more, Christopher. Soon they will start again on this side of the city.'
We moved again. I tunnelled gently within her, both of us wide awake now, our senses on edge, but keeping, or trying to keep anyway, to our slow and sleepy rhythm. But this time there was no stopping, no holding off and retreating to fight again. This time, we knew, it was our final run.
Our embrace tightened and our smooth movements became jerks until we were mad with it. Her teeth were in my neck and I was muttering and then hoarsely: 'It's here, my baby.'
'It's here, oh, it's here,' she cried, although her words were half choked back. 'Oh, my dear darling, I weep inside.'
We lay riding out the last moments like two boats tied together in a subsiding sea. I kissed her ear and her neck and felt my own neck where her teeth had entered. I could feel the small holes.
The toy planes and ships and army vehicles were on their tray within reach of my arm. I selected a neat tank with rubber tracks, examined it, and then put it on the shining surface of her belly.
'Come to the war,' I said. She smiled.
'It is always with us, Christopher.'
I moved the tank forward along her flesh and then, after glancing at her, rolled it on its rubber tracks up the nursery slopes of her breasts. The tracks clicked over easily for it was a well-constructed toy, made in England actually, and the tank tipped over the summit of her left breast, and I ran it slowly down into her valley and up the other slope. She watched it making its tracks in her sweat and then looked at me seriously.
'Soon,' she said. 'After Jerusalem our armies will attack the Syrians in the Golan Heights. Too long they have been killing Israelis in the Galilee.' I kissed her shoulder and returned the tank to its shelf.
Now the tiredness came back triumphantly, overtaking us like a conqueror who had prudently waited his turn. We lay exhausted in our wet arms, sore and heavy from what we had done. I could feel nothing but the weariness claiming me and the sloping pillow of her breast against my throat. She breathed with me, deeply, and then, when we were almost gone, stirred and protested briefly.
'Christopher,' she murmured. 'You must not make bad jokes about General Dayan and Popeye. General Dayan is our leader, remember.'
Thirteen
Within a half an hour of us sleeping after our lovemaking, the entire Israeli sector of Jerusalem came under heavy fire from the Arab artillery and mortars. The house shuddered and the picture of Popeye fell noisily from the wall. Shoshana sat up, naked in the bed, her bare breasts lit by the gun flashes. For a moment she looked as frightened and confused as the child in whose bed she lay would have been. I tumbled to the floor and sat there stupidly naked, blinking at the massive flashes outside the window.
I stood up and kissed Shoshana to calm her, but she was immediately well in control of herself. She swivelled her fine legs from the bed and returned the kiss hurriedly. In my mind I could still hear her saying, 'Christopher, we may die today,' but she was now brisk and businesslike. I left her and hurried to the next room where Zoo Baby was sitting on the edge of his bed scratching himself industriously.
'Toilet,' I said as I went into the room. 'It caught me in the lavatory.'
'Sure, sure,' he smiled. "The Arabs always make difficulties.'
I began to dress. A shell landed ver
y near the house, the blast nudging it, and I heard some of the windows fall in. I made for the door thinking it might be Shoshana's room, but when I reached the passage outside she was there, dressed, and talking patiently to Dov. They went down the stairs and Zoo Baby and I followed. O'Sullivan who had slept on the couch had made a pot of coffee and waved tiredly at the pot for us. It was one o'clock.
'You British had all this in the war, eh?' said Zoo Baby drinking his coffee. 'You sat under the stairways, eh?'
'When there was nowhere else,' I said. 'Sometimes it was warmer and drier than the air-raid shelter.' I was trying to be steady, to talk with the voice of one who had been brought up under bombardment. The difference was that I was now adult and knew exactly what it was about, and that these were twenty-five-pounder shells coming from half a mile away and not random droppings of a German aeroplane anxious to get home.
Dov said: 'I think maybe it would be a good idea to move into the forward area, where we were this afternoon. At least we don't get shelled there. That's too near the nose of this business for either side to shell.'
Shoshana looked fresh and placid. 'There will be an attack on the Police School before many hours. I would like to be there to report it. Maybe we will go back to the Press house to see Major de Groucy, he who fights with donkeys.' She laughed. The shelling eased after about twenty minutes and we left the house and went out into the close night.
There was a bitter smell of smoke over the city. The guns in the south were battling again now. It was like a thunderstorm that had moved away. Our area was now free of shelling, though, and the darkness was riven with the sound of motor vehicles, voices, and the businesslike click of the unfeeling crickets. Some houses had been demolished at the end of the road and a bus with a red cross painted on its side was there waiting for the digging into the debris to bring results.
Zoo Baby stopped the jeep behind the bus. 'Maybe we have some time?' he said without turning around.
I guess so,' said Dov. He looked at Shoshana. She wanted to go on. 1 could see that. She did not want to miss the attack on the Police School. But we were looking at her and she nodded curtly and said something in Hebrew.
'They don't seem to have a lot of labour here,' said O'Sullivan. 'This looks like a job for the Irish. We're very strong on clearin' rubble, you know.'
It was when we were walking towards the demolished houses that I began to think about my hands again. Tearing into stone and brick and wood is not an occupation my manager would like to know about. He seemed far away now like almost everything else in the world.
Two women and three men were trying to move a great cake of concrete almost at the centre of the confusion. Smoke wisped up from some fire below. Dov called to the five people in Hebrew and they waved us to hurry. Dov said: "They've already had half a dozen people from here and taken them away, but there's a whole family fixed down below somewhere.' He spoke to one of the bending men. Then to me: 'They're trying to get some heavy rescue equipment here, but the road is in a bad way from the shells.'
We were working then, Zoo Baby at the front, lifting, digging, cutting, striving through the mess, handing back lumps of masonry and wood, sweating, making a hole and then a tunnel. Eventually he called out something, sobbed it out through his huge sweat. There was not enough room for him to get into the aperture to whatever he had seen, but O'Sullivan went forward and he crawled down through the rescue hole.
O'Sullivan's lean form vanished into the hole Zoo Baby had made. We stood back as though expecting something terrible to be brought out but when he emerged he came carefully with a little girl in a tender, green cotton dress, limp in his arms, hair hanging like weed. She looked like the doll in the nursery I had left half an hour before.
I don't think there's much left in this one,' said O'Sullivan looking at the child's face. I heard Shoshana make a quick whimpering sound and hurry after the Irishman as he took the hanging figure to the bus. I went with Shoshana and saw O'Sullivan lay the girl on the rear, long seat.
'Can I help you ?' I asked O'Sullivan. 'Down the hole, I mean.'
'Well,' he returned conversationally as he stepped from the bus again. 'There's a great sagging piece of wood and plaster and suchlike hanging down over the rest of the people down there. I think Zoo Baby is too big because he'O bring the rest of the stuff down on me, and Dov is a trifle small and a trifle middle-aged. I wouldn't have asked you, unless you'd mentioned it...'
'Come on,' I said. We walked across the debris again. He descended into the hole first, motioning me to follow. Zoo Baby seeing that I was going down tugged away some plaster boards and planks of wood to make the hole wider.
'I'm well known for my big entrances,' I joked nervously to him. He laughed and so did Dov. I went into the choking hole, down several feet into the pile and O'Sullivan's hand came up from below and pointed to a sagging lump of debris hanging over a cave formed by a fluke involving several of the roof rafters which had caught and held together.
I put my back against the pregnant bulge, not pushing against it too heavily but trying to prevent it bursting. Even then it was like carrying five hundredweight of coal on my back. I pushed my arms out, as though I was crucified, and forced my shoulders, gently but strongly into the pile. O'Sullivan had a big torch and by turning my head his way I could see him crawling, an inch at a time towards two large boots sticking up dramatically and, in an odd leisurely way, like someone resting their feet in front of a fire. There were holes in the soles of both boots. Then O'Sullivan shifted to one side and I saw four people, a man, a woman and two more children pinned beneath the wreckage. One of the children, a girl about seven, was looking at O'Sullivan with a pathetic, fascinated anticipation, the sort of look she might have reserved for Father Christmas if she had not been a Jew. The mother had her eyes closed peacefully, as though asleep, although her dirty outstretched hand moved jerkily as though she were calling someone on. The second child, a boy in a cherry-red shirt, was unconscious and I could not see the man's face or head.
O'Sullivan was patiently working on the first child, moving pieces of timber and stone away from around her with the fine care of a chess player making moves. The girl was watching him and once she spoke to him casually and smiled at his reply. She reached out her hand towards her mother's twitching fingers, but was unable to reach them. She made one hard effort but it brought dust and rubble cascading around her shoulders and O'Sullivan told her to be still and she was. He burrowed around her, his wiry back working about in the narrow passage and the difficult angles. Once he pulled firmly at a diagonal rafter and began a rain of rubble around his own head. He covered his neck with his hands and waited until it was finished. I could see the little girl's face and saw her smile through the black dust when O'Sullivan lifted his head after the fall. He worked quietly, patiently and quickly. I forced myself back against the bulge I was supporting and saw O'Sullivan drag the child away from the cave and begin pulling her up through the tunnel. She began to cry and O'Sullivan soothed her.
'You'd better move out, Mr Hollings,' he said as he inched towards me. 'I can't get through.'
'What about this stuff,' I asked. 'It might come down.'
'Stick your belly in then, because I'm coming past and I don't reckon there's a lot of room for the pair of us and this kid.' I pushed back and he took her through. I could hear her crying loudly out in the open air. Then he came back. He went right down into the heart of the debris again and moved his torch on to the other people down there. Then the bombardment restarted, the shells breaking into the ground and the wreckage under which we were crouched rocking and creaking. Cascades of small debris were running over my head and shoulders. I could hear Shoshana, then Dov, urging us to come out. But O'Sullivan did not reply to them.
'Can you hold it another minute ?' he asked me.
I was breaking under the weight and choking with the chuting of the dust and the brittle debris about me. 'Yes,' I said. 'I'll hold it, I think. I feel like Atlas.'
'Fine, Mr Hollings,' he commented. 'Would you like to leave now because there's nothing anyone except God can do for those down there.'
'Dead?'I said.
'Aye. I had a look at them. And there'll be two more unless we're lucky.'
'You'd better go first,' I said.
'That's gallant of you,' said O'Sullivan.
'Gallantry has fuck all to do with it,' I said. 'If I let go we'll probably both be caught. Get out quick. I'm coming right after you.'
He went, bowing and moving quickly but economically like a man trying to duck out of a pub brawl. Once he was clear I made to go after him. But there were three swiftly successive explosions, probably mortar shells, and the whole sagging mass I was supporting heaved and yawned. It was killing me to hold it now. I was covered in dry muck and I could not see nor hardly breathe. But I held it until the shuddering had ceased. Then I let it go.
At first I took my support away gingerly, easily, and very fearfully, expecting it to immediately fall upon me. I wondered if this sort of stuff crushed you or merely suffocated you. But it held, precariously it held. There was a space, air, between my shoulders and the passage wall. I moved out like a thief, treading carefully up the tunnel, very afraid now, terrified unless the bombardment should come near again.
Come To The War Page 17