It was clear that apart from the height of Augusta Victoria most of the surrounding country was in Jewish hands. Curling smoke had replaced now the flash of explosions. Little fires were burning in a hundred places as though everyone was industriously clearing up. Only the stronghold of the Old City, pugnacious behind its thick walls and dominating towers, remained in Arab hands.
'Tomorrow,' Shoshana said. 'Tomorrow it will be ours. I promise you that.'
'Don't promise me,' I assured her.
"The only thing that will stop us taking the city will be a Ceasefire,' said Dov. 'If that happens Jerusalem could become an Arab island, just as this place, Mount Scopus, has been an Israeli island. That would be disaster.'
Zoo Baby wiped his wide, sweating forehead. He said: 'A Ceasefire? A finish?'
Dov shrugged. 'The Egyptians are beaten. Already they run like crying children to the United Nations. Maybe we win too quickly, but not win enough.'
We remained on Mount Scopus until it was dark, watching the extravagant sunset burn the roofs of Jerusalem with its hot colours, seeing the redness eventually drain from the Judean Hills and leave them to the pale touch of the stars.
Zoo Baby drove us back to the house at the Mandelbaum Gate where we found Major de Groucy in a deep sleep on the table where, a few hours before, we had laid the cold body of the elderly officer. Some of the correspondents and the Press centre clerks were lying against the walls or on the bare tables, sleeping away their exhaustion. Crouched across a typewriter in one corner was one of the middle-aged American journalists. He had been weeping and he told us about the two Americans who had been killed in the fighting that day and whom he had known and worked with and liked. He was very tired and he tapped out his story with two reluctant fingers.
Shoshana spent half an hour on the telephone to Tel Aviv. We waited for her in the jeep and were squatting, talking, when Cumberland drove up with almost a teenage flourish, tooting the horn of his jeep to us.
'Had a good day?' he asked brightly as though we had been fishing.
'So, so,' I said. 'How about you?'
'Jesus,' he said. 'This is some war! Everything happens so fast, and so near. In Vietnam you sometimes have to poke along for two days before you get to any shooting. It's just a great big place. But this is so dinky. Everything happens right around the block from the cable office.' He waited a moment and we smiled at him politely. 'Where's the young lady?' he asked. 'Shoshana. She's okay isn't she?'
'Unless she's tripped over the telephone wire, or pulled Major de Groucy down on top of her, she's in good health,' I said. 'We're just waiting for her.'
'Are you going to the Babylon Hotel?' he asked.
'Why should we go there? asked Dov.
'It's a great hotel and it's just been taken over from the former management - you get me? All the Press boys are going there for rest and recreation. There's chow there too. And the rates are reasonable.'
So we went to the Babylon Hotel. Someone in the Tel Aviv newspaper office had told Shoshana to go there to link up with her colleagues. She greeted Cumberland quietly as she came out of the door, and he was on the way in. Then she said to Zoo Baby: 'Let us go to the Babylon Hotel. It is good there.'
'So the word gets around,' said Dov.
It was to the south of the city, just off the Bethlehem road, in an island of fig and tamarisk trees. There was an ornamental pool in the front with three fountains continuing to jump. In the middle of the pool, burned to a skeleton, was a military motorcycle and sidecar. That day, in Jerusalem, it appeared to be nothing out of the ordinary.
Apart from a few untidy holes near the front porch the hotel had remained unscarred by the battle. It seemed to be full of wounded and tired men, but a cheerful thin Israeli officer sitting professionally behind the reception desk said that there were rooms available for us. The attack on the Old City, he predicted confidently, would not now take place until the morning and everyone would have time to be in their places.
'Before the war,' said Dov quietly to me, 'this man was the manager of the worst hotel in Haifa. High rates, low standards.' He smiled: 'One thing about the Jews, we always have the man for the job. This hotel was one of the showpieces of the Jordan Tourist Board. Our friend here will soon make a difference.'
'You,' I said, 'are a realistic man.'
'I have no fight about my head, if that is what you mean,' he laughed. 'Too many people, especially those who have written stories and novels about Israel, try to show us as a race of courageous saints. We are not. We are people like all the others on earth. Just people. If God chose us then he must have long ago regretted it.'
They gave me a room to myself, Shoshana having told the officer at the reception desk that I was an important person. I ran the bath and lay in it for half an hour. My hands were sore and torn, my face throbbed in the warm water from all its scratches and bruises, and the pathetic injury behind my knee inflicted by Abdullah's bicycle hurt more than all those brought about by the rough days of the war. I called the officer at the reception desk and he brightly assured me that he could send a razor and a toothbrush to me immediately and he could arrange for some clean underclothes and green denims. 'Nothing is beyond Israel, Mr Hollings,' he laughed. 'Nothing.'
In the mirror I saw that the sun had scorched my face. My forearms were almost black. The razor arrived with a packet of blades and some shaving cream. There was also a toothbrush and toothpaste and the change of clothes. The green fatigues were only slightly big. With the consignment was a typewritten slip which said: 'With the Compliments of the Management of the Golda Meir Plaza Hotel, formerly the Babylon Hotel'.
I changed and went to Shoshana's room. She opened the door to my tap and I went in and sat on the bed while she finished dressing. She was wearing a white nylon slip that fitted her well. Her face and arms and legs were deep brown. I kissed her when I first went in holding her soft body hard against me.
She went back to doing her hair in front of the mirror. She moved it up, handfuls of fair hair, with graceful womanly movements.
'This Mrs Haydn,' she said conversationally. 'She is a strange woman, yes?'
I hesitated. 'Well, different,' I said.
'You have made love on a bed with her?'
'What sort of thing to say is that?'
She turned unhurriedly. I could see there was a bruise on her cheekbone where Selma had struck her. 'It is a question,' she said. 'Have you made love on the bed with her?'
'And if I had?'
'Not today was it ?' she asked softly. 'Not after me ?'
I walked to her and she turned back to the mirror. I ran my arms about her soft middle, feeling the carefully domed flesh of her stomach beneath the skin of nylon. I put my head against her head. 'Not after you,' I said.
'That is good.' She turned against me, closely, so that her fine breasts pressed into my chest. 'There is nothing more to tell me.' We kissed and then she laughed. 'Oh, Christopher, was it not hilarious!'
'The fight?' I said.
'Yes, of course, the fight.' She giggled like a child. 'When you fell into the bicycle! It was so hilarious.'
'Look,' I said. 'Take a look at this.' I turned and undid my trousers, pulling them down so that she could see the injury behind my knee. I did a passable imitation of the bumptious Major de Groucy. 'Shall we say it was caused by an Arab bicycle pedal.' We fell on the bed together and embraced and slept quietly for a while in each other's arms. Then the telephone rang and I picked it up. 'The Golda Meir Plaza Hotel announces that dinner is served,' said the voice.
Dinner was by candlelight because the mains electricity was cut. All five of us arrived at the table like strangers, clean faces that shone, tidied hair, and clean clothes. O'SuIlivan had been to the dressing station and had his flesh wound bandaged.
'It's not every Catholic can say he got shot outside the Garden of Gethsemane,' he said. 'Or that he saw a woman throw a grenade like some women would throw a flower vase.'
Shoshana sai
d slowly: 'It is something we must not talk about. Now I am very afraid of what I did. Let us eat.'
They gave her a decoration for it a few weeks later. But she put it away in a drawer under her Israeli embroidery and I never saw it again.
We ate with fifty or sixty others, some soldiers, some civilians, some war correspondents. It was self-service from a long table served by Army cooks. There was a bottle of Jordanian red wine between every two people. Soon the men at the table began to sing.
Hebrew is a good language for singing songs. It moulds well with music. They sang their favourites, Hava Nagilla, and Yeroshalaim that was soon to be the anthem of all, but soon they softened and men began to sing the songs of their own, old countries. We sat and listened, for many had fine voices, as the Jewish folk-songs of half the world were sung.
There was a fat Pole and a thick Lithuanian, two Munich Germans, a funny man from New Jersey, and a Cochin Chinese Jew who sang a foul Oriental Jewish ballad with finger movements. v
'One thing you can say about this firm,' O'Sullivan whispered to me. 'They've got branches every bloody where.'
The wine was drunk and a new, captured consignment brought into the candlelit cavern of a room to schoolboy cheers. Another bottle between every two people. Shoshana and three Israeli girl soldiers were the only women in the room. Shoshana laughed, with her head in her hands, when the Chinese Jew was singing his finger song.
A man with his face bandaged stood up at one of the far tables and shouted, comically muffled, through his dressings, pointing towards our table. His ragged words brought wild cheering from everywhere in the room and a thumping of fists and cutlery on the boards.
Those around me applauded and looked at me. I grinned foolishly. 'There's no piano,' I said.
'Any army which can win a war in a couple of days can obtain a piano in a couple of minutes,' said Dov. Zoo Baby got up massively from the table and made a loud demand in Hebrew. Then, like the head of a raiding party, he made for the door and half a dozen others followed him like daring undergraduates. They returned within the two minutes, half-pushing, half-carrying an ancient and graceful upright piano. I stood up and everyone shouted and cheered. Around me I quickly saw O'Sullivan's grin, Dov's laugh, and the delighted eyes of Shoshana.
They put the piano in the centre of the tables and Zoo Baby made great play of dusting off the keyboard and obtaining a chair. I sat down, for once completely lost in front of the instrument. Its yellowed teeth grimaced at me. It was an Arab piano and for a moment I wondered if it might be a booby trap. I made a joke of this, standing on the chair and looking into the interior making an exaggerated search for a bomb. They roared and applauded.
Then I sat again and began to play. I played quietly at first and they sat attentively and listened. Then they murmured and hummed and I played while they sang their songs once more. That Yeroshalaim they sang again and again.
I thumped it out like a bar-room cornerman when they got to the rousing marching songs, and then I played in a lumbering rhythm while some of them performed their distant dances.
I shall always think of Zoo Baby that evening. They cleared a space on the floor for him and the big man danced alone in the light of the candles. It was a Balkan dance, remembered since childhood, a gentle, rustic dance at its start, progressing into a brilliant kicking rhythm, hands on hips, legs shooting out, face cascading with sweat. Like many big men he danced beautifully, with huge, light movements and great graceful curves. He hummed the pastoral melody and I easily followed him, and then led him. When the dance quickened he swung into the exciting movements, his large feet banging on the floor and his mouth hooting out the calls, the sweat covering him, and all the others in the room clapping the demanding time. He was a dance troupe all on his own. I don't know how he moved like that. He worked it into a fantastic crescendo, his boots flying like hooves, his arms finely balanced, his mouth now speechless. The climax came and he sprang up and whirled in a great flying leap, a jump of joy and exuberance, grotesquely misjudged, that sent him crashing into the nearest table. Men and crockery were flung aside. The table collapsed spectacularly and chairs splintered and broke. Zoo Baby sat in the debris, panting and sweating, his huge chest rising and dropping, his arms full out, his tree-trunk legs flung apart, and a great, mashed smile on his big face. Everybody laughed and cheered. Dear Zoo Baby.
Shoshana said: 'It was hilarious.'
'For once I think that's the right word,' I said.
'And you played the piano very fine, Christopher.'
'I should try it for a living,' I said. 'Instead of doing acrobatics into shell craters.'
Playing like that had hurt. My hands were puffed and bruised and lacerated from all the ill-treatment of the past days. Lying on the bed in her room they throbbed.
'You don't know what playing for your Army has cost me, I said. She was lying beside me in her slip and she looked at me quickly. 'You joke again,' she said, relieved. 'Sometimes it is not possible to tell with you.' I showed her my hands. She took them in hers. 'They are supposed to be very soft. That is correct?' she said. 'They must be for your career.'
'I was never even allowed to wash up at home,' I said.
She looked worried. 'They are so damaged,' she said. 'Put them here for comfort.'
She parted her thighs and took my sore hands and placed their, at the top of her legs next to the triangle of soft material and the softer flesh. Then she moved very slightly with a bellows movement, squeezing them and releasing them, and squeezing them again. Her hands were on the sides of my head and she was looking with her splendid eyes into my face.
'That is good for your hands?' she asked me seriously.
I recommend it,' 1 answered.
We moved around in the bed. There was a single candle in a holder in the room, making our shadows like monsters. The guns were still grunting about Jerusalem, but the armies were, for the most pan, resting, waiting for the daylight and the attack on the Old City. My face now rested luxuriously on the pillows of her legs. I was lying on my side, hard against the sheet, my head turned, my cheek and my ear cushioned by her left thigh and the hair on the top of my head against her patch of thick hair enclosed in the white nylon.
1 ran my tongue along her leg, knowing her reaction in the tightening of her trunk and the squeezing of her hands that came down to touch my forehead. I could smell her and I remembered very briefly that Selma smelled like my mother.
My hands were a little higher than my head, gently rubbing her flanks, bringing her warmth together at one spot. I war ted to get right to her then so I said: 'These pants are getting wet. I think they had better come off.'
She whispered: 'Please take them from me. I don't like them to be wet.'
I did, rolling them into a tight ball in my fist and then wiping around her thighs with them. She sat up and held her arms high as though surrendering. I quietly pulled her slip over her head. She had already taken off everything else and now she lay there, brown, with two white stripes across her body, her breasts a little swollen, their nipples sleepy. We lay down without fuss, kissing fully, and then she opened the scissors of her legs to let me in.
'Come to me, Christopher,' she said. 'Give to me.'
'Aaaaaaaaah!' I cried. And, 'Aaaaaaaah!'
My body suddenly bent like a bow, arching backwards and she let out a cry and tried to hold me. 'Christopher! Darling, what is wrong?'
'Aaaah, oh my God. Aaaaah. Jesus Christ, I've got such a pain in my back.'
'A pain in your back ? You joke ?'
It was like a serrated needle going through me, skewering my kidneys, drawing every nerve together in a knot. I rolled and rolled again. 'Dear Christ,' I muttered, tears of agony in my eyes. 'It's no joke. Oh no. Aaaaaah! Aaaaaah!'
'A doctor I will get,' she said reaching for the phone.
'No,' I gasped. 'No. Not here. This is your room.'
'This is Israel,' she said as though that were sufficient excuse. 'And it is war.'
&n
bsp; Because it was war she could not get a doctor because they were either treating the wounded or resting. I lay bent with pain at the bottom of her bed for about ten minutes. Then it receded and half an hour later we slept peacefully together. In the circumstances I thought she was very kind and understanding.
Eighteen
Zoo Baby was killed about an hour after breakfast the following morning as the Israelis broke through at Herod's Gate and the St Stephen's Gate and began fighting along the muscular walls and the tangled streets and alleys of the Old City.
We had breakfast at the hotel and everyone had patted Zoo Baby and told him it was a marvellous dance he had performed the previous evening. Dov was telling me about the trains which had been running to Jerusalem from the north, skirting the Jordanian border by only a hundred yards. The Jews ran them empty until just before the attack on Jerusalem to lull the Arabs on that side. 'They are good trains,' said Dov in his quiet schoolmaster manner. 'The Germans gave us the rolling stock as part of their conscience. They have also sent us fifty thousand gas masks.'
At eight o'clock we left the hotel. It was a settled, guileless morning, with no sounds of battle. Two Arabs were tending the plants in the hotel garden and did not look up. The sky was clear and full of sunlight. But at eight-thirty an Israeli tank column went straight up the road from Mount Scopus to the heights of Augusta Victoria, firing as it went, while Jewish recoil-less guns and the hard paratroops attacked the thick walls of the Old City.
As we went towards the battle in the jeep with Zoo Baby driving, a skein of Israeli jets ran across the towers and flashing cupolas of the Old City and loosed their bombs on the Arab troops inside. From above the wall we could see the debris flying and the flames lending their brief brightness to the brilliance of the sun.
'Another day's work,' I said to O'Sullivan. 'Right on time.'
'And the last day, I expect,' he answered. 'Nothing will stop them today. They'll be at the Wailing Wall in a couple of hours.'
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