Come To The War (6 page)

^{Along the wall was a parade of twisted ornaments in what appeared to be dark metals, red, black and brown each with a subdued sinning surface. I walked to them and saw they were glass tubes and bowls and bulbs, turned and stretched imaginatively. They were filled tightly with the red, brown and black.}

^{'Earth,' explained Selma from the cabinet. 'Earth from all parts of the world. I told you about my husband, didn't I? He's a soil scientist and they're his. You might say he collects dirt.' She smiled thinly. 'Actually that's bis joke not mine.}

^{'They're different,' I said. She brought a Martini over and sat down.}

^{'The place is full of them,' she said. 'Red dirt from this desert and black dirt from that mountain. We've even got some green dirt upstairs. It's in one of the bathrooms. My husband thought it was suitable for a bathroom. None of them are labelled, so no one but he knows what the hell they are or where they've come from. He knows them by heart. Which bit of the planet, when dug up, when bottled, and all that sort of thing. He treats the bloody stuff like some people treat a stock of wine. To me it's just dirt.'}

^{She laughed. She looked more her age today without her evening make-up. 'Here's to the rest of your concert tour,' she said tipping her glass.}

^{'Your health and happiness,' I responded.}

^{'It's a very quiet day,' she said. 'When it gets too hot the day, especially at this time, becomes almost ghostly.'}

^{I stood and looked out beyond the emblazoned garden and the pool to the sea climbing indolently up the legs of the beach. There was a white flagpole at the end of the garden, standing out like a seam of the sky. Its blue and white pennant moved with the unconscious stirring of a curled animal. There were no other people.}

^{I don't even have any house help today,' she said. "The two men have gone off to be soldiers in the Negev and the two women are down in Natanya learning how to be bloody air-raid wardens. Now the chauffeur has gone to fill sandbags. It was all I could do to persuade him to fetch you.'}

^{'This could be the day before the war,' I said.}

^{'It has a certain feeling about it, I admit,' she shrugged. She pulled her naked legs up underneath her using her left hand to tuck them in and cover them with her towel coat. 'It's an empty feeling. Usually from here you can hear the people shouting from the beach down below.'}

^{'That's just it,' I said. 'Empty. Days-before-wars must have always been like this. When our war broke out...'}

^{She smiled at my pause. 'You mean the one / missed? Of course I know about it. I may not have contributed, but I heard.'}

^{'I'm sorry, I didn't mean that,' I protested knowing that I had meant it. She laughed silently. I continued: 'Anyway I remember the Saturday before the Sunday. We lived in a village in the West Country and it was deserted that day. I was about six years old and I walked along the road wondering where everybody had gone. It was like a place struck by the plague. It was a hot day too and the village was full of the smell of dandelions and grass and the cows were out grazing.'}

^{She shifted and got up, walking gracefully to the french windows and looking out at the weary sea. 'There was some sort of regatta in Bermuda that day,' she said. 'I remember going down Front Street, alongside Hamilton Harbour, with my old man to see the start of one of the races. I was wearing my first American bra. My father stopped to talk to an old boy who was sprawled in one of the wicker chairs outside one of the stores. They do that there, you know. They have chairs under the shop awnings. It's a nice idea.'}

^{'Revolutionary,' I said. She pivoted on the marble floor. 'This old man telling my father that the storm clouds were gathering, or some such thing, and in my teenage uncaring way I thought, "Jesus Christ, this will bugger up the regatta".'}

^{I laughed and walked towards her at the window. 'In our village that afternoon,' I said, 'I met one other boy. He was a bit older than me and he was dragging along in the dust at the side of the road. He had a hell of a stutter, this kid. I remember we used to call him Tut-Tut and at school the teacher made him
sing
everything because he couldn't get started by merely saying it.}

^{'He was coming towards me, at a shuffling run, his mouth opening and shutting like a haddock. When he reached me his eyes were bulging and he put his hand out to me to tell me what was so momentous. I remember he started off saying, "W ... w ... w ... war," and I stood there, arms folded, and waited for him to get the next bit out. We stood facing each other in the middle of this deserted village street, me six, him about ten, and he couldn't say the next syllable.'}

^{Selma laughed. 'It sounds like the politicians of the world,' she said. 'Trying to say things and nothing being said.' We walked down towards the pool and I could see a table set out under a blue and white beach umbrella. 'Everything is blue and white,' she sighed. 'My husband is intensely patriotic. Then what?'}

^{'I couldn't stand the suspense,' I said. 'So I told him to sing it, just as he did at school.'}

^{We had reached the table. Her eyes widened with amusement. 'And he did? He sang it?'}

^{'Exactly. I remember him looking defiantly at me for a while and then he began to tap out the time with his foot -that was another thing he had to do. That was the way he got the rhythm. Bang, bang, bang, went his foot and he started to sing it:}

^{' "There's goin' t'be a war termorrer.
All the German bombs will come down
and kill everybody. My dad says ..." '}

^{Selma was laughing into her brown fingers. 'My God,' she said. 'What a scene! That's really awful.'}

^{We had walked into a vivid band of sun now. You could never call it sunshine in Israel for it never had any gentleness, no mild well-being about it. It seared across my back and burned my neck and ears.}

^{Selma said: 'Perhaps you would like to swim before lunch?'}

^{'I think I would,' I said. She pointed out a pair of blue and white changing cubicles far back beyond some vines. I changed into a pair of Yacob's bathing trunks there and returned across the hot stones to the pool. There were bulb-eyed lizards squatting on the stones, stony themselves. My feet sent them running.}

^{She was already in the pool moving delicately on her back, the underside of her bra, the topside of her breasts and her pelvis clear of the lucid water, her face staring at the lurid sky, her toes propelling her. The sun poured over my white skin, running like a liquid streak along my backbone and flowing over the backs of my thighs.}

^{I dropped into the water quietly and swam the length of the pool and back again. The water had a velvet warmth, it was thick and rich, there were no sharp edges to it. It pumped away from my arms and legs, from beneath my armpits and from the channel of my crotch. Selma paid no attention to me, but floated regally still looking up, pushed by the merest action of her toes. From my new level her breasts in their white satin cups looked like islands on the water.}

^{I paddled towards her and floated alongside. Our feet collided and I wheeled clumsily away. She said: I would like to show you Jerusalem before they destroy it. We have a house there.'}

^{I said: 'I would enjoy that.'}

^{'You are free tomorrow?' she asked.}

^'Yes.'

^{'Then I shall call at the hotel for you and we can drive there.'}

^{'Good. Then I go down to Eilat. On the following day.'}

^{'At Eilat you will play in the desert, then. Or on the beach, which is really the same thing. The beach and the desert are one,' she said.}

^{I stood on the floor tiles of the pool. 'No concert hall? No one mentioned that.'}

^{'The beach is a good concert hall, Christopher,' she said. She stood on the bottom tiles now, facing me, her face three feet away across the surface. I knew if I put my hands out I would touch her body. 'The acoustics are perhaps not what you would like, but it will be an unique experience for you, won't it?'}

^{'I'm full of the pioneer spirit,' I said. 'I'll be wearing an open-necked shirt like Ben Gurion next.'}

^{She splashed towards the side. 'They would like that,' she said. 'This lot, I mean. My God that would impress them! Not that I can see you doing it.'}

^{I followed her to the side and caught hold of the rail. 'The open neck doesn't go very well with the tails,' I said.}

^{'Perhaps the white tie and tails will seem odd in the desert too,' she said. We were standing very close now, side by side, like two people in a queue. I intended to touch her then, to put my hands to her. But she began speaking again.}

^{'Actually I have two houses in Jerusalem,' she said. 'The one I like best is quite small, but white and very beautiful, with a small walled garden and a terrace with a well. It's at the foot of Mount Zion. But I haven't been in it for a couple of years. It's all shut up.'}

^{'Why is that?' I asked.}

^{She stared straight across the glassy, low-bumped surface of the pool, her eyes just above water level. She said: 'It's in the Arab sector.'}

^{I whistled and blew a furrow across the water. 'Only someone like you could say that,' I said.}

^{'Of course no one here knows, least of all my husband. He would kill me on the spot. When I went two years ago - I just wanted to see the house because I was very happy there -I had to go to Cyprus and then fly to Beirut and go to Amman from there and then Jerusalem. I have a British passport and a separate one for Israel and there was no bother. When I returned I came back the same way. It seemed very strange because the other Jerusalem house, my husband's house, is only a few hundred yards away in the Israeli sector, in the New City. I can see each house from the other. But they are a long journey apart.'}

^{'How did you get the house?'}

^{'My mother married a second time, a Greek, just after the war,' said Selma. 'He was a jeweller and he spent a long time in Jordan, mostly in Jerusalem, and the house was his. When he died he left it to my mother and when she died it came to me. It has some fine furniture and other things and an old man who was a friend of my stepfather's has a key and goes into it sometimes to look around. It's all shut up and quite safe. The people over there are very good.'}

^{She swam out towards the centre of the pool leaving me by the wall. She turned gracefully, with a kick of her legs, and faced me. Then her smile dropped. A voice came from the house and she looked up guiltily, then looked at me.}

^{'My husband,' she said across the water.}

^{'Selma!' I heard him call. His Army boots struck heavily across the marble and out on to the terrace. He stopped just above my head. He must have been a couple of feet back from the edge because he did not see me close against the tiles at the side.}

^{'Yacob,' said Selma uncertainly. 'Have you finished the war?'}

^{'That's
not
funny,' I heard him say. 'It does not seem to disturb
your
life very much. I am going into Tel Aviv so I came in. I have only half an hour. There is some lunch?'}

^{'There is,' she said pushing out her arm towards the laden table at the end of the pool. I heard him go over there.}

^{'A big lunch!' he called back. 'You have guests coming?'}

^{'My guest is here,' Selma said. I had thought of trying to escape and she must have thought of the possibility too, but rejected it. I heard him turn about on the concrete.}

^{'Where?' he called to her.}

^{I peeped out. Hell, I thought, I'm only in his swimming-pool, not in his bed. 'Here I am,' I said with unconvincing cheerfulness. 'Just here.'}

^{Now I could see him, a tall warrior, with Jaffa-coloured hair, a ginger moustache and heavy brown freckles plastered all over his burned face; a fighter in a shapeless uniform, an officer's cap pushed casually back from staring blue eyes. He had an automatic rifle slung like an usherette's tray about his neck and a string of casual grenades over his shoulder.}