Come To The War (7 page)

^{We stood without moving, two in the pool, one on the side, a trio in the rough sunlight.}

^{His forearms were like pieces of husky wood, layered with shining red hairs. From the table he had taken a great slab of potato salad. Now he began to eat it from his hand, and some of the raw pieces stuck to his extravagant moustache.}

^{He marched with an exaggerated military stride towards me and looked down at my pale face and shoulders in the pool. Then he squatted as a visitor squats by the seal tank at the zoo.}

^{'This,' said Selma thinly, 'is Mr Christopher Hollings, the English concert pianist. He has come to lunch.'}

^{Yacob pushed some more potato salad from his hand into his face.
'Shalom,
Mr Hollings,' he said deeply, offering me the cream-stuck palm in which he had held the food. I made to put my hand up to shake it when Selma said stiffly, 'Yacob. Your hand. For God's sake!'}

^{'Oh, I am so sorry,' he laughed withdrawing it.
'Shalom. Shalom
anyway. Are you coming out of my pool? Let us have some lunch. All of us.'}

^{'Oh yes, of course,' I said. I could have waded to the steps but because he was watching me I heaved myself up on the swimming-pool rail and got my knee on to the wet concrete just at his feet. Then I slipped ignominiously and rolled back into the water. Furious with myself at the stupidity, I tried again, became fixed halfway, and eventually had to accept the assisting hand offered to me by Yacob. The hand in which he had held the potato salad.}

^Four

^{She telephoned me in the night when I was asleep at the hotel. She said: 'He's cleared off now, thank Christ.'}

^{'Who has?' I asked stupidly because I had been sleeping.}

^{'Yacob,' she said. 'You've been sleeping.'}

^{I looked at my watch. "That's reasonable,' I said. 'It's ten past three.'}

^{'Yes,' she said. 'And I've just got rid of him. He hung on here for hours. I think he expected that you would be back.'}

^{'I thought he was on military duty,' I said pulling myself up in the bed. 'He only dropped in for lunch, didn't he?'}

^{"That's what I argued, but apparently the Army can wait for proof of adultery. So he waited. He mooned about all the evening, looking at his bloody samples of dirt. Then we went to bed - he wanted to - and after that was all finished he cleared off. I suppose he thought that once he had been to bed with me that would lock up the shop for the night. So he felt safe to go.'}

^{Drowsily I said: 'I don't seem to remember us behaving in any way improperly. Unless swimming in your pool is improper.'}

^{'It must have looked strange,' she said.}

^{'To the man from the front line,' I nodded at the phone.}

^{She said: 'With the lunch all laid out and everything.'}

^{'I know that. My back is just starting to burn. He made me sit in the sun all the time, the bastard.'}

^{She said: 'That's my husband you speak of.'}

^{'Indeed,' I agreed. 'Why did you ring?'}

^{'I don't know,' she replied. 'What are you doing?'}

^{'Sleeping,' I said. 'What else? I was dreaming I was riding a dromedary to a desert of ice-cream.'}

^{"That's Freudian,' she said. 'Very nasty. Particularly on a dromedary.'}

^{'Probably, but I'm going back right now.'}

^{'To the dromedary?'}

^{'Of course.'}

^{'I'll bow out then. I'll pick you up at ten to take you to Jerusalem.'}

^{'The Golden,' I said. 'All right. At ten. Goodnight, Selma.'}

^{'Erav tov,
Christopher. Happy dromedaries.'}

^{She arrived at ten with her Mercedes. She was driving and we went off together out of Tel Aviv towards the jumped-up hills, first through the Vale of Sharon and then on to the gradually rising country to Jerusalem. All the hills were brown and strewn with white boulders as though some primitive battle had been joined and finished and all the ammunition left lying around.}

^{She looked very young again that morning. She wore a multi-patterned shirt and white slacks, flared at the bottom which was an advanced fashion then for a woman in Israel. Her shirt was silk and her breasts stuck out like prim pyramids under the material. All the time she drove she smiled to herself as though she had some specially good secret, but when I asked her about it she replied that she enjoyed driving before noon and the prospect of going to Jerusalem always pleased her.}

^{'Do you know many women in Israel?' she asked as we were going through Ramla, by the prison where they kept Eichmann before they executed him. She half-turned, moving the car expertly around the backside of a donkey in the street. 'Or is that a rude question?'}

^{'It's a rude question,' I said. 'But I'll tell you. I know two women here - to talk to that is. You and a young lady called Shoshana Levy who works for a newspaper in Tel Aviv.'}

^{She said: 'She writes a column in one of the morning papers. It's usually rubbish. It's in Hebrew, but I get someone to read the papers for me.'}

^{'Well, I know her,' I said. 'She came over to England to
write some articles about me. I had a drink with her the other evening, after going to the party.'}

^{'She works late,' Selma said.}

^{I said: 'That's correct, she works late.'}

^{'I remember the articles,' she said. She did not drive like most women, having to look at the person with whom she talked. Her eyes were on the road. 'I got someone to read them to me because I was interested in your visit here. They were pretty shitty.'}

^{The road was sunlit, then clouded with shade in parts by the piled hills of rock on either side. It ran at one place around the lip of a gradual crater and beyond, on the opposite rise, were the square-eyed houses of a village.}

^{'Abu Gosh,' she said. I had made no reply to what she had said about the articles.}

^{'Who lives there?' I asked.}

^{'It's an Arab village. Integrated Arabs. The Jews are very proud of their integrated Arabs, you know. They show them off like we show off the Tower of London.' When she chose, I noticed, she would suddenly claim her Britishness. Especially when she talked about the Jews. 'It's a sop to their conscience for driving all the others out,' she said. 'They point to this lot and a few thousand subjected others and ask you to realize how democratic Israel is, at the same time thanking God under their breaths that there are no more of the rotten bastards about. I hate to think what will happen to Abu Gosh and the other places when the real Arabs come up this road.'}

^{'You think they will come up this road?' I asked.}

^{'Certainly,' she replied. 'As soon as the Jordanians get on the move they'll cut straight through here and join up with Nasser's army coming the other way.'}

^{'The Israelis don't believe that,' I said.}

^{'No,' she admitted. 'It keeps them happy not to believe it, I suppose. You wait and see.'}

^{'Are you still going to play golf throughout the war?' I smiled.}

^{'Of course. Caesarea golf course will be the safest place to be. I shall wear a bright red shirt so that everyone can see I'm not one of the military and I shall have my British passport in my golf bag along with my scorecard. I always keep a scorecard, you know. It's good discipline, even when you're going around by yourself.'}

^{'And when the Arabs arrive?'}

^{'I shall wave my putter and my passport to the nearest officer. I think it's better to wave a putter than, say, a five iron. A putter doesn't look so aggressive.'}

^{'Where are we now?' I asked. We had run down through a steep valley with the road in its gully, the sides crowded with rocks and pines. It was cool and enclosed.}

^{"This is the Corridor,' she replied. 'The Jerusalem Corridor. Where they made all the fuss in 1948. The Jews got convoys through to the city and the other lot were shooting from up there on the hills. See along here. They left some of the casualties as mementoes.'}

^{On the flank of the road, blind, dead, hollow, were some armoured trucks, wheel-less, rust-red, garlanded with flowers, some alive some dead, lying peacefully beneath the pine branches. They were struck at grotesque angles like small shipwrecked vessels, strewn out at intervals along two miles of the Corridor road.}

^{'They left them where they were hit,' she explained. 'It was very unhealthy down here, as you can see. But they hung on to Jerusalem, or half of it anyway.'}

^{She drove the Mercedes elegantly around the painful bends of the road, now rising all the time. We passed struggling buses and huge gasping lorries, and were passed ourselves by frantic cars.}

^{Eventually she said quietly: 'There it is. The city.'}

^{It lay like a lion across the stony hills, tawny in the sunlight, a fine amber, brightening to gold, its towers and walls beautiful, assured, with all the calmness of four thousand years.}

^{'The prettier part is theirs,' she said. 'That is, the Jordan
i
ans. This side, the New City, is dowdy to say the least and
not even very ancient. The Jews on this side sit out in the
evenings and watch the wall and the roofs of the other side
and think how much they would like to be there.'}

^{'You're very anti-Jewish,' I said. 'For someone who lives in Israel.'}

^{'Perhaps that is the reason,' she said. 'Sometimes they're okay. Yacob is okay at times. But they make you a bit sick, too. They're like kids playing with a pile of building bricks.'}

^{The road widened and eased as though encouraged by the nearing end of its journey. We ran into the first streets, humped across the bending of the hills, lined with gritty open shops, hung blinds, people squatting in the dust, and animals in the road. 'That is the YMCA,' she pointed. 'That tower. I always thought how funny it was to have that stuck in the middle of a place like this. And this is the King David. Shall we have lunch.'}

^{It was a firm statement. She took the car into the curved gravelled drive and we lunched in the cool dining-room. 'They blew this place up, of course,' she said.}

^{‘I remember.'}

^{'Bloody fools the British. They even had a telephone call to warn them but they pooh-poohed it, and went on drinking their gin and tons. And then bang. Half the place fell down. They were lucky too, it was only half, because it's not often the Jews short change themselves.'}

^{Her house was not far from the Jerusalem Railway Station looking towards Pentecost and Mount Zion. There were cars parked at meters in the main street. We went through them and down an overhung alley and then beneath an arch into a little walled garden, the sunlight dulled by vines and figs. There was a formed hole like a grave under the figs, lined with stones, which she said was an ancient wine press. In this, its neck sticking up like a curious bird, was a clay jar. Selma felt into the neck and produced a Yale key. We went up the white steps towards the fine wooden door, held by brass hinges and ecclesiastically arched at its top.}

^{"There's a housekeeper here normally,' she said pushing the key and turning. 'But she's gone off to the Navy or some . other worthy cause. What with my husband and all my servants, it seems I'm providing the bulk of the bloody armed forces for this country.'}

^{Inside the house was dim. She began moving about, elegantly, raising shutters and opening doors. One door overlooked another garden with a running view of the Old City Wall, the capped heads of its towers peeping over like people overwhelmed with curiosity, and the shelving land of the Jewish sector on our side, and the wire-tangled frontier. There was a terrace outside and then a drop into the green branches spread like the arms of dancers in the garden. Sunlight came strong and white into the house and Selma walked about drawing light, cloudy curtains to filter it.}