Authors: Lesley Thomas
We shook hands. 'What is Segan? ...' I fumbled.
'Segan-Mefakeach,''
he repeated. 'Deputy-Inspector, that's all. Lowest rank in the force. I think
Segan-Mefakeach
sounds better. Deputy-Inspector sounds like someone who examines drains.' He was very thin, with hard-edged bones pushing at his face skin. It was difficult to see his eyes under the sinister peak of his cap, but he smiled with a disarray of teeth, and his hand was rigid with bones.
'The Irish in Israel,' I said. 'And in the frontier force.'
'They'll have anybody,' he retaliated amiably. 'It's steady too. I'm glad to meet you. I am off duty at seven and I'll be over to the concert. A lot of the lads will be across there tonight.' He looked about at the others and released a separate small smile for each. He also gave a nod to Zoo Baby, smiling at him, acknowledging his size as an Irishman does.
There was a movement from the top of a sand pile a hundred yards away and the lights of a motor vehicle were flashed. They were low and I could see it was a jeep. A voice shouted in Hebrew.
'Coming. I'm coming,' called O'Sullivan. He turned to us. 'See you all soon. But get back now because at this late time of the day there's liable to be misunderstandings along here. You could get shot and it makes a lot of paperwork for us and for the UN boys and the Arab border lads on the other side.'
When we returned to the hotel by the sea I saw Shoshana standing in the tiled entrance hall with Herbert Scheerer, the conductor. Scheerer, a blancmange German, round and pink with hair apologetically combed forward over his fat forehead, was fussing over the aeroplane trip.
'She go bump, bump, bump,' he was complaining to Haim Mendel, the leader of the orchestra, who had waited to meet him. Metzer walked in and Mendel gratefully introduced him to Scheerer. Metzer in turn introduced me, but he knew that we had already met. I remember doing the Tchaikovsky Number One in Hamburg once and Scheerer conducting, fatly and fussily, and bowing all over the place with a big white cloud of talcum powder on his trouser fly where he had powdered himself, been to the urinal and had forgotten to brush himself off.
'The plane go bump, bump, bump,' he told the impassive Metzer. 'Up and down, all der time. Also it was very small. This I did not expect.'
'It's the heat that goes to the sky from the desert,' explained Metzer. 'It makes the aircraft bump, bump, bump. But you are here, Herr Scheerer, and we are very glad.'
Shoshana was looking at me across the people and I smiled towards her. She was more feminine now wearing a blue skirt and white sweater. Her neck looked very tanned against the roll of the sweater neck and her arms and legs slender and brown. I walked towards her and said: 'Where did the war go ?'
She looked at me seriously. 'It is hiding for a small while,' she said. 'Everybody in Tel Aviv thinks it has gone away for good. But I think it will be back.'
'Down here ?' I said thinking of the Strait of Tiran down the gulf and the motor torpedo boats of that afternoon. 'Is that why you have come ?'
Now she smiled. 'No,' she corrected. I am not here for any battles. Only to hear you play.'
'Your editor sent you ?'
I suggested it, since I came to England to write about you. How do you feel about playing in such a place ? It is like the last piece of the world, is it not ?'
I grinned. 'The end of the world.'
She seemed embarrassed. 'This is correct. The end of the world. Sometimes my English goes a little away from me.'
I thought I had offended her by my correction because she turned abruptly from me and began conversing with Zoo Baby. She obviously knew him well because she pushed her long index finger into his thick waist and he admonished her in quick laughing Hebrew. But then she turned and continued her conversation with me.
'Dayan,' she said putting a mimicking hand over one eye, 'has become the Minister for Defence. Not everybody would have that, Eshkol the Prime Minister for one example, but he is a leader and we need a leader. He is a fighting man, Dayan. This is why I could never understand how they once made him the Minister for Agriculture. A warrior has little to do with chickens.'
'But the situation has quietened,' I affirmed.
'Oh yes, there is a small quiet. But now that Dayan is one of the Cabinet I am certain that a war will follow. You don't put a man of war in a possibility - no - a position, like that and expect him to make peace. We will be fighting in a short time that is without doubt.'
'Perhaps the Arabs will not attack,' I argued. She wanted to fight, I could see that. There was something in her lovely eyes. She sniffed like a schoolgirl. 'It matters nothing if they do not attack,' she said quietly arrogant. 'I have told you that we cannot afford to have the battle on Israeli soil. We may have to make them fight. It is enough that they threaten us.'
'You are foolish,' I said with offhand anger. We had walked from the main group of the musicians and the fluffy protests still coming from the German. 'How can you hope to win in the long run?'
'Of course we shall,' she answered. 'And it will not be a long run, Mr Hollings. I do not wish to argue tactics with you, because you would not understand. I will discuss the war with you when it is over. Then I will have more time. What are you playing tonight?'
'Rachmaninov,' I said. I was surprised how she was able to
terminate a conversation, particularly with me, on her own terms. 'Prelude Number Three.'
She produced a tiny note book and wrote it down. 'In C Sharp Minor,' I added and she wrote again. Then I said, 'Opus Three,' and she wrote that too. 'What else ?' she asked as though accumulating evidence.
'Grieg,' I said. 'The concerto.'
'Has it got a number?'
'Number One. He only wrote one.'
I did not know,' she said, writing. 'Music I know little about.'
'But the newspaper sent you to England to do the interviews with me, and they sent you down here.'
She looked up. 'I had a free airline ticket to England,' she explained without spite. I was travelling there in any case. I had to do some work so I wrote about you because you were coming to Israel. I also did an article about a small bear that was being sent from London to the Tel Aviv Zoo.'
'You are very adaptable.'
'Of course. And they sent me down today not because I am full of the knowledge of Grieg or Rachmaninov, but because I have had much hard work and experiences recently, and everybody else is too busy.'
If that had been my final public performance as a concert artist, and it very nearly was, then there could have been no more dramatic a stage for it. An orchestra and a soloist and the works they fashion can occasionally be lifted and enhanced by their physical surroundings like a stone in the setting of a ring. In Tel Aviv the atmosphere and the emotion had brought the experience to fullness, but sometimes it is the landscape which lends character and fineness.
A year after all this happened I sat on a damp deckchair in Holland Park, London, with two thousand people under the evening trees, listening to the London Philharmonic. There was a pale, late sky, washed clear by rain in the afternoon, and the airliners going into the airport were dropping down every few minutes in the sky behind the orchestra. The breeze was blowing their sound away from the music and they were silver, silent and slow, cutting cleanly like scissors through blue satin. It was strange how, although their paths were direct and unfaltering, their descent was in time and sympathy with the feeling of the orchestra.
On the beach at Eilat that evening it was the same, the sky littered with loitering stars and the sea all black and silver avenues. The land on all sides had backed away and only the lights of the two ports, one each side of the bay, broke the night below the level of the stars.
People had come in from the town, walking in hundreds down the hunched road that topped the airstrip; rough quiet people in odd clothes, pulling black-eyed children with them, walking but hardly speaking. They were quite unlike the alert and lively audience of Tel Aviv, the urban Jews, for there was about them something of the desert, something formed, I suppose, by winds and harsh sun and the living in that lonely place.
Others looking like dusty gypsies came in from the desert villages and the
kibbutzim
aboard trucks and half-track vehicles, rough people again with hard expressions, carrying rifles and sub-machine-guns as casually as walking sticks. Their clothes looked as though they had come immediately from the fields and although they were noisy enough among themselves they appeared to have no contact, no communication with the other people from the town.
No one needed marshalling to their place. They formed about the orchestra in concentric circles growing out to the fidgeting edge of the sea, and then farther along the beach each way in a long oval. O'Sullivan, the border guard, told me afterwards that his friends who were on duty that night, together with some Swedish and Indian United Nations soldiers, and the Jordanian platoon from the other side all stood along the barbed wire half a mile away and tried to listen to the diminished concert in the subdued night.
Everyone seemed very quiet; either that or the sound of an indoor audience was completely dissipated in the open night. I looked down from the balcony while I was dressing. Metzer had said that the orchestra would dress with complete formality, so I was in a ruffled evening shirt and tails, with the silver cuff-links that Malcolm Sargent had given to me. I stood feeling the freshness of the shirt and watched the audience gather about the orchestra.
It was like primitive tribesmen coming in from a desert for a meeting, sitting rough and quiet, waiting for the proceedings to commence. Power cables had been run from the hotel to the beach for the orchestra lights, but around the perimeter of the people were flaming brands fixed into metal horns. They threw sheets of orange light across the audience, sitting like a patient herd, contrasting with the steady white lights that held the low stage built for the orchestra.
The orchestra first performed
Till Eulenspiegel.
I stood on the hotel balcony, in a curtain of shadow, looking out over the beach and the sea and over that quiet, settled, powerful cloud of people squatting on the sand and listening to the music. This, again, was a different experience. The little fable of Richard Strauss rose up out of the close night and hovered over the place. The sky was choked with stars and from my place I could see the glow of the lights on the resting ships in the harbours, Eilat on the one hand and Akaba on the other. The dark air added a new sound to the music, as though an additional instrument had been added and from the hills across the desert came the mewing of the wind in the large mountains.
Metzer knocked and came into the room behind me, walking fatly through the yellow light and out on to the subdued balcony beside me. 'I think the news is
good,'
he whispered as though afraid to disturb the orchestra even at that distance.
'Kol Israel
has just broadcast a statement by Eshkol who is back from London and America, saying that there will be settlement in a peaceful way.'
'Good,' I said tapping my fingers on the balustrade of the balcony, working them through the exercises I had done since I was a child. 'I told you so. Everything will be fine.'
He grasped on to my encouragement like a man who fears he is incurably ill holds on to any words of hope, no matter how thin, from a surgeon. 'Yes, yes,' he answered, his big head nodding like a hammer. 'Many of the troops who were mobilized have been sent on leave. Tel Aviv is full of them.
The beaches were very crowded today, they say, and everybody is having a good time. Yes, it is all right. I think.'
All the week the radio station had been broadcasting sly little messages in between records by Ray Charles or Sandie Shaw, calling men to Army units throughout the land. In Tel Aviv Metzer had translated them from Hebrew for me. 'Green Dragon and Wishing Well report to border unit by twelve noon tomorrow. Benji the Yemenite is waiting in his grocer's shop. The Rose of Sharon is picked in the fields of Dan.. . Now, for your pleasure, the Number One record in America, Aretha Franklin and
Respect.'