Authors: Lesley Thomas
'The military messages have stopped,' said Metzer. 'They are giving weather reports too, even for the Galilee and Sinai. They would not do that if they were expecting a war.'
Till Eulenspiegel
came to its jovial end and a momentary cloth of silence fell over the scene below to be flung wildly aside by the swelling applause of the Jews sitting all about the beach. It was not like the applause in Tel Aviv, not stamping, whooping acclaim, the enthusiasm of a city audience. It was the hard applause of a different people, desert people, with sand in its throat, unused to demonstration. I looked at Metzer and he smiled. 'It is not often they have a chance to hear anything,' he said. 'Tomorrow they'll be back at their work.'
I walked from the room into the corridor and down the resounding concrete steps. At the entrance to the hotel there were some young waitresses and other staff and when I walked through the foyer out towards the beach it was they who turned and began to applaud. I felt very good that night, strange, but very happy. Strange because of the way I was dressed in the fine dark blue tailed suit and the white ruffled shirt, going out to play to those Negev people, those steely Jews, waiting in their rough clothes. The applause ran ahead of me like a rapid fuse, spluttering through the people at the door and those outside it under the hotel lights, and then igniting the great crowd waiting on the sand under the flaming brands and the low stars.
I had the impression of walking through the shallows and then into the deeps of a powerful sea, the waves thrown up all around. The sound of the hands was extraordinary even to someone like me who has known acclaim for a long time. There were no raised voices, only the hands, clapping, clapping, seeming to reach out to me as I walked through them. Then I mounted the few wooden steps to the platform, under the brilliant square of light, and I had lost them.
It was like stepping into a boxing ring. The sound still rose, but the forms and the faces had gone, all but those immediately about the fringe of the platform; gone, submerged into that applauding ocean. I could sense them, even when I was on the stool and they were quiet; sense them encircling me, people and people and people, going out in a rippling pattern far across the beach and into the Jewish night.
Six
Inland from the Gulf the road drags across the desert. It is a road only in the sense that it is a way, an access. It is bitter red, scarred, rutted and turned, littered with torn tyres and fractured wheels. The lorries that traverse it journey from Jerusalem and the northern towns to Beersheba and then to Eilat, carrying all the goods that life needs, for there is no railway. They make their own bonfires of dust as they work their way through the miles and the mountains. The telephone wires, the same that the Bedouin use to make copper bracelets and bangles, sag on poles forced into the hard desert. They straggle, each one alone yet attached to the pole in front and the one behind by their thin wires, some straight, some crooked, like a desolate chain gang or a party of men lost in the wilderness and strung together in case they stray.
Dov Haran was going to a kibbutz where his brother worked and lived. It was the day before the war began, a bright, hot forenoon at Eilat, and hotter inland. 'I will take you to King Solomon's Mines,' he offered. 'You have the whole day to fill.'
Shoshana came out into the white sunlight. She was wearing her khaki denims, clean but rough, with her hair tied back severely behind her neck. I thought then that people like her, particularly Jews like her,
have
to be soldiers all the time. If there
is
no war they will hope for one, and see in it an opportunity to fight and die for something they believe is bigger than the whole world. The Germans were like that.
She was wearing squat boots, dusty and wrinkled like tired hunting dogs, and her baggy trousers were tucked into the boots. Her shirt was wide at the neck like a navvy's collar, and the skin over her breastbone was hard and almost black with the sun. The only tenderness in her hard little frame came in the something she was unable to deny; the full circle of her breasts under the squared pockets of the shirt.
Dov had apparently already told her he was going up the desert road. She said to me: 'We will see the diggings of King Solomon,' and jerked her head with a man-like motion telling me to get into the jeep which Dov was about to drive away.
Starting a car on that surface of grit and dust was like opening a jet engine. The red clouds gushed from behind the jeep and trailed us as we took the track into the Negev, puffed and rising immediately behind the back wheels of the vehicle and then thinning and trailing out and finally dropping back, dust to dust.
Shoshana sat in the front with Dov, leaving me alone in the rear seat. She sat straight like a shotgun guard on an old Western stage coach, looking sometimes left or right but returning to straight ahead.
'It was very fine last night,' she called over her shoulder.
She was so unemphasizing about it that I was undecided if she meant the concert or the weather.
'Splendid,' 1 grunted covering both eventualities. I wondered why she always made me, Christopher Hollings, feel that I was riding back seat. The track was bumpy and the whirls and whorls of the violent desert rock were reaching higher. Dov was driving quite fast, but he began to brake abruptly, and eventually brought the jeep to a halt slightly to one flank of the track. We sat while a tribe of Bedouin rode from the sandstone crevices, blanketed people, as disdainful as their camels; their goats and other animals were layered with rusty dust. They made no sign that they had noticed us but filed across the track, silently and without fuss like a group of mysterious but well-behaved nuns embarking on an exotic outing.
Neither Dov nor Shoshana moved or made any comment. The whole incident unfolded and passed as though it had been well rehearsed. When they had gone, slipping again into a crack in the rocks, Dov put the jeep into gear and we stuttered forward. A boy, a goat-herd, driving half a dozen skinny and wall-eyed animals before him, appeared three hundred yards farther on the road, heading in the same direction as the camels and humans. Dov stopped again and motioned him and his herd across the track in the suburban manner of a driver at a school crossing.
When we moved again I said: "There's a lot of traffic this morning.'
Dov laughed deeply. 'They always have the right of way. At least they believe that, and it is as well to go along with them. They were here before us. That boy, he could have been Moses or Benjamin.'
Shoshana said coldly: 'They are a weight on Israel. They do no good, but make many incidents. They are diseased and smelling and all trouble.'
Dov laughed: 'They're Bedouin,' he said as though that explained it all.
'They are spies,' she alleged obstinately. 'And drug smugglers, and they have killed Israelis, even down here in the desert. And yet they walk from country to country as they please.'
'Perhaps they are setting a good example,' I suggested.
She became very angry, biting, but containing her voice. I could see her shoulders shaking under the shirt. I thought she was going to turn on me, but she remained looking to the front.
'Beasts,' she said. 'They treat their goats better than the women. The goats eat first, then the women.'
'Feminism!' exclaimed Dov turning to me for confirmation. 'Feminism, that's what it is called, correct?'
'Correct/ I laughed. 'And from Shoshana.'
Dov was laughing at her anger as he drove the jeep, now fast and kicking, along a straight stretch of the road.
'Nothing! That is nothing!' she shouted, then, unable to get enough meaning into her English, she attacked him in Hebrew. He still laughed, heaving the jeep around a bend in the road, almost scraping a hanging wall of rock, rising on one side and falling on the other. Shoshana returned to English and this time turned about to face me. Her eyes were magnificent. 'Because the women eat after the goats,' she shouted, 'when they come to bear children only half the children five.'
'It happens with all primitive people,' I said aloofly.
Shoshana let her annoyance escape, 'and,' she screamed, 'and, mister Hollings, the dyings of those children are used on the Israeli figures to the United Nations regarding infant mortality! These foul Bedouin are officially Israeli citizens!'
I faced her seriously. Dov was crouched over the wheel and watching a now straight road as though it were heavy of booby traps.
Shoshana reduced her voice but her back was hunched like a nasty-tempered cat. 'Arabs,' she grumbled.
'Israel
is full of
Arabs.
Jaffa, Nazareth, all Arabs. Why do we have them? Do they have Jews in Jordan?'
Dov shrugged at her childishness. He joked: 'We will build a kibbutz right outside King Hussein's palace.'
She whispered: 'One day perhaps we will.'
The sky was like a deep plate with the rising desert brilliantly red against it. The sun was getting towards its noon height. I could feel it burning through my hair. There was a khaki cap on the floor of the jeep, one of those tureen-shaped Jewish caps, and I put it on my head. From behind us, from the sun, at that moment issued three jet fighters, searing noisily across the wide chest of the desert, flying their low shadows over our vehicle and then arching spectacularly into the sky with the surprised grace of birds shot in the belly. I had only time to squeeze my shoulders to my neck after the first sound and the planes were away and curving far off.
'Ours,' I laughed unconvincingly.
'Ours', confirmed Shoshana indicating with the same expression that she meant to add 'not
yours'.
She sniffed at the sky like a mongrel investigating a temporary smell. 'Mirages from the north,' she added. She turned to me, facing me with sudden enthusiasm. 'They are stronger and faster and have better pilots than any of the Arabs.'
'So there,' I joked. Her English was not adequate enough to appreciate it.
'Of course, the Arabs have more,' suggested Dov patiently. 'But we have what's good in little parcels, as you say.'
'It will seem like we have more,' asserted Shoshana.
Dov did not reply. He had turned the jeep off the choking road now and driven it, frisking like a goat, up a lesser track going towards the mountains that guarded Egypt and the Sinai. 'Did you see the stick the Bedouin boy carried?' he asked suddenly as though the goat-herd had just crossed the track and was not ten miles back. 'That is a hollow tube which he pushes down into the desert waterholes. The water of the Negev is so bitter with minerals that it is not possible for drinking. We had some soldiers in a camp here and all their hair fell out because they drank the water.'
Shoshana unexpectedly giggled. 'They are the oldest young men in Israel,' she said. Then quickly serious: 'But very good soldiers.'
'Of course!' I shouted.
Dov said: "The shepherd boy pushes the hollow stick far down into the waterhole, beyond the water heavy with minerals, and he sucks through it the sweet water that is below that.'
'An old Bedouin trick,' I suggested.
He agreed: 'Very old, Mister Hollings. It is the same magic trick... How do you express it? ... A con...'
'A conjuring trick,' I said.
'No, a word I know. Con ...'
'Confidence trick, then.'
'That is true. My English grows every day don't you think?'
'It's excellent.'
'Yes, the same confidence trick that Moses did here in the Negev to impress the Children of Israel. You read in the Bible that he struck the rock and out came the fresh water. All he did was push his staff down through the bad water to the good spring underneath.'
'And so saved Israel from being a nation of bald heads,' I suggested.