Authors: Lesley Thomas
Dov laughed but Shoshana did not react. She could never take a joke about Israel. Dov brought the jeep around, a dusty tail curling behind us, and stopped in the middle of a flat red area of desert where columns of sandstone heaved themselves vertically into the hard and brilliant sky. They were chiselled and carved by winds and age, fat fingers of rock spread wide, and then another, a hand clenched and fisted, the knuckles bulging out over the hot bare flat area below.
Shoshana had jumped from the jeep and was walking about, looking up, arms spread, with a sort of staged holy excitement, like someone walking in a beloved cathedral. She walked fifty yards away from the jeep, her tied hair touching the back of her khaki shirt, her trousers baggy where they were pushed into her boots and tight around the backside. It was like watching a film where the star wanders into some wondrous place, spreads her hands and begins to sing. Shoshana shouted: 'The mines of King Solomon. Is it not great!'
Dov and I remained at the jeep. He was going to drive five miles farther into the desert to the kibbutz where his brother lived. At one moment we both found ourselves staring at this girl in the uncompromising male clothes, standing gracefully on high toes, tiptoeing about like a dancer.
'King Solomon!' She turned and called the words to us. 'This is his place. Do you like it, Mr Hollings ?'
Dov said to me: 'You had better say you like it, Mr Hollings. This girl is a patriot.'
‘I like it!'
I shouted back to her.
I
like it very much.'
The strength of my voice rustled rocks and segments on the crumbling sandstone ledges, dry from years without rain, and brought them chuting down to the foundations. Dov returned to his driver's seat and revved the engine bringing wider avalanches tipping from the crevices.
The jeep turned like a circus animal going around a ring and made for the narrow exit that led out to the desert and the road to Beersheba. Shoshana was still standing theatrically, her face bright in the sun and raised towards the tops of the cliffs. I walked to her.
'You like this place?' she repeated as though we were buying a house. 'You
do
with no doubt ?'
'With no doubt,' I smiled. I did a complete slow circle, eyes straining up, running along the frayed hem of the rocks and the sky. Red and orange, brown, sliced and spliced, layered and latticed rock.
'We have further places,' she enthused with all the gush of a bad salesman. 'So many. Even outside the famous towns. Israel is full of history. It has been here such a long time.'
I almost said: 'Most countries have,' but I restrained it because of her obvious happiness. She caught my hand. Her palm was unexpectedly soft. I wondered why I thought it would be hard. 'In this area - over here -' she said leading the way, 'this is where the fires would burn. Here the slaves would ... how is it? ... boil the metals for the making of the bronze. See the ground is still black. It was not a good job for employment.'
'He was a hard man that Solomon,' I said. We had begun walking up the crumbling path that projected like a dry tongue from the straight column formations. 'Cutting children in half...'
'Nonsense,' she interrupted seriously. 'It was only a suggestion.' We walked farther and higher. It was difficult under the sun and my shirt was sticky on my back. The heat was going through the material of the little Jewish cap I still had over the back of my head. 'Imagine,' she said with unconscious poetry, 'how it was when the Queen of Sheba in her lovely ships came to Eilat and King Solomon there to welcome her. What a day that was for Israel.'
'A different Israel,' I pointed out.
'No. The same Israel,' she argued. 'But we were bigger then.'
I laughed and the sound started red nuts of stone tipping down from a great bulb of rock just above us. She walked a little behind me and we reached the top of the rock and sat on its flat cap. From there we looked out across the boiling desert to the steely sea showing in the far south. Egypt was almost at our shoulder, Jordan rose to the left and beyond the gulf the dusky mountains of Saudi Arabia.
'We are surrounded by enemies - the poor bastards,' Shoshana observed. Her hand remained quietly in mine.
There was tuna for dinner again that evening. The Italian fisherman's catch had to be eaten by as many people along the gulf as possible so that it should not waste. It was baked and light brown, like veal or venison. Some of the musicians of the orchestra had gone back to the north that night leaving about twenty of the party at dinner at one long table near the window that was by the sea.
It was a good evening, full of benevolence, because the threat of the war had, they said, now reduced. Metzer was saying jovially that everyone would forget it soon and that Dayan could go back to his archaeology or even to his former job of looking after the nation's chickens as Minister of Agriculture. It was strange how they wanted the hooded general as their saviour when they felt they needed a saviour, but now they wanted him eliminated because he was a man of war as soon as the danger had apparently died. Zoo Baby dominated one end of the table, his bulk hardly contained in his huge white shirt, his thick neck thrusting like a trunk from his open collar, his eyes screwed up against the light of the table candles, his firm but soft voice moving in and out of the conversation. I had watched him carefully the previous night at the concert on the beach. A pianist and the man behind the drums have a lot in common for their attitudes to music both physical and emotional are alike, the crouch over the instrument, the waiting and watching for the moment to move into the work, the solitary feeling among the ranks of pipes and strings. There is a sensation too of ministering to the instrument, of leaning over and working it. The others hold their instruments to themselves like babies, kissing them or stroking them, but the pianist and the timpanist are as separate from theirs as a doctor over an operating table or a housewife over her kitchen board.
All the men were in clean white, open-necked shirts that evening at the table. They have this attitude to collars and ties in Israel which believes that nothing constructive is ever accomplished by a constricted neck. They also roll their sleeves up, or have short sleeves, with the open-air readiness of Boy Scouts, but most of the musicians about the table had their shirt sleeves long and cuff-linked indicating some sort of refinement allowed for men of their artistic stature. Herbert Scheerer, the conductor, and I alone wore jackets, demonstrating that we were foreigners from more northern and less workmanlike parts of the world.
There were few other guests at the hotel for any tourists had flown with rumours of war. In the dining-room were four Israeli naval officers from the little motor torpedo boats I had watched putting out from Eilat. It was they who stopped their laughter and talk first when Shoshana entered the room and walked towards our table. There was an awkward coughing of chairs as we all stood up. There was a place waiting for her between myself and Dov and she smiled all around and made her apologies for being late in Hebrew and then in English. Then she sat down.
She had tried to do something about herself and had failed. She wore a white dress of some material like lace, but not lace, which was a size too small for her. The buttons across her breasts were dragging at the buttonholes, and when she moved as she ate the material stretched all over like a series of hawsers. She had nail varnish clumsily applied and uncomfortable make-up sitting on the natural smoothness of her face. Her lipstick was odd enough to make me remember that her lips were full and lovely when she was not wearing it. She sat hunched and complicated in the dress, trying to stretch and be at ease, blinking her eyes under the black geometry she had drawn over them. When she had walked into the room I had noticed her walk and the graceless open-toed white shoes she wore. She looked and moved better in denims.
She had washed the red desert dust from her hair. It was magnificent, full and falling naturally in fair runs over her shoulders, and the skin of her arms and shoulders was even and fine.
Zoo Baby smiling with fat from the deep end of the table said: 'Shoshana, tonight you look like the Queen of Sheba.' The others laughed and clapped in their Jewish way because they knew he meant it. I clapped too with only disguised politeness and was closest to the look of pleasure in her eyes and the heightening of the colour under the make-up. With intended grace, but with the buttons on her dress forcefully trying to escape their holds, she turned to Zoo Baby and thanked him.
'Toda raba,
dear Zoo Baby,' she said quietly. 'And you tonight are like King Solomon.'
There was extra laughter and clapping, with the naval officers from the other table joining in, and only Herr Scheerer and myself, although giving lip and hand service to the acknowledgement, catching each other's expressions of minor puzzlement over the huge acclaim for such a small joke.
Zoo Baby said: 'I am glad there is no war. My Army uniform is getting tight in many places. Today I tried it in front of the mirror. It was not a good experience.'
He stood at his end of the table and amused us by demonstrating the various soldierly poses which he had adopted before his mirror. He amused the others well, but immediately I realized again that I was on the outside of a private joke. Zoo Baby stood and pretended to throw a grenade, use a submachine-gun, and then gave a great murderous jab with an imagined rifle and bayonet. With each movement he made a rubbery comic face and examined the cloth beneath his armpits and across his chest portraying the man who finds he is splitting at the seams. I was looking towards him, away from Shoshana, but I sensed her pulling at her own tight clothes. Dov and the others in the room laughed at the military mimicry, especially when Zoo Baby held the seams of his shirt together while he tossed another grenade towards the roaring naval officers.
Unfortunately I suddenly became aware of what it was all about. I think Scheerer did too. He glanced at me for the second time in a few minutes; he the product of a generation of invaders, and again with that puzzled, disturbed expression. Zoo Baby going through his battle drill, the others all laughing, suddenly looked very businesslike to me. Perhaps I missed the point because of my lack of Hebrew because occasionally he made exasperated remarks and was answered by the others. They all called at once on occasions, Shoshana immediately in my ear, and I had that sensation of swimming in the carrying current of an unknown language. It was the ungainly man's obvious proficiency in what he was about that was so startling. Despite the laughter and the voices he had in his movements a killer's intention, the decisive mobility of a trained and dedicated soldier. When he threw the supposed grenade you could see the fat fingers tugging the pin away expertly and know that the broad forearm had pitched it sixty yards away killing the crew of an Arab machine gun. His spraying fire with the sub-machine-gun was intense and determined and the 'glug' as the bayonet was forced home made me push away what remained of my dinner. Zoo Baby was an Israeli soldier.
He ended the act by throwing his hands in the air, with eyes rolled once more down to the shirt under the armpits, and surrendering in a loud Hebrew, and then fearful Arabic, tongue. All the musicians, the naval officers and Shoshana, collapsed laughing across their food on the table. There were shouts in Hebrew and applause. Scheerer and I, once more turning our loyal glance towards each other, strange aliens that we were, applauded the display also.
Then Zoo Baby, still surrendering, pretended that the Arabs had shot him. He collapsed to the table like a felled elephant and lay there, but with occasional, exaggerated examinations of his tight clothing. It was a splendid act, full of the rare expansive talent that only fat men seem to know
and possess. When he had finished and raised himself, beam
ing, from the table, everyone applauded again. I turned to see Shoshana and Dov streaming with
laughter tears. One of the violins was asking Scheerer what he thought of the performance and the puzzled stubby German was nodding seriously and saying: 'Goot, goot. I like very much.
Kamerad! Kamerad!'
He threw his hands in the air and imitated Zoo
Baby's surrendering act. Once more all the Jews threw them
selves upon the table and howled their laughter. I prodded at my tuna fish.
Seven