Authors: Lesley Thomas
'In Ireland, now, if we'd gone about our little troubles with the British in the same way, we'd have been far better off. We went on in little dribs and drabs, a few bombs and a bit of an uprising, for years. But these boys! It's all or nothing, mister. Take it from me, it'll be all over by the end of the week. One way or another.'
Zoo Baby and Dov and some of the other musicians came into the sunlight from the deep shadows of the hotel. They were now in their Army uniforms, self-conscious and joking about them, and carrying sub-machine-guns. Zoo Baby had not exaggerated about the fit of his uniform. As he walked it tugged at him at every joint and cavity. The others had to pull him up to the back of the truck and he was muttering in Hebrew as they did so. 'My God,' he said to me when I went around to the back. 'If this war does nothing else it will get me something more big to wear.'
'If you had been on the other side,' I said. 'In the Arab Legion. Then they would have given you some nice flowing robes and things and you would have fitted.'
He laughed, but only a half-laugh - you had to be careful then about mixing Arabs and Jews even in jokes - and said: 'My father chose to be Jewish and he chose a Jewish wife. So we have the lousy clothes.' He spread his arms and laughed a full, real laugh now. 'Are you coming?' he asked.
Shoshana climbed about the truck and held down her hand to me. Dov and Zoo Baby helped me up like a child. I might as well come,' I said. O'Sullivan started the rattling engine. I said: "The nearer I get to an international airport the better. My luggage is on board anyway. I don't feel like staying down here to be massacred by the Arab Legion. I'm a neutral, remember.'
In the truck with us now was Haim Mendel, the orchestra leader, a desperately quiet man, looking very old and comical in a scruffy uniform. I asked him what he was.
'For the bombing,' he answered hesitantly and glumly. 'In case.'
'He is an air-raid warden,' said Dov with a straight expression. Mendel's doomed face was apparently a joke in the orchestra.
'He stops air raids,' said Zoo Baby pretending he had misinterpreted.
'On Tel Aviv,' added Mendel sincerely. 'That is where I now go.'
Zoo Baby and Dov were going to report to their Army units in the north. 'Two weeks all the others have been taken into the Army,' said Zoo Baby holding up a fat pair of fingers. 'But the Government let us play the music for the people.'
"They thought the concert tour was important for morale,' explained Dov. 'But now we must get to the Army. My wife has joined her unit, already.'
'Mine is digging a bombing shelter. Also my children,' said Zoo Baby. 'Also I must get to the Army.'
Shoshana said: 'And I must get to somewhere where I can see the fighting for my newspaper.'
'Just drop me at the airport,' I said.
Metzer was also squatting in the truck, heavy with thought. Once he moved to the back to look out over the sweet and placid sea, as though seeking some comfort from it.
There were two other musicians whose names I cannot now recall, one was a french horn I remember; middle-aged men being tugged off from their lives to the violence of conflict.
The truck stopped abruptly after a few yards and crimson-faced, Herr Scheerer, carrying a pathetic little case, emerged from the hotel and puffed after us.
'Another neutral,' announced Dov as everyone helped the breathless German into the back of the truck. He reminded me of a puffer-fish I once saw in Brighton Aquarium.
'Neffer hav I know anything zo like this,' groaned Scheerer. His eyes seemed twice their normal size and he was cascading sweat. 'Neffer in all my conducting days.'
'Another neutral,' repeated Dov. He looked at me steadily. He held his sub-machine-gun like a seasoned soldier not like a musician. He smiled, a hard smile. 'We'll have to make sure those naughty wicked Arabs don't get hold of you,' he said.
Eight
Ten Israeli air strikes had that early morning attacked Egyptian airbases in Gaza, south into the Sinai Desert, along the Nile Delta, and even as far as Luxor. Israeli armoured columns and eager infantry were, within an hour, forcing their way into the Egyptian soldiers entrenched in the Gaza Strip and in the sand fortresses of the Sinai. In Jerusalem nothing had happened.
As our truck moved up along the desert road from Eilat, Dov was helped up on to the khaki canvas roof and lay up there under the clean sky with a transistor radio.
Kol Israel
was babbling its sweet Hebrew into the desert air. Sometimes they played a few minutes of music and Dov turned temporarily to Radio Amman.
'The bastards!' he called down over the edge of the truck canvas. 'They shelled our cornfields in Gaza today.'
The other Jews in the bouncing truck looked at each other and nodded their consciences clear. 'They shelled our cornfields,' repeated Shoshana to me as though I could not understand Dov's English. 'They started it.' I wondered why he had called out in English instead of Hebrew. Then I knew it was because even he, the liberal Dov, wanted to be sure that Scheerer and I, the neutrals, received the information.
I stood up and, catching on to the metal stanchion at the back of the truck, I looked on top of the canvas to Dov. He was lying relaxed as a sunbather, the small radio held high with one hand, like a prize, so that he could capture the best reception. 'Who is winning?' I called. The sun struck me in the face and the hot Negev wind blew at me. The canvas of the canopy smelled oily.
I went back into the interior and sat in the close air. The truck bounced and I could feel Shoshana's thigh move against mine. I could feel how hot her leg was under the trousers.
'Radio Amman says the Arabs are winning,' shouted Dov. His head was comically lowered below the top fringe of the truck and his upside-down face was lined with desert dust.
'Kol Israel
says there is no information at the moment. That means
we
are winning!'
The others half-laughed, half-cheered. That handful of Jews in the jolting back of the truck did not seem like yet another generation of their race facing extinction.
'Jerusalem,' called Shoshana up at the roof. 'What news of Jerusalem?'
Dov's inverted head magically appeared again. 'No news of the city. All fighting is in the south and the west.'
Zoo Baby made a large rubber face. 'Perhaps the Jordanians will not fight,' he said. They were all speaking in English now because of me and because of Scheerer. 'The other time, in 1956, they would not fight. They were still. It is a sad thing. If they do not fight we have no chance to fight them back and to take Jerusalem.'
Metzer, who had been silent, watching the desert road scurry beneath the lorry, turned and said something in Hebrew. Shoshana nodded and affirmed in English. 'This is correct. Hussein and Nasser have kissed at Cairo Airport.'
'May thirtieth,' mumbled Zoo Baby. His wide face closed into mine.
Shoshana nodded strongly: 'And they did not kiss because they were in love. This time the Jordanians will fight.' She suddenly turned upon me, looked quickly at the uncomfortable and bewildered Scheerer sitting opposite, and gathered our attention like a teacher explaining an awkward problem. 'Our large difficulty,' she said seriously, 'would be if the Jordanian and the Iraq troops in Jordan came across the middle of Israel to join up with the Egyptians from the other side.' I could see her full breasts hanging in the shirt. She turned and saw me looking at them and some anger flushed into her face. She raised her voice a little and it hardened, while she was continuing to look sideways at me. Tanks and soldiers and some Migs could do this.' She wriggled her finger on the dusty floor of the truck. 'You understand, this is Israel. Here is Jordan and the Egyptians would attack from here. If they have many forces coming across the desert from that side and this side, you understand, they would cut our small country in half.' She said 'small' in a pleading sort of way, directed immediately at Scheerer. He nodded with embarrassed agreement. Shoshana continued: 'They would remove our head from our belly. Tel Aviv and Haifa would be in one half and Jerusalem, Beersheba and this desert would be in the other. We would be apart. It would be hilarious.'
'Hilarious?' I said.
She coloured. 'No, no. Not that word. That is laughing, is that so? Yes. Like last night. It is some other word of English. But it would be bad for Israel.'
Zoo Baby grunted. "They would not do it. The Arabs are bad at moving forward. Always I have seen them move the other way.'
Scheerer muttered in his poor English: 'In der war I vaz of der band of Seventh Panzers. It was bad. They made me play the drum. Me, Herbert Scheerer, I play the drum!'
'It is good to play the drum,' said Zoo Baby defensively. Scheerer glanced at him guiltily.
'Not der Army drum,' said Scheerer mending the slight. "There is no good noise in it. Bang, bang bang.' He did it very Germanically and resoundingly and we had begun to laugh when his bangs were shattered by a line of terrifying real bangs that travelled alongside the truck throwing it up like a bucking horse, slewing it around, and sending rock and sand pummelling against its sides. The huge explosions ran with us.
Only after the attack did I hear the aeroplanes, a double roar across the roof of the truck. We were rolling and righting again with everyone pawing about on the floor and shouting. I found myself holding Shoshana against the metal as though I feared she might in some way attempt immediate retaliation. Above the Hebrew shouts I remember hearing the hoarse Irish of O'Sullivan from the front. Somehow I was looking at the interior of the canvas roof and, quickly, wondering if Dov was still up there.
The truck squared itself and began skidding along the brittle road, tearing into something with a splitting of glass at the front, and then jarring and stopping heavily. Dov's head, inverted again, comical had it not been for the blood all over his face, appeared from the roof. We were crawling like reptiles in a tank. Zoo Baby was lying across my left arm and the crash had left my face against the fatty softness of the top of Shoshana's legs.
Dov's mouth opened, gulping breath. A thread of blood ran from his nose and strained through his thick moustache.
'Hachutza!'
he cried out at last.
'Hachutza!’
It seemed his eyes caught me. 'Out! Out!' he repeated. 'They are coming back, the bastards.'
Zoo Baby stumbled to his knees like a small and sleepy elephant and made to crawl to the tailboard of the truck. He had a blue and red gash over his ear. I looked at the canvas roof again for some reason looking for bullet holes. Everyone was moving now. I kissed the inside of Shoshana's thigh. There was a rattling at the tailboard and O'Sullivan was there pulling at the chains and ushering us out like the superintendent of a Catholic Sunday school.
He was watching the sky though. 'Come on then, my boys,' he said quickly, without excitement. 'Let's get out. This vehicle is not fit for the road.'
I could hear the jet planes returning, breaking their backs to turn over in the hot sky and come at us again. 'Egyptians,' said Shoshana. She was standing next to me by the tailboard of the truck, calmly watching the angrily approaching planes. Scheerer was having some trouble in getting down from the tailboard. He was only middle-aged, not old, but he was very frightened. O'Sullivan and Zoo Baby were helping him, both watching the sky, and O'Sullivan was muttering about getting the silly old Hun to hurry up. Dov appeared from the side of the truck nearest the red wall of rock into which it had crashed. He was composed now, looking like a soldier, holding his sub-machine-gun, and wiping the blood from his moustache in the same casual manner as another man might wipe away soup. He fixed himself at the corner of the truck, conveniently found a wedged position between the lurching back and a slab of rock, and brought his gun to his shoulder and the muzzle optimistically to the sky.
Everyone else was dispersing to the rocks. As I ran I could hear the nasty approach of the two jet fighters and above them the urgently hard voice of O'Sullivan ordering Dov away from the vicinity of the truck. Dov looked up from his gun position, nodded and ran clear of the stalled vehicle.