Authors: Lesley Thomas
The lurching vehicle came up the final slope of road and stopped just short of the skeleton of our truck. A Star of David flag was idling against a broomstick handle which had been fitted into a rupture in the amphibian's metal deck. A heavy and old machine gun was mounted amidships and two young Jewish soldiers crouched by it, touching it and adjusting it, like junior dressers arranging the garments of a revered actress. The barrel pointed at the sky.
The driver of the amphibian, seventeen, red-faced and with tight fair curls, strong, and stripped to the waist despite the sun, called over to O'Sullivan in Hebrew, pointing at the wreckage of our truck. The Irish border guard zoomed both hands through the air.
'Aeroplanes,' translated the young man enthusiastically in English. He had seen me and recognized me. I suppose the English was to impress me. 'It was aeroplanes, eh ?'
'No,' said O'Sullivan quietly. 'Bloody carrier pigeons.' He walked forward. 'How far are you going anyway ?' he asked.
'Maybe to Beersheba,' said the boy. 'Want a ride ? Today it's free.' He grinned at me, wanting me to admire his English.
'Everyone up on the amphibian,' ordered O'Sullivan, wheeling about in the heavy dust. We all climbed over the hull of the ungainly thing and with a quivering engine cough it moved reluctantly up the desert road.
'I don't think much o' the camouflage,' commented O'Sullivan to the driver. 'What's your name ?'
'Solen,' replied the boy. He smiled as though he was driving a new sports car on a lovely day.
'I'm
Segan Mefakeach
O'Sullivan,' said O'Sullivan. The exotic title again sounded strange from him. He moved over a few inches so the boy could see me. 'And this is Mr Hollings, the English concert pianist.'
I was surprised by his formality and the strange deference which came into his tone when he introduced me. I know Mr Hollings,' said Solen respectfully. I was at the concert. It was most fine.'
He whirled the big steering wheel and we took a slow corner like a great, stiff armadillo. 'The colours are not good for the desert,' he admitted returning to the matter of camouflage. 'They are good for the Gulf of Eilat, for the sea, but not good for the desert.'
I should think not,' said O'Sullivan. 'This contraption can be spotted miles away.'
The young man looked hurt. 'Cont... contrap?'he asked. 'What is that? You mean it is not good?'
O'Sullivan said: 'Sure, the thing's all right. But I don't go a lot on the colours. The blue and white stripes, patriotic though they might be.'
'We
want
to be seen,' answered Solen patiently. 'We are out here waiting for Arab jets. Perhaps the ones which hit your truck. Who was killed ?'
'Herr Scheerer,' I said. "The conductor of the orchestra the other night.'
Solen shook his head in a strangely elderly fashion. 'It is bad to be killed in another man's fighting,' he said solemnly.
'How are you waiting for the jets?' I asked. Every time he turned the ungainly vehicle around another bend in the desert way the sweat oozed freshly from his thick face and big body.
'He means we're a decoy,' explained O'Sullivan. 'We're out here so that they'll attack us.'
'Jesus Christ,' I said.
'That's my sentiments,' said O'Sullivan. 'But it's a long walk to Beersheba and it's a hot day. Let's hope they don't notice our beautiful bright blue and white stripes in the middle of this red desert.'
I looked around. Shoshana and Dov were looking in detail at the old machine gun mounted behind us. Metzer and Zoo Baby were leaning against the vibrating hull of the amphibian, Metzer looking apprehensively at the sky and Zoo Baby as relaxed as a day-tripper. Mendel and the other musicians were squatting like a trio of monkeys at the rear arguing about music. They waved their hands, made rising and falling movements with their fingers and hummed and sang snatches.
'Surely we're not attracting Egyptian jets in the hope of shooting them down with that thing are we ?' I asked nodding at the gun.
'It is possible,' said Solen seriously. 'But up in the sky also - somewhere - we have an Israeli jet fighter, a Mirage, which is waiting for Arabs to find us and attack us.'
'Only one?'
'One only,' he smiled. 'It is enough. The others are killing the Egyptian Air Force on the ground. The news is good from the war. We have had many victories this morning.'
'I can tell you two Egyptian jets they didn't get on the ground,' I grumbled.
'Ah,' he sighed happily. 'Some got away. From Luxor they came, those two. Perhaps they will find us.'
He sounded as though he had the entire conduct of opera
tions of war completely in his seventeen-year-old grasp. He
grinned at my consternation. That's how they all were.
'Every night for two weeks I have driven this road in this boat,' he said. 'Two big tank carriers, some other trucks and me in this. With kilometres of chains and other things making a noise. I know the road very well by now.'
'They've been pretending to be an armoured column,' explained O'Sullivan. 'Christ, the noise they made you'd have thought it was a Panzer Division. And the Arabs have been listening to it and concluded it was a big armoured movement to the gulf. So you can bet they've shifted some of their stuff down to the south to be ready for this phantom army.' He laughed quietly. 'You've got to go along with them, these Jews,' he said. "They're a weird bloody bunch, but they do have ideas,'
'Like sending this thing out as a decoy,' I said. 'When you come to think about it, O'Sullivan, this isn't much of a life for an international concert artist, is it?'
He laughed. 'You should have stayed in Eilat,' he said. 'Though things might be very hot there by now.'
'Especially with a Jewish Army made up mostly of ghost noises,' I replied. 'My God, I could have been at the Winter Gardens Bournemouth this week.'
'Aye,' he agreed sagely. 'And we might all be paddlin' by the sea, or doing something else. But we're not, Mister Hollings. We're in the middle of a desert and a war, both of them bloody hot.'
Shoshana screamed, 'There!'
Her voice sounded girlish and excited. I knew it was the jets. I could hear them immediately but I couldn't see them.
'There!' Shoshana called again. She was pointing and the two exhilarated boys were swinging the wobbly machine gun about. I still couldn't see anything. The sky was full of midday glare.
'Do we jump out?' I asked O'Sullivan. I was surprised to find my tone weary, unemotional.
'You bet your sweet arse we jump out,' he said. He turned about and called:
'Hachutza! Hachutza!'
the word Dov had used before. Solen was still driving the amphibian at its full ten knots. The two boys were swivelling the gun ambitiously towards the line of the approaching jets. I caught hold of Shoshana's arm and pulled her towards the side, but she shook herself free. We jumped independently. I struck the broken road heavily and rolled in the way they taught me in the British Army, which was not the right thing. It is fine in English mud but damaging among stones and outcrops of a painful desert. I felt my face cut and my lip split. I tumbled to my feet, frightened now, and began running for the cover of some elder rocks. Shoshana and Zoo Baby were scrambling away at an angle to me. I couldn't see the others.
I heard the old machine-gun fire before the planes used their cannon. It was obviously much too early, but the boys couldn't wait. Then the planes were on all of us, their cannon fire spitting ahead of them.
I was very afraid that time. Like some burrowing creature I kicked and wriggled into a narrow crevice, realized that it was too shallow and, in panic, tried to wriggle out again. But the first of the Migs was homing in on us then, very low, cannons clattering and the shells bouncing and bursting among the outcrops and the gullies. I cringed back into the rocks, hands beseechingly over my head, waiting for the dreadful second when I would die. I thought of them dropping another canister and this time it would explode.
The second Egyptian pilot held back behind the first, by about a minute, and then came screeching in firing as he descended. Even between the fire and the explosions I could hear shouts from those about me. The first jet had merely swung down and fired indiscriminately at the general area, but the second.went for the blue and white striped amphibian, standing invitingly, blatant as a target in the red road. I realized this because none of the second salvo of cannon shells hit among the rocks where we were lying. Then I heard the amphibian blow up with a fearful noise and the plane wheeled away like some joyriding bird.
My head was buried, first by my hands and then by an avalanche of loose sand and grit thrown and disturbed by the explosions. I pushed this debris away and squirmed around so that I could see the vehicle. The body of the young man who had driven it, Solen, was hanging over the snout, his naked back and his hanging head like a carcass ready for the hook. I could not see the two enthusiastic youths who had been behind the machine gun. The explosion had torn the metal plates of the strange truck and it was spread open like an ugly tin box. It was burning sedately, being worked over by the smaller pedestrian flames that follow an explosion and the first fierce fire.
I saw Zoo Baby, Dov and then O'Sullivan run from their cover towards the road. I looked about for Shoshana and saw her walking briskly in the same direction, holding her forearm and with thin blood running between her ringers. Scrambling up
from my place oddly reminded me of being half buried
in playing on some childhood beach, forgotten until then. My face was stiff with blood, not serious blood, merely gashes and scratches from my rolling, running and hiding.
Shoshana looked at me as I stood and I thought a small scornful expression came to her face as I, automatically, brushed myself down.
'Are you hurt?' I went close to her.
'A small thing,' she said continuing to walk towards the three men and the amphibian. Metzer was not there and I looked about for him. Two of the other three musicians were helping the third out into the open from a place where he had hidden. It was Haim Mendel, the doleful orchestra leader and reluctant air-warden. They moved towards us and he hung on to their shoulders as he walked between them.
'Let me see your arm,' I said to Shoshana.
'It is a small thing,' she repeated sullenly. 'Why do you want to look? Are you a doctor?'
I said nothing more to her. I felt my anger coursing through me; anger at her and at myself for being stuck here at all. Zoo Baby, Dov and O'Sullivan stood in a group, away from the burning amphibian like gardeners disposing of rubbish. Shoshana called something to them in Hebrew, but Zoo Baby without turning around made a hopeless sign with his hands.
'Hem mechusalim,'’
he said to her when we got there. Then to me. 'Finished. All finished.'
'Where was your wonderful Air Force ?' I asked. 'Weren't they supposed to be up there to deal with the Migs? I thought that was the whole idea.' Then I said to myself sardonically, but only to myself because I did not want to elaborate on their failure, their hopelessness: 'The decoy, the hunter and the hunted.'
At that moment I could not help feeling how pathetic they were, these Jews. Standing in that deathly and isolated place, with O'Sullivan whispering, 'Shit. Shit. Shit,' to himself, I looked at the others, at their helplessness after their bombast, and I felt sorry for them. For the first time I thought, I felt certain, that they would all be wiped out by the end of the month. The Arab would accomplish what the Nazi had failed to do. Finish them.
Metzer had remained back, meeting the two men who were helping Mendel across the dusty place. The group stood for a moment in the sun while Metzer looked at Mendel's dragging leg. Then the three men stood around, discussing the leg, and eventually carried on towards us in a shambling echelon.