Authors: Lesley Thomas
'You'd better move out, Mr Hollings,' he said as he inched towards me. 'I can't get through.'
'What about this stuff,' I asked. 'It might come down.'
'Stick your belly in then, because I'm coming past and I don't reckon there's a lot of room for the pair of us and this kid.' I pushed back and he took her through. I could hear her crying loudly out in the open air. Then he came back. He went right down into the heart of the debris again and moved his torch on to the other people down there. Then the bombardment restarted, the shells breaking into the ground and the wreckage under which we were crouched rocking and creaking. Cascades of small debris were running over my head and shoulders. I could hear Shoshana, then Dov, urging us to come out. But O'Sullivan did not reply to them.
'Can you hold it another minute ?' he asked me.
I was breaking under the weight and choking with the chuting of the dust and the brittle debris about me. 'Yes,' I said. 'I'll hold it, I think. I feel like Atlas.'
He moved around down there like a lizard, his torch sweeping before him and he went from the now still mother to the father and then to the child. Another rending explosion sent the rubbish around us jumping and the little tunnel was thick with dust. I supposed we were six feet below the surface debris. I wondered how long it would take them to excavate us. My nose and my eyes were clogged and I could feel a great pile of dust sitting on my head. O'Sullivan crawled back.
'Fine, Mr Hollings,' he commented. 'Would you like to leave now because there's nothing anyone except God can do for those down there.'
'Dead?'I said.
'Aye. I had a look at them. And there'll be two more unless we're lucky.'
'You'd better go first,' I said.
'That's gallant of you,' said O'Sullivan.
'Gallantry has fuck all to do with it,' I said. 'If I let go we'll probably both be caught. Get out quick. I'm coming right after you.'
He went, bowing and moving quickly but economically like a man trying to duck out of a pub brawl. Once he was clear I made to go after him. But there were three swiftly successive explosions, probably mortar shells, and the whole sagging mass I was supporting heaved and yawned. It was killing me to hold it now. I was covered in dry muck and I could not see nor hardly breathe. But I held it until the shuddering had ceased. Then I let it go.
At first I took my support away gingerly, easily, and very fearfully, expecting it to immediately fall upon me. I wondered if this sort of stuff crushed you or merely suffocated you. But it held, precariously it held. There was a space, air, between my shoulders and the passage wall. I moved out like a thief, treading carefully up the tunnel, very afraid now, terrified unless the bombardment should come near again.
It was only a few feet but it seemed like miles. I had a funny prick of Godly conscience which told me if I had not made love to Shoshana, a married woman, a few hours before I might have more strength now. I suggested now that God should overlook it, and worked my way towards the sweet-smelling air at the top of the hole. I made it just in time. The yellow-flashing guns were going from both sides now, but it was three Israeli jet fighters which flung themselves across the border and flew very low over us which caused the entire tunnel to cave and collapse.
Zoo Baby patted me. Then Shoshana was about me, arms
about me, kissing my dirty neck, while Dov brushed the piles
of concrete dust from my hair and from behind my ears. Zoo Baby said: "Those planes fly too low. Maybe we should complain.'
The bus had gone with the two children to the hospital. Shoshana said she thought the first one had died, but they could not be certain because the Red Cross man who had arrived with the bus had been hit by a shell splinter and was dying himself. There was nobody else qualified to know for certain.
I shook myself free of some of the dirt. O'Sullivan was already brushed off and sitting sedately in the back of the jeep. I suppose that took you back ?' he said amiably as Zoo Baby started the engine.
'Back to where?' I asked.
'Well, you know, the Blitz,' he smiled. He looked twenty years older than he had looked the night when I first met him.
'Not really,' I said. 'I lived in a village in the West Country and there wasn't much of a blitz. A couple of land mines in the fields, killing a horse and some sheep, and three bombs dropped by Germans in a hurry to get home. One landed in the churchyard and threw up a lot of people we'd thought we'd seen the last of.'
He smiled. 'Christ Almighty,' he said. 'You should have been Irish.'
'And end up in the Jewish Border Police?'
He leaned close, to whisper, but as though we now had some bond and he were anxious to correct some grave misunderstanding. I was in the Congo with the Irish Army, you know. And in Cyprus. An Irishman has to go a long way before he can find an official fight.'
I thought the Irish Army was there to keep the peace,' I said.
'It's the same thing in the end,' he answered. His voice went lower. 'Before I got this job I offered my services to the Arabs but the buggers turned me down. So I rang up the Israeli Embassy and asked them. There's nothing personal in it for me.'
Fourteen
Arriving back at the Press house near the Mandelbaum Gate we discovered that half the big room had collapsed, the debris providing a convenient stage for the bouncy Major de Groucy. O'Sullivan said: 'Now doesn't he look fine and operatic up there with all the gunfire flashing behind him.' The correspondents, some of them fresh from Tel Aviv, others tired and bent from the strain of what they had seen and known, stood for a briefing under the ceiling of the remainder of the room, which had been temporarily secured by a couple of sinewy timbers. The major, in his bandages and with his martyred arm, stood on the rubble reading from a communique. He glanced up as we walked in and a little spasm of pain crossed his face, either his reaction to our arrival or part of his wounded-soldier act.
"These Jordanian donkeys are lethal,' I whispered to Shoshana. She smiled absently, but she was listening to de Groucy. Her love in the nursery and her full happiness when I managed to climb safely from the shelled house were now forgotten by her. Now she was cool and occupied again with the business of her war.
There were some American and European correspondents near the front and they asked that the details Major de Groucy had been giving should be repeated in English. He was pleased to demonstrate his lingual ability and with a small plaintive gasp and a courageous rubbing of his damaged ribs he began again, telling that more than three hundred Arab planes had been destroyed by the Israeli Air Force, something I still did not believe, and saying that the Egyptians in Sinai and Gaza were cracking under the pressure of the Jewish armoured thrust.
'We have had a good day of war,' he said modestly. 'Here in Jerusalem our tanks - they are British Centurions of course - have overcome great difficulties and are well within the Arab sector, moving both sides of the Old City. All Holy Places, Christian, Moslem, and, even Jewish, will be protected as far as possible. We hope to be at the Wailing Wall tomorrow. The Chief Military Rabbi, General Schlomo Goren, has been told by General Narkiss to prepare his trumpet.' This caused an appreciative stir among the journalists.
'Is that official - you intend to go on to Jericho, then?' asked a serious young American correspondent in a green uniform with 'Vietnam' written on a shirt flash. 'With the trumpet I mean.'
'The walls will tumble,' forecast Major de Groucy complacently.
'How bleeding Biblical,' I thought. My God, they annoyed me when they started acting up like this. Their piffling propaganda, their bristling over-confidence. You would have thought they had chosen God instead of him choosing them. I wish they had seen the two little girls we loaded into the bus half an hour before.
'What is happening now?' asked one of the new correspondents. 'Are your troops going over the wall into the Old City?'
The major shook his head solemnly. "The next action? I would not be surprised if it is against the Police School. It is heavily guarded by the Arab Legion and we have a requirement to break through so that our forces can reach Mount Scopus and cut the Jerusalem to Ramallah road.'
When he said, 'We have a requirement,' I winced because one of the Vietnam Americans had used the phrase in his question and de Groucy had salvaged it immediately.
'One more question, Major,' said one of the Americans. 'Where did you get your wounds ?'
There was a quick guilty glance at our group from de Groucy. He spread his hands and he shrugged. Then he smiled blatantly in our direction and laughed a brave but secretive laugh. 'It is nothing,' he shrugged. 'Shall we say that I collided with an Arab donkey.' A bellow of laughter came from the correspondents and some of them wrote in their notebooks.
As we left the place one American, still shaking his head and chuckling' said to me: 'Collided with an Arab donkey! They sure are something, these people, don't you think?'
'Oh, I do,' I said. 'I really do.'
We went out into the night again. The guns were busy to north and south. Zoo Baby had remained outside with the jeep. He said he had been told that the paratroops we saw at the zoo had occupied some of the gradually rising ground in the Sheikh Jarah district not far from the Mandelbaum Gate, and that we could go to one of the forward observation posts, if Shoshana required it.
As she spoke two arms of light reached across the city on to the distant Arab area. "The searchlights from the Histadrut,' said Dov. 'We will be attacking the Police School now.' Three low-bellied jet planes came from behind us almost immediately and curved like birds on to the point where the searchlights were fixed. They fired their cannons as they went in and then a second formation dropped from the hills and bomb flashes jumped among the white walls of the buildings.
'Let us watch,' said Shoshana. We followed her into the jeep. We felt we were an odd, renegade, exclusive gang, moving about the fringe of the battle. None of the other correspondents, even the women, had escorts and I was willing to wager that there were no other international, neutral, concert pianists involved in the battle for the city that night.
Zoo Baby drove up through the broken streets in the same direction as we had taken earlier in the day. We passed the Savoy Hotel and saw the robed proprietor, the man who had served us drinks, in the enclosed garden trying to clear some of the debris. Dov said: "That Arab is a businessman. Today he clears up, tomorrow he cleans and polishes and maybe paints a little. The next day he will be serving
lokchen
soup and
gefuelltefische.'
We drove for another half a mile, the conflict spilling over
to our right. In the night-time flashes of the guns we could see the Israeli tanks nudging forward and the paratroops moving behind them. Zoo Baby manoeuvred the jeep over choppy pieces of road, and curled it around shell and bomb craters. At one point we came upon a donkey cropping the gritty grass at the roadside and we all laughed and howled for Major de Groucy. We were near the battle, but apparently safe from it. The fighting was growing in the area to one flank, but on the other the hills were quiet in the night.
'First, I think, this place,' said Zoo Baby. He said something to Dov in Hebrew and Dov nodded after looking at O'Sullivan. Dov turned to Shoshana, but spoke in English. 'It will be no good to get too close, because of the planes arriving to bomb the Police School. I think maybe we can see everything from here.'
'But
here?’
asked Shoshana doubtfully. 'It is not a good place for us.' She argued further in Hebrew, but eventually nodded doubtfully. Zoo Baby took the jeep through a narrow alley and stopped outside a wooden door. We went through the door and into a dark garden.
Dov said to me: 'I told you of this place. This is the Garden of the Tomb. This is where, so some say, Jesus was buried.' He pointed through the darkness. 'Over there, in the wall. That is the Tomb.' He walked on along a narrow path, me behind, the others following. The garden was thick with warmth and sharp with spicy smells; peaceful, hardly stirring, even though the war was only half a mile beyond its wall. We stepped carefully through the vines and the hanging flowers. Dov said: 'And beyond here,
there -
where you can see the dark rock - that is, so they say, Golgotha, Calvary, the place of crucifixion. From there we will watch the fighting.'