Authors: Lesley Thomas
'Nobody's talking, naturally,' he said. 'But my guess is that the showdown will be here, at the crossroads of the Jerusa-lem-Ramallah road. General Ben-Ari's tanks will be all through with the American Colony by now. That is where they'll go and wait for the Arabs, who will also try to get there to ambush the Jews.' Then he added brightly: 'My guess is that the Jews will get there first.'
I could hardly stand seeing her leaning over him, so close, her breasts bulging within her shirt and the bulge touching his shoulder. I wondered how a man could have been a correspondent in the places he talked about and still be so white-faced.
He folded the map over and consulted a new strip of it. 'Up here,' he said. He seemed only to talk to Shoshana. 'There is a big house belonging to a nice guy who is a doctor. I was here last year and I met him and went to the house.'
'But he is a Jordanian, this doctor?' said Shoshana. Her head and her breasts came up from his shoulder. 'This is what you mean ?'
'Sure,' replied Cumberland agreeably. 'He's a specialist in rheumatic complaints. There's a lot of rheumatic fever in Jerusalem, you know. He told me. It's the changes in the temperature at different times of the year. Anyway, the whole of the area down here and then up to the Ambassador Hotel is now in Israeli hands, so we should be able to get high up above the junction of the Ramallah road with the Jerusalem road, and get a great view of what goes.'
'We will go,' announced Shoshana, immediately swallowing her prejudice. 'I will come with you in this jeep.' She looked at me and smiled at my uncertainty. 'And Christopher will ride with us too.'
'Get aboard, Chris,' said Cumberland. O'Sullivan, Dov and Zoo Baby who had stood watching this strange breed of uniformed man, went off to the other vehicle. We started down the alley, until we were almost upon the wall of the Old City. There was a distance of about a hundred yards when we were exposed to the Arab troops on the wall and a quick but harmless stream of machine-gun fire flew after us decapitating some tall crimson flowers topping a bank above us.
'Bad boys,' commented Cumberland, driving quickly and calmly.
We had all ducked, doubled up in the jeep, with the firing. As we turned north and were no longer visible from the wall, we straightened. Shoshana said: 'Today or tomorrow the Israelis will be on the wall.'
'That's a good bet,' agreed Cumberland. 'It looks like the whole thing is going your way. You'll have it cleaned up by the Sabbath, I guess.'
'You heard on the radio about Sinai ?' she asked.
'Sure, the Egyptians have been tough,' he said. 'But they've been turned around and it looks like they're going to have to swim home.'
She laughed. 'We will send our Navy for them,' she said. I put my fingers over my eyes; my eyes aching with tiredness and smoke. The streets we were now travelling had seen the advance of the tanks and the paratroopers. The fighting had gnawed its way through the buildings, leaving great holes and bites. The debris looked as though it had been spat from some huge mouth. Some Arabs were already emerging, stumbling about and looking with strange eyes at familiar things changed so quickly. They made no fuss nor noise, but walked about viewing the damage with the outward serenity of visitors to some ruined civilization of long ago. We reached a wider space, which had been a square. Here the house fighting must have been savage because the houses had fallen all around; the dead soldiers, Israeli and Arab, were being cleared from the area. In the square were two lorries loaded with Jordanian prisoners, crammed and sullen, standing without their trousers. Their trousers were piled like a bundle waiting for a laundry on the rubble of what had been some kind of fountain in the middle of the square. Water still sprang hopefully among the fallen masonry.
I could hear Zoo Baby laughing at the Arabs without their trousers, but Shoshana looked away from them. They stared down at her when we had to pull up to let one of the prisoner lorries move through, looking down into the jeep, a small interest suddenly lighting their empty faces. Shoshana looked away from them but some Arab women with children and goats running about them, walked towards the jeep from the other direction and stood ten paces away staring at Shoshana.
She looked back angrily at them, as though she were the prisoner, and then returned suddenly to the captive soldiers. One of the Arabs was urinating over the side of the truck, his tool big and hanging, his expression bored. His urine hit the dry stones of the square noisily. 'Cannot we move ?' Shoshana asked Cumberland. I don't like them. I can't stand to see them looking.'
I would say that you're not the Personality of the Year with them,' answered Cumberland, reasonably. 'We all have our prejudices, I guess. And they've got theirs. They don't like the Israelis. And they ain't going to like you any better from now. You can tell that.'
We moved forward as soon as the truck had cleared from our path. Shoshana kept her head dropped forward from then on. She would not look up, but remained sullenly gazing at the floor of the jeep. We turned through the rubbled street and then began moving uphill until we were facing the growing hills and the amber city began to fall away behind us. There were some rich houses crowning the elevated ground and Cumberland immediately turned into one courtyard and brought the jeep to a stop.
A bomb or a shell had demolished the right-hand wing of the long splendid house, giving it a spiked and tapering tail of white masonry. The fig trees in the courtyard were split and hanging in shreds like the hair of old crones. Glass, pieces of wood and stone were strewn about the circular courtyard path and outside the door of the house was a metal rocking-horse, its legs buckled, its expression sad. We walked towards the door. Cumberland pushed the horse as though anxious to see if it still worked. It rocked clumsily on its bent legs.
'Couple of kids,' he said as though that would explain everything. Shoshana was looking anxious and more uncertain than I would have thought possible for someone like her. I glanced at her, glad to see she was vulnerable. The horse, its metal burned black, its mane singed, was still rocking after Cumberland's push. Shoshana stopped it with her hands. We went into the house.
We were almost shot by three Israeli soldiers who came abruptly from the room to our left. They were nervous and Shoshana cried out to them in Hebrew as they raised their Uzzi machine guns. They had obviously just occupied the house and had been detailed to go out as sentries in the courtyard. They lowered their weapons and Shoshana spoke to them in swift Hebrew again. They directed her along the passage and then went out into the courtyard. I turned and watched them move towards the perimeter wall. One of them had set the horse rocking again.
Dov and the others had followed us into the house. It had a strange hollowed-out look about it. Some furniture and carpets were still in place, but there were chairs and tables and fine cabinets thrown against the walls of the long corridor. 'He was a wealthy doctor,' said Cumberland. 'He had some great stuff in this house.'
Inside a room overlooking a steep drop of ground was an Israeli observation post; an officer watching the gradual sunlight stretch its arms across the valley, two other soldiers kneeling as though in meditation by a radio set. The officer turned abruptly as we went into the room. He was round and red and he forgetfully kept the field glasses to his eyes as he turned about, dropping them to his chest with embarrassment when he realized what he had done. One of the disadvantages of having an army of civilians is that their occasional military unprofessionalism has to be overlooked.
Dov spoke to him in Hebrew and he was angry that we had arrived. He ill-temperedly motioned us towards a window in the adjoining room, muttering some annoyance which included the word 'Press', and we obediently trooped in there. Cumberland went back to speak to the officer with Dov as interpreter. We crouched at our window and watched the cascading valley, brown and amber, haphazard with white houses and green trees. It had already begun to take the increasing heat of the sun, and the dust which the night had settled was moving once more in little rocky pockets and crevices. Some goats grazed pessimistically about a hundred feet down, and beyond them the vacant roads, one to Jerusalem, the other reaching to Ramaliah, touched.
Cumberland came back with Dov. 'He says that my friend Doctor Asbar has gone to hospital with some of the Israeli and Jordanian wounded, and his wife and children are away. Nobody was on the rocking-horse when it got hit.'
He looked at Shoshana and she shrugged and said: 'Take the glasses. The Israeli tanks are hidden down there. They got here first, you see.' She handed O'Sullivan's field glasses to him and he turned them in a steady circuit over the ground below the window. His pulpy belly was hanging over his trousers in a damp cocoon. His sparse hair was sticking to his neck like the fine hair of a baby sticks. He was now chewing gum with a round, slow, movement.
O'Sullivan and I sat against a wall. Dov and Zoo Baby were standing in the shadows by the window viewing the valley, but keeping out of sight as if they too were part of the ambush. Shoshana had retained the glasses and her attention was fixed on the junction three hundred feet below. Cumberland was licking a stub of pencil like a railway clerk and making anxious heavy notes in an untidy little book.
I closed my eyes for the weariness of the past twenty-four hours was gaining on me. The daytime warmth was crowding into the room and some flies and other insects were moving about in the thickening air. I felt a layer of sleep over me, forming as it forms on a summer beach or in a midday park in England. I thought of Eastbourne and the gardens.
I slept for about twenty minutes and then woke reluctantly with O'Sullivan's thin elbow in my side. I was running with sweat within my clothes now and my mouth was thick and lined. I half rolled to the window where the others were already bent and watching.
Although it was still early the hillside was reflecting the high summer heat. The roads below were now less distinct. They were vacant except for the mildly majestic figure of an Arab on a donkey with a smaller donkey in tow, trotting carelessly along the route which was, within minutes, to be the conflict ground.
The Israeli tanks were crouched among the houses, behind walls and beneath trees on either side of the slopes. I could hear the red-faced officer in the next room giving orders to the wireless crew and then their voices came in to us as they talked to the tank commanders in their ambush positions.
We waited and watched the Arab and his two donkeys leave the road and take a rough, steep path into the rising hills. The noise from Jerusalem had settled and then we were clearly able to hear the squeaking tracks of the Jordanian tanks as they moved up towards the crossroads. 'They come now,' said Shoshana.
'I thought maybe it was mice,' said Cumberland. I decided I liked him.
Whatever the tank has done to revolutionize warfare it has done nothing to make it any quieter. You could hear them approaching a mile off, squealing and clanking, and coughing like sick old men as they came. From our place we could not see them until almost the last moment, but their hideous noise preceded them, getting louder and louder in the sun-filled valley. Waiting at that window was nothing like being hidden behind the sill of the hotel dining-room the previous afternoon. There we were yards from the waiting Arab soldiers, but here it was lofty and remote and safe. All we had to do was watch.
It was very sad seeing it take place. Knowing that it was going to happen. At that point I still knew no deep rights or wrongs or even sympathies for one side or another. I was there only because of Shoshana. I had seen and felt the bad breath of the battle and known, of course, that it involved me as much as every man around. But I had reacted to dead Jordanians equally as I had reacted to the little Jewish children they had brought through the tunnel from the wreckage of the house the night before. I was embarrassed for the prisoners deprived of their trousers and sorry for the elderly officer who had died by mistake in the hotel dining-room. But I still felt that I was outside it all. Like O'Sullivan and Cumberland I was there only by chance.
A Jordanian scout car, like a well-made tittle toy, came first into view, around a shoulder of yellowed rock. It had a mounted bazooka across its shoulder like an ungainly tree trunk. Two more little cars, neat and running abreast, followed it, and then the fat-bellied tanks, rolling like a cumbersome parade to the crossroads.
'He'll let the first bunch go through,' said Dov.
'He's watched his Red Indian films,' said Cumberland.
The Jewish commander let the Arab tanks come on, undisturbed and majestic, until they were astride the road junction.