Authors: Lesley Thomas
'The next move,
5
said Dov behind his coffee mug, 'will be the heights behind us, the Augusta Victoria area. Then the city will be surrounded.'
Zoo Baby said: 'Tomorrow we will pray at the Wailing Wall, you think?'
'Maybe tomorrow,' said Dov.
I was tired of them, their Wailing Wall, and their war. So I walked from the building into the hot sun and the disturbed dust. Feathers of surly smoke were hanging over the Mount of Olives and the sounds of the continuing conflict moved about the sacred hills. I was wondering where I could go to sleep for a while when I saw, through the trees below me, a house with cypresses in the garden, a neat white tower, and flying from a tower a brave Union Jack.
Sixteen
As I walked down the hill towards the house with its incongruous Union Jack I felt myself slumping with weariness. The battle in this part of the city was over and the people were beginning to move about the gaping streets. Jewish soldiers walked cautiously through the Arab places with that embarrassment peculiar to intruders. The Arabs kept their eyes down or their faces covered, except for the children who stood in little humps on the rubble and surveyed the conquerors with intense interest.
I went under torn trees, walked by military and civil vehicles hollowed and scarred by fire, and made detours around pyramids of debris. It seemed that the local population was attempting to occupy itself. One old man stood at the centre of a wrecked house hopefully but hopelessly sweeping with a broom.
When I was near Selma's house I looked across the valley to see if I could locate her other house in the Israeli sector. By working logically from the windmill at Yemin Moshe I fixed the general area but I was too fatigued to summon the concentration to pick out the single building among the other houses and the clustered trees.
Her Jordanian house was enclosed in its little garden, its small white turret giving it a minor regal distinction. The Union Jack that moved with sickly jerks in the small breeze was old and torn at the hems. There was a shell crater in the garden and the explosion had uprooted a family of tamarisk trees and thrown them against the windows of the house next door. All Selma's windows were smashed and against the portal of the open door was the ancient red racing bicycle which she had told me belonged to the postman.
I rang the bell politely and heard the muffled confusion that resulted within. The hall was two inches deep in battle dust and three apertures, like rough portholes, had been opened in the elegant wall to the right.
After a minute Selma herself came to the end of the passage, paused, and looked at me standing in the doorway.
'Did you get tired of the golf?' I asked.
'Sometimes you can't play alone very satisfactorily,' she said. She was holding on to the wall at her side and I could see she was crying. 'Oh, Christopher,' she said. 'I'm sorry about the mess the house is in.'
'Are you going to leave me at the door?' I asked.
She sniffed like a child. 'Please come in, darling. It's very strange but I thought somehow you would be here in Jerusalem.'
I walked towards her and she walked into my arms, lying tiredly against me. I could smell my mother's smell again. 'Yacob's dead,' she said. 'He was killed yesterday morning at El Arish.' She sniffed again. Her breasts were soft and pushed against me as though they needed me. 'He never knew about this house.'
'You did not want him to know, did you ?' I said.
'No, it was better that he did not. He would have thought it treacherous.'
She motioned me into what had been a large and fine room. Now it was in chaos, laden with dust and piled with furniture, curtains, books and crockery. It looked like a stage-property department.
'I brought everything I could salvage in here,' she shrugged. 'My God, Christopher, I've been so bloody frightened.' She hung on to me again and she cried heavily. I lowered her on to a pile of rugs. 'No,' she said. 'We can sit more comfortably over there. Just move those pictures.'
We lifted the paintings from a beautiful kidney-shaped settee and sat on its velvet. It felt firm under my aching backside.
'Why did you come back to Jerusalem ?' she asked me.
'You may well ask. At the moment I'm supposed to be a war correspondent.'
'That girl,' she guessed unhappily. 'The one from the newspaper?'
'A woman's intuition,' I answered.
'Is it?'
'Yes, I'm with her,' I admitted. 'But, my God, I didn't think I'd get into the middle of things like this.'
'Look at your hands,' she said sadly taking them. 'How will you be able to play ?'
I won't,' I said. 'But I'm lucky to have hands. That's how 1 feel about it. I had decided to go to Tel Aviv, to try and get a plane out, and I changed my mind. Then the jeep I was to travel in got a direct hit from a shell from this side. That could have been me.'
I am glad you are safe and I'm glad you are here,' she said still cradling my hands. I have been trying to shelter some of the people around here. They are down in the cellar.'
'The postman left his bike at the door,' I said. 'Why didn't you play golf, Selma ?'
'You know it was just a joke,' she said. I was frightened as hell when it all happened. I had come back to Jerusalem and I couldn't get out again because of the military. So I stayed in the other house, in the basement, by myself. An Arab shell went straight into the bedroom. The one we were in. Then, when the fighting had passed I walked over here to this house. And look what's been done to this.'
'I thought that might happen,' I said. 'You got it from both sides. You shouldn't spread your assets so widely. You got across here without trouble ?'
She smiled tiredly: I put a nice quiet dress on, picked up my handbag and simply walked through it all,' she said. 'You've never seen such a mess, but I could have been strolling down Bond Street for all anyone cared.'
'Jesus, I'm tired,' I said lolling full back against the settee. It was strange how at home I felt with her. She never worried me as Shoshana worried me. 'I've seen so many men killed in the past twenty-four hours.'
'That's wearying in itself,' she agreed sadly. 'Would you like a drink or some coffee? I can make some coffee. The drinks cabinet we would have to tunnel for.'
'Coffee is fine,' I agreed. 'Who have you got in the cellar?'
'Abdullah, the postman, two women from Hassan's house. You remember I told you about Hassan who used to let his goats feed in my garden. Poor old devil, God knows where he has gone.'
I sensed that she was hesitating. 'Anyone else?' I asked.
'How do you mean ?'
'Well, anyone else in the cellar.'
'No. There is no one else there,' she said. 'I'll get the coffee.'
She made it on a small stove in the adjoining room. There was a hatch, with one of its side pieces broken so that it seemed like a large fractured picture frame.
'You saw my Union Jack,' she called.
'Only you could have put that thing up in the middle of a war between the Jews and the Arabs. It's a wonder it wasn't the Rising Sun.'
I didn't have a Rising Sun,' she replied. 'I'm not patriotic, heaven knows, I've told you how I feel. But the Union Jack was handy.'
'A sort of flag of convenience,' I said.
'Quite. It was either that or the Greek flag. I told you, didn't I, that my mother and my stepfather used to fly them on their national days ?'
'Yes, you did. But why put it up now ? Were you hoping for some sort of immunity?'
'Something like that,' she admitted. I could hear her pouring the coffee. 'I had a mad thought that both sides might leave the house alone if that was flying above it.'
I looked about at the sad wreckage. 'Well, they didn't, did they,' I said. 'No respect these bloody little countries. I'm sorry about Yacob.'
'Yacob was run over by his own car,' she called. 'That was not very gallant, I'm afraid. They got stuck in a sand dune or something. Poor Yacob, to go like that on the first morning of a war would have upset him.'
'Wasn't your father run over in Birmingham during the Blitz. You told me that, didn't you?'
I heard her emit a small laugh. 'That's true. My relatives seem to make a habit of dying off rather unheroically.' She waited and then said clearly from the other room: 'Christopher, I
have
got some other people in the cellar.'
I was drifting towards sleep. 'I thought you had,' I said. She hurried into the room. Then she went back, brought the coffee in and set it down.
I don't know what the hell to do,' she confessed. 'These Israelis can be nasty, believe me. I know them very well. If they found me harbouring these soldiers.'
'Soldiers?'
'Three soldiers. Two are just Arab Legionnaires, peasant boys, both wounded. Not much, just grazes really. But the third is a Colonel somebody. Apparently he's some sort of intelligence officer and he knows a lot about the defences inside the Old City. He is terrified that the Jews will get him and make him talk. So I said he could hide down there.'
Wearily I said: 'Selma, you're out of your mind. For Christ's sake why get yourself involved like this?'
Her eyes were full of tears. I don't know, Christopher,' she said. I like them, I suppose. The Arabs. They are the only people I have ever liked or cared about.'
For her that was saying a lot. I put my arm out to her. 'You really ought to have gone to Haywards Heath, June or not,' I said. 'In the same way, I ought to be playing Beethoven in Eastbourne or even Bradford. God alone knows what we are doing here. I have never seen so much death and known so little about the need for it.'
'Do you want to sleep a while?' she asked. I wondered about Shoshana. I had left a message for her that I would be at the Press centre near the Mandelbaum Gate at one o'clock that afternoon and I would wait there until she arrived. But I had to sleep. 'If there is a spare bed,' I said, 'I could do with a nap.'
She took my hand and we went into another room. There was a hole in the roof opening out on to the splendid blue sky. It was a large bed, but with no linen or pillows. I pulled off my shoes and lay out on it luxuriously, feeling its soft but firm grip enfolding my tired body. Selma took her dress
off and lay down beside me, her adult softness moulding into
the bend in my chest and my raised legs. I was hardly aware of her. She had her back to me and I put my hands about her waist, to hold her, before I dropped to sleep.
Shoshana's young voice woke me from the deepest sleep in the afternoon, calling through the house after me. I found myself looking up from the deep bare bed to the great roof hole and the blue Jerusalem sky. From where I lay I could see the corner of the Union Jack on the flag mast flapping like a torn and Technicolored shirt tail.
Selma was not with me, but the place where she had slept was warm. She came into the room with the puzzled Shoshana.
Selma said: 'This young lady wishes to speak to Mr Hollings.'
'That's me,' I admitted, sitting up and trying to shrug the weariness away. I felt that what with the war and the women circumstances were becoming too involved.
'Why do you sleep here ?' asked Shoshana glaring at me and then at Selma.
'I thought it was the British Embassy,' I said. 'Didn't you see the flag on the roof?'
'In Tel Aviv is the British Embassy,' said Shoshana. I see the flag so I think this is where you are.'