Authors: Lesley Thomas
He smiled gratefully. I did not know whether it was for the reassurance or the pun at first, but then he said: 'Very graceful. Symbols and cymbals.'
I wanted to return to the room. But he touched then tugged my sleeve and said: 'Do you think America or England would come to help us?'
I began to feel annoyed at his insistence. 'You won't need it,' I smiled firmly. 'There will be nothing. No trouble, no war. You see.'
He shook his curious brush head. 'I cannot see how it can be avoided,' he said. He looked at me, tilting his chin. 'Everyone in the world thinks we are so brave,' he smiled. 'Israel will take on the earth! And then take the afternoon off! Ha, I wish it were so. Some are brave, my friend, and some are not. I am not. I fear it so much. I have sent my two sons to Rome. They went two weeks ago and I miss them. But I do not want them here. My wife, she will get out tomorrow. I would like to go too. The truth is I do not
want
to fight, to die, probably. Not for anything. Not even for Israel.'
This time I made a determined turn into the room and the party again. 'Patriotism has become devalued,' I assured him. 'It is not what it was. With the Bomb and one thing and another we've given war a bad name.'
We walked into the room. It was like entering a new layer of warmth. A tall, tanned woman in a long red dress leaned towards me and said, 'It was brilliant. So beautiful.' I would have liked to have stopped near her but Tobin was still worrying at my side.
'Patriotism, you say, may be old-fashioned. But not for the Israelis, unfortunately,' he went on. 'To be a person of this country you must fight. It is part of being a citizen. And I don't like it.'
I was introduced to a stony-looking archaeologist who took me to meet a seedy horticulturist who knew the woman in the red dress and introduced me to her. Her name was Selma Haydn. She was in her forties but good, taller than me, leisurely; a woman who was used to having time to care for herself, to dress herself with concern and finesse. Her tan was a sunbathing tan, gentle layers of it, not the harsh sun-brown of the outdoor working woman of Israel. She had careful make-up and veneered nails. Her fingers were slim and soft and she had a well-tended smile. This one had never worked on any kibbutz.
'Our friend Tobin has been worrying you about the war,' she suggested at the outset. She had a firm English accent.
'A trifle,' I agreed. 'But he is one of millions.'
She was drinking a Martini. She sighed. 'The war, the war. Everyone talks about it as though it were an accomplished fact, as though it were all definite and done. By one side or the other. I find it very tiring.'
'You're English,' I said. I grinned at her. 'Let me see - perhaps a girl ambulance driver in the war. Singing while the bombs fell.'
She looked at me quietly. Then she smiled: 'I'm a bit disappointed that you pinned down my age so quickly.'
'I am sorry,' I said.
'Oh, it's fair if it shows,' she protested holding her hands forward. 'I'm "White Cliffs of Dover" vintage, all right. But you got the other thing wrong. The bombs. Jesus Christ, you wouldn't have got me in that business. I spent the whole time in Bermuda. Every last day of it. I remember watching the Duke of Windsor playing golf in August 1940. I was having a lesson at the Mid-Ocean Club from the professional. In those days I was something of a golfing girl wonder. And that was while brave old Britain was standing alone. She was standing without the duke and without me, just to name two.'
'He couldn't help it,' I said. 'As I remember.' She wasn't being loud about it, talking quietly and not rattling it off like someone who has told it many times as a joke.
"No, it was none of his fault,' she agreed reasonably. 'It must have been nasty for him to be playing golf in Bermuda while all that bombing and suchlike was going on. He holed out from a bunker at Riddells Bay I remember. There was a picture in the paper.
'But I
could
help it. And I wasn't going to budge. My father had gone scurrying back to the old country to do his bit, whatever his bit was. He was put on cutting up ration books and he got killed by a fire engine one perfectly peaceful lunchtime in Birmingham. I suppose that's counted as a war death, isn't it?'
I laughed. Her dress was low, over one shoulder and her right breast was swollen out half clear of the downward slope of the material.
'My father was something like that,' I admitted. 'He deserted from the Army two weeks after war was declared. He simply cleared out, and then dropped dead from a heart attack in our front parlour. The War Office, through some strange process, sent my mother a telegram informing her of his death, just as if she didn't know. In a way we were quite proud of him. He was one of the first British soldiers to
go.'
She laughed like a girl. Then she became quiet and said: 'It was splendid tonight. Quite superb.'
I nodded my thanks. 'Something happened to everyone,' I said. 'It was like going for a ride.'
'If you had been a Jew I would have thought it was the emotion of this immediate time,' she said. She spoke now very correctly, not lightly as she had done while talking about Bermuda. 'The audience was full of it. Just exploding. And it caught the orchestra too.'
I smiled my agreement. 'There was a feeling,' I said. 'And I don't have to be a Jew to know it. Are you Jewish ?'
'Christ no!' she said quite loudly. 'I'm an Israeli, I suppose. I married one of the buggers. He's a reserve officer, a colonel this week, I think, and tonight he's out on the Golan Heights waiting for the Syrians. He's a soil engineer, always picking up bits of dirt and running his fingers through it treating it like gold. He's very nice really. A bit Jewish though. Not that he can help that. He can't wait to get into Syria just so that he can start stealing the earth from their back gardens. He says it's unique around Damascus.'
'People want to fight for odd reasons,' I observed.
'Ah, he wants to fight for the fighting too,' she said. 'They all do'. Her fingers took in the room. 'They're all so bloody effervescent. They're like the damned sixth form. All in love with somebody, and then somebody else. Can't wait to get out of school to have a battle with the kids next door.'
'And the kids next door also want a fight,' I pointed out.'That's the damn pity. Typical too. That's another lousy school.'"What will you do if it starts?'She pouted. 'I'll tell you what I'll be doing,' she said determinedly. 'Playing golf.''Like nineteen forty,' I said.
'Right. I shall go up to Caesarea and I'll play golf through
until either the Jews win or the Arabs arrive to rape me
or whatever.'
I laughed but then I thought she was serious. 'Why don't you go home to England then ?'
'Home ? England ? God, I couldn't stand it. Not Haywards Heath in June. I'd rather stay. If the Arabs have me then they have me.'
'You concentrate on your golf,' I advised. 'There's nothing like holing a few long putts to help the war effort.'
'How long will you be in Tel Aviv ?' she asked.
'Always excepting Acts of War, Acts of God, and that sort of thing, I shall be here for three more days. When the tour was arranged I had some idea of making it part-holiday. Then, of course, I didn't know everybody would be sharpening swords. After that I go down to Eilat with the orchestra and then to Jerusalem and to Haifa. And then home to England in June.'
From the edge of her eye she saw the worried Tobin coming towards us. 'Please come to my house for lunch tomorrow,' she said. 'At twelve. I will send a car to the hotel for you. Which is it?'
'The Dan,' I said. 'Let's hope they don't start shooting before then.'
'It's the Sabbath,' she assured me. 'It won't be on the Sabbath.'
Tobin had heard. He, as host, had ostensibly abandoned his depression in the company and now said to Mrs Haydn, 'War! Which war is this?' He laughed, his smile splitting unconvincingly under the ugly mop. Igor, who was sharing the car back to the city, stood by. Tobin laughed again, even less reassuringly. 'It is all just noise and propaganda,' he said. 'Symbols and cymbals.'
Igor raised his Russian eyebrows at me. I shrugged.
Three
It was one in the morning when we reached the Dan Hotel
but the city was still brimming with light and people. Igor went to his room, but I changed my clothes and went out
again walking in the cool air up through some streets of
trees until I came once more to the Dezingov.
The clamour and the activity were not slowed. Now I was no longer in the car I knew there was music everywhere along the broad channel of the street, threaded between the people's voices and the coughing and blowing of the cars jammed under the blatant white street lights.
Newspapers flapping like birds around the café£ tables went from hand to eager hand, were pointed at and discussed. The man bowed over the terrible old fiddle was still there, scraping at it tenderly, as though trying to nurse some sweetness, some life, into it. The boyish soldiers in their uniforms of green and brown, or splashed with camouflage like an animal skin, still lounged at the tables laughing with dark girls. One table was littered with sub-machine-guns. The soldiers wore ungainly long boots, laced high, and shapeless little hats. They did not look smart or alert. They looked tired, untidy, and not very tough.
I sat with a cognac for twenty minutes, watching it all. No
one recognized me and I was, for once, grateful. They were
too occupied with their arguments and discussions, their
plans, their newspapers. They seemed like massed swimmers
jumping in and out of a pool. Two young, brown women
with cherubic faces leaned back in their chairs, their strong,
long legs bridging to the table before them, singing quietly in
fine unison. The soldiers were examining marked out battle
maps on the stained cloth with the interest and enthusiasm
of hikers. On the other side of me six deaf and dumb
people talked excitedly with whirling fingers.
There was a flashing sign in red Hebrew and blue English across the road, a hundred yards up the vibrant thoroughfare. I realized that I had come out of the streets with the trees to within a short distance of the newspaper office where Shoshana worked.
I finished the cognac and walked among the promenaders to the corner building. From open windows on the first floor the office fights flew into the street. People were standing thickly about the ground-floor windows reading news bulletins. I went by them and up the stairs to the first floor. The rooms there were full of yellow hazy lights, and men in white shirts, sweating in the night heat, were hung over desks and typewriters, or moving about carrying wet printers' proofs delicately between fingers and thumbs as though they were fly-papers. The building began to shake, a long noise above the claustrophobic din of the people in the office. The presses in the basement were moving.
I walked through the activity, unquestioned but hesitant, unwilling to speak to anyone in case I intruded on something momentous. There was a sharp bend in the big room and I went around it like a stray cat. Immediately I saw Shoshana wearing khaki shirt and trousers, which made her look small. She was with some white-shirted men around a coffee machine, left hand on her hip, right hand lifting a paper cup. She had her back to me, but two of her companions looked up at me and she turned and saw me. The men looked pale against her. Her skin was deep and dark, far more than I remembered it, and her hair was much fairer, and tied behind her neck with a small band.
The coffee was near her mouth. She stopped it there and put it down, then laughed and turned towards me, glad to see me. Her face was strong and striking, but she looked hung with tiredness. Christopher she smiled. Then, 'Mister Hollings! Ha! How strange to see you here. So far from England's cold.'