Authors: Lesley Thomas
'It's not cold there now,' I said. She had a sheen of oil on one side of her face. 'Have they turned you into a mechanic ?' I smiled at her, thinking how weary her eyes looked.
She let out a half-laugh, her teeth showing quickly against the dark of her skin. 'Not yet. But there is time. I have been away.' She took my arm. 'Let us go and have a drink, if you have time. I am so tired.'
We went down to the street again. In the few minutes I had been in the newspaper office the people and the cars had thinned. She took me along the pavement, holding my arm still, almost dragging herself, not saying anything, until we came to some steps dropping to an open basement door. The door was almost round, like the end of a big pipe, and from the hollow came some indefinite jazz and a sulky fight.
'It won't be too bad,' she said. 'I would like to get somewhere
inside.
It will make me feel better. I have been in the open too long these days and nights.'
The cellar was crowded but quiet, the people listening to a man playing the vibes, leaning over the instrument lovingly, curiously like a carpenter making something intricate at a bench. There were two somnolent guitarists and a drummer like a shadow in the smoke at the extreme of the room. We found a table at the back near a whitewashed wall. The musicians were putting together something of their own, wandering about with the music, trying things, fitting bits together, unhurried, lost in it.
'I knew, of course, that you were coming to Israel,' she said watching the vibes player intently. 'But so many things are taking place . . .' She spread her hands and looked at me smiling. She was a Sabra, a third generation Israeli, the people they call after the prickly thorn of the desert, as she once told me. Her nose always looked to me as though it was spoiling her. It was not an ugly nose, but it seemed that it belonged to someone else, with a different face to hers. She had truly magnificent eyes, but that night the rings beneath them looked like the imprinted heels of two shoes.
'Who have you been fighting today?' I asked gently. 'You personally, I mean.'
She giggled quietly. 'I fight no one today,' she said. 'Maybe I look that way, but no fighting. Travel, travel, travel. They say this is a little country. Do not believe them. It is plenty.'
The waiter came through the haze with our drinks. It was close and sticky in the little place. 'What have you been doing?' I asked.
She drank. 'No, you first,' she insisted. 'Your concert was a magnificent success. Already I hear that in the office.'
'It went well,' I said seriously. 'Everyone wanted it to go especially well. The people, the audience, were unbelievable. And the orchestra -
boom?
I made an explosion with my hands.
'And the soloist?' she smiled.
'Never played better.
Magnifique!
She laughed now and ran her fingers across her cheek leaving tracks in the thin oil. 'That is better,' she said. 'That is more like you. This modesty is not becoming.' She looked closely at her hands and screwed up her nose in annoyance. 'Oil,' she said. 'Oil on my face. Like you say, maybe I am a mechanic'
The musicians came to the end of their journey and stopped, I applauded with the others but Shoshana lit a cigarette. They began again, slipping easily into the subdued music, the vibes thinking and hesitating as they sounded, the drums moving the piece along, but very slowly.
'You like this music?' she inquired as though surprised.
'Yes. I enjoy hearing them put it together. It is a luxury I would like myself.'
I like that one,' she said pointing to the vibes. 'So much like a slow musical box.'
'Where have you been?' I asked again.
'Everywhere,' she said wearily. 'I am tired so to cry. I have been in Gaza and along the borders of Sinai, and last week in the Golan Heights, where the bastard Syrians have been shelling the people gathering the crops and also in the villages. My driver was killed there on Friday. He was an old friend. There was a land mine and he was driving the jeep back to Tiberias to send something I had written for the newspaper. I had only left him a few moments before and he had gone two hundred metres along the road and the road exploded and the car was thrown off and he was killed in a moment.'
The vibes player was leaning close, nose over his keys as though seeking some small fault in them. His soft touches resounded deftly through the room. The drummer seemed to have fallen across his drums, the guitarist nodded at his fingers finding the strings and the bass player held the neck of his instrument like a man loving an ostrich.
'That must have been terrible,' I said inadequately.
She pushed the root of her hand across her cheek as though to push the surface oil away. 'My God this is going to be such a war,' she said. 'I have seen them all these days and nights lying in the hills and among the sand dunes. Lying there like dogs. Our side and their side. Waiting to get to each other.'
Her voice was slow. But she took a decisive drink. 'We cannot lose,' she said. 'We will not lose. That is not possible. They think they can come in and take us, but they will never do that. We will give them a war to remember.'
Inadequately again I said: 'Perhaps nothing will happen. There have been plenty of times when things have become as hot as this.'
She shook her head. 'If you had seen it all you would know that you don't speak any sense,' she argued. She did not say it roughly. It was her way of framing the words. 'You see, if they do not attack us we
must
attack them. We cannot have them sniffing beneath our doors and windows all the time. In Israel we cannot afford to have the battle on our own ground. There is not enough of it. One sweep across the Negev and we are cut. Then we have only two halves of a country. That is no good. The battles must be outside our doors - in the Sinai, on the far bank of Galilee, around Bethlehem and Jericho.'
There was a hardness in her voice now. She was gazing into the misty smoke, towards the veiled jazz players. Her dark face, with her Sabra-fair hair pulled so sternly back to her neck, looked as set and lined as a man's. She spoke as though I were not there. 'Then there is Jerusalem,' she muttered. 'The matter of the City of Jerusalem.'
She turned to me, as though recalling my presence, and a wry smile softened the unaccustomed set of her face. 'I'm sorry,' she said shrugging. 'Propaganda. And to a neutral.' She pulled away and regarded me from a new distance. 'Maybe I have been writing too much about it for my newspaper. I am too much part of it.'
We got up and went out. The night was much cooler now and almost empty. Many of the lights in the street had gone out and the cafes were closed. Some taxi drivers stood by their cabs at a corner, still arguing over a newspaper spread open on one of the bonnets. I thought, if they don't get a war they'll talk themselves into one. A group of young Jews were still around a table at one of the cafes that remained lit. Some dogs walked the pavements and a lately arrived moon was now dangling over the metallic inland hills.
We walked by the group at the cafe. Two of them were soldiers. Their chairs were pushed back from the tables and tilted as they pushed their boots against the cafe walls. There were some beer bottles on the table and two sub-machine-guns. One of the soldiers had his arms around the waists of two girls. The other laughed in argument, wagging his finger at another youth. One of the girls turned to look at us, but not the others.
'Your young people should not be up so late,' I said. "They'll be too tired to fight.'
For a moment I thought she was going to pull away from me, but abruptly she relaxed and shrugged her shoulders. 'Everyone will fight,' she assured me. 'You see.'
I won't be here to see,' I said decisively. I have things to do all over the place.'
She looked at me, then hooked her arm comfortably in
mine. 'Of course you have,' she said reasonably. 'And you must go on and do them. It is important.'
We had reached the corner of one of the short tree-crowded roads that runs to Dezingov. Shoshana stopped. She fumbled in her trouser pocket like a man. She took something from the pocket, something small. She had it between her finger and her thumb. I realized it was a ring. She worked it on to the third ringer of her left hand.
'My wedding ring,' she said. She gave a tight smile. 'I wear it tonight because I go now to my husband. Just a few houses down this place.'
'I did not know you were married,' I said quietly.
'There is very little to it,' she shrugged. 'This country is a bad place for marriage. Too much falling in and out. Divorce is very big. We marry too young and for not long enough. Soon, after the war has come and gone, Uri and I will divorce. That is if we are still here and such things matter.'
I said: 'But you are going to him now?'
'Yes,' she said simply. 'It is the right thing tonight. We have an apartment along here and we were very happy once. Sometimes we still find something in each other. We meet only sometimes because of my work and because he is also away. He is one of the Israeli Air Force. But tonight we are meeting because we are still in marriage.
Erav tov,
goodnight Christopher. I hope you play well in the concerts.'
She walked under the deep black of the lined trees. There were no lights in the little street. I remained at the corner and watched her walk, calling, 'Goodnight Shoshana,' after her. She answered only by waving her hand in the deep-cut shadows and without turning about. Then I could not see her at all, only a slice of light suddenly thrusting from a door and then vanishing again.
I walked back along the Dezingov. I was almost alone now, although I could hear the taxi men laughing farther down the wide street. At the cafe the two girls were with the third young man and the two soldiers had gone. It was five days before the war.
* * *
Mrs Haydn sent her chauffeur and her Mercedes for me at noon. It is surprising how many Mercedes and Volkswagen cars there are in Israel. We went along the sea road again, over the bridge guarded by the young soldiers and along the flowing hem of the sand dunes. It was a brilliantly hot day, still and stainless, petrified beneath the sun; the only moving things the languid sea and Mrs Haydn's car.
We ran quickly past Herzliya and to Natanya, a small town with a beach. The house was a mile outside the town, on the sea's fringe, set on a small cape of green land where, from somewhere, came a light touch of breeze. It touched the cedars in the garden giving them some refreshment from the bronze sun.
'My own private zephyr,' said Mrs Haydn waving her hand at the breeze. 'This is the only place from Haifa to Ashkelon which has a breath of air today.'
'All modern conveniences,' I said walking up the white steps of the house towards her. She was wearing a blue and white towelling jacket over a two-piece swimsuit. It was almost open at the front, held loosely by the tied belt, and when she moved towards me the tanned stomach underneath pressed against the narrow aperture, her navel peering out at me like a lone spying eye.
'This little piece of land sticks out just far enough to catch a whiff of whatever breezes are blowing on the sea. There is nearly always something and we can commandeer it.'
The walls within the house were cool green and there was a creamy marble floor, wooden furniture, softened with big bright cushions in traditional Eastern patterns. She walked with me, her sandals clapping lightly against the floor, her arms moving to and fro together as though she were pushing the air away. We walked into a slim and elegant room with white chairs, light rugs, and french windows embracing a square of fierce sun lying across a profuse flower garden and a blue swimming-pool. The water in the pool rubbed fondly against its tiles.
'A drink, Christopher,' Mrs Haydn suggested. She moved towards a cocktail cabinet.
'A Martini. Dry, please.'