Authors: Lesley Thomas
I was on the terrace and she came out and stood beside me. She was only a few inches away and I knew that it would not be long. I realized that with her height she would lie almost exactly alongside me in the bed, like one ship moored against another.
'There is some lime juice,' she said. 'Would you like a glass, Christopher?'
I said I would. She went and returned with the pale drinks. 'That is my house,' she said pointing across the garden, across the untidy wire of no-man's-land. 'My other house, you remember.'
I followed her eyes to the Jordanian houses piled in the other sector. 'The one with the two cypresses and the little round tower. It is no distance, is it?'
'Just like living next door to yourself,' I said. 'Does it make you unhappy to see it ?'
'Sometimes,' she admitted. 'There is a short flagstaff on the little tower. You see it? My mother and my stepfather used to make a great joke about flying flags from there. On St George's Day we always had the Union Jack run up and on the Greek Independence Day the old man used to have his flag flying.
'But I'm not a sentimental person. I am happy enough to watch the house. I used to purloin Yacob's military binoculars and sit here spying on the house and the people who live round about it. Most of them I remember well. Abdullah the postman with his red racing bike. He must be eighty now. Then there's Hassan the watchmaker who owns the house across the way. That bugger lets his goats graze in my garden. I've stood here and watched him open the gate and push them in there. So I wrote to him via a friend in London and told him not to do it. That must have given him a hell of a shock. He's probably been sniffing around trying to find out who shopped him.'
I laughed with her. 'What's the golden egg?' I asked pointing beyond the castellated wall, over the crammed roofs of the Old City.
'The Dome of the Rock, in the Temple area,' she said. 'Beautiful isn't it. It's dazzling in the sun, but in the evening when the light is richer, it is so magnificent.'
She turned back into the room. 'But the Wailing Wall is just a wall full of old birds' nests, and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre is such an ugly damn place, and a lousy package deal at that...'
'How is that?' I asked. I had remained on the terrace viewing the lion-coloured city, dusty under the bitter afternoon sun.
'Oh,' she said from within the room, 'it's all buttressed up with bits of wood, for a start. It's a bit unsteady after an earthquake. But it's full of touts and nasty Greeks with beards.' She laughed. I could hear her moving about in the room so I turned and went in to her. It would not be long now. She was standing in the filtered sunlight by one of the curtained windows.
'They show you quite blatantly where the Cross was stuck into the ground, and they obligingly push aside a floorboard to show where the earth cracked on Good Friday, and then they trot you across a few yards of the place and ask you to have a squint at the Tomb. It's all nicely parcelled up. Quite laughable really.'
She had been talking hurriedly, as though she were nervous. Now she stopped and we stood, half a room apart, me with the empty lime glass in my hand, her looking half away from me through the fine curtain. I put the glass down on a side table.
'Are we going to bed, Christopher?' she asked. I heard
some birds quarrel suddenly in the vines in the garden.
'Yes,' I said to her. 'I think it would be worth doing.'
'So do I,' she said. 'I've been looking forward to it.'
I walked to her and we kissed, almost formally, without passion, as though sealing some bargain which we had negotiated and understood. It was then I became aware of her smell. It was an English sort of smell. My mother smelt like it, fresh and unsubtle. It wasn't a young odour. It was strange to find it there in a city of spices and hot aromas.
Until then I had not touched her. I drew away a little when I smelled her and she now turned towards me and we smiled knowingly at each other. I had never before made love to a woman older than myself. My hands went to her breasts, but she quietly encircled my wrists and brought them down.
'I want us to undress separately,' she said. 'The bedroom is down that little flight of stairs and immediately through the doors. You can see Pentecost from the window. Wait for me for a few moments.'
She went up a companion flight of stairs to the set which went down to the bedroom. I watched her go, tall, good carriage, slim backside, and then walked down through a white door and into a fine bedroom with white furniture and a lime-green bedcover. It had a french window letting out on to another, lower terrace, and I stood and watched Arab soldiers moving along the great crusted walls of the Holy City, and a windmill sitting in the middle of the low buildings on the Jewish side.
It was brimmed with mid-afternoon heat out there, but cool where I stood. I pulled the light curtains and undressed, casually, easily, full of anticipation for the next hour. I dropped on to the bed and felt it give. Then I lay there, watching the egg and dart moulding around the ceiling, until I heard her bare feet coming down the short run of steps and into the room.
When she had gone off I had thought that she wanted to put on something conventionally glamorous, some silk or filmy thing that would hide some of the imperfections of her approaching middle age. But she came into the room naked. She stood by the bed.
There was no sagginess about her. She was tall and brown and composed. She smiled at me lying across her bed and put out the extremes of her right-hand fingers to me. I touched them then held them lightly. It was the first romantic thing we had achieved. I am always held by a woman's breasts. These were medium and quite firm with only a little ham-mocking. They were white against the brown of her trunk like some fruits deprived of the sun. Her nipples were small and pinched and redcurrant-red.
'Does your back hurt?' she asked kneeling forward on the lime counterpane. 'The sunburn ?'
'It's all right when I remain still,' I said looking at her steadily. 'It feels very raw when I move against something.'
She laughed and lowered herself towards me, kneeling like an animal on the bed, her breasts hanging down. When I see a woman in this position it always reminds me of the statue of the female wolf in Rome, her dugs dangling, standing over Romulus and Remus. I pushed my entire arm out, my hand like the head of a snake, thrusting it in the soft channel between her legs. She remained on all fours and I pushed my fingers along the warmth of the crease and held her backside in my hand so that my wrist was against her tender parts. I could feel her place pounding like a beating heart. There was a fly on the egg and dart moulding. Selma moved over me. I removed my hand and with both sets of fingers began tugging gently at her nipples like an apprentice bell-ringer. I watched the tight red nipples soften and flower with my touching.
'Put it back, please,' she said.
'What back?'
'Your hand, and your arm, for God's sake.'
'I forget where it was now,' I said.
'You're a bastard, Christopher. You're playing about with me. Put it back. Here.' She caught my hand and threaded it like a cable through the tunnel of her legs again pushing the end of my fingers into the culmination of her backside. 'Like that,' she said. 'Under and through... and then up.'
'I remember,' I said.
'I'm so glad you do.'
She moved on to me now, careful though not to press her weight into me because of my sunburned back. Her tongue went to my forehead and touched it as though in some sort of benediction. She began to run it down towards the centre of my eyebrows.
I said to her: 'What's that windmill doing in the middle of Jerusalem ?' She was right. I'm a bastard.
Her tongue stopped at the bridge of my nose.
'Do you want to know
now!’
'Well I saw it from the window and it seemed a bit strange having a windmill in the middle of Jerusalem. I could understand it in Amsterdam.'
She brought her tongue down my nose, let it spread itself across my nostrils for a while and continued to my mouth. We kissed very passionately then, for a long time. Her hand had gone down to me and she had hold of me like an Arab holding a donkey. I was feeling explosive.
'Why is it there?' I asked.
'Because I chose to put it there.'
'The windmill, I meant.'
'Oh, it was built to ...'
'Yes?'
'To grind corn for the people around here. Years ago.'
'Who built it?'
'You bastard. Sir Moses Montefiore. I know because I've read it all up. Eighteen fifty-eight. Turn over and he on top of me now. Please.'
I did. As I thought, we were exactly the same size. My
eyes were an inch away from hers. I was complete with her j now. She closed her eyes and when she opened them again I
a minute later mine were still an inch away and still looking j
at her. - 'Who was he?'
'Christopher, I feel terrible.'
'So do I. Think of something else. Like the windmill. Who was this Sir Moses Monty...'
'All right,' she muttered. 'Montefiore. An Englishman. A
philanthropist. Oh, my Christ. Gently baby. He built a settle
ment for Jews ...'
'Called?'
'Christopher,' she pleaded.'... Christopher...'
'Called?'
'Bastard. You really are. I've met some, but you are the biggest... It was called ... oh, what the hell. History at a time like this. It was called Yemin Moshe...'
I said: 'What's
that!’
I couldn't go on much longer. Not the first time.
Her eyes were screwed up. 'That's me,' she whispered. "That's all I can let you have. I can't tell you the anatomical name, but it's
me,
darling. It's my very end. You can't go any farther.'
'I meant Yemin Moshe. What's it mean?'
'The Right Hand of... Christ...'
"That's poetic'
'No,' she said. 'It wasn't
Christ.
I just said "Christ" as a sort of exclamation. It's to do with what we're doing, you see.'
'Oh.'
'Yemin Moshe means the Right Hand of Moses, meaning Moses Montefiore, not the better known one.'
'I think I'm coming,' I said.
'Me too. So shut up.'
I slept for about five minutes afterwards and when I woke up I was lying in her arms and my sweat was cooling, and I could smell my mother's smell.
"There was quite a battle about it once,' said Selma.
'What?'I asked.
'The windmill.'
'Oh yes. The one that Moses built.'
'Yes,' she said. She was looking at the egg and dart ornament on the ceiling. The fly was up there too. I watched him. "That was in 1948. The Jews and the Arabs had a battle over it.'
'It's a natural strongpoint,' I said like a general.
'Exactly. It was an extremely bloody battle. The Jews called it Operation Don Quixote.'
'Don Quixote - windmill. Very apt,' I said. I turned and kissed her gently and she kissed me in return.