Authors: Lesley Thomas
O'Sullivan slithered around a rock and fell at my side. Shoshana was crouched next to me, her eyes like hard eggs, looking up, and Zoo Baby had rolled against a rock only slightly bigger than himself a few yards farther away.
O'Sullivan said calmly: 'Blind. Now just fancy not hittin' a target the size of the truck the first time. My God, what
do
the Russians teach with them?'
The jets were on us now. They skimmed like low shadows across the rocks and boulders, their cannon shooting into the truck. It blew up abruptly spewing a big sheet of flame all around for an instant then settling down to burn rather sedately like a suburban bonfire. The second jet came in and fired into the rocks and the dry scrub shattering everything about with deafening explosions, choking the desert place with smoke and setting fire to little parcels of brown growth that had been clinging to the place for some salvation.
'Thank Jesus they don't stay too long,' muttered O'Sullivan looking up. "They might be back in a minute, so keep your heads down.' I noticed he had his revolver in his hand. He ran away from us quickly among the rocks like a wild rabbit, counting people, moving them, and finally getting back to us. 'Here they are again,' he muttered. 'Comin' back for a last bite. In the old days they'd have had us, you know. One thing to be said for these Migs is they can't hang about over you for more than a couple o' seconds. Right, get down - now!'
The planes were widely separated this time. The first one came in murderously, in a great swan's neck of a dive, and dropped a canister which fell with a horrible, slow grace into the clear space between the rocks where we were crouched. I felt Shoshana's soft flesh tighten as it came down and we forced our bodies nearer the earth as O'Sullivan yelled to us to duck. The canister bounced metallically like a ball on a blunt rock and then rolled and bumped playfully into the clearing, eventually coming to a standstill only ten yards from where we lay. Nothing happened. It lay looking harmless and uncertain. I closed my eyes and pressed my face to the earth. I heard O'Sullivan pass a quick message to the Virgin. Shoshana emitted a brief eerie laugh.
'It didn't go off,' decided O'Sullivan after ten seconds.
'I noticed,' I said. I realized I was calm and elated.
'Here is the other,' said Shoshana. 'From the sun.'
The Egyptian jet rolled across us spraying the ground with cannon fire. I thought they might hit the canister sitting close behind us, but they didn't.
Dov and Zoo Baby were firing back at the plane, forlornly but with great application. Zoo Baby was coolly sitting back against a bright orange rock and firing his sub-machine-gun from the shoulder with the logic he used sitting behind his drums in the orchestra. He continued firing, throwing up a fierce din among the rocks, for an unnecessary time after the plane had made off. We saw both jets turning towards the walled mountains of Sinai.
The truck continued to burn making a noise strangely like a grizzling baby. O'Sullivan got us across the road away from the silent canister and then we saw Metzer sitting in a gully holding Herbert Scheerer's big German head in his soft Jewish hands. Haim Mendel, the leader of the orchestra, was sitting in a begging attitude on the other side. The famous conductor had been rolled in the dust. His clothes and his face were coated with red like thick pepper. Metzer had opened his shirt and was inadequately pushing a handkerchief into blood running from a wound in the German's stomach. Scheerer was alive and conscious and looked up at me placidly, his face coated like a clown's. His lips were swollen and when he moved them no sound came.
'Don't talk, sir,' said O'Sullivan. 'Say nothing for the present, if you please.' He sounded like a cautioning policeman. He motioned Metzer to take the blood-wet handkerchief from the wound, and had a look. The others came in towards us from the rocks. No one else had been hurt. Dov ran from his gully laughing. 'Ran away! Did you see?' He stopped talking and walking when he saw Scheerer. Then he came forward quickly. 'He is shot?' he said unnecessarily to Zoo Baby.
'A little shot,' confirmed Zoo Baby turning away from the blood and looking at the innocent sky.
When I looked at Scheerer again his face was set and his eyes rolled around at our faces above him. He reminded me of a man I once saw knocked down by a bus in Hammersmith. The man was staring around at all the onlookers as though urgently seeking a face he knew or someone who could answer a question. Scheerer looked like that.
O'Sullivan's face moved. He scratched at his nose in a completely Irish manner. 'A pity,' he said quietly looking down at the yawning wound in Scheerer's abdomen. 'My field dressing was in the pack and the pack won't be much good now because it's back in the lorry.' He looked directly at me. 'Would you have a clean handkerchief?' he asked. I took out one of my special silk handkerchiefs which I had made for my concert tails. God knows how it was in my pocket at that moment. I handed it to O'Sullivan who glanced at the quality and then pressed it into the cavity. I watched it turn crimson.
Clear of the rocks it was very hot and exposed. Each one of us kept glancing at the sky fearful that the Migs might return. But it remained stark and blue and vacant.
I think we should move this gentleman into the shade,' said O'Sullivan. He glanced up at Zoo Baby who had moved so that his big shadow kept the sun from Scheerer.
Zoo Baby nodded in his rubbery manner, his face moving independent of the movement of his head. The Israeli bent ponderously and put his arms under Scheerer's narrow shoulders. O'Sullivan took the legs and Metzer, as though afraid the wounded man might break in the middle supported the small of his back. They moved, in step, already like a funeral procession, across the red, dusty ground and the harsh yellow sunlight, towards a bay in the rocks fifty yards away. I walked on one side and Shoshana walked on the other, both of us looking down at the face suddenly aged a hundred years. The eyes had closed, collapsed, now. The dust gave him the leathery look of an ancient animal. It was scaled over his eyelids and on the rounds of his lips. The lids shuddered a little as they carried him and then his mouth began to move, dryly, and I leaned forward for I thought he wanted to speak to me. But as I leaned, and as the three men carried Scheerer delicately towards the shady rocks, I realized that the German was singing.
With his last hopeless breaths he was croaking out a melancholy musical noise, a few la-la-la notes, and then a tum-de-dum. I tried to listen closely. The noise came brokenly through all the dust and the blood in his throat.
By the time we had reached the deeper shade Herbert Scheerer, distinguished conductor, had sung his tune and was dead. We buried him temporarily, a German casualty in a Jewish war.
After we had buried him, with O'Sullivan and myself standing over him, O'Sullivan saying a few Christian words, and the Jews, Shoshana, Metzer, Dov, Zoo Baby, Mendel and the other two musicians, standing properly a couple of paces back, we returned to the road and the burned truck.
We stood about it in the manner of children stranded at a picnic because of a flat tyre. Shoshana was pouting like a spoiled schoolgirl. Now that our own excitement and noise was over we could hear the guns firing in distant Sinai, the explosions rolling and rumbling among the desert hills.
'Every Israeli is fighting today,' fumed Shoshana, 'and we are fixed here like fools.'
'Haven't you had your war ration for this morning?' I asked her tersely. 'Isn't it enough what has happened?'
'We did nothing to
them'
she replied with sullen logic. 'We must get back to Jerusalem.'
I felt a bit sick of her just then. 'We mustn't miss the football match,' I said bitterly to O'Sullivan. I leaned on him as an ally, although he did not respond. What the hell was an Irishman doing with the Israelis anyway? It was like putting a Negro among Eskimos.
We hung raggedly about the hot, bent frame of the truck. It was still on fire down in its depths and little grunts and groans seeped from it. A front tyre exploded spectacularly making everyone dive for the road and then, embarrassed, rise with banal grins. The desert was large all about us, with the hot road winding and diminishing north and south.
'Usually,' said Metzer, 'there would be a truck or something else coming along the road before too much time. But maybe not today. Not with the war.'
O'Sulhvan walked about the wreck with the morose air of a farmer who has seen his prize bull drop dead on the way to the cattle show. 'There's not much we can do about this,' he commented unnecessarily, kicking at a wheel rim with his police boot. 'I think it might be a good idea if we exploded that little bomb across the way.' He pointed to the Egyptian canister still lying ineptly in the opposite clearing.
'It would stop the local children playing with it,' I suggested. O'Sulhvan looked at me, for the first time, in the odd way that the Irish sometimes look at the English.
'Good idea, Mister Hollings,' he agreed civilly. 'And if we blow it up it might attract some attention and get us out of here, don't you think ?'
I was sorry, because I liked him. I merely nodded and caught Shoshana's cold eyes. Her English had not been a-breast of what I had said. O'Sullivan waited, looking at me, as though seeking permission to get on with what he had planned. I looked over at the canister, round and black among the rocks.
'Everyone will withdraw in this direction,' he pointed to the far right, beyond where we had buried Scheerer. 'Behind the big wall of rocks. Then we'll explode this damned thing.'
He was the man in permanent uniform and nobody said anything. We moved up over the hard rising ground and arranged ourselves behind the parapet of red and yellow stones. From there the noise of the Sinai guns was more profound and Dov jolted me and pointed to a cloth of black smoke drifting over the hills of Egypt.
O'Sullivan came up last and we were strung in a line behind the rocks like ambushers. The Irishman gave a minor grin.
'If there's any of the spare-time soldiers would fancy his luck with his shooting...' he began. The canister was almost hidden from us at that height and position, perhaps a quarter of its black end projecting from a sheltering ledge of rock. O'Sullivan was about to add to his challenge when Zoo Baby half rose hydraulically from the knees and fired one, almost casual shot which exploded the canister. A shallow, white flash lit up the bright sunlight and the explosion cracked the air, and bounced about the broken desert. A rain of dust and stone fell down about us as we crouched. Everyone's fingers, except Zoo Baby's, were in their ears. I wiped the dust from my eyes and Shoshana was shaking her hair and laughing.
O'Sullivan said: 'If I'd been allowed to finish I was going to suggest that we pooled a bit o' money and made it a gamble. Your impetuosity, big fella, has cost you dear.'
We got up and walked down the slope to the road again. The force of the explosion, like insult to injury, had thrown the already disintegrating lorry all over the road and up on to the rock face. Where the canister had lain there was a black saucer cut out of the desert. O'Sullivan looked at the pieces of the lorry and said: 'There'll be no fixing that, now will there?'
Shoshana and Metzer called out simultaneously and pointed down the road we had travelled from the south. A tree of dust had appeared and was making towards us. We sat and waited, and then individually, as it occurred to each of us, we found some prudent cover in case the arriving vehicle was from the Arabs.
But four hundred yards away, when it was in the clear, we could see what it was. Moving towards us at the top of its ponderous speed was the big amphibian from Eilat, the boat-truck that gave visitors a ride in the bay and into the desert. Someone was standing on its bow and waving to us.
O'Sullivan grunted. 'It seems,' he said sourly, 'only right and logical that a collection like this, English, Irish and Jews, could be picked up in the middle of a desert by a bloody ship.'
Nine
Clumsily the amphibian crawled up the track towards our waiting group. It had a broad snout and went about forty feet from nose to end. It was gaily painted in wide blue and white stripes which had always attracted attention during its recent life as a visitors' amenity in Eilat.
'Nicely decorated, you'll no doubt notice, in the Israeli national colours,' O'Sullivan pointed out. He was resigned and quiet. 'If those jets come back they'll know for sure it's not King Hussein out for a ride.'