Authors: Lesley Thomas
The major nudged me along to a typewriter at the end of the same littered table at which Shoshana was working. I sat down behind the machine and looked dumbly at it. I was conscious of de Groucy looking at me sideways. Shoshana glanced up, and smiled at me through her dusty face. Since I was required to behave as an English correspondent would behave, I pushed some paper into the roller and wrote my feelings and impressions of the long day of travel and battle. I kept these notes, quite proudly, and I am using them now as I remember what happened in Jerusalem.
Shoshana when she had finished told the major that it was not necessary for me to use the cable facilities that night, since I worked for an influential weekly journal, and we found O'Sullivan, Dov and Zoo Baby outside in the lane with a newly acquired jeep.
The battle had become more subdued, as though it had tired itself out. By that time the Centurion tanks had overcome the last of the Jordanian strongpoints and were now working their way towards the Jerusalem-Ramallah road and Mount Scopus.
'Major de Groucy did not seem convinced about me,' I said to Shoshana as we climbed into the jeep. The night was warm and very dark with the poppings of the diminished battle going on to the north and east and louder rumbling to the south. Army vehicles were lumbering about in the darkened streets.
Shoshana laughed: 'He will say nothing. Only to us is it known that his wounds were from a donkey. All the others think it is from the Arabs and he would not like them to know.'
We all laughed. All the tension had gone from us now with the knowledge that we were behind the fighting and that we had survived through the deadly doings of the day. I ran my arm about Shoshana and felt that all her hardness had melted, that she was soft and tired and feminine again. She came to me, putting her head, her fine fair hair, on my shoulder and against my cheek. My hand moved and touched her breast through her sweaty shirt. Her face half turned to me and she touched me with her dry lips.
'Where are we going ?' I asked.
Zoo Baby, who was driving, said: 'For some eating.'
Dov, beside him, added: 'At the zoo.'
I laughed because I thought it was a joke, but soon we went through a part of the Israeli sector which had been violently shelled by the Arabs that day, where people wandered in the lost way that survivors of a bombardment or a raid wander, and the smoke still rolled from the rubble. It was there I saw a signpost in English, holed by a shrapnel but still readable in the dimmed headlights of the jeep. We waited by a cross-junction for the tank to go by, damaged and coughing like a consumptive, and I saw the signpost pointing to the right. It said: 'To the Biblical Zoo'.
We went through the little forest, the firm smell of the pine, the eucalyptus and the olive mixing with the wandering smoke that was everywhere in Jerusalem that night. Among the trees of the forest squatting like trogs and woodland gnomes were the paratroops who had come from the north and were waiting to go into the battle for the Old City. They sat quietly eating and drinking from their mess cans, stoic, their guns and their helmets on the ground. They were within the boundary of the zoo, sitting on the grass of the picnicking area and on the tree-shaded benches.
'Feeding time,' said O'Sullivan.
We drove on and then we heard the moans and roars of the animals coming through the dark. Dov said: 'The guns, maybe, have upset them.'
We pulled into an area near the pay-box at the entrance, left the jeep and walked into the noise of the zoo. I was unprepared. That day I thought I had seen every form of violent death. But this was different. The place was lit by dim flares and oil lamps. Two weeping men were carrying a dead ostrich on a wide stretcher. It lay more grotesque in death than any human, its ancient, wrinkled eyelids closed, its beak pleadingly half open, its great legs and feet crumbled like cables.
'Jesus,' I whispered. I felt myself grow sick. We stood and let the men with the ostrich go by. All around us caged animals were howling in the dimness.
"They bury their heads in the sand, of course,' said O'Sullivan nodding at the ostrich. 'That never was much of a way.'
We walked a few more paces. The zoo had been devastated. The cages and the trees were burst and wrecked. The animals which had survived were crying with fear and with the smell of blood.
'The main Arab shelling was in this area today,' said Dov soberly. 'It seems maybe we suffered some casualties.'
A giraffe, itself like a felled tree, lay in the ruins of its cage. There were birds lying about the place under the flares and lamps, their feathers grimed with the dirt of death. Four set-faced paratroopers marched by with a litter piled with the bodies of black, white and coloured birds. It looked like the rack at a butcher's shop before Christmas.
'Even the vultures,' said O'Sullivan sombrely.
We walked through the debris of the cages towards a clear area beyond some fig trees where another group of paratroops were squatting and eating apparently undisturbed by the unique devastation about them. Three foxes lay in their own blood at the bottom of their cage. On the cage, in Hebrew and underneath in English was,
'Take us the foxes, the little foxes, that spoil the vines'.
Dov said: 'The song of Solomon, you will recall. The zoo was meant to be a collection of animals mentioned in the Bible, but it has grown, or it
had
grown until this.'
Zoo Baby and Shoshana had said nothing while we had been there. O'Sullivan pointed a finger at a torn and empty cage.
'As a roaring lion and a greedy bear, so is a wicked
ruler over an ... indigent people,'
he read with difficulty in the poor fight. Then he spat and said: 'T'isn't much of a day to be going to the zoo.'
Shoshana stopped the two men who had carried the dead ostrich. They were returning with the stretcher. She asked them to sit for a moment and they sat wearily on the grass by the side of the zoo path. They wore their zoo attendants' uniforms which seemed strange among all the soldiers. The older one, a gentle, helpless sort of man in his sixties, spread his hands to Shoshana's questions and began to weep again as he answered her.
She glanced at me and asked him if he spoke English. He replied in Hebrew, but said the words, 'For the tourists.' He then wiped his tears with the flats of his hands, as a child smudges them away, and continued in good English.
'One hundred animals die,' he sobbed. 'All the time the
Arabs kill them. Bang, bang, bang. The lion, and the giraffe, the high one, the bear and the lion....'
The other keeper, a younger man, grey in the face, put his arm on the old man's shoulder. The first keeper looked at me. 'Sir,' he said, 'we have loved these. In the war of 1948 we could not feed them by day because of the Arab snipers who shoot at us, you understand. We creep and crawl to feed them in the night.
'Then we put them to live at Mount Scopus, and the Arabs were around us. We took them from there, sir, in armoured cars, and buses, and all the monkeys in ambulances.'
The noise of the creatures and the movements of the soldiers continued around us. The keeper put his eyes into his hands, but then wiped them resolutely and got up from the grass. 'But some we save today. I show you, sir.'
We followed him to a compound with a high wall. The cages there were untouched and the animals were fretful but making no great noise. On a table beneath some shredded eucalyptus trees in one corner using an oil lamp for illumination, two women dressed the wounds of a patient monkey. It sat woefully while they bandaged its foreleg. In the cages immediately about them other small animals, and two childlike donkeys stood and watched the bright lamp and the unusual activity.
'All these have been a little wounded and will be living,' said the keeper. 'But most were dead or we had to kill ourselves because of their wounds. Now we have to collect the giraffe with a truck and the foxes and some others. We have a big hill of dead creatures, sir.. . A mountain.'
We could say nothing. When we were nearly clear of the wrecked cages and the torn trees, and into the untouched area of the little forest, away from the animal howling, where more paratroopers were feeding, Shoshana held my hand and said: 'You see, Christopher, what they do to the poor Israeli animals.'
Dov said to me: 'It is very interesting, the zoo. One day you should return and see it again. When everything is okay. When the animals were on Mount Scopus it was a lunatic situation. Maybe it could only happen here. The troops had to be fed, but so did the monkeys. In the end they let all the harmless small animals - the ones that could survive by caring for themselves - they let them free and brought the rest back here, just as the old man said, in a convoy protected by the United Nations. The lions were brought down in an armoured car and the birds in double-decker buses. Most strange.'
The Army had a cookhouse established beneath the trees and we waited for ten minutes in a line with some of the fresh paratroops and some weary tank men who had come back from the battle with the Jordanian gun emplacements to the north of the Old City.
Zoo Baby was talking to one of the tank men, nodding his great head understandingly as he listened to the story. We collected our food in mess tins, a hot mass of meat and vegetables and went away under the trees to eat it. Dov was missing for a while and reappeared happily holding a bottle of red wine. He sat with us. Shoshana pushed a piece of meat on her fork under my nose. I bit at it as though we were enjoying a picnic. Dov said: 'The wine is not much, but just enough for five.'
I said: 'Last evening we were eating our dinner at Eilat. It's been a long twenty-four hours.'
"There is more,' said Zoo Baby. I talked to the men from the tanks. It was very bad they said because of the mines and the deep trenches. Men had to pick the mines from the ground before the tanks could go through.'
'There were no flails to fit to the tanks,' said O'Sullivan his face in his mess tin. "The flail pulls the mines up before the tank goes over them, but they're all in the south. The tanks were all right, but it seems we were caught a bit short of flails. Sounds more like Ireland than Israel.'
Shoshana said, through her food: 'In Sinai and Gaza it is good. The Egyptians are being defeated and are running for the canal. Also in the south of Jerusalem the Government House, which was of the United Nations before today, is now taken by Israel from the Jordanians. We have crossed the road to Bethlehem but there is still much fighting there.'
I suddenly thought of Selma then and her coveted house in
Jordan, of the cypress trees and the strange little turret, and the postman with the red bicycle. I remembered watching it across the frontier through the binoculars and how proud of it she was.
'Was there much shelling about the windmill?' I asked casually. It would be strange I thought if the Arabs destroyed Selma's house in Israel and the Israelis her house in Jordan.
'At Yemin Moshe below Mount Zion,' said Dov. 'There was a big battle going on there. We went across to get Government House and Sur Bahir which was an Arab strong-point. The windmill is useful. In the war before we used it as an observation point and there was much shelling there.'
'Don Quixote,' said Zoo Baby. 'This is what they called the battle. Yes, it was Don Quixote. Because of the windmill, you understand.'
I agreed that I understood. Again I wondered about Selma and if she had kept her word to play golf.
We returned to the jeep as they were lifting the dead giraffe on to the truck, using a block and tackle. It looked an awkward way to handle such a gentle creature. With its spread wooden legs the loading equipment itself looked like a giraffe. The old keeper was directing the loading and the paratroops were helping. The keeper's eyes were still streaming and his voice, as he called to the men, was thick as mud. He seemed very anxious that they should not drop the giraffe.
There was still fighting in the South, beyond the windmill, and some small-arms fire from the dark hills behind Gethsemane and the Mount of Olives. But the heavy Judean night had settled in with what I came to know later as its overpowering effect. It falls in summer upon everything like a hand, keeping it, containing it. It is a time for sleeping in Jerusalem, or for lying in helpless wakefulness. It is not good for fighting.