Authors: Lesley Thomas
"There will be an attack on the Police School in a few hours,' said Shoshana. 'This I have been told also.'
'And you want to be there,' I said tiredly.
'Of course,' she said. 'But you may stay in your bed.'
'Where is bed?' I asked.
Dov answered; 'My brother has a house not far away, near the President Hotel. We will go there for a time. He will be with his Army unit, but maybe his wife is there. I tried to telephone but the telephone is not working too well in Jerusalem today.'
I found Shoshana lolling in sleep against my shoulder before we reached the house of Dov's brother. She was full against me, but light, like a child exhausted after a busy day. I woke her softly when Zoo Baby turned the jeep into a steep lane and stopped halfway down the slope. It was dark but quiet. The crickets were even active here, clicking in the walls and the hanging vines. The place was clean and clear for there had been little shelling in that area.
We went to the house, but there was no answer to the door. Dov walked around the enclosed garden to a window. He unfussily broke a pane of glass and opened the casement door. We walked into the deserted house.
'Breaking and entering,' I smiled at Dov. 'And your brother's house too.'
He shrugged. 'One more pane of glass won't make a lot of difference in Jerusalem today,' he said. He pulled all the shutters and put on one lamp. It was a small house, but very clean and sweet smelling. There were some children's books on a table in the corner.
Batman and Robin, Mickey Mouse
and
Yogi Bear,
all in Hebrew.
'How many children?' I asked.
'Three,' said Dov. 'Rachel has probably taken them to Ramat Gan, to her mother's house.'
Shoshana had gone to the bathroom to shower. Dov poured some arak for each of us and we sat and drank it. He said: 'When we have the Old City you must see the Garden of the Tomb. As a Christian it should very much interest you.'
'Why is that?' asked O'Sullivan. The remark had been addressed to me, but he came in quickly, as though anxious to be identified as a Christian also. Dov smiled because he realized this.
Zoo Baby said: 'It is without the City wall.' He said 'without' because of his unfinished English, but it sounded like the Sunday school hymn about a green hill far away. 'It is just into the Arab territory. There was fighting there today.'
'It is very convincing,' said Dov. 'I have seen it, though many years ago, during the last fighting in Jerusalem, and, as a Jew, it seems to me that it is more convincing as the resting place of Christ than the official place at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.'
He was an extraordinary man, this Dov. We sat in dust and weariness, waiting to witness more dust and bloodshed, and yet he had time and enthusiasm to explore a small avenue of history. He poured some more arak all round. 'The garden is very quiet, just below an old Jewish cemetery on top of a rock that I think you will agree is shaped like a skull. Golgotha, the Place of the Skull. That's what they called Calvary, of course. Golgotha. There is a hill, a place like a skull, and known as a place of execution in ancient times. And within the garden there is a rock tomb, one which had a great stone in front of it at one time. You can still see the channels of the stone.'
Drawing with his finger in some arak which had spilt on the table he showed how Christ, bearing His cross down the Via Dolorosa, could have come to the place quite as easily as He could arrive at the spot where the Church of the Holy Sepulchre stands.
'It is simple,' he said as though explaining some battle logic. 'Christ turned
left,
not right, and came out of the gate and
up
to Calvary. The other way you go
down.
There is
no
rising hill.'
I could hear the shower running upstairs and Shoshana singing some military-sounding Israeli song. The guns were deadened from here. We sat and helped ourselves to more arak and listened to Dov. He went through his whole theory, how Christ coming out of the gate of the city met Simon of Cyrene, detailing the movements while 1 tried to remember the story forgotten since childhood. Then Dov described how at the Place of the Skull criminals were crucified or thrown down to death on the rocks below. When I lived with Shoshana in Jaffa Road, Jerusalem after the Six Day War I got to know the rocks where they threw the ancient criminals very well because the Israelis built a bus station there.
Shoshana came down the stairs wearing a pink towelling bath robe belonging to Dov's sister. It was a good deal too big for her, but she had washed all the grime away and had tied her splendid fair hair back behind her neck. She came and sat down, her brown feet nosing out from beneath the hem of the garment and her neck and face looking clean and tanned. All four men sat looking at her for a moment, without saying anything, then Dov suggested that I should go and shower. Shoshana said she would make some coffee.
I went up and let the cooling water run over me like a river. I had a look at my hands. A great many pianists make a big thing about their hands, insure them for major sums and that sort of thing. My manager, Eric, always told me I did not worry enough about mine. If he could have seen them after one day of war he would not have been pleased. I doubted if an insurance policy on a pianist's hands would allow him to take part in a war anyway.
I had to put the same clothes on and I did not shave. My luggage had been left in the jeep which was destroyed when Metzer died. When I had jumped from it to run towards Shoshana and the others I had left the cases there. All my clothes, even my tails. I grinned when I thought about the improbability of my tails being blown up on a street corner in Jerusalem. But for the impulse of getting out then I would have been killed too. On the other hand the jeep had only waited because Metzer had been calling me back. Otherwise it would have been on its way with me beside the driver. It had only been there, in that deadly spot, because of me. I had not thought of it like that before.
I went downstairs and O'Sullivan went to the bathroom. When Shoshana bent to pour the coffee the front of the robe eased out and I could see the clean lumps of her breasts, brown and then the inner band of white. She looked up and saw me looking at her.
'They have fixed two searchlights on top of the Histadrut
building,' said Dov. 'I heard at the zoo.' 'What's that?' I asked. "The Histadrut. ..'
'Oh, what would you say it was? It's the sort of Associa
tion ... no ... the Federation, that is right... of Labour,' he said.
I smiled at Shoshana as she passed my coffee. 'Federation is a better word when it is connected with Labour,' I said. 'Association is a bit upper class. It's for people like antique dealers.'
"The difficulties of the English language,' shrugged Shoshana.
'What about Hebrew?' asked Dov. He looked at me:
'What do you think of a country where they called a scram
bled egg "a confused egg"?'
'Or say the same thing for "hello" and "goodbye",' I said.
'Shalom
means "peace" not any of those things,' said
Shoshana huffily. 'It is like they say
ciao
in Italian. That is
also for meeting and parting.'
'When will they use the searchlights ?' I asked. 'For the School of Police,' said Zoo Baby. He was always
glad to come in when the English did not become too quick for him. He was sitting by Shoshana and he looked an
oddity, mountainous, grimed, sweated, but passive, along
side her cleanness. I could see the oily imprint of his sub
machine-gun on his palms. 'Tonight,' he said, 'in a few hours they will go for the school. It will be a bad battle there. They
have the fights for the jet planes.'
Dov said: "This is the particular thing about fighting in a city. It is so familiar. Even their side is familiar for we see it every day. It is not a war over many miles. It is just over a little space with the enemy country at the next block. In London it would be like fighting from Big Ben with the other army in Trafalgar Square, or in New York like shelling the lake in Central Park from the Plaza Hotel. In this sort of war you have no distance to travel.'
O'Sullivan had come down and was sitting on a bare wooden chair taking some coffee from Shoshana. Zoo Baby made his way up the stairs. O'Sullivan said: 'When the Irish patriots were going to attack Dublin Castle in the 1916 Rising they went on a tramcar, forty at a time. And they all paid their fares.' 'They would,' I said.
Once the house was quiet I went to her. Zoo Baby was sleeping like a balloon on the other bed in the room I was given and I did not wake him. While I waited I almost drifted to sleep myself, but I kept myself conscious by watching flashes of the battle in the south of the city through the window and the fanned branches of a tree in the garden.
I knew she would he awake for me because I touched her hand before we had left the room downstairs and she had gently pulled my middle finger out to its full length then sweetly closed her fingers around it. She was in a room belonging to the children. There was a Donald Duck on the outside of the white door with some Hebrew inscription underneath it. It looks strange to see Hebrew in that sort of context. It always looks in shape as though it should be preserved for religious, elevated things.
She had left the door only touching the jamb, so I did not have to turn the handle. I pushed it and went in to her.
In all the time since, I can never think about her without thinking of how she was when I saw her that moment.
She was lying full on her back, not asleep, on one of the children's small beds. There was a little nightlight, shaped like a lantern, burning on a table. The bed was against a wall and she was stretched, without her clothes, her hands behind her head, looking towards the pale, still flickering, light of a window. There were two other little beds in the shadowed room, toys on the shelves and big simple pictures on the wall. I could see, although the room was dim, a large painting of Popeye, a doll in a green dress, three wooden soldiers about a foot tall, Shoshana's breasts lying as quiet as the toys, her hair over the pillow flowing out over her arms; a baby's rocking-chair, a cuckoo clock, Shoshana's brown leg, her knee raised; the other leg, the nearest to me, flat like a plain lying below the high mountain of the first one. On a tray an assembly of model tanks and armoured cars, aeroplanes and ships of war. Shoshana's stomach looked flat and glistening in the same light.
As I came through the door she turned her head quietly to me and smiled. 'I am a child again,' she said.
'Oh, Christ,' I thought. 'Look at her. Just look at her sweet and naked there, lying among the toys.' Then I could again see her as she had been in the Negev that day looking at the bodies of the Israeli boys in the amphibian and hear her cold voice saying that all sorts of people die in war. I was clean but weary. All I wanted was to lie by her and feel her. The guns kept exploding, but they were to the south, towards Bethlehem. The sky flicked and occasionally flashed at the nursery window.
I closed the door cautiously behind me, then went to the little bed on which she lay. Beneath her she had a woollen rug, and it was rough against my skin. She moved over and I lay beside her knowing immediately the splendid touch of her beautiful skin, cool and warm at the same time, pliable, firm, painful but luxurious.
'Christopher, come to me,' she whispered. 'All day I have been so afraid.'
I could not believe her, but then, immediately, I did. She held me desperately, close to her, my nose and my wet mouth to her waiting breasts.