Come To The War (35 page)

^{'Let's hope He doesn't come today,' said O'Sullivan quietly. 'I think there's enough excitement already.'}

^{The paratroops were all along the walls now, running and crouching and firing into the alleys and streets down below. Another ten minutes and they were within the guts of the city. We saw a jeep go below us crowded with war correspondents, with Joe Cumberland driving. They were making for the St Stephen's Gate where now the Israeli tanks crawled in, one by one, like thieving cats. Zoo Baby drove after the jeep and we arrived outside the wall and waited until a military policeman said that we could go inside.}

^{The battle had been fierce in some of the streets, but not prolonged. In the stepped alleys the Jewish troops were forcing their way through machine-gun emplacements and groups of snipers. But the advance was quick and incisive. We followed the Israeli soldiers until everyone was held up by a brave machine gun which was perched behind the Al Aksa mosque.}

^{We had left the jeep and were creeping through the alleys with the other correspondents just ahead of us. The enclosed places were hazy with smoke and occasionally blocked with rubble. I helped Shoshana along, she wanted to run eagerly to be there when her soldiers reached the sacred objective, the Wailing Wall.}

^{Then the machine gun at the mosque opened fire and two soldiers twenty yards ahead of the correspondents went to their knees as though they had dropped in sudden prayer. A megaphone began to shout orders in Hebrew that bounced and echoed about the little courts and arched ways. All the Arab shops and houses were shuttered. In some places the shutters were broken and wrecked. Across the alley just ahead of us ran some thick, red, Arab treacle from a smashed jar. As if there wasn't enough blood around.}

^{Then the machine gun fired again, the bullets smashing into the old stone above our heads. We were lying against a wall. I felt trapped and frightened. Shoshana was lying against me on the inside and her face was rigid. 'Not now,' she whispered. 'God, not now.' The soldiers and the correspondents ahead were unable to move because of the machine gun. It fired again, with a terrific chatter, and gouged a channel out of the stonework ten feet up. The next burst was lower, cutting across the shutters of an Arab shop just ahead of us.}

^{'They'll have us in a minute,' grunted Dov. We couldn't get out backwards because the area behind us was an open courtyard, fully exposed. Zoo Baby lumbered up and moved towards the smashed shutters ahead of us. He retreated and then lunged at the shutter with his meaty shoulder. It split and splintered and he fell forwards comically into the shop. His fat sweaty head poked cheerfully around the corner. 'Okay,' he called. 'Come in. The shop is open.'}

^{We ran, doubled up and flung ourselves through the jagged opening he had made. We pressed ourselves against the near wall as the machine gun opened fire again, a few yards up the street.}

^{'That was better than your dance, Zoo Baby,' said Shoshana, touching him. 'We will wait here until they are destroyed. I could not bear to be killed now that we almost have the city.'}

^{We were in a barber's shop with three round, swivel chairs, big cracked mirrors and deep sinks. 'I'll have a haircut while we wait,' said O'Sullivan.}

^{It was not long. The Arabs with the machine gun fired twice more and then there was a close, violent explosion, and a whistle sounded like a conclusion of a football match. They did not fire again. O'Sullivan said: 'That seems to have settled that.'}

^{'We can go ?' asked Shoshana. 'I want to be at the Wall.'}

^{O'Sullivan cautioned her to wait. Then an Israeli officer bent to the size of a dwarf came with a funny mechanical run up the alley and called in to us in angry Hebrew.}

^{Shoshana said: 'We cannot move yet. He says there are
still snipers. He is very angry because we are here. Especially a woman. Maybe he does not know this is Israel.'}

^{Zoo Baby then sat in one of the tubby chairs before the barber's mirror. He swung himself easily and made fat faces at himself. I laughed and sat in the chair beside him.}

^{As soon as I sat down I got the pain in my kidneys again. I cried out and my back arched up. They thought I had been shot, but before anyone could move towards me a line of sniper's bullets drilled down the mirror in front of Zoo Baby. The last one hit him behind the ear, killing him at once. It was a mad situation. My pain was so intense that it even overcame my horror of his killing. I howled and he was dead. Shoshana rushed to me, because she too thought I had been hit, but I waved a panicked hand towards Zoo Baby. 'Go to him,' I squealed. 'It's only my back.'}

^{O'Sullivan, still not comprehending, pulled me to the floor of the shop. 'See to him, for God's sake,' I spluttered. 'I'm all right.' O'Sullivan went to Zoo Baby and he and Dov tugged the big, dead man to the floor. There was a blood mark and a black hole behind his ear, but there was not a lot of bleeding. Shoshana was hanging over him, weeping and rubbing his fat hands. As though that would do any good.}

^{An hour later we went to the Wailing Wall. We went because that is where everyone was going. Other men had died on the way. We saw the bodies of five Arabs and three Israeli soldiers in the steep alleys as we went towards the Temple area. There was still some shooting, but not much. Jerusalem was in the happy hands of the Jews.}

^{We reached an elevated place, overlooking the great stones of the wall. Fires still burned, and dust still came from the debris of the ancient surrounding buildings. But the sun was in the clear and unperturbed swallows were flying about the Wailing Wall. Below crowds of Israeli soldiers were weeping and kissing the stones and posting little pieces of paper containing prayers through its ancient cracks. Dov walked down there alone and I watched him go slowly to kiss the wall. The religion dictated that Shoshana could not go with him, but only watch.}

^{O'Sullivan, starkly thin, stood with me witnessing it all, detached from it as I was. We did not understand. We had seen a glut of death.
I said to O'Sullivan: 'Well, it's a good wall, isn't it?'
'Oh yes,' he said, very Irish. 'It's a fine wall, right enough.'}

^{It seems very long ago now. They took me with all the other war casualties to hospital at Ramat Gan, outside Tel Aviv. They said I had sand from the Negev Desert in my kidneys. I was the only one to be injured by sand in the entire six days of the war. It took a painful month to get it clear. Shoshana came to see me every day and when I left the hospital we went to live in Jerusalem in the dusty house in Jaffa Road.}

^{We lasted seven months together and then she went away with an Israeli schoolteacher to live on a kibbutz right against the border with Jordan. Selma I saw riding with the handsome Arab mayor of a small town on the Israeli-occupied West Bank. They had a big American car and they were driving through what had always been the Israeli sector of Jerusalem, in the direction that would take them towards both her houses. I half called to her, but she did not see me.}

^{My return to England was a glamorous event, dutifully drummed up by Philip, my agent and Eric, my manager. The heroic publicity was tremendous and all my concerts were sold out. But I had to keep doing recitals for Israeli charities.}

^{About three weeks ago I was lying awake in Faith's bed when I heard again the notes that Herr Scheerer had hummed in his last living minutes in the hot desert. Someone in the dockland street was whistling them in the early hollow hours. I lay and laughed quietly to myself. Dear old Scheerer, the grand master of Wagner, had died humming the tune of
Two Lovely Black Eyes.}

^{God knows why.}

^{The End}