Authors: Lesley Thomas
Hebrew is a good language for singing songs. It moulds well with music. They sang their favourites,
Hava Nagilla,
and
Yeroshalaim
that was soon to be the anthem of all, but soon they softened and men began to sing the songs of their own, old countries. We sat and listened, for many had fine voices, as the Jewish folk-songs of half the world were sung.
There was a fat Pole and a thick Lithuanian, two Munich Germans, a funny man from New Jersey, and a Cochin Chinese Jew who sang a foul Oriental Jewish ballad with finger movements.
v
'One thing you can say about this firm,' O'Sullivan whispered to me. 'They've got branches every bloody where.'
The wine was drunk and a new, captured consignment brought into the candlelit cavern of a room to schoolboy cheers. Another bottle between every two people. Shoshana and three Israeli girl soldiers were the only women in the room. Shoshana laughed, with her head in her hands, when the Chinese Jew was singing his finger song.
A man with his face bandaged stood up at one of the far tables and shouted, comically muffled, through his dressings, pointing towards our table. His ragged words brought wild cheering from everywhere in the room and a thumping of fists and cutlery on the boards.
Those around me applauded and looked at me. I grinned foolishly. 'There's no piano,' I said.
'Any army which can win a war in a couple of days can obtain a piano in a couple of minutes,' said Dov. Zoo Baby got up massively from the table and made a loud demand in Hebrew. Then, like the head of a raiding party, he made for the door and half a dozen others followed him like daring undergraduates. They returned within the two minutes, half-pushing, half-carrying an ancient and graceful upright piano. I stood up and everyone shouted and cheered. Around me I quickly saw O'Sullivan's grin, Dov's laugh, and the delighted eyes of Shoshana.
They put the piano in the centre of the tables and Zoo Baby made great play of dusting off the keyboard and obtaining a chair. I sat down, for once completely lost in front of the instrument. Its yellowed teeth grimaced at me. It was an Arab piano and for a moment I wondered if it might be a booby trap. I made a joke of this, standing on the chair and looking into the interior making an exaggerated search for a bomb. They roared and applauded.
Then I sat again and began to play. I played quietly at first and they sat attentively and listened. Then they murmured and hummed and I played while they sang their songs once more. That
Yeroshalaim
they sang again and again.
I thumped it out like a bar-room cornerman when they got to the rousing marching songs, and then I played in a lumbering rhythm while some of them performed their distant dances.
I shall always think of Zoo Baby that evening. They cleared a space on the floor for him and the big man danced alone in the light of the candles. It was a Balkan dance, remembered since childhood, a gentle, rustic dance at its start, progressing into a brilliant kicking rhythm, hands on hips, legs shooting out, face cascading with sweat. Like many big men he danced beautifully, with huge, light movements and great graceful curves. He hummed the pastoral melody and I easily followed him, and then led him. When the dance quickened he swung into the exciting movements, his large feet banging on the floor and his mouth hooting out the calls, the sweat covering him, and all the others in the room clapping the demanding time. He was a dance troupe all on his own. I don't know how he moved like that. He worked it into a fantastic crescendo, his boots flying like hooves, his arms finely balanced, his mouth now speechless. The climax came and he sprang up and whirled in a great flying leap, a jump of joy and exuberance, grotesquely misjudged, that sent him crashing into the nearest table. Men and crockery were flung aside. The table collapsed spectacularly and chairs splintered and broke. Zoo Baby sat in the debris, panting and sweating, his huge chest rising and dropping, his arms full out, his tree-trunk legs flung apart, and a great, mashed smile on his big face. Everybody laughed and cheered. Dear Zoo Baby.
Shoshana said: 'It was hilarious.'
'For once I think that's the right word,' I said.
'And you played the piano very fine, Christopher.'
'I should try it for a living,' I said. 'Instead of doing acrobatics into shell craters.'
Playing like that had hurt. My hands were puffed and bruised and lacerated from all the ill-treatment of the past days. Lying on the bed in her room they throbbed.
'You don't know what playing for your Army has cost me, I said. She was lying beside me in her slip and she looked at me quickly. 'You joke again,' she said, relieved. 'Sometimes it is not possible to tell with you.' I showed her my hands. She took them in hers. 'They are supposed to be very soft. That is correct?' she said. 'They must be for your career.'
'I was never even allowed to wash up at home,' I said.
She looked worried. 'They are so damaged,' she said. 'Put them here for comfort.'
She parted her thighs and took my sore hands and placed their, at the top of her legs next to the triangle of soft material and the softer flesh. Then she moved very slightly with a bellows movement, squeezing them and releasing them, and squeezing them again. Her hands were on the sides of my head and she was looking with her splendid eyes into my face.
'That is good for your hands?' she asked me seriously.
I recommend it,' 1 answered.
We moved around in the bed. There was a single candle in a holder in the room, making our shadows like monsters. The guns were still grunting about Jerusalem, but the armies were, for the most pan, resting, waiting for the daylight and the attack on the Old City. My face now rested luxuriously on the pillows of her legs. I was lying on my side, hard against the sheet, my head turned, my cheek and my ear cushioned by her left thigh and the hair on the top of my head against her patch of thick hair enclosed in the white nylon.
1 ran my tongue along her leg, knowing her reaction in the tightening of her trunk and the squeezing of her hands that came down to touch my forehead. I could smell her and I remembered very briefly that Selma smelled like my mother.
My hands were a little higher than my head, gently rubbing her flanks, bringing her warmth together at one spot. I war ted to get right to her then so I said: 'These pants are getting wet. I think they had better come off.'
She whispered: 'Please take them from me. I don't like them to be wet.'
I did, rolling them into a tight ball in my fist and then wiping around her thighs with them. She sat up and held her
arms high as though surrendering. I quietly pulled her slip over her head. She had already taken off everything else and now she lay there, brown, with two white stripes across her
body, her breasts a little swollen, their nipples sleepy. We lay
down without fuss, kissing fully, and then she opened the scissors of her legs to let me in.
'Come to me, Christopher,' she said. 'Give to me.'
'Aaaaaaaaah!' I cried. And, 'Aaaaaaaah!'
My body suddenly bent like a bow, arching backwards and she let out a cry and tried to hold me. 'Christopher! Darling, what is wrong?'
'Aaaah, oh my God. Aaaaah. Jesus Christ, I've got such a pain in my back.'
'A pain in your back ? You joke ?'
It was like a serrated needle going through me, skewering my kidneys, drawing every nerve together in a knot. I rolled and rolled again. 'Dear Christ,' I muttered, tears of agony in my eyes. 'It's no joke. Oh no. Aaaaaah! Aaaaaah!'
'A doctor I will get,' she said reaching for the phone.
'No,' I gasped. 'No. Not here. This is your room.'
'This is Israel,' she said as though that were sufficient excuse. 'And it is war.'
Because it was war she could not get a doctor because they were either treating the wounded or resting. I lay bent with pain at the bottom of her bed for about ten minutes. Then it receded and half an hour later we slept peacefully together. In the circumstances I thought she was very kind and understanding.
Eighteen
Zoo Baby was killed about an hour after breakfast the following morning as the Israelis broke through at Herod's Gate and the St Stephen's Gate and began fighting along the muscular walls and the tangled streets and alleys of the Old City.
We had breakfast at the hotel and everyone had patted Zoo Baby and told him it was a marvellous dance he had performed the previous evening. Dov was telling me about the trains which had been running to Jerusalem from the north, skirting the Jordanian border by only a hundred yards. The Jews ran them empty until just before the attack on Jerusalem to lull the Arabs on that side. 'They are good trains,' said Dov in his quiet schoolmaster manner. 'The Germans gave us the rolling stock as part of their conscience. They have also sent us fifty thousand gas masks.'
At eight o'clock we left the hotel. It was a settled, guileless morning, with no sounds of battle. Two Arabs were tending the plants in the hotel garden and did not look up. The sky was clear and full of sunlight. But at eight-thirty an Israeli tank column went straight up the road from Mount Scopus to the heights of Augusta Victoria, firing as it went, while Jewish recoil-less guns and the hard paratroops attacked the thick walls of the Old City.
As we went towards the battle in the jeep with Zoo Baby driving, a skein of Israeli jets ran across the towers and flashing cupolas of the Old City and loosed their bombs on the Arab troops inside. From above the wall we could see the debris flying and the flames lending their brief brightness to the brilliance of the sun.
'Another day's work,' I said to O'Sullivan. 'Right on time.'
'And the last day, I expect,' he answered. 'Nothing will stop them today. They'll be at the Wailing Wall in a couple of hours.'
The recoil-less guns and the dipping planes were attacking the troops positioned on the wall and the crowded Arab quarter within. Everything was breaking out now. The tanks, fat and noisy, clambering up the hill behind us towards Augusta Victoria beyond the Mount of Olives, the guns and planes bombarding the Old City. In ten minutes the bombing and shelling stopped and in a strange, short, smoky quiet the paratroops attacked Herod's Gate, climbing the cliffs of the great walls, bursting through the gate. Then a clanking tank column came up the road towards the St Stephen's Gate. Two hundred yards before they reached it the tanks began firing nastily. There were explosions on the walls and solid squares of masonry tumbled and fell. The noise gathered and came to a crescendo in the warm morning.
We sat safely in the jeep on the outside slope of the city and watched. Shoshana was close to me. 'We will not harm the Holy Places,' she assured me as though I were some church dignitary. Then she said: 'How is your back today, Christopher?' I grinned with embarrassment. 'Nothing,' I said. 'It went like it came.'
She ran her firm hand across my shirt over my kidneys and said: I am glad there is no more pain. It was not hilarious, was it.'
'No it wasn't hilarious,' I agreed.
She was calm, but I could feel the excitement in her as she watched the prize city that was to be theirs before the end of the day. Dov and Zoo Baby sat sweating and watching, like spectators at some sporting event. Dov said: 'It is like the Roman days, eh? The attack on the walls of a defended city. This does not happen in modern war. It is like something from history.'
The tanks had got to the St Stephen's Gate, torn open by their gunfire and the leading tank was putting its inquisitive nose into the Old City.
'There are six gates,' said Dov unable to resist one of his lessons. 'Zion Gate, Jaffa Gate, Herod's Gate, Damascus Gate and Dung Gate and that one down there the St Stephen's Gate.'
'There is a seventh,' said Zoo Baby. 'The Golden Gate.'
Dov looked at me. 'But it is sealed. By tradition it will not be opened until the Messiah enters the city.'