“And the border?”
“Approximately the ranges mark it, but it’s never completely closed and there is quite a lot of marauding and smuggling. Up there you can see the patches of the seven settlements along the escarpment. They are actually on the border.” She named them slowly as she pointed, but each time as she mentioned the Hebrew name, she added, as a sort of pseudonym, the name of a town or a country which characterized the inhabitants. It appeared that these settlements were called respectively, Brisbane, Brooklyn, Odessa, Lubeck.
“No, it’s not code,” said Peterson. “It’s simply that the inhabitants come from those places. Talk about a tower of Babel. But then you see that Israel consists of sixty nations. A patchwork quilt.”
“It looks so peaceful.”
“Most of the time it is. Sometimes not. See the bullet holes in that wall. Arab fire last year, one night, without warning.”
“But don’t the British keep the peace?”
“When it suits them. I think they would be rather glad if their Arab friends wiped out the kibbutzim; we are an embarrassment to them. On the Lebanon side we are well protected because we control the crown of the mountain and the settlements are spread out along it — good defensive positions with steep cliffs the other side. On this side, alas, it is not so good because the Syrians are astride the crown and we are down in the valley. They could lob stuff down at us quite easily and we couldn’t hit back with our weapons. Luckily, up to now, they don’t seem to have anything heavier than machine guns.”
At one end of the long terrace there stood an old-fashioned heliograph manned by a couple of girls, one of whom was the taciturn Anna. Seeing Judith’s curious eyes on the machine as it winked away, eliciting a similar star of light from the second of the settlements, Pete said: “We’ve no telephones, alas; heliograph by day and torch signalling by night is what we have to do.”
One of the girls, scribbling on a signals pad, looked up and said: “Pete — there was some sniping in Amir last night; nobody hurt. They say they want more apples against apricots weight for weight.”
Pete snorted. “The last lot of apricots were weary, tell them. Moreover, tell them from me that they are just a bunch of Glasgow Jews thriving on the sharp practice they picked up from the Scots. Tell them, moreover, that we honest lowland Jews from Poland, Latvia, Russia and Brooklyn hold them in massive contempt.” Chuckling, the girls spelled the message while Pete took a turn or two upon the deck, looking indeed as business-like as an admiral on his flagship. “You see,” she said to Judith, “we have a perimeter round the camp but we’ve long since overflowed it and put the whole valley under cultivation. It took thirty years and about two hundred lives to drain what was stinking marshland and turn it into the richest valley in Palestine. The Arabs never did anything with it, and were glad to sell it off bit by bit — now, of course, they would like it back. So you see, we have our problems.”
One of the signallers turned her head and giggled as she said: “They’ve replied, Pete.”
“What do they say?”
“They say: ‘Tell Pete to stuff it!’ ”
Pete grunted and turned aside, smiling. “Today,” she said, taking Judith’s arm, “I’m not going to attach you: just wander around and have a look at everything — orchards, vegetable plots, chickens. We even have a flock of sheep. Do you see where the river turns out of the mountain and gets broad? Those white things are the sheep at pasture. It’s the very edge, though; the border starts inside the ravine and if you go too close you are likely to get a bullet through your hat.”
Judith took her at her word and spent the whole morning inspecting the settlement. The spring flowers were in their first glory — carpets of scarlet and blue anemones, hollyhock, cyclamen, lupin, rose. She gathered herself enough for a bowl as she sauntered.
At lunchtime she managed to borrow a small pottery jar for her bouquet of flowers and she put them on the window-sill of her tiny room. Looking around her at its primitive simplicity, and its view onto the beds of carefully tended flowers, she suddenly felt an absurd disposition to cry; and cry she did a little for relief, telling herself that it was “just a reaction”, though she could not have defined the word with any precision. She felt rather like a snake about to shed its skin, to slough off the misery of the past and take on the bright hues of a present in this lovely place. Yet, from time to time, the past came back and almost choked one: rounding a hedge by the vegetable gardens she had suddenly come upon a row of smoking incinerators burning garbage — old turnip-ends, newspapers, kitchen refuse, rotten pumpkins. The incinerator was being fed by a bunch of Poles and Americans whom the smoke had turned black as demons. Her memory turned a double somersault and scattered all her self-possession. The incinerators! It was all she could do not to be violently sick.
6. The Long Arm of Chance
Mr. Donner was fated to be a policeman; it was not a question of vocation entirely, though he fitted the part and played it with a certain relish. He was in fact well cast, for he was a mountainous figure of a man who used his fat as extra weight when it came to exchanging shoves or blows with Arabs or Jews. Tall, of a deceptively babyish blondness and blue of eye, he could, when he chose, look as shy and innocent and bashful as only a Protestant Irishman can look. He had the brogue too — that slippery dialect accent which sorts so well with a national talent for hysteria or wheedling. Donner in his uniform was one thing — but Donner undressed… for at this very moment he was lying naked on his bed, enjoying the vague doze which helped him to pass away the siesta hour and digest a heavy meal, wallowing in the suds of beer. The Palestinian sun, instead of turning him brown, had only increased his pinkness; his flesh resembled somewhat the celluloid skin of a cheap doll. His knees and elbows wore large dimples. His legs were slightly bowed so that he stood awkwardly askew, which increased his air of apparent shyness. He breathed stertorously through his mouth, his straggling blonde moustache fluttering with the breaths. Mr. Donner… Inspector Donner, was sleeping the sleep of the just, from which he would be wrenched at a quarter to four by the silvery chime of an alarm clock. His little villa in the German colony was snug and well appointed for a bachelor. His Arab cook was good and cost little, though he thieved when he could. His office was within walking distance of his house and consequently most conveniently situated. But Mr. Donner was dreaming of himself in other circumstances, and in a more resplendent uniform than a police outfit. He saw himself walking about with modest vainglory, clad in the duds of a Staff-Captain (Substantive); nor was this entirely a dream, for he had, with great skill, managed to lobby himself the promise of precisely such a post on the Syrian Mission, and had that very day received confirmation of the fact that he would eventually be able to kiss his hand to the Force as well as to the Superintendent, who was a thorn in his side. The Superintendent could kiss his arse, thought Donner vindictively, as he lay with closed eyes, hovering between sleeping and waking. A single mosquito droned. He had forgotten to tell Abdul to fill the flit-gun. There! The clock had started to chime.