by Colin Smith
“So Churchill at the parliament,” she had started that morning. “So why the treason?”
“Treason?” Calderwell had said and bought a little time by savouring his coffee which was, as usual, always very good and came in a large cup with a dash of milk and Spinney’s arrowroot biscuits which he was always tempted to dunk in the coffee but could never quite dare.
“Yes, treason,” Mrs Fendelbaum had said, smoothing her white pleated skirt down over the shapely, silk sheened legs of a woman who had far fewer years over Calderwell than he had on her daughter. “Is it not treason to have such a vote in the middle of a war? In Germany this would be forbidden.”
“Oh you mean that No Confidence Vote?”
“No Confidence! Pah!”
“Well, he won it didn’t he?” said Calderwell. “No more than a couple of
dozen voted against him.”
“Twenty-five fifth columnists,” said Mrs Fendelbaum. “I heard it on the BBC. But to do such a thing when you are at war? This is suicidal. Do the English want to be like the French?”
Mrs Fendelbaum had strong views about the French. According to Mitzi she believed that if France had not surrendered the Germans would have soon grown war weary, got rid of Hitler and welcomed home all those German Jews driven from the Fatherland.
“Well, I suppose things haven’t been going all that well lately.” ventured Calderwell, finishing his last biscuit with relish. He had not had a proper breakfast and Mitzi had been particularly acrobatic the night before. “A lot of people think that what happened at Tobruk was the last straw. And they wanted to air their feelings on the matter. That’s democracy I suppose.”
“Democracy? Pah! Ridiculous!” said Mrs Fendelbaum who had about as much respect for universal adult franchise as she did for the French army. she believed in strong leaders not chaotic legislatures with everybody talking at once and nothing getting done. Churchill, Stalin, Hitler, even Mussolini were strong men. She had reservations about Roosevelt suspecting that America would still be neutral if it wasn’t for the Emperor of Japan. In Palestine some of the left-wing Jews called the Russian writer Vladimir Jabotinsky a Fascist but Zionism had needed someone to point out that the Arabs would never accept any kind of deal that was not imposed on them by force. Calderwell had once, quite gently for him, pointed out to her that the terrorist Avraham Stern considered himself a disciple of Jabotinsky’s revisionist Zionism but this had not stopped her joining a committee in Tel Aviv that was arranging an exhibition on Jabotinsky to commemorate the second anniversary of his death. The event was causing considerable friction within the Yekke community and she was not on the most popular side.
One thing Mrs Fendelbaum and Calderwell were agreed on was that these recent reports coming out of Eastern Europe alleging that the Germans had begun the systematic massacre of thousands of Jews were almost certainly rubbish. The German people would never stand for it. Had not the Lutheran church persuaded the Nazis to drop their euthanasia programme for the mentally sick? The Germans were not the Turks and the Jews were not the Armenians. Warmed by this meeting of minds, they chatted on while Mitzi collected her swimming costume, towel, Velveta sun cream, sun glasses and located a straw shopping bag to put them all in.
Once they were back in the car she said: “I’m sure if Hitler had not been so anti-Semitic Mother would have been making her Sieg Hails along with all the other good Germans.”
Calderwell grunted. He sometimes thought he had more in common with Mrs Fendelbaum than he did with her daughter.
It was just past noon when he parked the Austin outside the club. Far from saying there were no more canoes available the old Arab fisherman who hired them out eagerly led them down to the deserted beach where they were stacked. They were not really canoes at all but crude paddle board surfers that came with a single bladed paddle and could be propelled from a kneeling position or even astride and then, using the paddle, return you to shore on the crest of a wave.
A couple of RAF aircrew were drinking beer at the long bar in the dining room – the club granted honourary membership to all commissioned ranks - Calderwell and Mitzi were the only other patrons. Surveying the empty seats and tables he began to feel stirrings of guilt though he was owed enough leave and lost weekends to take the rest of the month off.
Having deposited his Webley in the club’s gun safe he emerged from the men’s changing room wearing new maroon woollen bathing trunks, a lemon short-sleeved sports shirt and a recently acquired flat white golfing cap, he thought rather snappy. His beach book, just in case Mitzi fell asleep, was Aircraft Recognition, Penguin’s best selling paperback by R.A. Saville-Sneath. The Palestine police were all supposed to know it by heart though Calderwell suspected that if he ever actually got close enough to a Junkers 88 to mistake it for an RAF Blenheim he’d probably soon be past caring. Resisting the urge to attend to the insistent pubic itch brought on by the trunk’s new wool, a problem he could never recall having with the old chest covering and looser fitting style public decency had quite recently demanded, he went in search of Mitzi.
She had changed into a white backless swimming costume and was already into the water almost up to her knees, staring out to sea with her back to him. Silhouetted on the horizon was a warship, a regular patrol watching for Axis submarines and small boats smuggling illegal Jewish immigrants ashore from Turkey. Calderwell gave her a wolf whistle and Mitzi pirouetted to face him then bobbed a ballerina’s curtain call. Apart from being backless her figure hugging costume was cut high up the thigh and with considerable décolletage. She was straight out of Hollywood or the pages of Parade magazine. All she lacked was any sign of a tan, a testament to her working hours. His own arms and face were browner than hers and he hadn’t even been trying.
“What’s that on your head?” She was pointing at his white cap.
“It’s to stop my brains from frying.”
“I shall have to buy you a ukulele. You look like George Formby.”
“I bloody well hope not. I’ve got better teeth,” said Calderwell, snatching off the headgear and cramming it into a small canvas holdall containing his towel and book.
“No, please, you need it.”
“Well, I’m not taking it into the sea and losing it,” he said, relieved at the notion that she might be willing to live with it. “Let’s go and get our boats.”
It was, thought Calderwell, almost a perfect day for it. At the moment, the surf looked manageable, not much more than a gentle swell. It was easy to time and there was no hint of undertow or other treachery. Mitzi was much better at it than he was. For a start she was a much more confident swimmer than Calderwell who had learned late in life when he was first posted to Galilee and found the warm and gentle waters of its inland sea magically unthreatening. She went out further, greeting the breakers when they were beginning their roll and riding in with them, shrieking and laughing, kneeling and stabbing at the surge with the paddle, yelling at him to get ready, this was the big one. While they played Calderwell tried to keep an eye on his grip which was lying beneath a small white beach umbrella Mitzi had planted into the deserted beach with pioneering zeal. Calderwell decided it must be a Zionist habit.
When they had finished they lay on their backs on the sand for ten minutes, which was about all the sun they could stand and certainly all the time they needed to dry off. Then they went to the club house to shower off the salt and the sand and hang their bathing costumes on the line provided for this before they went in for a late lunch.
Calderwell drank beer, Mitzi had a lemonade and they had lamb kebab with the thin Arab bread that felt a bit like soggy paper to mop up their humus and tahini dips. Calderwell had left the sports jacket in his locker and eat tieless in his shirt sleeves which the Committee had decided was, in the summer, acceptable at lunch time but not at dinner. The RAF men had gone and they were the only paying customers in the club. It rarely did much midweek lunchtime trade. With their cigarettes Mitzi had a Turkish coffee and
Calderwell ordered a glass of mint flavoured tea with plenty of sugar which arrived scalding hot and it was some time before he could as much as wet his lips with it.
At first, they talked a bit about what the future held for them but only the immediate future. Mitzi thought that, since the fighting in the desert had not gone as badly as everybody thought it would after Tobruk fell, her unit would be recalled to Cairo from Sarafand any day now. Calderwell spoke quietly of his own work with Hare and the mysterious German parachute that they had at first linked with the Mufti’s men.
“Well, what other Arabs would it be?” Mitzi inquired.
“Not Arabs,” said Calderwell. He was almost whispering.
“Did you say not Arabs?”
He nodded.
“Armenians? Circassians? Greeks? Men from Mars?”
He shook his head.
“Jews? You are trying to tell me that a German parachutist, a Nazi, is connected with some Jews?”
“That’s what it looks like.”
“I don’t believe it.”
“You don’t have to,” said Calderwell. “You’re not supposed to know anything about it.”
“I got a wireless intercept the other night, live high speed Morse quite close. David Hare was very pleased with me. Was that something to with your parachutist?”
“Might have been.”
“And somebody tried to kill MacMichael when he visited Sarafand?”
He nodded. What the hell. Mitzi was handling sensitive stuff all the time. She had once told him they had made her sign the Official Secrets Act. Nobody had ever asked him to do that. Now she asked: “Was the bomb at Sarafand to do with this German as well?”
“We think so. He seems to be posing as a South African officer, calls himself De Wet. We’ve put out a general alert for him.”
“Is it in the newspapers?”
“No, not yet. There’s a good chance he doesn’t know we’re onto him. Warn him and he’ll simply change identities. So please don’t tell your mother.”
She smiled. “Perhaps you should intern her? At least she’d get more German company.”
“Let’s go back to the beach,” he said.
***
That same afternoon Jessica and De Wet were swimming and dancing no more than fifteen minutes’ drive away from the Police Beach Club at Villa Bernstein, a restaurant owned by one of the founding Ukrainian Jewish families of the settlement known as Rishon Le Zion. It was a Tea Dance. Tickets were 55 mils each, admission to officers and their ladies only. And afterwards you could cool off in the swimming pool. Best to take two costumes but they dried off quickly enough if you left them on your lounger when you took the floor. They had intended to go to a Full Moon Dance with Midnight Bathing which, De Wet assured Jessica, you’d probably get locked up for in South Africa, even in Durban. In Palestine, war or no war, the English still liked to play. Then Jessica couldn’t make it. Evidently, there was a flap on at the Secretariat. They were all working around the clock regardless of what their normal duties were and she had drawn a week of nights.
It was, said Jessica, all frightfully hush-hush but something pretty big was coming up. She couldn’t possibly tell him what it was, no, really she couldn’t, but they all had to get ready for it. Apparently things were not going as well along the El Alamein line as the Palestine Post suggested. It was feared that Rommel might be simply regrouping and shortening his supply lines through Tobruk before making his next move. General Auchinleck and the High Commissioner were working out contingency plans in case the Eighth Army had to retreat into Palestine. Sir Harold was going to fly up to the airstrip at Burg-el-Arab just behind El Alamein for a face-to-face with Auchinleck.
“So you see,” said Jessica, chin inches from De Wet’s bobbing right shoulder. “We might end up in the same trench together yet.”
“I would prefer something a bit more comfortable,” he said, steering her carefully across a surprisingly full floor. It was the usual thirties style band with one of the Levant’s replacements for Al Bowlly crooning, “You couldn’t be cuter.” Once again she found she loved dancing with De Wet. No she couldn’t tell him what it was, honest she couldn’t.
He suggested cocktails and while he was waiting to order she went to the Ladies. When she came back she discovered him conducting a conversation in Hebrew with the Jewish waiter. “I’m trying to pick it up,” he told her. “I’ll tell you a secret. Some of it is a bit like Arabic. But don’t tell them.”
***
Calderwell, determined not to panic in front of Mitzi, was trying to decide whether he was in real trouble or merely needed to try a bit harder. He was always trying to improve his swimming and had gone out on his own without one of the paddleboards. But for some time now there had been this awful suspicion that the distance between himself and any given point along the shore was widening; that he was in the implacable embrace of some loving current determined that they should never be parted.
Mitzi had gone back to her book, the copy of Ten Little Nigger Boys she had borrowed from Hare at Sarafand. Once she had got up and waved at him and he tried to return it but as soon as he brought his hand up he had swallowed more water. Every time he tried to get back to his depth he was swamped by the next breaker that would first cast him teasingly towards the shore only to pluck him back as it withdrew down the slope of the beach taking everything it could move with it.
The main problem was that Calderwell was not getting himself in quite the right position to ride the surf because he was not really a confident enough swimmer to keep his head in the water, mouth firmly closed and kick. Instead he tried to keep his head up with the result that he was swallowing a lot of water. He kept his salt stung eyes on Mitzi’s white umbrella and tried again. He tried to get a rhythm going, time his breathing. He felt he was making progress; Mitzi’s beach umbrella was closer than it had been for some time. He put his feet down, feeling for the sand and the shingle. His toes touched something, and then the next breaker crashed over him, filling his mouth with water but driving him forward. For a moment he felt his feet scrape bottom then the wave tugged him back, leaving him treading water and gasping for air. Was it really going to end like this, drowned off a beach? Thirty-four years ago he should have drowned clinging onto the rail on a torpedoed troop ship, a terrified nineteen-year-old who only a few weeks before had survived the charge against the Austrian guns at Huj and been hailed as a bloody hero. He should never have grown into full manhood, met Mitzi. He should never have pushed his luck.
***
In the back of the old Ford taxi returning them to Jerusalem from the dance at Rishon LeZion Jessica and De Wet dozed and allowed their hands to coincide in the region of his groin. Her head rested on his left shoulder, her cheek more or less on the major’s crown sewn on the epaulette there, her long auburn hair in disarray as was the straight grey office skirt she was wearing which had shucked well above her stocking less knees which were curled against his, one sling-backed, high heel fallen to the floor, the other dangling precariously from her toes. Warm air caressed Jessica’s face. It came from the slip steam of their driver’s open window which sometimes lifted the tails of his headdress so that they fluttered like flags over the back of his seat.
She had been surprised that Maurice had turned up in an Arab taxi but apparently with the flap on and all the losses of equipment incurred at Tobruk there was a shortage of transport, and he was waiting to be allotted a car from the South African’s motor pool. Meanwhile, the taxi was undoubtedly one of the better examples of Palestine’s public transport probably no more than ten years old. Jessica briefly opened her eyes, felt a delicious languor begin to seep through her body, closed them again and snuggled closer to De Wet. His shirt, Jessica noted, was made of some superior non-issue Egyptian cotton of the kind Jewish shirt makers in Tel Aviv and Haifa used. Bob used to wear the same sort of thing in blue. Now DeWet’s held that musky and, she found, faintly arousing smell of male sweat.
Off and
on they had danced and swam for just over three hours and it had been a hot afternoon. Even now, as the shadows lengthened and then merged into a purple dusk, the temperature did not seem much below its midday high. Jessica sighed. It was so unfair they had called her in this evening. She had no desire to work. What she desired was Maurice De Wet and lots of him. She wondered whether she should pretend she was sick and spend the evening in bed with Maurice and a bottle of whisky. Then she wasn’t altogether sure Maurice was approve of that. He was such a stickler for duty himself, always disappearing on his ration procuring errands around the country or whatever he was doing to make himself useful before he was passed fit enough to return to Alexandria. He didn’t even seem to have any permanent quarters. “Can’t get into the King David for the moment,” he had explained that morning, sitting up in her bed with a Players and a coffee. “Been allotted some sort of monk’s cell at the Palestine Police depot on Scopus. Lots of barbed wire and bugle calls.”
“Well, you can always come here when you want a rest,” Jessica had said and they both broke up into fits of laughter.
The road they were following was the one the Turks had at last got round to building towards the end of the last century. Flat at first then shortly before the old wine making monastery at Latrun, it began its winding climb towards Jerusalem. Here they got stuck behind a crawling convoy of army trucks with a military police motorcyclist bringing up the rear who waved back all attempts to overtake. Denied his right to gamble against the chances of a head on collision with oncoming traffic, their driver muttered, and on one occasion slapped his steering wheel.
Jessica, who had been trying to will herself back into her doze sat up and peered at her watch. “I’m going to be late,” she said. “We’ve still got that bloody checkpoint to go through just after we get into Jerusalem. There’s always a queue there.”
