A Long Way to Shiloh

by Lionel Davidson

  ‘It’s terrible the drivers here. They should put still more taxes …’

  ‘For instance, in Vayishlach in Genesis today, something puzzles me. Ibn Ezra interprets the attitude of Esau …’

  ‘Idiot, you’ve been told – he’s not Jewish …’

  ‘They go like lunatics. If the police prosecuted every time an accident …’

  ‘She’s proud to work with you, our Shana. Look at her …’

  I looked at her. She wasn’t wearing uniform now. She was in pale blue slacks, pink jumper, tiny Shield of David on a thin gold chain round her neck, black, black hair. Shimshon was looking at her, too. A big morose character, khaki rig, captain’s stars, smouldering eyes, red beret; all the males covered in this religious household.

  ‘So he goes to greet his brother Jacob, taking four hundred men with him. Why? Because …’

  ‘A little chicken, a spoonful of rice – Come, what can the doctor object …’

  ‘If the police won’t take an action, go to your own people, the embassy. These liberty-takers in big cars …’

  ‘Again, why do the rabbis put dots over each letter of vayishakeihu – “And he kissed him”? Because it wasn’t a genuine kiss! Tell me …’

  ‘How many times more – idiot! Excuse him – he lives only for the synagogue …’

  ‘So take my advice, make them prosecute …’

  ‘Do you want to go to bed now?’ she said, brown eyes watching me.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Shimshon won’t mind sleeping on the floor, just one night. You won’t mind sleeping on the floor, Shimshon, just one night?’

  ‘So what does he do? Does he trust him, never mind the brotherly kiss? Does he stay with him …?’

  ‘No, not for a night,’ Shimshon said.

  ‘Exactly! You see? The military mind! Which Jacob had. Not for a night even! A clever man. They were all clever men in those days. When they said something plainly, all right. Otherwise they said one thing and meant another. So explain to me, why does Ibn Ezra …’

  ‘Come on,’ she said.

  ‘What – already going?’ her father said

  ‘Of course, idiot. To bed. He’s ill, can’t you see? So sleep well, we’ll see you tomorrow.’

  ‘The bocha stays here tonight?’

  ‘I told you already – he’s the professor of Shana!’

  ‘Fine. So we’ll go together to synagogue.’

  ‘Idiot – Pay no attention. He lives only …’

  ‘There’s no light,’ she said. ‘I’ll leave the door open till you undress.’

  ‘No, Shoshana, close it a minute. I want to talk to you.’

  She closed it, pitch blackness.

  ‘Shoshana, listen, I don’t want to go back yet. I’ve got to think. Will you fix me up with an hotel tomorrow?’

  ‘Stay here.’

  ‘It’s Shimshon’s bed.’

  She didn’t say anything. She just leaned on me, soft jumper, soft little breasts. My knees gave. I was sitting, in a jangle of springs. She was sitting beside me, lips touching mine, just touching. She said against them, ‘Oh, Caspar, Caspar, I’m so glad you’re here,’ hands cool on my neck.

  ‘Shoshana.’

  ‘Stay here.’

  ‘Yes.’

  I had no clear idea when she went. It wasn’t so dark suddenly. I seemed to be swooping about the room getting undressed. I had my trousers off before my jacket, was in bed before I remembered the hat. I levered the hat off and lay back, in some confusion of mind.

  The kiss, the crater, the gushing face on the carpet. I seemed to be obsessed with a need to return the hat, to prosecute liberty-takers. The softness of breast, of arm, next to mine in the photo, who wouldn’t eff off. Would he ever eff off, sitting smouldering next door while she kissed me here? Not a sisterly kiss, or a brotherly, like the clever man, like all the clever men, who couldn’t be believed unless they spoke plainly, saying one thing and meaning another.

  Tablets. Needed to take tablets. I’d roused up, but sank back again. No real need. Could manage without. Could easily manage, a filmy veil parting then, and under the veil a gulf, and down the gulf me, leaving the awful day, endlessly leaving it, endlessly floating in endless gulf on big balloon head.

  2

  I didn’t hear Shimshon in the night and he wasn’t there when I woke. Shoshana was there. She said, ‘Would you like tea or something? Would you like something to eat?’

  ‘What – breakfast already?’

  ‘Lunch already.’

  ‘What time, for Christ’s sake?’

  ‘One o’clock, for Christ’s sake. You were sleeping beautifully. Do you feel beautiful now?’

  ‘I don’t know how I feel.’

  ‘You look beautiful.’ She was very gay, eyes sparkling. The door was shut and she gave me a quick kiss. I sat up. My head lurched and every hump on my spiny prehistoric back ached.

  ‘Is there anything you should be taking?’

  ‘I don’t know. I have some tablets. I don’t want them.’

  ‘I think a little soup and mince and then compote.’

  ‘All right.’

  ‘I’ll bring you a bowl to wash in. There’s no bathroom.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘Do you want the lavatory? I’ll show you when you want it.’

  I just wanted to lay there. I didn’t want mince or compote or a bowl or the lavatory, and I didn’t want to think about them. She went after a while and I lay and thought about Ike. It seemed like a bad, a terrible dream. I felt nauseated and oppressed thinking about it. I thought about it while I washed and in the toilet and when I ate.

  I scarcely answered when she spoke to me, and presently she went again.

  There was a religious picture on the wall, the all-seeing eye of God looking through a cloud. Great shafts of light spread from the cloud as God looked through. I gave him a bit of a look, too.

  *

  ‘I think you should have a breath of air,’ she said. ‘I got most of the mud off your clothes.’

  ‘Where’s Shimshon?’

  ‘At the synagogue. He went with my father to ma’ariv. They’ll soon be back. Shabat is out. I thought we could have a little stroll and a cup of coffee. It will do you good.’

  ‘All right.’ I wasn’t doing myself much good in bed. I’d tried to get up, but there was nowhere to sit, no chairs, no carpet, no floor covering of any sort, just Shimshon’s neatly rolled blanket and his mattress. The only furniture in the room was an old chest of drawers, piled high with brown paper parcels containing, apparently, her father’s stock of prayer shawls, phylacteries and skull caps: he kept a little shop of religious articles.

  I dressed and got my great hat on and met her father and Shimshon just coming in as I left the room.

  ‘Hello, bocher!’ The old nut was exceedingly jovial. ‘Did you miss some talk today! You’d have licked your fingers.’ He’d had a perfectly marvellous day, Shabat the best one of the week for him, scarcely out of the synagogue or the adjoining study hall for a minute of it.

  ‘We’re just going out, Father. He hasn’t been out today yet. We’re going for a coffee.’

  ‘Fine. I’ll come with you.’

  ‘You wouldn’t like it. We’re going to Dizengoff.’

  ‘Dizengoff, feh! It’s too noisy, Dizengoff.’

  ‘I told you you wouldn’t like it.’

  ‘We don’t have to go to Dizengoff,’ she said in the street.

  ‘What’s wrong with Dizengoff?’

  ‘Isn’t it too busy for you?’

  ‘I don’t mind Dizengoff.’ I never did mind it. Dizengoff always had a tonic effect on me. Maybe it would have one now.

  It was too far to walk so we took a taxi and got off at the Circus and walked down from there.

  Tel Aviv on a Saturday night is a very lively town, of course, and Dizengoff Street is the liveliest part of it. The circus is a hub, of treed lights, wheeling traffic, corner cinemas, stores; and radiating away f
rom it, one of the spokes of five main streets, is Dizengoff.

  It isn’t very broad and it isn’t very tall, but a certain dense hubbub lets you know right away that you’re in one of the streets of the world. Tree-lined, café-lined – and with flats above the cafés, so that the balcony-dwellers may call without inconvenience to friends in the street – it exudes a gemutlichkeit not to be found elsewhere. It isn’t the rue de la Paix, of course, but the habitués like it better; just as they prefer soft drinks to aperitifs, and lemon tea and strudel to almost anything.

  We eased our way through the swarming strollers in the neon-lit night, passed packed tables of sports and political experts and found a place for ourselves in a noisy convocation of rabbinical students. My hat was not at all out of place here, I was glad to see, and I sat back and felt the accustomed revivifying process of a Saturday night in Tel Aviv.

  There are Jerusalem people and Tel Aviv people, and it’s aesthetically proper to be one of the former. I was one of the latter. It’s an architectural outrage, of course, a mass of Mediterranean concrete gimcrackery, mainly shoved up too quickly, to cope with the sudden influx of people who found themselves alive when they hadn’t expected to be. Teitleman and his mates had helped to perpetrate much of it; but the life of a Teitleman building, thank God, was not much above twenty years.

  But it’s a live town, an excitable and passionate town, swept by strange fads and fancies, dietetic, therapeutic and artistic. Any morning of the week you can see yogi and callisthenics enthusiasts intensely engaged on the beach, and any evening find packed crowds appreciating works of the most baffling obliquity in concert hall and gallery.

  All over it now, its smaller class of businessman had opened up to catch the post-sabbath trade. In every hole and corner there seemed to be an oil-lit stall selling some minute requisite, elastic, shoe-laces, combs; and at every other one, bits of food, potato cakes, fried chickpea balls, fruit and vegetable juices, nuts.

  It’s only twenty minutes by bomber from Cairo, and there was a fair amount of khaki in the street; and with it some less definable but very Israeli quality, a certain humorous pugnacity. Toughness, self-reliance, qualities greatly prized here, had also struck an echo in the girls. There was a mischievous, tomboyish look about many of them as they passed, army hats cocked modishly over one eye, egg-brown arms round the necks of male and female comrades; a strong impression of matey solidarity.

  I suddenly felt myself coming alive, with a sensation of cotton wool lifting off the top of my head. Hadn’t this girl been demonstrating some rather over-matey solidarity with me of late? Was it imagination, or had she or had she not been giving me a kiss-up on Shimshon’s bed?

  I had a look at her. She was tidying the giant Moroccan’s epaulets, which seemed to please him. He was smiling a fond darkling smile, anyway. It suddenly struck me as a bit rough on him, after sweltering for months in the south, to have won me for his last evening.

  I said, ‘Look, I don’t want to disrupt anything. I’m fine here if you want to go ahead.’

  ‘So are we,’ the girl said. ‘We wouldn’t want to do anything else, would we, Shimshon?’

  Shimshon opened his mouth and closed it again.

  ‘What had you planned to do?’

  ‘We had planned to go to a kebab house in Jaffa and after that to the Al Raschid nightclub,’ Shimshon said immediately.

  ‘I see,’ I said, a bit taken aback by his explicitness and also by the length of the speech. ‘Well, go ahead. I know my way around here. When I’m tired I’ll go back.’

  ‘We wouldn’t dream of it,’ the girl said. ‘We’d much sooner be with you, wouldn’t we, Shimshon?’

  ‘Yes,’ Shimshon said, into his coffee.

  I said, ‘Look, you’ll only make me come with you if you go on like –’

  ‘You mean you’d like to? You really feel up to it? You don’t think it would be too much for you?’

  ‘No. Yes. I don’t know,’I said irritably. ‘I just don’t want –’

  ‘Why, that would be wonderful. If you think it’s right for you. We’d love him to come, wouldn’t we, Shimshon?’

  ‘Yes,’ Shimshon said, and looked at me briefly. ‘If he thinks it’s right.’

  There was nothing ambiguous in his look at least. Two little red points glowed murderously in his eyes for a moment. But that’s what we did, anyway.

  3

  The kebabs came up on practically red-hot skewers, and we lingered over them in the little Arab parlour, and then had Turkish coffee before wandering down the dark Jaffa lanes to the Al Raschid.

  He’d booked a table, which was just as well, because it was after ten and the cellar was packed for the night. The ambience, I noted, was strictly non-rabbinic, and waves of amazed hilarity followed us as we were led to the table.

  ‘It’s your hat,’ Shimshon said, unnecessarily, delighted by my momentary discomfiture. ‘It surprises them here. You could take it off now.’

  ‘No, thanks.’ I didn’t know what she’d told him, but my Invisible-Man type bandages would surprise them even more. Also the hat had changed my face in subtle and not unpleasing ways. I’d quite taken to it.

  It certainly seemed to be producing service. The first cabaret was just finishing, and the belly dancer shimmied up and to applause practically screwed herself on my knee. Also, and more usefully, it brought the wine waiter at a jovial trot as soon as signalled.

  I sat and worked my way through a bottle of white wine, the others sipping abstemiously, while dancing proceeded. Nice wine, Avdat wine, from the stony uplands of the Negev. You needed to drink a certain amount to get the stony flavour. I drank a certain amount, and ordered another bottle. Some time during the course of it I began to feel wonderful.

  Much better to be alive than dead. Much better to be in Tel Aviv than, say, Amman. Much better to be here drinking stony Avdat than anything else I could think of. Life went on, of course, I thought, and sighed gustily, and watched absently as Shimshon began scooping about on his knee. He seemed to be scooping cigarette ends and ash from his knee. He seemed to be putting them back in the ashtray. Definitely something wrong with this fellow’s eyes. Funny little red points in them when he looked at you.

  I sighed heavily again, and saw the red points come up again as he started scooping on his knee once more. A strange sort of obsession. He was moving the ashtray away from me. I seemed to need the ashtray and took it back. Fellow didn’t want to give it, playing little games on his knee again. Definitely strange.

  ‘You are blowing the ash on Shimshon’s knee.’

  ‘Is that what it is?’ I said, and looked at him more kindly. ‘Good job you were there,’ I said obscurely.

  ‘Are you sure the wine is good for you?’

  ‘Something wrong with it? Tastes perfectly good to me.’

  ‘Your head.’

  ‘Ah. I see what you mean. Don’t think about it,’ I told her. ‘Life goes on, you know.’

  Which it did; nilly willy. Nilly willy? Willy nilly, back to front, say one thing and mean another, like the clever fellows in Vayishlach. There was something about these clever fellows that it was important for me to remember. What was it …?

  My head seemed to be orbiting gently like some black-ringed Saturn about a yard above my shoulders, filled with an immense life-enhancing capability. A capability for what? For posing opposings, for flashing nilly-willyisms.

  ‘Not dancing?’ I said to the military mind opposite.

  A touch of his old eye trouble came on again.

  ‘Shimshon doesn’t dance,’ the girl said for him.

  ‘Nor you neither? Either? Nilly willy,’ I said.

  ‘Yes, I dance.’

  ‘How about a spin, then?’

  She looked at me rather carefully, and then at my hat. ‘Are you sure you wouldn’t be better sitting quietly?’

  ‘Certainly not. Much better on my feet.’

  So I was, I thought, springing effortlessly across the floor on them.
And why not? Much better to spring across a dance floor with a lissom young thing than across a crater with a bullet in the behind. As a proposition it was self-evident, and one requiring celebration; except that the band seemed to have fallen into some slow confusion.

  ‘What on earth’s gone wrong with them?’ I said, not exactly put off but having to concentrate more on sudden inexplicable complications in my bosanova.

  ‘They’re supposed to be playing a tango.’

  ‘Is that what they’re supposed to be playing?’ I said, amused. But indeed, when you came to study the matter, which I did, amiably enough, nodding encouragement to the leader who seemed rendered uncertain by my patient ear-cupping attention, some tango-type rhythm did seem to be being attempted. The tango, of course, was my speciality, and once the facts had been established, I flowed smoothly enough into it. I fancied I knew a few steps that would interest them here.

  It occurred to me while executing them that the presence of the hat was lending a certain panache to my performance, and that by swivelling up my eyeballs and gazing intently at the brim I was able not only to enhance my aesthetic enjoyment of it, but also to provide what must be an appealing picture of exaltation, very pleasing to beholders. An appreciative circle began to open up around us, and encouraged by it, I smiled and allowed my tongue to hang out in a relaxed fashion, thus transforming the expression into one of mindless rapture that I was able to retain almost indefinitely; which I did, swooping sightlessly about the floor.

  The girl seemed to wilt after a bit.

  ‘Let’s sit down now. You’ve danced enough.’

  ‘Garnch enuch? I cug garnch all ni.’

  ‘Look, the cabaret’s ready. It’s Yemeni singers.’

  ‘Yengengi hinger, eh? A hewy inkerechking gialek,’ I said, not bringing my eyes down for an instant and intrigued by the unusal problem of having to produce a succession of labials with the tongue hanging out. ‘Ill gey ge hinging in gialek?’