by Wilbur Smith
David had been stalking Joe’s rook for half a dozen moves and now he had it trapped. Two more moves would shatter the king-side defence, and the third must force a resignation. David grinned smugly as Joe reached a decision and moved a knight out.
‘That’s not going to save you, dear boy.’ David hardly glanced at the knight, and he hit the rook with a white bishop. ‘Mate in five,’ he predicted, as he dropped the castle into the box, and then – too late – he realized that Joe’s theatrical expression of anguish had slowly faded into a beatific grin. Joseph Mordecai used any deception to bait his traps, and David looked with alarm at the innocuous-seeming knight, suddenly seeing the devious plotting in which the castle was merely bait.
‘Oh, you bastard,’ David moaned. ‘You sneaky bastard.’
‘Check!’ Joe gloated as he put the knight into a forked attack, and David had to leave his queen exposed to the horseman.
‘Check,’ said Joe again with an ecstatic little sigh as he lifted the white queen off the board, and again the harassed king took the only escape route open to him.
‘And mate,’ sighed Joe again as his own queen left the back file to join the attack. ‘Not in five, as you predicted, but in three.’ There was a loud outburst of congratulation and applause from the onlookers and Joe cocked an eye at David.
‘Again?’ he asked, and David shook his head.
‘Take on one of these other patsies,’ he said. ‘I’m going to sulk for an hour.’ He vacated his seat and it was filled by another eager victim as Joe reset the board. David crossed to the coffee machine, moving awkwardly in the grip of his G-suit, and drew a mug of the thick black liquid, stirred in four spoons of sugar and found another seat in a quieter corner of the crew-room beside a slim curly-headed young kibbutznik, with whom David had become friendly. He was reading a thick novel.
‘Shalom, Robert. How you been?’
Robert grunted without looking up from his book, and David sipped the sweet hot coffee. Beside him, Robert moved restlessly in his seat and coughed softly. David was lost in his own thoughts, for the first time in months thinking of home, wondering about Mitzi and Barney Venter, wondering, if the yellowtail were running hot in False Bay this season, and remembering how the proteas looked upon the mountains of the Helderberg.
Again Robert stirred in his chair and cleared his throat. David glanced at him, realized that he was in the grip of a deep emotion as he read, his lips quivering, and his eyes too bright.
‘What are you reading?’ David was amused, and he leaned forward to read the title. The picture on the dust jacket of the book was instantly familiar. It was a deeply felt desert landscape of fierce colours and great space. Two distant figures, man and woman, walked hand in hand through the desert and the effect was mystic and haunting. David realized that only one person could have painted that – Ella Kadesh.
Robert lowered the book. ‘This is uncanny,’ his voice was muffled with emotion. ‘I tell you, Davey, it’s beautiful. It must be one of the most beautiful books ever written.’
With a strange feeling of pre-knowledge, with a sense of complete certainty, of what it would be, David took the book out of his hands and turned it to read the title, A Place of Our Own.
Robert was still talking. ‘My sister made me read it. She works for the publisher. She cried all night when she read it. It is very new, only published last week, but it’s got to be the biggest book ever written about this country.’
David hardly heard him, he was staring at the writer’s name in small print below the title.
‘Debra Mordecai.’
He ran his fingers lightly over the glossy paper of the jacket, stroking the name.
‘I want to read it,’ he said softly.
‘I’ll let you have it when I’m finished,’ Robert promised.
‘I want to read it now!’
‘No way!’ Robert exclaimed with evident alarm, and almost snatched the book out of David’s hands.
‘You wait your turn, comrade!’
David looked up. Joe was watching him from across the room, and David glared at him accusingly. Joe dropped his eyes quickly to the chessboard again, and David realized that he had known of the publication. He started to go up to him, to challenge him, but at the moment the tannoy echoed through the bunker.
‘All flights Lance Squadron to Red standby,’ and on the readiness board the red lamps lit beside the flight designations.
‘Bright Lance.
‘Red Lance.
‘Fire Lance.’
David snatched up his flying helmet and joined the lumbering rush of G-suited bodies for the electric personnel carrier in the concrete tunnel outside the crew-room door. He forced a place for himself beside Joe.
‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ he demanded.
‘I was going to, Davey, I really was.’
‘Yeah, I bet,’ David snapped sarcastically. ‘Have you read it?’
Joe nodded, and David went on, ‘What’s it about?’
‘I couldn’t begin to tell you. You’d have to read it yourself.’
‘Don’t worry about that,’ David muttered grimly, ‘I will,’ and he jumped down as they reached their hangar and strode across to his Mirage.
Twenty minutes later they were airborne and Desert Flower sent them hastening out over the Mediterranean at interception speed to answer a Mayday call from an El Al Caravelle who reported that she was being buzzed by an Egyptian MiG 21 J.
The Egyptian sheered off and raced for the coast and the protection of his own missile batteries as the Mirages approached. They let him go and picked up the airliner. They escorted her into the circuit over Lod before returning to base.
Still in his G-suit and overalls, David stopped off at Le Dauphin’s office and got himself a twenty-four-hour pass.
Ten minutes before closing time he ran into one of the bookstores in the Jaffa Road.
There was a pyramid display of A Place of Our Own on the table in the centre of the store.
‘It’s a beautiful book,’ said the salesgirl as she wrapped it.
He opened a Goldstar, and kicked off his shoes before stretching out on the lace cover of the bed.
He began to read, and paused only once to switch on the overhead lights and fetch another beer. It was a thick book, and he read slowly – savouring every word, sometimes going back to re-read a paragraph.
It was their story, his and Debra’s, woven into the plot she had described to him that day on the island off the Costa Brava, and it was rich with the feeling of the land and its people. He recognized many of the secondary characters, and he laughed aloud with the pleasure and the joy of it. Then at the end, he choked on the sadness as the girl of the story lies dying in Hadassah Hospital, with half her face torn away by a terrorist’s bomb, and she will not let the boy come to her. Wanting to spare him that, wanting him to remember her as she was.
It was dawn then, and David had not noticed the passage of the night. He rose from the bed, light-headed from lack of sleep, and filled with a sense of wonder that Debra had captured so clearly the way it had been – that she had seen so deeply into his soul, had described emotions for which he had believed there were no words.
He bathed and shaved and dressed in casual clothes and went back to where the book lay upon the bed. He studied the jacket again, and then turned to the flyleaf for confirmation. It was there. ‘Jacket design by Ella Kadesh.’
So early in the morning he had the road almost to himself and he drove fast, into the rising morning sun. At Jericho he turned north along the frontier road, and he remembered her sitting in the seat beside him with her skirts drawn high around her long brown legs and her thick dark hair shaking in the wind.
The whisper of the wind against the body of the Mercedes seemed to urge him, ‘Hurry, hurry.’ And the urgent drumming of the tyres carried him up towards the lake.
He parked the Mercedes beside the ancient crusader wall and went through into the garden on the lake shore.
Calmly she looked up from her painting with her brush poised.
‘Hail, young Mars!’ she greeted him. ‘Well met indeed, and why do you bring such honour on my humble little home?’
‘Piss on it, Ella, you know damn well why I’m here.’
‘So sweetly phrased.’ She was shifty, he could see it in her bright little eyes. ‘Shame on it that such vulgar words pass such fair lips. Would you like a beer, Davey?’
‘No, I don’t want a beer. I want to know where she is.’
‘Just who are we discussing?’
‘Come on, I read the book. I saw the cover. You know, damn you, you know.’
She was silent then, staring at him. Then slowly the ornate head-dress dipped in acquiescence.
‘Yes,’ she agreed. ‘I know.’
‘Tell me where she is.’
‘I can’t do that, Davey. You and I both made a promise. Yes, I know of yours, you see.’
She watched the bluster go out of him. The fine young body with the arrogant set of shoulders seemed to sag, and he stood uncertainly in the sunlight.
‘How about that beer now, Davey?’ She heaved herself up from her stool and crossed the terrace with her stately tread. She came back and gave him a tall glass with a head of froth and they took a seat together at the end of the terrace out of the wind, in the mild winter sunlight.
‘I’ve been expecting you for a week now,’ she told him. ‘Ever since the book was published. I knew it would set you on fire. It’s just too damned explosive – even I wept like a leaky faucet for a couple of days,’ she giggled shyly. you’d hardly believe it possible, would you?’
That book was us – Debra and me,’ David told her. ‘She was writing about us.’
‘Yes,’ Ella agreed, ‘but it does not alter the decision she had made. A decision which I think is correct, by the way.’
‘She described exactly how I felt, Ella. All the things I felt and still feel – but which I could never have put into words.’
‘It’s beautiful and it’s true, but don’t you see that it confirms her position?’
‘But I love her, Ella – and she loves me,’ he cried out violently.
‘She wants it to stay that way. She doesn’t want it to die, she doesn’t want it to sicken.’ He began to protest, but she gripped his arm in a surprisingly powerful grip to silence him. ‘She knows that she can never keep pace with you now. Look at you, David, you are beautiful and vital and swift – she must drag you back, and in time you must as certainly resent it.’
Again he tried to interrupt, but she shook his arm in her huge fist. ‘You would be shackled, you could never leave her, she is helpless, she would be your charge for all your life – think on it, David.’
‘I want her,’ he muttered stubbornly. ‘I had nothing before I met her, and I have nothing now.’
‘That will change. Perhaps she has taught you something and young emotions heal as swiftly as young flesh. She wants happiness for you, David. She loves you so much that her gift to you is freedom. She loves you so much that for your sake she will deny that love.’
‘Oh, God,’ he groaned. ‘If only I could see her, if I could touch her and talk to her for a few minutes.’
She shook her massive head, and her jowls wobbled dolefully.
‘She would not agree to that.’
‘Why, Ella, tell me why?’ His voice was rising again, desperate with his anguish.
‘She is not strong enough, she knows that if you came near her, she would waver and bring even greater disaster upon you both.’
They sat silently together then and looked out across the lake. High mountains of cloud rose up beyond the heights of Golan, brilliant white in the winter sunlight, shaded with blue and bruised grey, and range upon range they bore down upon the lake. David shivered as an icy little wind came ferreting across the terrace and sought them out.
He drank the rest of his beer, and then revolved the glass slowly through his fingers.
‘Will you give her a message from me, then?’ he asked.
‘I don’t think—’
‘Please, Ella. Just this one message.’
She nodded.
‘Tell her that what she wrote in the book is exactly how much I love her. Tell her that it is big enough to rise above this thing. Tell her that I want the chance to try.’
She listened quietly, and David made a groping gesture with his hands as though to pluck words from the air that might convince her.
‘Tell her—’ He paused, then shook his head. ‘No, that’s all. Just tell her I love her, and I want to be with her.’
‘All right, David. I’ll tell her.’
‘And you will give me her answer?’
‘Where can I reach your
He gave her the number of the telephone in the crew ready room at the base.
‘You’ll ring me soon, Ella? Don’t keep me waiting.’
tomorrow,’ she promised. ‘In the morning.’
‘Before ten o’clock. It must be before ten.’
He stood up, and then suddenly he leaned forward and kissed her sagging and raddled cheek.
‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘You are not a bad old bag.’
‘Away with you, you and your blarney. You’d have the sirens of the Odyssey themselves come a-running to your bidding.’ She sniffed moistly. ‘Get away with you now, I think I’m going to cry, and I want to be alone to enjoy it.’
She watched him go up across the lawns under the date palms and at the gate in the wall he paused and looked back. For a second they stared at each other and then he stepped through the gate.
She heard the engine of the Mercedes whirr and pull away slowly up the track, then the note of it rose as it hit the highway and went racing away southwards. Ella rose heavily and crossed the terrace, went down the steps towards the jetty and its stone boathouses screened from the house by part of the ancient wall.
Her speedboat rode at its mooring, restless in the wind and the chop of the lake. She went on down to the farthest and largest of the boathouses and stood in the open doorway.
The interior had been stripped and repainted with clean white. The furniture was simple and functional. The rugs on the stone floor were for warmth, plain woven wool, thick and rough. The large bed was built into a curtained alcove in the wall beside the fireplace.
On the opposite wall was a gas stove with a double cooking ring above which a number of copper cooking pots hung. A door beyond led through to a bathroom and toilet which Ella had added very recently.
The only decoration was the Ella Kadesh painting from the house on Malik Street, which hung on the bare white wall, facing the door. It seemed to lighten and warm the whole room; below it the girl sat at a working table. She was listening intently to her own voice speaking in Hebrew from the tape recorder. Her expression was rapt and intent, and she stared at the blank wall before her.
Then she nodded her head, smiling at what she had just heard. She switched off the recorder and turned in the swivel chair to the second recorder and punched the record button. She held the microphone close to her lips as she began to translate the Hebrew into English.
Ella stood in the doorway and watched her work. An American publisher had purchased the English-language rights of A Place of Our Own. They had paid Debra an advance of thirty thousand American dollars for the book, and an additional five thousand for her services as translator. She had almost completed the task now.
From where she stood, Ella could see the scar on Debra’s temple. It was a glazed pinkish white against the deeply tanned skin of her face, a dimple like a child’s drawing of a seagull in flight; V-shaped and no bigger than a snowflake, it seemed to enhance her fine looks, almost like a beauty sp
ot, a tiny blemish that gave a focus point for her strong regular features.
She had made no attempt to conceal it for her dark hair was drawn back to the nape of her neck and secured there with a leather thong. She wore no make-up, and her skin looked clean and glowing, tanned and smooth.
Despite the bulky fisherman’s jersey and woollen slacks her body appeared firm and slim for she swam each day, even when the snow winds came down from the north.
Ella left the doorway and moved silently closer to the desk, studying Debra’s eyes as she so often did. One day she would paint that expression. There was no hint of the damage that lay behind, no hint that the eyes could not see. Rather their calm level gaze seemed to penetrate deeper, to see all. They had a serenity that was almost mystic, a depth and understanding that Ella found strangely disquieting.
Debra pressed the switch of the microphone, ending the recording, and then she spoke again without turning her head.
‘Is that you, Ella?’
‘How do you do it?’ Ella demanded with astonishment.
‘I felt the air move when you walked in, and then I smelt you.’
‘I’m big enough to blow up a storm, but do I smell so bad?’ Ella protested, chuckling.
‘You smell of turpentine, and garlic and beer,’ Debra sniffed, and laughed with her.
‘I’ve been painting, and I was chopping garlic for the roast, and I was drinking beer with a friend.’ Ella dropped into one of the chairs. ‘How does it go with the book?’
‘Nearly finished. It can go to the typist tomorrow. Do you want some coffee?’ Debra stood. up and crossed to the gas stove. Ella knew better than to offer her help, even though she gritted her teeth every time she watched Debra working with fire and boiling water. The girl was fiercely independent, utterly determined to live her life without other people’s pity or assistance.
The room was laid out precisely, each item in its place where Debra could put her hand to it without hesitation. She could move confidently through her little world, doing her own housework, preparing her own food and drink, working steadily, and paying her own way.
