Horn Thomas R. - Blood on the Altar: The Coming War Between Christian vs. Christian

Come To The War

by Leslie Thomas

Scanned by Bill

Jerusalem sits on its hills, its houses the colour of old sunlight, its television aerials reaching up like ten thousand thin arms.

The city raises its head so high that you would think it looked over the entire world instead of a few bald hills. That is how it always was. That is why they all think it is so special.

One

It can get cold in Jerusalem in midwinter. Much colder than you would think. It is a high city and it has sleet and heavy snowfalls at times. I have watched the Judean Hills vanish behind a flying storm and seen the Mount of Olives choked with snow. In the morning there would be bitter mounds of slush in Jaffa Road where Shoshana and I lived that winter.

At that season the brown of her body would fade to fawn and her breasts and small backside would not seem so white against the rest of her. She was a summer woman. The winter and the cold seemed to diminish her.

I remember when she first came to London to see me. I found her, on one February midday, at the middle of a small crowd of worried people in Waterloo Road. They were hunched around her and she was crying with the cold. I came out of the Festival Hall, where I had gone to retrieve some of my music, and I saw the people and spotted Shoshana's bright Israeli shopping basket on the pavement. I thought there had been an accident and ran, only to find London housewives clucking over her and an energetic middle-aged man actually rubbing her with his hands; to restore the circulation, he said.

She had a gift for releasing sympathy in people. The women bitterly blamed me for permitting her to be cold, just as though she were working the streets for me. 'Poor little thing,' they muttered as I took her towards a taxi with my arm around her small, lovely waist. They should have seen her throw a hand grenade.

In those first days in London when she was writing articles for her newspaper in Tel Aviv, including an uncomfortably truthful one about me, I don't think we did more than exchange two or three friendly kisses.

It was when I was sleeping with her in Jerusalem after the short war, and the summer and autumn went, that I realized the effect that the cold and winter had upon her. In the summer heat she was like a wet animal in bed, slithering and sliding as she sweated in lovemaking, and the city would be full of dry, night dust drifting into the room, clogging eyes and nostrils and adhering to sweat. She would stop loving me, at last, at about three in the morning and I would lie and let myself cool, watching the dim ceiling of the room which was like the curving, inside roof of a tomb. Then, when I was drifting into sleep, cooled and aching, she would put her hands down into my groin, work them under, and around as though she were washing them. Then we would start again. I had to sleep half the day while she was out. My performance went entirely to pieces that summer.

Not that I was playing at all. My concert programme in Europe that autumn had to be abandoned. There was a rumour that I had been killed or badly injured in the war in Jerusalem and something to this effect appeared in the papers. My agent denied it but I didn't care anyway. Philip John, my agent, and my manager, Eric Forth, sent me letters and cables, threats and promises, eventually both flying out to Israel. They went back and told people in Europe that their famous pianist was ill. I was not. I was in bed with Shoshana.

Philip and Eric actually arrived at our house in Jaffa Road in late September and stood at the bottom of the big knobbly bed while Shoshana and I sat in it, naked, with the damp sheet primly pulled up around us. They observed the hero, the idol, of the Festival Hall, the Lincoln Centre and the European concert circuit squatting nude in a dust-hung, stone bedroom in Jerusalem. They told me I was mad, which I was, and that they would sue me if they didn't kill me first. But I told them to go back to London and because they are reasonable men, friends too, and because they could see I was not going to get out of bed anyway, they went. They actually wanted to have me examined by a psychiatrist because they had some strange theory that getting my kidneys full of sand from the Negev had somehow loosened my brain. A year later I went to a psychiatrist in Boston and he told me that he thought this could be true. Having sand in your kidneys could make you a trifle strange. I think it was merely being in bed with Shoshana.

In the winter she was different. She seemed to shrink and would have our bed piled with blankets and coats and dressing-gowns and even some curtains her mother had given her. She hibernated beneath this pile, hardly getting up even to make any food. When I wanted her for love I used to have to burrow down and find her. She seemed smaller in my arms in winter and she didn't fight and want to get her mouth to me or anything. I had to take her and do it gently while she lay and then leave her to sleep in the great piled bed. I only realized that spring was coming because she abruptly bit me on the leg one Sunday morning.

Today, long after, here in London, I thought about Jerusalem because I think about it almost every day. I remembered the cold of the winter there especially this morning because as I was walking through Cannon Street at seven o'clock there was a cutting edge of snow on the wind. Early people were moving with that low, doubled-up trudge of the dawn risers, yellow oblongs of light were in office buildings where cleaning women worked and the streets belonged to the crouching bicycle pedallers.

I leave Faith's flat early because her landlady does not like anyone being there all night. God knows why Faith has to live in the City. But she's always been there and she makes a good breakfast even though it's so early. She's very wifely. Her place is in Upper Thames Street which I like because from her bed you can hear the grunting of the ships on the hollow river. Faith is a nice, short, unusual girl, a librarian at the John Colne Music Library. We met about six months ago. When I stay at her flat she gets up with the alarm clock at five-thirty and does the breakfast; then I go up to Cannon Street and get the bus.

Nowadays I invariably get the bus because it's more private than a taxi. People waiting to go over the road at traffic lights and crossings always stare or glare into the back of a taxi. On a bus nobody cares about you even if they're sitting immediately next to you. Quite a lot of people recognize me because they've seen my face in the papers or on the television, and some of them from the concerts. I've had a scrap of paper thrust through a taxi window at a December daybreak and scribbled my autograph while the half-hostile, frozen face was wondering what the hell I was doing out at that hour. Perhaps he thought I had a spare-time job at the docks.

Modesty has not been one of my noticeable features although I've been better recently (one critic said only last week that Christopher Hollings 'is maturing') but in the early morning I don't want people. I sit downstairs on the left hand of the bus, so that if I'm due to do a concert at the Albert Hall I can see how many posters they've displayed outside and how big they've made 'Christopher Hollings'. They always make it very big but you need to watch these things. I'm doing the Rachmaninov Number Three there next week with the London Symphony. Even if I'm not performing I like to see who they've got working that week.

I really would get this bloody hair cut off if I could. But Philip and Eric agree that I'd be finished in a year without the image. It is as important as technique. When the fighting in Jerusalem was going on and when we were coming up through the Negev and the Egyptian jets caught us, my hair was about the only thing Shoshana, Zoo Baby and the others could laugh about. I remember on that blind corner, just by the Garden of Gethsemane, when the five Jewish boys were killed in about two square yards, how Zoo Baby kept yelling to me to keep my hair down. Not my head, my hair.