Two Is Lonely

  ‘It’s too hot here,’ he complained childishly. ‘I want to go home.’

  ‘Well, we can’t,’ I said shortly, turning deaf ears, with difficulty, upon an announcement which trailed out after us of a BOAC flight to London leaving at any moment.

  Jo had booked us into a hotel near the airport, but our booking was for the following day. I only realised this when we got there.

  ‘I am sorry,’ said the clerk without a hint of either sorrow or deference. ‘We are full up.’

  ‘Even with the crisis?’

  He smiled an Oriental smile.

  ‘What crisis?’

  ‘But what can we do for tonight?’

  He shrugged.

  I’m going to hate this place if I’m not careful, I thought with sudden ferocity.

  The obvious thing to do was go straight to the kibbutz, but it was a long way away, it was late afternoon and we were both exhausted. I felt the wall of panic roll closer. I turned to John in desperation.

  ‘What shall we do?’

  ‘Go home,’ he said mulishly.

  I turned again to the clerk.

  ‘Do you know of any other hotel . . .?’ He turned down his mouth, shook his head slightly, and spread his hands. ‘Well, do you know of this place?’ I got out Toby’s letter and pointed to the address on it. He frowned. ‘That is not how you write it. It is a big kibbutz quite close to here.’

  ‘Close to here? Are you sure?’ I asked in surprise. I had looked it up on a map before I left and it had looked to be about fifty miles south of the airport.

  ‘Do you want to go there? I will arrange for you a taxi.’

  ‘A taxi? Won’t that be very expensive?’ Another shrug. ‘Isn’t there any other way?’

  ‘By bus would be difficult—three changes. A lot of waiting, perhaps.’

  ‘Oh, all right.’

  While the clerk spoke in rapid Hebrew to the taxi-driver, certainly the most villainous-looking I have ever seen, not excluding those who ply their trade from London Airport, I stood motionless, appalled at the imminence of the meeting with Toby which now, apparently, lay just ahead. I had supposed I would have at least one night to rest and go through the necessary mental scenarios (I’ve discovered that what I have carefully imagined, never happens, so it is a kind of insurance). I had also, of course, planned to ring up and let him know we were coming, as the shock of seeing me when he least expected to was clearly a very unfair imposition. I wondered now what had prevented me from sending him a wire.

  The clerk returned to say that it was all arranged, the taxi ‘special’ would take me to the kibbutz for fifty lira (a sum which meant nothing to me and which I only later realised was over £6). I asked if I might telephone to the kibbutz from the hotel. He smiled again.

  ‘You can try,’ he said enigmatically.

  I saw what he meant quite soon. Telephoning a kibbutz at five p.m. is like telephoning an abandoned desert outpost. Nobody answered for ages, and when at last somebody did, she spoke only Hebrew. I put the clerk on the line and asked if she could call Toby Cohen to the telephone. They had a jolly conversation, punctuated with bursts of laughter, and then the clerk put the phone back.

  ‘It is impossible,’ he said. ‘First, she doesn’t know him, she was a visitor there who just happened to be near the phone. Second, nobody calls anybody to a phone in a kibbutz, it would mean running for miles and looking for them. You had better just go and give him a nice surprise.’

  We piled our scuffed and dusty bits of luggage into the taxi (a vast, ancient American car with extra seats put in) which bounded forward and roared away, seeming to cut a swathe through the heat like a bulldozer cutting through some sort of solid matter.

  The temperature was quite incredible. The island and the cool turquoise sea were as the memory of paradise lost. ‘Is it always this hot here?’ I asked the driver.

  ‘Sharav,’ he answered. ‘Hot desert wind. Blow fifty days a year. Blow now six days, every day get worse. Tomorrow I think I kill my wife. Nobody blame me.’

  I sank back and tried to think, to plan, to imagine. The juices of my brain seemed to be drying out. I glanced at John. He was asleep again, his guitar cradled on his knees.

  I abandoned my efforts to project myself forward to this terrifying meeting. I no longer either wanted nor dreaded to see Toby; the prospect was quite simply beyond my ability to grasp.

  ‘Is there going to be a war?’ I asked the driver.

  He shrugged his massive shoulders in their tee-shirt, which oddly enough was not soaked with sweat as one might expect. I, too, was quite dry. It seemed this wind simply evaporated the sweat the second it emerged. Even my hair began to feel brittle.

  ‘If Moshe Dayan takes over, then we will show them something,’ he said. ‘Now is bad. We sit like ducks and wait for them to start shooting us. I have a son in the army. Two weeks he’s waiting. The waiting kills you, special in a sharav.’

  ‘Aren’t you afraid for your son?’

  ‘You are tourist?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So you can’t understand. Is not a matter of be afraid. We are used to be afraid, we don’t notice it so much. I fighted in forty-eight, one year, many battles. Since then, no peace, always crisis, crisis, bit of rest, another crisis. True, this time is bigger. But fear is like a pain you learn to live with it.’

  This conversation had the effect of halting the remorseless forward motion of the wall of panic. After all, what the hell had I got to be panicky about? Here was an entire nation on the brink of being wiped out, and this man in front of me was scratching his neck and turning his radio up full-blast and bearing his fear with a shrug. I watched a truckload of young soldiers, armed to the teeth, go roaring by. They were all singing.

  I sank back and tried to think about Andy. It didn’t help a bit. I seemed to have left him behind on the wharf at Hydra; he was no longer here to help me. John was, of course, a dead loss at this point, and in fact I must spare both time and emotional energy to help him as much as I could. I really was alone—entirely alone, thrown on my own resources at this crisis in my own life. It would no doubt be very strengthening for my character. If only it were not so bloody hot! Even with the windows down and the wind blowing in I could hardly breathe, and every inch of my skin was shrivelling from the dryness.

  ‘You want to stop for a drink?’ The driver asked.

  ‘How far are we from the kibbutz?’

  ‘Ten kilometres.’

  How far was that? I was too hot to work it out.

  ‘Well, let’s stop. I don’t mind.’

  He pulled up at a shabby little kiosk beside the road, jumped out with devastating energy and returned with a bottle of ice-cold lager. It was more delicious than anything I have ever tasted. As the first rivulets forced their way over my tongue through the dust and scum and down my throat, I remembered Chris and his self-imposed thirst-rituals. Next time we met, I would tell him that beer was best.

  ‘What about your friend?’

  ‘I won’t wake him. Is this Israeli beer?’

  ‘Yes. Good?’

  ‘Marvellous! How much?’

  ‘No, no. I pay. You are visitor.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘For nothing.’

  We set off again. After a while I said, ‘It feels as if we’re travelling north.’

  ‘North—yes.’

  I sat up sharply. ‘But the kibbutz is south of Lydda!’

  ‘No—’

  ‘But it is! I looked on a map!’

  He screeched to a stop. ‘What kibbutz you want?’

  Again I got out Toby’s letter. He peered at it, and then put his heavy moustached face down on the back of the seat.

  ‘The man at the hotel said it was spelt wrong.’ I said.

  ‘I spell him wrong, next time I see him,’ said the driver, smacking his forehead. ‘Tembel! He is idiot, that fellow! This is not what he tell me. This is a little kibbutz, very far south of here, we are going all opp
osite direction.’

  ‘Oh my God,’ I moaned.

  ‘You want I turn around, take you to this place?’

  ‘I don’t know. What do you think? I’ve nowhere else to go.’

  He consulted his watch. ‘Is six o’clock now. I get you there by nine o’clock.’

  ‘Three hours! Of this!’

  ‘Be dark by seven. Little cooler. We stop for food and drinks.’

  ‘And the fare?’

  ‘Seventy lira.’

  ‘What? It was fifty to the near place.’

  His eyes shifted away from me. ‘Did he tell you fifty? I told him twenty.’

  Yeah, and besides, since then we’ve drunk beer together and talked about your son so now I’m getting a fair price, you robber.

  I gave him an old-fashioned look which was not lost on him.

  ‘Let’s go,’ I said.

  Chapter 2

  THE heat, the jolting and my weariness—not to mention all the beer we had drunk on the way—knocked me out long before we reached the right kibbutz at last. We had been driving through darkness for hours, but the departure of the sun had had depressingly little effect on the sharav. I was coated all over with an encrustation of dust, like an old wall smeared with lime; as I woke up and stirred I felt my skin would crack, and my head and eyeballs ached painfully as if from the worst sort of hangover. I began, as I crawled out of the taxi, to wonder if beer was best after all.

  I dragged the stuff out, paid the driver, and only then, with a feeling of reluctance, shook John awake. It was cruelty to bring him back to awareness; only when he opened his eyes did I realise the relief, from an empathetic consciousness of his misery, I had felt while he had been asleep.

  ‘Come on,’ I said gently. ‘We’ve arrived.’

  He got out with an effort, and stood there, blinking and rubbing his forehead.

  ‘Where are we?’

  ‘In Toby’s kibbutz. Soon we’ll see him.’

  He seemed to rouse himself a little at this. The taximan was giving me his card. If I wanted to see something of the country . . . And not to worry about the crisis. ‘My son will take care of it,’ he said with a grin. ‘But if you should want suddenly a ride back to the airport . . . after all, it is not your war. You Jewish? No. Not your war,’ he repeated.

  I said goodbye to him, he climbed back into his enormous car and roared away, leaving us standing in a little island of familiarity—our luggage—in a great dark sea of strangeness.

  We seemed to be in an open space behind a large building. Some steps led onto a kind of platform, cluttered with crates and churns, where there was a light shining, and swing doors. There were a few other lamps, like street-lamps, dotted about, showing various rather ramshackle out-buildings half-hidden by trees and bushes. There was nobody about.

  While I stood there, uncertain what to do next, John unexpectedly took the initiative for the first time since morning.

  ‘Come on, let’s find him,’ he said.

  He slung his guitar on his back, picked up most of the luggage, and set off towards the lighted doors. I hurried up the stone steps after him.

  ‘Do you think it’s all right just to walk in here?’ I asked anxiously.

  ‘Why not?’

  He shouldered the doors open and I followed him into a large kitchen, such as you might find in a hotel. The lights were on, but it was obvious that the business of the day was over; all the huge utensils were clean and empty, everything else put away. A few slices of wind-dried bread lay on the bread-slicing machine. John hiked one suitcase under his arm and grabbing one of these rusks, began to gnaw it. I watched him uneasily. Nobody was there, but still, it seemed a bit of a liberty. John found a huge stainless-steel sink, turned on a tap and put his head under it. He seemed to stay there, sucking the water into his mouth in great noisy gasps, for about five minutes. Then he finished off the bread.

  ‘Funny how you still have to eat,’ he said.

  ‘Come on, we’d better try and find somebody.’

  We passed through the kitchen into a big, dark hall, full of tables and chairs—clearly the dining-hall. It was empty of people, but there was a glazed double door at the far end, and through that I could see a sort of porch with a notice-board, where two or three people were standing. We hurried between the tables and through the doors. John burst out first. The people outside all gave startled jumps at the sight of his big black figure suddenly leaping out of the darkened dining-hall at them.

  ‘Where’s Toby?’ he asked in what might well have seemed a menacing fashion to anyone unused to his directness.

  They all looked at me.

  ‘We’re looking for Toby Cohen,’ I explained, and was dismayed to find myself beginning to tremble.

  A woman came up to me. She was about my age, not at all good-looking, with lined and shiny skin, soft skimpy hair and very pale, rather bulging blue eyes. She wore a sun-faded sleeveless cotton dress cut away at the neck, and sandals. My first general impression of her was of a comfortable, relaxed ease of manner; a rare quality to find in a plain woman.

  ‘My name is Hava,’ she said. We shook hands. Hers was hard and masculine, as I’d expected. ‘I’ll show you to Toby’s room. Is he expecting you?’

  ‘No,’ I said, wondering if she had felt, through that hard, muscular arm, how my hand trembled uncontrollably. I thought she had, for she gave me a sharp look.

  ‘You can leave your things here. Are you staying the night?’

  ‘I’m afraid we have nowhere else to go,’ I said.

  ‘I will try to find a room for you. Can you share? We are rather full just now.’

  ‘Share?’ I thought at first she meant with Toby, but then I realised she meant with John. Her casualness took me unawares. ‘Well—’

  ‘There are two beds. It’s only for tonight—I thought since you’re travelling together—’

  ‘We don’t want to give you any trouble.’ After all, I had shared a room with John once before, and it hadn’t done us any harm. I could almost smile as I thought what Chris would say if he knew how uneasy I felt about it. You poor old square!

  Hava was leading us through the kibbutz along a broad, well-lit path. Lawns stretched away into the darkness on either side, and there were bushes and trees—it was like walking through a park. The dry wind still blew but it seemed less tormenting now, as if passing through so many leaves had taken the viciousness out of it. Still, it was oddly hard for me to breathe. John was walking beside me. He took my hand, wrapping his huge fingers all round mine so that it lay within his like a child’s, curled in a ball.

  ‘Don’t be frightened,’ he whispered.

  Only then did I realise how frightened I was. The shaking had spread to my legs and it was hard to walk in a straight line. Hava was talking to me over her shoulder but I wasn’t taking in a word. Memories were rushing in upon me pellmell as if I were drowning in this dark green wind, which seemed to be whirling me along in a scurry of leaves and dust, snatching at my dress and my hair, pulling me towards this meeting. I saw Toby’s face, the beaky, bright-eyed, tender face I had loved so passionately, I saw the black tousled hair and the slight, strong body which could hold me up when I fell or threw myself against it, and yet which had withdrawn and left me to bruise myself with endless falls . . . seven years! What would happen, what would he say and do, how would he look? The wall of panic had become the darkness and the wind and the next bend in the homely path, almost upon me now, making me long to turn and run—away from his need or his lack of it, never to know the outcome of all this suffering I had done, all the wasteful waiting and the regrets and the loneliness. But Hava’s broad, sure back led me on, and John’s hand enclosed mine like a ball-and-socket joint—I knew it was inevitable, inescapable, that in fact it was what I wanted most.

  ‘Here we are,’ said Hava.

  It was a door in a low, small building with three other doors; four little windows, four little gardens, four little porch-lights shining in the most
prosaic, friendly way. And we were suddenly out of the wind, there was no more tugging; we had arrived at the still vortex, and Hava was knocking briskly on the door to Toby’s room.

  I thought my legs would refuse to hold me.

  ‘Please,’ I said suddenly. ‘Would you go away?’

  She turned to look at me in surprise. John had released my hand; I glanced round and found him gone, vanished like a headless ghost into the surrounding darkness. I heard footsteps inside and I clutched the door-post with a sharp intake of breath.

  ‘Please!’ I said urgently.

  She turned and walked quickly away round the side of the house.

  The door opened and Toby was there.

  The panic-wall crashed down on me and somehow I stood up under its impact and the trembling stopped and I looked at him. How he was changed, I couldn’t notice then; I only saw the ways in which he was the same—the shape of the eyes and nose and mouth, the whole look of him that was as much part of my life as a knot in the wood of my own trunk. A warp, perhaps, a blemish which caught the saw of the days and made it screech as it tried to cut through; it was there, he was there, embedded in me, and the more I stared at him the more I thought there was no need to stare, for we were not really separate beings but psychically interlocked. I caught my breath again this time on a sob of despair, for in that moment of seeing him again my first thought was that I would never be free of him, never, and I knew at the same moment that I wanted to be, I did not want to love him any more or be dependent on him, for we were too far apart in all other aspects of ourselves—we were like Siamese twins who are joined at their little fingers only, but who have aberrent bloodstreams—a major artery running through the join—and thus can never be divided, never be released into total individuality even by the most skilful surgery . . .

  And now this long, anguished moment was passing and his face began to emerge from its sparkling frame of shock. His arms came up and locked around me and once again I felt that familiar body, its full length pressed against mine; I felt his ribs heaving and he made strange, incoherent sounds that reverberated through the side of my head. No name, no words at all, just noises of recognition and realisation as deep and hopeless as mine. We clung together, not like lovers meeting again, but like victims of some disaster.