Lawrence Durrell - Judith

“I really am dreadfully sorry,” he said, but he was shaking with laughter now; for a moment she managed to remain icily cool and then she, too, could not resist.

“You look so funny and so beautiful,” he said, roaring with laughter.

It was an autumn night of no moon when they arrived in different groups at the point of rendezvous on the coast. It was a lonely and desolate place, an area of shallow sand-dunes which supported little life beyond thorn scrub and tamarisk. The first premonitory lightening of the eastern sky had begun, though it would yet be two or three hours before sunrise. The sea was running relatively high, and the waves burst on the shallow sand to form great pools of phosphorescent bubbles which reflected back the stars. There was a wind blowing which chilled them as they crouched among the dunes.

Aaron cursed his inability to smoke. He himself had given the order, for they were only a few hundred yards away from the main road, and from time to time they could hear the rumble and whine as a British convoy passed on patrol. There was some anxiety as the ship was rather late, and Aaron expressed the fear that perhaps the British naval blockade had managed to intercept it. He stared at the phosphorescent hands of his watch and said grimly:

“I can’t afford to give them more than another hour. It will be broad daylight soon.” But, even as he spoke, Judith pointed out to sea, licking her salty lips, and said:

“What’s that?” They stared, tense and expectant, while a frail light was born and gradually blossomed into a beam. Then it sparked four times and four times again, and the parties expelled their breaths in a hiss of relief.

“That’s them,” cried Sholem, so loud that Aaron had to call out in a terse whisper:

“Silence down there!”

A large patch of low-lying cloud on the horizon had prevented them from seeing the silhouette of the approaching ship, but now they caught sight of her as she turned beam on, and Aaron gave orders for the operation to start, answering signal for signal with his hand torch. For the next hour a frantic though purposeful activity reigned. Boats dotted the phosphorescent water and the lee of the ship. Voices called hoarsely in a number of languages and the reception party at the water’s edge worked feverishly but methodically, like postal sorters on the day before Christmas. Bundles of clothes, medical equipment, false identity papers and packets of food had already been dragged into various positions on the dunes among the bushes, and people were directed to the point where they could be either treated for wounds, given first aid, or hot drinks after falling into the sea. Many individuals swam ashore and, later on, Judith heard that several had been drowned, though in the heat of operations she noticed nothing which suggested this.

The only untoward and gruesome side of the business which filled her with a wild exhilaration — because at last she was not afraid — was the sight of Sholem giving artificial respiration to a woman on the beach. She heard the rumble of lorries taking off with the first of the refugees and Aaron, who was everything and everywhere at once, seemed delighted with the progress of the disembarkation.

“With any luck, we’ll have them all away before light,” he said. “Judith, where are you?” he added. “Could you come with me quickly.” He thrust a torch into her hand and led her down to where, among the dunes, there lay an emaciated young man, groaning.

“Give us some light,” he said tersely. And in the puddle of yellow glow she saw him deftly slip up the trousers of the man to reveal a long, jagged splinter of wood buried in the thigh.

Aaron grunted and said: “Consider yourself lucky, if you’d had it through the belly…

The wounded man groaned and said: “I’m sorry to be such a nuisance.”

“ I’m sorry,” said Aaron. “I think that should come out. Do you mind?”

“Good God, no,” said the man wanly, “I’m just furious to be such a burden at a time like this.”

Aaron opened a first-aid kit and covered the contused area with yellow acroflavin, before taking a pair of surgical scissors and snipping the shallow groove of the splinter as one might open an envelope. Then, between finger and thumb, he jerked out the splinter and gazed at the blood that followed it, with a kind of detached curiosity. After a final disinfection of the wound, he set to work and bandaged it up while the young man said sleepily:

“That feels better already. I think perhaps it’s the morphia that’s beginning to work.”

“You’ll be alright,” said Aaron laconically and, taking the torch from Judith, he turned it upon a nearby group of figures, calling softly: “Stretcher bearers.”

To her surprise, Judith found herself standing with her hand in his. She did not stir nor did he make any gesture. They stood like this, pointing the torch on the sick man, until they saw him loaded onto the stretcher and carried away. Then Aaron abruptly dropped her hand and marched off towards the shore.

Now Judith had the chance for the first time of witnessing the different reactions of these arrivals. Some had thrown themselves on the ground, others were laughing and crying, others kissing the wet sand. Most of the refugees were wearing on their backs all the clothes they possessed, which gave them an unnatural walk like blown up balloons as they bobbed around towards the dunes, behind which they were being divided into groups, some of which were immediately pushed onto awaiting lorries and sent to different kibbutzim; others were led on foot to the nearest settlements. One girl she helped along the shore to the waiting doctor was yellow-haired and blue-eyed. Her delicate features were drawn and pale, her voice muted as she answered Judith’s brief encouragements, in German monosyllables. Her name was Grete Schiller, she said, and Judith thought fleetingly how completely Aryan she looked — they were to become friends in an undemanding, non-intimate way, but neither of them suspected it at the time. There was too much to think about and to act upon… and so little time.

Aaron and his men were still going back and forth with the last immigrants, when suddenly, ominously, the buzzing of the helicopter and pencils of white light pierced the darkness and began to move laboriously like the feet of a daddy-long-legs along the beach. Almost at the same moment there came the boom of the ship’s siren which made Aaron exclaim: “Oh, no, I hope that’s the last of them. The ship’s pulling out.”

The relentless glare approached them and they instinctively threw themselves face down on the dunes. Judith found herself lying almost face to face with Aaron in this theatrical white light. “Don’t move,” he whispered but, as the light plunged them back into the darkness, she saw that he was smiling at her.

The helicopter now veered off out to sea, whence the hoot came, and left the prostrate group in darkness once more. Taken by surprise again, they used this opportunity of jumping to their feet and making for the waiting lorries, but not before turning towards the sea and seeing that the helicopter had picked up the stern of the ship.

Four miles to the east, the convoy of jeeps and lorries had been drawn up off the road among the olive trees, where the commanders and their troops were refreshing themselves with what the British Army knows as the “brew-up”. The sun had already begun to etch into the mountains and leak into the plains behind them.

Major Lawton, the O.C. of the patrol, fingered the unshaven stubble of his jaw and debated whether to shave there and then or wait until his return to Jerusalem. The hot sweet tea was delicious in the chill of the early morning. Presently, however, he heard the sound of static from the command car and he saw the Signal Sergeant stiffen up, adjust his earphones and start “talking”. Lawton turned to his companion, the youthful, elegant John Carstairs, who was sitting on the ground, smoking a cigar, and said: