Lawrence Durrell - Judith

“I can’t understand what has happened to me,” she whispered.

“You have come back to yourself.”

“David, could the child being dead for certain make me change?”

“That among other things, perhaps the most. Kiss me.”

In the confused silence of the little room, the spell cast by their lovemaking seemed to spread out tentacles of lassitude around them, but she felt suddenly buoyant, self-confident, able to return stroke for stroke, kiss for kiss.

“I want to see your face,” he said suddenly, and before she could move he lit a match to stare down at her, brushing her hair back from her forehead with his hand, tucking it back in order to free her ears, the better to kiss them. Then the match went out and the darkness closed in on them. In the silence of the camp around them their own soft quick breathing seemed to magnify itself, until they had the illusion that it was not they who breathed, but the starlit night-universe itself. Yes, the night was breathing in its sleep.

David said: “Tonight I am going to make you a child.”

Her mind had dissolved into smoke, she could find nothing to say in reply; she lay passive under his kisses, like a creature sentenced to death, awaiting the stroke of the headsman’s axe.

From the dark nothingness of sleep, was it the thin calling of the cocks that woke them — or perhaps it was the simultaneous sound of bugle-calls on the violet hillsides beyond the valley? A clear-rinsed dawn was coming up. She heard his rapid breathing as he dressed; the faint bugle-calls seemed to belong to the sounds of another world altogether. The smoke would be rising from their fires, he thought. Abruptly he kissed her and was gone. The light was rising at the edges of the eastern escarpments.

“David!” she called out, rising and running to the window, but he was already striding away through the trees in the direction of the fort. Suddenly, a sense of doom possessed her; all the fond fancies of the darkness, of their lovemaking, had vanished at the frail sound of the bugle-calls. She sat down on the bed heavily and said aloud: “I know he is going to be killed; I know it.” And throughout the day the weight of this conscious thought pressed on her mind, heavy with a premonition like a child in the womb.

But David shared none of her fears; at this moment he was gazing through powerful glasses at the mill which covered the head springs of the Jordan. He grunted as he saw a wisp of smoke rising. Doubtless that old rogue Karam was making a morning brew of coffee in the Yemeni fashion. There was no movement, no fires or sounds from the great mass of rock on the eastern side. The world looked so peaceful and so empty in the dawn light that one might be forgiven for thinking that the Arab army which crouched behind the towering cliffs, ready to pounce, was a mere figment of the imagination.

How sound carried in the quiet valley! He heard the distant roar of transport from the British camp, and knew that the convoys were being formed and would soon be on the road. His pulse beat faster with the thought that soon they would be alone, face to face with whatever destiny held in store for them. He waited until he saw the first dust plumes rise from the mountain roads before turning to the business of the day.

Peterson arrived, pale and serious, to convey the committee’s compliance with David’s first military act as its local representative. He proposed to issue an order of the day; crisply he dictated the first of such documents:

“Distribution of arms is now complete and all section leaders know their places. If we need an emergency muster I will sound the siren. Meanwhile I want the camp to retain an air of complete normality. Remember that, though there is fighting in the south, we may not be attacked at all.”

Anna snapped her pad shut and lumbered off down to the cellars where the duplicating machines were; in one of the cellars she caught sight of Grete with a group of children. They had temporarily moved the school below ground, in case of air attack.

Peterson yawned and puffed a cigarette. “I didn’t get much sleep,” she said. “Nor you, I suppose.”

David looked at her and then away. “What is the news?” he asked quietly and she replied:

“A few of the kibbutzim have been over-run or by-passed, but the main points are holding up. Jerusalem seems the toughest place. How long before the great powers step in and order a truce?”

David bit his lip. “I don’t know; but we mustn’t cede a lot of ground, for the arbiters are likely to work on the ‘finders-keepers’ principle when the truce does come.”

“David,” said Peterson, “I’m worried about the men from the mountains.”

He shrugged. Peterson wrinkled her nose aggrievedly and said:

“You yourself say that it would take over an hour to concentrate them in the field to help us… Are you confident we could hold out an hour under sudden attack?”

David threw her a keen look and grinned. “Good Lord, yes,” he said. “And we can count on Aaron…

Peterson shook her head doubtfully. “If they brought tanks and rushed our wretched perimeter…

David walked up and down. “They couldn’t; first we’d get a warning from Karam up at the mill. Then, if they did, we have a number of gentlemen among us who have dealt very efficiently with Tigers and Centurions and would certainly not be above doing in half a dozen tanks of an older pattern, which I believe is all they have…

“Well, it’s your war,” said Peterson. “Let me know if I can do any thinking for you.”

“I will,” he said with a grin. “Meanwhile, business as usual please.”

So it was that the community life of Ras Shamir appeared to continue with perfect normality; from the viewpoint of a watcher on those rosy cliffs above the valley, there would have been nothing untoward to report. The tractors went out as usual with their armed drivers of both sexes; from the sawmill came the whine and whir of the saws cutting up timber; a team of brawny Swedes, scythes in hand, cut a circular swathe in the green of a square field, moving steadily forward and round in a slow arc. The British had rumbled away from the mountain ravines. The valley, with its small communities of Jews, lay at the mercy of any invader strong enough to wrest it from them. Yet there was only silence, heat and the drowsy hum of bees among the clover.

David did not quit his observation post; he had food sent up to the roof from which he watched, his face turned now towards the northeast range. Once a solitary plane passed over them — a bi-plane; but they could not tell if it was a spotter sent by the Arab forces or the British. The sun was hot; the concrete floor of the look-out post was baking. From somewhere down among the green trees came the oddly reassuring sound of someone snoring, which made the sentries laugh.

The hours wore on, and still there was no sign from the guard post at the head springs, and no visible movement along the escarpment. Only once or twice they heard a new sound, an echoing, snarling sound of motors revving up. David’s face grew grave as he listened with his head on one side. The sentries stiffened at their posts, listening.

“What do you make of that?” said David, but he knew only too well. Tank engines!

For about half an hour they listened to that ominous roaring and rasping of invisible tanks moving about somewhere behind the rosy bluffs of the eastern chain. Finally the sound died away, as if swallowed by a ravine, and silence returned to the valley. But there was still no movement, nothing to be seen. Clouds began to form under the sun and its attenuated light began to change the green valley from emerald to rose-violet.

So much for the heliograph — it was out of action without sun. David thanked God for the kindly Macdonald’s gift of Verey lights and signal pistols. Up to now they signalled to the mountain kibbutzim only by torchlight — a clumsy method at best, and always with the danger of the Morse signals being miscoded or misread. Now at least they had naval flares, red, white and green, at their disposal.