Come To The War Read Online Free

and yet not for a moment preventing or impeding the unstoppable running of the thing.
    At the first pause I kept my head directly over the keys looking down at their smooth smile. I was panting with the effort and the realization, feeling the bursting of the emotional people who were listening in the hot dark. At the second break I allowed myself to look up and saw how much the musicians had been taken by it too.
    Their wet faces under the lights worked over strings and brass with the dedication of men using guns.
    Then it was finished. Done. I thought they were going to rush the stage. Igor clutched the brass rail on the podium, head bent forward, baton limp in hanging fingers, colour like pulp, face like running fat. I had almost collapsed across the piano, knowing that I had reached for something high and caught it. Christ, I thought, that was so bloody marvellous.
    The people exploded in the auditorium, their shouts, their noisy stamping like all the sounds of a marauding army. I could feel them rising. Igor glanced my way as we took our bows with an expression that told me I had played far above anything he had considered possible from an English soloist. To me he was the celestial engine driver. The violins were standing, dumb and wet, some blankly grinning, others shakily looking down, examining their bows. The brass and the woodwind puffed out their cheeks as though eager to play it again, and the timpani player, the great fat exuberant Zoo Baby, bent across his drums like a man who has lost something invaluable down a well.
    There was a party after the concert at a house on the beach at Herzliya, a long-spined villa, its rooms spread out like padded feet each side of its main body. It belonged to a man called Nicolas Tobin, a patron of the arts in Israel. Igor and I travelled from Tel Aviv in the same car, both relaxed now. His English is good, but we talked only a little. We went from the concert hall along the wide, white street called Dezingov, all lights and traffic and people in the hot, bright night. The people were thick at the pavement tables and promenading, processing each way before the fringes of cafes. In the car we had the windows down and we felt the heavy summer air coming in to us with the strong lights of the street and the broken voices of the people.
    They moved like a long reel of fragmented film passing us as the car went slowly among the traffic along Dezingov. There were hundreds of Jews there, drinking at those arranged tables, greeting friends, and prodigiously shaking hands. There was overwhelming talking and some laughter. We stopped at traffic lights. A woman was howling in argument with a taxi driver. People at the cafe tables watched and laughed and called raucous advice. The taxi driver climbed from his seat and began disputing with the woman. He was a mound of a man: fat and white, his sleeves rolled, his forearms like large fish. His face sweated and he glared in exasperation at the scolding woman, and then threw out his thick arms to the spectators appealing for help or judgement. They laughed. Some girls in fawn uniforms, their shoulder-bags slung like guns, were wrangling lightly with young, green soldiers, cockily sitting at a corner table, faces upturned, grinning, sub-machine-guns lying like pets across their legs. A man was scraping at a dead violin at one corner and a juke box cried from a hamburger bar. Everyone was out in the bright lights of that street.
    'You were excellent tonight,' said Igor looking out of the window, away from me.
    I returned: 'You were also.'
    'A gregarious people, the Israelis,' said Igor nodding his head benignly as though acknowledging a salute from the street.
    'Anything for a night out,' I replied quietly. 'Perhaps there won't be many more.'
    'It is nothing,' he shrugged. 'Nobody is happy unless they have something to fear.'
    I did not talk to him about it because just then I did not want to. In any case I was fascinated by that silver ribbon of