Free Come To The War by Lesley Thomas Page A

Eilat in a small boat rowing the course that the Queen of Sheba had travelled. They were childish men, giggling and gesticulating, running seawards towards their boats, carrying the seine net like a dead serpent, hurt clouding their black faces when the Italian shouted at them.
    Some men had carried my piano on to the beach and settled it in front of the orchestra stands. It looked illogical there, like a clever advertising picture, sitting on the shelving sand with the sea behind it, with the men rushing to trap the fish, and the two motor torpedo boats a long way out and turning back from Jordan.
    Metzer was standing on the beach, exploring the notes of the piano as though testing the acoustics of that widespread place. On one side, the dull hills of the Egyptian Sinai were burned with the setting of the sun, with bloody streaks cutting through their chasms. On the other, the quick sunset caught the Jordan hills making them like livid coals. I walked across the cooling sand and stood by him. The musicians had stopped carrying things now and were grouped together like children watching the working of the fishermen.
    Zoo Baby, the biggest of all the orchestra players, and the only one I knew by name, turned and shouted back to Metzer in Hebrew. Metzer laughed and returned the shout as though he were directing the fishing operation. Zoo Baby acknowledged the remark and called to the fishermen who were bending their boats in a pincer movement around the backs of the populous fish.
    Metzer said to me: 'It's a fine catch of tuna. They have been waiting for three days for them. Now they are caught. Everybody down here will eat tuna.' He shook his head in admiration: 'We Israelis are good fishermen,' he said.
    He was the same as all of them. Full of themselves. Any Israeli is better than ten others, from anywhere. I don't know how they got this arrogance. Perhaps in the Warsaw Ghetto when they first learned to fight and kill. They boast and they mean every word they say about themselves.
    'The fishermen are not Jews,' I pointed out. I used the word Jews purposely, instead of Israelis, because I had some idea it might irritate him, but it did not. Metzer considered the correction. 'True,' he said squeezing his eyes to look out to sea, as though the next order had to come from him. 'But the methods we use down here, my friend, are our own. The Italian and the black men have come to learn them. Ah, they have the fish.'
    Across the purple water the Abyssinian boys began hooting with excitement and from the other boat the Italian steadied them hoarsely. But they had the tuna, trapped and trembling, a great horde of rotund fish in the arms and fingers of the net, panicked and thrashing the water. The musicians on the beach, all in bright shirts, some with trousers rolled up like seaside fathers, were chorusing encouragement, and ran into the water when the boats returned to help tug at the aching net. They scampered and splashed and heaved with the exaggerated effort of men of a soft occupation suddenly encountering a physical task. Finding that one ear of the net was more heavily manned than the other some of them ran across, through the shallows, to reinforce the other side. Then there were too many on that side and some scampered back to their original places. At the centre Zoo Baby, the huge back heaving under a bright yellow shirt, urged them on like the captain of twin tug-of-war teams. His trousers were rolled up and the broad hairy trunks of his legs were planted apart in the sand.
    "The Jews,' said Metzer turning to me, although with no noticeable emphasis on the second word, 'have always been great fishermen. Peter and James and John, all that gang, you remember were fishers. Didn't their boss call them fishers of men?' He spread his hands. I don't know. I only hear about these incidents.'
    I remember the story,' I said. 'Those fish are bleeding, they are kicking about so much.'
    'Yes,' he said with interest. 'See, the water is