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between fingers and thumbs as though they were fly-papers. The building began to shake, a long noise above the claustrophobic din of the people in the office. The presses in the basement were moving.
    I walked through the activity, unquestioned but hesitant, unwilling to speak to anyone in case I intruded on something momentous. There was a sharp bend in the big room and I went around it like a stray cat. Immediately I saw Shoshana wearing khaki shirt and trousers, which made her look small. She was with some white-shirted men around a coffee machine, left hand on her hip, right hand lifting a paper cup. She had her back to me, but two of her companions looked up at me and she turned and saw me. The men looked pale against her. Her skin was deep and dark, far more than I remembered it, and her hair was much fairer, and tied behind her neck with a small band.
    The coffee was near her mouth. She stopped it there and put it down, then laughed and turned towards me, glad to see me. Her face was strong and striking, but she looked hung with tiredness. Christopher she smiled. Then, 'Mister Hollings! Ha! How strange to see you here. So far from England's cold.'
    'It's not cold there now,' I said. She had a sheen of oil on one side of her face. 'Have they turned you into a mechanic ?' I smiled at her, thinking how weary her eyes looked.
    She let out a half-laugh, her teeth showing quickly against the dark of her skin. 'Not yet. But there is time. I have been away.' She took my arm. 'Let us go and have a drink, if you have time. I am so tired.'
    We went down to the street again. In the few minutes I had been in the newspaper office the people and the cars had thinned. She took me along the pavement, holding my arm still, almost dragging herself, not saying anything, until we came to some steps dropping to an open basement door. The door was almost round, like the end of a big pipe, and from the hollow came some indefinite jazz and a sulky fight.
    'It won't be too bad,' she said. 'I would like to get somewhere inside. It will make me feel better. I have been in the open too long these days and nights.'
    The cellar was crowded but quiet, the people listening to a man playing the vibes, leaning over the instrument lovingly, curiously like a carpenter making something intricate at a bench. There were two somnolent guitarists and a drummer like a shadow in the smoke at the extreme of the room. We found a table at the back near a whitewashed wall. The musicians were putting together something of their own, wandering about with the music, trying things, fitting bits together, unhurried, lost in it.
    'I knew, of course, that you were coming to Israel,' she said watching the vibes player intently. 'But so many things are taking place . . .' She spread her hands and looked at me smiling. She was a Sabra, a third generation Israeli, the people they call after the prickly thorn of the desert, as she once told me. Her nose always looked to me as though it was spoiling her. It was not an ugly nose, but it seemed that it belonged to someone else, with a different face to hers. She had truly magnificent eyes, but that night the rings beneath them looked like the imprinted heels of two shoes.
    'Who have you been fighting today?' I asked gently. 'You personally, I mean.'
    She giggled quietly. 'I fight no one today,' she said. 'Maybe I look that way, but no fighting. Travel, travel, travel. They say this is a little country. Do not believe them. It is plenty.'
    The waiter came through the haze with our drinks. It was close and sticky in the little place. 'What have you been doing?' I asked.
    She drank. 'No, you first,' she insisted. 'Your concert was a magnificent success. Already I hear that in the office.'
    'It went well,' I said seriously. 'Everyone wanted it to go especially well. The people, the audience, were unbelievable. And the orchestra - boom? I made an explosion with my hands.
    'And the soloist?' she smiled.
    'Never played better.