When the
Cold War ended, people wiser than myself rushed to print with the gleeful
declaration that henceforth I had nothing further to write about: Le Carré’s
wry spell was broken. Well, the fact is that of my 14 novels to date, 5 have
had nothing whatever to do with the Cold War and that as a writer I’m far
happier than many of my colleagues that the Wall has finally come down and I
can move to the other passions of our time.
Unlike the
Kremlinologists, arm-chair strategists and defence correspondents, who are at
this moment desperately scratching around for new territory, mine was staked
out long ago and the LDG, written in 1981 and 1982, while the Cold War was
still running nicely, is a piece of it. Its cast contains no George Smiley and
no character I have used before or since. The Cold War is a distant
abstraction, at best. The novel’s ‘theatre of the real’, as my protagonist
Joseph calls it, is the much longer running war between two peoples, the Jews
and the Arabs. Oh, but stop stop! I’ve already revealed my bias. The
Palestinians, I was repeatedly assured in Israel in those days, are not a
people. They’re a left-over rabble of peasants and lay-abouts, whose only task,
for two thousand years, was to keep the Jewish homeland ticking over, until its
rightful owners returned.
It was a
hard story to come to grips with. I began with no firm plot in my head, which
is my way and no preconception about which side had the better case, except
that, as a young Intelligence officer in post-war Austria, I had interrogated
numberless Jewish refugees and their plight was, and is, forever printed in my
memory.
I had the
usual English familiarity with middle-class anti-Semitism, though, Lord knows,
it was never a patch on the Continental and East-European varieties that I have
since encountered. Of Palestinians, of Arabs altogether, I knew next to
nothing. In the Foreign Office, where I had served for a few years, Arabists
had always seemed to me to have an upper-class slant to them, even when they
were working on other territories. They seemed to remain a club within a club
and outsiders got to hear little of their deliberations. The Arabists, of
course, would have said the same about the pro-Israeli lobby, though it was
much smaller. And probably, in the diplomatic theatre of the unreal, as in
Joseph’s theatre of the real, both sides would have been right.
Somehow,
one morning, I began. My first destination was the offices of the League of
Arab States, in Green Street, in London’s West End. Is it still there, I
wonder? With its security cameras on the rooftops of adjoining houses and its
bored, fit men, lounging in the streets. I’ve never been back. Not to the
Middle East, not to Green Street. Once the books are finished, I never do. The
PLO’s Representative in Green St, in those days, was a Mr Rumlowie, and I had
an appointment with him that midday. I sent him a copy of Time Magazine, with
my engaging features on the cover. On the telephone I dropped names of people
we had in common. « Yes, yes, nice fellow », said a brown voice. It
was in my mind, if we got along, to take Mr R on to lunch. I wanted everything
he could give me - introductions, guidance, warnings, propaganda, lies - I
didn’t mind. I wanted the treatment from both sides. But because the PLO were
strangers to me, I wanted them to have first go. I pressed the bell, and the
bored, fit men in the street eyed me without expression. So did the cameras on
the roof. The door opened and I stepped into an armoured glass coffin set on
end. The door clicked shut behind me. While I stood in my nice suit, peering
through the glass into the pretty eighteenth century hallway, two Arab heavies
studied me with liverish disapproval. My coffin opened, I stepped into the
hall, the men closed on me and patted me down, the long, slow, methodical hand
search of professionals. They do it to you at Lod airport in Tel Aviv, or in
the antechamber to Yasser Arafat’s permanently temporary headquarters. And they
do it to you in Green Street. Or they did then. They don’t just frisk you,
these Arab and Jewish bodyguards. They interrogate you with their hands and
eyes, watching you for suspicious body talk as they move slowly over you. Time
is of the essence - take as much of it as you like, make the suspect conscious
of his genitals, his bad breath, his bad intentions. Writing the LDG, I was
searched like this more times than I’ll ever remember. But you never forget a
first time and mine was in Green Street, that midday, on my way to visit Mr R.
And of course Mr R didn’t show up. He left me standing at the altar. There was
nothing in his appointments book, his secretary had never heard of me, he was
abroad, he was out, he was busy - try another day. So that was another first
time. Countless Arabs have kept me waiting since. I could do a book on the
antechambers of the PLO alone. But the absent R. gave me my baptism of fire,
which is a bad joke, because his predecessor in London had been shot dead and
R. himself was in due course shot dead in Spain, or perhaps he was blown up, I
forget. But the PLO won’t forget.
After Green
Street, I did what I should have done in the first place, and got hold of
Patrick Seale, the distinguished Arabist and writer, and gave him the lunch I
couldn’t give R. And through Seale, I began to leapfrog, which is how it goes
when it’s going properly and you’re making the inward and outward journey at
the same time. People led to other people, I was passed around, pointed in
conflicting directions. My telephone never stopped ringing, everybody wanted to
persuade me of something, head me off from some fatal error. My case had
finally become active, as far as the Palestinians were concerned.
From then
on, like my heroine Charlie, I rode the emotional pendulum, swaying first this
way then that, as I went back and forth, most often via Cyprus, between Israel
and the scattered Palestinians. One week I was with the Palestinians in Lebanon
or Jordan or Tunisia, the next I was in Jerusalem or Tel Aviv or the Negev or,
on one disastrous occasion, crossing the Alambe bridge from the Jordanian side
while afflicted with dysentery. My friend David Greenway, then of The
Washington Post, was with me and I will never forget watching him, as I
crouched miserably in the back of our car, stride confidently down the line of
parked lorries to the checkpoint and by throwing out the name of every Oriental
dignitary he knew, persuading the guard to let us go first. On another
occasion, Greenway and I had ourselves driven up to an old crusader fort on the
extreme southern borders of Lebanon. The Palestinians were still in occupation,
just. I’ll never know which I was more afraid of - the sniper fire from the
valley or the driving technique of our Druise driver, who prayed in grunts each
time he flung us round another hairpin bend. Greenway was based in Jerusalem in
those days, and like myself covering both sides of the conflict.
It took an
awful lot of waiting to meet Yasser Arafat. I’d wasted the requisite number of
infuriating hours in the evil little anteroom to the PLO office in Beirut,
studying the mangy exhibits of Israeli cluster bombs and napalm canisters,
while I waited to be received by their spokesman of the day, a Mr Lapadi. I had
nearly asphyxiated myself, breathing the stale cigarette smoke that clouded the
offices of Arafat’s seemingly numberless deskborn heroes.
« You
will be contacted at your hotel, Mr John. », I had been told.
« Remain in your hotel, please and wait ». Writing is waiting. I
hunkered down in Beirut’s Commodore hotel, and spent a lot of money in the bar,
where the parrot had learned to imitate incoming and outgoing gunfire. I
listened to the evening fusillades and watched the long, slow flashes behind
the hilltops, from my unlit bedroom window. I ate jumbo spring rolls in the empty
Chinese restaurant that the Commodore’s extraordinary staff somehow kept
running, through thick and thin. And I kept a constant ear for the front desk.
It was the limping waiter who finally brought me the summons. I think he had
lost most of a leg, but he was so young and agile that it was hard to guess how
much of him was missing. I was about half way into my iron-case spring roll, as
he toppled towards me between the empty tables, his eyes burning with
excitement. « Our chairman will see you now », he announced, in a
conspiratorial murmur of immense significance. « Now please ». But it
was my evening to be stupid. I saw that he meant me to stand up, so out of a
kind of courtesy I did so. I supposed he was proposing to take me to see the chairman
of the board of the hotel. I wondered whether I had stayed too long without
paying my bill. Or perhaps our chairman wanted me to sign a book for him. Or
perhaps he proposed to throw me out for some real or imagined offence against
the hotel’s propriety. In Beirut, nobody’s behaviour, including my own, was
predictable.
I followed
the boy across the lobby as far as the front door. And it wasn’t till I saw the
little group of fighters, with their coats worn like capes over their
shoulders, and their hands out of sight in the folds, and their two
sand-coloured Volvo saloon cars waiting, that it dawned on me that I was being
taken to see the chairman of the PLO.
Somewhere
in the LDG there is a description of a similar journey through Beirut at night
- the repeated switching of cars, the lying low, the ninety-mile-an-hour burst
before we bumped across the central reservation of a dual carriage way in the
wrong direction and continued with our lights flashing down the opposing lane.
It was the journey we made that night. Our final destination was a half-bombed,
half-restored high-rise apartment house, the tenth or twelfth floor. And here
at last, as the fighters came forward to frisk me for the umpteenth time, I
lost my temper and announced rudely that I was sick of being searched. Smiling
apologetically, they drew back and bowed me into Arafat’s presence.
He was
wearing a silver-coloured pistol, and a perfectly pressed uniform. And he
smelled of baby powder. The stubble on his cheeks, as we entered the
traditional embrace, was silky, not prickly. « Mr John, why have you come
here? » he demanded, unexpectedly using my Christian name while he placed
his hands on my shoulders, studied my eyes like a worried doctor. « Mr
Chairman », I said, « I’ve come to put my hand on the Palestinian
heart ». He seized my hand and pressed it to his breast. His hand was as
soft as a girl’s. « Mr John, it is here, it is here. » He talked in soft rushes of enthusiasm,
punctuating a standard act with inspirational leaps to suit his audience. He
could lecture you like a schoolmaster or stare at you like a spellbound
disciple, while he listened to your wisdom. But the face that appeared between
times was the face of an over-sensitive little soldier who had lost his horse
and you felt an irresistible urge to go and find it for him. I was enchanted by
Arafat, which was what I wanted to be. I wanted to be as seducible as my
heroine Charlie, I wanted her to be a twice promised woman, serving both
loyalties and therefore doomed to betray them also.
So I went
with the flow, as we say these days. But with both flows, with both opposing
currents. And the terror? you ask indignantly. The violence? The bombs on
Jewish schoolbuses? Was I really so starry-eyed, so soft-headed that I didn’t
even realise what was going on beneath my nose? Oh, I realised all right. You
didn’t have to be in Beirut very long in those days to smell the terror outside
the door. It didn’t take a trained eye to see that half of the people you
laughed and chattered with should be stretched out on the psychiatrist’s couch,
that their lives since infancy had been so displaced and violent that they had
learnt to identify normal society as a hostile target. Those who are treated as
pariahs become pariahs just as, to quote Auden, those to whom evil is done, do
evil in return.
And of
Israel? Why do I say so little of my experiences there? Well, because in a
sense they were predictable and structured. And because Israelis are
accessible, they have doorbells and telephones that work, and nice houses, and
schools and passports. If you want to talk to someone in Israel, you say so and
in almost every case, you can. The official arguments are familiar, and fall
more easily on our Western ear. Nobody kept me waiting. Generals in shirt
sleeves leapt to their feet, clapped me on the shoulder, had all the time in
the world. Politicians, Intelligence officials, newspaper editors chatted and
argued together in an atmosphere of assured normality, which the Palestinians,
as a matter of philosophy, refuse to let into their lives. It is not the
Israelis’ fault that victory does not bring popularity, that the romantic in us
instinctively espouses the underdog. The Palestinians like to get themselves up
as exiled partisans, as a popular and spontaneous movement of a people that has
become a pawn in the world’s game. But Israel can no longer conceal its
identity, as a hugely impressive, American-armed, military power, arguably the
best fighting force in the world. In the tug of war of public relations, the Palestinians
have become the David, and the Israelis the Goliath. It was easy enough to see
why European terror gangs had nailed the Palestinian flag to their mast. Easy
enough too to understand how my Charlie’s heart could be swayed in each
direction in turn.
The
reception of the book, three years later, was as paradoxical as had been my
experience of writing it, but then I expected no different. The Israelis were
relaxed and gave it a good press. In America, where no popular novel had
presumed to suggest that the Palestinians were human beings with a legitimate
case, it created a brief furore. I endured, pretty much in silence, the cheap
gibe that anyone who criticises Israel is by definition anti-Semitic. I
received some foul letters from American Jewish organisations, but some
remarkably moving ones from individual Jews. The most influential American
reviewers, Jewish and non-Jewish, gave the book a good time. A leading Arab
American dismissed it as the usual stuff about Arabs as terrorists. In the Arab
press, the book was praised and damned in the same haphazard way. An important
Arab critic declared it anti-Palestinian, on the grounds that in the novel, as
in life, the Palestinians lost.
As to
myself, looking at it for the first time after ten years, I find that I am
uncharacteristically at ease with it, my main regret being that we spend a
little too long with the Germans at the beginning. My sadness is, that with a
few changes, the story could be played today, tomorrow or the next day. And
Charlie, my heroine, would still come out of it as I did myself, torn to pieces
by the battle between two peoples who both have justice on their side.
It was the
Bad Godesberg incident that gave the proof, though the German authorities had
no earthly means of knowing this. Before Bad Godesberg, there had been growing
suspicion; a lot of it. But the high quality of the planning, as against the
poor quality of the bomb, turned the suspicion into certainty. Sooner or later,
they say in the trade, a man will sign his name. The vexation lies in the
waiting.
At twenty-six minutes past eight on Monday morning the waiting ended. Of the
four injured, one was the wife of the Israeli Labour Attaché, in whose house
the bomb had exploded. The Israeli Labour Attaché had left more than an hour
ago. Their small son, Gabriel, was killed. But the intended victim, it was
afterwards widely concluded, was neither of these people, but rather an uncle of
the Labour Attaché’s injured wife, who was here on a visit from Tel Aviv, a
Talmudic scholar who was mildly celebrated for his hawkish opinions regarding
the rights of Palestinians on the West Bank : in a word, he believed they
should have none and believes so still, no doubt, for he survived.
By early
afternoon of the day of the explosion a six-man team of Israeli experts had
flown in from Tel Aviv; on the German side the controversial Doctor Alexis, of
the Ministry of the Interior, was imprecisely charged with the investigation.
By the fourth day, though the results of many enquiries were still outstanding,
the joint working party had put together a convincing preliminary picture of
what had happened. In the first place, it was common ground that no special
security watch had been kept on the target house; in the second place, the
family’s au pair girl, a Swede of impeccable record named Elke had the day
before left for a week’s holiday. These two factors made the attack possible.
What made it succeed was the fatal good nature of the Labour Attaché himself.
At six
o’clock on the same Sunday evening, two hours after Elke’s departure, the front
door bell rang. As always, the Labour Attaché looked through the peephole
before opening. A blonde girl of around twenty-one or two, rather frail and
affecting, was standing on the doorstep beside a scuffed grey suitcase with
Scandinavian Air Services labels tied to the handle. The Labour Attaché
described her as a really nice girl. She had just arrived from Sweden, she
said, and had promised Elke’s mother
she would deliver this suitcase containing some clothes and gramophone
records. The gramophone records were a particularly neat touch since Elke was
mad about pop. The Labour Attaché had even, in his innocence, picked up the
suitcase and carried it across the threshold, a thing for which all his life he
would never forgive himself. The Labour Attaché noticed that the girl was
wearing white cotton gloves but she was that kind of girl and it was a sticky
day for carrying a heavy suitcase. So no fingerprints on the suitcase. The
entire exchange had taken, the poor man later estimated, five minutes. Here,
like a mystery train that abruptly vanishes from the track, the passage of
events stopped. The girl Elke was whisked back to Bonn; she had, it turned out,
no such friend from Sweden; her mother had sent no suitcase.
At this
point of stalemate, the Israeli team seemed to go into a kind of collective
coma. A lethargy overcame them. They arrived late and left early and spent a
lot of time at their embassy, where they appeared to be receiving new
instructions. The days passed and Alexis decided they were waiting for
something, marking time but excited somehow. Then a broad-faced, older man,
calling himself Schulman, joined their team, accompanied by a very thin
sidekick, half his age. Alexis likened them to a Jewish Caesar and his Cassius.
He was the leader the Israeli team had been waiting for, Schulman, from
Jerusalem. To Alexis’s eye, a broad-headed, bustling veteran of every battle
since Thermopylae, aged between forty and ninety, squat and Slav and strong,
and far more European than Hebrew, with a barrel chest and a wrestler’s wide
stride and a way of putting everyone at his ease. And this seething acolyte of
his was not perhaps Cassius after all; rather your archetypal Dostojevsky
student, starved and in conflict with demons. When Schulman smiled, the
wrinkles that flew into his face had been made by centuries of water flowing
down the same rock paths and his eyes clamped narrow like a Chinaman’s. Then
long after him, his sidekick smiled, echoing some twisted inner meaning. When
Schulman greeted you, his whole right arm swung in on you like a crab-like
punch, fast enough to wind you if you didn’t block it. But the sidekick kept
his arms at his sides, as if he didn’t trust them out alone. When Schulman
talked, he fired off conflicting ideas like a spread of bullets, then waited to
see which ones went home and which came back at him. The sidekick’s voice
followed like a stretcher party, softly collecting up the dead. « I’m
Schulman. Glad to meet you, Doctor Alexis. » said Schulman, in a
cheerfully accented English. Just Schulman. No first name, no rank, no academic
title, no branch or occupation. And the student didn’t have a name at all, or
not for Germans, anyway. A people’s general, Schulman was, the way Alexis read
him. A giver of hope. A powerdrill. A taskmaster extraordinary. An alleged
specialist who needed a room to himself, and got one the same day, the sidekick
saw to it. But more than anything else, it was Schulman’s driven urgency that
Alexis felt most strongly. He was a kind of human ultimatum, passing on to his
team the pressures that were upon himself, imposing a scarcely bearable
desperation on their labours.
The
obligatory conference to round up all the joint investigations took place in a
vast lecture hall with over three hundred chairs, mostly empty. But among them
two groups, German and Israeli, clustered like nuptial families either side of
the church aisle. The Germans were fleshed out with officials from the Ministry
of the Interior, and some voting fodder from the Bundestag. The Israelis had
their military attaché from the embassy with them, but several of their team,
including Schulman’s emaciated sidekick, had already left for Tel Aviv, or so
it was said by his comrades. They assembled at eleven in the morning to be
greeted with a buffet table covered with a white cloth on which the tell-tale
fragments from the explosion were set out like archaeological finds at the end
of a long dig, each with its own little museum label in electric type, and a
reconstructed duplicate of the now famous scuffed grey suitcase. It was a
classic set-up, thought Alexis, straight out of bomb school. No compromising
materials, no touches of vanity, no frills, beyond a kiddykit boobytrap built
into the inside angle of the lid. Someone was making a dreadful joke about it:
« We are calling this the bikini bomb », he boomed proudly.
« The minimum, uh, no extras. » « And no arrests either »,
Alexis called out recklessly, and was rewarded with an admiring and strangely
knowing smile from Schulman. Schulman examined the home-made booby-trap inside
the lid, gently tugging at the stretch of wire that was stitched into the
lining, and joined to a dowel in the
mouth of the clothespeg. « There’s something interesting, Herr
Schulman? » the same man inquired. « You’ve found a clue, perhaps.
Tell us, please; we shall be interested. » Schulman pondered this generous
offer. « Too little wire », he announced as he returned to the buffet
table and hunted among its grisly exhibits. « Over here you have the
remains of... 77 cm of wire ». He was brandishing a charred skein. It was
wound on itself like a woollen dummy with a loop around its waist holding it
together. «In your reconstruction you have twenty-five centimetres maximum. Why
are we missing half a metre of wire from your reconstruction? » There was
a moment’s puzzled silence before the man gave a loud, indulgent laugh
« But Herr Schulman, this was spare wire » he explained, as if
reasoning with a child. « For the circuitry, just common wire. When the
bomber had made the device, there was evidently wire over so he or she they
threw it into the suitcase. This is for tidiness, this is normal. It was spare
wire. » he repeated. Übrig.
Without technical significance. Sag ihm
doch übrig. » « Left over », someone translated, needlessly.
« It has no meaning, Mr Schulman. It is left over. » Looking up,
Alexis was at first surprised, and then immensely pleased, to see Schulman
beckoning to him. Detaching himself discreetly from the others, Alexis tiptoed
quickly after him. In the corridor, Schulman grasped his arm in a spontaneous
gesture of affection. « They tell
me you are getting a new job soon, down in Wiesbaden. », Schulman
remarked. « Some desk job. Bigger but smaller, I hear. They say you are
too much man for the people here. Now that I have seen you, and seen the
people, well, I’m not surprised. » Alexis tried not to be surprised either.
Of the details of the new appointment nothing had been said. Only that one
would be forthcoming. Schulman was smiling broadly. « Somebody is nicely
disposed towards us, has an impressive record like yours, with him we will do
business. Informally, between friends. If he can use our information
constructively for himself, advance himself in his profession a little, all the
better. But we want half of the deal. We expect people to deliver. Of our
friends we expect this particularly. You want lunch? » It was the nearest
Schulman ever came, that day or later, to stating the terms of his proposition.
Over lunch he simply resumed their conversation, as if the bargain had been
struck and they were squarely in business together. « A few years ago now,
a bunch of Palestinians raised a certain amount of hell in my country. »
he began, reminiscently. Normally, these people are low grade, peasant kids
trying to be heroes. If we don’t catch them first time out, we catch them the
second, if there is one. The men I am speaking of were different, they were
led. They knew how to move. First time in, they hit a supermarket in Bet’Sham.
The second time a school, then some settlements, then another shop, till it
became monotonous. A lot of angry mothers, newspapers, everybody saying « Get
these men! ». We listened for them, put the word out everywhere we knew.
Brothers, the word said, three maybe four, operating out of Jordan. We put a
team together, went after them. The Palestinian commander was a loner, we
heard. We never found him. His two brothers were not so nimble. They walked
into some machinegun fire. By then we knew who they were. West bankers from a
grape-growing village near Hebron, fled after the war of ‘67. There was a
fourth brother, but he was too young to fight, even by Palestinian standards.
There were two sisters, but one of them had died in reprisal bombings. That
didn’t leave much of an army. Just the commander. One sister. The youngest
brother. All the same, we kept looking for our man. Six months passed, a year.
We heard the Syrians had given him a rough time, so maybe he’d died. A few
months back, we picked up a rumour he had come to Europe. Here. Put himself a
team together, several of them ladies, mostly German, young. » At first,
in the long silence that followed, Alexis could not make Schulman out. Then,
Alexis recognised the passion, which till then had remained hidden from him. As
some men may be seen to be in love, so Schulman was possessed by a deep and
awesome hatred.
Schulman
left that evening. A month later, as he had foretold, Alexis was shunted off to
Wiesbaden. A backroom job. Theoretically a promotion, but one that gave less
rein to his capricious individuality.
Almost
eight weeks passed before Schulman returned to Germany. In that time, the
investigations and planning of the Jerusalem teams had taken such extraordinary
leaps that those still labouring through the debris of Bad Godesberg would not
have recognised the case.
Schulman
came not to Bonn, but to Munich. And not as Schulman, either. And Alexis was
unaware of his arrival. His name, if he had one, was Kurtz. He arrived in
Munich from Tel Aviv by way of Istanbul, changing passports twice and planes
three times. Before that, he had been staying for a week in London. At what
stage in the chase he had hit upon his plan, probably not even Kurtz himself
could have said. Such plans began in him deep down, like a rebellious impulse
waiting for a cause, then welled out of him almost before he was aware of them.
« It must be done », he had told anyone who would listen after a
particularly menacing session with Misha Gavron, his chief that spring.
« If we don’t take the enemy from inside his own camp, those clowns in
Knesset and Defence will blow up the whole of civilisation in their hunt for him.
Find the boy », Kurtz told his Jerusalem team, setting out on his murky
travels. « It’s one boy and his shadow. Find the boy, the shadow will
follow, no problem. The boy will show us the way. » One day, from nowhere,
he produced a codename for him, Yanuka, which is a friendly Aramaic word for
kid, literally a half-grown suckling. « Get me Yanuka, and I will deliver
those hawks the whole apparatus on a plate. »
In Munich,
his business was administrative, but he went about it with a hushed delicacy,
contriving to force his driving nature into the most modest mould of all. No
fewer than 6 members of his newly-formed team had now been installed there, and
they occupied two, quite separate establishments in quite different areas of
town. The first team consisted of the two outdoor men; they collected Kurtz and
drove him to the Olympic village, that disintegrating citadel of grey concrete
more reminiscent of an Israeli settlement than anything that can be found in
Bavaria, to a duplex apartment which they had taken part furnished on a short
let. Outdoors they spoke English and called him Sir, but indoors they called
him Marty and spoke respectfully to him in Hebrew. The apartment was at the top
of a corner building and filled with odd bits of photographic lighting and
portentous cameras on stands as well as tape decks and projection screens. It
boasted an open-tread teak staircase and a rustic minstrel gallery, which
jangled when they trod on it too hard. From it led a spare bedroom with walls,
floor and ceiling all padded and the result resembled a mix between a modern
priest-hole and a madman’s cell. The rest of the apartment was airy, but like
the Olympic Village itself awfully down at heel. The team members had developed
a floppy, ineffectual look. Their passports revealed them to be Argentineans,
professional photographers, of what sort no one knew or cared. Sometimes, they
told Kurtz, to give their household an air of naturalness and irregularity,
they announced to their neighbours that they would be holding a late party, of
which the only evidence was loud music till all hours and empty bottles in the
dustbins. But in reality they had admitted nobody at all to the apartment,
except the courier from the other team. No guests, no visitors of any kind.
From the
Village they returned Kurtz to the middle of the town, where his next
destination was the top floor of a high-gabled gingerbread house, right at the
heart of fashionable Munich. Kurtz climbed to the flat by way of a dark
stairway and walked in without a word. The men here were professional static
watchers, a secret society even unto themselves. Lace curtains hung across the
window; it was dusk in the street and dusk in the flat also. An array of
electronic and optical devices was crowded among the fake Biedermeyer
furniture, including indoor aerials of varying designs. Kurtz embraced each man
gravely. Then, over crackers, cheese and tea, the oldest of the men, whose name
was Lenny, gave Kurtz the full tour of Yanuka’s lifestyle, quite disregarding
the fact that for weeks now Kurtz had been sharing every small sensation as it
arose: Yanuka’s phone calls, in and out; his latest visitors; his latest girls;
« He is a normal young man, this Yanuka », Lenny said sadly,
« now and then it’s hard to believe in this other side of him, Marty,
trust me. » Kurtz assured Lenny that he fully understood. He was still
doing this when a light came on in the mansard window of the flat directly
across the street. « Want to take a look, Marty? » Lenny suggested,
hopefully. Kurtz ducked his big head to the binoculars and he remained a long
time that way, hunched like an old hawk, hardly seeming to breathe, while he
studied Yanuka, the half-grown suckling. « You have a fine boy,
there. » Kurtz agreed finally, with his iron-hard smile as he slowly
straightened himself. « Keep taking photographs of him. All angles. »
They picked
Kurtz up in the van again and the three of them drove, from one glum spot to
another, killing time before Kurtz’s plane. « What’s he got, now? »
Kurtz asked, though he must have known the answer. « His latest is a
Mercedes. » the driver replied. « Red again? » Kurtz asked.
« His favourite colour », said the driver. « Stay close to that
car », Kurtz advised them both. « The moment he hands back his car to
the rental company and doesn’t take another one, that’s the moment we have to
know about immediately. They had heard this till they were deaf from it.
Suddenly, the driver had had enough. « Why do we let him go through with
this? » he demanded. « Why play games with him? What if he goes back
home and doesn’t come out again, then what? » « Then we lose
him » « So let’s kill him now tonight. You give me the order,
it’s done. » Kurtz let him rave on. « Marty, he did Bad Godesberg.
Jews are dying! How many do we let die while we play our games? »
« They. Not he - they », said Kurtz, this time with menace.
« They did Bad Godesberg. And it’s them we intend to take out, not one
silly little boy. Yanuka has friends. Relatives. People we have not yet been
introduced to. You want to run this operation for me? » There was no
answer to Kurtz’s question.
Kurtz took
the night flight from Munich to Berlin. His war had just begun. Shimon Litvak
was waiting in the car park, in an inferior Ford. Litvak, whom Doctor Alexis
had first cast as Cassius and then as the Dostojevsky student. Like Kurtz, he
did not feel he had a right to sleep. « How long did he give you? »
he asked. Kurtz affected not to understand. « Gave me? who gave me? »
« Gavron. What’s your licence? A month, two months? What’s the
deal? » « The deal is, we win. By yesterday. If not, the crazies
in Defence will tear into Lebanon with all the Biblical restraint for which
they are not very famous. » After which, Kurtz lapsed into an unaccustomed
silence.
In the middle
of West Berlin there is no darkness. At the edges, no light. They were heading
for the light. « So what name is Gadi using these days? » Kurtz
inquired, with an indulgent smile to his voice. « Tell me how he calls
himself. » « Becker. » said Litvak tersely. Kurtz expressed
jovial disappointment. « Becker? What the hell name is that? Gadi Becker,
and him a sabra? » « It’s the German version of the Hebrew version of
the German version of his name. » Litvak replied, without humour. « At
the request of his employers, he has reverted. He is not an Israeli any more.
He is a Jew. » Kurtz kept his smile flying. « Does he have any ladies
with him, Shimon? What’s with women for him these days? » « A night
here, a night there. Nothing he could call his own. » Kurtz settled more
comfortably in his seat. « So maybe an involvement is what he
needs. » « Will he do it? » asked Litvak. Kurtz seemed genuinely
surprised. « Do it? He is an Israeli officer, Shimon. » Then he
smiled so warmly that Litvak, taken by surprise, smiled in return. « And
the similarity is enough - his height, his face? » « The similarity
is enough. », Kurtz replied, as his features hardened into their old
lines. « He is a fighter, he is a man of peace. He belongs to the middle
ground and he will do the job better than anyone we know. »
Of the
kidnapping of Yanuka, some thirty kilometres on the Greek side of the Turkish
Greek border, little need be said. With an experienced team, such things happen
fast and almost ritualistically these days, or not at all. Only the potential
scale of the catch gave it its nervy quality. There was no messy shooting or
unpleasantness; just the straight appropriation of one wine-red Mercedes and
its occupant the driver.
With Yanuka
temporarily removed from society, and the recruitment of Gadi Becker as his
replacement, the vital thing was to make sure nobody, in Beirut or anywhere
else, noticed the transition. Yanuka’s people knew already that he was of an
independent and carefree nature. They knew he was celebrated for altering his
plans from one second to the next. They knew of his recently acquired passion
for things Greek; on his last run he had gone as far South as Epidaurus,
without so much as a by-your-leave from anyone. These random practises had in
the past rendered him extremely hard to catch; used against him, as now, he was
in Litvak’s cool estimate, unsavable, for his own side could keep no better
check of him than his enemies.
If Yanuka’s
people had a vision of him at all, Shimon Litvak cautiously concluded, then it
was of a young man in his prime of mind and body, gone off in search of life
and, who knows, new soldiers for the cause. So the fiction, as Kurtz and his
team now called it, could begin.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Charlie and
Joseph were formally introduced to each other on the island of Mykonos, on a
beach with two tavernas, at a late luncheon in the second half of August, just
around the time when the Greek sun hits its fiercest heat. Or, in terms of the
larger history, four weeks after Israeli jets bombed the crowded Palestinian
quarter of Beirut, in what was afterwards declared to be an effort to destroy
the leadership, though there were no leaders among the several hundred dead,
unless of course they were the leaders of tomorrow, for many were children.
« Charlie,
say hello to Joseph. » said somebody excitedly. And it was done. Yet both
behaved as if the meeting had scarcely taken place. She, by pulling her
revolutionist’s frown, and holding out her hand for an English schoolgirl’s
handshake of quite vicious respectability. And he by casting her a glance of
calm and tolerant appraisal, strangely without ambition. « Well, Charlie,
yes. Hello », he said, and smiled no more than was necessary to be polite.
So it was actually he, not Charlie, who said ‘Hullo’.
Her name
was Charmian, but she was known to everyone as Charlie and often as Charlie the
Red, in deference to the colour of her hair and to her somewhat crazy radical
stances, which were her way of caring for the world and coming to grips with
its injustices. Charlie was not the prettiest of the girls, by any means,
though her sexuality shone through, as did her incurable good will, which was
never quite concealed by her posturing. She was the outsider of a rackety troop
of young British acting people, who slept in a tumble-down farmhouse half a
mile inland and descended to the shore in a shaggy, close-knit family that
never broke up. Whereas Joseph, as they called him, was not part of their
family at all. He was friendless, but uncomplaining, the stranger who needed
nobody, not even them, just a towel, a
book, a waterbottle and his own small foxhole in the sand. Charlie alone knew
he was a ghost.
Her first
local sighting of him occurred the morning after her big fight with Alastair,
which she lost, on a straight knock-out. There was a central meekness in
Charlie somewhere, that seemed to attract her fatally to bullies. And her bully
of the day was a six-foot drunken Scot, known to the family as Long Al. She
decided to take herself for a solitary bathe, then walk into town and treat
herself to an English language newspaper and breakfast. It was while she was
buying her Herald Tribune that the apparition occurred, a clear case of psychic
phenomenon. He was the man in the red blazer. He was standing right behind her
at that moment, choosing himself a paperback, ignoring her. No red blazer this
time, but a T-shirt, shorts and sandals, yet the same man, without a doubt, the
same cropped black hair, frosted at the tips, and running to a devil’s point at
the centre of the forehead. The same brown and courteous stare, respectful of
other people’s passions, that had fixed on her like a dark lantern, from the
front row of the stalls at the Barry theatre in Nottingham for half a day.
First the matinee, then the evening performance, eyes only for Charlie, as they
followed every gesture she made. A face that was neither softened nor hardened
by time, but was finite as a print. A face that to Charlie’s eye spelled one
strong and constant reality, in contrast to an actor’s many masks. She had been
playing Saint Joan, and going nearly mad about the Dauphin, who was miles over
the top and upstaging every speech she made. So it was not till the final
tableau that she first became aware of him, sitting among the schoolchildren at
the front of the half-empty auditorium. And when the curtain rose again, for
the evening show, there he was, still. A few days later, in York, when she had
forgotten him, she could have sworn she saw him again. The sight of him now,
therefore, threw her into an extraordinary state of flurry. « I’m
mad », she thought. « It’s his double. »
The
incident that brought the two of them into formal touch occurred next afternoon
and Alastair was the occasion of it. Long Al was leaving. His agent had sent a
cable, which was a miracle in itself. It offered what it styled «possibility major film part ». The
family led Long Al down to the Olympic Airways office in the town as soon as it
opened after siesta in order to get him safely on the next morning’s flight to
Athens. There was not only a seat available for Long Al, but a reserved seat in
his full name, booked by telex from London. Long Al was headed for the big
time. An immediate celebration was called for. They repaired to the taverna,
Long Al took the head of the table and that was the moment when they realised
he had lost his passport, and his wallet, and his Barclays card and his air
ticket and almost everything else that a good anarchist might reasonably regard
as the disposable trash of the enslaved society. And it was just then, when the
dismay was at its height, that Joseph made his entry. Quite from where, nobody
seemed to know. He laid out his finds on the table, one by one. Not a sound
anywhere in the taverna, suddenly, except the little pat, as each in its turn
hit the table, passport, wallet, air ticket. Finally, he spoke: «Excuse me, I
have an idea somebody is going to be missing these quite soon ». There was
amazement, then laughter, then gratitude. They begged him to sit with them.
«Well, if you insist », he said. Each member of the family in turn faced
his straight glance until suddenly it was Charlie’s harsh blue eyes versus
Joseph’s brown. Charlie’s furious confusion versus Joseph’s perfect composure,
from which all triumph was so carefully extinguished, yet which she knew,
alone, to be a mask fixed upon quite other thoughts and motives. « Well,
Charlie, yes - hullo, how do you do? », he said calmly. They shook hands.
For the few
days that were left to the family, Joseph now became their mascot. In the
relief of Alastair’s departure they adopted him whole-heartedly. But frightened
by her own disordered feelings, Charlie held back. « He is a forty-year
old fraud, you idiots! Can’t you see? You can’t, can you? You’re such a pack of
freaked-out frauds yourselves, you literally can’t see! » They were
puzzled by her. What had become of her old generosity of spirit. How could he
be a fraud, they argued, when he wasn’t claiming to be anything in the first
place? « Come on, Chas! Give him a break! » But she wouldn’t.
Charlie and
Joseph began their tour of Greece the following week. Like other successful
proposals, it was one that in a strict sense was never made. Cutting herself
off from the gang completely, she had taken to frittering away the day in
tavernas, drinking Greek coffees and learning her lines from As You Like It,
which she was to take to the West of England that autumn. Aware of being stared
at, she glanced up, and there was Joseph. « Go away », she said. With
a smile, he ordered himself a coffee. « Ever been to Nottingham,
Jose? », she demanded, staring straight at him and not troubling to smile.
« Nottingham? I fear not. Should I have been? » « It’s just that
I was acting there last month. I hoped you might have seen me. We played at
York, too - Shaw’s Saint Joan. I was Joan », she said, her eyes still
intently fixed upon his own. « Really? So you took it on tour. How
nice! » « Yes, isn’t it? » He’s amnesiac, she decided. Or I am.
Oh, mother! As their coffee came, he asked Charlie whether she had seen many
Greek antiquities during her stay. It was an enquiry of the merest general
interest and Charlie replied to it in a tone of matching inconsequence. It was
not till he raised the matter of her return ticket to England that she began to
suspect a tactical intention behind his curiosity. « Well, we could
perfectly well travel together », he said, as if this was the solution
both of them had been working toward. She said nothing at all. Inside her, it
was as if each component of her nature had gone to war against the other: the
child fought the mother, the tart fought the nun. « I have to be in
Thessalonica one week from now », he explained. « We could rent a car
in Athens, take in Delphi, head north together for a couple of days - why not?
You would be my guest, naturally. » « Naturally », she said.
« So why not? » She thought of all the reasons that she had rehearsed
for just this moment, or one like it. And she remembered how often it had
crossed her mind that if he ever did let go, the detonation would be deafening,
which she told herself was what had drawn her to him, above all else.
« I’m not going to have the gang knowing », she muttered, head down
to her drink. « You’ll have to fiddle it somehow. They’d laugh their
bloody heads off. » To which he replied briskly that he would depart
tomorrow morning and arrange things. « And of course if you really wish to
leave your friends in the dark... » Yes, she damned well did, she said.
Then this, said Joseph, in the same practical tone, was what he suggested.
Whether he had prepared his plan in advance, or simply had that kind of mind,
she couldn’t tell. Either way she was grateful for his precision though
afterwards she realised that she had counted on it. « You go with your
friends by boat as far as Piraeus. The boat docks in late afternoon but this
week it is liable to be delayed by industrial action. Shortly before the boat enters
harbour, you’ll tell them that you propose to wander alone round the mainland
for a few days. An impulsive decision, the sort you are famous for. Don’t tell
them too early, or they will spend the boat trip trying to argue you out of it.
Don’t tell them too much, it is the sign of an uneasy conscience », he
added, with the authority of somebody who possessed one. « Spose I’m
broke? », she said before she had had time to think, for Alastair, as
usual, had been through her cash as well as his own. All the same, she could
have bitten her tongue off, and if he had offered her money at that moment, she
would have flung it in his face. But he seemed to sense that, too. « Do
they know you are broke? » « Of course, they don’t »
« then your cover story is intact, I would say. » And as if that
clinched the matter, he dropped her air ticket into an inside pocket of his
jacket. « Hey, give that back », she screamed, in sudden alarm. But
not, though there was just a hair’s breadth in it, not aloud.
SKIPPED
The boat
was two hours late arriving in Piraeus and if Joseph had not already pocketed
her air ticket, she might very well have stood him up, then and there. Sorry,
Jose, wrong time, wrong place, she decided, rehearsing her exit lines as she headed
for the hotel. Sorry, Jose, it was a great fantasy but the holiday’s over and
Chas is for the smoke so I’ll just take back that ticket and blow.
Feeling a
slut in her worn jeans and scuffed boots, she banged her way between the
pavement tables until she came to the interior door. Anyway, he’ll be gone, she
told herself. Who waits two hours for a lay these days? The air turned cool,
the babble of the pavement stopped. She was standing in a twilit, panelled
restaurant and there, in his own bit of darkness sat Saint Joseph of the
Island, creep and well-known author of all her guilt and disorder, with a Greek
coffee at his elbow and a paperback book open in front of him. Just don’t touch
me, she warned him in her mind, as he came towards her, just don’t take one
finger of me for granted. I’m tired, and famished, and liable to bite, and I’ve
given up sex for the next two hundred years. But the most he took of her was
her guitar and her shoulder-bag. And the most he gave her was a swift,
practical handshake from the other side of the Atlantic. And all she could
think of to say was « You’re wearing a silk shirt », which he was, a
cream one, with gold cufflinks as big as bottle tops. « Christ, Jose, look
at you! » she exclaimed, as she took in the rest of his hardware.
« Gold bracelet, gold watch! I can’t even turn my back and you find
yourself a rich protectress ». All of which spilled out of her in a part
hysterical, part aggressive tone, with the instinctive aim, perhaps, of making
him feel as uncomfortable about his appearance as she felt about her own. But
Joseph let it all go past him, anyway. « Charlie, hello - The boat was
late, poor you. Never mind, you’re here. » He ordered lobster and white
wine, and a whisky for her while they waited. « And after dinner, as your
personal Mephistopheles, I shall take you up a high hill, and show you the
second best place in the world. You agree? A mystery tour » « I want
the best », she said, drinking her scotch. « And I never award first
prizes », he replied, placidly. « Get me out of here », she
thought. Sack the writer, get a new script. She tried a party gambit, straight
out of Rickmansworth « So what did you get up to these last days, Jose?
Apart from pining for me, naturally. » He did not quite answer. Instead,
he asked her about her own waiting, about the journey and the gang. As they
talked, she was assailed by a sense of wrongness. It was the feeling she had on
stage, sometimes, when a scene was not playing. The events were happening
singly and in a wooden succession. But the line of dialogue was too thin, too
straight. Now, she thought. She hesitated, then said it, kindly and gently,
straight into his face: « Jose, we don’t have to go on with this, you
know. I can still hoof it to the plane, if that’s what you prefer. I just
didn’t want you to... » « To what? » « I didn’t want to
hold you to a rash promise, that’s all. » « It was not rash, it was
most seriously meant. » Now it was his turn. He produced a wad of travel
brochures. Unbidden, she moved round and sat beside him, her left arm thrown
carelessly over his shoulder, so that they could study them together.
« Delphi, Jose, gosh, super ». Her hair was against his cheek;
she had washed it for him last night. « Olympus, terrific! Meteora, never
heard of it. » Their foreheads were touching. « Thessalonica,
wow! » The hotels they would stay at, all planned, all booked. She kissed
his cheekbone, just beside the eye, a casual peck bestowed upon a passing
target. He smiled, and gave her hand an avuncular squeeze, till she almost
ceased to wonder what it was in him, or in her, that gave him the right to take
her over, without a fight, without even a surrender. « You never wear a
red blazer, do you, Jose? » she asked, before she had even considered the
question. « Wine-coloured, brass buttons, a breath of the twenties about
the cut? » His head slowly lifted, he turned, and returned her stare.
« Is that a joke? » « No, it’s a straight question. »
« A red blazer. But why on earth should I? Do you want me to support your
football team, or something? » « You’d look good in one, that’s
all. » He smiled, she smiled back. Another meeting across the footlights.
They had
eaten, they had talked with the earnestness of strangers. He had paid the bill,
from a crocodile skin wallet that must have cost half the national debt of
whatever country owned him. « You getting me on expenses, Jose? » she
asked, as she watched him fold and pocket the receipt. The question went
unanswered, for suddenly, thank God, his familiar administrative genius had
taken charge and they were frightfully short of time. « Please look out
for a red Mercedes with a driver who looks as though he needs his mother’s
permission to be up », he told her as he hurried her down a cramped
kitchen passage, her luggage across his arms. « Righto », she said.
It was waiting at the side entrance, its lights out. The driver took her
baggage from Joseph and put it in the boot, fast. And yes, he was very young.
The hot night was shedding its habitual slow rain.
« Charlie,
meet Dimitri », said Joseph, as he received the keys from the boy.
« Don’t you care for it? », he asked, with an airy lightness that she
immediately suspected. « Shall I order a different one? I thought you
had a weakness for fine cars. » « You mean you’ve hired it? »
« Not strictly. It’s been lent to us for our journey. » He was
holding the door open. She didn’t get in. « Lent who by? » « A
kind friend. » « I’m not going in this thing, it’s
crazy ». She got in, nevertheless, and in no time he was sitting next to
her. The car started immediately and with it, his facetious tour guide
monologue. « So, Charlie, here we have the home of modern Greek democracy,
Constitution Square. Note the many democrats, enjoying their outdoor freedom in
the restaurants. Now, on the left you see the Olympian and Hadrian’s gates. I
must warn you, however, before you get ideas, that it is a different Hadrian
from the one who built your famous wall. The Athens version is a more fanciful
man, don’t you agree? More artistic, I would say. » « How
much? », she said. Come alive, she told herself angrily, snap out of it,
it’s a free ride, it’s a new gorgeous man, it’s Ancient Greece and it’s called
fun! They were slowing down. She glimpsed ruins to her right, but the high
bushes hid them again. They reached a roundabout, rode slowly up a paved hill
and stopped. Springing out, Joseph opened her door for her, grasped her hand
and led her swiftly, almost conspiratorially, to a narrow stone stairway,
between overhanging trees. « We speak only in whispers, and even then in
the most elaborate code », he warned her, in a stage murmur, and she said
something equally meaningless in reply. His grasp was like a charge of
electricity, her fingers seemed to burn at his touch. They were following a wood
path, now paved, now dry earth, but climbing all the time. The moon had
vanished and it was very dark but Joseph darted ahead of her unerringly, as if
it were by daylight. Once they crossed a stone staircase, once a much wider
path, but the easier ways were not for him. The trees broke, and to her right
she saw the city lights, already far below her. To her left, still high above,
a kind of mountain crag stood black against the orange skyline. She heard
footsteps behind her and laughter, but it was just a couple of kids having a
joke. « You don’t mind the walk? », he asked, without relaxing his
speed. « You want me to carry you? » « Yes »
« Unfortunately, I have pulled a muscle in my back » « I
saw », she said, recalling the strange scars on his back, which the Mykonos
family, to her fury, had discussed, excitedly. She looked right again, and made
out what looked like the ruins of an old English mill, one arched window
stacked upon another and the lighted city behind them. She glanced left, and
the mountain crag had become the black outline of a building, with what might
have been a chimney, poking from one end. Then they were in the trees again,
with the deafening clatter of the cicadas and a smell of pine strong enough to
make her eyes tingle. « It’s a tent », she whispered, momentarily
drawing him to a halt. « Right? Sex on the South Col. How did you
guess my secret appetites? » But he was striding strongly ahead of her.
She was breathless, but she could go all day when she felt like it, so her breathlessness
came from something else. They had joined a wide path. Before them two grey
figures in uniform were standing guard over a small stone hut, on which a light
bulb burned inside a wire cage. Joseph went forward to them and she heard the
responsive murmur of their greeting. The hut stood between two iron gates.
Behind one lay the city again, now a distant blaze of busy lights. But behind
the other lay only pitch darkness and it was to the darkness that they were
about to be admitted, for she heard the clank of keys and the creak of iron, as
the gate swung slowly on its hinges. For a moment, the panic got her: what am I
doing here? where am I? bolt, nitwit, bolt! The men were officials or policemen
and she guessed by their sheepishness that Joseph had bribed them. They all
looked at their watches and as he raised his wrist, she saw the glint of his
flashy cream shirt and cufflinks. Now Joseph was beckoning her forward, she
peered back and saw two girls standing below her on the path, looking up. He
was calling to her. She started for the open gate, she felt the policemen’s
eyes undress her, and it occurred to her that Joseph never looked at her that
way. He had not supplied the crude evidence of wanting her. In her uncertainty,
she wished urgently that he would. The gate shut behind her. There were steps
and after the steps a path of slippery rock. She heard him warning her to take
care. She would have put her arm around him but he manoeuvred her ahead of him,
saying her view must not be hampered by his own bulk. So it’s a view, she
thought. The second best view in the world.
The rock
must have been marble, for it shone even in the darkness, and her leather soles
slipped on it perilously. Once she almost fell, but his hand caught her with a
speed and strength that made Al’s puny. Once she squeezed her arm to her side,
making his knuckles press against her breast. Feel, she told him desperately in
her mind, it’s mine, the first of two, the left one is marginally more
erogenous than the right, but who’s counting? The path zigzagged, the darkness
grew thinner and felt hot to her, as if it had retained the day’s sun. Below
her through the trees, the city fell away like a departing planet. Above her
she was aware only of a jagged blackness of towers and scaffolding, the rumbling
of the traffic died, leaving the night to the cicadas. « Walk slowly now,
please » She knew by his tone that whatever it was, it was near. The path
zigzagged again, they came to a wooden staircase, steps, a flat stretch, then
steps again. Joseph walked lightly here, and she copied his example, so that
once again their stealth united them. Side by side, they passed through a vast
gateway, of which the sheer scale made her lift her head. As she did so, she
saw a red half moon slip down from among the stars and take its place between
the pillars of the Parthenon. She whispered « God », she felt
inadequate and for a second utterly lonely. She walked forward slowly like
someone advancing on a mirage, waiting for it to turn to nothing, but it didn’t.
She walked the length of it, looking for a place to climb aboard, but at the
first staircase a prim notice said « Ascent is not allowed ».
Suddenly, for no clear reason, she was running, she was running heaven-bent
between the boulders, making for the dark edge of this unearthly city, only
half aware that Joseph in his silk shirt was jogging effortlessly at her side.
She was laughing and talking at the same time, she was saying the things that
she was told she said in bed, whatever came into her mind. She had the feeling
she could escape her body and run into the sky without falling. Slowing to a
walk, she reached the parapet and flopped over it, gazing downward into the
lighted island, ringed with the black ocean of the Attic plain. She looked back
and saw him watching her, from a few paces off. « Thank you », she
said at last. Going over to him she grasped his head in both hands and kissed
him on the mouth, a five-year kiss, first without the tongue, then with it,
tilting his head this way and that, and inspecting his face between whiles, as
if to measure the effect of her work. And this time they held each other long
enough for her to know. Absolutely, yes, it works.
Thanks,
Jose, she repeated, only to feel him pulling back. His head slipped from her
grasp, his hands unlocked her arms and returned them to her side. He had left
her, amazingly, with nothing. Mystified and nearly angry, she stared at his
motionless sentinel’s face in the moonlight. In her time she reckoned she had
known them all, the closet gays who bluffed until they wept, the too old
virgins haunted by imagined clouds of impotence, the would-be Don Juan’s and
fabled studs, who withdrew from the brink in a fit of timidity or conscience.
And there had been enough honest tenderness in her, as a rule, to turn mother
or sister, or the other thing, and make a bond with any of them. But in Joseph,
as she gazed into the shadowed sockets of his eyes, she sensed a reluctance she
had never met before. It was not that he lacked desire, not that he lacked
capacity, she was too old a trooper to mistake the tension and confidence of
his embrace. Rather it was as though his aim lay out beyond her somewhere, and
by withholding himself, he were trying to tell her so. « Shall I thank you
again? », she asked. For a moment longer, he remained gazing at her in the
silence, then he lifted his wrist and looked at his gold watch by the
moonlight. « I think actually since we have too little time already, I
should show you some of the temples here. You allow me to bore you? » In the
extraordinary hiatus that had risen between them, he was counting on her to
support his vow of abstinence. « But Jose, I want the lot! » she
declared, flinging an arm through his, and bearing him off as if he were a
trophy. « Who built it, how much
did it cost, what did they worship and did it work? You can bore me till life
us do part. » It never occurred to her he wouldn’t have the answers, and
she was right. He lectured her, she listened. He walked her, sedately, from
temple to temple, she followed, holding his arm, thinking ‘I’ll be your sister,
your pupil, your anything. I’ll hold you up, and say it was all you, I’ll lay
you down and say it was all me. I’ll get that smile out of you, if it kills
me. ’ « No, Charlie », he replied gravely, « Propylea was
not a goddess, but the gateway to a sanctuary. The word came from propylon, the
Greeks used the plural form to give distinction to the holy places. »
« Learn it up especially for us, Jose, did you? » « Of course,
all for you, why not? » « I could do that. Mind like a sponge, me.
You’d be amazed. One peek at the books, I’d be your instant expert. » He
stopped, she stopped with him. « Then repeat it to me » She didn’t
believe him at first, she suspected he was teasing her. Then, grasping him by
the arms, she turned him sharply round and marched him back over the course,
while she repeated to him everything he had told her. « Will I do? »
They were at the end again. « Do I get second-best prize? » She
waited for another of his famous three-minute warnings. « It is not the
shrine of Agrippa, it is the monument. Apart from this one small error, I would
say you were word perfect. Felicitations. » At the same moment, from far
below them, she heard a car hooting, three deliberate blasts, and she knew the
sound was meant for him, for he once lifted his head and considered it, like an
animal scenting the wind, before, yet again, looking at his watch. The coach
has turned into a pumpkin, she thought. Time good children were in bed, and
telling one another what the hell they’re all about.
They had
already started down the hill when Joseph paused to gaze into the melancholy
theatre of Dyonisos, an empty bowl lit only by the moon and the stray beams of
distant lights. It’s a last look, she thought in bewilderment, as she watched
his motionless black shape against the lights of the city. « I read
somewhere that no true drama can ever be a private statement », he
remarked. « Novels, poems, yes. But not drama. Drama must have an
application to reality. Drama must be useful. Do you believe that? »
« In Burton-on-Trent’s Women’s Institute », she replied with a laugh,
« playing Helen of Troy at pensioners’ Saturday matinees? » « I
am serious. Tell me what you think. » « About theatre? »
« About its uses. » She felt disconcerted by his earnestness, too
much was hanging on her answer. « Well, I agree. », she said
awkwardly. « Theatre should be useful. It should make people share and
feel. It should... well, waken people’s awareness » « Be real,
therefore. You are sure? » « Sure. I’m sure. » « Well
then », he said, as if in that case she shouldn’t blame him. « Well
then » she echoed, gaily. We are mad, she decided. Barking, certifiable
loonies, the pair of us.
The
policemen saluted them on their way down to earth. The red Mercedes was waiting
for them. Joseph took the wheel, gazing intently ahead of him. Who is he? she
wondered, as the car filled suddenly with light. She swung round and saw
through the rear window a pair of headlights about a hundred yards behind them,
neither gaining nor losing. She was actually settling down again when she
realised what else had caught her eye. A red blazer, lying along the back seat,
brass buttons like the brass buttons in Nottingham and York. « Your kind
friend a snappy dresser, is he? » « Quite, yes, he is. Why do you
ask? » « That’s his red blazer, there, on the back seat or
yours? » He glanced swiftly at her, as if impressed, then returned his
eyes to the road. « Let us say it is his, but I have borrowed it. »,
he replied calmly, as the car’s speed increased. The road was straight, but
very narrow, the needle reached a hundred and forty kilometres, she could feel
the panic forming inside her and battling with her artificial calm. « Mind
telling us some good news, would you? Something to put a person at her
ease? » « The good news is that I have lied to you as little as
possible and that in a short time from now you’ll understand the many good
reasons for your being with us. » « Who’s us? » Till then he had
been a loner, she didn’t like the change at all. They were heading for a main
road, but he was not slowing down. They jumped a set of traffic lights and
swung left, so violently that her seat belt locked and punched the breath out
of her. He swung left a second time through a white gateway into a private
drive lined with azaleas and hibiscus. The second car was pulling up behind
them, blocking the way out. The house was an old villa covered in red flowers.
One pale light burned in the porch. Joseph switched off the engine, pocketed
the ignition key, and opened his door. Charlie stayed in her seat. There was no
breeze, no other sensation of fresh air, no sound but the delicate shuffle of
young, light-footed people gathering round the car. Dimitri, whose mother had
to let him stay up at night, two girls in jeans and jackets, the same pair she
realised she had seen slouching around Mykonos a couple of times when she had
gone window-shopping. But all she could think of was Joseph with his back to
her, striding briskly towards the house and not looking back, like someone
walking away from a traffic accident. Hearing the thud of someone unloading
luggage from the boot, she leapt furiously from the car. « My
guitar! », she shouted, « you leave that alone , you... ». She
was about to spring for it when the two girls each took hold of a wrist and
elbow and without effort led her inside the villa. As she passed the car,
Charlie saw by the porch light the markings of the rear licence plate. It was
not a Greek registration at all, it was Arab, with Hollywood-style writing
round the number and a plastic CD for Corps Diplomatique stuck on the lid of
the boot, just to the left of the Mercedes emblem.
The house
was ancient and smelt of cat. It was crammed with bad Greek furniture in the
Empire style and hung with faded velvet curtains and brass chandeliers, but if
it had been clean as a Swiss hospital or sloping like a ship’s deck, it would
only have been a different madness, not a better or a worse one. They
approached a double door, a cavernous upper room opened to her. At its centre
sat two figures at a table, one broad and big, one stooping and very thin, both
dressed in cloudy browns and greys, and from that distance, ghosts. On the
table she saw papers strewn, they looked to her like press cuttings. Her
entrance was the cue for the two men to bounce simultaneously to their feet.
The thin man remained standing at the table, but the big man strode over to her
and his right hand curved in on her in a crab-like gesture seizing her own and
shaking it before she could prevent him. « Charlie, we surely are glad to
have you safely here among us », Kurtz exclaimed, in a swift
congratulatory flow, as if she had risked fire and flood to get to them.
« Charlie, my name for want of a better is Marty and when God finished
making me there were a couple of spare pieces left around, so he put together
my thin friend here as an afterthought, so say hello to him ».
Litvak, for he it was, gave a watery smile. Peering round, she found Joseph on
the point of arranging some papers on a small folding table set apart from
everyone. He doesn’t care, she thought bitterly, he’s put down his burden and
the burden was me. The two men at the table were still standing, waiting for
her to sit, which was a madness in itself. Madness to be polite to a girl you
have just kidnapped, madness to sit down to a conference with your abductors.
She sat down nevertheless, Kurtz and Litvak did the same. « Who’s got the
cards? » she blurted facetiously, as she punched away a stray tear with her
knuckles. She noticed the press cuttings were about herself and her career.
« You’ve got the right girl, you are sure of that, are you? », she
said, determinedly. « Charlie, we sure have the right girl », Kurtz
cried delightedly. « Charlie, what we seek to do: we wish to define
ourselves, we wish to introduce ourselves
and though nobody here is given to apologising overmuch, we also wish to
say we are sorry. Sorry, greetings, and again welcome! Hi. » If Charlie
had not already guessed that she was headed for a long night, the relentless
pounding voice of Kurtz told her now. « Charlie, primarily, we are decent
people as Joseph said, good people. In that sense, call us non-sectarian,
non-aligned and deeply concerned, like yourself, about the many wrong directions
the world is taking. We are also Israeli citizens. » An icy stillness
descended over Charlie’s manner, disguising the chaos and momentary terror
inside her. That Joseph was Jewish she had not seriously doubted, but Israel
was a confused abstraction to her, engaging both her protectiveness and her
hostility. She had never supposed for one second that it would ever get up and
come to face her in the flesh. « So what is this, actually? A war party? A
punitive raid? You gonna put the electrodes on me? What the hell’s the big
idea? » « You have some racial objections to Jews overall, Jews as
Jews, period? You feel you are among enemies here? » « Oh, Christ,
what gave you that idea? I mean anybody who kidnaps me is a friend for life. »,
she retorted and to her surprise won a burst of spontaneous laughter in which
everyone seemed free to join, except for Joseph, that is, who was too busy at
his reading, as she could hear, even then, by the faint rustle as he turned the
pages over. Kurtz bore in on her a little harder: « So put our minds at
rest for us », he urged, still beaming heartily, « let us forget that
you are in some sense captive here. May Israel survive or must all of us here pack up our belongings and go back
to our former countries and start over again? What do you say, Charlie? »
« I just want you to leave the poor bloody Arabs alone », she said,
parrying again. « Great. And how do we do that, specifically? »
« Stop bombing their camps, driving them off their land, bulldozing their
villages, torturing them. » « Ever looked at a map of the Middle
East? » « Course I have. » « And when you looked at that
map, did you once wish the Arabs would leave us alone? », said Kurtz, as dangerously cheerful as before. To
her confusion and fear was added plain embarrassment, as Kurtz had probably
intended. Faced with such bald reality, her flip phrases had a schoolroom
cheapness, she felt like a fool preaching to the wise. « I just want
peace », she said stupidly, though as a matter of fact it was true. She
had a decent vision, when it was allowed to her, of a Palestine magically
restored to those who had been hounded from it in order to make way for more
powerful, European custodians. « In that case why don’t you take a look at
the map again and ask yourself what Israel wants », Kurtz advised her
contentedly and stopped for a break that was like a commemorative silence for
the loved ones unable to be with us here tonight.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
« Charlie,
we are not here to attack your politics. You will not believe me at this early
stage, why should you, but we like your politics - every paradox and good
intention, we respect them and we need them. On this premise, you’ll surely sit
with us a little longer and hear us out. » Once again, Charlie hid her
response under a fresh attack « If Joseph’s Israeli, what the hell is he
doing driving round in a dirty great Arab car? » Kurtz’s face broke into a
ploughed and wrinkled smile, « We stole it, Charlie », he replied
cheerfully. « And the next thing you will want to know, Charlie, he said,
« is what you are doing here among us. I will tell you. The reason,
Charlie, is that we want to offer you a job, an acting job, the biggest part
you ever had in your life, the most demanding, the most difficult, surely the
most dangerous and surely the most important - and I don’t mean money. You can
have money galore. No problem, name your figure. » First Al gets his big
part, she thought, in an instinctive rush of elation, and now I do. The madness
of her situation was still quite clear to her, yet it was all she could manage
to bite back a grin of excitement that was tickling at her cheeks and trying to
get out. « A part what in? », she said, still fighting the grin.
« In a sense, it is a play. » « Who writes it? » « We
handle the plot, Joseph does the dialogue, with a lot of help from you. »
« Who’s the audience? » Kurtz’s solemnity was as sudden and awesome
as his good will. « Charlie, there are people out there who will never get
to watch the play, never even know it’s running, yet who will owe you, for as
long as they live. Innocent people, the ones you’ve always cared about, tried
to speak for, march for, help. In everything that follows from here on, you
have to keep that notion before you in your head or you will lose us and you
will lose yourself. No question? » She tried to look away from him, his
rhetoric was too high, too much. « Who the hell are you to say who’s
innocent? », she demanded rudely, again forcing herself against the tide
of his persuasion. « You mean we as Israelis, Charlie? »
« I mean you », she retorted, skirting the dangerous ground. « I
would prefer to turn your question around a little, Charlie and say that in our
view somebody has to be very guilty indeed before he needs to die. »
« Such as who? who needs to die? those poor sods you shoot on the West
Bank? or the ones you bomb in Lebanon? » How on earth had they come to be
talking about death, she wondered, even as she put the crazy question. Had she
started it, had he? It made no difference. He was already weighing his reply.
« Only those who break completely the human bond, Charlie », Kurtz
replied, with steady emphasis « They deserve to die ». Stubbornly she
went on fighting him, « are there Jews like that? » « Jews, yes,
Israelis, surely also. But we are not among them and mercifully they are not
our problem here tonight » He had the authority to talk that way, he had
the answers children long for. « Do not confuse our play with
entertainment, Charlie », he told her earnestly. « There is no
squeamish pulling back from the harsher scenes, no days off sick, it’s peak
performance all the way down the line. If that’s what you like, if that’s what
you can handle, and we think it is, then hear us out. Otherwise, let’s skip the
audition right now. » In his Euro-Bostonian drawl, Shimon Litvak made a
first husky interjection, « Charlie never walked away from a fight in her
life, Marty », he objected, in a tone of a disciple reassuring his master.
« We don’t just believe that, we know it. It’s all over her record. »
They were half way there, Kurtz told his chief, Misha Gavron, later,
describing, during a rare cease-fire in their relationship, this point in the
proceedings. « A lady who consents to listen is a lady who
consents », he said and Gavron very nearly smiled, which was also a
record. « So, Charlie, what we propose, we propose an open-ended audition,
a string of questions which we invite you to answer very frankly, very
truthfully, even though for the meanwhile, remaining necessarily in the dark
about the purpose of them. » Needing an activity, Charlie took up a pen
and pretended to doodle on the pad before her. Suddenly, like a man annoyed at
being interrupted, Joseph spoke, yet his voice, for all its severity, had a
thrilling and warm effect on her. « Charlie, it will not be enough for you
to play the sullen witness, it is your own dangerous future they are
discussing. A commitment, you understand? Charlie, come... » She drew
another circle. She was as keen-witted and alert as she had been in her life,
but every cunning instinct in her told her to dissemble and withhold.
« So, how long does the show run, Mart? » she asked, in a lacklustre
voice, as if Joseph had never spoken at all. Kurtz rephrased her question,
« Well, now, I guess what you really mean is what happens to you when the
job runs out, is that right? » She was wonderful, a shrew. Flinging down
her pencil, she slapped the table with her palm « No, it bloody well
isn’t. I mean, how long does it run, and what about my tour with As You Like It
in the autumn? » Kurtz betrayed no triumph at the practicality of her
objection, « Charlie, your projected tour with As You Like It will in no
wise be affected. As to duration, your commitment to our project could take six
weeks, it could take two years, even though we surely hope not. What we have to
hear from you now is whether you wish to audition with us at all, or whether
you prefer to tell good-night to everybody here and go home to a safer, duller
life. What’s your verdict? » « Jose », she said, without turning
her head. « Yes, Charlie? » « This is it, is it? Our big
romantic tour of Greece? » « Our drive North will in no wise be
affected », Joseph replied. « Not even postponed? » « I
would say it was imminent, actually. » Let them sweat a little. She puffed
out some breath, as if blowing away her forelock. « So, I’ll stick around
for the audition, then, won’t I? » she told Kurtz carelessly. The interrogation,
with Charlie’s gracious consent, could now begin in earnest.
Kurtz’s
first questions, by design, were scattered and harmless. It was as if, thought
Charlie, he had a blank passport application pinned up in his mind and Charlie,
without being able to see it, was filling in the boxes. « Full name of
your mother, Charlie. Your father’s date and place of birth if known,
Charlie. » Not a single one of the early questions bore directly upon
herself, nor did Kurtz intend it to. Charlie, for her part, as the sap of her
trade increasingly worked in her, performed, obeyed and reacted, with ever
increasing compliance. Had she not done as much for directors and producers a
hundred times? used the stuff of harmless conversation to give them a sample of
her range? All the more reason, under Kurtz’s hypnotic encouragement, to do it
now. Meticulously, but swiftly, he bustled her through her early childhood:
boarding schools, houses, names of early friends and ponies and Charlie
answered him in kind: spaciously, sometimes humorously, always willingly, her
excellent memory illuminated by the fixed glow of his attention and by her
growing need to be on terms with him. From schools and childhood it was a
natural step, though Kurtz took it only with the greatest diffidence, to the
painful history of her father’s ruin and Charlie rendered this in quiet but
moving detail, from the first brutal breaking of the news to the trauma of the
trial and sentence and imprisonment. Now and then, it was true, her voice
caught slightly, sometimes her gaze sank to study her own hands that played so
prettily and expressively in the down light. Then, a gallant, lightly
self-mocking phrase would come to her to blow it all away. « We’d have
been all right if we’d been working class », she said once, with a wise
and hopeless smile. « You get sacked, you go redundant, the forces of
capital run against you, it’s life. It’s reality, you know where you are. But
we weren’t working class. We were us, the winning side. And all of a sudden,
we’d joined the losers. » « Tough », said Kurtz gravely, with a
shake of his broad head. Backtracking, he probed for the solid facts:
« Date and place of trial, Charlie? The exact length of sentence,
Charlie. » Names of lawyers, if she remembered them. She didn’t, but
wherever she could, she helped him and Litvak duly noted down her answers,
leaving Kurtz free to give her his entire, benevolent attention. Sometimes,
resting her gaze briefly from Kurtz, she would see the kids dozing at their
posts: Swedish Raoul with his flaxen head sunk upon his chest, and the sole of
one thick track-shoe flattened against the wall, South-African Rose, propped
against the double doors, her runner’s legs stretched in front of her, and her
long arms folded across her chest, North-country Rachel, the wings of her black
hair folded round her face, eyes half closed, but still with her soft smile of
sensual reminiscence. Yet the smallest, extraneous whisper found everyone of
them instantly alert. « So what’s the bottom line, here, Charlie? »,
Kurtz enquired kindly. « Regarding that whole, early period of your life,
until what we may call the Fall » « The age of innocence,
Mart », she suggested helpfully. « Precisely. Your age of innocence.
Define it for me. » « It was hell » « Want to name some
reasons? » « It was suburbia, isn’t that enough? » « No, it
is not. » « Oh, Mart, you’re so... » Her slack-mouthed voice,
her tone of fond despair, limp gestures with the hands. How could she ever
explain? « It’s all right for you. You’re a Jew, don’t you see? You’ve got
these fantastic traditions of security, even when you’re persecuted, you know
who you are and why » Kurtz ruefully acknowledged the point. « So, as
soon as you could, you left home and you took refuge in the stage and radical
politics », he suggested, contentedly. « You became a political exile
to the stage. I read that somewhere, some interview you gave. I liked it. Go on
from there. » « Oh, well,
there were other ways of breaking out before that » « Such as? »
« Well, sex, you know », said Charlie, carelessly. « I mean...
we haven’t even touched on sex as the essential basis of revolt, have we? or
drugs » « We haven’t touched
on revolt », said Kurtz. « Well, take it from me, Mart. »
Then a strange thing happened, proof perhaps of how a perfect audience can
extract the best from a performer and improve her in spontaneous, unexpected
ways. She had been on the brink of giving them her set piece, for the
unliberated - how the discovery of self was an essential prelude to identifying
with the radical movement. Instead of which, to her surprise, she heard herself
enumerating aloud for Kurtz, or was it Joseph?, her rows and rows of early
lovers and all the stupid reasons she had invented for going to bed with them,
the five-minute lusts that smashed like pottery in her hands and left her
lonelier than ever, failures, failures, everyone of them, Mart. Or so she
wanted him to believe. « But they freed me, don’t you see? I was using my
own body in my own way. Even if it was the wrong way, it was my show »
While Kurtz nodded sagely, Litvak wrote swiftly at his side. She felt quiet,
and her own quiet chilled her. Why had she done that? in her entire life she
had never played that part before, not even to herself. The timeless hour of
the night had affected her, she wanted to sleep, she’d done enough - they must
give her the part or send her home, or both. But Kurtz did neither. Not yet.
Instead, he called a short interval, picked up his watch, and buckled it to his
wrist by its khaki webbing strap. Then he bustled from the room, taking Litvak
with him. She waited for a footfall from behind her, as Joseph also left, but
none came, and still none. She wanted to turn her head, but didn’t quite dare.
She propped an elbow on the back of her chair, in order to be able to glance
naturally over her shoulder. Joseph had vanished, taking his papers with him.
The resting room that they had retired to was as large as the room they had
left and quite as bare. Becker and Litvak sat facing each other, studying their
respective files. « She is a neat lady », Kurtz called, as Litvak
turned a page and sidelined something with a felt tip pen. « She’s
everything we expected, bright, creative, and underused. » « She’s
lying in her teeth », said Litvak, still reading. But it was clear from
the slant of his body, as well as the provocative insolence of his tone, that
his remark was not intended for Kurtz. « For a woman lying is a
protection, she protects the truth, so she protects her chastity - for a woman
lying is a proof of virtue », Kurtz announced.
To resume
his little chat with Charlie, Kurtz had selected a tone of benevolent finality,
as if he wished to check a few last fiddly points before moving to other
things. « Charlie, regarding your parents once more », he was saying.
Litvak had pulled a file from his briefcase and was holding it out of Charlie’s
line of sight. « Regarding them », she said, and reached bravely for
a cigarette. Kurtz took a little break while he studied certain documents that
Litvak had slipped into his hand. « Looking at the final phase of your
father’s life, now - his crash, financial disgrace, death and so forth - can we
just confirm with you the exact sequence of those events? You are at British
boarding school, the terrible news came. Take it from there, please. » She
shrugged : « The school threw me out. I went home, the bailiffs were
swarming over the house, like rats. We’ve been there, Mart. What else is
there? » « The head mistress sent for you, you said. », Kurtz
reminded her, after a pause. « Great. So what did she say? Precisely,
please, her words. » « Sorry, but I have asked matron to pack
your things. Goodbye and good luck. As far as I remember. » « Oh,
you’d remember that! », said Kurtz, with quiet good humour, leaning across
to take another look at Litvak’s papers. « No homily from her on the big
wicked world out there », he asked, still reading. « Don’t give
yourself away too easy type of thing? No? No explanation of why exactly
you were being asked to leave? » « The fees hadn’t been paid for two
terms already. Isn’t that enough? » She made a show of weariness:
« Don’t you think we’d better call it a day? I can’t think why, but I seem
to be a trifle flaked. » « Oh, I don’t think so. You’re rested and
you have resources. So you went home. By rail? » « All the way by
rail. On my own. With my little suitcase. Homeward bound. » « And you
came home to what, precisely? » « To chaos, I told you »
« Just specify the chaos a little, will you? » « Furniture van
in the drive, men in aprons, mother weeping, half my room already
emptied. » Kurtz was back at his papers, watching Litvak’s long finger
point things out to him. « So the entire responsibility of coping with the
family crisis fell upon your young shoulders, OK? Charlie aged a mere sixteen
to the rescue, all the toys of consumerism, pretty furniture, pretty dresses,
all the attributes of bourgeois respectability, you saw them physically
dismantled and removed before your very eyes. You alone, managing, disposing in
undisputed mastery over your pathetic bourgeois parents who could have been
working class, should have been working class, but carelessly were not.
Consoling them, easing them in their disgrace, almost a kind of absolution you
gave them I guess. Tough, very very tough. » And he stopped dead, waiting
for her to speak, but she didn’t, she stared him out, she had to. His slashed
features had undergone a mysterious hardening, particularly around the eyes,
but she stared him out all the same, she had a special way of doing it left
over from her childhood, a freezing her face into an ice picture and thinking
other thoughts behind it. And she won, she knew she did, because Kurtz spoke
first, which was the proof. « Charlie, we recognise that this is very
painful for you, but we ask you to continue in your own words. We have the van
, we see your possessions leaving the house, where was your father physically
located at this time? Was he in the study, looking through the window, say,
watching it all go by? How does a man like him bear up in his disgrace? Tell
us » « He was in the garden » « Doing what? »
« Looking at the roses, staring at them. He kept saying: ‘They mustn’t
take the roses’, whatever happened. He kept saying it, on and on: ‘If they take
my roses, I’ll kill myself’ » « And your mother? » « Mum
was in the kitchen, cooking. It was the only thing she could think of to
do. » « Did I mishear you, or did you say the electricity company had
switched the power off? » « They reconnected it. » « And
they didn’t take away the cooker? » « They have to leave it by law.
The cooker, a table, a chair for everyone in the house. » « Why
didn’t they just sequester the house? Throw you all out? » « It was
in Mother’s name. She insisted on it years before. » « Wise woman.
However, it was in your father’s. And where did you say did the headmistress
read about your father’s bankruptcy? » She had almost lost it. For a
second, the images inside her head had wavered, but now they hardened again,
providing her with the words she needed. Her mother in her mauve headscarf,
bowed over the cooker, frantically making bread and butter pudding, a family
favourite. Her father, grey-faced and mute, in his blue double-breasted blazer,
staring at the roses. The headmistress, hands behind her back, warming her
tweed rump before the unlit fire, in her imposing drawing room. « In The London Gazette », she replied,
stolidly, where everybody’s bankruptcies are reported. « The headmistress
was a subscriber to this journal? » « Presumably ». Kurtz gave a
long, slow nod, then picked up a pencil and wrote the one word presumably, on a pad before him, in a
way that made it visible to Charlie. « So, and after the bankruptcy came
the fraud charges, is that right? Want to describe the trial? » « I
told you. Father wouldn’t let us be there. At first, he was going to defend
himself, be a hero. We were to sit in the front seats and cheer him on. When
they showed him the evidence, he changed his mind. « What was the
charge? » « Stealing clients’ money » « How long did he
get? » « Eighteen months, less remission. I told you, Mart. I said it
all to you before. What is this? « Ever visit him in prison? »
« He wouldn’t let us? He didn’t want us to see his shame. His shame, his
disgrace. The Fall. » « It really got to you, didn’t it? »
« Would you like me better if it hadn’t? » « No, Charlie, I
don’t suppose I would. » He took another small break. « Well, there
we are. So you stayed home, gave up school, forsook the proper instruction of
your excellent developing mind, looked after your mother, waited for your
father’s release, right? » « Right. » «Never went near the
prison once? » « Jesus, why do you keep twisting the knife like
this? » « Not even near it? » « No ». She was holding
back her tears, with a courage he must surely admire. The silence was like a
pause between screams. The only sound was from Litvak’s ball-point pen, as it
flew across the pages of his notebook. « Any of that any use to you,
Mike? » Kurtz asked of Litvak, without turning his gaze from her.
« Great. It’s gritty, it adds up, we can use it. I just wonder whether she
might have a catchy anecdote for that prison stuff somewhere. Or maybe when he
came out is better, the final months. Why not? » « Charlie? »,
said Kurtz shortly, passing on Litvak’s enquiry. Charlie made a show of
pondering for them, till inspiration came to her. « Well, there was the
thing about the doors », she said doubtfully. « Doors? » said
Litvak. « What doors? Tell it to us. », Kurtz suggested. A beat while
Charlie lifted one hand and delicately pinched the bridge of her nose between
her forefinger and thumb, indicating deepest grief and a slight migraine. She
had told the story often before, but never as well as this. « We weren’t
expecting him for another month. He didn’t phone, how could he? He just showed
up. ‘Hello, Chas. I’m out.’ Gave me a hug, wept, mum’s upstairs too scared to
come down to him. He was completely unchanged, except for the doors. He
couldn’t open them. He’d go up to them, stop, stand at attention with his feet
together and his head down, and wait for the warder to come and unlock
them. » « Your agent Ned Quilley recently told someone of our
acquaintance that your father died in prison. » « That’s Ned talking,
not me » « Quite so. So it is. Agreed. » Kurtz closed the file,
still unconvinced. She couldn’t help herself. Turning right round in her chair,
she addressed Joseph, indirectly begging him to get her off the hook: «How’s it
going, Jose? All right? » « Very effectively, I would say », he
replied and continued as before with his own affairs. « Better than Saint
Joan? » « But my dear Charlie, your lines are a lot better than
Shaw’s. » He is not congratulating me. He is consoling me, she thought
sadly. Yet why was he so harsh to her? So brittle? So abstaining, after he
had brought her here.
The sweet
time was over and now it was the long-awaited dangerous time, the middle hour
of watchfulness before the dawn, when her head was clearest and her anger
sharpest. The time had come to transfer Charlie’s politics, which Kurtz had
assured her they all deeply respected, from the back-burner to a more
conspicuous heat. « Date, place and people, Charlie, name us your five
guiding principles, your first ten encounters with the militant
alternative... » But Charlie was becoming sick of them. Sick of being
helpful in this shotgun alliance. The victim in her was spoiling for a fight.
« Charlie, dear, this is strictly but strictly for the record. Once we
have it for the record, we shall be able to shed a couple of veils for you. »
But he still insisted on dragging her through a wearying catalogue of demos and
sit-ins and marches and squats and Saturday afternoon revolutions, asking in
each case for what he called the argumentation behind her action. « For
Christ’s sake stop trying to evaluate us, will you? », she threw back at
him. « We’re not logical, we’re not informed, we’re not organised. »
« So, what are we, dear? » « We are not dear, either. We are
people, adult human beings, get it? So stop riding me. We don’t think it’s a
very good idea to have people we have never met or heard of, or voted for, going out ruining the world for
us. » « How ruining the world, exactly, Charlie? »
« Poisoning it, burning it, fouling it up with trash and colonialism and
the total calculated mind-bending of the workers and... » And the other
lines I’ll think of in a minute, she thought. « So just don’t come asking
me for the names and addresses of my five main gurus, right, Mart? Because
they’re in here. » She thumped her chest. « And don’t go sneering at
me when I can’t recite Che Guevara to you all bloody night. Just ask me whether
I want the world to survive and my babies to... » « Can you recite
Che Guevara? » « No, of course I bloody well can’t » From behind
her, it seemed a mile away, Joseph’s disembodied voice gently modified her
answer. « But she could if she learned him, she has excellent
recall », he assured them with a touch of the creator’s pride. « She
has only to hear something and it
belongs to her. She could learn his entire writings in a week if she put her
mind to it. » « Charlie, you and your boy-friend Al recently
attended a certain residential forum
down in Dorset someplace », said K. as he laboriously unfolded the press
cuttings , « a week-end course in radical thinking I believe; mind if we
dig a little deeper? » Like a man refreshing his memory K. silently read
the press cuttings to himself, occasionally shaking his head as if to say
« Well, well... » « Seems quite a place, he remarked genially as
he read « weapon training with dummy guns, the techniques of sabotage,
using plasticine instead of the real stuff, naturally. How to live in hiding,
survival, the philosophy of the urban guerrilla, even how to look after an
unwilling guest, I see - that’s a fine euphemism ». He glanced over the
top of his cutting. « This correct? This report, more or less? Or are we
dealing with the typical exaggerations of the capitalist Zionist press
here? » She no longer believed in his good will, nor did he want her to.
« It was Al’s scene, not mine. », she said defiantly, making her
first withdrawal. « But you went together » « It was a cheap
week-end in the country, at a time when we were broke, that’s all. »
« That’s all », K. echoed, leaving her with a vast and guilty silence
too heavy for her to shift single-handed. « It was not just me and
him », she protested, « it was -God- twenty of us, kids, acting
people. Some of them were still at drama school. Hire a bus, take some hash,
play musical beds till morning. What’s wrong with that? » Kurtz had no
opinion, just then, of what was wrong with anything. « No discussions? No
seminars? » « We had discussions, yes » « On what subjects,
please? » « Basic principles » « Of what? » « Of
radicalism, what do you think? » « Remember who addressed you? »
« A spotty Lesbian on Women’s Lib... » « And who
else? Forgotten that as well? » « Yes. » Her answer only
saddened him. « Charlie, I have ceased to understand you. My confidence in
you is ebbing. » « Then let it bloody well ebb. Find someone else to
kick around. Why should I play parlour games with a bunch of Israeli thugs? Go
and car-bomb some more Arabs. Get out of my hair, I hate you, all of
you! » Saying this, Charlie had a most curious intimation. She decided
that they were only half listening to her words, and with the other half of
their attention, studying her technique. « Charlie, I do not understand
your evasion. The discussion was devoted exclusively to the lamentable
expansion of world Zionism and its links with American imperialism. The leading
performer was a gentleman purportedly representing the Palestinian Revolution,
though he declined to say which wing of that great movement he belonged to. He
also refused, in the most literal sense, to reveal himself, since his features
were hidden behind a black balaclava helmet, which gave him a becomingly
sinister air. Do you still not recall this speaker? » He left her no time
to answer. « His theme was his own heroic life, as a great warrior and
killer of Zionists. ‘The gun is my passport to homeland. We are no longer
refugees. We are a revolutionary people.’ » He paused. But still, she did
not speak. « Why don’t you tell us these things, Charlie? Why do you flop
from place to place, not knowing which lie to tell us next? Did I not assure
you that we need your past, that we like it very much? » Again, he waited
patiently for her answer, but in vain. « We know your father never went to
prison. You never had the bailiffs in. The poor gentleman suffered a small,
innocent, incompetent bankruptcy, injuring nobody except a couple of local bank
managers. He was discharged with honour, if that is the expression, long before
his death. A few friends raised a little money between them, and your mother
remained a proud and devoted wife to him. It was never your father’s fault that
you left school prematurely, it was your own. You had made yourself, let us
say, a little too available to several boys in the local town. And word of this
had duly gotten back to the school staff. You were accordingly expelled from
the school in haste as a corrupting and potentially scandalous element, and
returned to your grossly over-indulgent parents who, as usual, forgave you your
transgressions, to your great frustration, and did their best to believe
everything you told them. Over the years you’ve spun an ingenious fiction
around the incident in order to make it bearable and you’ve come to believe in
it yourself, though secretly the memory still turns you inside out and drives
you in many strange directions. We are your friends, Charlie. Do you think we
would ever blame you for such a thing? Do you think we do not understand that
your politics are the externalisation of a search for dimensions and responses
not supplied to you when you most needed them? We are your friends, Charlie. We
are not mediocre bored apathetic suburban or conformist. We want to share with
you, to make use of you. Why do you sit there deceiving us when all we wish to
hear from you, from start to end, is the unadorned, objective truth? Why do you
hinder your friends? Instead of giving us you full-hearted trust. »
Her anger
swept over her like a red hot sea. It lifted her, it cleansed her, she felt it
swell and she embraced it like her one true ally. With the calculation of her
trade, she let it take command of her entirely, while she herself, that tiny
gyroscopic creature deep inside that always managed to stay upright, tiptoed
gratefully to the wings to watch. Joseph, she thought, you, you did it. She hit
him once, hard, across the jaw and as she hit him again, with her closed fist,
less certainly, he neither moved nor protested, so she stopped. She was
screaming ‘Fascist bastard’, and she went on repeating it, feeling her strength
wasting with her breath. She wished terribly that she could go mad, so that
everyone would be sorry for her. She wished she was just a raving lunatic,
waiting to be let off, not a stupid little fool of a radical actress, who made
up feeble versions of herself as she went along and embraced a bumper-sticker
faith she hadn’t the courage to renounce. And anyway, what was there till now
to replace it? There was only one way out for her, so she took it. Hunching her
shoulders, she hid her face, dramatically, into her hands and wept.
Inconsolably.
« You
did well, Charlie. Congratulations. You took a dive, but you recovered. You
lied, you lost your way, but you hung in there, and when the line broke, you
threw a tantrum and blamed your troubles on the whole world. We were proud of
you. Next time, we’ll think you up a better story to tell. »
It was dawn
and therefore bedtime, and she was with them, where she wanted, more than
anything, to be. They had told her a little, they had brushed across the story
as a headlight brushes across a dark doorway, giving a passing glimpse of
whatever lies hidden in it. Imagine, they said. And told her of a perfect
lover, whom she had never met. She hardly cared. They wanted her. They knew her
through and through, they knew her fragility and her dragonfly loyalties, and
they still wanted her. They had stolen her, in order to rescue her. After all
her drifting, their straight line. After all her guilt and concealment, their
acceptance. « So, is it yes so far, or is it ‘take me home’,
Charlie? » « Jose? » « They say you will save lives,
Charlie. », J. replied, in a detached tone from which all hint of theatre
had been rigorously expunged. Did she hear reluctance in his voice? If so, it
only emphasised the gravity of his words. « And you, what do YOU
say? » « We shall stay as close to you as we can. » « I
said YOU, you singular, J. » « I shall be close, naturally. That
will be my job. » And only my job, he was saying. Not even Charlie could
have mistaken the message. « J. will be right with you all along the line,
Charlie », K. put in. « Joseph is a fine, fine professional. J, tell
her about the time factor, please. » « We have very little. » J.
said. « Every hour counts. » K. was smiling, seeming to wait for him
to go on, but J. had finished. She said: « Yes. » She must have done.
Or yes to the next phase, at least, because she felt a slight movement of
relief around her, and then, to her disappointment, nothing more. In her
hyperbolic state of mind, she had imagined her whole audience bursting into
applause, but it didn’t.
If she
dreamed, she had no knowledge of it when she woke. Or perhaps, like Adam, she
woke and found the dream true, because the first thing she saw was a glass of
fresh orange juice by her bed, the second, J., striding purposefully across the
room, pulling open cupboards, drawing back the curtains to let in the sunshine.
« What’s the time? » « Three o’clock ». He gave a tug of
the curtain. « In the afternoon. You’ve slept enough, we must get on our
way. » He stayed up, she thought, remembering his absorption with the
papers on his desk. He’s been finishing his homework. « I’d like you
please to put on this dress, also the new underclothes you’ll find in the box
here. I prefer you best in blue today, with your hair brushed long. These
clothes are my gift to you, and it is my pleasure to advise you what to wear
and how to look. Sit up, please. Take a thorough look round the room. »
She was naked. Clutching the sheet to her throat, she cautiously sat up. A week
ago, on the beach, he could have studied her body to his heart’s content. That
was a week ago. « Memorise everything around you. We are secret lovers,
and this room is where we spent the night. It happened as it happened. We were
reunited in Athens, we came to this house and found it empty. No Marty, no
Mike, nobody but ourselves. You want coffee? » « Coffee would be
great. » The door closed. She heard him stride away down the passage.
Feeling utterly unreal, she stepped gingerly from the bed. It’s pantomime, she
thought. Goldylocks in the bears’ house. The evidence of their imagined revelry
lay all around her. A vodka bottle, two thirds full, floating in an ice bucket,
two glasses, used. A bowl of fruit, two plates, complete with apple peel and
grape pips. The red blazer, draped over a chair. The smart black leather grip
with side pockets, part of every budding executive’s virility kit. She dressed
and was brushing out her hair when he marched back into the room, bearing a
tray with coffee. He could be heavy, and he could be so light you’d think they
had lost the sound track. He was somebody with a wide range of stealth, she
thought. « You look excellent, I would say. », he remarked, placing
the tray on the table. « Excellent? » « Beautiful, enchanting,
radiant. You’ve seen the orchids? ». She hadn’t but she saw them now and
her stomach turned over the way it had on the Acropolis. A sprig of golden
russet, with a white envelope propped against the vase. Deliberately, she
finished her hair, then picked the little envelope from its perch, took it to
the chaise longue where she sat down. Joseph remained standing. Lifting the
flap, she drew out a plain card with the words ‘I love you’ written in a
sloping, un-English hand, and a familiar signature, ‘M’. « Well, what does
it remind you of? » « You know damn well what it reminds me of »,
she snapped as, far too late, she made that connection in her memory, as well.
« So, tell me. » « Nottingham, the Barry Theatre; York, The
Phoenix. Stratford East, The Cockpit. You, crouching in the front row, making
cow eyes at me. » « The same handwriting? » « The same
hand, the same message, the same flowers. » « You know me as Michel,
M for Michel. » Opening the smart black grip, he began swiftly packing his
clothes into it. « I am all you ever desired. », he said, without
even looking at her. « To do the job, you don’t just have to remember it,
you have to believe it and feel it and dream it. We are building a new reality.
A better one. » She put aside the card, and poured herself some coffee,
playing deliberately slow against his obvious haste. « You passed your
holiday in Mykonos with Alastair, but in your secret heart you were waiting
desperately for me, Michel. » He darted into the bathroom and returned
with his holdall. « Not Joseph, Michel. As soon as the holiday was over,
you hurried to Athens. On the boat you told your friends you wanted to be alone
for a few days. A lie. You had an assignation with Michel. Not J., M. Hurry,
please. We have much driving to do, and much talking. » « What about
you? Are you in love with me too? Or is
it all a game? » « You love M., you believe M. loves you. »
« He is an Arab, isn’t he? » she said, still watching him. « He
is your archetypal Arab chauvinist. It’s his car you’ve nicked. » He was
closing the grip. Straightening, he gazed at her a second, partly in
calculation and partly, she could not help feeling, in rejection. « Oh,
he’s more than just Arab, I would say. He’s more than just chauvinist. There is
nothing ordinary about him at all, least of all in your eyes. Go over to the
bed, please. » He waited while she did so, watching her intently.
« Feel under my pillow, slowly. Take care, I sleep on the right-hand side.
So. » Cautiously, as he commanded, she slid her hand under the cold
pillow, imagining the weight of J’s sleeping head pressing down on it.
« You’ve found it. I said ‘Take care’.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Yes, Jose,
she had found it. « Lift it carefully, the safety catch is off. M. is not
in the habit of giving warnings before he shoots. The gun is a child to us. It
shares every bed we sleep in. We call it our child. Even when we are making
passionate love, we never disturb that pillow, and we never forget what is
underneath it. That is how we live. Do you see now that I am not
ordinary? » She handed it to him, and watched him slip it inside his
blazer, as easily as if he were putting away his wallet. She followed him
downstairs. The Mercedes stood waiting in the forecourt. « Do Charlie and
Joseph exist as well? », she asked him as they joined the evening traffic.
« Or is it just the other two? » A three-minute warning before he
answered. « Of course we exist. Why not ? » Then, the lovely smile,
the one she would have tied herself to the railings for. For twenty minutes by
the quartz clock on the dashboard, J. barely spoke. Yet she sensed no
relaxation in him, rather a methodical preparation before the attack.
« So, Charlie. You are ready? » Jose, I am ready.
« On the twenty-sixth of June, a Friday, you are playing Saint Joan at the Barry theatre in
Nottingham. Minutes before curtain up, a sprig of gold-brown orchids is
delivered for you at the stage door with a note addressed to Joan. « J, I
love you infinitely. » « No stage door. » « There is a back
entrance for stage deliveries. Your admirer, whoever he was, rang the bell and
put the orchids into the arms of the janitor. So then, tell me what you did
when you received the orchids. » « The signature was M. »
« M is correct. What did you do? » « Nothing. » « Nonsense. »
She was stung. « What was I supposed to do? I had about ten seconds before
I was on. » A dust-laden lorry was careering towards them on the wrong
side of the road. With majestic unconcern J. guided the Mercedes on to the soft
shoulder, and accelerated out of the slide. « Oh, so you threw thirty
pounds’ worth of orchids in your waste-paper basket, shrugged your shoulders,
and went on stage. Perfect. I congratulate you. » « I put them in
water. »
They had
stopped for traffic lights. The stillness made a new intimacy. « And the
‘I love you’? » «Yes, that’s theatre, isn’t it? Everybody loves everybody.
Some of the time. I liked the ‘infinitely’, though. That was class. » The
lights changed, and they were driving again. « Did you not consider
looking at the audience, in case you saw anyone you recognised? »
« There wasn’t time. » « And in the interval? » « In
the interval I peeked but I didn’t see anyone I knew. » « And after
the show, what did you do? » « Returned to my dressing-room, changed,
hung around a bit, thought ‘Sod it’ and went home. » « Home being the
Astral Commercial Hotel near the railway station. » She had long ago lost
her capacity to be surprised by him. « Near the railway station »,
she agreed. « And the orchids? » « Went with me to the
hotel. » « You did not however ask the caretaker for a description of
the person who had brought them? » « Next day I did. He said a
foreign gent but respectable. I asked what age. He leered and said ‘Just
right’. I tried to think of a foreign M but couldn’t. » « Not in your
whole private menagerie, one single foreign M? You disappoint me. »
« Not a one. » Briefly, they both smiled, though not at each other.
« So,
Charlie, we now have day two. A Saturday matinee followed by the evening
performance, as usual. » « And you were there, weren’t you? Bless
you, out there in the middle of the front row, in your nice red blazer,
surrounded by sticky school kids all coughing and wanting the loo. »
Irritated by her levity, he devoted his attention to the road for a while, and
when he resumed his line of questioning, it had a pointed earnestness that made
his eyebrows come together in a schoolmasterly frown. « I wish you please
to describe to me your feelings exactly, Charlie. I am in the front row, I have
a decidedly foreign look, a foreign manner somehow, foreign clothes; I am
extremely conspicuous. Do you not suspect at any point that I am the giver of
the orchids, the strange man signed M, who claims to love you
infinitely? » « Of course, I did. I knew. » « How? »
« I just knew. I saw you there, mooning at me. I thought, hullo, it’s you.
Whoever you are. Then, when the curtain went down, for the end of the
matinee, you stayed put in your seat and produced your ticket for the next
performance... » « How did you know I did that? Who told you? »
« About twenty members of the cast, that’s all. You don’t look very like a
schoolkid, you know, Jose... » She could not resist the question:
« Was it a bore? The show, actually? Twice running like that, or did you
quite enjoy it, now and then? » « Oh, it was the most monotonous day
of my life », he replied, without a second’s hesitation. Then, his rigid
face broke and reformed itself into the best ever smile, so that for a moment
he really did look as if he had slipped through the bars of whatever confined
him. « As a matter of fact, I thought you were quite excellent », he
said. This time she did not object to his choice of adjective. « Will you
crash the car, now, please, Jose? This will do me fine. I’ll die here. »
And before he could stop her, she had grabbed his hand, and kissed him hard on
the knuckle of his thumb.
The road
was straight but potholed. Hills and trees to either side were powdered with
moondust from a cement works. They were in their own capsule, where the nearness
of other moving things only made their world more private. She was coming to
him all over again, in her mind and in his story. She was a soldier’s girl,
learning to be a soldier.
« So,
tell me please. Apart from the orchids, did you receive any other gifts while
you were playing at Nottingham? » « The box », she said with a
shudder, before she had even made a show of pondering. « What box,
please? » « Some creep sent me a box to the theatre. Registered,
special delivery. » « And what was in the box? » « Nothing.
It was an empty jeweller’s box. Registered and empty. « Now we make the
fiction », J. announced quietly. « On the old reality we impose the
new fiction. » Too close to him to trust herself, she did not answer. He
withdrew a small package from the door pocket, and tossed it on her lap. She
looked down at the package, glanced at him again. Small white envelope
unsealed, plain white card within. ‘To Joan, spirit of my freedom.’, she read.
‘You are fantastic. I love you.’ The signature, Michel. It was a thick, gold
bracelet, mounted with blue stones. ‘Jesus!’, she said softly. « What do I
have to do to earn that?’ ‘Very well, that is your first reaction. Exactly
that. That was your response. You blasphemed. From now on, always, you remember
how you blasphemed. » « OK », she said, and puffed out about a
gallon of air. « What are your feelings? About the bracelet? About its
giver? » « Well, I can’t accept it. I mean... it’s money, it’s
valuable. » « But you have accepted it. » « Well, I’ll give
it back, won’t I? » Relaxing a little, he too gave a sigh of relief, as if
she had at long last proved his thesis. « So, Charlie. After the show, you
find Michel still sitting in the stalls. You enter the empty auditorium, you
walk slowly down the aisle. » « And there he is », she said
softly. « Jesus, that’s corny. » « But it plays. »
« Oh, it plays. » « Because there he is, still in his same seat,
in the middle of the front row, waiting for his Joan, the spirit of his freedom,
whom he loves. » « I mean, this is awful. »,Charlie murmured.
But he ignored her. « He stares at you with his deep and passionate eyes,
challenging you to speak. He has come to claim you. » The road was leading
them up a winding hill. His commanding voice, coupled to the mesmeric rhythm of
successive bends, forced her mind further and further into the labyrinth of his
story. « You say something. What do you say? » Obtaining no answer
from her, he supplied his own. « ’I do not know you. Thank you, Michel, I
am flattered. But I do not know you and I cannot accept this gift.’ Would you
say that? Yes, you would. But better, perhaps. » She barely heard him. She
was standing before him in the auditorium, holding the box to him, gazing into
his dark eyes. Joseph was continuing his fairy tale. « Still I speak not
one word. You will know from your theatrical experience that there is nothing
like silence to establish communication. If the wretched fellow won’t speak,
what can you do? You are obliged to speak again yourself. Tell me what you say
to him this time. » An unwonted shyness struggled with her burgeoning
imagination. « I ask him who he is. » « My name is
Michel. » « I know that part. Michel who? » « No
answer. » « I ask you what you are doing in Nottingham. »
« Falling in love with you. Go on. » « Christ, Jose! »
« Go on! » « He can’t say that to me. » « Then tell
him! » « I reason with him. Appeal to him. » « Then let’s
hear you do it- he’s waiting for you, Charlie! Speak to him. » « I’d
say... » « Yes? » « Look, Michel. It’s really nice of you.
I’m very flattered, but sorry, it’s too much. » He was disappointed.
« Charlie, you must do better than that. He’s an Arab. Even if you do not
know that yet, you may suspect it. You are refusing his gift. You must try
harder. »
« It’s
not fair to you, Michel. People often get fixations about actresses. And
actors. Happens every day. There is no reason to go ruining yourself just for
a... kind of... illusion. » « Good. Go on. » It was coming more
easily to her. She hated his browbeating of her, she hated any producer’s, but
she could not deny its effect. « That’s what acting’s all about, M.
Illusion. The audience sits down here, hoping to be enchanted, we stand up
there, trying to enchant. We fooled you, that’s all that’s happened. Theatre is
a con trick, M. Do you know what that means, con trick? You’ve been
deceived. » « I still don’t speak. » « Well, make
him! » « Why? Are you running out of conviction already? Don’t you
feel responsible for me? A young boy like me, so handsome, throwing away my
money on orchids and expensive jewels? Come. » « ’Course I do! I’ve
told you. » « Then protect me. Save me from my infatuation. »
« I’m trying. » In her imagination’s eye, Charlie had sat herself
beside M. on the next seat. Her hands clasped on her lap, she was leaning
forward earnestly, to reason with him. She was a nurse to him, a mother, a
friend. She took a deep breath and plunged. « Listen, M. I’m just an
ordinary girl. I’ve got torn tights, an overdraft, and I’m certainly no Joan of
Arc, believe me. I’m no virgin, and no soldier, and God and I haven’t exchanged
a word since I was chucked out of school for... (I’m not gonna say that bit).
I’m Charlie, a feckless Western slut. » « Excellent. Go on. »
« So, here, take this back. Keep your money. And your illusions. And
thanks. Really thanks. Over and out. » « But you don’t want him to
keep his illusions. », J. objected. « You have a warm heart, Charlie.
Others might think of M. at this moment as some kind of refined seducer. Not
you. You believe in people, and that is how you are tonight with M. Without
thought for yourself, you are sincerely affected by him. In a soft and
appealing foreign accent he addresses you without shyness or inhibition. He is
not interested in arguments, he says. You are everything he has ever dreamed
of, he wishes to become your lover, preferably tonight, and he calls you Joan
although you are really Charlie. If you go out with him to dinner, and after
dinner you do not want him any more, he’ll consider taking back the bracelet.
No, you say. He must take it back now. And besides, don’t be ridiculous, where
is dinner in Nottingham at half past ten on a pouring wet Saturday night? You would say this? ‘tis true? »
« Oh, it’s a dump », she admitted, refusing to look at him. « M.
brushes your hesitations aside. He knows a place, he has made arrangements. So.
We can eat. Why not? »
Swinging
off the road, he had brought the car to a halt in the gravel lay-by in front of
the taverna. Dazed by his wilful leap from past fiction to present time, she was
perversely elated by his harassment of her and
relieved that, after all, M. had not let her go. « By the
way... » She waited. « On the drive to the restaurant, you ask him
where he comes from. He replies ‘Palestine, presently under illegal occupation.’
Much as
Charlie might have supposed the contrary, she was not the only centre of
Kurtz’s universe that night, nor of Joseph’s, and certainly not of Michel’s.
Well before Charlie and her putative lover had said a last goodbye to the
Athens villa, K. was seated on a Lufthansa plane bound for Munich. On landing,
K. repaired immediately to the Olympic village, where the so-called Argentinean
photographers eagerly awaited him.
The
interrogation of Yanuka was entering its fourth day when K. arrived to take up
the reins, and had proceeded till then with unnerving smoothness. It was a job
after K’s heart. If he could have been in three places at once rather than
merely two, he would have kept it to himself, but he couldn’t, so he chose as
his proxies two heavy-bodied specialists in the soft approach, famous for their
muted histrionic talents and a joint air of lugubrious good nature.
Yanuka had
been brought to Munich by way of Cyprus. No flashing cameras celebrated his
arrival, for he was got up as a stretcher case attended by an orderly and a
private doctor. At the Olympic Village, the two Argentine photographers and
their friends were seen to manhandle a wicker laundry basket marked ‘Glass
delicate’ from their battered minibus to the service lift. Minutes later, they
had laid him carefully on the floor of the padded priesthole where he could be
expected to come round in about half an hour. Sure enough, in less than forty
minutes they saw Yanuka pull against his chains. After which, with no further
warning, all hell broke loose as Y. gave vent to one anguished, sobbing roar
after another, writhed, bucked, and generally threw himself about with a vigour
that made them doubly grateful for his chains. At last, Y. seemed to drop off
to sleep again and the interrogators decided it was time to make a start. So
they played sounds of morning traffic, switched on a lot of white light, and
together brought him breakfast - though it was not yet midnight -, loudly
ordering the guards to unbind him and let him eat like a human being, not a
dog. Then they themselves solicitously untied his hood, for they wanted his
first knowledge of them to be their kind, un-Jewish faces gazing at him with
fatherly concern.
They were
Red Cross observers, they said in English. They were Swiss subjects, but
resident here in the prison. What prison, where, they were not at liberty to
reveal, though they gave clear hints it might be Israel. They produced a big
printed form and helped Y. to complete it in his own hand : name here, old
fellow, address, date of birth, next of kin, that’s the way. Y. complied,
accurately enough, despite an initial reluctance, and this first sign of
collaboration was noted by the rest of the team downstairs with quiet
satisfaction, even if his handwriting was puerile on account of the drugs.
For the
next hours, from the adjoining room, they watched him by infra-red light, as he
lay in the pitch dark, weeping and tossing his head. Then they raised the
lighting and barged in cheerfully, calling out ‘Look what we’ve got for you;
come on, wake up, Salim, it’s morning.’ It was a letter, postmark Beirut, sent
care of the Red Cross, and stamped ‘Prison Censor Approved’, from his beloved
sister Fatmeh, which they had lovingly forged. Their models were the letters Y.
had received from her while he was under surveillance. Scene by scene this
charade continued over several more hours, while Y. in his weakened state
struggled vainly to reject the offered hand of friendship. His written reply to
Fatmeh was classic: « My darling sister, now I face the fateful testing of
my life, at which your great spirit will accompany me. », he wrote. That
news was the subject of a special bulletin to K. ‘Start at the end’, K. had
told them. The end in this case was miles of seemingly irrelevant small talk.
For hour upon hour the two interrogators chatted to Y. with unflagging
geniality. They asked him about his childhood, his parents, his home in
Palestine. And it was observed with silent satisfaction that he never once
mentioned his elder brother; that even now, big brother was written out of Y.’s
life entirely. With so much going for them, they noted, Y. could still talk
only of matters he considered harmless to his cause.
To discuss
the diary, they had a different bluff, and a far more hazardous one. They put
it off until the third real day, by which time they had picked him as clean as
they knew how by the simple conversational methods. The watchers had found it
on the day after Y.’s kidnapping. They had marched into his flat, three of
them, wearing canary overalls with badges describing them as members of a
commercial cleaning firm. How to interpret the crucial entries in the diary?
How to decipher them, without Y.’s help? How, therefore, to obtain Y.’s help?
First, they brought him an urgent letter from Fatmeh, one of their briefest and
best forgeries. ‘I have heard that the hour is very near. I beg you, I pray
you, to have courage.’ They switched on the lights long enough for him to read
it, switched them off again and stayed away longer than was customary. In the
pitch darkness they played muffled screams to him, the clanging of distant cell
doors, and the sounds of a slumped body being dragged in chains along a stone
corridor. Then they played the funeral bagpipes of a Palestinian military band
and perhaps he thought he was dead. Certainly he lay still enough. They played
more screams to him, then made an absolute silence. They fired one pistol shot
in the darkness. It was so sudden and clear that he bucked at the sound of it.
Then he began howling, but quietly, as if he couldn’t get the volume to rise.
And that
was when they decided to move. First the guards walked into his cell,
purposefully, and lifted him to his feet, one arm each. By the time they had
dragged his shaking body as far as the cell door, Y.’s two Swiss saviours
appeared, and blocked their way. Then a long-delayed, passionate argument broke
out between the guards and the Swiss. It was waged in Hebrew and therefore only
partly comprehensible to Y., but it had the unmistakable ring of a last appeal.
It was agreed that they would all four go to the governor now for an immediate
ruling. So they stormed off together, leaving Y. in the dark yet again, and
quite soon he was seen to hunch up to the wall and pray, though he could have
no earthly idea, by then, where the East was.
Next time,
the two Swiss returned without the guards but looking very grave indeed, and
bringing with them Y.’s diary, as if, small though it might be, it somehow
changed things completely. And then they explained that they had seen the
governor, and persuaded him to let the Red Cross place the documents before Y.,
and invite him, rather than force him, to prepare a statement of his
whereabouts during the last six months with dates, places, whom he had met,
where he had stayed, and on what papers he had travelled. Here they ventured to
offer him some private advice of their own, ‘Above all, be accurate.’ they
implored him. ‘Remember that we have our reputation to maintain. Think of those
like yourself who may come after you. For their sakes, if not for ours, do your
best.’ The way they said this suggested somehow that Y. was already halfway to
martyrdom. Quite why seemed not to matter; the only truth he knew by then was
the terror in his own soul.
It was on
the day following these little dramas - around lunch time in the normal scheme
of things - that K. arrived directly from Athens, looking none the worse for
his night interrogation of Charlie or a morning’s travel. He examined their
exhibits, listened appreciatively to tape recordings of crucial moments, and
watched with admiration as the desk computer printed out one day after another
of Y.’s recent life in green type on its television screen : dates, flight
numbers, arrival times, hotels. Then he watched again, while the screen cleared
and they superimposed fiction : ‘Writes Charlie from City Hotel, Zürich, letter
posted on arrival De Gaulle airport, eighteen-twenty hours, meets Charlie
Excelsior Hotel, Heathrow, phones Charlie from Munich railway station...’.
K., playing the role of governor, began by asking Y. a few simple questions.
Dull questions, tiny things. Where a certain fuse came from, or explosive, or a
car. Or the exact spot, say, where Y. and the girl had met up before she
planted the Godesberg bomb. K.’s detailed knowledge, so casually displayed, was
terrifying to Yanuka, whose reaction was to shout at him and order him to keep
quiet for reasons of security. K. was puzzled by this. « But why should I
keep quiet? If your great brother won’t keep quiet, what secrets are there left
for me to preserve? » He asked this question, not as a revelation at all,
but as the logical outcome to a piece of common knowledge. « Where is
he? », Y. began screaming. « What have you done with him? My brother
does not talk! He would never talk! How did you capture him? »
The deal
was done in moments. « Your brother is in a hospital cell downstairs, he
is a little tired. Naturally one hopes he will live but it will be some months
before he can walk. When you’ve answered the following questions, I shall sign
an order permitting you to share his accommodation and nurse him to
recovery. ». By the time K. returned downstairs, therefore, the team had
really obtained pretty well everything from Y. that was obtainable - which
amounted to nothing at all, as K. was quick to point out, when it came to
establishing his big brother’s whereabouts.
The taverna
was rougher than those on Mykonos, with a black-and-white television set
fluttering like a flag nobody saluted, and old hillsmen too proud to take an
interest in tourists, even pretty red-headed English girls in blue kaftans, and
gold bracelets. But in the story J. Now related, it was Charlie and Michel, who
were dining alone in the grillroom of a roadhouse outside Nottingham. « So
now you must tell me, please, what Palestine, spoken in this way by this eager
boy, means to you in a roadhouse in N. on a rainy night. Let us say he asks you
this himself. » She took a deep breath. Not for nothing after all my week-end
sessions at the forum. « All right. Here it is. The Palestinians, you, are
gentle, decent farming people, of great tradition, unfairly driven from your
land, from 1948 onwards, in order to appease Zionism and create a Western
foothold in Arabia. » « Your words do not displease me. Kindly
continue. » It was wonderful to discover how much came back to her under
his perverse prompting. Snatches of forgotten pamphlets, lovers’ lectures, the
harangues of freedom fighters, bits of half-read books, all rallied to her like
faithful allies in her need. « You’re the invention of a European guilt
complex about the Jews... You’ve been forced to pay the penalty for a holocaust
you had no part in... You’re the victims of a racist, imperialist policy of
dispossession and banishment... » « And murder » « And
murder. » « Michel is a prophet to you tonight, Charlie. Nobody has
ever before concentrated the full force of his fanaticism on you alone. His
conviction, his commitment, his devotion, they all shine out of him as he
speaks. In theory of course he is already preaching to the converted but in
reality he is planting the human heart into the ragbag of your vague leftwing
principles. » A candle burned between them. It was jammed in a greasy
black bottle and under constant attack by an old drunk moth that Charlie
occasionally pushed away with the back of her hand, making the bracelet
sparkle.
By its
glow, as J. spun his story around her, she watched his strong, disciplined face
alternate with Michel’s like two images overlaid upon a single photographic
plate. « Listen. Are you listening? » Jose, I am listening. Michel, I
am listening. « I was born of a patriarchal family in a village not far
from the town of El Khalil, which the Jews call Hebron. » He paused, his
dark eyes vigorously upon her. « Khalil. », he repeated.
« Remember the name. It is of great importance to me for many reasons. You
remember. Khalil » « Yes, Michel. I remember Khalil. »
« Say it. » She said it. Khalil. « Khalil is a great centre for
the pure faith of Islam. In Arabic the word means a friend of God. The people
of Khalil - or Hebron - are the élite of Palestine. I was the youngest of four
brothers and two sisters. In the war of ‘67, as the tanks approached our
village, we fled across the Jordan. With tears in his eyes, my father called us
together, and told us to assemble our possessions. ‘What the Westerners did to
the Jews, so the Zionists now do to us.’, he said. Make a toast to me, Charlie,
come. Lift your glass. History belongs to the winners. Have you forgotten that
simple fact? Drink with me. » Doubtfully she raised her own glass to him.
« To tiny gallant Israel. », he said. « To her amazing survival,
thanks to an American subsidy of seven million dollars a day, and the entire
might of the Pentagon dancing to her tune. » Without drinking, he put his
glass down again. She did the same. With the gesture, to her relief, the
melodrama seemed temporarily over. « And you, Charlie, you listen.
Overawed. Amazed. By his romanticism, his beauty, his fanaticism. He has no
reticence. No Western inhibitions. Does it play? Or does the tissue of
your imagination reject the disturbing transplant? » Taking his hand, she
began exploring the palm with the tip of her finger. « What’s Charlie doing
all this time? » « According to the script, your performance is
practically irrelevant. Michel is half hypnotising you across the candle. That
is how you describe it to him later in one of your letters. » She gave him
back his hand. « What letters? Where are we getting letters from all the
time? » « For the moment, let us agree only that you will later write
to him. Let me ask you again. Does it play? Or shall we shoot the writer
and go home? » She took a drink of wine. Then another. « It plays. So
far it plays. » « He is everything a bored Western girl ever dreamed
of, I would say. » « Jose, for Christ’s sake », she muttered, not
even able to look at him. « So then », he said briskly, signalling
for the bill, « congratulations, you’ve met your soulmate at last ».
A
mysterious brutality had entered his manner. She watched him pay the bill, she
saw him pocket the receipt. She stepped after him into the night air. I’m the
twice-promised girl, she thought. If you love J., take M. He’s pimped me for
his phantom in the theatre of the real.
« In
bed, he tells you that his real name is Salim. But that is a great
secret. », said J. casually, as they got into the car. « He prefers
M., partly for security, partly because he is already slightly in love with
European decadence. » « I like S. better. » « But you use
M. » Just whatever you all say, she thought. But her passivity was a
deception, even to herself. She could feel her anger on the move, far down, but
rising. « Jose », she whispered hopelessly, taking his hand once
more, « who the hell are you? What do you feel inside all those
barbed-wire entanglements? » But she received no answer.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
For his
reunion in Frankfurt with the good Doctor Alexis that same night Kurtz had
donned an attitude of natural affinity between professionals, coloured by
ancient friendship. Kurtz gave Alexis the facts he had discovered about the
planting of the Bad Godesberg bomb. What he did not mention was that Yanuka was
the source of his information. “Cologne will be very grateful to you, you may
be sure “ Alexis said sourly. “My excellent successor - you remember him,
Marty? - he will score an immense
personal triumph. With the assistance of the media, he will become the most
brilliant and popular policeman in West Germany. Quite rightly, yes, and all
thanks to you.” “Well now, Jerusalem gave quite a lot of thought to this
question, Paul, and we’re not quite as sure as you seem to be that your
successor is the type of gentleman whose progress in life we are
overenthusiastic to advance” Kurtz affected to ponder. “Maybe, we said to
ourselves, there are ways in which the good Doctor Alexis could pass our
information to Cologne on our behalf, privately, unofficially yet officially,
if you take my meaning.” Alexis affected not to understand. He’d gone rather
red, and there was a slightly hysterical note to his denials. “But Marty,
listen to me, I have no sources, I am not operational, I’m a bureaucrat, you
know...” “Nobody is looking for arrests, Paul, not yet, not on our side of the
house. Nobody is looking for anything overt at all, least of all in Jerusalem.”
“Then what are you looking for?” Alexis demanded, with sudden snappishness. “An
ally, Paul. You. A German to redress the balance, a man of history and
conscience.” Alexis made a pious
expression which could not conceal his excitement. “Well, this is hard to find”
he said. “Suppose I were to report an accident to you, Paul, one that was going
to happen, say, in around four days’ time, and suppose by this foreknowledge,
Paul, you were to earn the amazed admiration of your superiors...”
Alexis had
bitten, Kurtz told Litvak back in Munich, but he’s gonna need one hell of a lot
of shepherding. “Why can’t Gadi hurry that girl up?” he muttered, staring
moodily at his watch.
Early on
the Monday morning, he resumed, Michel returned to London, but Charlie, who had
no rehearsal till afternoon, remained behind, heart-broken, in the motel. He
briskly described her grief: “The day is dark as a funeral, the rain is still
falling. Remember the weather. At first you are crying so much you cannot even
stand, you lie in the bed that is still warm from his body, weeping your heart
out. He has told you he will try to come to York next week, but you are
convinced you will never see him again in your life. So what do you do?” He
gave her no chance to answer. “You sit yourself at the cramped dressing-table
in front of the mirror, you stare at the marks of his hands on your body, at
your own tears as they continue falling. You open a drawer, take out the motel
folder, and from the folder, motel stationary and a courtesy ballpoint pen. And
you write to him, as you sit there, describing yourself, your inmost thoughts,
five pages, the first of many, many letters which you send to him. You would do
this, in your despair? You are an impulsive letter writer, after all.” “If I
had his address, I would.” “He has given you an address in Paris.” He gave it
to her himself now, care of a tobacconist’s in Montparnasse. To Michel, please
forward, no surname needed or supplied.
“At
rehearsals, in the intervals, at all odd times henceforth, you write to him
passionately, unthinkingly, with total frankness.” He glanced at her. “You
would do that?” he insisted again. “You really would write such letters?” “How
much reassurance does a man need?” she wondered. But he was already away again.
For, joy of joys, despite her pessimistic forecasts, Michel came not only to
York, he came to Bristol and, better still, to London, where he spent a whole
miraculous night in Charlie’s flat in Camden, frenzy all the way. “And it was
there”, said Joseph, as gratefully as if rounding off a complicated
mathematical premise, “in your own bed, in your own flat, between protestation
of eternal love, that we planned this very Greek holiday which we are here and
now enjoying.”
A long
silence while she drove and thought. We’re here at last, from Nottingham to
Greece in one hour’s driving. They passed a wayside chapel. “Slow down”, he
ordered, and again studied the map. Slow down, park here, march.
Their path
led to a cluster of derelict sheds and past it to a disused quarry hacked like
a volcanic crater into the summit of the hill. Removing the red blazer, Joseph
folded it and laid it carefully on the ground. The gun was at his waist,
dropped into a leather loop fastened to his belt, the butt tipped slightly
forward on a line below his right armpit. Grasping her wrist, he drew her to
the ground to squat, Arab style, beside him. “So then, Nottingham is in the
past, so is York, so is Bristol, so is London. Today is today, the third of our
great Greek honeymoon. We are where we are, we made love all night in our motel
in Delphi, rose early. And now I’ve brought you here, to this hilltop, you do
not know why. My mood, as you have noticed, is withdrawn. I’m brooding, perhaps
wrestling with a great decision. I sit you here, beside me, so, and I draw the
gun.” She watched in fascination how he slipped it nimbly from its holster and
made it the natural extension of his hand. “As a great and unique privilege,
I’m going to initiate you, Charlie, into the history of this gun.” And for the
first time his voice slowed down to make the emphasis. “I am going to mention
to you my great brother Khalil, whose very existence is a military secret which
only the most loyal few may share. How often, in your many letters, in our
love-making, have you begged for a chance to prove your loyalty in action?
Today we are taking the first step along that path.” Once again she was aware
of his seemingly effortless ability to put on Arab clothes, as last night in
the taverna, when at times she barely knew which of his conflicting spirits was
speaking out of him. So now she listened in trance to his adoption of the
ornate Arab style of narrative. “All through my nomadic life, as a victim of
the Zionist usurpers, my great elder brother shone before me like a star. I see
him seldom, and only in great secrecy, now in Damascus, now in Amman. A
summons, come, then for a night I’m at his side, drinking in his words, his
nobility of heart, his clear commander’s mind, his courage. One night, he
orders me to Beirut. He has just returned from a mission of great daring, of
which I may know nothing except that it was a total victory over the fascists.
I am to go with him to hear a great political speaker, a Libyan, a man of
wonderful rhetoric and persuasiveness, the most beautiful speech I ever heard
in my life. To this day I can quote it to you. The oppressed people of the
entire earth should have heard this great Libyan.” The gun lay flat in his
palm, he was holding it out for her, willing her to covet it. “With our hearts
beating with excitement, we depart from the secret lecture place and walk back
through the Beirut dawn, arm in arm, after the Arab fashion. There were tears
in my eyes. On an impulse, my brother Khalil stops and embraces me as we stand
there on the pavement. I can feel now his wise face pressed against my own. He
takes this gun from his pocket and forces it into my hands, so.” Grasping
Charlie’s hand, he transferred the gun to it, but kept his own hand over hers
while he pointed the barrel towards the quarry wall. “’A gift’, he says, ‘to
avenge, to set our people free. A gift from one fighter to another. With this
gun I declared my oath upon the gave of our father.’ I am speechless.”
They set
off down the hillside, Joseph driving. She no longer knew herself, if she ever
had. Joseph’s preoccupation was as great as her own, but his aim lay once more
ahead of them, and while he drove he pressed forward ceaselessly with his
narrative, heaping detail upon detail. She tried to keep herself awake for him,
but eventually the effort was too much. She put her head on his shoulder and
for a while escaped the mounting crisis.
The hotel
in Thessalonika was an antique Edwardian pile with floodlit domes and an air of
circumstance. Their suite was on the top floor. “So, Charlie.” “So, Charlie.
“she echoed quietly, waiting for the explanation that was owed to her. “You’ve
pledged yourself to Michel’s battle, my battle. But how is it fought? Where? I
have talked of the cause, I have talked of action, we believe therefore we do.
I have told you that terror is theatre and that sometimes the world has to be
lifted up by its ears before it will listen to justice.” She shifted
restlessly. “So how, in practical terms, do you become my little soldier? That
is what we are discussing tonight, on the last night of our Greek honeymoon,
maybe our last night ever for you can never be sure that you will see me
again.” He turned to face her, nothing rushed.
“I am ordering you, asking you, to drive that Mercedes car across the
Yugoslav border, northward and into Austria, where it will be collected from
you. Alone.” It’s now, she thought. Charlie, you’re on. A driving job. Away you
go. She was staring straight at him, hard-jawed, the way she stared at people
when she lied. “Well, how do you
respond to him?” he enquired, jollying her slightly. “Alone,” he reminded her,
“all that way. What do you say?” “What’s in it?” He chose to misunderstand her.
“Money. Your débuts in the theatre of the real, everything Marty promised you.”
His mind seemed as close to her as it was perhaps to himself. His tone was
clipped and deprecating. “I meant what’s in the car?” The three-minute warning
before his voice became hectoring. “What does it matter what’s in the car? A
military message perhaps, papers, do you think you can know every secret of our
great movement on your first day? This is your Rubicon. You know what that is,
the Rubicon? Cut off now, go home, you can take some money, forget the
revolution, Palestine, Michel, me, everything. Or drive the car, your first
blow for the cause. Alone. Seven hundred miles. Which is it to be?” “Where will
you be?” His calm was once more unassailable, and once more he took refuge in
Michel. “In spirit, close to you. But I cannot help you, nobody can help you.
You will be on your own, performing a criminal act in the interest of what the
world will call ‘a gang of terrorists’.” He started again, this time he was
Joseph. “Some of the kids will make an escort for you, but there is nothing
they can do if things go wrong except report the facts to Marty and myself.
Yugoslavia is no great friend of Israel.” Charlie hung on, all her instincts of
survival told her to. “We haven’t finished the scene” she said. “I’m asking
you, both of you, what’s in the car? You want me to drive the car, whoever
does, however many of you there are in there. I need to know what’s in it,
now.” “Explosives” he retorted, in his most detached voice. “two hundred pounds
of Russian plastic explosive divided into half-pound sticks, good new stuff,
well cared for, capable of standing extremes of heat and cold, and reasonably
plastic at all temperatures.” “Oh, well, I’m glad it’s well cared for” Charlie
said, fighting off the tidal wave. “Where is it hidden?” “In the valance, cross
members, roof lining and seats. As an older make of car it has the advantage of
box sections in girders.” “What’s it gonna be used for?” “Our struggle.” “And
what form exactly, in this case, does our struggle take, would you say?”
Charlie enquired in the same over-relaxed voice. Again, he did not hesitate.
“Killing the Jews in their exile. As they have dispersed the people of
Palestine, so we punish them in their diaspora and declare our agony to the
ears and eyes of the world.” She shivered violently. “Keep convincing me, do
your job.” “I shall be waiting for you in Austria. That is Michel’s promise to
you also.” “If you’re Michel talking to me, it’s easy” she continued,
reasonably, fastening the bracelet on her other wrist. “You’ve bowled me off my
feet, I’ve kissed the gun, and I can’t wait to get to the barricades. If we
don’t believe that, your best endeavours over the last few days have failed,
which they haven’t. That’s how you cast me, and that’s how you’ve got me. End
of argument. I’ll go.” She saw his head nod slightly in agreement. “And if
you’re Joseph talking, what’s the difference? If I said no, I’d never see you
again. It would be back to Nowheresville with my golden handshake.” She noticed
to her surprise that he had lost interest in her. His shoulders lifted, he let
out a long breath. His head remained turned to the window, his gaze fixed on
the horizon. “Michel would be pleased with this town, I think. Until the
Germans began their occupation here, sixty thousand Jews lived fairly happily
on that hillside, post workers, merchants, bankers, Sephardim. They came here
from Spain through the Balkans. By the time the Germans left there were none.
Those who were not exterminated found their way to Israel.” She realized that
he was explaining why, so far as he was concerned, there had never been any
real choice for either of them.
The old
monastery lay two kilometres from the border, in a hollow of boulders and
yellow sedge. The red Mercedes stood like a warhorse being tended for the
battle. Beside it, the champion who would ride it, with Joseph the
administrator supervising at her elbow. “This is where Michel brought you to
change the number plates and see you off, Charlie. This is where he handed you
the false papers and the keys.” From the side pocket of his jacket he had drawn
a small diary wrapped in protective cellophane. It was cloth-bound, with a
little pencil in the spine. “Since you do not keep a diary, we decided to keep
one for you.” Gingerly, she accepted it. The pencil was lightly dented with
teeth marks, which was what she still did with pencils. She dropped the diary
into the handbag and closed the catch with a snap. It was too much, she felt
dirty and invaded. With his gloved hand Joseph was holding open the car door
for her. She got in quickly. “Look at the papers once more”, he ordered. “I
don’t need to”, she replied, looking straight ahead of her. “Number of the
car?” She gave it. “Date of registration?” She gave it all, story within the
story within the story. “Don’t be
over-confident”, he advised her with no more feeling than if he were examining
her for the driver’s licence. “Not every frontier guard is a fool or a sex
maniac.” She had promised herself no farewells, and perhaps Joseph had done the
same. She drove for ever. She drove with her arms aching from grasping the
wheel too tight and her neck aching from keeping her legs too rigid. She drove
with her belly feeling sick from too much slackness, then sick again from too
much fear. She drove with her mind whited out and her thoughts deliberately
foreshortened. Once she saw a boy hitchhiker and had an overwhelming urge to
ignore Joseph’s orders and give him a lift. Her loneliness was suddenly so
awful that she would have done anything to keep him with her, married him in
one of the little chapels scattered on the treeless hilltops, raped him in the
yellow grass beside the road. But she never once admitted to herself, in all
the years and miles of driving, that she was ferrying two hundred pounds of
prime-quality Russian plastic explosives.
By
mid-afternoon the next day, she had hit the queue for the Austrian border. Most
cars were being waved straight through, but she wasn’t counting on that. The
rest were showing papers and a few were being fished out for a thorough search.
She wondered whether it was random, or whether they had advance warning, or
whether they went by certain illegible indications. Two men in uniform were
coming slowly down the line, pausing at each window. One man asked her
something in German and she said ‘Sorry?’ in English. She was holding up her
British passport to him, profession actress. He took it, compared it with her
photograph, handed it to his colleague. Their four eyes stayed on her while
they asked her their questions, your turn, my turn. ‘No’, she said, ‘well, just
a hundred Greek cigarettes and a bottle of ouzo.’ ‘No’, she said, ‘no gifts.
Honest. ’She looked away from them, resisting the temptation to flirt. They
opened her door and asked her to show them the bottle of ouzo, but she had a
shrewd suspicion that, having had a good look down the front of her blouse,
they were keen to see her legs and match everything up. She lifted the bottle
to show it to them and in the same moment felt something damp and cold strike
her bare flesh. Jesus, they’ve stabbed me! She let out an exclamation, clapped
her hand over the spot, and was astonished to see, printed on her thigh, an
inky blue entry stamp recording her arrival in the Republic of Austria. She was
so angry she nearly flew at them, she was so grateful she nearly burst into
uncontrollable laughter.
The long
watch of Shimon Litvak began in early morning, eight hours before Charlie had
been reported safely across the border. From his commanding position at the
window of the bridal suite of an old hotel, Litvak looked down upon a pretty
south-Austrian market square. At four o’clock Charlie pottered into the square
with the Mercedes. A space became vacant, she took it, got out, stretched, rubbed
her backside, fished her shoulder bag and guitar from the boot. ‘She’s good,’
thought Litvak., watching her through his glasses, ‘a natural. Now lock the
car.’ She did, leaving the boot till last. ‘Now slip the key into the exhaust
pipe.’ She did that too, a really deft movement as she stooped to her luggage,
then set course wearily for the railway station; looking neither left nor
right. Litvak settled down to wait again. At eight a powerful motorbike made
one swift pass before anyone could get the number and roared out again. Pillion
passenger, long hair, could be female, looked like two kids on a spree. By ten
o’clock the restaurants were beginning to empty; a deep country quiet was
descending over the town. The motorbike returned. It had been in the station
square for five and a half eternal minutes, by Shimon Litvak’s luminous
wristwatch, bearing one leather-clad helmeted driver, gender still to be
determined, and one male broad-shouldered pillion passenger, with a hank of
brown locks bound at the nape, instantaneous alias Longhair. He was wearing
jeans and sneakers, and a heroic neckscarf. The bike had parked close to the
Mercedes, but not so close as to suggest they had designs on it. ‘Party
collected’ Litvak said softly over the headset, and received four
acknowledgements immediately. Longhair languidly dismounted from his pillion,
then ambled past the Mercedes, his head innocently tilted while he presumably
marked down the fishtail of the ignition key protruding from the exhaust. But
he didn’t make a lunge for it, which Litvak, as a fellow performer,
appreciated. He strolled past the car and headed for the station concourse, and
then the public lavatory, from which he emerged again immediately, hoping to
wrong-foot anybody unwise enough to be following him in. Nobody was. Longhair
passed the car a second time, and Litvak besought him very hard to stoop and
help himself to the key because he wanted a conclusive gesture. But Longhair
declined to oblige. He returned instead to the motorbike and his companion, who
had stayed in the saddle, doubtless in order to be able to make a smooth
getaway if one were needed. Longhair said something to his companion, then
pulled off his helmet, and with a flick of the head turned his face carelessly
into the light. ‘Luigi’ said Litvak into his headset, giving the agreed cover
name. As he did so, he experienced the rare and timeless blessing of pure
satisfaction. It’s you, he thought calmly, Rossino, the apostle of the peaceful
solution. Litvak knew him really well, he knew Jerusalem’s long-nurtured
suspicions about him, and the whole history of their repeated fruitless efforts
to obtain the proof. He knew the smell of him, and his shoe size. He was
beginning to guess the part he had played in Bad Godesberg and in several other
places, and he had very clear ideas, as they all had, about what could best be
done with him. But not yet, not for a long time, not till the whole tortuous
journey was behind them could that score be settled.
‘She’s paid
her way’, he thought joyously. ‘With this one identification she has paid her
whole long trip till here.’ She was a
righteous gentile, and at Litvak’s estimation, one of a rare breed. Now at last
the driver himself was dismounting. The driver was a slim blond girl, and
Litvak at this critical stage refused point blank to bother himself about
whether she made a practice of delivering suitcases of gramophone records to
Swedish girlfriends. It was now the girl’s turn to visit the lavatory, fishing
a small bag from the luggage grid and handing Rossino her helmet to look after.
She walked bareheaded across the square and straight into the concourse where,
unlike her companion, she remained. Once more Litvak waited for her to make a
dive for the ignition key but she didn’t. Her walk, like Rossino’s, was lithe
and effortless, and it didn’t falter. She was undeniably a most attractive
girl, no wonder that wretched Labour Attaché had fallen for her. He returned
his gaze to Rossino. Rising slightly in the front saddle, Rossino had cocked
his head as if listening for something. ‘Of course’, thought Litvak, as he
strained his own ears to catch the same faint rumble, ‘the 10.24 from
Klagenfurt, due any minute.’ With a long slow shudder the train pulled up at
the platform. The first bleary-eyed arrivals emerged in the concourse. A couple
of taxis shuffled forward and stopped again. A couple of private cars drove
away. A tired excursion group appeared, a carriage-load of them, everyone with
the same luggage labels. ‘Do it now’, Litvak pleaded, ‘grab the car and get out
with the traffic. Make sense of what you are here for.’ He was still not
prepared for what they actually did. An elderly couple was standing at the cab
rank, behind them a demure young girl like a nanny or companion. She wore a
brown, double-breasted suit and a strict little brown hat with the brim down.
Litvak noticed her as he noticed a lot of other people in the concourse, with a
trained clear eye made clearer by the tension. A pretty girl, carrying a small
travel bag. The elderly couple hailed a taxi, both together, and the girl
stayed close behind them, watching it arrive. The elderly couple clambered in,
the girl helped them, handing in their bits and pieces, obviously their
daughter. Litvak returned his gaze to the Mercedes, then to the motorbike. If
he thought anything about the girl in brown, he assumed she had got into the
taxi and driven away with her parents. Naturally. It was not till he gave his
attention to the tight group of trippers who were filing along the pavement
towards two waiting coaches that with a leap of pleasure he realized it was his
girl. ‘Our girl, the girl from the motorbike!’ She had done a quick change in
the lavatory and fooled him, and having done so, had tagged herself on to the
coach party in order to get herself across the square. He was still rejoicing
as she unlocked the car door with her own key, tossed in her travel bag,
settled herself into the driving seat as chastely as if she were leaving for
church, and drove away with the fishtail still glinting in the exhaust pipe.
This touch too delighted him. How obvious! How sensible! Duplicate keys, our
leader believes in doubling his chances.
He gave the
one-word order and watch the followers discreetly peel away. He had an
immediate choice to make and immediate choice were what training was all about.
To follow both Rossino and the girl was impossible, he lacked the resources. In
theory he should follow the explosives and therefore the girl, yet he still
hesitated for Rossino was elusive and by far the greater catch, whereas the
Mercedes was by definition conspicuous and its destination a near certainty.
Litvak gave the order: ‘Stay with the car, let Luigi go.’
The
Austrian city of Salzburg had still to hear of summer. A fresh spring air was
blowing off the mountains and the Salzach River smelt of the sea. How they
arrived there was still a mystery to her because she slept so often along the
journey. From Graz they had flown to Vienna but the trip had taken about five
seconds. She must have slept on the plane. In Vienna he had a hire car waiting,
a smart BMW. She slept again, and as they entered the city she thought for a
moment the car must be on fire, but it was only the evening sun catching the
crimson paintwork as she opened her eyes. ‘Anyway, why Salzburg?’ she had asked
him. ‘Because it is one of Michel’s cities’, he had replied. ‘Because it is on
the way.’ ‘On the way where to?’ she asked, but once more struck his reserve.
Their hotel had a roofed interior courtyard, with old gilded banisters and potted
plants in marble urns. Their suite looked straight on to the fast brown river,
and across it at more domes than are in Heaven. Behind the domes rose a castle
with a cable car that switched up and down the hillside. ‘I need to walk’, she
said. She took a bath and fell asleep in it, and he had to bang on the door to
wake her up. She dressed and once more he knew the places to show her and the
things that would please her most. ‘It’s our last night, isn’t it?’ she said.
and this time he didn’t hide behind Michel. ‘Yes, it’s our last night, Charlie.
Tomorrow we have a visit to make and then you return to London.’ Clutching his
arm in both her hands, she wandered with him through narrow streets and squares
that ran into each other like drawing-rooms. They stood outside the house where
Mozart was born, and the trippers were like a matinée audience to her, cheerful
and unaware. ‘I did well, didn’t I, Jose? I did really well. Say it.’ ‘You did
excellently’, he said, but somehow his reservations meant more to her than his
praise. The doll’s-house churches were more beautiful than anything she had
imagined, with scrolled golden altars and voluptuous angels and tombs where the
dead seemed still to be dreaming of pleasure. A Jew pretending to be a Muslim
shows me my Christian heritage, she thought. But when she demanded information
of him, the most he would do was buy a glossy guidebook and put the receipt in
his wallet. ‘I fear that Michel has not yet had the time to launch himself upon
the Baroque period’ he explained in his dry way, and yet again she sensed in
him the shadows of some unexplained obstruction. ‘Shall we go back now?’ She
shook her head. ‘Make it last’, she said. The evening darkened, the crowds
disappeared, choirboy singing issued from unexpected doorways. They sat by the
river and listened to the deaf old bells chiming at each other in stubborn
competition. They started to walk again, and suddenly she was so floppy she
needed his arm round her waist just to keep her upright. ‘Food’, she ordered,
as he guided her into the lift. ‘Champagne, music.’ But by the time he had rung
room service she was fast asleep on the bed and nothing on God’s earth, not
even Joseph, was going to wake her.
She lay as
she had lain in the sand on Mykonos, her left arm crooked and her face pressed
into it. And Becker sat in the armchair, watching her. The first weak glow of
dawn was appearing through the curtains, he could smell fresh leaves and
timber. There had been a rain storm in the night, so loud and sudden it was
like an express train crashing up the valley. From the window he had watched
the city rock under the long slow onslaughts of its lightning and the rain
dancing on the glistening domes. But Charlie had lain so still he had actually
stooped over her and put his ear to her mouth to make sure she was breathing.
He glanced at his watch. ‘Plan’, he thought, ‘move. Let action kill the doubt.’
The dinner table with its uneaten fruit stood in the window bay, the ice bucket
with its unopened bottle of champagne. Taking each fork in turn, he began
scooping the lobster meat from its shell, dirtying plates, mixing up the salad,
spoiling the strawberries, adding one last fiction to the many they had already
lived: their gala banquet in Salzburg. Charlie and Michel celebrate the successful
completion of her first mission for the revolution. He took the champagne
bottle to the bathroom and closed the door in case the pop of the cork should
wake her. He poured the champagne down the basin and ran water after it, he
flushed the lobster meat and strawberries and salad down the lavatory, and had
to wait and flush again because they wouldn’t disappear the first time. He left
enough champagne to pour a little into his own glass, and for Charlie’s glass
he took lipstick from her bag and drew traces round the brim before adding the
dregs of the bottle. and he went to the window again, where he’d spent much of
the night, and gazed at the rain-soaked blue hills. ‘I’m a climber weary of the
mountain’, he thought.
He shaved,
he put on his red blazer. He went to the bed, stretched out his hand to wake
her and drew it back. A reluctance, like a heavy tiredness, descended over him.
He sat down in the armchair again, his eyes closed. He forced them open. He
woke with a jolt, feeling the weight of the desert dew clinging to his
battledress, smelling the scent of damp sand before the sun had burnt it dry.
‘Charlie.’ He again reached out, to touch her cheek, but touched her arm
instead. ‘Charlie, wake up. We have work to do.’ He went downstairs, paid the bill
and obtained the last receipt. He walked out the back of the hotel to collect
the hired BMW, and the dawn was the way the dusk had been, fresh but not yet
summer. ‘You’re to wave me off, then appear to take a walk’, he told her,
‘Dimitri will bring you separately to Munich.’
The drive
lasted less than an hour. They went straight to the Olympic village. She
entered the lift without speaking. It smelled of disinfectant and the graffiti
were scratched deep into the grey vinyl. She had shoved the toughness in her to
the front, the way she did at demos and talk-ins and all the other junkets. She
was excited and she felt a sense of impending completion. Dimitri pressed the
bell. Kurtz himself opened the door. Behind him stood Joseph. ‘Charlie, this is
truly great, and you are great’ said Kurtz with soft, heartfelt urgency, and
clutched her intensely to his chest. ‘Charlie, incredible.’ ‘Where is he?’ she
said, looking past Joseph at the closed door. Dimitri had not come in. Having
delivered her, he had taken the lift down again. ‘Charlie, this could be a
little emotional’, Kurtz warned. ‘If you get seasick, just remember he killed a
lot of innocent human beings. Everybody has a human face, this boy is no
exception. A lot of good looks, lot of talent, a lot of unused capacity, all
wasted. That’s never very nice at all to see. I don’t want you speaking,
remember that. Leave all the speaking to me. You’ll find him docile, we have to
keep him that way when he’s here with us. Otherwise he’s in good shape, no
problems. Just don’t speak to him.’ She sat down and Joseph sat beside her. We
should hold hands, she thought. Kurtz had picked up a grey telephone and was
pressing the extension button. He said something in Hebrew, looked up at the
gallery as he spoke. He put the phone down, smiled at her reassuringly. Now
Joseph was looking up at the gallery too. Charlie followed his gaze. The door
on the balcony opened on three boys, but one, in his red blazer, was sagging
between the other two: the slender Arab boy, her lover, her collapsed puppet
from the theatre of the real.
Yes, she
thought, yes, well, not a bad likeness at all, given the few years’ age
difference and Joseph’s indefinable maturity. Sometimes, in her fantasies, she
had used Joseph’s features, letting him understudy for the lover of her dreams.
She thought of getting up and rushing to protect him, but on stage one doesn’t,
not unless it’s in the script. And besides, she’d never have broken free of
Joseph. For a second, all the same, she nearly lost her hold on herself. For
that second, she was everything that Joseph said she was, she was Michel’s
saviour and liberator, his Saint Joan, his body slave, his star. He was so
beautiful, as beautiful as Joseph had promised, he was more beautiful, he had
the absolute attraction that Charlie and her kind acknowledge with rueful
inevitability: he was of that monarchy and knew it. He was slight, but perfect,
with well-formed shoulders and very slender hips. He had a pugilist’s brow and
a Pan-child’s face crowned with a rich mop of black curls. Nothing they had
done to tame him could conceal from her the rich passion of his nature or
extinguish the light of rebellion in his coal-dark eyes. He was so trivial, a
little peasant boy fallen out of an olive tree, with a repertoire of learned
phrases and a magpie eye for pretty jewels, crocodile wallets, pretty ladies
and pretty cars. And a peasant’s indignation against those who drove him from
his farm. Come into my bed, you little baby, and let Mummy teach you some of
life’s long words.
They were
bringing him towards her, and she wasn’t sure she could stand it. She
recognized the smell of the after-shave lotion that Joseph had laid out in
every bathroom they had never shared. They must have smeared some on him for
the occasion. ‘Don’t you want to speak to this lady?’ Kurtz was asking. ‘Don’t
you want to welcome her to our villa here? I’m beginning to wonder why you
don’t cooperate with us anymore.’ Gradually, under his persistence, Michel’s
eyes woke and his body straightened slightly in obedience. ‘You want to greet
this lady politely? You want to wish her good day? Good day? You want to tell
her good day, little fellow?’ Of course he did. ‘Good day’, said Michel, in a
listless voice. ‘Don’t answer’, Joseph warned her softly from her side. ‘Good
day, Madame’, Kurtz insisted, still without the least rancour. ‘Madame’, said
Michel. She was talking to Joseph, but only in her mind. Get me out, I think
I’m dying. She heard the bump of Michel’s feet as they took him up the stairs
and out of hearing, but Kurtz allowed her no respite, just as he allowed none
to himself. ‘Charlie, we have one further stage of this thing, I think we
should go through with it now even if it costs a little effort. Some things
have to be done.’ Holding Joseph’s arm, she followed Kurtz upstairs. She didn’t
know why but she found it helpful to limp a little like Michel. They entered a
padded room with a single bed shoved against the far wall. And on the bed,
Michel again, naked except for his gold medallion, his hands clutched over his
crotch and hardly a crease where his belly folded. The muscles of his shoulders
were full and round, the muscles of his chest were flat and broad, the shadows
beneath them crisp as lines of India ink. On an order from Kurtz, the two boys
stood him up and pulled away his hands. Circumcised, well-grown, beautiful.
Silently, with scowling disapproval, the bearded boy pointed to the white
birthmark like a milk stain on the left flank, and the smeared scar of a knife
wound on the right shoulder, and the endearing rivulet of black hair that ran
downward from the navel. Silently, they turned him round. My favourite kind of
back, she thought, a spine recessed in muscle. But no bullet holes, not like
Joseph’s, nothing at all to spoil the sheerness of his beauty. ‘Show her the
feet’, said Kurtz. They laid him on his back and held his feet to her, and she
saw the scars of where he had been beaten by the Jordanians when he was a
child, unnatural furrows ending in small white blemishes round the instep. They
started to stand him up again, but by then Joseph had apparently decided that
Charlie might have had enough of a good thing, for he was leading her down the
stairs, fast, one arm locked round her waist and the other grasping her wrist
so tight it hurt. In the lavatory of the hall she paused long enough to vomit
but all she wanted after that was to get out. Out of the apartment, out of
sight of them, out of her own mind and skin.
The lower
apartment was much like the upper one, except that it possessed no balcony, and
no prisoner. And sometimes, while she
read or listened, she managed to convince herself that she had never been
upstairs at all. Upstairs was a chamber of horrors in the dark attics of her
mind. Then she would hear the bump of a packing case through the ceiling as the
boys cleared up their photographic equipment and generally prepared for the end
of term. And she had to admit that upstairs was as real as down stairs after
all, more real since the letters were fabrications whereas Michel was
flesh.
They sat in
a ring, the three of them, and Kurtz began with one of his preambles. But his
style was a lot crisper and less roundabout than usual, perhaps because she was
a proven soldier now, ‘a veteran with a whole basket of exciting new
intelligence already to her credit’, as he put it. The letters were in a
briefcase on the table, and before opening it, he reminded her once more of the
‘fiction’, a word he had in common with Joseph. The fiction was that she was
not only a passionate lover, but a passionate correspondent who in Michel’s
long absences was deprived of all other outlets. Explaining this, he put on a
pair of cheap cotton gloves. The letters were therefore not a mere sideshow in
the relationship, he explained, they were the only place where you could live
aloud, dear. Put together, they comprised the diary of an emotionally and
sexually aroused person as she advanced from vaguely focussed protest to
wholesale activism, with its implicit acceptance of violence. ‘And since we
could not rely on you, in the circumstances, to provide us with the full
variety of your literary style’ he ended as he unlocked the briefcase, ‘we
decided to compose the letters for you, from certain selected samples of your
handwriting borrowed from a variety of sources without their knowledge,
naturally, dear.’ Quilley, she thought sadly. Poor old Ned. My bloody mother.
Al. Dear God, how do they do it?
The letters
were in two brown wrapped packages, one much larger than the other. Taking the smaller
first, Kurtz clumsily opened it with his gloved fingertips and spread the
papers flat. She recognized the black schoolboy writing of Michel. He unwrapped
the second and, like a dream come true, she recognized the handwriting as her
own. ‘Michel’s to you are in Photostat, dear’, Kurtz was saying, ‘we have the
originals waiting for you in England. Your own letters, now, they’re originals,
so they belong to Michel, don’t they, dear?’ She read Michel’s letters first
because she felt she owed him the attention. There were a dozen, and they
varied from the frankly sensual and passionate to the brief and authoritarian.
‘Kindly in your letters be sure to number. If you do not number, do not write.
I cannot enjoy your letters if I do not know I receive them all. This is for my
personal safety.’ As she read on, she began to form a new and humbler picture
of Michel, one that came suddenly much closer to that prisoner upstairs. ‘He’s
a baby’, she muttered. She glanced accusingly at Joseph. ‘You built him up so much.
He’s a kid.’ Receiving no answer she turned to her own letters to Michel,
picking them up gingerly as if they solved a great mystery. ‘Schoolbooks’, she
said aloud, with a stupid smile, as she took a first nervous look at them, and
this was because, thanks to poor Ned Quilley’s archives, they had been able to
reproduce not merely Charlie’s exotic taste in stationary – the backs of menus,
bills, the headed notepaper of hotels and theatres and boarding houses along
her route – but had caught, to her mounting awe, the spontaneous variations in
her writing.
Afterwards
she remembered the long fatherly hug from Kurtz, because at the time it seemed
as inevitable and necessary as parenthood. Of her farewell from Joseph, her
last of the series, she had no recollection at all, not the manner of it, not
the place. And she remembered the landing in London, more alone than she’d ever
been in her life. And the smell of English sadness that had greeted her on the
runway. Coming home is like going abroad, she thought, as she joined the
despondent queue for the bus. Let’s blow the whole lot up and start again.
The motor
lodge was called Romanz and was set among pine trees on a rise beside the
autobahn. Kurtz had the last chalet of the row, with a leaded jalousie window
that looked outwards over the westbound lane. It had been a long day, not
really starting until Charlie had left the city. There had been the Olympic
village apartments to clear and Kurtz
had supervised that operation personally because he knew it gave the kids an
extra edge when they were reminded of his determination to handle detail. There
had been the letters to place in Yanuka’s apartment and Kurtz had seen to that
as well. And now he was installed in the motor lodge. Litvak and Becker were
there too.
‘The blond
girl knows nothing’, Litvak reported. ‘She’s a half-wit. She’s Dutch, her name
is Larsen. She admits Bad Godesberg.’ Kurtz was looking at his watch and beyond
it. ‘Whatever she knows, it’s already history’, he remarked, ‘important is only
what we do with her, and when.’ But he spoke as the man who must give the final
answer himself. ‘How does the fiction play, Gadi?’ ‘It fits’, said Becker. He
let them wait a moment. ‘Rossino had the use of her in Vienna for a couple of
days, drove her south, and delivered her to the car. All true. She drove the
car to Munich, met Yanuka. Untrue, but they’re the only two people who know
it.’ ‘So where is she at this moment?’ Kurtz asked, gathering in the details
while he continued to deliberate. ‘In reality?’ ‘In the van’, said Litvak. ‘And
where’s the van?’ ‘Beside the Mercedes, in the lay-by. You give the word, we
transfer her.’ ‘And Yanuka?’ ‘Also in the van. Their last night together. We
sedated both of them, just like we agreed.’ ‘Do we have an alternative?’ Kurtz
asked. ‘No, we have no alternative’, Becker replied, taking his time. ‘Spare
the Dutch girl, they’ll never accept Charlie. Alive, Miss Larsen is as
dangerous as Yanuka. If we’re going on, this is where we do it.’ ‘If’, Litvak
echoed with contempt. Kurtz ended any further dialogue by lifting the telephone
receiver and slowly dialling a number. He was calling Alexis. Litvak departed.
Becker stayed.
‘Paul, uh,
it appears that a certain accident we recently spoke of is about to occur at any
moment and there’s nothing you or I can do to prevent it, so get yourself a pen
and paper.’ Changing tone, he poured out his instructions in a brisk, Germanic
stream. Finally, a massive calm entered his voice. ‘No innocent blood will be
shed, Paul. You have my word. No German citizen will suffer so much as a
scratch.’ ‘I can rely on this?’ ‘You’ll have to’, said Kurtz, and rang off
without leaving his number.
Litvak rang
ten minutes later. ‘Go’, said Kurtz. ‘The green light. Do it.’ They waited,
Kurtz at the window, Becker in his chair again, looking past him at the uneasy
night sky. Grabbing the central catch, Kurtz unfastened it and shoved the two
casements as wide as they would go, admitting the boom of traffic from the
autobahn. Becker began counting at the soldier’s speed. So long to arrange the
two of them in position, so long for the last check-up, so long to get clear,
so long before a break in the traffic was signalled from both directions, so
long to wonder how much human life is worth, even to those who dishonour the
human bond completely. And to those who do not.
It was as
usual the loudest bang anyone had ever heard. Still sitting in his chair,
looking past Kurtz’s silhouette, Becker saw one orange ball of flame burst out
of the ground, then vanish, taking the late stars and early daylight with it.
It was followed at once by a wave of oily black smoke that rushed to fill the
space left behind by the expanding gases. He saw debris fly into the air and a
spray of black fragments spin away from the rear – a wheel, a chunk of tarmac,
something human, who would ever tell? He saw the curtain brush itself
affectionately against Kurtz’s bare arm, and felt the warm puff of a hairdryer.
He heard the insect-like buzz of hard objects trembling against each other and,
well before they had stopped, the first cries of indignation, the yapping of
dogs.
For three
interminable weeks, while London slipped from summer to autumn, Charlie lived
in a state of half reality, vacillating from disbelief to impatience, from
excited preparation to spasmodic terror. ‘Sooner or later they will come for
you’, Joseph kept saying, ‘they must.’ And set about preparing her mind for her
accordingly. Love Joseph, but dream of Michel. At first she hardly dared look
at herself in the mirror, she was so convinced her secret showed. Her faced was
stretched tight by the outrageous information hidden just behind it. Then
slowly, as the time dragged by, her fear of exposure gave way to an
affectionate disrespect for the innocents around her, who failed to see what
was shoved under their noses every day. They are where I came from, she
thought. They are me before I walked through the looking-glass.
Joseph was
her sprite who popped up at all odd places, with quite impossible prescience
about her movements, now at a bus stop, now at the launderette, but she never
admitted his existence. He was outside her life completely, out of time and
touch, except for their furtive assignations, which sustained her. Except for
his proxy, Michel.
She began
to feel she was floating, acting all the time for an unseen audience, guarding
her every word and gesture against a momentary carelessness. And in her handbag
lived a brand new white silk scarf, not for surrender but to say ‘They’ve
come’, if they ever did. She maintained her pocket diary, taking over where
Kurtz’s forgers had left off. She wrote endless letters to her missing man but,
little by little, ceased to post them. Michel, darling, oh Michel, for mercy’s
sake, come to me.
What
disconcerted her was the ghostly way that her little flat in Camden Town had
been altered to meet the new identity into which she was so carefully easing
herself, a scene change of which the scale only gradually declared itself. Of
her entire new life, the insidious reconstruction of her flat during her
absence was the most disturbing thing. There was her writing drawer, for
instance, with Michel’s letters to her jammed into the back, all the originals
of which she had seen the Photostats in Munich. There was her fighting fund,
three hundred quids’worth in old fivers, stowed behind the cracked panel of the
bath, where she used to keep her grass in the days when she smoked. There were
the mementoes, the hoarded fragments of her love affair from day one in
Nottingham onwards. That’s me all over, she thought, as she picked her way
slowly through the collection. Except that it wasn’t me. It was them.
The house
in Hampstead that Kurtz had rented for the watchers, by contrast, was very
large, set in a quiet backwater favoured by the Finchley driving schools. At
the front was a tiny gatehouse, and that’s where they put their notices saying
‘Hebraic and Humanist Study Group, Students and Staff Only’, which, in
Hampstead, did not raised an eyebrow. There were fourteen of them in all,
including Litvak, and with a fine team spirit they settled to the wait like
clockwork. They avoided, without even being told, the local pubs and
restaurants and unnecessary contact with local people. On the other hand, they
took care to send themselves mail and buy milk and newspapers and do the things
that the inquisitive otherwise notice by omission.
The call
came on day eighteen. A telex from Geneva put them on standby, a phone call
from Paris gave the green light. Within an hour, two thirds of the team was on
the road, headed westward through black rain.
Charlie’s
acting company was called The Heretics, and its tour opened in Exeter, then
moved to Plymouth, and then to a dripping, granite mining town, far down the
Cornish peninsula, with cramped alleys steaming with sea mist and stunted trees
made hunchback by the gales. The cast was spread round half a dozen guest
houses, and Charlie’s luck was a slate-gabled island entirely surrounded by
hydrangeas. Their dressing room was a women’s locker room, and that was where
they brought her the orchids, while she was putting on her make-up, ten minutes
before curtain-up.
Charlie
picked up the envelope in full view of everyone who cared to look. ‘For Miss
Rosalind’. Inside, one continental visiting card, high gloss. ‘Anton
Mesterbein. Geneva.’ Below it, the one word ‘Justice’. It’s him, it’s word of
him. Then why isn’t he here? Why is the note not written in his hand? Trust no
one, Michel had warned, but specially mistrust those who claim to know me. It’s
a trap, it’s the pigs, they found out about my drive through Yugoslavia.
They’re setting me up to snare my lover. Michel, Michel, lover, life, tell me
what to do!
Somehow she
performed, perhaps she even acted too while she scanned the half-empty rows in
the hope of glimpsing a red blazer. In vain. In the locker room she changed
quickly, put on her white headscarf and dawdled there till the janitor threw
her out. She found her car, unlocked it, laid the orchids on the passenger seat
and heaved the door shut after her. As she roared down the drive into the main
road, she saw in her mirror the headlights of another car pull out after her,
then follow her at an even distance to her guest house. She parked, wrapped her
coat round her, and with the orchids inside it, made a dash for the front door.
The hall door opened and closed behind her. A man’s feet were approaching
across the hall carpet. She allowed herself one swift glance at him, in case he
was Michel. But he wasn’t, as her expression of disappointment showed. ‘Miss
Charlie?’ he asked. ‘I bring you greetings from our mutual acquaintance,
Michel, Miss Charlie.’ Charlie hardened her face like someone preparing to take
punishment. ‘Michel who?’ she said, and saw how nothing in him stirred, which
in turn made her very still herself, in the way we stand still for paintings
and statues and motionless policemen. ‘Michel asked me to bring you gold
orchids and take you to dinner with him. He was insistent that you come. Please.
I am a good friend of Michel. Come.’ You, she thought, friend? Michel wouldn’t
have a friend like you to save his bloody life. But she let her glower say it
for her. ‘Michel orders me to bring you fresh lobster and a bottle of Boutaris
wine. I have other messages from him also. He will be very angry when I tell
him you refused his hospitality, also insulted.’ It was too much, he was her
own dark angel, claiming the soul she had carelessly pledged. Whether he was
lying, whether he was the police or a common blackmailer, she could follow him
to the centre of the underworld if he could lead her to Michel.
They drove
in slow convoy through the fog patches. She followed him down a hill and
through a village. She lowered her window and filled the car with the salt
smell of the sea. The rushing Cornish air opened her mouth for her in a scream.
Mesterbein parked and climbed out. She did the same and locked her car. He
pushed the gate and it creaked. A light went on ahead of them, a tall blond
woman in a blue corduroy suit greeted them. ‘Anton! Oh, this is too nice, you
have brought me Charlie! Charlie, welcome!’ Grabbing Charlie’s shoulders, she
embraced her excitedly. ‘I mean, Charlie, listen, you were completely fantastic
tonight in that Shakespeare. Wasn’t she, Anton? I mean superb. I am Helga,
okay?’ Her eyes were grey and lucid and, like Mesterbein’s, dangerously
innocent. Helga’s hands still rested on Charlie’s shoulders, her strong thumbs
lightly grazing her neck. ‘Is it difficult to learn so many words, Charlie?’
she asked, staring brightly into Charlie’s face. ‘I don’t have that problem’,
she said, and broke away from her. ‘You said you had news of Michel.’ A tremor
had entered her voice and her lips felt stiff. ‘Just tell me where he is.’
‘Actually she could lie easily, such an actress’ Helga said, while her wide
eyes gazed up at Charlie in a questing, unshadowed stare. ‘A woman so trained
to pretend, how can one believe anything, actually?’ ‘We must be very careful’,
Mesterbein agreed, as a private note to himself for the future. Their
double-act had a ring of sadism, they were playing upon a pain she had yet to
feel. She stared at Helga, then at Mesterbein. Her words slipped from her. She
could no longer keep them in. ‘He’s dead, isn’t he?’ she whispered. Helga
seemed not to hear, she was entirely taken up with watching. ‘Oh yes, Michel is
dead’, Mesterbein agreed, glumly. ‘I’m sorry, naturally. Fräulein Helga is also
sorry. We are both very sorry. From the letters you wrote to him we assume you
will be sorry also.’ ‘ Ja, but maybe the letters are also pretending, Anton’
Helga reminded him. Her knees sagged and she felt straight over her feet,
feeling perfectly all right from the waist up but paralysed below. It was not a
studied thing at all, she did it before she was herself aware of it, before she
had even half-way considered the enormity of the information, and before Helga
could put out a hand to catch her. She keeled over and hit the floor with a
thud that made the ceiling light hop on its flex. Helga knelt quickly beside
her; Mesterbein stooped to gaze at her but didn’t touch her. His interest was
directed more towards examining the way she wept. She had her head sideways,
and she was resting her cheek on her clenched fist, so that the stream of her tears
ran across her face instead of down it. Turmoil, anger, guilt, remorse, terror,
she perceived each one of them like the phases of a controlled yet deeply felt
performance. I knew, I didn’t know, I didn’t dare allow myself to think. You
cheats, you murdering fascist cheats, you bastards who killed my darling lover
in the theatre of the real. She choked and retched and her words clogged in her
throat and stumbled on her lips. For the tears to come running on command, she
had only to remember the half-tamed Arab boy who had restored her capacity for
love, who had given her life the direction it had always craved, and who now
was dead. ‘She says it was the Zionists’ Mesterbein objected to Helga in
English. ‘Why does she say it was the Zionists when it was an accident? The
police have assured us it was an accident.’ But Helga had either heard it
already for herself or didn’t care. She made coffee on the electric stove.
Charlie sat on the sofa cradling her mug in both hands, bowed over it as if
inhaling its vapour, while the tears ran steadily down her cheeks. ‘It was an
explosion accident’, Mesterbein said, ‘on the autobahn Salzburg-Munich.
According to police, his car was full of explosive. Hundreds of pounds. Why?
Why should explosive detonate suddenly on a flat autobahn? The car was a
Mercedes. Why should my client drive a car full of explosive? He was a student,
he was not a bomber. It was a conspiracy, actually, oh yes.’ ‘Do you know this
car, Charlie?’ Helga murmured into her ear. But all Charlie could hear was the
voice of her nameless mentor saying ‘Distrust them, lie to them, deny
everything, reject, refuse.’ ‘A girl died also’, Mesterbein said, ‘she was with
him in the car, they say.’ ‘A Dutch’, Helga said softly, so close that Charlie
could feel her breath upon her ear. ‘A real beauty. Blonde. So Michel is a
martyr but the dead cannot fight and there are many martyrs also in the world.
One soldier is dead, the revolution continues, yes?’ ‘Yes’, Charlie whispered.
‘You listen to me and answer, okay? I did not come here for fun, you
understand? Say ‘yes’.’ ‘I said it. Yes.’ ‘Why did Michel not tell us about
you? Why did he not share you with us? You, his dark horse for so many months,
it’s too ridiculous!’ ‘He loved me.’ ‘Quatsch! He was using you! You have his
letters still, yeah?’ ‘He ordered me to destroy them.’ ‘But you didn’t, of
course you didn’t. In Michel’s last letter that he did not post to you, he says
you have kissed the gun. What does that mean?’ ‘It... it means I kissed his
gun.’ She corrected herself. ‘His brother’s gun.’ Helga’s voice rose abruptly.
‘His brother? What brother?’ ‘He had an older brother, his hero, a great
fighter. The brother gave him the gun. Michel made me kiss it as a pledge.’
Helga was staring at her in disbelief. ‘Michel told you this?’ ‘I read it in
the newspapers, didn’t I?’ ‘What else of this brother? Quickly!’ she almost
screamed. But Charlie’s secret voice was telling her she had already gone far
enough. ‘He’s a military secret’, she said, and helped herself to a cigarette.
‘Did he tell you where he is, what he is doing? Charlie, I order you to tell
me.’ She drew nearer. ‘Police, intelligence, maybe even the Zionists, everybody
is looking for you. You have no right to this information. Give it to me!’
Charlie considered Helga’s application, but after due reflection, rejected it.
‘No’, she said. ‘Your job is to make them need you’, Joseph had said. ‘Think of
it as courtship. They will treasure most what they cannot have.’ ‘You are
suddenly like Rome, Charlie’ Helga remarked. ‘All roads lead to you, it’s too
perverse. You are his secret love, you drive his car, you spend his last night
on earth with him. You knew what was in that car when you drove it?’
‘Explosives.’ ‘Nonsense. Of what sort?’ ‘Russian plastic, two hundred pounds of
it.’ ‘The police told you this, it is their lie.’ ‘Michel told me.’ Helga let
out a false, angry laugh. ‘Oh Charlie! Now I don’t believe you one word. You’re
lying to me completely.’ Sitting beside her again, Helga put her arm around
Charlie’s unresponsive shoulders. ‘We shall be your friends perhaps. We must be
careful, we must bluff a little. That is natural. All right. Tell me first
Michel’s real name.’ ‘ Salim, but I swore never to use it.’ ‘And the brother’s
name?’ ‘Khalil’, she muttered. She began weeping again. ‘Michel worshipped
him’, she said. ‘And his workname?’ She didn’t understand, and she didn’t care.
‘It was a military secret’, she repeated.
She was
alone again, driving there, but taking care, using open roads, stopping for
small errands while she watched her back. His hotel was by the sea, a few miles
from her own, Joseph’s place. He opened the door to her and she walked past him
with a distracted frown, not knowing what to feel. Murderer. Bully. Cheat. But
she had no appetite for the obligatory scenes, she had played them all. ‘Did I
fool them?’ she asked. He came and stood beside her, to be near but not to
touch. ‘Since you are still alive, we must assume that so far you fooled them.’
‘Let’s go’, she said. And reaching past him, switched on the tape recorder.
With no more preamble, they passed to the debriefing, sitting on the bed. As
she left, she kissed him. ‘You’re all I’ve got left’, she said. He didn’t
understand. ‘Michel’s dead. It’s you or nothing. I can’t take nothing. Not
again.’
Skipped.
After that
it was back to London and the waiting. For the two wet autumn weeks ever since
Helga had broken the terrible news to her, the Charlie of her imagination had
entered a morbid, vengeful hell, and burned in it alone. I am in shock, I am an
obsessive, solitary mourner without a friend to turn to. I am a soldier robbed
of my general, a revolutionary cut off from the revolution. Her once-loved
flat, perched in a little courtyard above a Goanese café, now became the
unkempt shrine to Michel’s memory, a place of grimy, chapel-like quiet. Books
and pamphlets he had given her were spread face downward over the floor and
table, opened at marked passages. At night, when she could not sleep, she would
sit at her desk with an exercise book jammed among the clutter, while she
copied out quotations from his letters. Sometimes she made a show of pestering
her agent Quilley about future parts. What had happened about the screen test?
For Christ’s sake, Ned, I need work! But the truth was that her zest for the
artificial stage was waning. She was committed, for as long as it lasted, and
despite its mounting hazards, to the theatre of the real.
Then the
warnings began, like the advance creakings of a sea storm in the rigging. The
first came from poor Ned Quilley, a phone call much earlier in the day than was
his custom, ostensibly to return one she had made to him the day before. No, he
had nothing for her, but he wanted to cancel their lunch that day. ‘I just don’t
think it would be appropriate at this time, Charlie’, he said loftily. ‘Ned,
what’s up? It’s not Lent. What’s come over you?’ Her false frivolity, intended
to make things easier for him, only spurred him to greater feats of pomposity.
‘Charlie, I don’t know what you’ve been up to’, he began, from his High Altar.
‘I was young once myself and not as hidebound as you may think, but if one half
of what is being implied is true , then I can’t help feeling that you and I may
do better, a lot better for both parties...’ But, being her lovely Ned, he
couldn’t bring himself to deliver the final blow, so he said ‘to put off our
date until you have come to your senses.’ At which point he rang off. She rang
back immediately and got the receptionist, which was what she wanted. ‘What’s
up? Why have I got bad breath suddenly?’ ‘Oh, Charlie! What have you been up
to?’ Mrs Ellis said, speaking very low because she feared the phone might be
tapped. ‘The police came for a whole morning about you, three of them. None of us
are allowed to say anything.’ ‘Well, screw them’, she said bravely.
Next came
the hairdresser. She had fixed her hair appointment for eleven and she kept it,
lunch or no. The proprietress was a generous Italian lady called Bibi. She
frowned when she saw Charlie come in, and said she would do Charlie herself
today. ‘You been going with a married fellow again?’ she yelled as she worked
shampoo into Charlie’s hair. ‘You don’t look good, you know that? You been a
bad girl, stole someone’s husband? What you do, Charlie?’ ‘Three men’, said
Bibi when Charlie made her tell. ‘Yesterday, asking about your politics, who
you love.’
It was
seven in the evening, and the Goanese café was having a lull. The chef grinned
at her brilliantly and his cheeky boyfriend, as usual, waved at her as if she
were daft. Inside her flat, instead of putting on the light, she sat on the bed
and left the curtains open, and watched in the mirror how the two men on the
opposite pavement loitered and never talked to each other and never looked in
her direction. Michel’s letters were still under the floorboard. So was her
passport, and what was left of her fighting fund. ‘Your passport is now a
dangerous document’, Joseph had warned her in his sermon on her new status
since Michel’s death, ‘he should not have let you use it for the drive. Your
passport must be guarded with your other secrets.’ Cindy, Charlie thought.
Cindy was a Geordie waif who lived downstairs. Her West Indian lover was in
prison for grievous bodily harm, and Charlie occasionally gave her free guitar
lessons to help her pass the time. ‘Cind’, she wrote, ‘here is a birthday
present for you for whenever your birthday is. Practice till you’re half dead.
Take the music case too, but like an idiot I’ve left the key at Mum’s. I’ll bring
it when I next call. Anyway the music’s not right for you yet. Love you, Chas.’
Her music case was her father’s, a sturdy Edwardian job with serious locks and
stitching. She put Michel’s letters into it, together with her money and
passport and plenty of music. She took it downstairs with the guitar. She
returned to her flat, switched on the light, pulled the curtains and dressed
herself in her full war paint because it was Peckham night and not all the
coppers on earth, and not all her dead lovers, were going to stop her
rehearsing her kids for their pantomimes. She got home soon after eleven. A
police car was parked on the kerb, and a uniformed sergeant was standing in the
open doorway, the chef beside him, grinning at her with Asian embarrassment. It’s
happened, she thought calmly. High time too. They’ve come out of the woodwork
at last. The sergeant was the angry-eyed, close-cropped type who hates the
whole world, but Indians and pretty women most. ‘Café’s temporarily closed’, he
snapped at her. ‘Find somewhere else.’ ‘Has someone died?’ ‘If they have, they
haven’t told me. There’s a suspected burglar been seen on the premises. Our
officers are investigating. Now hop it.’ She kept going, but no footsteps or
furious voices came after her, no car screeched alongside. She reached the main
road, and somewhere along the way she pulled on one leather glove, which was
what Joseph had told her to do if and when they flushed her. She saw a free cab
and hailed it. Well then, she thought cheerfully, here we all are. It was only
much, much later that it crossed her mind that they might have let her go
deliberately. So she moved by stages, nothing hasty. She was talking herself
down. After the taxi, we take a bus ride, she told herself, walk a bit, then a
stretch by tube. Her mind was as sharp as flint, she knew she had to grab a
firm hold on her responses before she made her next move, because if she
fluffed this, she fluffed the whole show. Joseph had told her so, and she
believed him. Helga, she prayed, oh, Helg, get me out of this! She caught a bus
in the wrong direction, waited, caught another and walked again, but funked the
tube because the thought of being below ground scared her. So she weakened and
caught another cab, and watched out of the back window. Nothing was following
her. The street was empty. To hell with walking, to hell with tubes and buses.
‘Peckham’, she said to the driver, and went right to the gates in style. The
hall they had used for rehearsals that same afternoon was at the back of a
church, a barn-like place next to an adventure playground, which the kids had
smashed to pieces long ago. She unlocked the door and stepped inside. She
closed the door behind her and lit a match. Its flame flickered on the glossy
green tiles and the high vault of the Victorian pine roof. The match went out,
but she found the door chain and slipped it into its housing before lighting
another. Her voice, her footsteps, the rattle of the chain in the pitch
darkness echoed crazily for hours.
A staircase
with an iron handrail led upward to a pine gallery known euphemistically as the
‘common room’, and ever since her clandestine visit to the Munich duplex,
reminiscent of Michel. Grabbing the rail, she followed it upstairs, then stood
motionless on the gallery, staring into the gloom of the hall and listening
while her eyes grew accustomed to the dark. She made out the stage, then the
billowing, psychedelic clouds of her backdrop. There was an old sofa on the
gallery, and beside it a pale, plastic-topped table that caught the city’s glow
from the window. On the table stood the black telephone, for staff only, and
the exercise book where you were supposed to enter private calls, which sparked
off about six major rows a month. Sitting on the sofa, Charlie waited till her
stomach had untied itself and her pulse rate dropped below the three hundred
mark. Then she lifted phone and cradle together and laid them on the floor
beneath the table. There used to be a couple of household candles in the table
drawer for when the wiring failed, which it often did, but somebody had nicked
them. So she twisted a page of an old parish magazine into a spill and, having
propped it into a dirty teacup, lit one end to make a tallow. With the table
above and the balcony to one side, the flame was as contained as it could be,
but as soon as she had dialled, she blew it out all the same. She got a pensive
silence, followed by the peep of a continental ringing tone. Followed a lot
later by the strident voice of Helga speaking German. ‘It’s Joan’, said Charlie.
‘Remember me?’ and got another pensive silence. ‘Where are you, Joan?’ ‘Mind
your own bloody business.’ ‘You have a problem, Joan?’ ‘Not really. I just
wanted to thank you for bringing the pigs to my sodding doorstep.’ Helga heard
her out in silence. ‘But where are you?’ she repeated when Charlie had
finished. ‘Forget it.’ ‘You will please phone me again in one hour, Charlie.’
‘Like hell I will!’ A long silence. ‘Where are the letters?’ ‘Safe.’ Another
silence. ‘Get paper and pencil immediately.’ ‘I don’t need one.’ ‘Get one all
the same. You are not in a condition for accurate remembering. You are ready?’
Not an address, not a telephone number either. But street directions, a time,
and the route by which she should approach. ‘Do exactly as I am telling you. If
you cannot make it, if you have any more problems, telephone to the number on
Anton’s card and say you wish to contact Petra. Bring the letters. Do you hear
me?’
Ringing
off, Charlie heard the sound of one pair of hands softly clapping from the
auditorium downstairs. She went to the edge of the balcony and looked over, and
to her immeasurable joy saw Joseph sitting all alone in the centre of the front
row. She turned and ran down the stairs to him. She reached the bottom step to
find him waiting with his arms out for her. He was afraid she might lose her
footing in the darkness. He kissed her, and went on kissing her; then he led
her back to the gallery, keeping his arm round her even on the narrowest bit of
the staircase, and carrying a basket in the other hand. He had brought smoked
salmon and a bottle of wine. He had put them on the table without unwrapping
them. He knew where the plates lived under the sink, and how you plugged the
electric fire into the spare socket on the cooker. He had brought a thermos of
coffee and a couple of blankets. And she knew, even in the gloomy light, she
could tell by the line of his back and the private deliberation of his
gestures, that he was doing something outside the script. He was closing the
doors on every world but their own. He sat beside her on the sofa and put a
blanket over her because the cold in the hall was something that really had to
be dealt with, and so was her shivering, she couldn’t stop. He held her tighter
to keep her trembling in check, to absorb it and make it his. It occurred to
her that she had always known, despite his evasions and disguises, that he was
in essence a kind man, of instinctive sympathy for everyone, in battle and in
peace, a troubled man who hated causing pain. She put her hand to his face, and
suddenly it was clear to her that their whole shared fiction was nothing but
foreplay for this night of fact. He took her hand away and drew her into him,
and kissed her mouth and she responded chastely, waiting for him to light the
passions they had so often spoken of. He was touching her face, her neck, her
breasts, and she held back from kissing him because she wanted her flavours
separate. Now he is kissing me, now he is touching me, undressing me, he is
lying in my arms, we are naked. He started again from the beginning in case she
had forgotten the story this far, kissing and touching everything with a light
possessiveness that slowly lost its diffidence, but always returning to her
face, because they needed to see and taste each other repeatedly and reassure
themselves that they were who they said they were. He was the best, long before
he entered her, the one incomparable lover she had never had, the distant star
she had been following through all that rotten country.
She woke
and found him sitting over her, waiting for her to come round. ‘It’s a boy’, he
said and smiled. ‘It’s twins’, she replied and pulled his head down until it
was against her shoulder. He started to speak but she stopped him with a stern
warning. ‘I don’t want a squeak out of you. No cover stories, no apologies, no
lies. If it’s part of the service, don’t tell me.’ ‘Don’t go’, he said. She
stared at him. ‘Don’t meet them tomorrow. Stop now.’ Still, she said nothing.
‘There is an above the line and a below the line. Until now you’ve been above
the line, but you’ve managed all the same to show us what was going on lower
down. But from here on in, you’ll be one of them, Charlie, sharing their lives,
their mentality, their morals. You could spend weeks, months out of touch with
us. Don’t go.’ ‘I should stop, this is the end.’ ‘For you, yes; for the
operation, no.’ ‘So what’s the end for you?’ ‘The end is a man.’ ‘Khalil’, she
said. ‘He is dangerous, he is as good as Michel was bad. We can find him by
some other means. Stop now, you’ll leave with honour, no problem.’ ‘How will I
know him? Does he look like Michel?’ He seemed to give up, as if his will had
failed him, or reasserted itself after all. ‘You will know him when you see one
of these’, he said, and from the basket Joseph produced what resembled a fat
ballpoint refill, crimped at one end, with a pair of thin red wires, like
lobster whiskers, protruding from it. ‘This is a detonator’, he explained as he
gingerly tapped the refill. ‘At the end, this is the bung, and fed into the
bung you see the wires here. A little of the wire, he needs. The rest, what is
spare, he packages it like this.’ Producing a pair of wiresnippers, he cut each
strand separately, leaving about eighteen inches still attached. Then, with a
deft and practised gesture, he wound the spare wires into a neat dummy,
complete with belt. Then he passed it to her to hold. ‘The little doll is what
we call his signature. Every bomber has a signature. That’s his.’ She let him
take it from her hand. An extraordinary calm had descended over her, a lucidity
of feeling beyond anything she had known until now. Joseph had not slept with
her in order to send her away, but in the hope that he might hold her back. He
was suffering on her behalf all the fears and hesitations that should have been
her own. Yet she knew also that in this secret microcosm of existence they had
made for her, to turn back now was to turn back for ever. But a love that did
not advance could never renew itself. It could only slump into the pit of
mediocrity to which her other loves had consigned themselves since her life
with Joseph had begun. The fact that he wanted her to stop did not deter her.
To the contrary, it fortified her resolve. They were partners, they were
lovers, they were married to a common destiny, a common forward march. It was
early dawn and the sparrows were starting to sing.
Skipped.
It was
raining as the plane landed in Beirut, and she knew it was a hot rain, because
the heat of it came into the cabin while they were still circling and made her
scalp itch again from the dye she had put on her hair. Clutching her shoulder
bag to her chest, she shoved her way towards the immigration queue and
discovered to her surprise that she was smiling. Her East German passport, her
false appearance, which five hours ago at London airport had been matters of
life and death to her, were trivial in the atmosphere of restless, dangerous
urgency. ‘Miss Palme? Passport. Pass. Yes, please.’ Palme was her German name,
it was spoken by a small, happy Arab with a day’s growth of beard and curly
hair and immaculate, threadbare clothes. ‘Please’, he repeated, and plucked at
her sleeve. His jacket was open and he had a big silver automatic shoved into
the waistband. There were twenty people between herself and the immigration
officer, and Helga hadn’t said it would be like this at all. ‘Miss Palme,
come.’ She gave him her passport and he dived away with it into the crowd,
holding his arms wide for her to follow in his wake. ‘Our Captain will see you
soon’, he assured her tenderly. ‘He is making preparations. He is a great man.’
‘You will find them an easy people to love’, Joseph had told her.
Charlie
spent four nights and four days with the boys, and loved them singly and
collectively. They were the first of her several families. They moved her
constantly, like a treasure, always by dark, always with the greatest courtesy.
She had arrived so suddenly, they explained with charming regret. It was
necessary for our Captain to make certain preparations. They called her ‘Miss
Palme’, and perhaps they really thought that was her name. They returned her
love for them, yet they asked her nothing personal and nothing obtrusive. They
maintained in every sense a shy and disciplined reticence, which made her
curious to know the nature of the authority that governed them.
The nights
were eternal, yet no two minutes were the same. The very sounds were at odds
with one another, first lying off at a safe distance, then advancing, then
grouping, then falling upon each other in a skirmish of conflicting dins, a
burst of music, the scream of car tyres and sirens, followed by the deep
silence of a forest. In that orchestra, gunfire was a minor instrument: a
drumbeat here, a tattoo there, sometimes the slow whistle of a shell. Once she
heard peals of laughter, but human voices were few.
She
remembered afterwards four cars, but it could have been five, because it all
happened very fast, a zigzag of increasingly alarming journeys, mostly in
sand-coloured Volvo saloons, with aerials front and back and bodyguards who
didn’t speak. Eventually they drove into the forecourt of an old villa with boy
sentries with machine guns posing in silhouette on the roof like heroes in a
Russian movie. The sky was full of storms and smoking cloud, the valley
stretched below them in receding squares of light. They led her through a porch
and into the hall, and there, by the dimmest of overhead lamps, she saw a
brown, lopsided figure with a hank of straight black schoolboy hair and an
English-looking walking stick of natural ash to support his legs, and a wry
smile of welcome brightening his pitted face. ‘Miss Charlie, I am Captain Tayeh
and I greet you in the name of the revolution.’ ‘Fear will be a matter of
selection’, Joseph had warned her. ‘Unfortunately, no one can be frightened all
the time. But with Captain Tayeh, as he calls himself, you must do your best,
because Captain Tayeh is a clever man.’
She was
sitting where he had told her to sit, on the leather sofa, but Tayeh himself
was bumping relentlessly about the room on his stick, doing everything singly
while he shot her glances from different angles, getting the measure of her:
now the glasses, now a smile, now, with another smile, vodka. A boy sat either
end of the room, each with a machine gun across his knees. A pile of letters
lay strewn over the table, and she knew without looking that they were her own
letters to Michel. ‘They say you were much in love with your dead Palestinian.
Is that true?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘In the old days, if you had the courage, we would take
you with us into Palestine, over the border. Attack. Avenge. Come back.
Celebrate. We would go together. Helga says you want to fight. You want to
fight?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Anybody or just Zionists?’ He didn’t wait for an answer. ‘Why
kill yourself fighting for us?’ ‘For him’, she said. ‘Did he teach you to
hate?’ ‘He said hate was for Zionists. He said that to fight we must love. He
said anti-Semitism was a Christian invention.’ ‘We are going south’, Tayeh said
to her. ‘Maybe I believe you, maybe I don’t. Maybe it won’t matter too much.
The boys have clothes for you. ‘ It was not a car but a grimy white ambulance
with green crescents painted on the sides and a lot of red dust over the
bonnet, and a tousled boy in dark glasses at the wheel. Two more boys crouched
on the torn bunk beds in the back with their machine guns jammed uncomfortably
into the narrow space, but Charlie sat between Tayeh and the driver, wearing an
old hospital tunic and a headscarf. ‘South’, Tayeh had said. For how long? For
what? But there was an ethic about not asking questions, and her pride and her
instinct of survival required she conform with it. ‘From now on, the horse
knows the way’, Joseph had told her, ‘your job is to stay in the saddle.’
TAPE SEVEN
The old
prison was in the centre of town. It was the place, Tayeh had said cryptically,
where the innocent served their life sentences. To reach it, they had to park
in the main square and enter a maze of ancient passages open to the sky but
hung with plastic-covered slogans, which she at first mistook for washing. It
was the evening hour for trading, shops and stalls were full. A hostile man in
bowlegged trousers led the way. ‘I have explained to the Administrator that you
are a Western journalist’, Tayeh told her as he hobbled at her side. ‘His
manners towards you are not good, because he does not love those who come here
to improve their knowledge of zoology.’ The high gates stood open and gave on
to a bright-lit courtyard from which a stone staircase lifted to successive
balconies. ‘So who are they?’ Charlie whispered, still mystified. ‘What have
they done?’ ‘Nothing. That is their crime. They are the refugees who have taken
refuge from the refugee camps’, Tayeh replied. ‘The prison has thick walls and
was empty, so we took possession of it to protect them. Greet people solemnly’,
he added. ‘Do not smile too readily, or they will think you are laughing at
their misery.’ Charlie gazed around. I see this everyday, I’m a hardnosed
Western journalist describing deprivation to those who have everything and are
miserable. Fresh white paint, covering everything, gave an illusion of hygiene.
The cells on the ground floor were arched. Their doors stood open as if for
hospitality, the figures inside them appeared at first motionless. Even the
children moved with great economy. Clotheslines hung before every cell, and
their symmetry suggested the competitive pride of village life. The smell was
of coffee, open drains, and wash-day.
They
climbed a marble staircase, and were soon advancing into the very centre of the
prison. She glanced at Tayeh, but he did not want to look at her. They entered
a former staffroom or canteen. At the centre stood a plastic-covered
examination table and, on a new trolley, medicines, swab buckets, and syringes.
A man and a woman were ministering. The woman, dressed in black, was swabbing a
baby’s eyes with cotton wool. Waiting mothers sat patiently along the wall
while their babies dozed or fretted. The woman lifted her eyes to him, then to
Charlie, and they remained on her, full of meaning and question. She said
something to the child’s mother and handed back the baby. She went to the
handbasin and methodically washed her hands while she examined Charlie in the
mirror. ‘Follow us’, Tayeh told her, and they walked silently to an empty room
further along the corridor. ‘You know who she is? You recognise something
familiar in the face? Look hard.’ Charlie did not need to. ‘Fatmeh’, she said.
‘She has returned to Sidon to be among her people. She speaks no English but
she knows who you are. When you speak to her, please do not sentimentalise. She
has lost three brothers and a sister already, she knows how it is done.’ Very
calmly, Fatmeh began speaking. When she stopped, Tayeh interpreted. ‘She wishes
to hear about how Michel spoke of his family and of Palestine. Don’t fabricate,
she has a good instinct.’ Tayeh’s manner was no longer careless. Leaving the
table where he had perched, he began a slow tour of the room, now interpreting,
now throwing in his own subsidiary questions. Charlie spoke directly ahead of
her, from the heart, from her wounded memory. She was an impostor to nobody,
not even to herself. The girl kept her eyes all the time on Charlie’s face,
watching it, listening to it, questioning it. ‘She asks, what did Michel say of
her?’ ‘He said Fatmeh was the model I should try to copy.’ ‘She asks, who
should Michel try to copy?’ ‘Khalil, his great brother, the fighter. One day he
would be as great a hero as Khalil, killing many Zionists.’ Fatmeh stared at
her, then at Tayeh, then she spoke to him angrily, tilting her head towards
Charlie. ‘She says to tell you that her small brother had a big mouth, and God
was wise to close it when he did’, said Tayeh, and beckoning to the boys, he
limped quickly ahead of her down the stairs. But Fatmeh put a hand on Charlie’s
arm and held her back, then yet again stared at her with a friend but friendly
curiosity. Side by side, the two women returned along the corridor. At the door
to the clinic, Fatmeh again studied her, this time with undisguised
bewilderment. Then she kissed Charlie on the cheek. The last Charlie saw of
her, she had recovered the baby and was once more swabbing its eyes, and if
Tayeh hadn’t been calling her to make haste, she would have stayed and helped
Fatmeh for the rest of her life.
‘You must
wait’, Tayeh told her as he drove her to the camp. ‘We were not expecting you,
after all. We did not invite you.’ She thought at first that he had brought her
to a village, for the terraces of white huts that clambered down the hillside
looked quite attractive enough in the headlights. But as the drive continued,
the scale of the place began to reveal itself, and by the time they had reached
the crest, she was in a makeshift town built for thousands, not hundreds. A
grizzled, dignified man received them, but it was Tayeh on whom he lavished his
warmth. He addressed Charlie as ‘Comrade Leila’, Which was how Tayeh had
announced her.
There is a
terrible, yet pastoral peace that comes from living for a long time among
life’s real victims. In the camp, Charlie experienced at last the sympathy that
life till now had denied her. Waiting, she joined the ranks of those who had
waited all their lives. Sharing their captivity, she dreamed that she had
extricated herself from her own. Loving them, she imagined that she was
receiving their forgiveness for the many duplicities that had brought her here.
No sentries were assigned to her, and on her first morning, as soon as she woke,
she set to work cautiously probing the limits of her freedom. There seemed to
be none. She walked the perimeter of the playing fields and watched small boys
with hunched shoulders straining bitterly to achieve the physique of manhood.
Soon Charlie’s hut was full of children from dawn to dusk, some to speak
English with her, some to teach her to dance and sing their songs, and some to
hold her hand and march up and down the street with her, for the prestige of
being in her company. As to their mothers, they brought her so many sugar
biscuits and cheese pies that she could have held out here for ever, which was
what she wanted to do.
The great
demonstration took place three days later, starting on the playing field in the
middle of the morning heat and progressing slowly round the camp, through
streets overflowing with crowds and emblazoned with hand-embroidered banners
that would have been the pride of any English Women’s Institute. Charlie was
standing on the doorstep of her hut holding up a little girl who was too young
to march, and the air attack began a couple of minutes after the model of
Jerusalem had been carried past her shoulder-high by half a dozen kids. First
came Jerusalem, represented by the Mosque of Omar done in gold paper and sea
shells. Then, like a continuation of the festivities, came the jolly little
tattoo of cannon fire from the hillside. But no one screamed or started to move
away. Not yet. Until then, Charlie had not really thought about aircraft at
all. She had noticed a couple, high up, and admired their white plumes as they
lazily circled the blue sky. But it had not occurred to her, in her ignorance,
that the Palestinians might possess no planes, or that the Israeli Air Force
might take exception to fervent claims to their territory made within walking
distance of their border. The first bomb, when it struck, was almost an
anti-climax: if you hear it, you’re still alive. She saw its flash a quarter of
a mile away on the hillside, then a black onion of smoke as the noise and blast
swept over her at the same time. ‘When they want to hit us, they hit us’, one
girl told Charlie. ‘Today they are playing with us. You must have brought us
luck.’ The significance of that suggestion was too much for Charlie, and she
rejected it outright. The second bomb fell and it seemed farther away, or
perhaps she was less impressionable. It could fall anywhere it liked except in
these packed alleys, with their columns of patient children waiting like tiny,
doomed sentries for the lava to roll down the mountain. The band struck up,
much louder than before. The procession started, twice as brilliant. The band
was playing a marching song and the crowd was clapping to it. Unfreezing her
hands, Charlie set down her little girl and started too. The planes returned
two hours later, just before dark, when she was back in her hut. The siren
started too late and she was still running for the shelters as the first wave
came in, two of them, straight out of an air display, deafening the crowd with
their engines. Will they ever pull out of the dive? They did, and the blast of
their first bomb threw her against the steel door, though the noise was not as
bad as the earthquake that accompanied it, and the hysterical swimming-pool
screams that filled the black, rank smoke on the other side of the playing
field. The thud of her body alerted someone inside, the door opened, and strong
women’s hands pulled her into the darkness and forced her onto a wooden bench.
At first she was stone deaf, but gradually she heard the whimpering of
terrified children, and the steadier but fervent voices of their mothers.
Another pair of planes followed - or was it the first pair making a second run?
– and a stick of bombs approached in careful crescendo. She felt the first two
like blows on her body – no, not again, not again, oh please! The third was the
loudest and killed her outright, the fourth and fifth told her she was alive,
after all.
Charlie was
not alone in watching the time pass and her life unfold before her eyes. From
the moment she had crossed the line, Litvak, Kurtz, and Becker, her whole
former family, in fact, had been forced, in one way and another, to harness
their impatience to the alien and desultory tempo of their adversaries. ‘There
is nothing so hard in war’, Kurtz liked to quote to his subordinates, and
assuredly to himself as well, ‘as the heroic feat of holding back.’ Kurtz was
holding back as never before in his career. Reluctant to leave Jerusalem even
for a night while these intrigues continued, he consigned Litvak to the
European shuttle as his emissary charged with strengthening and recasting the
surveillance team, and to prepare by all possible means for what they all
prayed would be the final phase. The carefree days of Munich, when a couple of
boys on double shift could meet their needs, were over for good. To maintain a
full-time watch on the heavenly trio of Mesterbein, Helga, and Rossino, whole
platoons of fieldsmen had to be levied, all German-speakers and many of them
rusty from disuse. Litvak’s suspicion of non-Israeli Jews only added to the
headache. On Kurtz’s orders, Litvak also flew to Frankfurt for a clandestine
meeting with Doctor Alexis at the airport. The reason was this: Kurtz’s team
had uncovered one tantalizing clue, a picture postcard addressed to Helga under
one of her many other aliases. Handwriting unfamiliar, postmark the seventh
district of Paris. Intercepted by the German post office, on orders from
Cologne. The text, in English, ran: ‘ Poor Uncle Frei will be operated on next
month as planned. But at least that is convenient because you can use V.’s
house. See you there. Love, K.’ Frei spelled f-r-e-i. Three days later the same
dragnet pulled in a second letter in the same hand, sent to another of Helga’s
safe addresses, the postmark this time Stockholm. The text was brief: ‘Frei
appendectomy room 251 at 18.00 hours 24th.’ and the signature was
‘M.’, which told the analysts only that there must have been a missing
communication in between. Postcard L., despite everyone’s efforts, was never
found. Instead, two of Litvak’s girls picked up a letter posted by the quarry
itself, in this case Helga, to none other than Anton Mesterbein in Geneva. It
was an eight-page scrawl of gushing schoolgirl passion. It was frank, it
praised Mesterbein’s sexual powers. It raged about the Zionist bombings of
Lebanon and spoke of the Isrealis’ ‘Final Solution’ for the Palestinians. But
it had a postscript, one line, heavily underscored, and backed with exclamation
marks. A strutting, teasing pun, personal to both of them, yet, like other
parting words, containing perhaps the purpose of the whole discourse up to this
point. And it was in French. Attention! On va épater les ‘Bourgeois!
The analysts froze at the sight of it. Why the capital ‘B’ for ‘bourgeois’? Why
the underlining? Was Helga’s education so poor that she applied her native
German usage to French nouns? And why the apostrophe, so carefully added above
and to the left of the word ‘bourgeois’? While the cryptologists and analysts
sweated blood to break the code, while the computers shuddered and creaked and
sobbed out impossible permutations, it was the uncomplicated Rachel, none
other, who sailed straight for the obvious conclusion. Rachel was originally
English and North Country, she did crosswords in her spare time and dreamed of
winning a free car. ‘Uncle Frei’ was one half, she declared simply, and
‘Bourgeois’ was the other. The ‘Freibourgeois’ were the people of Freiburg, and
they were to be shocked – épatés – by an ‘operation’ that would take
place at six in the evening of the twenty-fourth. Room 251? ‘Well, we’d have to
enquire, wouldn’t we?’ she told the bemused experts. ‘Yes’, they agreed, ‘we
would.’
Then one
afternoon in the middle of all this, almost as if their energies, applied at
one spot, had forced the truth in the open at another, Rossino, the murderous
Italian, took a plane from Vienna to Basel, where he rented a motorbike.
Crossing the border into Germany, he drove forty minutes to the ancient
cathedral city of Freiburg-im-Breisgau, once the capital of the state of Baden.
There, he presented himself to the university’s Rektorat and enquired
courteously about a course of lectures on humanist subjects that was available,
on a limited basis, to members of the public. And more covertly, where room 251
was situated on the university’s diagram of its premises. It was a dart of
light through the fog. Rachel was right, Kurtz was right, God was just. The
market forces had found their natural solution. Only Gadi Becker did not share
the general elation.
Hiring a
car, Becker drove first to Tel Aviv, where, having transacted some pessimistic
business with his bank manager, he visited the old cemetery where his father
was buried. From Tel Aviv he headed south-east to Hebron or, as Michel would
have called it, El Khalil. From Hebron, it seems, Becker drove northward up the
Jordan Valley to Beit She’an, an Arab town resettled by the Jews when it was
left empty in the war of ‘48. He surfaced next at Metulla, on the very northern
border with Lebanon. Metulla in those days was also the natural terminus for
courier lines running up to Beirut, and Gavron’s service, or Kurtz’s,
maintained a discreet section there to administer its agents in transit. The
great Becker presented himself in the early evening, leafed through the
section’s logbook, asked some desultory questions about the location of United
Nations forces, left again. Looking troubled, the section commander said. ‘So
what the devil was Gadi looking for?’ Kurtz asked of the commander when he
heard this. But the commander could offer no further theories. Troubled, he
repeated. The way agents look sometimes when they come in from a long run.
Having heard this, Kurtz cut short Becker’s leave and put him back to work.
‘Find out about Freiburg’, he told him. ‘Comb the libraries, the records. Find
out who we know there, get the layout of the university. Get architects’
drawings and town plans. Work out everything we need and double it. By
yesterday.’
It was the end of the line. It was the worst place of all Charlie’s
lives this far, a place to forget even while she was there, her bloody boarding
school with rapists added, a forum stuck out in the desert and played with life
ammunition. The battered dream of Palestine lay five hours’ back-breaking drive
behind the hills, and in place of it they had this tatty little fort, like a
film set for a Beau Geste remake, with yellow stone battlements and a
stone staircase and half its side bombed out.
Their social centre was the small-arms range, which was an old barrack
hut with the windows blocked and a line of electric light-bulbs rigged from the
steel beams, and leaking sand bags round the walls. The targets were brutish
man-sized effigies of American marines, with painted grimaces and fixed
bayonets and rolls of sticky brown paper at their feet to patch up their bullet
holes after you had shot them. For living quarters, they had three long huts,
one with cubicles for women, one without cubicles for men, and a third with a
so-called library for the training staff. ‘And if they invite you to the
library,’ said a tall Swedish girl, ‘don’t expect too much in the way of
reading.’
Their guards were a new kind of Arab that she hadn’t met till now and
didn’t need to meet again: strutting, near-silent cowboys whose game was
humiliating Westerners. They postured on the perimeters of the fort and rode
six up in jeeps at breakneck speed. Some were so young Charlie wondered their
feet could reach the pedals.
All the trainers were men, and for morning prayers they ranged
themselves before the comrade students like a rabble army while one of them
read an aggressive condemnation of the day’s arch-enemy: Zionism, Egyptian
treachery, European capitalist exploitation, Zionism again, and a new one to Charlie
called Christian expansionism, but that was because it was Christmas Day, a
feast celebrated by determined official neglect.
All comrades to use their Arab names at all times. No drugs, no nudity,
no swearing by God, no private conversations, no alcohol, no cohabitation for
men and women, no masturbation. Lingua franca for political discussion? O-level
English, with a bit of French here and there, and if Charlie ever got home
alive she swore in her secret heart that she would dine out on those cretinous
midnight exchanges on such subjects as the ‘Dawn of the Revolution’ for the
rest of her unnatural life. Meanwhile, she laughed at nothing. ‘You will treat
everybody and everything with a great and lonely seriousness’, Joseph had told
her, himself as lonely and serious as he could wish her to be. ‘You will be
aloof, maybe a little crazy, they are used to that. You will ask no questions,
you will be private to yourself, day and night.’
‘Day and night’, Joseph had said. Day and night, therefore, she strove,
for Michel, for her own mad sanity, for Palestine, for Fatmeh and for the
bombed children in the Sidon prison, driving herself outward in order to escape
the chaos inside, gathering together the elements of her assumed character as
never before, welding them into a single combative identity. I am a grieving, outraged widow and I have come
here to take up my lover’s fight. I am the awakened militant who has wasted too
long on half measures and now stands before you sword in hand. I have put my
hand on the Palestinian heart, I am pledged to lift the world up by its ears to
make it listen. I am on fire but I am cunning and resourceful. I am the sleepy
wasp that can wait all winter long to sting. I am Comrade Leila, a citizen of
the world revolution. Fly me. Day and night.
She played this part to its limit, from the angry snap with which she
performed her unarmed combat to the unyielding glower with which she regarded
her own face in the mirror as she savagely brushed out her long hair. She was
dedicated but she was apart. Gradually, she felt them defer to her. The men,
even the Syrian militia, ceased to proposition her indiscriminately, the women
gave up their suspicion of her striking looks, the weaker comrades started
timidly to gather to her, and the strong to acknowledge her as an equal. ‘There
is only one logic, Charlie,’ Joseph had said, ‘you. There can be only one
survivor: you. One person you can trust: you.’
Then the evening came, without warning, when Tayeh summoned her. ‘We
have a mission for you. Get your possessions and return here immediately. Your
training is complete.’
Professor Minkel lived on the eighth floor of a new tower block close to
the Hebrew University, one of a great cluster on the skyline which have caused
pain to Jerusalem’s luckless conservationists. The lift engineers were on
strike, so Kurtz was obliged to take the staircase, but nothing could have
dampened his good spirits. The door number 8D had a steel-plated eyehole and
locks all the way down one side of it, and Mrs Minkel undid them one by one
like boot buttons, calling ‘Just one moment, please’ while she got lower and
lower. He stepped inside and waited while she patiently replaced them. ‘Hansi
is expecting you’, she informed him with a certain guardedness as she gave him her
hand. ‘Welcome. Please.’ She opened the door to a tiny study and there her
Hansi sat. With a warning glance at her husband from the doorway, Mrs Minkel
reluctantly withdrew.
‘Professor, I understand that our mutual friend, Ruthie Zadir, spoke to
you only yesterday’, Kurtz began, with a bedside respectfulness. ‘Ruth was one
of my best students’, the Professor observed, with an air of loss. ‘She is
surely one of ours too’, said Kurtz, more expansively. ‘Professor, are you
aware, please, of the nature of the work in which Ruthie is now engaged?’ ‘If
your visit here concerns the political leanings, sympathies, of present or
former students under my charge, I regret that I am unable to collaborate with
you.’ ‘Professor, may I take it that your forthcoming lecture at the university
of Freiburg touches upon this same issue of individual rights? The Arabs, their
basic liberties, isn’t that your subject on the twenty-fourth?’ Minkel’s wife
returned with a tray of homemade cakes. ‘Is he asking you to inform on your students?’
she demanded. ‘If he’s asking, tell him no. Then when you’ve said no, say no
again, until he hears.’ ‘Mrs Minkel, I surely am asking your husband no such
thing’, said Kurtz, quite unperturbed. But Mrs Minkel still had a wealth to
say. Finally, however, she stopped, and when she had done so, Kurtz asked her
whether she too would not sit down and listen to what he had come to talk
about. Kurtz picked up his words very carefully, very kindly. What he had to
say was about as secret as a secret could be, he said. Not even Ruthie Zadir, a
fine officer, handling many secrets every day, not even Ruthie was aware of it,
he said. Which was not true, but never mind. He had intruded here solely in
order to discuss the Professor’s forthcoming lecture in Freiburg, which had
caught the attention of certain extremely negative elements. ‘So here’s the sad
fact’, he said, and drew a long breath. ‘If some of those Palestinians, whose
rights you have both been so bravely defending, have their way, you will make
no speech at all on the twenty-fourth of this month in Freiburg. In fact,
Professor, you will never make a speech again.’
Chapter
twenty-four
Charlie flew into Freiburg in early evening. Storm flares lined the
runway and blazed before her like the path of her own purpose. Her mind, as she
had desperately prepared it, was an assembly of her old frustrations, matured
and turned upon the rotten world. Now she knew there was not a shred of good in
it, now she had seen the agony that was the price of Western affluence. I have
no life but this one. I have no love but Michel and no loyalty except to the
great Khalil.
An out-of-date Christmas tree stood in the arrivals hall and there was
an air of family bustle and everybody going home. Queuing with the South African
passport which Tayeh had given her, Charlie studied the photographs of wanted
women terrorists and had a premonition that she was about to see her own. She
passed through immigration without a blink, she passed through green. The
electric doors opened, a swirl of snow hit her face. Pulling up her coat
collar, she hurried across the broad pavement towards the car park. ‘Fourth
floor’, Tayeh had said, ‘far left corner, and look out for a VW with a fox tail
on the radio aerial.’
‘I’m Saul. What’s your name, honey?’ said a man’s voice close to her, in
soft American. ‘Imogen’, she replied, because Saul was the name Tayeh had told
her to expect. Saul opened the passenger door for her. ‘And fix your seat belt,
honey’, he said as he got in beside her. ‘They got laws in this country, okay?
Where you been, Imogen? Where’d you get your suntan?’ But little widows bent on
murder do not engage strangers in small talk. With a shrug, Saul switched on
the radio and listened to the news in German. The snow made everything beautiful,
and the traffic cautious. They drove down the helter-skelter and joined a
ribbon-built dual carriageway. Fat flakes raced into their headlights. As each
beautiful thing went by, she cast her heart after it, trying to attach to it
and slow it down. But nothing stayed, nothing left an imprint on her mind, the
images around her were like breath on polished glass. Occasionally a car
overtook them. Once a motorbike raced by and she thought she recognized
Dimitri’s retreating back, but he was beyond the range of their headlights
before she could be certain. Now Charlie began to make out a blackened old
house with high chimney stacks, and for a second it reminded her of the house
in Athens. Frenzy, is that the word? Stopping the car, Saul dipped his headlights
twice. From what seemed to be the centre of the house, a hand-torch winked in
return. ‘Far as we go, honey. It was a great conversation. Peace, okay?’
Suitcase in hand, she selected a rut in the snow and started walking towards
the house with only the snow’s pallor and the strips of moonlight through the
trees to show her the way. The next moment, a soft strong body had emerged from
the darkness of the porch to enfold her own, only slightly hampered with an
automatic pistol. Seized by a flood of ridiculous gratitude, Charlie returned
Helga’s embrace. ‘Helg, Christ, it’s you, great!’
By the light of her torch, Helga guided her across a marble-floored hall
of which half the stones had already been removed, then cautiously up a sagging
wooden staircase with no banister. Charlie looked swiftly round her. She was in
a large attic. On the raised floor, two water beds were laid side by side. On
one, naked to the waist and lower, reclined the dark Italian with a tattered
coverlet across his thighs. The broken-down parts of a Walther automatic lay
around him while he cleaned them. ‘And here we have the energetic Mario
Rossino’, Helga announced with sarcastic pride, prodding his genitals with her
toe. ‘Mario, you are completely shameless, you know that? Cover yourself
immediately and greet our guest. I order you!’
Like a scream in church, a phone rang, the more alarming because it had
never crossed Charlie’s mind they might possess one. Helga lifted the earpiece
and answered it with a curt ‘Yes?’ and then listened, without a nod or a smile,
for perhaps two minutes, before ringing off. ‘The Minkels have changed their
plans’, she announced. ‘They are spending tonight in Tübingen, where they have
friends in the faculty. They have four large suitcases, many small pieces, and
a briefcase. The briefcase is black, it has simple hinges. The location of the
lecture is also changed. The police are not suspicious, but they are nervous.
They are taking what they call “sensible precautions”. For Imogen, nothing is
changed. Her orders are the same. It is her first action. She will be the
complete star. No, Charlie?’
‘Follow them wherever they lead you’, Joseph had said. ‘If they tell you
to kill, then kill. It will be our responsibility, not yours.’ ‘Where will you
be?’ ‘Close.’
The team’s operations room in Freiburg city centre was a hastily rented
ground-floor office in a busy main street. It was early morning. ‘She’s
panicked’, Litvak announced suddenly to Becker’s back. ‘She’s gone over.’
Puzzled, Becker turned and glanced at him. ‘Part of her has gone over, part has
stayed’, he replied calmly. ‘That is what we asked of her.’ ‘She’s gone over’,
Litvak repeated, rising on the swell of his own provocation. ‘It’s happened
with agents before, it’s happening now. I saw her at the airport, you didn’t.
She looks like a ghost, I tell you!’ ‘If she looks like a ghost, that’s how she
wants to look’, said Becker, still majestically unruffled. ‘She’s an actress,
she’ll see it through, don’t worry.’ ‘So what’s her motivation? She’s not Jewish.
She’s not anything. She’s theirs. Forget her.’ Hearing Kurtz stir beneath his
blanket, Litvak lifted his voice still higher to include him. ‘If she’s ours
still, why doesn’t she try to contact us? Week on week among that rabble and
she doesn’t even write us a note when she comes out again? What kind of agent
is that, who is so loyal to us?’ ‘Maybe she has nothing to say’, Becker
answered. From the shallows of his sparse camp bed, Kurtz offered drowsy
consolation. ‘Germany makes you jumpy, Shimon. Ease off. What does it matter
who she belongs to so long as she keeps showing us the way?’ But the effect of
Kurtz’s words was the opposite of their intention. ‘And if she breaks down,
confesses? If she tells them the whole story, Mykonos till here, does she still
show us the way?’ He seemed set upon collision, nothing else would satisfy him.
‘He’s somewhere out there. In a hotel, an apartment, in a doss house. He must
be. Seal off the town. Roads, the railway. Buses. Have Alexis put a cordon
round. Search every house till we find him.’ Kurtz tried a kindly little
humour: ‘Shimon, Germany is not the West Bank.’ But Becker, interested at last,
seemed anxious to pursue the argument. ‘And when we have found him?’ he said,
as if he hadn’t quite got his mind around Litvak’s plan. ‘What do we do then,
Shimon?’ ‘Then we find him! Kill him! The operation’s over!’ ‘And who kills
Charlie? Us or them?’
The hotel had been built in the sixties, when the catering industry
still believed in large, milling lobbies with soothing illuminated fountains
and gold watches under glass. A wide double staircase rose to a mezzanine, and
from the balcony table where they sat, Charlie and Rossino had a view of both
the main door and the reception. ‘And His Holiness the Pope plans a tour of all
fascist South American states’, Rossino announced from behind his newspaper as
she stood up. ‘Maybe this time they finish him off. Where are you going,
Imogen?’ ‘To piss.’ ‘What’s the matter? Nervous?’
The women’s room had fluttering pink lights over the handbasins and soft
music to drown the whirr of the ventilators. Rachel was putting on her eye
shadow. Brushing past her, Charlie pressed the scribbled message into Rachel’s
waiting hand. She cleaned up and returned to Rossino’s table. ‘The Minkels should
be here any moment.’ ‘Why don’t we just shoot the bastard and be done with it?’
Charlie whispered, with a sudden welling up of fear and hatred as she once more
fixed her gaze upon the entrance.
A blue Peugeot taxi had pulled up on the other side of the glass doors.
A grey-haired woman was scrambling out. She was followed by a tall,
distinguished-looking man with a slow and ceremonious walk. ‘Watch the little
pieces, I’ll watch the big ones’, Rossino told her as he relit his cigar. The
driver was unlocking the boot. Franz, the chasseur, was standing behind him
with his trolley. First came two matching suitcases in brown nylon, now an old
leather suitcase, much bigger, followed by yet another suitcase. Mrs Minkel
picked up the briefcase. ‘Shit’, said Charlie. ‘Wait’, said Rossino. She
waited. ‘Go’, said Rossino, ‘now.’ Laden with parcels, Minkel followed his wife
through the sliding doors to the reception desk. The stairs were hitting
Charlie’s heels, her damp hand was sticking on the wide banister. Minkel was
stooped over the counter, filling in his form. The briefcase stood on the floor
beside his left foot. Charlie cleared her throat, acting shy, which was no
hardship. Now.
‘Professor Minkel?’ she said. He had grey troubled eyes and looked even
more embarrassed than Charlie was. It was suddenly like supporting a bad actor.
‘I am Professor Minkel’, he conceded, as if he were not quite sure. ‘Yes. I am
he. Why?’ The sheer badness of his performance gave her strength. She took a
deep breath, and made her best shot at a South African accent. ‘Professor, my
name is Imogen Baastrup from Johannesburg and I’m a graduate in social studies
from Wits University’, she said, all of a rush. ‘I had the great good fortune
to hear your centenary lecture last year on minority rights in racially
determined societies. That was a fine lecture. It changed my life, in fact. I
meant to write to you but never got around to it. Do you mind, please, if I
shake your hand?’ She practically had to take it from him. He stared foolishly at
his wife, but she had the better talent and was at least giving Charlie a
smile. Taking his cue from her, Minkel smiled too, if wanly, and gave his hand.
Rossino was heading briskly for the main entrance, Minkel’s briefcase mostly
hidden by the smart black raincoat over his arm. With a last bashful effusion
of thanks and apologies, Charlie went out after him, careful to show no sign of
haste. As she reached the glass doors, she was in time to see the reflected
image of the Minkels peering helplessly round them, trying to remember who had
it last and where. Stepping between the parked taxis, Charlie reached the hotel
car park, where Helga sat waiting in a green Citroën. Charlie got in beside
her. She gulped, she put her knuckles in her mouth and her head on Helga’s
shoulder, and broke into helpless, glorious mirth. ‘I was incredible, Helg! You
should have seen me, Jesus!’
In the operations room, Litvak sat over the radio, Becker and Kurtz
stood behind him. Litvak seemed frightened of himself, muted and pale. He wore
a headset with one earpiece, and a throat-pad microphone. ‘Rossino has taken a
cab to the station’, Litvak said. ‘He has the briefcase with him. He’s gonna
collect his bike.’ ‘I don’t want him followed’, Becker said across Litvak’s
back to Kurtz. Litvak tore off his throat pad and acted as though he couldn’t
believe his ears. ‘Not followed? We’ve got six men round that bike. The
briefcase takes us to our man!’ He swung to Kurtz, appealing for his support.
‘Gadi?’ said Kurtz. ‘He’ll use cut-outs’, Becker said. ‘Rossino will take it so
far, hand it over, somebody else will take it on the next stage. There’s not a
surveillance team in the world that could survive that without being
recognized.’ ‘And your special interest, Gadi?’ Kurtz enquired. ‘Helga will
stay on Charlie all day long. Khalil will phone her at agreed intervals and
places. If Khalil smells a rat, he’ll order Helga to kill her. If he doesn’t
call for two hours, three hours, whatever their arrangement is, Helga will kill
her anyway.’ Kurtz was looking at Becker. His regard was respectful, even
tender. He was an old coach whose favourite athlete had finally found his form.
‘Gadi has won the day, Shimon’, he said, his gaze still upon Becker. ‘Call off
your kids. Tell them to rest up till evening.’
TAPE
EIGHT
She was on the hilltop, walking. On the whole hilltop, not a soul, just
the distant van parked high on the kerb. Snow lay over the fields and snow flew
in her face. The road was a black river drawn across the moon. The van came
nearer. Fifty yards beyond it, under the next lamp, she made out a tint café,
and beyond the café again nothing but the bare snow plateau and the straight,
pointless road to nowhere. What had possessed anybody to put a café in such a
godless spot was a riddle for another life.
She opened the van door as she had been told and got in. It was the
quietest place in the world. She waited. A tall man in a peaked cap stepped out
of the café, sniffed the air, then peered up and down the street, uncertain
what time of day it was. He returned to the café, came out again, walked slowly
towards her until he came alongside. He tapped on Charlie’s window with the
fingertips of one gloved hand. A leather glove, hard and shiny. A bright torch
shone on her, blacking him off from her completely. The torch went out, her
door opened, one hand closed on her wrist and hauled her straight out of the
car. She was standing face to face with him, and he was taller than she was by
a foot, broad and square to her. But his face was in black shadow under the
peak of his cap, and he had turned his collar up against the cold. ‘Stand very
still’, he ordered. Unslinging her shoulder bag, he first felt the weight of
it, then opened it and looked inside. Her little clock radio received careful
attention. He switched it on. It played. He switched it off, fiddled with it,
and slipped something into his pocket. For a second she thought he had decided
to keep the radio for himself. But he hadn’t after all, for she saw him drop it
back into the bag, and the bag into the van. Then, like a deportment instructor
correcting her posture, he put the tips of a gloved hand on each of her
shoulders, straightening her up. His dark gaze was on her face all the time.
Letting his right arm dangle, he began lightly touching her body with the flat
of his left hand. Dropping into a crouch, he explored her hips and legs and the
inside of her thighs with the same minute attention as the rest of her, still
only with his left hand. His face, as much as she could see of it, reminded her
of Joseph’s, not in its features but in its intentness, in the drawn-back
corners of his fighter’s eyes, which kept a constant watch on the van’s three
mirrors, as well as on herself.
They were heading back towards the city. Its glow made a pink wall under
the heavy evening cloud. They descended a hill and arrived in a flat, sprawling
valley suddenly without form. They entered a concrete forecourt. He stopped the
van but did not switch off the engine. ‘Hotel garni Eden’, she read, in
red neon letters, and above the garish doorway: ‘Willkommen! Bienvenue!
Welcome!’. As he handed her her shoulder bag, she noticed again the
stillness of his gloved right hand. ‘Room five, fourth floor. The stairs, not
the elevator. Go well.’ The van’s engine was still running. He watched her
across the forecourt to the lighted entrance. The staircase was narrow and
twisting, the carpet worn to the thread. The stairs were steep, and she walked
slowly. She knocked on the door, it opened and her first thought was: Oh Christ,
typical, I’ve mucked it up; because the man who stood before her was the man
who had just driven here in the van, minus his hat and left glove. He must have
taken the lift while she climbed the stairs. And then she realized who he was:
Khalil.
Chapter
twenty-five
Michel full-grown, with Joseph’s abstinence and grace and Tayeh’s
unbothered absolutism. He was everything she had imagined when she was trying
to turn him into somebody she was looking forward to. He was broad-shouldered
and sculptured, with the rarity of a precious object kept from sight. He could
not have walked into a restaurant without the talk dying round him, or walked
out of it without leaving a kind of relief in his wake. He was a man of the
outdoors condemned to hiding in a small room, with the pallor of the dungeon in
his complexion. About the only thing in the room apart from the bed was the
briefcase. It was lying on the washstand, empty, its black mouth turned towards
her like a jaw. It was the one she had helped steal from Professor Minkel, back
in that big hotel with the mezzanine, when she was too young to know any
better. He had drawn the curtains and put on the bedside light. There was no
chair for her so she sat on the bed. He was fishing out a succession of small
packages from a box with his left hand and unwrapping them one by one while he
used his right to hold them down. Desperate to concentrate on something,
Charlie tried to commit the whole lot to memory, then gave up: two new
supermarket torch batteries in a single pack, one detonator of the type she had
used at the fort for training, with red wires sprouting from the crimped end.
Penknife. Pliers. Screwdriver. Soldering iron. A coil of fine red wire, steel
staples, copper thread, insulating tape, a torch bulb, assorted lengths of
wooden dowelling. And a rectangular piece of softwood as a base for the device.
Taking the soldering iron to the handbasin, Khalil plugged it into a nearby
power point, causing a smell of burning dust.
‘You are nervous?’ he asked her. ‘Yes.’ ‘It’s natural. Are you nervous
in the theatre?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘It is the same. Terror is theatre. We inspire, we
frighten, we awaken indignation, anger, love. We enlighten. The theatre also.
The guerrilla is the great actor of the world.’ ‘Michel wrote me that too. It’s
in his letters.’ ‘But I told it to him. It was my idea.’ Observing him from so
near, she noticed a patch of creased white skin where the cheek and lower ear
seemed to have been melted together and cooled again.
‘Pay attention.’ Sitting beside her on the bed, he picked up the wood
base and with a ballpoint pen briskly drew some lines on it for the circuit.
‘What we make is a bomb for all occasions. It works as a timer, here, also as a
booby trap, here. Trust nothing. That is our philosophy.’ Handing her a
clothespeg and two drawing-pins, he watched while she pushed the pins into
either side of the peg’s mouth. She gave him back the clothespeg, he took it to
the handbasin and set to work soldering wires to the heads of the two
drawing-pins. From his pocket, Khalil had pulled a folded handkerchief, and
from the centre of the handkerchief a cheap pocket watch with the glass and
hour hand removed. Setting it beside the explosive, he took up the red circuit
wire and unwound it. She had the base-board on her lap. He took it from her,
then grasped her hand and placed it so that she could hold the staples while he
lightly tapped them home, fixing the red wire to the board according to the
pattern he had drawn. Next, returning to the basin, he soldered the wires to
the battery while she cut up lengths of insulating tape for him with the
scissors.
‘Was my brother religious with you?’ ‘He was an atheist.’ ‘Sometimes he
was an atheist, sometimes he was religious. Other times he was a silly little
boy, too much with women and ideas and cars. Tayeh says you were modest at the
camp. No Cuban boys, no Germans, nobody.’ ‘I wanted Michel. That’s all I
wanted, Michel’, she said, too emphatically to her own ear. But when she
glanced at him she could not help wondering whether their brotherly love had
been quite as infallible as Michel had proclaimed, for his face had set into a
scowl of doubt. ‘Tayeh is a great man’, he said, implying perhaps that Michel
was not. The bulb lit. ‘The circuit is good’, he announced and , reaching
gently past her, picked up the three sticks of explosive. Handing her the
detonator, he looked on approvingly while she attached it the circuit. When she
had finished, he took what wire remained and, with a deft, almost unconscious
movement, wound it like wool round the tips of his dead fingers until he had
made a little dummy, then wound two
strands horizontally for a belt. ‘You know what Michel wrote to me before he
died? In his last letter?’ ‘No, Khalil, I do not know.’ ‘Posted only hours
before his death? “I love her. She is not like the others. It is true that when
I first met her she had the paralysed conscience of a European, also she was a
whore. But now she is an Arab in her soul and one day I shall show her to our
people and to you.”’
There remained the booby trap, and for this they had to work in still
closer intimacy, for he required her to loop a length of steel wire through the
fabric of the lid, then he himself held the lid as low as possible while her
small hands led the wire to the dowelling in the clothespeg. Gingerly now, he
took the whole contraption to the basin once more, and, with his back to her,
refitted the hinge-pins with a blob of solder for each side. They had passed
the point of no return.
He handed her the briefcase, then began swiftly gathering up his tools
and packing them in the box. She walked ahead of him down the stairs. Exit one
tart, carrying her little box of tricks. The van stood in the forecourt still,
but he strode past it as if he had never seen it in his life and climbed into a
farmer’s Ford, a diesel with bales of straw strapped to the roof. She got in
beside him. Hills again. Pine trees laden on one side with fresh wet snow.
Instructions, Joseph-style. ‘Charlie, do you understand?’ ‘Yes, Khalil, I
understand.’ ‘Then repeat it to me.’ She did. ‘It is for peace, remember that.’
‘I will, Khalil.’ For peace, she thought; for Michel, for Palestine, for Joseph
and Khalil, for Marty and the revolution and for Israel, and for the theatre of
the real.
He had stopped beside a barn and put out the headlights. He was looking
at his watch. From down the road a torch flashed twice. He reached across her
and pushed open her door. ‘His name is Franz and you will tell him you are
Margaret. Good luck.’
The evening was moist and quiet, the street lamps of the old city centre
hung over her like caged white moons in their iron brackets. She had made Franz
drop her at the corner because she wanted the short walk across the bridge
before she made her entrance. The briefcase was dangling in her right hand and
she felt it brushing her thigh. A whining police siren made her shoulder
muscles convulse in terror, but she kept going. She turned left and began
skirting the building, following a pebble pavement on which the snow had failed
to settle. She was not fifty feet from the side door and she began to feel the
calm she was waiting for, the sensation, almost of levitation, that came over
her when she stepped on stage and left her other identities behind her in the
dressing room. She had reached the side entrance. It was closed. She tried the
door handle but it didn’t turn. Dither. She put the flat of her hand on the
panel and pushed but it wouldn’t budge. She stood back and stared at it, then
looked round for someone to help her, and by then two policemen were eyeing her
suspiciously, but neither came forward. Curtain up. Go! ‘I say, excuse me’, she
called to them. ‘Do you speak English? Somebody needs to give this to the
Professor immediately. Will you come over here, please?’ Both scowled, but only
one of them came over to her. Slowly, as befitted his dignity. ‘Toilette
nicht hier’, he snapped, and tipped his head up the road where she had come
from. ‘I don’t want the toilet. I want you to find somebody who will give this
briefcase to Professor Minkel. Min-kel’, she repeated, and held up the
briefcase. The policeman prodded it. ‘Öffnen’, he ordered. ‘I can’t open
it. It’s locked.’ She let a note of desperation enter her voice. ‘It’s the
Professor’s, don’t you understand? For all I know, it’s got his lecture notes
in it. He needs it for tonight.’ Turning from him, she beat loudly on the door.
‘Professor Minkel? It’s me, Imogen Baastrup from Wits. Oh God!’ At the same
moment, the door opened a few inches, and a goatish male face peered at her with
deep suspicion. He spoke something in German to the policeman, and Charlie
caught the word ‘Amerikanerin’ in his reply. ‘I am not American’, she
retorted, now nearly in tears. ‘My name is Imogen Baastrup, I’m from South
Africa, and I’m bringing Professor Minkel’s briefcase to him. He lost it. Would
you kindly give him this immediately, because I’m sure he’s desperate for it.
Please!’ She held out the briefcase, but the man refused to take it. He looked
at the policeman behind her and seemed to receive some faint reassurance from
him. He looked at the briefcase again, and then at Charlie. ‘Come this way’, he
said, like a stage butler earning his ten quid a night, and stood aside to
admit her. She was appalled. This wasn’t in the script. Not in Khalil’s or Helga’s
or anybody else’s. What happened if Minkel unlocked it under her very eyes? But
the man had his orders too, and he had his fears, for as she shoved the
briefcase at him he leapt away from it as if it were on fire.
The door closed. They were in a corridor with lagged pipes running along
the ceiling. They had reached a door marked ‘Vorstand’. The man tapped
and called ‘Oberhauser! Schnell!’ As he did so, she looked desperately
back and saw two fair boys in leather jackets in the corridor behind her. They
carried machine guns. Christ Almighty, what is this? The door opened. She was
in a movie set for Journey’s End. Wings and rear stage were sandbagged,
great bales of wadding lined the ceiling, held in place by chicken wire.
Sandbag barriers made a zigzag walkway from the door. Centre stage stood a low
coffee table with a tray of drinks. Beside it, in a low armchair, sat Minkel
like a waxwork staring straight towards her.
So much for the talent, and crammed into the wings among the sand bags
was the rest of the unit, in two distinct groups. The home side was led by
Kurtz; to his left stood a randy, middle-aged man with a weak face, which was
Charlie’s swift dismissal of Alexis. Kurtz the ringmaster had his finger to his
lips, and his left wrist lifted for him to study his watch. She started to say
‘Where is he?’ and then, with a rush of joy and anger, she saw him, set apart
from everyone as usual, Joseph, the fraught and lonely producer on his first
night. Coming swiftly to her, he placed himself a little to one side, leaving
her a path to Minkel. ‘Say your piece to him, Charlie’, he instructed him
quietly. ‘Say what you would say and ignore everyone who is not at the table.’
All she needed was the clack! of the clapper board in her face.
‘Professor, a most terrible thing has happened’, she began in a rush. ‘The
stupid hotel sent your briefcase to my room with my luggage. They saw me
talking to you, I suppose, and_’ She turned to Joseph to tell him she’d run
dry. ‘Give the briefcase to the Professor.’
Minkel would have accepted it, but no sooner did she offer it than other
hands spirited it to a large black box lying on the floor with heavy cables
snaking from it. Suddenly everyone seemed scared of her and was cowering behind
the sand bags. Joseph’s strong arms gathered her after them, his hand shoved
her head down until she was looking at her own waist. But not before she had
seen a deep-sea diver muffled in a heavy bomb suit wade towards the box. A
muffled order commanded silence. Joseph had drawn her to him and was half
smothering her with his own body. Another order signalled a general relief.
Charlie, under Joseph’s urgent guidance, was already making for the door, half
walking, half carried by his arm round her waist. ‘I won’t do it, Jose, I
can’t. I’ve spent my courage, like you said. Don’t let me go, Jose. Don’t.’
Behind her she heard muffles orders and the sounds of hasty footsteps as
everyone seemed to beat a retreat. ‘Two minutes’, Kurtz called after them in
warning. They were back in the corridor with the two fair boys with their
machine guns. ‘Where did you meet him?’ Joseph asked, in a low, fast voice. ‘A
Hotel Eden. A sort of brothel on the edge of town, next to a chemist. He’s got
a red van, FR stroke BT something 5. And a clapped-out Ford saloon. I didn’t
get the number.’ ‘Open your bag.’ She did so. Fast, the way he talked. Taking
out her little clock radio, he replaced it with a similar one from his own
pocket. ‘It is not the same device that you have used before. It will receive
on one station only. It will tell the time but it has no alarm. But it
transmits, and it tells us where you are.’ ‘When?’ ‘What are Khalil’s orders to
you now?’ ‘I’m_ I’m to walk down the road and keep walking_ Jose, when will you
come? For Christ’s sake! He wants me, Jose, he wants to take me over where his
little brother left off! He’s sick!’ She held him so fiercely that he had
difficulty breaking her grasp. She stood against him with her head down,
against his chest, wanting him to take her back into his protection. But
instead he put his hands under her arms and straightened her, and started her
on her journey. She shook him off and went alone. He took a step after her and
stopped. She looked back and hated him. She closed her eyes and opened them,
she let out a deep breath. I’m dead.
She stepped into the street, straightened herself and, crisp as a
soldier and quite as blind, marched briskly up a narrow street. Ahead of her,
Rossino was pushing his motorbike silently out of a gateway. She walked up to
him, he handed her a helmet and a leather jacket, and as she started to put
them on, something made her look back in the direction she had come from, and
she saw a lazy orange flash stretch towards her down the damp cobble like the
path of the setting sun, and she noticed how long it stayed on the eye after it
had disappeared. Then at last she heard the sound she had been dully expecting:
a distant, yet intimate thud, like a breaking of something unmendable deep
inside herself, the precious and permanent end to love. Well, Joseph, yes.
Goodbye.
At the same second exactly, Rossino’s engine burst into life, ripping
the damp night apart with its roar of triumphant laughter. Me too, she thought.
It’s the funniest day of my life.
Chapters
twenty-six and twenty-seven
Khalil took her arm and almost carried her to the shiny new car because
she was weeping and trembling so much she wasn’t very good at walking. ‘Michel
would be proud of you’, he said kindly. ‘What happened?’ ‘You have won a great
victory for us. Minkel died as he was opening the briefcase. Other friends of
Zionism are reported to be severely wounded. They are still counting.’ He spoke
in savage satisfaction. ‘You want to tell me how it went?’ She shook her head.
‘Don’t worry. We look after you, I promise. I am glad you are in grief. Others,
when they kill, they laugh and triumph, get drunk, tear off their clothes like
animals. All this I have seen. But you, you weep. This is very good.’
The house was beside a lake and the lake was in a steep valley. Khalil
drove past it twice before he turned into the drive, and his eyes as he scanned
the roadside were Joseph’s eyes, dark and purposeful and all-seeing. It was a
modern bungalow, a rich man’s second home. Khalil took her inside. ‘Would you
like some vodka? I do not drink, but you must please yourself.’ She would, so
he poured some for her, far too much. ‘Do you want to smoke?’ He handed her a
leather box and lit her cigarette for her. The lightning in the room
brightened; her glance went swiftly to the television and she found herself
staring straight into the exciting, over-expressive features of the weaselly
little German she had seen not an hour earlier at Marty’s side. He was posed
beside the police van. Behind him she could see her bit of pavement and the
side door of the lecture hall , fenced off with fluorescent tape. Police cars,
fire engines and ambulances bustled in and out of the cordoned area. Terror is
theatre, she thought. Khalil turned up the sound and she heard the wailing of
ambulances behind the sleek, well-modulated voice of Alexis. ‘What’s he
saying?’ ‘He’s leading the investigation. Wait, I tell you.’ Alexis vanished
and was replaced with a studio shot of a man identified as Doctor Oberhauser.
‘That’s the idiot who opened the door to me’, she said.
Switching off the set, Khalil again came and stood before her. ‘You
allow?’ he asked shyly. She picked up her handbag and put it on the other side
of her so that he could sit down too. Did it hum? Bleep? Was it a microphone?
What the hell did it do? Khalil spoke precisely. ‘You are one of us. You are
our sister. Fatmeh says you are our sister. You have no home but you are part
of a great family. We can make you a new identity, or you can go to Fatmeh,
live with her as long as you wish. We shall take care of you. For Michel. For
what you have done for us.’ His loyalty was appalling. Her hand was still in
his, his touch powerful and reassuring. His eyes shone with a possessive pride.
Suddenly she could bear it no longer. It was the worst play she had ever been
in. Her urge to smash the tension was the same as the urge to smash herself.
This is what Joseph has sent you for; take it. She stood up and started to
unbutton her dress, but her hands were in such disorder that she couldn’t make
them work for her. She was talking and weeping at the same time. His arms came
round her, he kissed her, then lifted her across his body like a wounded
comrade and carried her to the bedroom. He laid her on the bed and suddenly, by
God knew what desperate chemistry of her mind and body, she was taking him. She
was upon him and undressing him, she was drawing him into her as if he were the
last man on earth, on the earth’s last day; for her own destruction and for
his.
He lay with his tousled dark hair on her shoulder, his good arm thrown
carelessly across her breast. ‘Salim was a lucky boy’, he murmured, with a
smile in his voice. ‘A girl like you, that’s a cause to die for.’ ‘Who says he
died for me?’ ‘Tayeh said this was possible.’ ‘Salim died for the revolution.
The Zionists blew up his car.’ ‘He blew himself up. We read many German police
reports of this incident. I told him never to make bombs, but he disobeyed me.
He had no talent for the task. He was not a natural fighter.’ ‘Broke the rules,
didn’t he?’ she said and, seizing his gloved hand, considered it in the half
darkness, pinching each dead finger in turn. They were of wadding, all but the
smallest and the thumb. ‘So what did this lot?’ she demanded brightly. ‘Mice?
What did this lot, Khalil? Wake up. Love me, Khalil, tell me.’ He took a long
time to answer. ‘One day in Beirut, I am a stupid fellow like Salim. I am in
the office, the post comes, I am in a hurry, I am expecting a certain parcel, I
open it. This was an error.’
It was dawn, but still she would not let him sleep. ‘You’re my best’,
she whispered to him, ‘and I never award first prizes.’ Oh Khalil, Khalil,
Christ, oh please! ‘Better than Salim?’ he asked. ‘More patient than Salim,
more cherishing, more grateful.’ Better than Joseph, she thought, who sent me
to you on a plate. They started to make love again, when suddenly he disengaged
from her, reached out his good hand and with a commanding gesture lightly
pinched her lips together. Then lifted himself stealthily on his elbow. She
listened with him. The clatter of a waterbird lifting from the lake. The shriek
of geese. The crowing of a cockerel, the chiming of a bell. She felt the
mattress lift beside her. ‘No cows’, he said softly, from the window. He was
standing at the side of the window, still naked, but with his gun looped by its
belt over his shoulder. And for a second, in the extremity of her tension, she
imagined the mirror image of Joseph standing facing him, red-lit by the
electric fire, separated from him only by the thin curtain. ‘What do you see?’ she
whispered at last, unable to bear the tension any more. ‘No cows. And no
fishermen. And no bicycles. I see much too little.’ His voice was tense with
action. He pulled on his dark trousers and white shirt, and buckled the gun
into place beneath his armpit. ‘No cars, no passing lights’, he said evenly.
‘Not one labourer on his way to work. And no cows.’ ‘They’ve gone to milking.’
‘Not for two hours do they go for milking.’ ‘It’s the snow. They’re keeping
them indoors.’ Something in her voice caught his ear. The quickening in him had
sharpened his awareness of her. ‘Why do you apologise for them?’ ‘I don’t. I’m
just trying_’ An idea was growing in him, a terrible idea. He could read it in
her face, and in her nakedness; and she in turn could feel his suspicions form.
‘Why do you wish to quell my fears? What guilt is in your mind?’ ‘None. Come
back to bed, love me. Come back.’ Why was he so leisurely if they were all
around the house? How could he stare at her like this while the ring tightened
round him every second? ‘What is the time, please?’ he asked, still staring at
her. ‘Charlie?’ ‘Five. Half past. What does it matter?’ ‘Your little clock
radio. I require to know the time, please. ‘ ‘I’ll look.’ ‘Stay where you are,
please. Otherwise I shall perhaps kill you. We shall see.’ He fetched her
handbag and brought it to the bed. ‘Sit up, please. Kindly open it for me’, he
said, and watched her while she wrestled with the clasp. ‘So what is the time,
please, Charlie?’ he asked again, with a terrible lightness. ‘Kindly advise me,
from your little clock, what hour of the day it is.’ ‘Ten to six. Later than I
thought.’ He snatched it from her and read the dial. He had lost interest in
her. He switched on the radio and it gave a wail of music before he switched it
off again. The clock had all his attention. ‘Bring me that radio beside the
bed, please, Charlie. We make a little experiment. An interesting technological
experiment relating to high-frequency radio.’ She had reached the end of her
invention. All of it, for all time, here and for ever after, because by now she
had remembered the moment on the hilltop when he had stood her outside the van
to search her, and the moment when he dropped the batteries into his pocket
before returning the clock to her shoulder bag and tossing the bag into the
van. ‘Can I put something on?’ She pulled on her dress and took the bedside
radio to him , a modern thing in black plastic with a speaker like a telephone
dial. Placing the clock and the radio together, Khalil switched on the radio
and worked through the channels until suddenly it let out a wounded wail, up
and down like an air-raid warning. Then he picked up the clock, pushed back the
hinged flap of the battery chamber with his thumb, and shook the batteries onto
the floor. The wailing stopped dead.
Like a child who has performed a successful experiment, Khalil lifted
his head to her and pretended to smile. She tried not to look at him, but could
not help herself. ‘Who do you work for, Charlie? For the Germans?’ She shook
her head. ‘For the Zionists?’ He took her silence for yes. ‘Are you Jewish?’
‘No.’ ‘Do you believe in Israel? What are you?’ ‘Nothing.’ ‘Did you betray my
brother?’ The obstructions in her
throat disappeared, to be replaced by a mortal flatness of tone. ‘I never knew
him. I never spoke to him in my life. They showed him to me before they killed
him. The rest was invented. Our love affair, my conversion, everything. I
didn’t even write the letters, they did. They wrote his letter to you too. The
one about me. I fell in love with the man who looked after me. That’s all there
is.’ ‘And you are the same English who gave away my country’, he remarked
quietly, as if he could hardly believe the evidence of his eyes. He lifted his
head and as he did so, she saw his face snatch away in disapproval and then,
under the force of whatever Joseph had shot him with, catch fire. Charlie had
been taught to stand still when she pulled the trigger, but Joseph didn’t do
that. He didn’t trust his bullets to do their work, but ran after them, trying
to beat them to the target. He rushed through the door like an ordinary
intruder, but instead of pausing, hurled himself straight forward as he fired.
And he fired with his arms at full stretch, to reduce the distance still more.
She saw Khalil’s face burst, she saw him spin round and spread his arms to the
wall, appealing for its help. The bullets went into his back. His hands
flattened against the wall, one leather, one real, and his wrecked body slipped
to a rugger player’s crouch as he tried desperately to shove a way through it.
But by that time, Joseph was close enough to kick his feet away from under him,
hastening him on his last journey to the ground. After Joseph came Litvak, whom
she had always known, as she now realised, to be of an unhealthy nature. As
Joseph stood back, Litvak knelt down and put a last precise shot into the back
of Khalil’s neck, which must have been unnecessary. After Litvak came about
half the world’s executioners, in black frogmen’s clothes, followed by Marty
and the German weasel and two thousand stretcher bearers and ambulance drivers
and doctors and unsmiling women, holding her, clearing the vomit off her,
guiding her down the corridor and into God’s fresh air, though the sticky warm
smell of blood clung to her nose and throat.
She had gone deaf, so she could only vaguely hear her own screaming, but
her main concern was to get her dress off, partly because she was a whore and
partly because there was so much of Khalil’s blood on it. She looked down and saw all the silly faces staring at her, the
tough little boys with their heroes’ scowls, Marty and Mike, Dimitri and other
friends as well, some of them not yet introduced. Then the crowd parted and Joseph emerged, considerately having got
rid of the gun with which he had shot Khalil, but still unfortunately with
quite a lot of blood over his jeans and running shoes, she noticed. He forced a
path to her and was standing in front of her, and at first it was like staring
into her own face, because she could see exactly the same things in him that
she hated in herself. So a sort of exchange of character occurred, where she
assumed his role of killer and pimp, and he, presumably, hers of decoy, whore,
and traitor.
Till suddenly, as she continued to stare at him and muse, a surviving
spark of outrage kindled in her, and gave her back the identity he had stolen
from her. She stood up, drew an enormous breath, and she shouted ‘Go!’ at him,
or so at least it sounded to herself. Perhaps it was ‘No!’ It hardly mattered.
She wanted to add something about the theatre of the real, how the bodies
didn’t get up and walk away. But she lost it somehow. She was leaning on him
and she would have fallen if he hadn’t been holding her so firmly. Her tears
were half blinding her, and she was hearing him from under water. ‘I’m dead’,
she kept saying. ‘I’m dead, I am dead.’ But it seemed that he wanted her, dead
or alive. Locked together, they set off awkwardly along the pavement, though
the town was strange to them.