The Little Drummer Girl (63 page)

"What's your real name, Leila?" he asked.

"Smith."

"I like it. Smith." He repeated the name several times in different keys. "You Irish, Smith?" He lit the cigarette and offered her a pull. She ignored it. "I hear you are the personal property of Mr. Tayeh. I admire your taste. Tayeh's a very picky guy. What d'you do for a living, Smith?"

She strode to the door and pulled it open, but he stayed on the bed, grinning at her in a weakly, knowing way through his cigarette smoke.

"You don't want to screw?" he enquired. "Pity. These Fräuleins are like Barnum's baby elephants. Thought we might raise the standard a little. Demonstrate the Special Relationship."

Languidly he got up, dropped his cigarette at her bedside, and ground it with his boot.

"You don't have a little hash for a poor man, do you, Smith?"

"Out," she said.

Passively acceding to her judgement, he shuffled towards her, then stopped and lifted his head, and stayed still; and to her embarrassment she saw that his exhausted, characterless eyes were filled with tears, and there were lumps of childish supplication round his jaw.

"Tayeh won't let me jump off the merry-go-round," he complained. His Deep South had given way to East Coast ordinary. "He fears my ideological batteries have run low. And rightly, I'm afraid. I kind of forgot the reasoning about how every dead baby is a step towards world peace. Which is a drag, when you happen to have killed a few. Tayeh is being very sporting about it. Tayeh's a sporting man. ‘If you want to go, go,' he says. Then he points at the desert. Sportingly."

Like a puzzled beggar, he took her right hand in both of his and stared into the empty palm. "My name is Halloran," he explained, as if he himself had trouble remembering it. "For Abdul, read Arthur J. Halloran. And if you are ever passing a U.S. Embassy some place, Smith, I'd be awfully grateful if you'd drop a note in to say that Arthur Halloran, formerly of Boston and the Vietnam show, latterly of less official armies, would like to hurry home and pay his debt to society before those crazy Maccabees come over the hill and zap the lot of us. Will you do that for me, Smith, old girl? I mean when the chips are down, us Anglos are a cut above the field, don't you think?"

She could barely move. An irresistible drowsiness had come over her like the first feelings of cold in a very wounded body. She wanted only to sleep. With Halloran. To give him the comfort he asked and extract it in return. Never mind if in the morning he would inform on her. Let him. All she knew was she could not face, for one more night, this hellish empty cell.

He was still holding her hand. She let him, hovering like a suicide on the window-ledge who stares longingly into the street far below. Then, with a huge effort, she freed herself, and with both hands together shoved his unresisting, emaciated body into the corridor.

She sat on her bed. It was the same night, definitely. She could smell his cigarette. See the stub of it at her feet.

If you want to go, go, said Tayeh. Then he pointed at the desert. Tayeh is a very sporting man.

There is no fear like it,Joseph had said. Your courage will be like money. You will spend and spend, and one night you will look in your pockets and you'll be bankrupt and that is when the real courage begins.

There is only one logic,Joseph had said:you. There can be only one survivor: you. One person you can trust: you.

She stood at the window, worrying about the sand. She had not realised sand could climb so high. By day, tamed by the scalding sun, it lay docile, but when the moon shone, as now, it swelled into restive cones that dodged from one horizon to another, so that she knew it was only a matter of time before she heard it spilling through the windows, stifling her in her sleep.

Her interrogation began next morning and lasted, she reckoned afterwards, one day and two half nights. It was a wild, unreasoning process, depending on whose turn it was to scream at her and whether they were challenging her revolutionary commitment or accusing her of being a British or Zionist or American informer. For as long as it lasted, she was excused all tuition, and between sessions, ordered to remain in her hut under house arrest, though no one seemed to bother when she took to wandering around the camp. The shifts were divided between four Arab boys of great fervour working in pairs and barking their prepared questions from pages of handwritten notes, and they got angriest when she failed to understand their English. She was not beaten, though it might have been easier if she had been, for at least she would have known when she was pleasing them and when not. But their rages were quite frightening enough and sometimes they would take turns shouting at her, keeping their faces close to hers, covering her with spit, and leaving her with a sickening migraine. Another trick was to offer her a glass of water, then throw it in her face as she was about to take it. But the next time they met, the boy who had instigated this scene read out a written apology in front of his three colleagues, then left the room in deep humiliation. Another time they threatened to shoot her for her known attachment to Zionism and the British Queen. But when she still refused to confess to these sins, they seemed to lose interest, and told her instead proud stories about their home villages, which they had never seen, and how they had the most beautiful women, and the best olive oil and the best wine in the world. And that was when she knew she had come home to sanity again; and to Michel.

An electric punkah turned on the ceiling; on the walls hung grey curtains partly concealing maps. Through the open window, Charlie could hear the intermittent thud of bombing practice from Bubi's range. Tayeh had taken the sofa, and laid one leg along it. His wounded face looked white and ill. Charlie stood in front of him like a naughty girl, her eyes lowered and her jaw clamped with rage. She had tried to speak once, but Tayeh had upstaged her by fishing his whisky bottle from his pocket and taking a swig from it. With the back of his hand he wiped his mouth each way as if he had a moustache, which he had not. He was more contained than she had known him, and somehow less at ease with her.

"Abdul the American," she said.

"So?"

She had prepared it. In her mind, she had practised it repeatedly: Comrade Leila's high sense of revolutionary duty overcomes her natural reluctance to rat on a fellow soldier. She knew the lines by heart. She knew the bitches at the forum who had spoken them. To deliver them, she kept her face turned away from his and spoke with a harsh, mannish fury.

"His real name is Halloran. Arthur J. Halloran. He's a traitor. He asked me, when I leave, to tell the Americans that he wants to go home and face trial. He frankly admits to harbouring counter-revolutionary beliefs. He could betray us all."

Tayeh's dark gaze had not left her face. He held his ash walking stick in both hands, and was tapping the end of it lightly on the toe of his bad leg, as if to keep it awake.

"Is this why you asked to see me?"

"Yes."

"Halloran came to you three nights ago," he remarked, looking away from her. "Why did you not tell me earlier? Why wait three days?"

"You weren't here."

"Others were. Why did you not ask for me?"

"I was afraid you would punish him."

But Tayeh did not seem to think that Halloran was on trial. "Afraid," he repeated, as if that were a grave admission."Afraid! Why should you be afraid for Halloran? For three whole days? Do you secretly sympathise with his position?"

"You know I don't."

"Is this why he spoke to you so frankly? Because you gave him reason to trust you? I think so."

"No."

"Did you sleep with him?"

‘No."

"So why should you wish to protect Halloran? Why should you fear for the life of a traitor when you are learning to kill for the revolution? Why are you not true to us? You disappoint me."

"I am not experienced. I was sorry for him and I did not wish him harmed. Then I remembered my duty."

Tayeh seemed increasingly confused by the whole conversation. He took another pull of whisky.

"Sit down."

"I don't need to."

"Sit down."

She did as he ordered. She was looking fiercely to one side of him, at some hated spot on her own private horizon. In her mind she had passed the point where he had any right to know her. I have learnt what you sent me here to learn. Blame yourself if you do not understand me.

"In a letter you wrote to Michel, you speak of a child. You have a child? His?"

"I was talking about the gun. We slept with it."

"What type of gun?"

"A Walther. Khalil gave it to him."

Tayeh sighed. "If you were me," he said at last, turning his head away from her, "and you had to deal with Halloran--who asks to go home, but who knows too much--what would you do with him?"

"Neutralise him."

"Shoot him?"

"That's your business."

"Yes. It is." He was considering his bad leg once more, holding his walking stick above it and parallel to it. "But why execute a man who is already dead? Why not let him work for us?"

"Because he's a traitor."

Once again, Tayeh seemed wilfully to misunderstand the logic of her position.

"Halloran approaches many people in this camp. Always with a reason. He is our vulture, showing us where there is weakness and disease. Pointing the way to potential traitors. Don't you think we would be silly to get rid of such a useful creature? Did you go to bed with Fidel?"

"No."

"Because he is a dago?"

"Because I didn't want to go to bed with him."

"With the Arab boys?"

"No."

"You are too fastidious, I think."

"I wasn't fastidious with Michel."

With a sigh of perplexity, Tayeh took a third pull of whisky. "Who is Joseph!" he asked, in a mildly querulous tone. "Joseph. Who, please?"

Was the actress in her dead at last? Or was she so reconciled with the theatre of the real that the difference between life and art had disappeared? None of her repertoire occurred to her; she had no sense of selecting her performance. She did not consider falling over her feet and lying still on the stone floor. She was not tempted to embark on a wallowing confession, trading her own life for everything she knew, which she had been told was her final, permissible option. She was angry. She was sick to death of having her integrity dragged out and dusted down and subjected to fresh scrutiny every time she reached another milestone in her march towards Michel's revolution. So she flung straight back at him without thinking--a card flipped off the top of the pack--take it or leave it, and to hell with you.

"I don't know a Joseph."

„"Come. Think. On Mykonos. Before you went to Athens. One of your friends, in casual conversation with an acquaintance of ours, was heard to make a reference to Joseph, who joined your group. He said Charlie was quite captivated by him."

There were no barriers left, no twists. She had cleared them all, and was running free.

"Joseph? Ah,that Joseph!" She let her face register the belated recollection: and as it did so, to cloud in disgust.

"I remember him. He was a greasy little Jew who tagged on to our group."

"Don't talk about Jews like that. We are not anti-Semitic, we are merely anti-Zionist."

"Tell me another," she snapped.

Tayeh was interested. "You are describing me as a liar, Charlie?"

"Whether he was a Zionist or not, he was a creep. He reminded me of my father."

"Was your father a Jew?"

"No. But he was a thief."

Tayeh thought about this for a long time, using first her face, then her whole body as a term of reference for whatever doubts still lingered in his mind. He offered her a cigarette but she didn't take it: her instinct told her to make no step towards him. Once more he tapped his dead foot with his stick. "That night you spent with Michel in Thessalonika--in the old hotel--you remember?"

"What of it?"

"The staff heard raised voices from your room late at night."

"So what's your question?"

"Don't hurry me, please. Who was shouting that night?"

"No one. They were snooping at the wrong bloody door."

"Who was shouting?"

"We weren't shouting. Michel didn't want me to go. That's all. He was afraid for me."

"And you?"

It was a story she had worked up with Joseph: her moment of being stronger than Michel.

"I offered him his bracelet back," she said.

Tayeh nodded. "Which accounts for the postscript in your letter: ‘I am so glad I kept the bracelet.' And of course--there was no shouting. You are right. Forgive my simple Arab trick." He took a last searching look at her, trying once more, in vain, to resolve the enigma; then pursed his lips, soldier-like, as Joseph sometimes did, as a prelude to issuing an order.

"We have a mission for you. Get your possessions and return here immediately. Your training is complete."

Leaving was the most unexpected madness of all. It was worse than end of term; worse than dumping the gang at Piraeus harbour. Fidel and Bubi clutched her to their breasts, their tears mixing with her own. One of the Algerian girls gave her a wooden Christ-child as a pendant.

Professor Minkel lived on the saddle that joins Mount Scopus to French Hill, on the eighth floor of a new tower close to the Hebrew University, one of a great cluster on the skyline which have caused pain to Jerusalem's luckless conservationists. Every apartment looked down on the Old City, but the trouble was, the Old City looked up at every apartment too. Like its neighbours, it was a fortress as well as a skyscraper, and the positioning of its windows was determined by the most favourable arcs of fire if an attack were to be riposted. Kurtz made three wrong tries before he found the place. He lost himself first in a shopping centre built in concrete five feet deep, then again in a British cemetery devoted to the fallen of the First World War. "A Free Gift from the People of Palestine," read the engraving. He explored other buildings, mostly the gifts of millionaires from America, and came finally upon this tower of hewn stone. The name signs had been vandalised and so he pressed a bell at random and unearthed an old Pole from Galicia who spoke only Yiddish. The Pole knew which building all right--this one as you see me!--he knew Dr. Minkel and admired him for his stand; he himself had attended the venerated Krakow University. But he also had a lot of questions on his own account, which Kurtz was obliged to answer as best he could; like where did Kurtz come from originally? Well, my heaven, did he know so-and-so? And what was Kurtz's business here, a grown man, eleven in the morning when Dr. Minkel should be instructing future fine philosophers of our people?