The Little Drummer Girl (19 page)

An icy stillness descended over Charlie's manner, disguising the chaos and momentary terror inside her. That Joseph was Jewish she had not doubted since her abortive interrogation of him on the beach. 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?" she demanded, ignoring Kurtz's offer to discontinue dealings before they had begun. "A war party? A punitive raid? You going to put the electrodes on me? What the hell's the big idea?"

"Ever met an Israeli before?" Kurtz enquired.

"Not that I know of."

"You have some racial objection to Jews overall? Jews as Jews, period? We don't smell bad to you, have improper table manners? Tell us. We understand these things."

"Don't be bloody silly." Her voice had gone wrong, or was it her hearing?

"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 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? Maybe you would prefer us to take a piece of Central Africa? Or Uruguay? Not Egypt, thank you, we tried it once and it wasn't a success. Or shall we re-disperse ourselves over the ghettos of Europe and Asia while we wait for the next pogrom? 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?"

"Of course I have."

"And when you looked at the 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 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.

And this silence became more extraordinary the longer it lasted, since it was Charlie herself who helped preserve it. Charlie, who minutes before had been screaming blue murder at God and the world, now suddenly had nothing to add. And it was Kurtz, not Charlie, who finally broke the spell with what sounded like a prepared statement for the press.

"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 aspect of them. Every paradox and good intention. We respect them and we need them; we do not laugh at them at all, and in due course I surely hope we may return to them and discuss them openly and creatively. We are aiming to address the natural humanity in you, that is all. We are aiming at your good, caring, human heart. Your feelings. Your sense of right. We mean to ask nothing of you which conflicts in any wise with your strong and decent ethical concerns. Your polemical politics--the names you give to your beliefs--well, we would like to put them on a back burner. Your beliefs themselves--the more confused they are, the more irrational, the more frustrated--Charlie, we respect them totally. On this premise, you will 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," she demanded, "what the hell's he doing driving round in a dirty great Arab car?"

Kurtz's face broke into that ploughed and wrinkled smile which had so dramatically betrayed his age to Quilley. "We stole it, Charlie," he replied cheerfully, and his admission was followed at once by another round of laughter from the kids, in which Charlie was half tempted to take part. "And the next thing you want to know, Charlie," he said--thus incidentally announcing that the Palestinian issue was, at least for the time being, safely stored away on that back burner he had spoken of--"is what are you doing here among us and why have you been dragged here in such a roundabout and unceremonious fashion. I will tell you. The reason, Charlie, is that we want to offer you a job. An acting job."

He had hit calm water and his bountiful smile showed he knew it. His voice had become slow and deliberate, as if he were announcing the number of the lucky winners: "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." His big forearm swept away financial considerations. "The part we have in view for you combines all your talents, Charlie, human and professional. Your wit. Your excellent memory. Your intelligence. Your courage. But also that extra human quality to which I already referred. Your warmth. We chose you, Charlie. We cast you. We looked at a big field, many candidates from many countries. We came up with you and that's why you're here. Among fans. Everybody in this room has seen your work, everybody admires you. So let's get the atmosphere right. On our side there is no hostility. There is affection, there is admiration, there is hope. Hear us out. It's like your friend Joseph said, we are good people, the same as you. We want you. We need you. And there are people out there who are going to need you even more than we do."

His voice had left a void. She had known actors, just a few, whose voices did that. It was a presence, by its remorseless benevolence it became an addiction, and when it ceased, as it did now, it left you stranded. 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.

"So that's how you do your casting, is it?" she said, mustering a sceptical tone once more. "Knock ‘em over the head and drag ‘em in handcuffed? That's your usual way, I suppose."

"Charlie, we are surely not claiming that this is usual drama," Kurtz replied equably, and once more left the initiative with her.

"A part what in, anyway?" she said, still fighting the grin.

"Call it theatre."

She remembered Joseph and the fun fading from his face, and his clipped reference to the theatre of the real. "So it's a play then," she said. "Why don't you say so?"

"In a sense it is a play," Kurtz agreed.

"Who writes it?"

"We handle the plot, Joseph does the dialogue. With a lot of help from you."

"Who's the audience?" She made a gesture towards the shadows. "These little charmers?"

Kurtz's solemnity was as sudden and awesome as his goodwill. His worker's hands found each other on the table, his head came forward over them, and not even the most determined sceptic could have denied the conviction in his manner. "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 up and you will lose yourself, no question."

She tried to look away from him. His rhetoric was too high, too much. She wished he would train it on someone else.

"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 up 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. He had the background and the whole room knew it, Charlie included: that he was a man who dealt only in things he had experienced. When he asked questions, you knew he had himself been questioned. When he gave orders, you knew he had obeyed the orders of others. When he spoke of death, it was clear that death had passed by him often and very close, and might any moment come his way again. And when he chose to issue a warning to her, as he did now, he was quite evidently on terms with the dangers he spoke of: "Do not confuse our play with entertainment, Charlie," he told her earnestly. "We are not speaking of some enchanted forest. When the lights go down on the stage, it will be night-time in the street. When the actors laugh they will be happy, and when they weep they will very likely be bereaved and broken-hearted. And if they get hurt--and they will, Charlie--they will surely not be in a position, when the curtain falls, to jump up and run for the last bus home. There's 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, faint as a distant signal on the transatlantic radio, Shimon Litvak made a first husky interjection: "Charlie never walked away from a fight in her life, Marty," he objected, in the tone of a disciple reassuring his master. "We don't just believe that, we know it. It's all over her record."

They were halfway there, Kurtz told Misha Gavron later, describing, during a rare ceasefire 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.

Halfway, perhaps--yet, in terms of the time ahead of them, barely at the beginning. By insisting on compression, Kurtz was not in the least insisting upon haste. He placed great weight upon a laboured manner, on adding fuel to her frustration, on having her impatience racing out ahead of them like a lead-horse. Nobody understood better than Kurtz what it was like to possess a mercurial nature in a plodding world, or how to play upon its restlessness. Within minutes of her arrival, while she was still scared, he had befriended her: a father of Joseph's lover. Within minutes more, he had offered her the resolution to all the disordered components of a life so far. He had appealed to the actress in her, to the martyr, to the adventurer; he had flattered the daughter and excited the aspirant. He had granted her an early glimpse of the new family she might care to join, knowing that deep down, like most rebels, she was only looking for a better conformity. And most of all, by heaping such benefits upon her, he had made her rich, which, as Charlie herself had long preached to anyone who would hear her, was the beginning of subservience.

"So, Charlie, what we propose," said Kurtz, in a slower, more genial voice, "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."

He paused but she didn't speak, and there was by now a tacit submission in her silence.

"We ask you never to evaluate, never to try to come to our side of the net, never to seek to please or gratify us in any regard. Many things you might consider negative in your life we would surely see differently. Do not attempt to do our thinking for us." A short jab of the forearm entrenched this amicable warning. "Question. What happens--whether now or later--what happens should either one of us elect to jump off the escalator? Charlie, let me try to answer that."

"You do that, Mart," she advised, and putting her elbows on the table, rested her chin in her hands and smiled at him with a look intended to convey dazed unbelief.

"Thank you, Charlie, so listen carefully, please. Depending on the precise moment you want out or we do, depending on the degree of your knowledge at that time and our assessment of you, we follow one of two courses. Course one, we extract a solemn promise from you, we give you money, we send you back to England. A handshake, mutual trust, good friends, and a certain vigilance on our side to make sure you keep the bargain. You follow me?"

She lowered her gaze to the table, partly to escape his scrutiny, partly to conceal her growing excitement. For that was another thing Kurtz counted on, which most intelligence professionals forget too soon: to the uninitiated, the secret world is of itself attractive. Simply by turning on its axis, it can draw the weakly anchored to its centre.

"Course two, a little rougher, still not terrible. We place you in quarantine. We like you, but we fear we have reached a point where you might compromise our project, where the part we are proposing, say, cannot safely be offered any place else while you are at large to talk about it."