The Little Drummer Girl (33 page)

Not stagily at all, she put down her glass with a snap.

A new excitement had taken hold of him: "Listen to me," he said, leaning forward, and the candlelight struck his bronzed temple like sunlight on a helmet. "Listen to me," he repeated. "You are listening?"

Again, he did not bother to wait for her answer.

"A quotation. A French philosopher.'The greatest crime is to do nothing because we fear we can only do a little.' Does it ring a bell with you?"

"Oh Jesus," said Charlie softly, and on an impulse folded her arms across her breast in self-protection.

"Shall I go on?" He went on anyway. "Does this not remind you of someone?'There is only one class war and it is between the colonialists and the colonised, the capitalists and the exploited. Our task is to bring the war home to those who make it. To the racist millionaires, who see the Third World as their private farm. To the corrupt oil-rich sheikhs who have sold the Arab birthright.' " He paused, observing how her head had slipped between her hands.

"Jose, stop," she muttered. "It's too much. Go home."

" To the imperialist warmongers, who arm the Zionist aggressors. To the mindless Western bourgeoisie who are themselves the unconscious slaves and perpetuators of their own system.' ‘ He was barely whispering, yet his voice was all the more penetrating on account of it. "'The world tells us we should not attack innocent women and children. But I tell you there is no such thing as innocence any more. For every child who dies of hunger in the Third World, there is a child in the West who has stolen his food--

"Stop it," she repeated through her fingers, now all too certain of her ground. "I've had enough. I surrender."

But he continued his recitation. "'When I was six, I was driven from our land. When I was eight, I joined the Ashbal. ‘ ‘What is Ashbal, please?' Come, Charlie. That was your question. Was it not you who asked me--you who put up your hand--‘What is Ashbal, please?' How did I reply?"

"Children's militia," she said, her head between her hands. "I'm going to be sick, Jose. Now."

"When I was ten, I crouched in a home-made shelter while the Syrians poured rockets into our camp. When I was fifteen, my mother and my sister were killed in a Zionist air raid.' Go on, please, Charlie. Complete my life story for me."

She had grasped his hand again, this time with both of hers, and was gently beating it against the table in reproof.

" ‘If children can be bombed, they can also fight,' " he reminded her. "And if they colonise? What then? Go on!"

"They must be killed," she muttered unwillingly.

"And if their mothers feed them, and teach them to steal our homes and bomb our people in their exile?"

"Then their mothers are in the front line with their husbands. Jose--"

"So what do we do about them?"

"They must be killed also. But I didn't believe him then, and I don't now."

He ignored her protests. He was making his protestations of eternal love. "Listen. Through the eye holes of my black balaclava helmet, while I was inspiring you with my message at the forum, I observed your enraptured face upon me. Your red hair. Your strong, revolutionary features. Is it not ironic that on the first occasion that we met, it was I who was on stage, and you who were among the audience?"

"I was not enraptured! I thought you were way over the top, and I had a damn good mind to tell you so!"

He was unrepentant. "Whatever you felt at the time, here in the Nottingham motel, under my hypnotic influence, you instantly revise your memory. Though you could not see my face, you tell me, my words have remained seared in your memory ever since. Why not?... Come, Charlie! It is in your letter to me!"

She was not to be drawn. Not yet. Suddenly, for the first time since Joseph's story had begun, Michel had become a separate, living creature for her. Till this moment, she realised, she had unconsciously used Joseph's features to describe her imaginary lover, and Joseph's voice to characterise his declamations. Now, like a cell dividing itself, the two men were independent and conflicting beings, and Michel had acquired his own dimension in reality. She saw again the unswept lecture-room with its curling photograph of Mao and its scratched school benches. She saw the rows of unequal heads, from Afro to Jesus and back again, and Long Al slumped at her side in a state of alcoholic boredom. And on the podium she saw the isolated, unreadable figure of our gallant representative from Palestine--shorter than Joseph, maybe a fraction stockier as well, though it was hard to tell, for he was muffled in his black mask and his shapeless khaki blouse, and his black-and-white kaffiyeh. But younger--that for certain--and more fanatical. She remembered his fish-like lips, expressionless within the ragged cage. She remembered the red handkerchief tied defiantly round his neck, and the gloved hands gesticulating to his words. Most of all, she remembered his voice: not guttural, as she had expected, but literary and considerate, in macabre contrast to his bloodthirsty message. But not Joseph's either. She remembered how it paused,un-Joseph-like, to rephrase an awkward sentence, hunted for grammatical aptness:"The gun and the Return are one for us... an imperialist is whoever does not aid us in our revolution... to do nothing is to endorse injustice..."

"I loved you immediately," Joseph was explaining, in the same pretended tone of retrospection. "Or so I tell you now. As soon as the lecture was over, I enquired who you were, but I did not feel able to approach you before so many people. I was also aware that I was unable to show you my face, which is one of my greatest assets. I therefore decided to seek you out at the theatre. I made enquiries, tracked you to Nottingham. Here I am. I love you infinitely, signed Michel!"

As if making amends, Joseph put on a show of fussing over her welfare, refilling her glass, ordering coffee--medium sweet, the way you like it--did she want to wash? No thanks, I'm fine. The television was showing news footage of a grinning politician descending the gangway of an aeroplane. He made the bottom step without mishap.

His ministrations complete, Joseph glanced significantly round the taverna, then at Charlie, and his voice became the essence of practicality.

"So then, Charlie. You are his Joan. His love. His obsession. The staff have gone home, the two of us are alone in the dining-room. Your unmasked admirer, and you. It is after midnight and I have been talking far too long, though I have scarcely begun to tell you what is in my heart, or ask you about yourself, whom I love beyond comparison, such an experience is entirely new to me, etcetera. Tomorrow is Sunday, you have no commitments, I have rented a room in the motel. I make no attempt to persuade you. That is not my way. Perhaps I am also too respectful of your dignity. Or perhaps I am too proud to think you need persuading. Either you will come to me as a comrade-in-arms, a true, free lover, soldier to soldier--or you will not. How do you respond? Are you suddenly impatient to return to the Astral Commercial and Private Hotel, near the railway station?"

She stared at him, and then away from him. She had half a dozen facetious answers ready but suppressed them. The hooded, totally separate figure at the forum was once more an abstraction. It was Joseph, not the stranger, who had put the question. And what was there to say when, in her imagination, they were already lying in bed together, Joseph's cropped head resting on her shoulder, Joseph's strong wounded body stretched along her own, while she willed his true nature out of him?

"After all, Charlie--as you told us yourself--you have been to bed with many men for less, I would say."

"Oh, much less," she agreed, developing a sudden interest in the plastic salt-pourer.

"You are wearing his expensive jewellery. You are alone in a dismal city. It's raining. He has enchanted you--flattered the actress, inspired the revolutionary. How can you possibly refuse him?"

"Fed me too," she reminded him. "Even if I was off meat."

"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 have met your soul mate at last."

A mysterious brutality had entered his manner. She had the ridiculous feeling that her acquiescence had angered him. 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 Joseph, take Michel. 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 Joseph casually as they got into the car. "He prefers Michel. Partly for security, partly because he is already slightly in love with European decadence."

"I like Salim better."

"But you use Michel."

Just whatever you all say, she thought. But her passivity was a deception, even to herself. She could feel her anger on the move, still far down but rising, rising.

The motel was like a low factory block. At first there was no space to park; then a white Volkswagen minibus lumbered forward to make room for them, and she glimpsed the figure of Dimitri at the wheel. Clutching the orchids as Joseph had instructed her, she waited while he pulled on his red blazer, then followed him across the tarmac to the front porch; but reluctantly, keeping her distance. Joseph was carrying her shoulder bag as well as his smart black grip. Give that back, it's mine. In the foyer, out of the corner of her eye, she saw Raoul and Rachel standing under the vile strip-lighting, reading notices about tomorrow's tours. She glowered at them. Joseph went to the desk and she drew close to watch him sign the register, though he had specifically told her not to. Arab name, nationality Lebanese, address an apartment number in Beirut. His manner disdainful: a man of position, ready at any time to take offence. You're good, she thought ruefully, while she tried to hate him. No wasted gestures but plenty of style, and you make the part your own. The bored night manager cast her a lustful glance, but showed none of the disrespect she was accustomed to. The porter was loading their luggage onto an enormous hospital trolley. I'm wearing a blue kaftan and a gold bracelet and underwear from Persephone of Munich and I'll bite the first peasant who calls me a tart. Joseph took her arm and his hand burned her skin. She pulled free of him. Sod off. To the strains of canned Gregorian plainsong, they followed their luggage down a grey tunnel of pastel-painted doors. Their bedroom was double-bedded, grandeluxe and sterile as an operating theatre.

"Christ!" she exploded, staring round her in black hostility.

The porter turned to her in surprise but she ignored him. She spotted a bowl of fruit, a bucket of ice, two glasses, and a vodka bottle waiting beside the bed. A vase for the orchids. She dumped them into it. Joseph tipped the porter, the trolley gave a departing shriek, and suddenly they were alone, with a bed the size of a football field, two framed Minoan bulls in charcoal providing the tastefully erotic atmosphere, and a balcony with an unspoilt view of the car park. Taking the vodka bottle from the bucket, Charlie poured herself a stiff one and flopped onto the edge of the bed.

"Cheers, old man," she said.

Joseph was still standing, watching her without expression. "Cheers, Charlie," he replied, though he had no glass.

"So what do we do now? Play Monopoly? Or is this the big scene we bought our tickets for?" Her voice rose. "I mean, who the hell are we in this? Just for information. Who? Right? Just who?"

"You know very well who we are, Charlie. We are two lovers enjoying our Greek honeymoon."

"I thought we were in a Nottingham motel."

"We are playing both parts at once. I thought you understood that. We are establishing the past and the present."

"Because we are so short of time."

"Let us say, because human lives are at risk."

She took another pull of vodka, and her hand was as steady as a rock because that was how her hand went when the black mood got into her. "Jewish lives," she corrected him.

"Are they different from other lives?"

"I'll say they bloody are! Jesus Christ! I mean Kissinger can bomb the poor bloody Cambodians till the cows come home. Nobody lifts a finger. The Israelis can hack the Palestinians to pieces any time. But a couple of rabbis knocked off in Frankfurt or whatever--I mean that's a real grade-one prime-beef international disaster, isn't it?"

She was staring straight past him at some imaginary enemy, but out of the corner of her eye she saw him take a firm step in her direction, and for a brilliant moment she really thought he was going to remove her choices for good. But instead he walked past her to the window and unlocked the door, perhaps because he needed the drumming of the traffic to drown her voice.

"They are all disasters," he replied unemotionally, looking out. "Ask me what the inhabitants of Kiryat Shimonah feel when the Palestinian shells come down. Ask them in the kibbutzim to tell you about the whining of the Katyusha rockets, forty at a time, while they hide their children in the shelters pretending it is all a game." He paused and gave a kind of bored sigh, as if he had listened too often to his own arguments. "However," he added, in a more practical tone, "on the next occasion you use that argument, I suggest you please remember that Kissinger is a Jew. That also has a place in Michel's somewhat elementary political vocabulary."

She put her knuckles in her mouth and discovered she was weeping. He came and sat beside her on the bed, and she waited for him to put his arm round her or offer more wise arguments or simply take her, which was what she would have liked best, but he did nothing of the kind. He was content to let her mourn, until gradually she had the illusion that he had somehow caught her up, and they were mourning together. More than any words could have done, his silence seemed to mitigate what they had to do. For an age, they stayed that way, side by side, till she allowed her choking to give way to a deep, exhausted sigh. But he still did not move--not towards her, not away from her.