The Secret Pilgrim (29 page)

“Britta is very intelligent,” she said apologetically. “For an intelligent man to question an intelligent woman, that's sometimes difficult. Do you have a daughter, sir?”

I was not about to fill in my character profile for her so I said no, which happened also to be the truth.

“A pity. Never mind. Maybe you still get one. A man like you, you have time. You speak German?”

“Yes.”

“Then you are lucky. You can communicate with her in her language. That way you get to know her better. Britta and I, we can speak only English together. I speak it like my late husband, who was American. Britta speaks it like her late lover, who was Irish. Tel Aviv says we are to allow you two hours. Will you be happy with two hours? If you need more, we shall ask them—maybe they say yes. Maybe two hours will be too much. We shall see.”

“You are very kind,” I said.

“Kind, I don't know. Maybe we should be less kind. Maybe we are making kind too much. You will see.”

And with this she sent for coffee and for Britta, while the Colonel and myself took up our places along one side of the plain wood table.

But Captain Levi did not sit at the table, I supposed because she was not part of the interview. She sat beside the door on a straight kitchen chair, her eyes lowered as if in preparation for a concert. Even when Britta walked in between two young wardresses, she only lifted her eyes as far as was necessary to watch the three women's feet pass her to the centre of the room and halt. One wardress pulled back a chair for Britta, the second unlocked her handcuffs. The wardresses left, and we settled to the table.

And I would like to paint for you the scene exactly as I saw it from where I sat: with the Colonel to the right, and Britta opposite us across the table, and the bowed grey head of Captain Levi almost directly behind her, but slightly to the left, wearing a reminiscent expression that was half a smile. Throughout our discussion she stayed like that, still as a waxwork. Her part-smile of familiarity never altered and never went away. There was concentration in her pose, and something of effort, so that I wondered whether she was straining to pick out phrases and words she could identify, perhaps from a combined knowledge of Yiddish and English, for Britta, being a Bremen girl, spoke a clear and authoritarian German, which makes comprehension easier.

And Britta, without a doubt, was a fine sample of her breed. She was “blond as a bread roll,” as they say up there, tall and deepshouldered and well-grown, with wide rather insolent blue eyes and a strong attractive jaw. She had Monica's youth and Monica's height as well, and, as I could not avoid speculating, Monica's sensuality. My suspicion that they had been maltreating her vanished as soon as she walked in. She held herself like a ballerina, but with more intelligence and more of life's reality than is to be found in most dancers. She would have looked well in tennis gear or in a
dirndl
dress, and I suspected that in her time she had worn both. Even her prison tunic did not diminish her, for she had made herself a cloth belt out of something, and tied it at the waist, and she had brushed her fair hair over her shoulders in a cape. Her first gesture when her hands were freed was to offer me one, at the same time dropping a schoolgirl bob, whether out of irony or respect it was too soon to tell. She wore no make-up but needed none.

“Und mit wem hab' ich die Ehre?”
she enquired, either courteously or impishly. And whom do I have the honour to address?

“I'm a British official,” I said.

“Your name, please?”

“It's unimportant.”

“But you are very important.”

Prisoners when they are brought up from their cells often say silly things in their first flush, so I answered her with consideration.

“I'm working with the Israelis on aspects of your case. That's all you need to know.”

“Case? I am a case? How amusing. I thought I was a human being. Please sit down, Mr. Nobody,” she said, doing so herself.

So we sit as I have described, with Captain Levi's face behind her, a little out of focus like its expression. The Colonel had not stood up to greet Britta, and he barely bothered to look at her now she was sitting before him. He seemed suddenly to be without expectation. He glanced at his watch. It was of dull steel and like a weapon on his brown wrist. Britta's wrists were white and smooth like Monica's, but chafed with red rings from the handcuffs.

Suddenly she was lecturing me.

She began at once, as if she were resuming a tutorial, and in a sense she was, for I soon realized she lectured everyone this way, or everyone whom she had dismissed as bourgeois. She said she had a statement to make which she would like me to relay to my “colleagues,” as she called them, since she felt that her position was not being sufficiently appreciated by the authorities. She was a prisoner of war, just as any Israeli soldier in Palestinian hands
was a prisoner of war, and entitled to the treatment and privileges set out in the Geneva Convention. She was a tourist here, she had committed no crime against Israel; she had been arrested solely on the strength of her trumped-up record in other countries, as a deliberate act of provocation against the world proletariat.

I gave a quick laugh, and she faltered. She was not expecting laughter.

“But look here,” I objected. “Either you're a prisoner of war or you're an innocent tourist. You can't be both.”

“The struggle is between the innocent and the guilty,” she retorted, without hesitation, and resumed her lecture. Her enemies were not limited to Zionism, she said, but what she called the dynamic of bourgeois domination, the repression of natural instincts, and the maintenance of despotic authority disguised as “democracy.”

Again I tried to interrupt her, but this time she talked straight through me. She quoted Marcuse at me and Freud. She referred to the rebellion of sons in puberty against their fathers, and the disavowal of this rebellion in later years as the sons themselves became the fathers.

I glanced at the Colonel, but he seemed to be dozing.

The purpose of her “actions' she said, and those of her comrades, was to arrest this instinctual cycle of repression in all its forms—in the enslavement of labour to materialism, in the repressive principle of “progress” itself—and to allow the real forces of society to surge, like erotic energy, into new, unfettered forms of cultural creation.

“None of this is faintly interesting to me,” I protested. “Just stop, please, and listen to my questions.”

Acts of so-called “terrorism” had therefore two clear purposes, she continued, as if I had never spoken, of which the first was to disconcert the armies of the bourgeois-materialist conspiracy, and the second to instruct, by example, the pit-ponies of the earth, who had lost all knowledge of the light. In other words, to introduce ferment and awaken consciousness at the most repressed human levels.

She wished to add that though she was not an adherent of Communism, she preferred its teachings to those of Capitalism, since Communism provided a powerful negation of the ego-ideal which used property to construct the human prison.

She favoured free sexual expression and—for those who needed them—the use of drugs as a means of discovering the free self as contrasted with the unfree self that is castrated by aggressive tolerance.

I turned to the Colonel. There is an etiquette of interrogation as there is about everything else. “Do we have to go on listening to this nonsense? The lady is your prisoner, not mine,” I said. For I could hardly lay the law down to her across his table.

The Colonel lifted his head high enough to glance at her with indifference. “You want to go back down, Britta?” he asked her. “You want bread and water for a couple of weeks?” His German was as bizarre as his English. He seemed suddenly a lot older than his age, and wiser.

“I have more to say, thank you.”

“If you're going to stay up here, you answer his questions and you shut up,” said the Colonel. “It's your choice. You want to leave now, it's fine by us.” He added something in Hebrew to Captain Levi, who nodded distantly. An Arab prisoner entered with a tray of coffee— four cups and a plate of sugar biscuits—and handed them round meekly, a coffee cup for each of us and one for Captain Levi, the biscuits at the centre of the table. An air of lassitude had settled over us. Britta stretched out her long arm for a biscuit, lazily, as if she were in her own home. The Colonel's hand crashed on the table just ahead of her as he removed the plate from her reach.

“So what do you wish to ask me, please?” Britta enquired of me, as if nothing at all had happened. “Do you wish me to deliver the Irish to you? What other aspects of my case could interest the English, Mr. Nobody?”

“If you deliver us one particular Irishman, that will be fine,” I said. “You lived with a man named Seamus for a year.”

She was amused. I had provided her with an opening. She studied me, and seemed to see something in my face she recognised. “
Lived
with him? That is an exaggeration. I slept with him. Seamus was only for sex,” she explained, with a mischievous smile. “He was a convenience, an instrument. A
good
instrument, I would say. I was the same for him. You like sex? Sometimes another boy would join us, maybe sometimes a girl. We make combinations. It was irrelevant but we had fun.”

“Irrelevant to what?” I asked.

“To our work.”

“What work?”

“I have already described our work to you, Mr. Nobody. I have told you of its aims, and of our motivations. Humanitarianism is not to be equated with non-violence. We must fight to be free. Sometimes even the highest causes can only be served by violent methods. Do you know that? Sex also can be violent.”

“What kind of violent methods was Seamus involved in?” I asked.

“We are speaking not of wanton acts but of the people's right of resistance against acts committed by the forces of repression. Are you a member of those forces or are you in favour of spontaneity, Mr. Nobody? Perhaps you should free yourself and join us.”

“He's a bomber,” I said. “He blows up innocent people. His most recent target was a public house in southern England. He killed one elderly couple, the barman and the pianist, and I give you my word he didn't liberate a single deluded worker.”

“Is that a question or a statement, Mr. Nobody?”

“It's an invitation to you to tell me about his activities.”

“The public house was close to a British military camp,” she replied. “It was providing infrastructure and comfort to Fascistic forces of oppression.”

Again her cool eyes held me in their playful gaze. Did I say she was attractive? What is attraction in such circumstances? She was wearing a calico tunic. She was an enforced penitent of crimes that
she did not repent. She was alert in every part of herself, I could feel it, and she knew I felt it, and the divide between us enticed her.

“My department is considering offering you a sum of money on your lease, payable, if you prefer, to somebody you nominate in the meantime,” I said. “They want information that would lead to the arrest and conviction of your friend Seamus. They are interested in his past crimes, others he has yet to commit, safe addresses, contacts, habits and weaknesses.” She waited for me to go on, so, perhaps unwisely, I did. “Seamus is not a hero. He's a pig. Not what you call a pig. A real pig. Nobody did bad things to him when he was young; his parents are decent people who run a tobacco shop in County Down. His grandfather was a policeman, a good one. Seamus is blowing people up for kicks because he's inadequate. That's why he treated you badly. He only exists when he's inflicting pain. The rest of the time he's a spoilt little boy.”

I had not scratched the surface of her steady stare.

“Are you inadequate, Mr. Nobody? I think perhaps you are. In your occupation, that is normal. You should join us, Mr. Nobody. You should take lessons with us, and we shall convert you to our cause. Then you will be adequate.”

You must understand that she did not raise her voice while she said this, or indulge in dramatics of any kind. She remained condescending and composed, even hospitable. The mischief in her lay deep and well-disguised. She had healthy natural smile and it stayed with her all the time she spoke, while Captain Levi behind her continued to gaze into own memories, perhaps because she did not understand what was being said.

The Colonel glanced at me in question. Not trusting myself to speak, I lifted my hands from the table, asking what's the point? The Colonel said something to Captain Levi, who in the disappointed manner of someone who has prepared a meal only to see it taken away uneaten, pressed a bell for the escort, Britta rose to her feet, smoothed her prison tunic over her breasts and hips and held out her hands for the handcuffs.

“How much money were they thinking of offering me, Mr Nobody?” she enquired.

“None,” I said.

She dropped me another bob and walked between her guards towards the door, her hips flowing inside her calico tunic, reminding me of Monica's inside her dressing-gown. I was afraid she would speak again but she didn't. Perhaps she knew she had won the day, and anything more would spoil the effect. The Colonel followed her out and I was alone with Captain Levi. The half smile had not left her face.

“There,” she said. 'Now you know a little of what it feels like to hear Britta's music.”

“I suppose I do.”

“Sometimes we communicate too much. Perhaps you should have spoken English to her. So long as she speaks English, I can care for her. She is a human being, she is a woman, she is in prison. And you may be sure she is in agony. She is courageous, and so long as she speaks English to me I can do my duty for her.”

“And when she speaks German to you?”

“What would be the point, since she knows I cannot understand her?”