The Little Drummer Girl (58 page)

She broke off, hearing what Tayeh had heard so long before: a car coming up the hill. He hears like the blind, she thought. It's because of his body.

"You like America?" he enquired.

"No."

"Ever been?"

"No."

"How can you tell you don't like it if you haven't been?" he asked.

But once again the question was rhetorical, a point he was making to himself in the dialogue he was conducting around her. The car was pulling into the forecourt. She heard footsteps and subdued voices, and saw the beams of its headlamps cross the room before they were put out.

"Stay where you are," he ordered.

Two other boys appeared, one carrying a plastic bag, the other a machine gun. They stood still, waiting respectfully for Tayeh to address them. The letters lay between them on the table and, when she remembered how important they had been, their disorder was majestic.

"You are not followed and you are going south," Tayeh said to her. "Finish your vodka and go with the boys. Maybe I believe you, maybe I don't. Maybe it won't matter too much. They 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 up boldly beside the driver, wearing a grey hospital tunic and headscarf. It was not night any more but a cheerful dawn, with a heavy red sun to their left that kept hiding as they wound carefully down the hill. She tried English small talk on the driver but he became angry. She gave a happy "Hi there" to the boys behind, but one was sullen and the other ferocious, so she thought, Fight your own damn revolution, and studied the view. South, he 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 to it.

The first checkpoint came as they entered the city; there were four more before they left it on the coast road south, and at the fourth a dead boy was being loaded into a taxi by two men, while women screamed and beat on the roof. He was on his side with an empty hand pointing downwards, still grasping for something. After the first death there is no other, Charlie recited to herself, thinking of the murdered Michel. The blue sea opened to their right, and once more the landscape became ridiculous. It was as if civil war had broken out along the English seaside. Wrecks of cars and bullet-spattered villas lined the road; in a playing field, two children kicked a football to each other across a shell crater. The little yachting jetties lay smashed and half submerged; even the northbound fruit lorries that nearly ran them off the road had a fugitive desperation.

Again they stopped for a road check. Syrians. But German nurses in Palestinian ambulances were of no interest to anyone. She heard the revving of a motorcycle and glanced incuriously towards it. A dusty Honda, its carrier bags crammed with green bananas. A live chicken dangling by its legs from the handlebar. And, in the saddle, Dimitri listening earnestly to the engine. He wore the half uniform of a Palestinian soldier, and a red kaffiyeh round his neck. Shoved through the khaki epaulette of his shirt, like a girl's favour, was a bold sprig of white heather to say "We're with you," because white heather was the sign she had been looking out for these last four days.

From now on, only the horse knows the way,Joseph had told her;your job is stay in the saddle.

Once again, they made a family and waited.

Their home this time was a small house near Sidon with a concrete verandah that had been split in two by a shell from an Israeli warship, leaving rusted iron rods sticking out like the antennae of a giant insect. The back garden was a tangerine orchard where an old goose pecked at the fallen fruit; the front was a tip of mud and scrap metal that had been a famous emplacement during the last invasion, or the last but five. In the adjacent paddock a wrecked armoured car was shared between a family of yellow chickens and a refugee spaniel with four fat puppies. Beyond the armoured car lay the blue Christian sea of Sidon, with its Crusader fortress stuck out on the waterfront like a perfect sandcastle. From Tayeh's seemingly endless stock of boys, Charlie had acquired two more: Kareem and Yasir. Kareem was plump and clownish, and made a show of regarding his machine gun as a dead weight, puffing and grimacing whenever he was obliged to shoulder it. But when she smiled at him in sympathy he became flustered and hurried away to join Yasir. His ambition was to become an engineer. He was nineteen and had been fighting six years. He spoke English in a whisper, and put "use to" with almost every verb.

"When Palestine will use to be free, I study in Jerusalem," said Kareem. "Meantime"--he tilted his hand and sighed at the awful prospect--"maybe Leningrad, maybe Detroit."

Yes, Kareem agreed politely, he use to have a brother and a sister, but his sister had died in a Zionist air attack on the camp at Nabatiyeh. His brother was moved to Rashidiyeh camp and died in a naval bombardment three days later. He described these losses modestly, as if they ranked low in the general tragedy.

"Palestine is use to be a little cat," he told Charlie mysteriously one morning, as she was standing patiently at her bedroom window in a billowing white nightdress while he held his machine gun at the ready. "She needs much stroking or she use to go wild."

He had seen a bad-looking man in the street, he explained, and had come up to see whether he should kill him.

But Yasir, with his boxer's lowered brow and scorching, furious gaze, could not speak to her at all. He wore a red check shirt and a black lanyard looped over his shoulder to denote Military Intelligence, and when darkness fell, he stood in the garden, watching the sea for Zionist raiders. He was a big Communist, Kareem explained sympathetically, and he was going to destroy colonialism everywhere in the world. Yasir hated Westerners even when they claimed to love Palestine, said Kareem. His mother and all his family had died at Tal al-Zataar.

Of what? Charlie asked.

Of thirst, said Kareem, and explained a small piece of modern history to her: Tal al-Zataar, the hill of thyme, was a refugee camp in Beirut. Tin-roofed huts, often eleven to a room. Thirty thousand Palestinians and poor Lebanese held out there for seventeen months against persistent shelling.

By whom? Charlie asked.

Kareem was puzzled by her question. By the Kata'ib, he said, as if it were obvious. By Fascist Maronite Irregulars, assisted by the Syrians and doubtless by the Zionists also. Thousands died, but no one knew how many, he said, because so few remained to miss them. When the attackers came in, they shot most of the survivors. The nurses and doctors were lined up and shot dead too, which was logical, since they had no medicine left, no water, and no patients.

"Were you there?" Charlie asked Kareem.

No, he replied; but Yasir was.

"In the future, do not sunbathe," Tayeh told her when he arrived to collect her the next evening. "This is not the Riviera."

She never saw the boys again. She was entering by degrees exactly that condition which Joseph had predicted. She was being educated to tragedy, and the tragedy absolved her of the need to explain herself. She was a blinkered rider, being conveyed through events and emotions too great for her to encompass, into a land where merely to be present was to be part of a monstrous injustice. She had joined the victims and was finally reconciled to her deceit. As each day passed, the fiction of her pretended allegiance to Michel became more firmly based in fact, while her allegiance to Joseph, if not a fiction, survived only as a secret mark upon her soul.

"Soon we shall all use to be dead," Kareen told her, echoing Tayeh. "The Zionists will genocide us to death, you will use to see."

The old prison was in the centre of town, and 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 of trading; shops and stalls were full. The street lamps shone deeply into the old marble of the walls, seeming to light them from inside. The noise in the alleys was piecemeal, and sometimes when they turned a corner it stopped, except for their own footsteps clipping and shuffling on the polished Roman paving stones. 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 torn moon kept pace with them; the night was very hot. They entered another square and a burst of Arab music greeted them, relayed from improvised loudspeakers on poles. The high gates stood open and gave on to a bright-lit courtyard from which a stone staircase lifted to successive balconies. The music was louder.

"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."

An old man on a kitchen chair stared blankly at them. Tayeh and the Administrator went forward to greet him. Charlie gazed around. I see this every day. I am a hard-nosed Western journalist describing deprivation to those who have everything and are miserable. She was in the centre of a vast stone silo whose ancient walls were lined to the sky with cage doors and wooden balconies. 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. Charlie smelt coffee, open drains, and wash-day. Tayeh and the Administrator returned.

"Allow them to speak to you first," Tayeh advised her, yet again. "Do not be forward to these people, they will not understand. You are observing a species already half extinct."

They climbed a marble staircase. The cells on this floor had solid doors, with peep holes for the jailers. The noise seemed to rise with the heat. A woman passed wearing full peasant costume. The Administrator addressed her and she pointed along the balcony to a hand-drawn sign in Arabic, shaped like a crude arrow. Looking downward into the well, Charlie saw the old man back on his chair, staring into nothing. He has done his day's work, she thought; he has told us "Go upstairs." They reached the arrow, followed its direction, came upon another, and were soon advancing into the very centre of the prison. I'll need string to find my way back, she thought. She glanced at Tayeh, but he did not want to look at her. In future don't sunbathe. They entered a former staff room 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. The waiting mothers sat patiently along the wall while their babies dozed or fretted.

"Stand here." Tayeh ordered, and this time went forward himself, leaving Charlie with the Administrator. But the woman had already seen him enter; her eyes lifted to him, then to Charlie, and 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 studied Charlie in the mirror.

"Follow us," Tayeh said.

Every prison has one: a small bright room with plastic flowers and a photograph of Switzerland, where blameless people can be entertained. The Administrator had departed. Tayeh and the girl sat either side of Charlie, the girl as straight as a nun, and Tayeh on the slope, with one leg stuck stiffly to one side of him and the stick like a tent pole down the centre of him, and the sweat running over his cratered face while he smoked and fidgeted and frowned. The sounds from the prison had not ceased, but had joined together in a single jangle, partly of music, partly of human voices. Sometimes, amazingly, Charlie heard laughter. The girl was beautiful and stern, and a little awesome in her blackness, with straight strong features and a dark, direct gaze that had no interest in dissembling. She had cut her hair short. The door stood open. The usual two boys guarded it.

"You know who she is?" Tayeh enquired, already stubbing out his first cigarette. "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. She has read your letters to Michel, also his letters to you. Translated. She is interested in you, naturally."

Shifting painfully in his chair, Tayeh fished out a sweat-smeared cigarette and lit it.

"She is in grief, but so are we all. 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--with contempt, which was his manner tonight.

"She wishes first to thank you for the great comfort you gave to her brother Salim while he was fighting Zionism, also that you yourself have joined the struggle for justice." He waited as Fatmeh resumed. "She says, now you are sisters. Both loved Michel, both are proud of his heroic death. She asks you--Again he paused to let her speak. "She asks you, will you also accept death rather than become the slave of imperialism? She is very political. Tell her yes."

"Yes."

"She wishes to hear about how Michel spoke of his family and of Palestine. Don't fabricate. She has a good instinct."