The Little Drummer Girl (62 page)

But after a while, these insoluble issues became too familiar to Becker, and in keeping with his introverted mood he took to sauntering about the camp alone. His favourite spot was a smashed watchtower that looked straight down into a little Shiite town, and north-eastward to the Crusader bastion of Beaufort, at that time still in Palestinian hands. They saw him there on his last evening with them, standing clear of any cover, as close to the electronic border fence as he could get without actually setting off the alarms. He had a light side and a dark side because of the setting sun, and he seemed, by his erect posture, to be inviting the whole Litani basin to know that he was there.

Next morning, he had returned to Jerusalem and, having presented himself at Disraeli Street, spent the day wandering the city's streets where he had fought so many battles and seen the shedding of so much blood, his own included. And still he seemed to question everything he saw. He stared in dazed bewilderment at the sterile arches of the recreated Jewish quarter; he sat himself in the lobbies of the tower hotels that now wreck the Jerusalem skyline, and brooded over the parties of decent American citizens from Oshkosh, Dallas, and Denver who had come in their jumbo-loads, in good faith and middle age, to keep in touch with their heritage. He peered into the little boutiques that sold hand-embroidered Arab kaftans and Arab artefacts guaranteed by the proprietor; he listened to the innocent chatter of the tourists, inhaled their costly scents, and heard them complain, but with comradely politeness, about the quality of the New York-style cuts of prime beef, which were not somehow just the way they tasted back home. And he spent a whole afternoon in the Holocaust Museum, worrying over the photographs of children who would have been his age if they had lived.

Having heard all this, Kurtz cut short Becker's leave and put him back to work. Find out about Freiburg, he told him. Comb the libraries, the records. Find out who we know there, get the layout of the university. Get architects' drawings and town plans. Work out everything we need and double it. By yesterday.

A good fighting man is never normal, Kurtz told Elli, to.console himself. If he's not plain stupid, he thinks too much.

But to himself Kurtz marvelled to discover how deeply his unrecovered ewe-lamb could still anger him.

twenty-three

It was the end of the line. It was the worst place of all her lives this far, a place to forget even while she was there, her bloody boarding school with rapists added, a forum stuck out in the desert and played with live ammunition. The battered dream of Palestine lay five hours' back-breaking drive behind the hills, and in place of it they had this tatty little fort, like a film set for a Beau Geste remake, with yellow stone battlements and a stone staircase and half its side bombed out, and a sandbagged main gate with a flagpole on it that slapped its frayed ropes in the scalding wind and never flew a flag. No one slept in the fort that she knew of. The fort was for administration and interviews; and lamb and rice three times a day; and the turgid group discussions till after midnight at which the East Germans harangued the West Germans and the Cubans harangued everybody, and an American zombie who called himself Abdul read a twenty-page paper on the immediate achievement of world peace.

Their other social centre was the small-arms range, which was not a disused quarry on a hilltop, but an old barrack hut with the windows blocked and a line of electric light-bulbs rigged from the steel beams, and leaking sandbags round the walls. The targets were not oil cans either, but brutish man-sized effigies of American marines, with painted grimaces and fixed bayonets and rolls of sticky brown paper at their feet to patch up their bullet-holes after you had shot them. It was a place constantly in demand, often at dead of night, full of boisterous laughter and groans of competitive disappointment. One day a great fighter came, some kind of terrorist V.I.P. in a chauffeur-driven Volvo, and the place was cleared while he shot in it. Another day a bunch of very wild blacks burst in on Charlie's class, and loosed off magazine after magazine without paying the smallest attention to the young East German in command.

"That satisfy you, whitey?" one of them bellowed over his shoulder, in a rich South African accent.

"Please--oh yes--very good," said the East German, very thrown by their discrimination.

They swaggered away, laughing their heads off, leaving the marines holed like colanders, with the result that the girls' first hour of that day was spent patching them from head to toe.

For living quarters, they had the three long huts, one with cubicles for women; one without cubicles for men; and a third with a so-called library for the training staff--and if they invite you to the library, said a tall Swedish girl called Fatima, don't expect too much in the way of reading. To wake them in the morning, they had a belch of martial music over a loudspeaker they couldn't turn off, followed by physical exercises on a sand flat smeared with lines of sticky dew like gigantic snail tracks.

But Fatima said the other places were worse. Fatima, to believe her version of herself, was a training freak. She had been trained in the Yemen, and in Libya, and in Kiev. She was playing the circuit like a tennis pro until somebody decided what to do with her. She had a three-year-old son, called Knut,who ran around naked and looked lonely, but when Charlie talked to him he cried.

Their guards were a new kind of Arab she hadn't met till now and didn't need to meet again: strutting, near-silent cowboys whose game was humiliating Westerners. They postured on the perimeters of the fort and rode six up in jeeps at breakneck speed. Fatima said they were a special militia raised on the Syrian border. Some were so young Charlie wondered their feet could reach the pedals. At night, till Charlie and a Japanese girl raised hell, the same kids arrived in raiding parties of twos and threes and tried to persuade the girls to take a ride into the desert. Fatima usually went, so did an East German, and they came back looking impressed. But the rest of the girls, if they bothered, played safe with Western instructors, which made the Arab boys even crazier.

All the trainers were men, and for morning prayers they ranged themselves before the comrade students like a rabble army while one of them read an aggressive condemnation of the day's arch-enemy: Zionism, Egyptian treachery, European capitalist exploitation, Zionism again, and a new one to Charlie called Christian expansionism--but perhaps that was because it was Christmas Day, a feast celebrated by determined official neglect. The East Germans were cropped and sullen and pretended that women bored them; the Cubans were by turns flamboyant, homesick, and arrogant, and most of them stank and had rotting teeth, except for gentle Fidel, who was everybody's favourite. The Arabs were the most volatile and acted toughest, screaming at the stragglers and, more than once, spraying bullets at the feet of the supposedly inattentive, so that one of the Irish boys bit clean through his finger in a panic, to the great amusement of Abdul the American who was watching from a distance, which he often did, smirking and slopping after them like a stills man on a film set, taking notes on a pad for his great revolutionary novel.

But the star of the place during those first insane days was a bomb-crazed Czech called Bubi,who on their first morning shot his own combat hat along the sand, first with a Kalashnikov, then with a massive.45 target pistol, and lastly, to finish the brute off, with a Russian grenade, which blew it fifty feet in the air.

Lingua franca for political discussion was O-level English with a bit of French here and there, and if Charlie ever got home alive she swore in her secret heart that she would dine out on those cretinous midnight exchanges concerning the "Dawn of the Revolution" for the rest of her unnatural life. Meanwhile, she laughed at nothing. She had not laughed since the bastards blew up her lover on the road to Munich; and her recent vision of the agony of his people had only intensified her bitter need for retribution.

You will treat everything with a great and lonely seriousness,Joseph had told her, himself as lonely and serious as he could wish her. You will be aloof, maybe a little crazy, they are used to that. You will ask no questions, you will be private to yourself, day and night.

Their numbers vacillated from the first day. When their lorry left Tyre, their party was five boys and three girls and conversation was forbidden by order of two guards with cordite smears on their faces who rode with them in the back while their lorry bucked and slithered over the stony hill trail. A girl who turned out to be Basque managed to whisper to her that they were in Aden; two Turkish boys said they were in Cyprus. They arrived to find ten other students waiting, but by the second day the two Turks and the Basque had vanished, presumably at night when lorries could be heard arriving and leaving without lights.

For their inauguration they were required to swear an oath of loyalty to the Anti-Imperialist Revolution and to study the "Rules for This Camp," which were set out like the Ten Commandments on a flat space of white wall in the Comrades' Reception Centre. All comrades to use their Arab names at all times, no drugs, no nudity, no swearing by God, no private conversations, no alcohol, no cohabitation, no masturbation. While Charlie was still wondering which of these injunctions to break first, a recorded address of welcome, no credits, was played over the loudspeaker.

"My comrades. Who are we? We are the ones with no name, no uniform. We are the escaped rats from the capitalist occupation. From the pain-ridden camps of the Lebanon--we come! And shall fight the genocide! From the concrete tombs of Western cities--we come! And find each other! And together we shall light the torch on behalf of eight hundred million starving mouths across the world!"

But when it was over, she felt a cold sweat on her back and a pounding anger in her breastwork shall, she thought. We shall, we shall. Glancing at an Arab girl beside her, she saw the same fervour in her eye.

Day and night,Joseph had said.

Day and night, therefore, she strove--for Michel, for her own mad sanity, for Palestine, for Fatmeh and for Salma and the bombed children in the Sidon prison; driving herself outward in order to escape the chaos inside; gathering together the elements of her second character as never before, welding them into a single combative identity.

I am a grieving, outraged widow and I have come here to take up my dead lover's fight.

I am the awakened militant who has wasted too long on half measures and now stands before you sword in hand.

I have put my hand on the Palestinian heart; I am pledged to lift the world up by its ears to make it listen.

I am on fire but I am cunning and resourceful. I am the sleepy wasp that can wait all winter long to sting.

I'm Comrade Leila, a citizen of the world revolution.

Day and night.

She played this part to its limit, from the angry snap with which she performed her unarmed combat to the unyielding glower with which she regarded her own face in the mirror as she savagely brushed out her long black hair with its red roots already showing. Until what had begun as an effort of will became a habit of mind and body, a sickly, permanent, solitary anger that quickly communicated itself to her audience, whether staff or students. Almost from the first, they accepted the certain strangeness in her, which gave her distance. Perhaps they had seen it in others before her; Joseph said they had. The cold-eyed passion she brought to the weapon training sessions--which extended from hand-held Russian rocket launchers through bomb-making with red circuit wire and detonators to the inevitable Kalashnikov--impressed even the ebullient Bubi. She was dedicated, but she was apart. Gradually she felt them defer to her. The men, even the Syrian militia, ceased to proposition her indiscriminately; the women gave up their suspicion of her striking looks; the weaker comrades started timidly to gather to her, and the strong to acknowledge her as an equal.

There were three beds in her dormitory but to begin with she had only one companion--a tiny Japanese girl who spent much time kneeling in prayer, but to fellow mortals spoke no word of any language but her own. Asleep, she ground her teeth so loudly that one night Charlie woke her up, then sat beside her, holding her hand while she wept silent Asian tears till the music belched and it was time to get her up. Soon afterwards, without explanation, she too vanished, to be replaced by two Algerian sisters, who smoked rancid cigarettes and seemed to know as much about guns and bombs as Bubi did. They were plain girls to Charlie's eye, but the training staff held them in veneration for some unexplained feat of arms against the oppressor. In the mornings they were to be seen wandering sleepily out of the training staff's quarters in their woollen jump-suits as the less favoured were finishing their unarmed combat. Thus Charlie for a while had the dormitory to herself, and though Fidel, the gentle Cuban, appeared one night, scrubbed and brushed like a chorister, to press his revolutionary love for her, she maintained her pose of stiff-jawed self-denial and granted him not so much as a kiss before sending him on his way.

The next to apply for her favours after Fidel was Abdul the American. He called on her late one night, knocking so softly that she expected to see one of the Algerian girls, since both regularly forgot their keys. By now, Charlie had decided that Abdul was a permanency of the camp. He was too close to the staff, he had too much licence, and no function but to read his dreary papers and quote Marighella in a rambling Deep South accent, which Charlie suspected was put on. Fidel, who admired him, said he was a Vietnam deserter who hated imperialism and had come here by way of Havana.

"Hi," said Abdul, and slipped past her, grinning, before she had a chance to slam the door on him. He sat on the bed and started to roll himself a cigarette.

"Blow," she said. "Scram."

"Sure," he agreed, and went on rolling his cigarette. He was tall and balding and, seen at close quarters, very thin. He wore Cuban fatigues and a silky brown beard that seemed to have run out of hair.