The Little Drummer Girl (64 page)

The lift engineers were on strike, so Kurtz was obliged to take the staircase, but nothing could have dampened his good spirits. For one thing, his niece had just announced her engagement to a young boy in his own service--though not before time. For another, Elli's Bible conference had passed off happily; she had given a coffee party at the end of it and, to her great contentment, he had managed to be present. But best of all, the Freiburg breakthrough had been followed by several reassuring pointers, of which the most satisfactory was obtained but yesterday, by one of Shimon Litvak's listeners, testing a newfangled directional microphone on a rooftop in Beirut: Freiburg, Freiburg, three times in five pages, a real delight. Sometimes luck treated you that way, Kurtz reflected as he climbed. And luck, as Napoleon and everybody in Jerusalem knew, was what made good generals.

Reaching a small landing, he paused to collect his breath a little, and his thoughts. The staircase was lit like an air-raid shelter, with wire cages over the light-bulbs, but today it was the sounds of his own childhood in the ghettos that Kurtz heard bouncing up and down the gloomy well. I was right not to bring Shimon, he thought. Sometimes Shimon puts a chilly note on things; a surface lightness would improve him.

The door of number 18D had a steel-plated eye hole and locks all down one side of it, and Mrs. Minkel undid them one by one like boot buttons, calling "Just one moment, please," while she got lower and lower. He stepped inside and waited while she patiently replaced them. She was tall and fine-looking, with blue eyes very bright, and grey hair pinned in an academic bun.

"You are Mr. Spielberg from the Ministry of the Interior," she informed him with a certain guardedness as she gave him her hand. "Hansi is expecting you. Welcome. Please."

She opened the door to a tiny study and there her Hansi sat, as weathered and patrician as a Buddenbrook. His desk was too small for him, and had been so for many years; his books and papers lay stacked about him on the floor with an order that could not have been haphazard. The desk stood askew to a window bay, and the bay was half a hexagon, with thin smoked windows like arrow slits, and a bench seat built in. Rising carefully, Minkel picked his way with unworldly dignity across the room until he had reached the one small island that was not claimed by his erudition. His welcome was uneasy and as they sat themselves in the window bay, Mrs. Minkel drew up a stool and sat herself firmly between them, as if intent upon seeing fair play.

An awkward silence followed. Kurtz pulled the regretful smile of a man obliged by his duty. "Mrs. Minkel, I fear there are a couple of things on the security side which my office insists I am to discuss with your husband alone in the first instance," he said. And waited again, still smiling, until the Professor suggested she make a coffee, how did Mr. Spielberg like it?

With a warning glance at her husband from the doorway,

Mrs. Minkel reluctantly withdrew. In reality there could have been little difference between the two men's ages; yet Kurtz was careful to speak up to Minkel because that was what the Professor was accustomed to.

"Professor, I understand that our mutual friend, Ruthie Zadir, spoke to you only yesterday," Kurtz began, with a bedside respectfulness. He could understand this very well, for he had stood over Ruthie while she made the call, and listened to both sides of the conversation in order to get the feel of this man.

"Ruth was one of my best students," the Professor observed, with an air of loss.

"She is surely one of ours too," said Kurtz, more expansively. "Professor, are you aware, please, of the nature of the work in which Ruthie is now engaged?"

Minkel was not really used to answering questions outside his subject, and he required a moment's puzzled thought before replying.

"I feel I should say something," he said, with awkward resolution.

Kurtz smiled hospitably.

"If your visit here concerns the political leaning--sympathies--of present or former students under my charge, I regret that I am unable to collaborate with you. These are not criteria which I can accept as legitimate. We have had this discussion before. I am sorry." He seemed suddenly embarrassed, both by his thoughts and by his Hebrew. "I stand for something here. When we stand for something, we must speak out, but most important is to act. That is what I stand for."

Kurtz, who had read Minkel's file, knew exactly what he stood for. He was a disciple of Martin Buber, and a member of a largely forgotten idealistic group that between the wars of ‘67 and ‘73 had championed a real peace with the Palestinians. The rightists called him a traitor; sometimes, when they remembered him these days, so did the leftists. He was an oracle on Jewish philosophy, on early Christianity, on the humanist movements in his native Germany, and on about thirty other subjects as well; he had written a three-volume tome on the theory and practice of Zionism, with an index as long as a telephone directory.

"Professor," said Kurtz, "I am well aware of your posture in these matters and it is surely no intention of mine to seek to interfere in any way with your fine moral stand." He paused, allowing time for his assurance to sink in. "May I take it, by the way, that your forthcoming lecture at the University of Freiburg also touches upon this same issue of individual rights? The Arabs--their basic liberties--isn't that your subject on the twenty-fourth?"

The Professor could not go along with this. He did not deal in careless definitions.

"My subject on that occasion is different. It concerns the self-realisation of Judaism, not by conquest, but by the exemplification of Jewish culture and morality."

"So how does that argument run exactly?" Kurtz asked benignly.

Minkel's wife returned with a tray of homemade cakes. "Is he asking you to inform again?" she demanded. "If he's asking, tell him no. Then when you've said no, say no again, until he hears. What do you think he'll do? Beat you with a rubber truncheon?"

"Mrs. Minkel, I surely am asking your husband no such thing," said Kurtz, quite unperturbed.

With a look of patent disbelief, Mrs. Minkel once more withdrew.

But Minkel barely paused. If he had noticed the interruption at all, he ignored it. Kurtz had asked a question; Minkel, who renounced all barriers to knowledge as unacceptable, proposed to answer it.

"I will tell you exactly how the arguments run, Mr. Spielberg," he replied solemnly. "As long as we have a small Jewish state, we may advance democratically, as Jews, towards our Jewish self-realisation. But once we have a larger state, incorporating many Arabs, we have to choose." With his old mottled hands, he showed Kurtz the choice. "On this side, democracy without Jewish self-realisation. On that side, Jewish self-realisation without democracy."

"And the solution, therefore, Professor?" Kurtz enquired.

Minkel's hands flew in the air in a dismissive gesture of academic impatience. He seemed to have forgotten that Kurtz was not his pupil.

"Simple! Move out of the Gaza and the West Bank before we lose our values! What other solution is there?"

"And how do the Palestinians themselves respond to this proposal, Professor?"

A sadness replaced the Professor's earlier assurance. "They call me a cynic," he said.

"They do?"

"According to them, I want both the Jewish state and world sympathy, so they say I am subversive of their cause." The door opened again, and Mrs. Minkel entered with the coffee pot and cups. "But I am not subversive," the Professor said hopelessly--though he got no further, owing to his wife.

"Subversive?"Mrs. Minkel echoed, slamming down the crockery and colouring purple. "You are calling Hansi subversive? Because we speak our hearts about what is happening to this country?"

Kurtz would not have been able to stop her if he had tried, but in the event he made no effort to. He was content to let her run her course.

"In the Golan, the beatings and the torture? On the West Bank, how they treat them, worse than the S.S. In the Lebanon, in Gaza? Here in Jerusalem, even, slapping the Arab kids around because they are Arabs! And we should be subversive because we dare to talk about oppression, merely because no one is oppressing us--Jews from Germany,subversive in Israel?"

"Aber, Liebchen--" the Professor said, with an embarrassed fluster.

But Mrs. Minkel was clearly a lady who was used to making her point. "We couldn't stop the Nazis, now we can't stop ourselves. We get our own country, what do we do? Forty years later, we invent a new lost tribe. Idiocy! And if we don't say it, the world will. The world says it already. Read the newspapers, Mr. Spielberg!" As if warding off a blow, Kurtz had lifted his forearm until it was between her face and his. But she had not nearly finished. "That Ruthie," she said, with a sneer. "A good brain, studies three years under Hansi here. And what does she do? She joins the apparatus."

Lowering his hand, Kurtz revealed that he was smiling. Not in derision, not in anger, but with the confused pride of a man who truly loved the astonishing diversity of his people. He was calling "Please," he was appealing to the Professor, but Mrs. Minkel still had a wealth to say.

Finally, however, she stopped, and when she had done so, Kurtz asked her whether she too would not sit down and listen to what he had come to talk about. So she perched herself on the stool once more, waiting to be appeased.

Kurtz picked his words very carefully, very kindly. What he had to say was about as secret as a secret could be, he said. Not even Ruthie Zadir--a fine officer, handling many secrets every day--not even Ruthie was aware of it, he said: which was not true, but never mind. He had come not about the Professor's pupils, he said, and least of all to accuse him of being subversive or to quarrel with his fine ideals. He had come solely about the Professor's forthcoming address in Freiburg, which had caught the attention of certain extremely negative elements. Finally he came clean.

"So here's the sad fact," he said, and drew a long breath. "If some of those Palestinians, whose rights you have both been so bravely defending, have their way, you will make no speech at all on the twenty-fourth of this month in Freiburg. In fact, Professor, you will never make a speech again." He paused, but his audience showed no sign of interrupting. "According to information now available to us, it is evident that one of their less academic groups has singled you out as a dangerous moderate, capable of watering the pure wine of their cause. Just as you described to me, sir, but worse. A protagonist of the Bantustan solution for Palestinians. As a false light, leading the weak-brained into one more fatal concession to the Zionist jackboot."

But it took far, far more than the mere threat of death to persuade the Professor to accept an untested version of events.

"Excuse me," he said sharply. "That is the very description of myself which appeared in the Palestinian press after my speech at Beer Sheva."

"Professor, that is precisely where we got it from," said Kurtz.

twenty-four

She flew into Zürich in early evening. Storm flares lined the runway and blazed before her like the path of her own purpose. Her mind, as she had desperately prepared it, was an assembly of her old frustrations, matured and turned upon the rotten world. Now she knew there was not a shred of good in it; now she had seen the agony that was the price of Western affluence. She was who she had always been: an angry reject, getting her own back; with the difference that the Kalashnikov had replaced her useless tantrums. The flares sped past her window like burning wreckage. The plane touched down. But her ticket said Amsterdam, and theoretically she had still to land. Single girls returning from the Middle East are suspect, Tayeh had said, at her final briefing in Beirut. Our first task is to give you a more respectable provenance. Fatmeh, who had come to see her off, was more specific:Khalil has ordered that you acquire a fresh identity when you arrive.

Entering the deserted transit lounge, she had the feeling of being the first pioneer ever to set foot there. Canned music played but there was nobody to hear it. A smart shop sold chocolate bars and cheese, but it was empty. She went to the lavatory and considered her appearance at leisure. Her hair bobbed, and dyed a vague brown. Tayeh himself had hobbled round the Beirut flat while Fatmeh butchered it. No make-up, no sex appeal, he had ordered. She wore a heavy brown suit and a pair of vaguely astigmatic spectacles to scowl through. All I need is a boater and a crested blazer, she thought. She had come a long way from Michel's revolutionary poule de luxe.

Give my love to Khalil,Fatmeh had told her as she kissed her goodbye.

Rachel was standing beside her at the next basin, but Charlie saw straight through her. She didn't like her, didn't know her, and it was sheer coincidence that Charlie put her open handbag between them, her packet of Marlboros on top, in the way that Joseph had instructed her. And she didn't see Rachel's hand either, swapping the Marlboros with a packet of her own, or her quick, reassuring wink in the mirror.

I have no life but this one. I have no love but Michel and no loyalty except to the great Khalil.

Sit as close to the departures board as you can get, Tayeh had ordered. She did so, and from her little case took a book on Alpine plants, broad and slim like a schoolgirls' annual. Opening it, she perched it on her lap at an angle that allowed the title to be seen. She was sporting a round badge saying "Save the Whale" and that was the other sign, said Tayeh, because from now on Khalil requires that there always be two things: two plans, two signs, in everything a second system in case the first fails; a second bullet in case the world is still alive.

Khalil trusts nothing the first time,Joseph had said. But Joseph was dead and buried long ago, a discarded prophet from her adolescence. She was Michel's widow and Tayeh's soldier and she had come to enlist in the army of her dead lover's brother.

A Swiss soldier was eyeing her, an older man carrying a Heckler & Koch machine pistol. Charlie turned a page. Hecklers were her favourite. At her last weapon-training session she had put eighty-four shots out of a hundred into the storm-trooper target. It was the top score, men or women. Out of the corner of her eye she saw that he was still looking at her. An angry idea struck her. I'll do to you what Bubi once did in Venezuela, she thought. Bubi had been ordered to shoot a certain Fascist policeman as he came out of his house in the morning, a very favourable hour. Bubi hid in a doorway and waited. His target carried a gun under his arm, but he was also a family man, forever romping with his kids. As he stepped into the road,Bubi took a ball from his pocket and sent it bouncing down the street towards him. A kid's rubber ball--what family man would not instinctively bend down to catch it? As soon as he did, Bubi stepped out of his doorway and shot him dead. For who can fire a weapon while he is catching a rubber ball?