The Little Drummer Girl (69 page)

"Do the Zionists think of all the nice people when they bomb us? I don't think so. When they napalm our villages, kill our women? This I doubt very much. I do not think the terrorist Israeli pilot, sitting up there, says to himself, those poor civilians, those innocent victims.' " He talks like this when he is alone, she thought. And he is alone a lot. He talks to keep his faith alive; and his conscience quiet. "I have killed many people whom I would no doubt respect," he said, back at the bed. "The Zionists have killed many more. But I kill only for love. I kill for Palestine and for her children. Try to think like this also," he advised her piously, interrupting himself as he glanced at her. "You are nervous?"

"Yes."

"It's natural. I too am nervous. Are you nervous in the theatre?"

"Yes."

"It is the same. Terror is theatre. We inspire, we frighten, we awaken indignation, anger, love. We enlighten. The theatre also. The guerrilla is the great actor of the world."

"Michel wrote me that too. It's in his letters."

"But I told it to him. It was my idea."

The next parcel was wrapped in oil paper. He opened it with respect. Three half-pound sticks of Russian plastic. He laid them in pride of place at the centre of the eiderdown.

"The Zionists kill for fear and for hate," he announced. "Palestinians for love and justice. Remember this difference. It is important." The glance again, swift and commanding. "You will remember this when you are afraid? You will say to yourself ‘for justice'? If you do, you will no longer be afraid."

"And for Michel," she said.

He was not entirely satisfied. "And for him also, naturally," he conceded, and from a brown paper bag shook two household clothespegs onto the bed, then brought them to the bedside light to compare their simple mechanisms. Observing him from so near, she noticed a patch of creased white skin where the cheek and lower ear seemed to have been melted together and cooled again.

"Why do you put your hands over your face, please?" Khalil enquired, out of curiosity, when he had selected the better peg.

"I was tired for a moment," she said.

"Then wake up. Be alert for your mission. Also for the revolution. You know this type of bomb? Did Tayeh teach it to you?"

"I don't know. Maybe Bubi did."

"Then pay attention." Sitting beside her on the bed, he picked up the wood base and with a ballpoint pen briskly drew some lines on it for the circuit. "What we make is a bomb for all occasions. It works as a timer--here--also as a booby trap--here. Trust nothing. That is our philosophy." Handing her a clothespeg and two drawing-pins, he watched while she pushed the pins into either side of the peg's mouth, "I am not anti-Semitic, you know that?"

"Yes."

She gave him back the clothespeg, he took it to the handbasin and set to work soldering wires to the heads of the two drawing-pins.

"How do you know?" he demanded, puzzled.

"Tayeh told me the same. So did Michel." And so did about two hundred other people, she thought.

"Anti-Semitism, this is a strictly Christian invention." He again returned to the bed, this time bringing Minkel's open briefcase with him. "You Europeans, you are anti-everybody. Anti-Jew, anti-Arab, anti-black. We have many great friends in Germany. But not because they love Palestine. Only because they hate Jews. That Helga--you like her?"

"No."

"Me neither. She is very decadent, I think. You like animals?"

"Yes."

He sat next to her, the briefcase on the bed beside him. "Did Michel?"

Choose, never hesitate,Joseph had said. It is better to be inconsistent than to be uncertain.

"We never talked about them."

"Not even about horses?"

And never, never correct yourself.

"No."

From his pocket, Khalil had pulled a folded handkerchief, and from the centre of the handkerchief a cheap pocket watch with the glass and hour hand removed. Setting it beside the explosive, he took up the red circuit wire and unwound it. She had the base-board on her lap. He took it from her, then grasped her hand and placed it so that she could hold the staples while he lightly tapped them home, fixing the red wire to the board according to the pattern he had drawn. Next, returning to the basin, he soldered the wires to the battery while she cut up lengths of insulating tape for him with the scissors.

"See," he said proudly as he added the watch.

He was very near her. She felt his nearness like a heat. He was stooped like a cobbler to his last, engrossed by his work.

"Was my brother religious with you?" he asked, taking up a light-bulb and twisting a pared end of wire to it.

"He was an atheist."

"Sometimes he was an atheist, sometimes he was religious. Other times he was a silly little boy, too much with women and ideas and cars. Tayeh says you were modest at the camp. No Cuban boys, no Germans, nobody."

"I wanted Michel. That's all I wanted, Michel," she said, too emphatically to her own ear. But when she glanced at him, she could not help wondering whether their brotherly love had been quite as infallible as Michel had proclaimed, for his face had set into a scowl of doubt.

"Tayeh is a great man," he said, implying perhaps that Michel was not. The bulb lit. "The circuit is good," he announced and, reaching gently past her, picked up the three sticks of explosive. "Tayeh and myself--we died together. Did Tayeh describe to you this incident?" he asked, as with Charlie's help he began taping the explosive tightly together.

"No."

"The Syrians caught us--cut here. First they beat us. This is normal. Stand up, please." From the box he had extracted an old brown blanket, which he made her stretch across her chest for him while he deftly sliced it into strips. Their faces across the blanket were very close. She could smell the warm sweetness of his Arab body.

"In the course of beating us they make themselves very angry, so they decide to break all our bones. First fingers, then arms, then legs. Then they break our ribs with rifles."

The knife point through the blanket was inches from her body. He cut swiftly and cleanly, as if the blanket were something he had hunted and killed. "When they finish with us, they leave us in the desert. I am glad. At least we die in the desert! But we don't die. A patrol of our commandos finds us. For three months Tayeh and Khalil lie side by side in hospital. Snowmen. Covered in plaster. We have some nice conversations, we become good friends, we read some good books together."

Folding the strips into neat military piles, Khalil addressed himself to Minkel's cheap black briefcase, which she noticed for the first time was opened from the back, by way of the hinges, while the fastenings at the front were still firmly closed. One by one he laid the folded strips inside, until he had built up a soft platform for the bomb to lie on.

"You know what Tayeh said to me one night?" he enquired as he did this.

"‘Khalil,' he said, ‘for how much longer do we play the nice guys? Nobody helps us, nobody thanks us. We make great speeches, we send fine orators to the United Nations, and if we wait another fifty years, maybe our grandchildren, if they're alive, they get a little piece of justice.'"

Interrupting himself, he showed her how much with the fingers of his good hand.

"‘Meanwhile our brother Arabs kill us, the Zionists kill us, the Falangists kill us, and those of us who remain alive go into their diaspora. Like the Armenians. Like the Jews themselves.'" He became cunning. "‘But if we make a few bombs--kill a few people--make a slaughterhouse, just for two minutes of history--‘"

Without finishing the sentence, he took up the device and solemnly, with great precision, laid it inside the case.

"I need spectacles," he explained with a smile, and shook his head like an old man. "But where should I go for them--a man like me?"

"If you were tortured like Tayeh, why don't you limp like Tayeh?" she demanded, growing suddenly loud in her nervousness.

Delicately, he removed the light-bulb from the wires, leaving the pared ends free for the detonator.

"The reason I do not limp is because I prayed to God for strength, and God gave it me so that I could fight the real enemy and not my brother Arabs."

Handing her the detonator, he looked on approvingly while she attached it to the circuit. When she had finished, he took what wire remained and, with a deft, almost unconscious movement, wound it like wool round the tips of his dead fingers, until he had made a little dummy. Then wound two strands horizontally for a belt.

"You know what Michel wrote to me before he died? In his last letter?"

"No, Khalil, I do not know," she replied as she watched him toss the dummy into the briefcase.

"Please?"

"No, I said no, I don't know."

"Posted only hours before his death? ‘I love her. She is not like the others. It is true that when I first met her she had the paralysed conscience of a European'--here, wind the watch, please--‘also she was a whore. But now she is an Arab in her soul and one day I shall show her to our people and to you.' ‘:

There remained the booby trap, and for this they had to work in still closer intimacy, for he required her to loop a length of steel wire through the fabric of the lid, then he himself held the lid as low as possible while her small hands led the wire to the dowelling in the clothespeg. Gingerly now, he took the whole contraption to the basin once more, and, with his back to her, refitted the hinge-pins with a blob of solder for each side. They had passed the point of no return.

"You know what I told to Tayeh once?"

"No."

"Tayeh, my friend, we Palestinians are very lazy people in our exile. Why do we have no Palestinians in the Pentagon? In the State Department? Why are we not yet running the New York Times, Wall Street, the CIA? Why are we not making Hollywood movies about our great struggle, getting ourselves elected Mayor of New York, head of the Supreme Court? What is wrong with us, Tayeh? Why are we without enterprise? It is not enough that our people become doctors, scientists, schoolmasters. Why do we not run America as well? Is it because of this that we have to use bombs and machine guns?' ‘

He was standing strictly before her, holding the briefcase by its handle like a good commuter.

"You know what we should do?"

She didn't.

"March. All of us. Before they destroy us for ever." Offering her his forearm, he lifted her to her feet. "From the United States, from Australia, Paris, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon--from everywhere in the world where there are Palestinians. We take ships to the borders. Planes. Millions of us. Like a great tide which nobody can turn back." He handed her the briefcase, then began swiftly gathering up his tools and packing them in the box. "Then all together, we march into our homeland, we claim our houses and our farms and our villages, even if we have to knock down their towns and settlements and kibbutzim in order to find them. It wouldn't work. You know why not? They would never come." He dropped to a crouch, examining the threadbare carpet for tell-tale traces. "Our rich would not be able to sustain their social-economic drop in lifestyle " he explained, ironically emphasising the jargon. "Our merchants would not leave their banks and shops and offices. Our doctors would not give up their smart clinics, the lawyers their corrupt practices, our academics their comfortable universities." He was standing before her, and his smile was a triumph over all his pain. "So the rich make the money and the poor do the fighting. When was it any different?"

She walked ahead of him down the stairs. Exit one tart, carrying her little box of tricks. The Coca-Cola van stood in the forecourt still, but he strode past it as if he had never seen it in his life and climbed into a farmer's Ford,a diesel with bales of straw strapped to the roof. She got in beside him. Hills again. Pine trees laden on one side with fresh wet snow. Instructions, Joseph-style. Charlie, do you understand? Yes, Khalil, I understand. Then repeat it to me. She did. It is for peace, remember that. I will, Khalil, I will: for peace, for Michel, for Palestine; for Joseph and Khalil; for Marty and the revolution and for Israel, and for the theatre of the real.

He had stopped beside a barn and put out the headlights. He was looking at his watch. From down the road a torch flashed twice. He reached across her and pushed open her door.

"His name is Franz and you will tell him you are Margaret. Good luck."

The evening was moist and quiet, the street lamps of the old city centre hung over her like caged white moons in their iron brackets. She had made Franz drop her at the corner because she wanted the short walk across the bridge before she made her entrance. She wanted the puffed look of someone stepping in from outdoors, and the nip of cold on her face, and the hatred back in her mind. She was in an alley among low scaffolding, which closed round her like a spindly tunnel. She passed an art gallery full of self-portraits of a blond, unpleasing boy in spectacles, and another next to it with idealised landscapes that the boy would never enter. Graffiti screamed at her but she could not understand a word until she suddenly read "Fuck America."Thanks for the translation, she thought. She was in the open air again, climbing concrete steps strewn with sand to beat the snow, but they were still slippery underfoot. She reached the top and saw the glass doors of the university library to her left. The lights were still burning in the students' café. Rachel and a boy were sitting tensely at the window. She passed the first marble totem-pole, she was on the treewalk high above the carriageway, crossing to the farther side. Already the lecture hall rose ahead of her, its strawberry stone turned to blazing crimson by the floodlighting. Cars were pulling up; the first members of the audience were arriving, climbing the four steps to the front entrance, pausing to shake hands and congratulate one another on their immense prominence. A couple of security men perfunctorily checked ladies' handbags. She kept walking. The truth will make you free. She passed the second totem-pole, heading for the town staircase.

The briefcase was dangling in her right hand and she felt it brushing her thigh. A whining police siren made her shoulder muscles convulse in terror, but she kept going. Two police motorcycles with whirling blue lights pulled up, cossetting a shiny black Mercedes with a pennant. Usually when grand cars passed, she turned her head away in order not to give the occupants the satisfaction of being looked at, but tonight was different. Tonight she could walk tall; she had the answer in her hand. So she stared at them and was rewarded by a glimpse of a florid, overfed man in a black suit and silver tie: and a sullen wife with three chins and a mink rug. For great lies we need naturally a great audience, she remembered. A camera flashed and the eminent couple ascended to the glass door, admired by at least three passers-by. Soon, you bastards, she thought,soon.