The Little Drummer Girl (72 page)

"Wake up. Talk to me."

"Better to sleep."

"I can't. I'm afraid."

He began to tell her a story of a night mission he had made into the Galilee long ago, he and two others. How they were crossing the sea in a rowing boat, and it was so beautiful that they lost all sense of what they had come for, and fished instead. She interrupted him.

"It wasn't a boat," she insisted. "It was a car, I heard it again. Listen."

"It was a boat," he said sleepily.

The moon had found a space between the curtains, and shone towards them across the floor. Getting up, she went to the window and without touching the curtains stared out. Pine woods lay all around, the moonpath on the lake was a white staircase reaching downward to the centre of the world. But there was no boat anywhere and no light to lure the fish. She returned to the bed and his right arm slipped across her body, drawing her to him, but when he sensed her resistance he gently drew away from her and turned languidly onto his back.

"Talk to me," she said again. "Khalil. Wake up." She shook him fiercely, then kissed him on the lips. "Wake up," she said again.

So he roused himself for her, because he was a kind man, and had appointed her his sister.

"You know what was strange about your letters to Michel?" he asked. "The gun. ‘From now on, I shall dream of your head on my pillow, and your gun beneath it'--lovers' talk. Beautiful lovers' talk."

"Why was it strange? Tell me."

"I had exactly such a conversation with him once. Precisely on this very matter. ‘Listen, Salim,' I told him. ‘Only cowboys sleep with their guns under the pillow. If you remember nothing else I teach you, remember this. When you are in bed, keep your gun at your side where you can hide it better, and where your hand is. Learn to sleep that way. Even when you have a woman.' He said he would. Always he promised me. Then he forgot. Or found a new woman. Or a new car."

"Broke the rules then, didn't he?" she said and, seizing his gloved hand, considered it in the half darkness, pinching each dead finger in turn. They were of wadding, all but the smallest and the thumb.

"So what did this lot?" she demanded brightly. "Mice? What did this lot, Khalil? Wake up."

He took a long time to answer. "One day in Beirut, I am a little stupid like Salim. I am in the office, the post comes, I am in a hurry, I am expecting a certain parcel, I open it! This was an error."

"So? What happened? You opened it and there was a bang, was there? Bang go your fingers. That how you did your face too?"

"When I woke up in hospital, there was Salim. You know something? He was very pleased I had been stupid. ‘Next time, before you open a parcel, show it to me or read the postmark first,' he says. ‘If it comes from Tel Aviv, better you return it to the sender.' ‘

"Why do you make your own bombs then? If you've only got one hand?"

The answer was in his silence. In the twilit stillness of his face as it lay turned to her, with its straight, unsmiling fighter's stare. The answer was in everything she had seen since the night she had signed on with the theatre of the real. For Palestine, it ran. For Israel. For God. For my sacred destiny. To do back to the bastards what the bastards did to me. To redress injustice. With injustice. Until all the just are blown to smithereens, and justice is finally free to pick herself out of the rubble and walk the unpopulated streets.

Suddenly he was demanding her, and no longer to be resisted.

"Darling," she whispered. "Khalil. Oh Christ. Oh, darling. Please."

And whatever else whores say.

It was dawn, but still she would not let him sleep. With the pale daylight, a wakeful light-headedness possessed her. With kisses, with caresses, she used every wile she knew to keep him present with her, and his passion burning. You're my best, she whispered to him, and I never award first prizes. My strongest, my bravest, my most clever lover of all time. Oh, Khalil, Khalil, Christ, oh please. Better than Salim? he asked. More patient than Salim, more cherishing, more grateful. Better than Joseph, who sent me to you on a plate.

"What's the matter?" she said as he suddenly disengaged from her. "Did I hurt you?"

Instead of answering, he reached out his good hand and with a commanding gesture lightly pinched her lips together. Then lifted himself stealthily on his elbow. She listened with him. The clatter of a water bird lifting from the lake. The shriek of geese. The crowing of a cockerel, the chiming of a bell. Foreshortened by the snowbound countryside. She felt the mattress lift beside her.

"No cows," he said softly, from the window.

He was standing at the side of the window, still naked, but with his gun looped by its belt over his shoulder. And for a second, in the extremity of her tension, she imagined the mirror image of Joseph standing facing him, red-lit by the electric fire, separated from him only by the thin curtain.

"What do you see?" she whispered at last, unable to bear the tension any more.

"No cows. And no fishermen. And no bicycles. I see much too little."

His voice was tense with action. His clothes lay beside the bed where she had thrown them in their frenzy. He pulled on his dark trousers and white shirt, and buckled the gun into place beneath his armpit.

"No cars, no passing lights," he said evenly. "Not one labourer on his way to work. And no cows."

"They've gone to milking."

He shook his head. "Not for two hours do they go for milking."

"It's the snow. They're keeping them indoors."

Something in her voice caught his ear; the quickening in him had sharpened his awareness of her. "Why do you apologise for them?"

"I don't. I'm just trying--

"Why do you apologise for the absence of all life around this house?"

"To quell your fears. Comfort you."

An idea was growing in him--a terrible idea. He could read it in her face, and in her nakedness; and she in turn could feel his suspicion form. "Why do you wish to quell my fears? Why are you more frightened for me than for yourself?"

"I'm not."

"You are a wanted woman. Why are you so able to love me? Why do you speak of my comfort, and not of your own safety? What guilt is in your mind?"

"None. I didn't like killing Minkel. I want to get out of this whole thing. Khalil?"

"Is Tayeh right? Did my brother die for you after all? Answer me, please," he insisted, very, very quietly. "I wish for an answer."

Her whole body begged for his reprieve. The heat in her face was terrible. It would burn for ever.

"Khalil--come back to bed," she whispered. "Love me. Come back."

Why was he so leisurely if they were all around the house? How could he stare at her like this while the ring tightened round him every second?

"What is the time, please?" he asked, still staring at her. "Charlie?"

"Five. Half past. What does it matter?"

"Where is your clock ? Your little clock I require to know the time, please."

"I don't know. In the bathroom."

"Stay where you are, please. Otherwise I shall perhaps kill you. We shall see."

He fetched it, and handed it to her on the bed.

"Kindly open it for me," he said, and watched her while she wrestled with the clasp.

"So what is the time, please, Charlie?" he asked again, with a terrible lightness. "Kindly advise me, from your clock, what hour of the day it is."

"Ten to six. Later than I thought."

He snatched it from her and read the dial. Digital, twenty-four-hour. He switched on the radio and it gave a wail of music before he switched it off again. He held it to his ear, then weighed it appreciatively in his hand.

"Since last night when you left me, you have not had much time to yourself, I think. Is that so? None, in fact."

"None."

"Then how did you buy new batteries for this clock?"

"I didn't."

"Then why is it working?"

"I didn't need to--they hadn't run out--it goes for years, just on one set--you buy special ones--long life--

She had reached the end of her invention. All of it, for all time, here and for ever after, because by now she had remembered the moment on the hilltop when he had stood her outside the Coca-Cola van to search her, and the moment when he dropped the batteries into his pocket before returning the clock to her shoulder bag and tossing the bag into the van.

He had lost interest in her. The clock had all his attention.

"Bring me that imposing radio beside the bed, please, Charlie. We make a little experiment. An interesting technological experiment relating to high-frequency radio."

She whispered, "Can I put something on?" She pulled on her dress and took the bedside radio to him, a modern thing in black plastic, with a speaker like a telephone dial. Placing the clock and the radio together, Khalil switched on the radio and worked through the channels until suddenly it let out a wounded wail, up and down like an air-raid warning. Then he picked up the clock, pushed back the hinged flap of the battery chamber with his thumb, and shook the batteries onto the floor, much as he must have done last night. The wailing stopped dead. Like a child who has performed a successful experiment, Khalil lifted his head to her and pretended to smile. She tried not to look at him, but could not help herself.

"Who do you work for, Charlie? For the Germans?"

She shook her head.

"For the Zionists?"

He took her silence for yes.

"Are you Jewish."

"No."

"Do you believe in Israel? What are you?"

"Nothing," she said.

"Are you Christian? Do you see them as the founders of your great religion?"

Again she shook her head.

"Is it for money? Did they bribe you? Blackmail you?"

She wanted to scream. She clenched her fists, and filled her lungs, but the chaos choked her, and she sobbed instead. "It was to save life. It was to take part. To be something. I loved him."

"Did you betray my brother?"

The obstructions in her throat disappeared, to be replaced by a mortal flatness of tone. "I never knew him. I never spoke to him in my life. They showed him to me before they killed him, the rest was invented. Our love-affair, my conversion--everything. I didn't even write the letters, they did. They wrote his letters to you too. The one about me. I fell in love with the man who looked after me. That's all there is."

Slowly, without aggression, he reached out his left hand and touched the side of her face, apparently to make sure that she was real. Then looked at the tips of his fingers, and back at her again, somehow comparing them in his mind.

"And you are the same English who gave away my country," he remarked quietly, as if he could hardly believe the evidence of his eyes.

He lifted his head and as he did so, she saw his face snatch away in disapproval and then, under the force of whatever Joseph had shot him with, catch fire. Charlie had been taught to stand still when she pulled the trigger, but Joseph didn't do that. He didn't trust his bullets to do their work, but ran after them, trying to beat them to the target. He rushed through the door like an ordinary intruder, but instead of pausing, hurled himself straight forward as he fired. And he fired with his arms at full stretch, to reduce the distance still more. She saw Khalil's face burst, she saw him spin round and spread his arms to the wall, appealing for its help. So the bullets went into his back, ruining his white shirt. His hands flattened against the wall--one leather, one real--and his wrecked body slipped to a rugger player's crouch as he tried desperately to shove a way through it. But by that time, Joseph was close enough to kick his feet away from under him, hastening him on his last journey to the ground. After Joseph came Litvak, whom she knew as Mike, and had always, as she now realised, suspected of an unhealthy nature. As Joseph stood back, Mike knelt down and put a last precise shot into the back of Khalil's neck, which must have been unnecessary. After Mike came about half the world's executioners, in black frogmen's clothes, followed by Marty and the German weasel and two thousand stretcher bearers and ambulance drivers and doctors and unsmiling women, holding her, cleaning the vomit off her, guiding her down the corridor and into God's fresh air, though the sticky warm smell of blood clogged her nose and throat.

An ambulance was being backed to the front door. There were bottles of blood inside and the blankets were red too, so at first she refused to get in. In fact, she resisted quite hard and must have lashed out, because one of the women holding her suddenly let her go and swung away with her hand to her face.

She had gone deaf, so she could only vaguely hear her own screaming, but her main concern was to get her dress off, partly because she was a whore, partly because there was so much of Khalil's blood on it. But the dress was still more unfamiliar to her than it had been last night, and she couldn't fathom whether it had buttons or zip, so she decided not to bother with it after all. Then Rachel and Rose appeared either side of her, and each grabbed an arm exactly as they had done in the Athens house when she first arrived there for her audition for the theatre of the real; the experience told her that further resistance was futile. They led her up the steps to the ambulance and sat either side of her on one of the beds. She looked down and saw all the silly faces staring at her--the tough little boys with their heroes' scowls, Marty and Mike, Dimitri and Raoul,and other friends as well, some of them not yet introduced. Then the crowd parted, and Joseph emerged, considerately having got rid of the gun with which he had shot Khalil, but still unfortunately with quite a lot of blood over his jeans and running shoes, she noticed. He came to the foot of the steps and looked up at her, and at first it was like staring into her own face, because she could see exactly the same things in him that she hated in herself. So a sort of exchange of character occurred, where she assumed his rôle of killer and pimp, and he, presumably, hers of decoy, whore, and traitor.

Till suddenly, as she continued to stare at him, a surviving spark of outrage kindled in her, and gave her back the identity that he had stolen from her. She stood up, and neither Rose nor Rachel was in time to hold her down; she drew an enormous breath, and she shouted"Go" at him--or so at least it sounded to herself. Perhaps it was"No". It hardly mattered.