The Secret Pilgrim (28 page)

Changing direction, he had begun talking to the receptionist, but at an angle facing into the lobby, already searching for the person he was enquiring for. Which was when I saw the red spots spattered over his cheeks and forehead, like hives or chicken pox, but more vivid. The bedbugs had eaten him in some stinking hostel, I decided. He had stuck his head through the windscreen of a clapped-out car. He started walking towards me. Stiffly again, without expression. Purposefully, a man used to being looked at. Angrily, the eyeshade dangling from his hand. Glowering at me blindly through his black glasses as I sat drinking. A woman had taken his arm. She wore a skirt and could have been the nurse who had given him his headscarf. They stood before me. Me and no one else.

“Sir? This is Sol, sir,” she said—or Mort, or Syd, or whatever. “He's asking whether you're the journalist, sir.”

I said I was a journalist.

“From London, sir, visiting? Are you the editor, sir? Are you influential, sir?”

Influential, I doubted, I said with a deprecating smile. I was on the managerial side, here on a brief swing.

“And going back to London, sir? Soon?”

In Beirut you learn not to talk in advance about your movements. “Pretty soon,” I conceded, though the truth was I was planning to return south again next day.

“Can Sol speak with you a moment, sir, just speak? Sol needs very much to speak with a person who has influence with the major Western newspapers. The journalists here, he feels they've seen it all, they're jaded. Sol needs a voice from outside.”

I made space and she sat beside me while Sol very slowly lowered himself into a chair—this covered, silent, very clean man in his
long football sleeves and headscarf. Seated finally, he laid his wrists over his knees, holding the eyeshade in both hands. Then he gave a long sigh and began to murmur to me.

“There's this thing I've written, sir. I'd like, please, to have it printed in your newspaper.”

His voice, though soft, was educated and polite. But it was lifeless and, like his movements, economical, as if each word hurt him to produce. Inside the lenses of his very dark glass I saw that his left eye was smaller than his right. Narrower. Not swollen, not closed by a punch, just altogether smaller than its partner, taken from a different face. And the spots were not bites, not hives, not cuts. They were craters, like pockmarks of small-arms fire on a Beirut wall, stamped with heat and speed. Like craters also, the skin around them had risen but not closed.

His story followed without my asking for it. He was a relief volunteer, sir, a third-year medical student from Omaha. He believed in peace, sir. And he had been in this bombing, down by the Corniche, in this restaurant that had been one of the worst-hit places, just wiped out, you should go down there and take a look, a place called Akhbar's, sir, where a lot of Americans went, there was this car bomb and car bombs are the worst. You can't get worse than car bombs for surprise.

I said I knew that.

Almost everyone in the restaurant had died except himself, sir, the people nearest the wall just blew apart, he continued, unaware that he had painted my own worst nightmare for me. And now he had this thing he had written, he felt he had to say it, sir, a sort of mild statement about peace; which he needed to print in my newspaper, maybe it would do some good, he was thinking of like this weekend or maybe Monday. He'd like to donate the fee to charity. He guessed it could be like a couple of hundred dollars, maybe more. In the Beirut hospitals, that still bought people a piece of hope.

“We need a pause, sir,” he explained, in his dead voice as the woman fished a wad of typescript from his pocket for him.

“A pause for moderation. Just a break between wars to find the middle way.”

Only in the Commodore in Beirut could it have seemed natural that a bomb-shocked peace-seeker should be pleading a hopeless cause to a journalist who wasn't one. Nevertheless I promised to do what I could. When I had done my business with the man I was waiting for—who knew nothing, of course, had heard nothing, but perhaps, sir, if I spoke to Colonel Asme in Tyre?—I settled in my room and with a glass at my elbow began to read his offering, determined that if it had any reasonable chance of publication, I would twist the arm of one of our numberless Fleet Street friendlies when I returned to London, and see it done.

It was a tragic piece, and quickly it became unreadable: a rambling, emotional appeal to Jews, Christians and Muslims alike to remember their own mothers and children, and live together in love. It urged the middle ground of compromise and gave inaccurate examples from history. It proposed a new religion “like Joan of Arc would have given us only the English wouldn't let her, so they burned her alive, disregarding her screams and the will of the ordinary people.” This great new movement, he said, would “bind the Semitic races in a spiritual brotherhood of love and tolerance.” Then it lost its way completely, and resorted to capital letters, underlining, and rows of exclamation marks. So that by the time I reached the end, it had ceased to be what it set out to be at all, and was talking about “this whole family, kids, and grandparents, that was sitting up beside the wall nearest to the epicentre.” And how they had all been blown to pieces, not once, but over and over again, each time Sol allowed himself to look into his anguished memory.

Suddenly I was writing the piece for him. To her. To Annie. First in my mind, then in the margin of his pages, then on a fresh sheet of A
₄
paper from my briefcase, which was quickly covered so I took another. I was sweating, the sweat was pouring off me like rain; it was that kind of Beirut night, quiet till now but with a damp, itchy
heat rolling off the mountains and an evil grey smog like gunsmoke draping itself across the sea. I was writing, and wondering if she would ring again. I was writing as the bombed boy, to a girl I didn't know. I was writing—as I saw to my dismay when I awoke next morning—pretentious junk. I was proclaiming maverick affections, mouthing great sentiments, pontificating about the unbreakable cycle of human evil, about man's endless search for reasons to do the wrong thing.

A pause, the boy had said. A pause for moderation, a break between wars. I put him right on that. I put Annie right on it too. I told them that the only pauses in the history of human conflict had been pauses not for moderation but excess, pauses for the world to redivide itself, for the thugs and the victims to find each other, for greed and deprival to regroup. I wrote like an adolescent bleeding heart, and when the morning came and I saw the pages of my handwriting strewn over the floor around the empty whisky bottle, I could not believe this was the work of anyone I knew.

So I did the only thing I could think of. I put them in the handbasin and cremated them, then broke up the ash and scattered it in the lavatory and flushed it into the body-blocked sewers of Beirut. And when I had done that, I took myself for a punishing pelt along the waterfront, running as hard as I could go from whatever was coming after me.

I was running towards Hansen, away from myself, but I had one more stop to make along the way.

My German girl, Britta, turned out to be in Israel, in the middle of the Negev Desert, in a compound of stark grey huts near a village called Revivim. The huts had a ploughed strip round them, and a double perimeter of barbed-wire fence with a manned watchtower at each corner. If there were other European prisoners in the compound apart from her, I was not introduced to them. Her only companions that I saw were young Arab girls, mainly from poor villages in the West Bank or the Gaza, who had been talked or
bullied by their Palestinian comrades into committing acts of savagery against the hated Zionist occupiers, most often planting bombs in marketplaces or tossing them into civilian buses.

I arrived there by jeep from Beersheeba, driven by a hardy young Colonel of Intelligence whose father, while still a boy, had been trained as a Night Raider by the eccentric General Wingate during the British Mandate. The Colonel's father remembered Wingate squatting naked in his tent by candlelight, drawing out the battle plan in the sand. Every Israeli soldier seems to talk about his father and a good few talk about the British. After the Mandate, they think they know us for what we probably still are: anti-Semitic, ignorant and imperialist, with just enough exceptions to redeem us. Dimona, where the Israelis store their nuclear arsenal, was up the road.

My sense of unreality had not left me. To the contrary, it had intensified. It was as if I had lost the distance from the human condition that is essential to our trade. My feelings and the feelings of others seemed to count more with me than my observations. It is quite easy in the Lebanon, if you drop your guard, to develop an unreasoning hatred of Israel. But I had succumbed to a serious dose of the disease. Trudging through the mud and stench of the shattered camps, crouching in the sandbagged hovels, I convinced myself that the Israeli thirst for vengeance would not be stilled until the accusing eyes of the last Palestinian child had been closed for good.

Perhaps my young Colonel got a hint of this, for though I had flown in from Cyprus it was still only a few hours since I had left Beirut, and something of what I felt may still have been legible in my face.

“You get to see Arafat?” he asked, with a moody smile as we drove along the straight road.

“No, I didn't.”

“Why not? He's a nice guy.”

I let that go.

“Why do you want to see Britta?”

I told him. There was no point in not doing so. It had taken all London's powers of persuasion to get me the interview with her at all, and my hosts were certainly not going to let me speak to her alone.

“We think she may be willing to talk to us about an old boyfriend,” I said.

“Why would she do that?”

“He jilted her. She was angry with him.”

“Who's the ‘boyfriend?'”—as if he didn't know.

“He's Irish. He has the rank of adjutant in the IRA. He briefs bombers, reconnoitres targets, supplies the equipment. She lived underground with him in Amsterdam and Paris.”

“Like George Orwell, huh?
Down and Out?
”

“Like George Orwell.”

“How long ago he jilted her?”

“Six months.”

“Maybe she's not angry any more. Maybe she'll tell you go suck. For a girl like Britta, six months is a hell of a long time.”

I asked whether she had talked much in her captivity. It was a delicate question, since the Israelis were still not saying how long they had been holding her, or how they had obtained her in the first place. The Colonel was broad-faced and brown-skinned. His family came originally from Russia. He wore parachute wings on his short-sleeved khaki shirt. He was twenty-eight, a Sabra, born in Tel Aviv, engaged to a Sephardi from Morocco. His father, the Night Raider, was now a dentist. All this he had told me in the first few minutes of our acquaintance, in a guttural English he had captured single-handed.

“Talked?” he repeated with a grim smile, in answer to my question. “Britta? That lady didn't stop talking since she became a resident.”

Knowing a little of Israeli methods, I was not surprise, and I shuddered inwardly at the prospect of questioning a woman who had been subjected to them. It had happened to me in Ireland: a man
buttoned to the neck who had stared at me like a dead man and confessed to everything.

“Do you interrogate her yourself?” I asked, noticing afresh his thick brown forearms and the uncompromising set of his jaw. And thinking, perhaps, of Colonel Jerzy.

He shook his head. “Impossible.”

He seemed about to tell me something, then changed his mind. “We got experts,” he said. “Shin Bet guys, smart like Britta. Take their time with her. Family.”

I had heard about this loving family too, though I didn't say so. The Zionists had lured her into a trap, a bloodshot-eyed informant had whispered to me in Tyre. She had left the camps and gone to Athens with her new boyfriend, Said, and three of Said's friends, he said. Good boys. All able. The plan had been to shoot down an El Al plane as it made its approach to Athens airport. The boys had got themselves a hand-held rocket launcher and a rented house on the flightpath. Britta's job, as an unsuspicious-looking European, was to stand in a phone box at the airport with a thirty-dollar shortwave receiver and relay the control tower's instructions to the boys on the roof as the plane came in. Everything had been set fair, said my bone-weary informant. The rehearsals had gone like a dream. But on the day, the operation had fouled up.

Listening to him, I had filled in the rest of the story for myself, imagining how the Service would have done the job if we'd had the foreknowledge: two teams to assault the roof and the phone box simultaneously; the target plan, forewarned and empty, landing safely at Athens airport; the plane's homeward journey to Tel Aviv with the terrorists chained in their seats. I wondered what they would do with her. Whether they would put her on trial or trade her for favours in return.

“What happened to the boys she was with in Athens?” I asked the Colonel, ignoring London's injunction to show no curiosity in such matters.

“Boys? She knows nothing from boys. Athens? Where's Athens already? She's an innocent German tourist on vacation in Eilat. We kidnapped her, we drugged her, we imprisoned her, now we're framing her for propaganda. She invites us to prove the contrary because she knows we can't. You want any more information? Ask Britta, be our guest.”

His mood mystified me, the more so when, as we got out of the jeep, he laid a hand on my shoulder and wished me a sort of luck. “She's all yours,” he said. “
Mazal tov.
”

I was beginning to dread what I might find.

A dumpy little woman in army uniform received us in her clean office. Prison staff never go short of cleaners, I thought. She was Captain Levi and she was Britta's unlikely gaoler. She spoke English the way a small-town American school mistress might speak it, but more slowly, with greater care. She had twinkly eyes and short grey hair and a look of kindly resignation. She had the dusty complexion of prison life, but when she put her hands together you felt she ought to be knitting for her grandchildren.