The Little Drummer Girl

ten

The taverna was rougher than those on Mykonos, with a black-and-white television fluttering like a flag nobody saluted, and old hillsmen too proud to take an interest in tourists, even pretty red-headed English girls in blue kaftans, and gold bracelets. But in the story Joseph now related, it was Charlie and Michel who were dining alone in the grill-room of a roadhouse outside Nottingham that Michel had bribed to stay open. Charlie's own pathetic car, as usual, was off the road at her latest pet garage in Camden. But Michel had a Mercedes saloon, he liked no other make so well; he had it waiting at the back entrance of the theatre and whisked her off in it immediately, ten minutes through the eternal Nottingham rain. And no passing tantrum of Charlie's, whether here or there, no momentary doubts, could arrest the pull of Joseph's narrative.

"He wears driving gloves," Joseph said. "They are a fad with him. You notice it but do not remark on it."

With holes in the back, she thought. "How does he drive?"

"He is not a natural driver but you do not hold this against him. You ask him where he lives and he replies that he has driven up from London in order to see you. You ask him what his occupation is and he says 'Student.' You ask him where he studies, he replies 'Europe,' implying somehow that Europe is a bad word. When you press him, not too hard, he says he takes semesters in different cities, depending on his mood and who is lecturing. The English, he says, do not understand the system. When he speaks the word 'English,' it sounds hostile to you, you don't know why, but hostile. Your next question?"

"Where's he living now?"

"He is evasive. Like me. Sometimes Rome, he says vaguely, sometimes Munich, Paris a little, wherever he decides. Vienna. He does not say he lives in a box, but he makes it clear that he is unmarried, which does not totally dismay you." He smiled and took back his hand. "You ask which city he likes best, he dismisses the question as irrelevant; you ask what subject he is studying, he replies 'Freedom'; you ask him where home is, and he replies that his home is presently under enemy occupation. Your response to this?"

"Confusion."

"However, with your customary persistence you again press him and he speaks the name Palestine. With passion. You hear it at once in his voice-Palestine, like a challenge. Like a war-cry-Palestine." His eyes were so fixedly upon her that she had to give a nervous smile and look away. "I may remind you, Charlie, that though you are heavily involved with Alastair at this period, he is presently safely in Argyll making a commercial for some totally valueless consumer product, and you happen to know he is keeping company with his leading lady. Correct?"

"Correct," she said, and to her astonishment found that she was blushing.

"So now you must tell me, please, what Palestine, spoken in this way by this eager boy, means to you in a roadhouse in Nottingham on a rainy night. Let us say he asks you this himself. Yes. He asks you. Why not?"

Oh glory, she thought, how many sides to a threepenny bit? "I admire them," she said.

"Call me Michel, please."

"I admire them, Michel."

"What for?"

"Their suffering." She felt a bit of a fool. "For hanging on."

"Nonsense. We Palestinians are a bunch of uneducated terrorists, who should have reconciled ourselves long ago to the loss of our homeland. We are nothing but former shoe-shine boys and street vendors, delinquent children with machine guns in our hands, and old men who refuse to forget. So who are we then, please? Tell me your opinion, I shall value it. I am still calling you Joan, remember."

She took a deep breath. Not for nothing, after all, my weekend sessions at the forum. "All right. Here it is. The Palestinians-you-are gentle, decent farming people of great tradition, unfairly driven from your land, from 1948 onwards, in order to appease Zionism-and make way for a Western foothold in Arabia."

"Your words do not displease me. Kindly continue."

It was wonderful to discover how much came back to her under his perverse prompting. Snatches of forgotten pamphlets, lovers' lectures, the harangues of freedom fighters, bits of half-read books-all rallied to her like faithful allies in her need. "You're the invention of a European guilt complex about the Jews… you've been forced to pay the penalty for a Holocaust you had no part in… you're the victims of a racist, anti-Arab imperialist policy of dispossession and banishment-

"And murder," Joseph suggested quietly.

"And murder." Faltering again, she caught the stranger's gaze fixed steadily upon her and, as at Mykonos, she had suddenly no idea what she read there. "Anyway, that's who Palestinians are," she said lightly. "Since you enquire. Since you do," she added when he still said nothing.

She went on looking at him, waiting for the lead that would tell her what to be. Under the compulsion of his presence, she had consigned her convictions to the dross of an earlier existence. She wanted none of them, unless he did.

"Notice he has no small talk," Joseph ordered, as if they had never smiled at each other in their lives. "How quickly he has appealed to the serious side of you. He is also in certain ways meticulous. For example, tonight he has prepared everything-the food, the wine, the candles, even his conversation. We may say that with Israeli-style efficiency, he has mounted a complete campaign to capture his Joan single-handed."

"Disgraceful," she said gravely, studying her bracelet.

"Meanwhile he tells you that you are the most brilliant actress on earth, which once again, I take it, does not incurably dismay you. He persists in confusing you with Saint Joan, but by now you are no longer quite so upset that life and theatre are inseparable for him. Saint Joan, he tells you, has been his heroine ever since he first read about her. She was a woman, yet she successfully aroused the class awareness of the French peasantry and led them in battle against the British imperialist oppressors. She was a true revolutionary, who lit the flame of freedom for the exploited peoples of the world. She turned slaves into heroes. That is the sum of his critical analysis. The voice of God addressing her is no more than her own revolutionary conscience urging her to resist the colonialist. It cannot be the actual voice of God, because Michel has decided God is dead. Perhaps you were not aware of all these implications when you played the part?"

She was still fiddling with the bracelet. "Well, I might have missed out on some of them," she admitted carelessly-only to look up and meet head on with his granite disapproval. "Oh Christ," she said.

"Charlie, I warn you most sincerely never to tease Michel with your Western wit. His sense of humour is capricious, and stops well short of jokes against himself, particularly when made by women." A pause for the admonition to sink in. "Very well. The food is dreadful, but you are totally indifferent to it. He has ordered steak and does not know that you are going through one of your vegetarian phases. You chew some in order not to offend him. In a later letter you tell him it was the worst steak you ever ate, but also the best. All you can think of while he is talking is his animated, passionate voice and his beautiful Arab face across the candle. Yes?"

She hesitated, then smiled. "Yes."

"He loves you, he loves your talent, he loves Saint Joan. 'For the British colonialists she was a criminal,' he tells you. 'So were all freedom fighters. So was George Washington, so was Mahatma Gandhi, so was Robin Hood. So are the secret soldiers of the Irish freedom struggle.' These are not exactly new ideas he is expressing, as you appreciate, but in his fervent Oriental voice, so full of-what shall we say, animal naturalness?-they have a hypnotic effect upon you; they give new life to the old cliches, they are like a rediscovery of love. 'For the British,' he tells you, 'whoever fights the terror of the colonialist is himself a terrorist. The British are my enemies, all but you. The British gave away my country to the Zionists, they shipped the Jews of Europe to us with orders to turn the East into the West. Go and tame the Orient for us, they said. The Palestinians are trash, but they will make good coolies for you! The old British colonisers were tired and defeated, so they handed us over to the new colonisers who had the zeal and the ruthlessness to cut the knot. Don't worry about the Arabs, the British said to them. We promise to look the other way while you deal with them.' Listen. Are you listening?"

Jose, when was I not?

"Michel is a prophet to you tonight. Nobody has ever before concentrated the full force of his fanaticism on you alone. His conviction, his commitment, his devotion-they all shine out of him as he speaks. In theory, of course, he is already preaching to the converted, but in reality he is planting the human heart into the ragbag of your vague left-wing principles. That too you tell him in a later letter, whether or not it is logical that a ragbag should acquire a human heart. You want him to lecture you: he does. You want him to play upon your British guilt: he does that too. Your protective cynicism is swept aside completely. You are renewed. How apart he is from your middle-class prejudices, still not eradicated! From your lazily formed Western sympathies! Yes?" he enquired softly, as if she had asked a question. She shook her head and he was away again, filled with the borrowed fervour of his Arab surrogate.

"He ignores entirely that you are already in theory on his side; he demands your total obsession with his cause, a new conversion. He throws statistics at you as if you had caused them yourself. Over two million Christian and Muslim Arabs driven from their homeland and disenfranchised since 1948. Their houses and villages bulldozed-he tells you how many-their land stolen under laws they had no part in making-he recites the number of dunams-one dunam is a thousand square metres. You ask him and he tells you. And when they reach exile their brother Arabs slaughter them and treat them like scum and the Israelis bomb their camps and shell them because they continue to resist. Because to resist being dispossessed is to be a terrorist, whereas to colonise, and to bomb refugees, to decimate a population-these are unfortunate political necessities. Because ten thousand dead Arabs are not worth one dead Jew. Listen." He leaned forward and grasped her wrist. "There is not a Western liberal who will hesitate to speak out against the injustices of Chile, South Africa, Poland, Argentina, Cambodia, Iran, Northern Ireland, and other fashionable trouble spots." His grasp tightened. "Yet who has the simple courage to tell out loud the cruellest joke in history: that thirty years of Israel have turned the Palestinians into the new Jews of the earth? You know how the Zionists described my country before they seized it? 'A land without a people for a people without land.' We did not exist! In their minds, the Zionists had already committed genocide; all that remained for them was the fact. And you, the British, were the architects of this great vision. You know how Israel was born? A European power made a present of an Arab territory to a Jewish lobby. And did not consult a single inhabitant of the territory concerned. And that power was Britain. Shall I describe to you how Israel was born?… Is it late? You are tired? Must you go home to your hotel?"

As she gave him the answers he wanted, she still found time to marvel inside herself at the paradoxes of a man who could dance with so many of his own conflicting shadows, and still stand up. A candle burned between them. It was jammed in a greasy black bottle and under constant attack by an old drunk moth that Charlie occasionally pushed away with the back of her hand, making the bracelet sparkle. By its glow, as Joseph spun his story round her, she watched his strong, disciplined face alternate with Michel's like two images overlaid upon a single photographic plate.

"Listen. Are you listening?"

Jose, I am listening. Michel, I am listening.

"I was born of a patriarchal family in a village not far from the town of El Khalil, which the Jews call Hebron." He paused, his dark eyes vigorously upon her. "El Khalil," he repeated. "Remember the name, it is of great importance to me for many reasons. You remember Khalil? Say it!"

She said it. El Khalil.

"El Khalil is a great centre for the pure faith of Islam. In Arabic the word means a friend of God. The people of El Khalil or Hebron are the elite of Palestine. And I will tell you a small joke that will make you laugh very much. There is a belief that the only place from which the Jews were never exiled is the Hebron mountain south of the city. It is therefore possible that Jewish blood flows in my veins. Yet I am not ashamed. I am not anti-Semitic, only anti-Zionist. You believe me?"

He did not wait to be assured; he did not need to.

"I was the youngest of four brothers and two sisters. Everyone worked on the land, my father was the mukhtar, or chief, selected by the wise elders. Our village was famous for its figs and grapes, for its fighters, and for its women, as beautiful and obedient as you are. Most villages are famous for one thing only. Ours was famous for many."

"Naturally," she murmured. But he was a long, long way from being teased.

"It was most famous of all, however, for the wise counsels of my father, who believed that Muslims should make a common society with Christians and Jews, exactly as their prophets lived harmoniously together in Heaven under one God, I talk to you a great deal about my father, my family, and my village. Now and later. My father admired the Jews. He had studied their Zionism and he liked to summon them to our village and speak with them. He obliged my elder brothers to learn Hebrew. As a boy, I listened at night to the menfolk singing songs of ancient wars. By day, I took my grandfather's horse to the water and heard the tales of travellers and pedlars. When I describe to you this paradise, I sound as if I am speaking real poetry to you. I can do that. I have the gift. How in our village square we danced the dabke and listened to the oud, while the old men played backgammon and smoked their narjeels."

The words meant nothing to her but she was wise enough not to interrupt him.

"In reality, as I freely admit to you, I remember little of such things. In reality, I am handing on the reminiscences of my elders, for that is how our traditions survive in the exile of the camps. As the generations pass, we must live our homeland more and more through the memory of our elders. The Zionists will tell you we had no culture, that we did not exist. They will tell you we were degenerate and lived in mud huts and went about in stinking rags. They will tell you word for word the things that were formerly said of the Jews by the anti-Semites of Europe. The truth, in both cases, is the same: we were a noble people."

A nod of the dark head suggested that his two identities had agreed upon this point of fact.

"I describe our peasant life to you, and the many intricate systems by which the communality of our village was maintained. The wine harvest, how the whole village went out together to the grapefields on the orders of the mukhtar, my father. How my elder brothers began their education in a school which you British founded in the Mandate. You will laugh, but my father believed in the British also. How the coffee in our village guest house was kept hot all hours of the day in order that nobody could ever say of us, 'This village is too poor, these people are inhospitable to strangers.' You want to know what happened to my grandfather's horse? He sold it for a gun, so that he could shoot the Zionists when they attacked our village. The Zionists shot my grandfather instead. They made my father stand beside them while they did it. My father, who had believed in them."

"Is that true too?"

"Of course."

But she could not tell whether Joseph or Michel was replying, and she knew he did not mean her to.

"I refer to the war of '48 as 'the Catastrophe.' Never the war-the Catastrophe. In the Catastrophe of '48, I tell you, the fatal weaknesses of a peaceable society were revealed. We had no organisation, we could not defend ourselves against the armed aggressor. Our culture was tended in small communities, each one complete in itself, our economy also. But like the Jews of Europe before their Holocaust we lacked political unity, and this was our downfall, and too often our communities fought each other, which is the curse of Arabs everywhere and perhaps of Jews. So you know what they did to my village, those Zionists? Because we would not flee like our neighbours?"

She knew, she did not know. It did not matter because he paid her no heed.

"They made barrel bombs filled with petrol and explosives, and rolled them down the hill, setting fire to our women and children. I could talk to you for a week, just of the tortures of my people. Hands cut off. Women raped and burned. Children blinded."

Once again she tested him, trying to discover whether he believed himself; but he would give her no clue beyond an intense solemnity of expression, which could have suited any of his natures.

"I whisper the words 'Deir Yasseen' to you. Have you ever heard them before? You know what they mean?"

No, Michel, I have not heard them before.

He seemed pleased. "Then ask me now, 'What is Deir Yasseen?' '

She did. Please, sir, what is Deir Yasseen?

"Once more I answer as if I saw it happen yesterday with my own eyes. In the small Arab village of Deir Yasseen on April 9, 1948, two hundred and fifty-four villagers-old men, women, and children-were butchered by Zionist terror squads while the young men were working in the fields. Pregnant women had their unborn children killed in their bellies. Most of the bodies were thrown down a well. Within days, nearly half a million Palestinians had fled their country. My father's village was an exception. 'We will stay,' he said. 'If we go into exile, the Zionists will never let us come back.' He even believed you British would return to save us. He did not understand that your imperialist ambitions required an obedient Western ally to be implanted in the heart of the Middle East."

She felt his glance and wondered whether he was aware of her inner withdrawal, or whether he was determined to ignore it. Only afterwards did it occur to her that he was deliberately encouraging her away from himself, and into the opposing camp.

"For almost twenty years after the Catastrophe, my father clung to what was left of our village. Some called him stubborn, some foolish. Outside Palestine, his compatriots called him a collaborator. They knew nothing. They had not felt the Zionist boot on their necks. All round us in the neighbouring regions, the people were driven away, beaten, arrested. The Zionists confiscated their land, flattened their houses with bulldozers, and built new settlements on top of them in which no Arab was allowed to live. But my father was a man of peace and wisdom, and for a time he kept the Zionists from our doors."

Again she wanted to ask him, Is this true? But again she was too late.

"But in the war of '67, as the tanks approached our village, we too fled across the Jordan. With tears in his eyes, my father called us together and told us to assemble our possessions. The pogroms are about to begin,' he said. I asked him-I, the smallest, who knew nothing-'Father, what is pogrom?' He replied, 'What the Westerners did to the Jews, so the Zionists now do to us. They have won a great victory and they could afford to be generous. But their virtue is not to be found in their politics.' Until my death I shall never forget watching my proud father enter the miserable hut that was now our home. For a long time he stood at the threshold, waiting for the strength to cross. He did not weep, but for days he sat on a box full of his books and ate nothing. I think he grew twenty years older in those days. 'I have entered my grave,' he said. 'This hut is my tomb.' From the moment of our arrival in Jordan we had become stateless citizens, without papers, rights, future, or work. My school? It is a tin shed crammed to the roof with fat flies and undernourished children. The Fatah teaches me. There is much to learn. How to shoot. How to fight the Zionist aggressor."

He paused, and at first she thought he was smiling at her, but there was no mirth in his expression.

" 'I fight, therefore I exist,' " he announced quietly. "You know who said these words, Charlie? A Zionist. A peace-loving, patriotic, idealistic Zionist, who has killed many British and many Palestinians by terrorist methods, but because he is a Zionist he is not a terrorist but a hero and a patriot. You know who he was when he spoke these words, this peace-loving, civilised Zionist? He was the Prime Minister of a country they call Israel. You know where he comes from, this terrorist Zionist Prime Minister? From Poland. Can you tell me, please-you an educated Englishwoman, me a simple stateless peasant-can you tell me how it happened, please, that a Pole came to be the ruler of my country, Palestine, a Pole who exists only because he fights? Can you explain to me, please, by what principle of English justice, of English impartiality and fair play, this man rules over my country? And calls us terrorists?"

The question slipped from her before she had time to censor it. She had not meant it as a challenge. It emerged by itself, from the chaos he was sowing in her: "Well, can you?"

He did not answer, yet he did not avoid her question. He received it. She had a momentary impression he was expecting it. Then he laughed, not very nicely, reached for his glass, and raised it to her.

"Make a toast to me," he ordered. "Come. Lift your glass. History belongs to the winners. Have you forgotten that simple fact? Drink with me!"

Doubtfully she raised her own glass to him.

"To tiny, gallant Israel," he said. "To her amazing survival, thanks to an American subsidy of seven million dollars a day, and the entire might of the Pentagon dancing to her tune." Without drinking, he put his glass down again. She did the same. With the gesture, to her relief, the melodrama seemed temporarily over. "And you, Charlie, you listen. Overawed. Amazed. By his romanticism, his beauty, his fanaticism. He has no reticence. No Western inhibitions. Does it play-or does the tissue of your imagination reject the disturbing transplant?"

Taking his hand, she began exploring the palm with the tip of her finger. "And his English is up to all this, is it?" she asked, buying time.

"He has a jargon-ridden vocabulary and an impressive store of rhetorical phrases, questionable statistics, and tortuous quotations. Despite this, he communicates the excitement of a young and passionate mind, and an expanding one."

"And what's Charlie doing all this time? I'm just stuck there, am I, with egg on my face, hanging on his every word? Do I encourage him? What am I doing?"

"According to the script, your performance is practically irrelevant. Michel is half hypnotising you across the candle. That is how you describe it to him later in one of your letters. 'As long as I live, I will never forget your lovely face across the candlelight on that first night we were together.' Is that too lurid for you, too kitschy?"

She gave him back his hand. "What letters? Where are we getting letters from all the time?"

"For the moment, let us agree only that you will later write to him. Let me ask you again, does it play? Or shall we shoot the writer and go home?"

She took a drink of wine. Then another. "It plays. So far it plays."

"And the letter-not too much-you can live with it?"

"If you can't let it all hang out in a love-letter, where can you?"

"Excellent. Then that is how you write to him, and that is how the fiction runs so far. Except for one small point. This is not your first meeting with Michel."

Not stagily at all, she put down her glass with a snap.

A new excitement had taken hold of him: "Listen to me," he said, leaning forward, and the candlelight struck his bronzed temple like sunlight on a helmet. "Listen to me," he repeated. "You are listening?"

Again, he did not bother to wait for her answer.

"A quotation. A French philosopher. 'The greatest crime is to do nothing because we fear we can only do a little.' Does it ring a bell with you?"

"Oh Jesus," said Charlie softly, and on an impulse folded her arms across her breast in self-protection.

"Shall I go on?" He went on anyway. "Does this not remind you of someone? 'There is only one class war and it is between the colonialists and the colonised, the capitalists and the exploited. Our task is to bring the war home to those who make it. To the racist millionaires, who see the Third World as their private farm. To the corrupt oil-rich sheikhs who have sold the Arab birthright.' " He paused, observing how her head had slipped between her hands.

"Jose, stop," she muttered. "It's too much. Go home."

" To the imperialist warmongers, who arm the Zionist aggressors. To the mindless Western bourgeoisie who are themselves the unconscious slaves and perpetuators of their own system.' ' He was barely whispering, yet his voice was all the more penetrating on account of it. " 'The world tells us we should not attack innocent women and children. But I tell you there is no such thing as innocence any more. For every child who dies of hunger in the Third World, there is a child in the West who has stolen his food-

"Stop it," she repeated through her fingers, now all too certain of her ground. "I've had enough. I surrender."

But he continued his recitation. " 'When I was six, I was driven from our land. When I was eight, I joined the Ashbal. ' 'What is Ashbal, please?' Come, Charlie. That was your question. Was it not you who asked me-you who put up your hand-'What is Ashbal, please?' How did I reply?"

"Children's militia," she said, her head between her hands. "I'm going to be sick, Jose. Now."

' 'When I was ten, I crouched in a homemade shelter while the Syrians poured rockets into our camp. When I was fifteen, my mother and my sister were killed in a Zionist air raid.' Go on, please, Charlie. Complete my life story for me."

She had grasped his hand again, this time with both of hers, and was gently beating it against the table in reproof.

" 'If children can be bombed, they can also fight,' " he reminded her. "And if they colonise? What then? Go on!"

"They must be killed," she muttered unwillingly.

"And if their mothers feed them, and teach them to steal our homes and bomb our people in their exile?"

"Then their mothers are in the front line with their husbands. Jose-"

"So what do we do about them?"

"They must be killed also. But I didn't believe him then, and I don't now."

He ignored her protests. He was making his protestations of eternal love. "Listen. Through the eyeholes of my black balaclava helmet, while I was inspiring you with my message at the forum, I observed your enraptured face upon me. Your red hair. Your strong, revolutionary features. Is it not ironic that on the first occasion that we met, it was I who was on stage, and you who were among the audience?"

"I was not enraptured! I thought you were way over the top, and I had a damn good mind to tell you so!"

He was unrepentant. "Whatever you felt at the time, here in the Nottingham motel, under my hypnotic influence, you instantly revise your memory. Though you could not see my face, you tell me, my words have remained seared in your memory ever since. Why not?… Come, Charlie! It is in your letter to me!"

She was not to be drawn. Not yet. Suddenly, for the first time since Joseph's story had begun, Michel had become a separate, living creature for her. Till this moment, she realised, she had unconsciously used Joseph's features to describe her imaginary lover, and Joseph's voice to characterise his declamations. Now, like a cell dividing itself, the two men were independent and conflicting beings, and Michel had acquired his own dimension in reality. She saw again the unswept lecture-room with its curling photograph of Mao and its scratched school benches. She saw the rows of unequal heads, from Afro to Jesus and back again, and Long Al slumped at her side in a state of alcoholic boredom. And on the podium she saw the isolated, unreadable figure of our gallant representative from Palestine-shorter than Joseph, maybe a fraction stockier as well, though it was hard to tell, for he was muffled in his black mask and his shapeless khaki blouse, and his black-and-white kaffiyeh. But younger-that for certain-and more fanatical. She remembered his fish-like lips, expressionless within the ragged cage. She remembered the red handkerchief tied defiantly round his neck, and the gloved hands gesticulating to his words. Most of all, she remembered his voice: not guttural, as she had expected, but literary and considerate, in macabre contrast to his bloodthirsty message. But not Joseph's either. She remembered how it paused, un- Joseph-like, to rephrase an awkward sentence, hunted for grammatical aptness: "The gun and the Return are one for us… an imperialist is whoever does not aid us in our revolution… to do nothing is to endorse injustice …"

"I loved you immediately," Joseph was explaining, in the same pretended tone of retrospection. "Or so I tell you now. As soon as the lecture was over, I enquired who you were, but I did not feel able to approach you before so many people. I was also aware that I was unable to show you my face, which is one of my greatest assets. I therefore decided to seek you out at the theatre. I made enquiries, tracked you to Nottingham. Here I am. I love you infinitely, signed Michel!"

As if making amends, Joseph put on a show of fussing over her welfare, refilling her glass, ordering coffee-medium sweet, the way you like it-did she want to wash? No thanks, I'm fine. The television was showing news footage of a grinning politician descending the gangway of an aeroplane. He made the bottom step without mishap.

His ministrations complete, Joseph glanced significantly round the taverna, then at Charlie, and his voice became the essence of practicality.

"So then, Charlie. You are his Joan. His love. His obsession. The staff have gone home, the two of us are alone in the dining-room. Your unmasked admirer, and you. It is after midnight and I have been talking far too long, though I have scarcely begun to tell you what is in my heart, or ask you about yourself, whom I love beyond comparison, such an experience is entirely new to me, etcetera. Tomorrow is Sunday, you have no commitments, I have rented a room in the motel. I make no attempt to persuade you. That is not my way. Perhaps I am also too respectful of your dignity. Or perhaps I am too proud to think you need persuading. Either you will come to me as a comrade-in-arms, a true, free lover, soldier to soldier-or you will not. How do you respond? Are you suddenly impatient to return to the Astral Commercial and Private Hotel, near the railway station?"

She stared at him, and then away from him. She had half a dozen facetious answers ready but suppressed them. The hooded, totally separate figure at the forum was once more an abstraction. It was Joseph, not the stranger, who had put the question. And what was there to say when, in her imagination, they were already lying in bed together, Joseph's cropped head resting on her shoulder, Joseph's strong wounded body stretched along her own, while she willed his true nature out of him?

"After all, Charlie-as you told us yourself-you have been to bed with many men for less, I would say."

"Oh, much less," she agreed, developing a sudden interest in the plastic salt-pourer.

"You are wearing his expensive jewellery. You are alone in a dismal city. It's raining. He has enchanted you-flattered the actress, inspired the revolutionary. How can you possibly refuse him?"

"Fed me too," she reminded him. "Even if I was off meat."

"He is everything a bored Western girl ever dreamed of, I would say."

"Jose, for Christ's sake," she muttered, not even able to look at him.

"So then," he said briskly, signalling for the bill. "Congratulations. You have met your soulmate at last."

A mysterious brutality had entered his manner. She had the ridiculous feeling that her acquiescence had angered him. She watched him pay the bill, she saw him pocket the receipt. She stepped after him into the night air. I'm the twice-promised girl, she thought. If you love Joseph, take Michel. He's pimped me for his phantom in the theatre of the real.

"In bed, he tells you that his real name is Salim, but that is a great secret," said Joseph casually as they got into the car. "He prefers Michel. Partly for security, partly because he is already slightly in love with European decadence."

"I like Salim better."

"But you use Michel."

Just whatever you all say, she thought. But her passivity was a deception, even to herself. She could feel her anger on the move, still far down but rising, rising.

The motel was like a low factory block. At first there was no space to park; then a white Volkswagen minibus lumbered forward to make room for them, and she glimpsed the figure of Dimitri at the wheel. Clutching the orchids as Joseph had instructed her, she waited while he pulled on his red blazer, then followed him across the tarmac to the front porch; but reluctantly, keeping her distance. Joseph was carrying her shoulder bag as well as his smart black grip. Give that back, it's mine. In the foyer, out of the corner of her eye, she saw Raoul and Rachel standing under the vile strip-lighting, reading notices about tomorrow's tours. She glowered at them. Joseph went to the desk and she drew close to watch him sign the register, though he had specifically told her not to. Arab name, nationality Lebanese, address an apartment number in Beirut. His manner disdainful: a man of position, ready at any time to take offence. You're good, she thought ruefully, while she tried to hate him. No wasted gestures but plenty of style, and you make the part your own. The bored night manager cast her a lustful glance, but showed none of the disrespect she was accustomed to. The porter was loading their luggage onto an enormous hospital trolley. I'm wearing a blue kaftan and a gold bracelet and underwear from Persephone of Munich and I'll bite the first peasant who calls me a tart. Joseph took her arm and his hand burned her skin. She pulled free of him. Sod off. To the strains of canned Gregorian plainsong, they followed their luggage down a grey tunnel of pastel-painted doors. Their bedroom was double-bedded, grande luxe and sterile as an operating theatre.

"Christ!" she exploded, staring round her in black hostility.

The porter turned to her in surprise but she ignored him. She spotted a bowl of fruit, a bucket of ice, two glasses, and a vodka bottle waiting beside the bed. A vase for the orchids. She dumped them into it. Joseph tipped the porter, the trolley gave a departing shriek, and suddenly they were alone, with a bed the size of a football field, two framed Minoan bulls in charcoal providing the tastefully erotic atmosphere, and a balcony with an unspoilt view of the car park. Taking the vodka bottle from the bucket, Charlie poured herself a stiff one and flopped onto the edge of the bed.

"Cheers, old man," she said.

Joseph was still standing, watching her without expression. "Cheers, Charlie," he replied, though he had no glass.

"So what do we do now? Play Monopoly? Or is this the big scene we bought our tickets for?" Her voice rose. "I mean, who the hell are we in this? Just for information. Who? Right? Just who?"

"You know very well who we are, Charlie. We are two lovers enjoying our Greek honeymoon."

"I thought we were in a Nottingham motel."

"We are playing both parts at once. I thought you understood that. We are establishing the past and the present."

"Because we are so short of time."

"Let us say, because human lives are at risk."

She took another pull of vodka, and her hand was as steady as a rock because that was how her hand went when the black mood got into her. "Jewish lives," she corrected him.

"Are they different from other lives?"

"I'll say they bloody are! Jesus Christ! I mean Kissinger can bomb the poor bloody Cambodians till the cows come home. Nobody lifts a finger. The Israelis can hack the Palestinians to pieces any time. But a couple of rabbis knocked off in Frankfurt or whatever-I mean that's a real grade-one prime-beef international disaster, isn't it?"

She was staring straight past him at some imaginary enemy, but out of the corner of her eye she saw him take a firm step in her direction, and for a brilliant moment she really thought he was going to remove her choices for good. But instead he walked past her to the window and unlocked the door, perhaps because he needed the drumming of the traffic to drown her voice.

"They are all disasters," he replied unemotionally, looking out. "Ask me what the inhabitants of Kiryat Shimonah feel when the Palestinian shells come down. Ask them in the kibbutzim to tell you about the whining of the Katyusha rockets, forty at a time, while they hide their children in the shelters pretending it is all a game." He paused and gave a kind of bored sigh, as if he had listened too often to his own arguments. "However," he added, in a more practical tone, "on the next occasion you use that argument, I suggest you please remember that Kissinger is a Jew. That also has a place in Michel's somewhat elementary political vocabulary."

She put her knuckles in her mouth and discovered she was weeping. He came and sat beside her on the bed, and she waited for him to put his arm round her or offer more wise arguments or simply take her, which was what she would have liked best, but he did nothing of the kind. He was content to let her mourn, until gradually she had the illusion that he had somehow caught her up, and they were mourning together. More than any words could have done, his silence seemed to mitigate what they had to do. For an age, they stayed that way, side by side, till she allowed her choking to give way to a deep, exhausted sigh. But he still did not move-not towards her, not away from her.

"Jose," she whispered hopelessly, taking his hand once more. "Who the hell are you? What do you feel inside all those barbed-wire entanglements?"

Raising her head, she began to listen to the sounds of other lives in adjoining rooms. The querulous burbling of a sleepless child. A strident marital argument. She heard a footfall from the balcony and glanced round in time to see Rachel in a towelling tracksuit, armed with a sponge-bag and a thermos flask, stepping over the threshold into the room.

She lay awake, too exhausted to sleep. Nottingham was never like this. From next door came the muffled sound of telephoning and she thought she recognised his voice. She lay in Michel's arms. She lay in Joseph's. She longed for Al. She was in Nottingham with the love of her life, she was safe in her own bed back in Camden, she was in the room her bloody mother still called the nursery. She lay as she had lain as a child after her horse had thrown her, watching the picture-show of her life and exploring her mind as she had tentatively explored her body, feeling out each bit in turn, testing it for damage. A mile away on the other side of the bed, Rachel lay reading Thomas Hardy in paperback by the light of a tiny lamp.

"Who's he got, Rache?" she said. "Who darns his socks and cleans out his pipes for him?"

"Better ask him, hadn't you, dear?"

"Is it you?"

"Wouldn't work, would it? Not in the long run."

Charlie dozed, still trying to figure him out. "He was a fighter," she said.

"The best," said Rachel, contentedly. "Still is."

"How did he pick his quarrels then?"

"They were picked for him, weren't they?" Rachel said, still deep in her book.

Charlie tried a dare: "He had a wife once. What happened to her?"

"Sorry, dear," said Rachel.

" 'Did she jump or was she pushed?' one asks oneself," Charlie mused, ignoring the rebuff. "I'll say one bloody does. Poor bitch, she'd have to be about six chameleons just to ride on a bus with him."

She lay still a while.

"How did you get into this lot, Rache?" she asked, and, to her surprise, Rachel laid her book on its stomach and told her. Her parents were Orthodox Jews from Pomerania, she said. They had settled in Macclesfield after the war and become wealthy in the weaving industry. "Branches in Europe and a penthouse in Jerusalem," she said, unimpressed. They had wanted Rachel to go to Oxford and into the family firm, but she had preferred to study Bible and Jewish history at the Hebrew University.

"It just happened," she replied when Charlie pressed her about the next step.

But how? Charlie persisted. Why? "Who picked you, Rache, what do they say?"

Rachel was not telling how or who, but she was telling why. She knew Europe and she knew anti-Semitism, she said. And she had wanted to show those stuck-up little sabra war heroes at the university that she could fight for Israel as well as any boy.

"So what's Rose then?" said Charlie, forcing her luck.

Rose was complicated, Rachel replied, as if she herself were not. Rose had done Zionist Youth in South Africa, and come to Israel not knowing whether she should have stayed put and fought apartheid.

"She sort of tries harder because she doesn't know which she should be doing," Rachel explained, and, with a firmness that ended further discussion, went back to her Mayor of Casterbridge.

A surfeit of ideals, thought Charlie. Two days ago I had none. She wondered whether she had any now. Ask me in the morning. For a while she indulged drowsily in headlines. "famous female fantasist meets reality." "joan of arc burns palestinian activist." Well, Charlie, yes, good night.

Becker's room lay a few yards down the corridor and it had twin beds, which was the nearest the hotel came to acknowledging that anyone was single. He lay on one and stared at the other, with the telephone on the table between them. In ten minutes it would be one-thirty, and one-thirty was the time. The night porter had his tip, and had promised to put through the call. He was very wakeful, as often at this hour. To think too brightly and come down too slowly. To get everything to the front of your head and forget what is behind. Or what is-not. The phone rang on time and Kurtz's voice greeted him immediately. Where is he, Becker wondered. He heard canned music in the background and rightly guessed a hotel. Germany, he remembered. A hotel in Germany talks to a hotel in Delphi. Kurtz spoke English because it was less conspicuous, and he spoke with an overlay of casualness that should not alarm the unlikely eavesdropper. Yes, everything was fine, Becker assured him; the deal was going through nicely, and he foresaw no immediate snags. What about the latest product? he asked.

"We are getting a lot of first-rate cooperation," Kurtz assured him, in the fulsome tone he used for rallying his far-flung troops. "You go right down to the warehouse as soon as you like, you will surely not be disappointed in the product. And another thing."

Becker seldom completed his telephone conversations with Kurtz as a rule, nor Kurtz with him. It was an odd thing between them that each vied to be the first to get out of the other's company. This time, however, Kurtz listened all the way to the end, and so did Becker. But as he put down the receiver, Becker caught sight of his attractive features in the mirror, and stared at them with sharp distaste. For a moment, they were like a wrecker's light to him, and he had a morbid and overwhelming wish to extinguish them for good: Who the hell are you?… What do you feel! He drew closer to the mirror. I feel as if I am looking at a dead friend, hoping he will come alive. I feel as if I am searching for my old hopes in someone else, without success. I feel that I am an actor, as you are, surrounding myself with versions of my identity because the original somehow went missing along the road. But in truth I feel nothing, because real feeling is subversive and contrary to military discipline. Therefore I do not feel, but I fight and therefore I exist.

In the town he walked impatiently, striding wide and looking hard ahead of him, as if walking bored him, and the distance, as ever, were too short. It was a town waiting for attack, and over twenty years or more he had known too many towns in that condition. The people had fled the streets, there was not a child to be heard. Knock down the houses. Shoot whatever moves. The parked charabancs and cars lay abandoned by their owners, and God alone knew when they would see them next. Occasionally, his quick glance slipped to an open doorway or the entrance to an unlit alley, but observation was habitual to him and his stride did not relent. Reaching a side street, he lifted his head to read the name but again swept past, before turning swiftly into a building site. A gaudy minibus was parked among tall stacks of bricks. The masts of a washing line drooped beside it, disguising thirty feet of thread aerial. Faint music issued from inside. The door opened, the barrel of a pistol pointed at his face like one eye scanning him, then vanished. A respectful voice said, "Shalom." He stepped inside and closed the door behind him. The music did not quite drown the unsteady chatter of the little teleprinter. David, the operator from the Athens house, was crouched over it; two of Litvak's boys kept him company. With no more than a nod, Becker sat down on the padded bench and began to read the fat bundle of tearsheets set aside for his arrival.

The boys eyed him respectfully. He felt them counting his medal ribbons in their hungry minds, and probably they knew his feats of heroism better than.he did himself.

"She's looking good, Gadi," said the bolder of the two.

Becker ignored him. Sometimes he sidelined a paragraph, sometimes he underlined a date. When he had finished, he handed the papers to the boys, and made them test him until he was satisfied that he knew his lines.

Outside the minibus again, he paused at the window despite himself and heard their cheerful voices discussing him.

"The Rook got him a whole directorship to himself, running some great new textile factory near Haifa," said the bold one.

"Great," said the other. "So let's retire and let Gavron make us millionaires."