The Little Drummer Girl

sixteen

For three interminable weeks, while London slipped from summer to autumn, Charlie lived in a state of half-reality, vacillating from disbelief to impatience, from excited preparation to spasmodic terror.

Sooner or later they will come for you, he kept saying. They must. And he set about preparing her mind for her accordingly.

Yet why must they come? She did not know and he did not tell her, but used his remoteness as a protection. Would Mike and Marty somehow make Michel their man, as they had made Charlie their girl? She had days of imagining that Michel would one day catch up with the fiction they had built for him, and appear before her, ardent for his lover's due. And Joseph gently encouraged her in her schizophrenia, guiding her ever closer to her absent proxy. Michel, my darling own Michel; come to me. Love Joseph, but dream of Michel. At first she hardly dared look at herself in the mirror, she was so convinced her secret showed. Her face was stretched tight by the outrageous information hidden just behind it; her voice and movements had an underwater deliberation that set her miles apart from the rest of humanity: I'm a one-girl show right round the clock; it's all the world, then me.

Then slowly, as the time dragged by, her fear of exposure gave way to an affectionate disrespect for the innocents around her who failed to see what was shoved under their noses every day. They are where I came from, she thought. They are me before I walked through the looking-glass.

Towards Joseph himself, she used the technique she had perfected on her drive through Yugoslavia. He was the familiar to whom she referred her every action and decision; he was the lover she cracked her jokes and put on her make-up for. He was her anchor, her best friend, her best thing altogether. He was the sprite who popped up at all odd places, with quite impossible prescience about her movements-now at a bus-stop, now at the library, now at the launderette, sitting under the neon lights among the dowdy mums, watching his shirts go round.

But she never admitted his existence. He was outside her life completely, out of time and touch-except for their furtive assignations, which sustained her. Except for his proxy, Michel.

For rehearsing As You Like It, the company had rented an old Territorial Army drill hall near Victoria Station and she went there each morning, and each evening she washed the smell of stale military beer from her hair.

She allowed Quilley to lunch her at Bianchi's and found him odd. He seemed to be trying to warn her of something, but when she asked him outright what it was, he clammed up and said that politics were people's own affair, which was what he'd fought the war for, in the Green Jackets. But he got awfully drunk. Having helped him sign the bill, she rejoined the crowds in the street and had the feeling of riding out ahead of herself; of following her own elusive shape as it slipped away from her, through the bobbing people. I am separated from life. I'll never find my way back. But even while she thought this, she felt the brush of a hand against her elbow as Joseph drew momentarily alongside before peeling away into Marks amp; Sparks. The effect of these sightings upon her was soon extraordinary. They kept her in a constant state of vigilance and, if she was honest with herself, desire. A day without him was a nothing day; one glimpse, and her heart and body thrilled to him like a sixteen-year-old's.

She read the respectable Sunday newspapers and studied the latest amazing revelations about Sackville-West-or was it Sitwell?-and marvelled at the self-regarding irrelevance of the ruling English mind. She looked at the London she had forgotten, and found everywhere support for her identity as the radical committed to the violent path. Society as she knew it was a dead plant; her job was to clear it away and use the soil for something better. The hopeless faces of the shoppers shuffling like manacled slaves through the neon-lit supermarket told her so; so did the despairing old, and the venomous-eyed policemen. So did the lounging black kids watching the Rolls-Royces sweep by, and the shiny banks with their air of secular worship and their righteous martinets of managers. The building societies luring the deluded into their property traps; the booze shops, the betting shops, the vomit-with little effort on Charlie's part, the entire London scene presented an unemptied dustbin of discarded hopes and disappointed souls. Thanks to the inspiration of Michel, she constructed her mental bridges between capitalist exploitation in the Third World and here on her doorstep in Camden Town.

Lived so brightly, life even sent her a heavy symbol of man adrift. Taking an early Sunday-morning walk along the Regent's Canal towpath-in reality, for one of her few scheduled meetings with Joseph-she heard the sound of a deep-throated string instrument warbling a Negro spiritual. The canal opened up and she saw, in the centre of a harbour of discarded warehouses, an old black man straight out of Uncle Tom's Cabin, sitting on a tethered raft and playing his cello to a group of spellbound children. It was a scene from Fellini; it was kitsch; it was a mirage; it was an inspired vision risen from her subconscious.

Whatever it was, for several days it became a private term of reference for everything she saw around her, too private to confide even to Joseph, for fear he would laugh at her-or, worse still, offer a rational explanation.

She went to bed with Al a few times because she wanted no crisis with him and because, after the long drought with Joseph, her body needed him, and, besides, Michel had ordered her to. She wouldn't let him visit her flat because he was homeless again and she was afraid he would try and stay, which was what he had done before, until she had flung his clothes and razor into the street. Anyway, her flat possessed new secrets that nothing on God's earth would have persuaded her to share with him: her bed was Michel's, his gun had lain beneath the pillow, and there was nothing Al or anyone else could do to force her to desecrate it. She also trod wary with Al because Joseph had warned her that his movie deal had fallen through, and she knew of old how bad he could get when his pride was hurt.

Their first impassioned reunion took place in his usual pub, where she found the great philosopher ensconced with a couple of female disciples. As she walked across to join him, she thought: He'll smell Michel; he's in my clothes, my skin, my smile. But Al was too busy demonstrating his indifference to smell anything. He pushed back a chair for her with his foot, and as she sat down she thought: God help me, not one month ago this midget was my top adviser on what makes the world tick. When the pub closed and they went to a friend's flat and commandeered his spare room, she was appalled to find herself imagining it was Michel inside her, and Michel's face gazing down at her, and Michel's olive body bearing in on her in the half dark-Michel, her own little killer boy, driving her to the brink. But beyond Michel there was another figure still, Joseph, hers at last; his burning, locked-in sexuality finally burst loose; his scarred body and his scarred mind hers.

Apart from the Sundays, she read capitalist newspapers sporadically, listened to consumer-orientated radio bulletins, but heard nothing of a red-headed English girl sought in connection with the smuggling of high-grade Russian plastic explosive into Austria. It never happened. It was two other girls, one of my little fantasies. In most other respects, the state of the wider world had ceased to interest her. She read of a Palestinian bombing in Aachen, and of an Israeli reprisal raid on some camp in the Lebanon claiming large numbers of civilian dead. She read of mounting popular fury in Israel, and was duly chilled by an interview with an Israeli general who promised to solve the Palestinian problem "from the roots up." But after her crash course in conspiracy, she had no faith in the official description of events and never would have again. The only news items she followed with any loyalty concerned a female giant panda at London Zoo who was declining to mate, though feminists insisted it was the male's fault. Also, the zoo was one of Joseph's places. They would meet on a bench there, if only to squeeze hands like lovers, before going their separate ways.

Soon, he would say. Soon.

Floating this way, acting all the time for an unseen audience, guarding her every word and gesture against a momentary carelessness, Charlie found herself relying heavily on ritual. At weekends she usually went to her kids' club in Peckham and, in a great arched hall big enough for Brecht, whipped her kids' drama group back into action, which she loved. They were planning a rock pantomime for Christmas, a piece of sheer anarchy.

On Fridays she sometimes went to Al's pub, and on Wednesdays she took two quart bottles of brown ale to Miss Dubber, who lived round the corner, a retired tart from the chorus line. Miss Dubber had arthritis and rickets and woodworm and several serious ailments as well, and cursed her body with a zeal she had once reserved for ungenerous lovers. Charlie in return filled Miss Dubber's ear with marvellous made-up stories about the scandalous goings-on in the world of showbusiness, and they laughed so raucously together that the people next door turned up their television set to drown the din.

Otherwise Charlie could not manage company, though her acting career had provided her with half a dozen families she could have called on if she'd had a mind to.

She chatted to Lucy on the phone; they agreed to meet but left it open. She tracked down Robert in Battersea, but the Mykonos crowd were like schoolfriends from ten years ago; there was no life left to share with them. She had a curry with Willy and Pauly, but they were thinking about breaking up and it was a flop. She tried a few other bosom friends from previous existences but with no better success, and after that she became an old maid. She watered the young trees in her street when the weather went dry and hung fresh nut-bunches in steel pouches from her window-sill for the sparrows, because that was one of her signs to him, like the World Disarmament sticker on her car and the brass "C" she wore on a leather label strapped to her shoulder bag. He called them her safety signals and rehearsed her repeatedly in their uses. The disappearance of any one of them meant a cry for help, and in her handbag lived a brand-new white silk scarf, not for surrender but to say "They've come," if they ever did. She maintained her pocket diary, taking over where the Literacy Committee had left off; she completed the repair of an embroidery picture she had bought before she went on holiday, showing Lotte in Weimar pining to death over Werther's tomb. Me again, gone classic. She wrote endless letters to her missing man, but little by little ceased to post them.

Michel, darling, oh Michel, for mercy's sake, come to me.

But she steered clear of the squats and the alternative bookshops in Islington where she used to drop in for torpid coffee sessions; and very clear indeed of the angry bunch down in St. Pancras whose occasional cocaine-based pamphlets she used to distribute because no one else would. She got her car back from Eustace, the repair man, at last, a souped-up Fiat that Al had smashed for her, and, on her birthday, gave it a first airing by driving it to Rickmansworth to visit her bloody mother and take her the tablecloth that she had bought for her in Mykonos. She dreaded these visits as a rule: the Sunday-lunch mealtrap, with three vegetables and a rhubarb pie, followed by her mother's detailed summary of what the world had done wrong to her since they had last met. But this time, to her surprise, she found herself on delightful terms with her. She stayed the night, and next morning put on a dark headscarf, never the white one, and drove her to church, careful not to think of the last time she had worn a headscarf. Kneeling, she found herself stirred by an unexpected residual sense of piety, and fervently laid her several identities at God's service. Listening to the organ music, she began weeping, which made her wonder how much, after all, she had her mind under control. It's because I can't face going back to my flat, she thought.

What disconcerted her was the ghostly way that her flat had been altered to meet the new personality into which she was so carefully easing herself: a scene-change of which the scale only gradually declared itself. Of her entire new life, the insidious reconstruction of her flat during her absence was the most disturbing. Till now she had regarded it as the safest place ever, a kind of architectural Ned Quilley. She had inherited it from an out-of-work actor who, having taken to burglary, had retired and removed himself and his boyfriend to Spain. It was situated on the northern side of Camden Town over a Goanese Indian transport cafe, which warmed up at two in the morning and stayed awake to serve sarnosas and fried breakfasts till seven. To reach her staircase, you had to squeeze between the lavatory and the kitchen and cross a courtyard, by which time you were an object of scrutiny by the patron, the chef, and the chef's cheeky boyfriend, not to mention anyone who happened to be in the loo. And when you reached the top of the staircase there was a second front door to get through before you entered the sacred domain, which consisted of an attic room with the best bed in the world, and a bathroom and kitchen, all separate and rent-controlled.

Now suddenly she had lost that consolation of security. They had stolen it away from her. She felt as if she had lent the flat to someone during her absence and he had done all sorts of wrong things to it as a favour. Yet how had they got in unnoticed? When she asked in the cafe, they knew nothing. There was her writing drawer, for instance, with Michel's letters to her jammed into the back-all the originals, of which she had seen the photostats in Munich. There was her fighting fund, three hundred quids' worth in old fivers stowed behind the cracked panel of the bath, where she used to keep her grass in the days when she smoked. She moved them to a space under the floorboards, then back to the bath, then back to the floorboards again. There were the mementoes, the hoarded fragments of her love-affair from day one in Nottingham onwards: book-matches from the motel; the cheap ballpoint with which she had written her first letters to Paris; the very first russet orchids pressed and weighted between the pages of her Mrs. Beeton cookbook; the first dress he had ever bought for her-in York that was, they had gone to the store together; the hideous earrings he had given her in London, which she really couldn't wear except to please him. Such things she had half expected; Joseph had as good as warned her of them. What disturbed her was that these tiny touches, as she began to live with them, became more herself than she was: in her bookcase, the well-thumbed copies of glossy works of information on Palestine, signed with cautious dedications from Michel; on the wall, the pro-Palestinian poster with the frog-like features of the Israeli Prime Minister unflatteringly displayed above the silhouettes of Arab refugees; pinned next to it, the set of coloured maps tracing the course of Israeli expansion since 1967, with her own hand-drawn question mark over Tyre and Sidon, derived from her readings of Ben-Gurion's claims to them; the stack of ill-printed English-language magazines of anti-Israeli propaganda.

That's me all over, she thought as she picked her way slowly through the collection; once I'm hooked, I go out and buy the shop.

Except that I never did. It was them.

But saying so didn't help her, nor with time did she quite retain the distinction in her mind. Michel, for Christ's sake, have they caught you!

Soon after her return to London, as instructed, she visited the post office in Maida Vale, presented her credentials, and collected one letter only, postmark Istanbul, which had evidently arrived after she had left London for Mykonos. Darling. Not long now till Athens. I love you. Signed "M." A scribbled note to keep her going. But the sight of this live communication disturbed her deeply. A horde of buried images leapt out to. haunt her. Michel's feet slopping down the staircase in his Gucci shoes. His slack, lovely body supported by his jailers. His faun's face, too young for conscription. His voice, too rich, too innocent. The gold medallion gently slapping his naked olive breast. Joseph, I love you.

After that she went every day to the post office and sometimes twice, becoming a feature of the place, if only because she always left empty-handed looking more and more distraught; a delicate, well-directed piece of acting, which she worked upon with care, and which Joseph, in his capacity of secret coach, more than once personally witnessed while he bought stamps at the next-door counter.

In the same period, hoping to prompt life from him, she posted three letters to Michel in Paris, begging him to write, loving him, and forgiving him in advance for his silence. These were the first letters she had composed and written for herself. Mysteriously, she found relief in sending them; they gave an authenticity to their predecessors, and to her professed feelings. Each time-she wrote one, she took it to a postbox chosen for her and she supposed there were people covering it, but she had learned not to stare around and not to think about it. Once she spotted Rachel in the window of a Wimpy Bar looking very dowdy and English. Once Raoul and Dimitri rode past her on a motorbike. The last of her letters to Michel she sent express, from the same post office where she asked in vain for mail, and she scrawled "darling please please please oh please write" along the back of the envelope after she had franked it, while Joseph waited patiently behind her.

Gradually she came to think of her life over these weeks as possessing a large print and a small print. The large print was the world she lived in. The small was the world she slipped in and out of when the large world wasn't watching. No love-affair, even with very married men, had ever been so secret for her.

Their trip to Nottingham came on her fifth day. Joseph took exceptional precautions. He picked her up in a Rover from a remote tube station on a Saturday evening and drove her back on the Sunday afternoon. He had brought a blonde wig for her, a really good one, and a change of clothes, including a fur coat, in a suitcase. He had arranged a late dinner and it was as awful as the original; in the middle of it, Charlie confessed to an absurd panic lest the staff might recognise her despite her wig and fur coat and demand to know what had become of her one true lover.

Then they went to their bedroom, two chaste twin beds, which in the fiction they had remade by pulling them together and laying the mattresses the other way. For a moment, she really thought it was going to happen. She came out of the bathroom and Joseph was lying full length on the bed, looking at her, and she lay beside him and put her head on his chest, then lifted her face to him and began kissing him, light selective kisses on favourite places around the temples, cheeks, and finally the lips. His hand held her back, then lifted to her face, and he kissed her in return, keeping his hand along her cheek and his eyes open. Then very gently he pushed her away from him, and sat up. And kissed her once more: goodbye.

"Listen," he said as he picked up his coat.

He was smiling. His beautiful, kind smile, his very best. She listened, and heard the Nottinghamshire rain clattering against their window-the same rain that had kept them in bed for two nights and one long day.

Next morning they retraced nostalgically the little excursions that she and Michel had made together into the surrounding countryside until their desire swept them back to the motel; all for the visual memories, Joseph assured her earnestly, and for the added confidence of having seen. Between such lessons, like a light relief, he taught her other things. Silent signals, as he called them; and a method of secret writing on the inside of Marlboro cigarette packets, which somehow she could not take seriously.

Several times, they met in a theatrical costumier's behind the Strand, usually after rehearsals.

"You'll have come for the fitting, won't you, dear?" said a mountainous blonde lady of sixty in flowing robes, each time Charlie stepped through the doorway. "That's the way then, dear," and showed her into a back bedroom where Joseph sat waiting for her like a whore's client. Autumn becomes you, she thought, noticing the frost on his hair again, and the pink nip in his frugal cheeks; it always will.

Her greatest worry was not knowing how to reach him: "Where are you staying? How can I get in touch with you?"

Through Cathy, he would say. You have the safety signals and you have Cathy.

Cathy was her lifeline, and Joseph's front office, the preserver of his exclusiveness. Each evening between six and eight Charlie would enter a phone box, always a different one, and ring a West End number so that Cathy could take her through her day: how the rehearsals had gone, what news of Al and the gang, how was Quilley and had they discussed future parts, had she auditioned for the movie yet, and was there anything she needed?-often for half an hour or more. At first Charlie resented Cathy as a diminution of her relationship with Joseph, but gradually she came to look forward to her chats because Cathy turned out to possess a nice line in senior wit and a great deal of earthy wisdom. Charlie had a picture of somebody warmhearted and detached and possibly Canadian: one of those unshockable lady-shrinks she used to visit at the Tavistock Clinic after she was expelled from school and thought she might be going bananas. And this was clever of Charlie, for though Miss Bach was American and not Canadian, her family had been doctors for generations.

The house in Hampstead that Kurtz had rented for the watchers was very large, set in a quiet backwater favoured by the Finchley driving schools. Its owners, at the suggestion of their good friend Marty from Jerusalem, had tiptoed off to Marlow, but their house remained a garrison of hushed and intellectual elegance. There were pictures by Nolde in the drawing-room and a signed photograph of Thomas Mann in the conservatory, and a cage-bird that sang when you wound it up, and a library with cracking leather chairs, and a music room with a Bechstein grand. There was ping-pong in the basement and at the back a tangled garden with a crumbling grey tennis court too far gone, so the kids invented a new game for it, a kind of tennis-golf to accommodate its bunkers. At the front was a tiny gatehouse, and that was where they put their notices saying "Hebraic and Humanist Study Group, Students and Staff Only," which in Hampstead did not raise an eyebrow.

There were fourteen of them in all, including Litvak, but they spread themselves over the four floors with such a discreet and catlike orderliness you could hardly have told there was anyone there at all. Their morale had never been a problem, and the Hampstead house raised it even higher. They loved the dark furniture and the feeling that every object around them seemed to know more than they did. They loved working all day and often half the night, and coming back to this temple of gracious Jewish living; and living out that heritage as well. When Litvak played Brahms, which he did very well, even Rachel, who was pop-mad, put aside her prejudices and came downstairs to hear him, though-as they were not slow to remind her-she had at first kicked against the very idea of coming back to England at all, and had made an ostentatious point of not travelling on a British passport.

With such a fine team spirit, they settled to the wait like clockwork. They avoided, without even being told, the local pubs and restaurants and unnecessary contact with local people. On the other hand, they took care to send themselves mail and buy milk and newspapers and do the things that the inquisitive otherwise notice by omission. They bicycled a lot and were hugely tickled to discover what distinguished and sometimes questionable Jews had been here ahead of them, and there was not one who did not pay his wry respects to the house of Friedrich Engels, or to the tomb of Karl Marx in Highgate Cemetery. Their transport stable was a smart little pink-painted garage off Haverstock Hill, with an old silver Rolls-Royce in the window marked "Not for Sale" and a proprietor called Bernie. Bernie was a big, growling man, with a dark face and a blue suit and a half-smoked cigarette and a blue Homburg hat like Schwili's that he wore while he did his own typing. He had vans and cars and motorbikes and number plates galore, and on the day they arrived he put up a big sign saying "contract business only. no callers." "A bunch of bleeding poofters," he told his business friends coarsely. "Called themselves a film company. Hired everything in my bleeding shop, paid me in bleeding used-oncers-well, how can you bleeding resist?"

All of which, to a point, was true, for that was the fiction they had agreed with him. But Bernie knew a whole lot better. Bernie too, in his day, had done a thing or two.

Meanwhile, almost daily, tidbits of news came in by way of the London Embassy, like the word of a distant battle. Rossino had called again at Yanuka's flat in Munich, this time accompanied by a blonde woman who satisfied their theories about the girl known as Edda. So-and-so had visited so-and-so in Paris, or Beirut, or Damascus, or Marseilles. With the identification of Rossino, new avenues had opened in a dozen different directions. As often as three times a week, Litvak held a briefing and a free discussion. Where photographs had been taken, he held a magic-lantern show as well, with short lectures on known aliases, behaviour patterns, personal appetites, and habits of tradecraft. Periodically he mounted quiz competitions with amusing prizes for the winners.

Occasionally, though not often, the great Gadi Becker slipped in to hear the latest word, seating himself at the back of the room apart from everyone and leaving as soon as the meeting ended. Of his life away from them they knew nothing at all, nor did they expect to: he was the agent runner, a breed apart; he was Becker, unsung hero of more secret missions than most of them had had birthdays. They called him affectionately "the Steppenwolf," and told each other impressive half-true stories about his feats.

The call came on day eighteen. A telex from Geneva put them on standby, a cable from Paris gave the confirmation. Within an hour, two-thirds of the team was on the road, headed westward through black rain.