The Little Drummer Girl

twenty

She started earlier than Helga had told her, partly because in some ways she was a worrier, and partly because she had clothed herself deliberately in a coarse scepticism about the whole plan. What if it's out of order? she had objected-this is England, Helg, not super-efficient Germany-what if it's occupied when you ring? But Helga had refused to entertain these arguments: do exactly as you are ordered, leave everything else to me. So she started from Gloucester Road all right, and she sat upstairs; but instead of catching the first bus after seven-thirty, she caught the one that came at twenty past. At Tottenham Court Road tube station she was lucky; a train pulled up just as she reached the southbound platform, with the result that she had to sit like a wallflower at Embankment until she made her last connection. It was Sunday morning, and apart from a few insomniacs and churchgoers she was the only person awake in the whole of London. The City, when she reached it, had been abandoned totally, and she had only to find the street to see the phone box a hundred yards ahead of her, exactly as Helga had described it, winking at her like a lighthouse. It was empty.

"You walk first to the end of the road, you turn round, and you come back again," Helga had said, so she dutifully made a first pass and established that the phone did not look too smashed up; though by then she had decided that it was an absurdly obvious place to hang around waiting for phone calls from international terrorists. She made the turn and started back again; and, to her great annoyance, as she did so, a man got into the box ahead of her and closed the door. She glanced at her watch and there were twelve minutes still to go, so, not unduly worried, she parked herself a few feet away and waited. He was wearing a bobble hat like a fisherman's and a leather flying-coat with a fur collar, too much for such a sticky day. He had his back to her and was talking Italian non-stop. That's why he -needs the fur-lined, she thought; his Latin blood doesn't fancy our climate. Charlie herself was wearing the clothes she had worn since she picked up the boy Matthew at Al's party: old jeans and her Tibetan jacket. She had combed her hair but not brushed it; she felt fraught and haunted, and hoped she looked it.

Seven minutes to go, and the man in the box had launched himself upon one of those passionate Italian monologues that could as well have been about unrequited love as the state of the Milan stock market. Nervous now, she licked her lips and looked up and down the street, but not a soul stirred-no sinister black sedans or men in doorways; no red Mercedes either. The only car in sight was a grotty little van, with corrugated sides and the driver's door still open, standing directly in front of her.

All the same, she was beginning to feel very naked. Eight o'clock arrived, announced by an amazing variety of secular and religious chimes. Helga had said five past. The man had stopped speaking, but she heard the chink of coin in his pockets as he fumbled for more; then she heard a tapping as he tried to attract her attention. She turned round and saw him holding a fifty-pence piece at her and looking appealing.

"Can't you let me go first?" she said. "I'm in a hurry."

But English was not his language.

To hell with it, she thought; Helga will just have to keep dialling. It's exactly what I warned her of. Slipping the shoulder strap of her handbag, she unpopped it and delved in the sump for tens and fives till she made up fifty. Christ, look at the sweat on my fingers. She stuck her closed fist towards him, damp fingers downward, ready to drop the stuff into his grateful Latin palm, and saw that he was pointing a small pistol at her from within the folds of his flying-jacket, straight at the point where her stomach met her rib cage, as neat a piece of conjuring as she was likely to find. Not a big gun, though guns do look a lot bigger when they're pointed at you, she noticed. About the size of Michel's. But as Michel himself had told her, every handgun is a compromise between concealment, portability, and efficiency. He was still holding the telephone in his other hand and she supposed that someone was still listening at the other end, because although he was addressing Charlie now, he kept his face close to the mouthpiece.

"What you do, you walk beside me to the car, Charlie," he explained, in good English. "You keep to my right side, you walk on my right side a little ahead of me, hands behind your back where I can see them. Joined behind your back, you follow me? If you try to get away or make a signal to someone, if you call out, then I shall shoot you through the left side-here-and kill you. If the police show up, if anyone shoots, if I'm suspicious, it's the same. I shoot you."

He indicated to her the same point on his own body, so that she understood. He added something Italian into the telephone and rang off. Then he stepped out onto the pavement and cracked a big confiding smile at her just at the moment when his face was closest to hers. It was a real Italian face, not a single lazy line to it. A real Italian voice too, rich and musical. She could imagine it echoing round ancient marketplaces and chatting up the women at their balconies.

"Let's go," he said. One hand had stayed in the pocket of his flying-jacket. "Not too fast, okay? Nice and easy."

A moment earlier she had desperately needed a pee, but with walking the urge left her and she developed instead a cramp in the nape of the neck and a wailing in her right ear like a mosquito in the dark.

"As you get into the passenger seat, transfer your hands to the dashboard in front of you," he advised as he walked behind her. "The girl in the back has a gun too and she is very quick to shoot people. Much quicker than me."

Charlie opened the passenger door, sat down, and placed her fingertips on the dashboard like a good girl at table.

"Relax, Charlie," said Helga cheerfully from behind her. "Lower your shoulders, my dear, you are looking like an old woman already!" Charlie kept her shoulders where they were. "Now smile. Hoorah. Keep smiling. Everybody's happy today. Whoever is not happy must be shot."

"Start with me," said Charlie.

The Italian got into the driving seat and switched the radio to the God slot.

"Turn it off," Helga ordered. She was wedged against the rear doors with her knees up, and holding her gun with both hands, and she didn't look like somebody who would miss an oil can at fifteen paces. With a shrug, the Italian turned off the radio and, in the restored quiet, once more addressed her.

"Okay, so put on your seat belt, then link your hands together and put them on your lap," he said. "Hang on, I do it for you." Picking up her handbag, he tossed it to Helga, then grabbed the seat belt and buckled it, carelessly brushing her breasts. Thirtyish. Handsome as a movie star. A spoilt Garibaldi in a red neckscarf going for the hero kick. Very calmly, with all the time in the world to kill, he fished a pair of large sunglasses from his pocket and fitted them over her eyes. At first she thought she had gone blind with funk, because she could see nothing through them at all. Then she thought, they're the self-adjusting kind; I'm supposed to sit tight and wait for them to clear. Then she realised that seeing nothing was what was intended.

"If you take them off, she'll shoot you through the back of the head for sure," the Italian boy warned her as he started the car.

"Oh, she will," said jolly old Helga.

They set off, first bumping over a bit of cobble, then settling into calmer water. She listened for the sound of another car but heard only their own engine ticking and rattling through the streets. She tried to work out which way they were heading but she was already lost. Without warning, they stopped. She had no sensation of slowing down, nor of the driver shaping up to park. She had counted three hundred of her own pulsebeats, and two previous stops, which she assumed were traffic lights. She had memorised such trivia as the new rubber mat under her feet and the red devil with a trident in his hand dangling from the car keyring. The Italian was helping her out of the car; a stick was put into her hand, she supposed a white one. With plenty of help from her friends, she was negotiating the six paces and four rising steps to somebody's front door. The lift mechanism had a warble in it that was an exact reproduction of the water-whistle she had blown in her prep-school orchestra to make the bird noises in the Toy Symphony. They are good performers, Joseph had warned her. There is no apprenticeship. You will go from drama school straight to the West End. She was sitting on some kind of leather saddle with no back. They had made her link her hands and keep them on her lap again. They had kept her handbag and she heard them tip its contents onto a glass table, which chimed when her keys and small change landed. And thudded to the weight of Michel's letters, which she had collected that morning on Helga's orders. There was a smell of body lotion in the air, sweeter than Michel's, and sleepier. The carpet at her feet was of thick nylon and russet-coloured, like Michel's orchids; she guessed the curtains must be heavy and drawn tight, because the light at the edges of her spectacles was electric yellow, not a hint of day. They had been in the room some minutes with no word spoken.

"I need Comrade Mesterbein," Charlie pronounced suddenly. "I need the full protection of the law."

Helga laughed rapturously. "Oh, Charlie! This is too completely crazy. She is wonderful. Don't you think so?" This to the Italian, presumably, for she was aware of no one else in the room. Yet the question received no answer, and Helga seemed to expect none. Charlie sent out another probe.

"A gun suits you, Helg, I'll give you that. From now on, I'll never think of you dressed in anything else."

And this time Charlie distinctly heard the note of nervous pride in Helga's laughter; she was showing Charlie off to someone-someone she respected a great deal more than she respected the Italian boy. She heard a footstep and saw, at the very bottom of her vision, laid out on the russet carpet for her inspection, the black and highly polished toecap of one very expensive male shoe. She heard breathing, and the suck of a tongue placed against the upper teeth. The foot disappeared and she felt a disturbance of air as the warm-scented body passed very close to her. Instinctively, she leaned away from it but Helga ordered her to be still. She heard a match struck and smelled one of her father's Christmas cigars. Yet again Helga was warning her to keep still-"exactly still, otherwise you will be punished, there will be no hesitation." But Helga's threats were a mere intrusion into Charlie's thoughts as she tried by every means known to her to define the unseen visitor. She imagined herself as a kind of bat, sending.out signals and listening to how they bounced back to her. She remembered the blindfold games she used to play at children's parties at Hallowe'en. Smell this, feel that, guess who is kissing you on your thirteen-year-old lips.

The darkness was making her dizzy. I'm going to fall over. Lucky I'm sitting down. He was at the glass table, inspecting the contents of her handbag, much as Helga had done in Cornwall. She heard a snatch of music as he fiddled with her little clock radio, and a clunk as he set it aside. This time we play no tricks, Joseph had said. You take your very own model, no substitutes. She heard him flipping through her diary while he puffed. He's going to ask me what "off games" means, she thought. See M… meet M… love M… athens!!… He asked her nothing. She heard a grunt as he sat himself gratefully on the sofa; she heard the crackle of his trouser seat on stiffened chintz. A tubby man wearing expensive body oil and handmade shoes and smoking a Havana cigar sits himself gratefully on a tart's sofa. The darkness was hypnotic. Her hands were still linked on her lap but they were someone else's. She heard the snap of an elastic band. The letters. We shall be very cross with you if you do not bring the letters. Cindy, you have just paid for your music lessons. If only you knew where I was going when I called on you. If only I did.

The darkness was making her a little mad. If they imprison me, I've had it-claustrophobia's my worst thing. She was reciting T. S. Eliot to herself, something she had learnt at school the term they sacked her: about time present and time past all being contained in time future. About all time being eternally present. She hadn't understood it then and she didn't now. Thank God I didn't take in Whisper, she thought. Whisper was a scurrilous black lurcher who lived across the road from her, and his owners were going abroad. She imagined Whisper sitting beside her now, wearing dark glasses too.

"You tell us the truth, we don't kill you," said a man's voice softly.

It was Michel! Almost. Michel is almost alive again! It was Michel's accent, Michel's beauty of cadence, Michel's rich and drowsy tone, produced from the back of the throat.

"You tell us everything you told to them, what you did for them already, how much they pay you, that's okay. We understand. We let you go."

"Keep your head still," Helga snapped from behind her.

"We don't think you betrayed him like betray, okay? You were frightened, you got in too deep, so now you play along with them. Okay, that's natural. We are not inhuman people. We take you out of here, we drop you at the edge of town, you tell them everything that happened to you here. We still don't mind. So long as you come clean."

He sighed, as if life were becoming a burden to him.

"Maybe you develop a dependence on some nice policeman guy, yes? You do him a favour. We understand those things. We're committed people but we are not psychopaths. Yes?"

Helga was annoyed. "Do you understand him, Charlie? Answer or you will be punished!"

She made a point of not answering.

"When did you first go to them? Tell me. After Nottingham? York? It doesn't matter. You went to them. We agree. You got frightened, you ran to the police. 'This crazy Arab boy is trying to recruit me as a terrorist. Save me, I do whatever you tell me.' That how it happened? Listen, when you go back to them, it's still no problem. You tell them what a heroine you are. We'll give you some information you can take to 'them, make you feel good. We're nice people. Reasonable. Okay, let's get to business. Let's not fool around. You're a nice lady but out of your depth. Let's go."

She was at peace. A profound lassitude had come over her, brought on by isolation and blindness. She was safe, she was in the womb, to begin again or to die peacefully, however nature disposed. She was sleeping the sleep of infancy or old age. Her silence enchanted her. It was the silence of perfect freedom. They were waiting for her-she could feel their impatience but had no sense of sharing it. Several times she went so far as to think of what she might say, but her voice was a long way from her and there seemed no point in going to fetch it. Helga spoke some German, and though Charlie couldn't understand a word of it, she recognised as clearly as if it were her own language the note of bewildered resignation. The fat man answered and he sounded quite as perplexed, but not hostile. Maybe-maybe not, he seemed to be saying. She had an impression of the two of them disclaiming responsibility for her as they passed her back and forth between them: a bureaucratic hassle. The Italian joined in, but Helga told him to shut up. The discussion between the fat man and Helga resumed and she caught the word "logisch." Helga is being logical. Or Charlie isn't. Or the fat man is being told he should be.

Then the fat man said, "Where did you spend the night after you telephoned Helga?"

"With a lover."

"And last night?"

"With a lover."

"A different one?"

"Yes, but they were both policemen."

She reckoned that if she hadn't had the glasses on, Helga would have hit her. She stormed up to her and her voice rasped with anger as she flung a volley of orders at her-not to be impertinent, not to lie, to answer everything immediately and without sarcasm. The questions began again and she answered wearily, letting them drag the answers out of her, sentence by sentence, because ultimately it was none of their damn business. In Nottingham what room number? In Thessalonika what hotel? Did they swim? What time did they arrive, eat; what drinks did they have sent up to their room? But gradually, as she listened first to herself and then to them, she knew that, this far at least, she had won-even though they made her wear the sunglasses when she left, and keep them on her till they had driven her a decent distance from the house.

twenty-one

It was raining as they landed in Beirut and she knew it was a hot rain, because the heat of it came into the cabin while they were still circling and made her scalp itch again from the dye that Helga had made her put on her hair. They flew in over cloud like rock that burned red hot under the plane's lights. The cloud stopped and they were low over the sea, skimming to destruction in the approaching mountains. She had a recurring nightmare that went the same way, except that her plane was flying down a crowded street with skyscrapers either side. Nothing could stop it, because the pilot was making love to her. Nothing could stop it now. They made a perfect landing, the doors opened, she smelled the Middle East for the first time, greeting her like a homecomer. The hour was seven in the evening, but it could have been three in the morning, for she knew at once that this was not a world that went to bed. The uproar in the reception hall reminded her of Derby Day before the "off"; there were enough armed men in different uniforms to begin their own war. Clutching her shoulder bag to her chest, she shoved her way towards the immigration queue and discovered to her surprise that she was smiling. Her East German passport, her false appearance, which five hours ago at London Airport had been matters of life and death to her, were trivial in this atmosphere of restless, dangerous urgency.

"Take the left queue, and when you show your passport ask to speak to Mr. Mercedes," Helga had commanded as they sat in the Citroen in the car park at Heathrow.

"What happens if he looses off at me in German?"

The question was beneath her. "If you get lost, take a taxi to the Commodore Hotel, sit in the foyer, and wait. That is an order. Mercedes like the car."

"Then what?"

"Charlie, I think actually you are being a bit stubborn and a bit stupid. Please stop this now."

"Or you'll shoot me," Charlie suggested.

"Miss Palme! Passport. Pass. Yes, please!"

Palme was her German name. Pronounced "Pal-mer," Helga had said. It was spoken by a small, happy Arab with a day's growth of beard and curly hair and immaculate, threadbare clothes. "Please," he repeated, and plucked at her sleeve. His jacket was open and he had a big silver automatic shoved into his waistband. There were twenty people between herself and the immigration officer, and Helga hadn't said it would be like this at all.

"I am Mr. Danny. Please. Miss Palme. Come."

She gave him her passport and he dived away with it into the crowd, holding his arms wide for her to follow in his wake. So much for Helga. So much for Mercedes. Danny had vanished, but a moment later he reappeared looking very proud, clutching a white landing-card in one hand and in the other a big official-looking man in a black leather coat.

"Friends," Danny explained, with a patriot's grand smile. "Everybody friends of Palestine."

Somehow she doubted it, but faced with his enthusiasm she was too polite to say so. The big man looked her over gravely, then studied the passport, which he handed to Danny. Lastly, he studied the white card, which he posted into his top pocket.

"Willkommen," he said, with a swift diagonal nod, but it was an invitation to hurry.

They were at the doors as the fight broke out. It began small, as something that a uniformed official had apparently said to a prosperous-looking traveller. Suddenly both were shouting and passing their hands very close to each other's faces. Within seconds, each man had acquired champions, and as Danny guided her to the car park, a group of soldiers in green berets were hobbling towards the scene, unslinging their machine guns on the way.

"Syrians," Danny explained, and smiled philosophically at her as if to say that every country had its Syrians.

The car was an old blue Peugeot full of stale cigarette smoke, and it was parked beside a coffee stall. Danny opened the back door and dusted the cushions with his hand. As she got in, a boy slipped in beside her from the other side. As Danny started the engine, another boy appeared and sat himself in the passenger seat. It was too dark for her to see their features, but she could see their machine guns clearly. They were so young that for a moment she had difficulty in believing that their guns were real. The boy beside her offered her a cigarette and was sad when Charlie declined.

"You speak Spanish?" he enquired with the greatest courtesy, by way of an alternative. Charlie did not. "Then you forgive my English language. If you would speak Spanish, I would speak perfectly."

"But your English is wonderful."

"This is not true," he replied reprovingly, as if he had already identified a Western perfidy, and lapsed into a troubled silence.

A couple of shots rang out behind them, but nobody remarked on them. They were approaching a sandbagged emplacement. Danny stopped the car. A uniformed sentry stared at her, then waved them through with his machine gun.

"Was he Syrian too?" she asked.

"Lebanese," said Danny, and sighed.

But she could feel his excitement all the same. She could feel it in all of them-a keening, a quickness of eye and mind. The street was part battlefield, part building site; the passing street lamps, those that worked, revealed it in hasty patches. Stubs of charred tree recalled a gracious avenue; now bougainvillea had begun to cover the ruins. Burnt-out cars, peppered with bullet-holes, lay around the pavements. They passed lighted shanties, with garish shops inside, and high silhouettes of bombed buildings broken into mountain crags. They passed a house so pierced with shellholes that it resembled a gigantic cheese-grater balanced against the pale sky. A bit of moon, slipping from one hole to the next, kept pace with them. Occasionally, a brand-new building would appear, half built, half lit, half lived in, a speculator's gamble of red girders and black glass.

"Prague I was two years. Havana, Cuba, three. You have been to Cuba?"

The boy next to her seemed to have recovered from his disappointment.

"I have not been to Cuba," she confessed.

"Now I am official interpreter, Spanish Arabic."

"Fantastic," said Charlie. "Congratulations."

"I interpret for you, Miss Palme?"

"Any time," said Charlie, and there was much laughter. Western woman was reinstated after all.

Danny was braking the car to a walking pace and lowering his window. Dead ahead of them in the centre of the road a brazier glowed, and round it sat a group of men and boys in white kaffiyehs and bits of khaki battledress. Several brown dogs had made their own encampment close to them. She remembered Michel in his home village, listening to the tales of travellers, and thought, now they have made a village in the street. As Danny dipped his lights, an old, beautiful man stood up, rubbed his back, shuffled over to them, machine gun in hand, and leaned his lined face into Danny's window until they could embrace. Their conversation flowed timelessly back and forth, Ignored, Charlie listened to every word, imagining that she could somehow understand. But, looking past him, she had a less comfortable vision: standing in a motionless half circle, four of the old man's audience had their machine guns trained upon the car, and not one of them was above fifteen years old.

"Our people," said Charlie's neighbour, with reverence, as they continued on their way. "Palestinian commandos. Our part of town."

Michel's part too, she thought proudly.

You will find them an easy people to love, Joseph had told her.

Charlie spent four nights and four days with the boys, and loved them singly and collectively. They were the first of her several families. They moved her constantly, like a treasure, always by dark, always with the greatest courtesy. She had arrived so suddenly, they explained, with charming regret; it was necessary for our Captain to make certain preparations. They called her "Miss Palme" and perhaps they really thought it was her name. They returned her love for them, yet they asked her nothing personal and nothing obtrusive; they maintained in every sense a shy and disciplined reticence, which made her curious about the nature of the authority that governed them. Her first bedroom was at the top of an old shell-torn house empty of all other life except for the absent proprietor's parrot, which had a smoker's cough and produced it every time someone lit a cigarette. Its other trick was to squawk like a telephone, which it did in the dead hours, causing her to steal to the door and wait for it to be answered. The boys slept on the landing outside, one at a time, while the other two smoked, drank tiny glasses of sweet tea, and kept up a campfire murmur over their card games.

The nights were eternal, yet no two minutes were the same. The very sounds were at war with one another, first lying off at a safe distance, then advancing, then grouping, then falling upon each other in a skirmish of conflicting dins-a burst of music, the scream of car tyres and sirens-followed by the deep silence of a forest. In that orchestra, gunfire was a minor instrument: a drumbeat here, a tattoo there, sometimes the slow whistle of a shell. Once she heard peals of laughter, but human voices were few. And once, in early morning after an urgent tapping at her door, Danny and the two boys tiptoed together to her window. Going after them, she saw a car parked a hundred yards along the street. Smoke poured out of it; it lifted and tolled itself onto its side like someone turning over in bed. A puff of warm air pushed her back into the room. Something fell off a shelf. She heard a thud inside her head.

"Peace," said Mahmoud, the prettiest, with a wink; and they all retired, bright-eyed and confiding.

Only the dawn was predictable/ when from crackling loudspeakers wailed the muezzin, summoning the faithful to prayer.

Yet Charlie accepted everything, and gave herself entirely in return. In the unreason around her, in this unlooked-for truce for meditation, she found at last a cradle for her own irrationality. And since no paradox was too great to bear amid such chaos, she found a place in it for Joseph too. Her love for him, in this world of unexplained devotions, was in everything she heard and looked at. And when the boys, over tea and cigarettes, regaled her with brave stories of their families' sufferings at the hands of the Zionists-just as Michel had done, and with the same romantic relish-it was her love for Joseph once more, her memory of his soft voice and rare smile, that opened her heart to their tragedy.

Her second bedroom was high up in a glittering apartment house. From her window, she could stare at the black facade.of a new international bank, and past it to the unmoving sea. The empty beach with its deserted beach-huts was like a holiday resort permanently out of season. A single beachcomber had the eccentricity of a Christmas Day bather at the Serpentine. But the strangest thing in that place was the curtains. When the boys drew them for her at night, she noticed nothing odd. But when the dawn came, she saw a line of bullet-holes running in a wavy snake across the window. That was the day she cooked the boys omelettes for breakfast, then taught them gin rummy for matches.

On the third night, she slept above some sort of military headquarters. There were bars over the windows and shell-holes on the staircase. Posters showed children waving machine guns or bunches of flowers. Dark-eyed guards lounged at every landing, and the whole building had a rackety, Foreign Legion air.

"Our Captain will see you soon," Danny assured her tenderly, from time to time. "He is making preparations. He is a great man."

She was beginning to learn the Arab smile that explained delay. To console her in her waiting, Danny told her the story of his father. After twenty years in the camps, it seemed the old man had grown light-headed with despair. So one morning before sunrise he packed his few belongings into a bag, together with the deeds of his land, and without telling his family, set off across the Zionist lines with the aim of reclaiming his farm in person. Hastening after him, Danny and his brothers arrived in time to see his little crooked figure advance farther and farther into the valley until a landmine blew him up. Danny related all this with a puzzled exactness, while the other two patrolled his English, interrupting to rephrase a sentence when its syntax or cadence displeased them, nodding like old men to approve a phrase. When he had finished, they asked her a number of grave questions about the chastity of Western women, of which they had heard disgraceful but not wholly uninteresting things.

So she loved them more and more, a four-day miracle. She loved their shyness, their virginity, their discipline, and their authority over her. She loved them as captors and as friends. But for all her love, they never gave her back her passport, and if she came too near to their machine guns they drew back from her with dangerous and unbending glances.

"Come, please," said Danny, tapping softly on her door to wake her. "Our Captain is prepared."

It was three in the morning and still dark.

She remembered afterwards about twenty cars, but it could have been only five, because it all happened very fast, a zigzag of increasingly alarming journeys across town, in sand-coloured saloons with aerials front and back and bodyguards who didn't speak. The first car was waiting at the foot of the building, but on the courtyard side where she hadn't been before. It wasn't till they were out of the courtyard and racing down the street that she realised that she had left the boys behind. At the bottom of the street, the driver seemed to see something he didn't like, for he threw the car into a screeching U-turn that nearly tipped it, and as they raced back up the road she heard a rattle and a shout from close to her, and felt a heavy hand shove her head down, so she supposed that the gunfire was meant for them.

They went over a crossroads on red and missed a lorry by a prayer; they mounted a pavement to the right, then made a wide arc left into a sloped car park overlooking a deserted lido. She saw Joseph's half moon again, hanging over the sea, and for a second she imagined she was on the drive to Delphi. They pulled up beside a big Fiat and almost tossed her into it; she was away again, the property of two new bodyguards, heading down a pitted motorway with riddled buildings either side and a pair of lights following very close. The mountains straight ahead of her were black, but those to her left were grey because a glow from the valley lit their flanks, and beyond the valley lay the sea again. The needle was on 140, but suddenly it was on nothing at all because the driver had turned his lights out and the pursuit car had done the same.

To their right ran a line of palms, to their left the central reservation that divided the two carriageways, a pavement six feet across, sometimes gravel, sometimes vegetation. With a great bump they mounted it and with another landed on the opposing carriageway. Traffic was hooting at them and Charlie was shouting "Jesus!" but the driver was not receptive to blasphemy. Putting his lights on full, he drove straight at the oncoming traffic before wrenching the car left again under a small bridge, and suddenly they were careering to a halt in an empty mud road and changing to a third car, this time a Landrover with no windows. It was raining. She hadn't noticed it till now, but as they bundled her into the back of the Landrover, a downpour soaked her to the skin and she saw a shellburst of white lightning smash against the mountains. Or perhaps it was a shell.

They were climbing steeply, a winding road. Through the back of the Landrover she could see the valley fall away; through the windscreen, between the heads of the bodyguard and driver, she could watch the rain leaping out of the tarmac like shoals of dancing minnows. There was a car in front of them, and Charlie knew from the way they followed it that it was theirs; there was a car behind them, and from the way they didn't bother with it, it was theirs as well. They made another change and perhaps another; they approached what seemed to be a deserted schoolhouse, but this time the driver cut the engine while he and the bodyguard sat with their machine guns at the windows, waiting to see who else came up the hill. There were road checks where they stopped and others where they drove through with no more than a slow lift of the hand at the passive sentries. There was a road check where the bodyguard in the front seat lowered his window and fired a burst of machine-gun fire into the darkness, but the only response was a panicky whining of sheep. And there was a last terrifying leap into blackness between two sets of headlamps that were turned full on to them, but by then she was past being terrified; she was shaken and punchdrunk and she didn't give a damn.

The car pulled up; she was in the forecourt of an old villa with boy sentries with machine guns posing in silhouette on the roof like heroes in a Russian movie. The air was cold and clean and full of all the Greek smells that the rain had left behind-cypress and honey and every wild flower in the world. The sky was full of storms and smoking cloud; the valley lay stretched below them in receding squares of light. They led her through a porch and into the hall, and there, by the dimmest of overhead lamps, she had her first sight of Our Captain: a brown, lopsided figure with a hank of straight black schoolboy hair, and an English-looking walking stick of natural ash to support his limping legs, and a wry smile of welcome brightening his pitted face. To shake hands with her, he hung the walking stick over his left forearm, letting it dangle, so that she had the feeling of holding him up for a second before he set himself straight again.

"Miss Charlie, I am Captain Tayeh and I greet you in the name of the revolution."

His voice was brisk and businesslike. It was also, like Joseph's, beautiful.

Fear will be a matter of selection, Joseph had warned her. Unfortunately, no one can be frightened all the time. But with Captain Tayeh, as he calls himself, you must do your best, because Captain Tayeh is a very clever man.

"Forgive me," Tayeh said, with cheerful insincerity.

The house was not his, for he could find nothing he wanted. Even for an ashtray he had to stomp around in the gloom, humorously questioning objects, whether they were too valuable to use. Nevertheless the house belonged to somebody he liked, for she observed a friendliness about his manner that said That's typical of them-yes, that's exactly where they would keep their drink. The light was still sparse, but as her eyes grew accustomed to it she decided she was in a professor's house; or a politician's; or a lawyer's. The walls were lined with real books that had been read and flagged and shoved back none too tidily; a painting that hung over the fireplace could have been Jerusalem. All else was a masculine disorder of different tastes: leather chairs and patchwork cushions and a jarring hotchpotch of Oriental carpets. And pieces of Arab silver, very white and ornate, glinting like treasure chests out of dark recesses. And a separate study down two steps into an alcove, with an English-style desk and a panoramic view of the valley she had just emerged from, and of the sea coast in the moonlight.

She was sitting where he had told her to sit, on the leather sofa, but Tayeh himself was still bumping relentlessly about the room on his stick, doing everything singly while he shot her glances from different angles, getting the measure of her; now the glasses; now a smile; now, with another smile, vodka; and lastly Scotch, apparently his favourite brand, for he studied the label approvingly. A boy sat either end of the room, each with a machine gun across his knees. A pile of letters lay strewn over the table, and she knew without looking that they were her own letters to Michel.

Do not mistake seeming confusion for incompetence, Joseph had warned her; no racist thoughts, please, about Arab inferiority.

The lights went out completely but they often did; even in the valley. He stood over her, framed against the huge window, a vigilant smiling shadow leaning on a stick.

"Do you know what it's like for us when we go home?" he asked, still gazing at her. But his stick was pointed to the big picture window. "Can you imagine what it is like to be in your own country, under your own stars, standing on your own land, with a gun in your hand, looking for the oppressor? Ask the boys."

His voice, like other voices she knew, was even more beautiful in the dark.

"They liked you," he said. "Did you like them?"

"Yes."

"Which one you liked best?"

"All equally," she said, and he laughed again.

"They say you are much in love with your dead Palestinian. Is that true?"

"Yes."

His stick was still pointing at the window. "In the old days, if you had the courage, we would take you with us. Over the border. Attack. Avenge. Come back. Celebrate. We would go together. Helga says you want to fight. You want to fight?"

"Yes."

"Anybody, or just Zionists?" He didn't wait for an answer. He was drinking. "Some of the scum we get, they want to blow the whole world up. Are you like that?"

"No."

"They are scum, those people. Helga -Mr. Mesterbein-necessary scum. Yes?"

"I haven't had time to find out," she said.

"Are you scum?"

"No."

The lights came on. "No," he agreed, continuing to examine her. "No, I don't think you are. Maybe you change. Ever killed anybody?"

"No."

"You're lucky. You've got police. Your own land. Parliament. Rights. Passports. Where do you live?"

"In London."

"Which part?"

She had a feeling that his injuries made him impatient of her answers; that they drove his mind beyond them all the time, to other questions. He had found a tall chair and was dragging it carelessly towards her, but neither of the boys got up to help him, and she guessed they didn't dare. When he had the chair where he wanted, he pulled a second up to it, then sat on the one and with a grunt swung his leg onto the other. And when he had done all that, he dragged a loose cigarette from the pocket of his tunic and lit it.

"You're our first English, know that? Dutch, Italian, French, German. Swedes. Couple of Americans. Irish. They all come to fight for us. No English. Not till now. The English come too late as usual."

A wave of recognition passed over her. Like Joseph, he spoke from pains she had not experienced, from a viewpoint she had yet to learn. He was not old, but he had a wisdom that had been acquired too early. Her face was close to the little lamp. Perhaps that was why he had put her there. Captain Tayeh is a very clever man.

"If you want to change the world, forget it," he remarked. "The English did that already. Stay home. Act your little parts. Improve your mind in a vacuum. It's safer."

"Not now it isn't," she said.

"Oh, you could go back." He drank some whisky. "Confess. Reform. A year in prison. Everyone should spend a year in prison. Why kill yourself fighting for us?"

"For him," she said.

With his cigarette, Tayeh irritably waved away her romanticism. "Tell me what's for him? He's dead. In a year or two, we shall all be dead. What's for him?"

"Everything. He taught me."

"Did he tell you what we do-bomb?-shoot?-kill?… Never mind."

For a time the only thing he cared about was his cigarette. He watched it burn, he inhaled from it and scowled at it, then he stubbed it out and lit another. She guessed he did not really like to smoke.

"What could he teach you?" he objected. "A woman like you? He was a little boy. He couldn't teach anybody. He was nothing."

"He was everything," she repeatedly woodenly, and once again felt him lose interest, like someone bored by callow conversation. Then she realised he had heard something ahead of everybody else. He gave a swift order. One of the boys leapt to the door. We run faster for crippled men, she thought. She heard soft voices from outside.

"Did he teach you to hate?" Tayeh suggested, as if nothing had happened.

"He said hate was for Zionists. He said that to fight we must love. He said anti-Semitism was a Christian invention."

She broke off, hearing what Tayeh had heard so long before: a car coming up the hill. He hears like the blind, she thought. It's because of his body.

"You like America?" he enquired.

"No."

"Ever been?"

"No."

"How can you tell you don't like it if you haven't been?" he asked.

But once again the question was rhetorical, a point he was making to himself in the dialogue he was conducting around her. The car was pulling into the forecourt. She heard footsteps and subdued voices, and saw the beams of its headlamps cross the room before they were put out.

"Stay where you are," he ordered.

Two other boys appeared, one carrying a plastic bag, the other a machine gun. They stood still, waiting respectfully for Tayeh to address them. The letters lay between them on the table and, when she remembered how important they had been, their disorder was majestic.

"You are not followed and you are going south," Tayeh said to her. "Finish your vodka and go with the boys. Maybe I believe you, maybe I don't. Maybe it won't matter too much. They have clothes for you."

It was not a car but a grimy white ambulance with green crescents painted on the sides and a lot of red dust over the bonnet, and a tousled boy in dark glasses at the wheel. Two more boys crouched on the torn bunk beds in the back with their machine guns jammed uncomfortably into the narrow space, but Charlie sat up boldly beside the driver, wearing a grey hospital tunic and headscarf. It was not night any more but a cheerful dawn, with a heavy red sun to their left that kept hiding as they wound carefully down the hill. She tried English small talk on the driver but he became angry. She gave a happy "Hi there" to the boys behind, but one was sullen and the other ferocious, so she thought, Fight your own damn revolution, and studied the view. South, he had said. For how long? For what? But there was an ethic about not asking questions, and her pride ' and her instinct of survival required she conform to it.

The first checkpoint came as they entered the city; there were four more before they left it on the coast road south, and at the fourth a dead boy was being loaded into a taxi by two men, while women screamed and beat on the roof. He was on his side with an empty hand pointing downwards, still grasping for something. After the first death there is no other, Charlie recited to herself, thinking of the murdered Michel. The blue sea opened to their right, and once more the landscape became ridiculous. It was as if civil war had broken out along the English seaside. Wrecks of cars and bullet-spattered villas lined the road; in a playing field, two children kicked a football to each other across a shell crater. The little yachting jetties lay smashed and half submerged; even the northbound fruit lorries that nearly ran them off the road had a fugitive desperation.

Again they stopped for a road check. Syrians. But German nurses in Palestinian ambulances were of no interest to anyone. She heard the revving of a motorcycle and glanced incuriously towards it. A dusty Honda, its carrier bags crammed with green bananas. A live chicken dangling by its legs from the handlebar. And, in the saddle, Dimitri listening earnestly to the engine. He wore the half uniform of a Palestinian soldier, and a red kaffiyeh round his neck. Shoved through the khaki epaulette of his shirt, like a girl's favour, was a bold sprig of white heather to say "We're with you," because white heather was the sign she had been looking out for these last four days.

From now on, only the horse knows the way, Joseph had told her; your job is stay in the saddle.

Once again, they made a family and waited.

Their home this time was a small house near Sidon with a concrete verandah that had been split in two by a shell from an Israeli warship, leaving rusted iron rods sticking out like the antennae of a giant insect. The back garden was a tangerine orchard where an old goose pecked at the fallen fruit; the front was a tip of mud and scrap metal that had been a famous emplacement during the last invasion, or the last but five. In the adjacent paddock a wrecked armoured car was shared between a family of yellow chickens and a refugee spaniel with four fat puppies. Beyond the armoured car lay the blue Christian sea of Sidon, with its Crusader fortress stuck out on the waterfront like a perfect sandcastle. From Tayeh's seemingly endless stock of boys, Charlie had acquired two more: Kareem and Yasir. Kareem was plump and clownish, and made a show of regarding his machine gun as a dead weight, puffing and grimacing whenever he was obliged to shoulder it. But when she smiled at him in sympathy he became flustered and hurried away to join Yasir. His ambition was to become an engineer. He was nineteen and had been fighting six years. He spoke English in a whisper, and put "use to" with almost every verb.

"When Palestine will use to be free, I study in Jerusalem," said Kareem. "Meantime"-he tilted his hand and sighed at the awful prospect-"maybe Leningrad, maybe Detroit."

Yes, Kareem agreed politely, he use to have a brother and a sister, but his sister had died in a Zionist air attack on the camp at Nabatiyeh. His brother was moved to Rashidiyeh camp and died in a naval bombardment three days later. He described these losses modestly, as if they ranked low in the general tragedy.

"Palestine is use to be a little cat," he told Charlie mysteriously one morning, as she was standing patiently at her bedroom window in a billowing white nightdress while he held his machine gun at the ready. "She needs much stroking or she use to go wild."

He had seen a bad-looking man in the street, he explained, and had come up to see whether he should kill him.

But Yasir, with his boxer's lowered brow and scorching, furious gaze, could not speak to her at all. He wore a red check shirt and a black lanyard looped over his shoulder to denote Military Intelligence, and when darkness fell, he stood in the garden, watching the sea for Zionist raiders. He was a big Communist, Kareem explained sympathetically, and he was going to destroy colonialism everywhere in the world. Yasir hated Westerners even when they claimed to love Palestine, said Kareem. His mother and all his family had died at Tal al- Zataar.

Of what? Charlie asked.

Of thirst, said Kareem, and explained a small piece of modern history to her: Tal al-Zataar, the hill of thyme, was a refugee camp in Beirut. Tin-roofed huts, often eleven to a room. Thirty thousand Palestinians and poor Lebanese held out there for seventeen months against persistent shelling.

By whom? Charlie asked.

Kareem was puzzled by her question. By the Kata'ib, he said, as if it were obvious. By Fascist Maronite irregulars, assisted by the Syrians and doubtless by the Zionists also. Thousands died, but no one knew how many, he said, because so few remained to miss them. When the attackers came in, they shot most of the survivors. The nurses and doctors were lined up and shot dead too, which was logical, since they had no medicine left, no water, and no patients.

"Were you there?" Charlie asked Kareem.

No, he replied; but Yasir was.

"In the future, do not sunbathe," Tayeh told her when he arrived to collect her the next evening. "This is not the Riviera."

She never saw the boys again. She was entering by degrees exactly that condition which Joseph had predicted. She was being educated to tragedy, and the tragedy absolved her of the need to explain herself. She was a blinkered rider, being conveyed through events and emotions too great for her to encompass, into a land where merely to be present was to be part of a monstrous injustice. She had joined the victims and was finally reconciled to her deceit. As each day passed, the fiction of her pretended allegiance to Michel became more firmly based in fact, while her allegiance to Joseph, if not a fiction, survived only as a secret mark upon her soul.

"Soon we shall all use to be dead," Kareen told her, echoing Tayeh. "The Zionists will genocide us to death, you will use to see."

The old prison was in the centre of town, and it was the place, Tayeh had said cryptically, where the innocent served their life sentences. To reach it, they had to park in the main square and enter a maze of ancient passages open to the sky but hung with plastic-covered slogans, which she at first mistook for washing. It was the evening hour of trading; shops and stalls were full. The street lamps shone deeply into the old marble of the walls, seeming to light them from inside. The noise in the alleys was piecemeal, and sometimes when they turned a corner it stopped, except for their own footsteps clipping and shuffling on the polished Roman paving stones. A hostile man in bowlegged trousers led the way.

"I have explained to the Administrator that you are a Western journalist," Tayeh told her as he hobbled at her side. "His manners towards you are not good, because he does not love those who come here to improve their knowledge of zoology."

The torn moon kept pace with them; the night was very hot. They entered another square and a burst of Arab music greeted them, relayed from improvised loudspeakers on poles. The high gates stood open and gave on to a bright-lit courtyard from which a stone staircase lifted to successive balconies. The music was louder.

"So who are they?" Charlie whispered, still mystified. "What have they done?"

"Nothing. That is their crime. They are the refugees who have taken refuge from the refugee camps," Tayeh replied. "The prison has thick walls and was empty, so we took possession of it to protect them. Greet people solemnly," he added. "Do not smile too readily or they will think you are laughing at their misery."

An old man on a kitchen chair stared blankly at them. Tayeh and the Administrator went forward to greet him. Charlie gazed around. I see this every day. I am a hardnosed Western journalist describing deprivation to those who have everything and are miserable. She was in the centre of a vast stone silo whose ancient walls were lined to the sky with cage doors and wooden balconies. Fresh white paint, covering everything, gave an illusion of hygiene. The cells on the ground floor were arched. Their doors stood open as if for hospitality; the figures inside them appeared at first motionless. Even the children moved with great economy. Clotheslines hung before every cell, and their symmetry suggested the competitive pride of village life. Charlie smelt coffee, open drains, and wash-day. Tayeh and the Administrator returned.

"Allow them to speak to you first," Tayeh advised her, yet again. "Do not be forward to these people, they will not understand. You are observing a species already half extinct."

They climbed a marble staircase. The cells on this floor had solid doors, with peepholes for the jailers. The noise seemed to rise with the heat. A woman passed wearing full peasant costume. The Administrator addressed her and she pointed along the balcony to a hand-drawn sign in Arabic, shaped like a crude arrow. Looking downward into the well, Charlie saw the old man back on his chair, staring into nothing. He has done his day's work, she thought; he has told us "Go upstairs." They reached the arrow, followed its direction, came upon another, and were soon advancing into the very centre of the prison. I'll need string to find my way back, she thought. She glanced at Tayeh, but he did not want to look at her. In future don't sunbathe. They entered a former staff room or canteen. At the centre stood a plastic-covered examination table and, on a new trolley, medicines, swab buckets, and syringes. A man and a woman were ministering; the woman, dressed in black, was swabbing a baby's eyes with cotton wool. The waiting mothers sat patiently along the wall while their babies dozed or fretted.

"Stand here." Tayeh ordered, and this time went forward himself, leaving Charlie with the Administrator. But the woman had already seen him enter; her eyes lifted to him, then to Charlie, and remained on her, full of meaning and question. She said something to the child's mother and handed back the baby. She went to the handbasin and methodically washed her hands while she studied Charlie in the mirror.

"Follow us," Tayeh said.

Every prison has one: a small bright room with plastic flowers and a photograph of Switzerland, where blameless people can be entertained. The Administrator had departed. Tayeh and the girl sat either side of Charlie, the girl as straight as a nun, and Tayeh on the slope, with one leg stuck stiffly to one side of him and the stick like a tentpole down the centre of him, and the sweat running over his cratered face while he smoked and fidgeted and frowned. The sounds from the prison had not ceased, but had joined together in a single jangle, partly of music, partly of human voices. Sometimes, amazingly, Charlie heard laughter. The girl was beautiful and stern, and a little awesome in her blackness, with straight strong features and a dark, direct gaze that had no interest in dissembling. She had cut her hair short. The door stood open. The usual two boys guarded it.

"You know who she is?" Tayeh enquired, already stubbing out his first cigarette. "You recognise something familiar in the face? Look hard."

Charlie did not need to. "Fatmeh," she said.

"She has returned to Sidon to be among her people. She speaks no English, but she knows who you are. She has read your letters to Michel, also his letters to you. Translated. She is interested in you, naturally."

Shifting painfully in his chair, Tayeh fished out a sweat-smeared cigarette and lit it.

"She is in grief, but so are we all. When you speak to her, please do not sentimentalise. She has lost three brothers and a sister already. She knows how it is done."

Very calmly, Fatmeh began speaking. When she stopped, Tayeh interpreted-with contempt, which was his manner tonight.

"She wishes first to thank you for the great comfort you gave to her brother Salim while he was fighting Zionism, also that you yourself have joined the struggle for justice." He waited as Fatmeh resumed. "She says, now you are sisters. Both loved Michel, both are proud of his heroic death. She asks you- Again he paused to let her speak. "She asks you, will you also accept death rather than become the slave of imperialism? She is very political. Tell her yes."

"Yes."

"She wishes to hear about how Michel spoke of his family and of Palestine. Don't fabricate. She has a good instinct."

Tayeh's manner was no longer careless. Clambering to his feet, he began a slow tour of the room, now interpreting, now throwing in his own subsidiary questions.

Charlie spoke directly ahead of her, from the heart, from her wounded memory. She was an impostor to nobody, not even to herself. At first, she said, Michel would not speak of his brothers at all; and only once, in passing, of his beloved Fatmeh. Then one day-it was in Greece-he started with great love to reminisce about them, remarking that since his mother's death, his sister Fatmeh had made herself the mother of all the family.

Tayeh brusquely translated. The girl made no response, but her eyes were all the time on Charlie's face, watching it, listening to it, questioning it.

"What did he say about them-the brothers," Tayeh ordered impatiently. "Repeat it to her."

"He said that all through his childhood, his elder brothers were his shining inspiration. In Jordan, in their first camp, when he was still too young to fight, the brothers would slip away without saying where they were going. Then Fatmeh would come to his bed and whisper to him that they had made another attack against the Zionists-"

Tayeh interrupted with a swift translation.

Fatmeh's questions lost their nostalgic note and acquired the harshness of examination. What had her brothers studied? What were their skills and aptitudes, how had they died? Charlie answered where she could, piecemeal: Salim-Michel-had not told her everything. Fawaz was a great lawyer, or had meant to be. He had been in love with a student in Amman-she was his childhood sweetheart from their village in Palestine. The Zionists shot him down as he came out of her house early one morning. "According to Fatmeh-" she began.

"What according to Fatmeh?" Tayeh demanded.

"According to Fatmeh, the Jordanians had betrayed her address to the Zionists."

Fatmeh was putting a question. Angrily. Tayeh again translated:

"In one of his letters, Michel mentions his pride at sharing torture with his great brother," Tayeh said. "He writes regarding this incident that his sister Fatmeh is the only woman on earth, other than you, whom he can love completely. Explain this to Fatmeh, please. Which brother does he mean?"

"Khalil," said Charlie.

"Describe the whole incident," Tayeh ordered.

"It was in Jordan."

"Where? How? Describe exactly."

"It was evening. A convoy of Jordanian jeeps came into the camp, six of them. They grabbed Khalil and Michel- Salim-and ordered Michel to go and cut some branches from a pomegranate tree"-she held out her hands, just as Michel had done that night in Delphi-"six young branches, one metre each. They made Khalil take his shoes off and Salim kneel down and hold Khalil's feet while they beat them with the pomegranate branches. Then they had to change over. Khalil holds Salim. Their feet aren't feet any more, they're unrecognisable. But the Jordanians make them run all the same, by shooting behind them into the ground."

"So?" said Tayeh impatiently.

"So what?"

"So why is Fatmeh so important in this matter?"

"She nursed them. Day and night, bathing their feet. She gave them courage. Read to them from the great Arab writers. Made them plan new attacks. 'Fatmeh is our heart,' he said. 'She is our Palestine. I must learn from her courage and her strength.' He said that."

"He even wrote it, the fool," said Tayeh, hanging his walking stick over the back of a chair with an angry clank. He lit himself another cigarette.

Staring stiffly towards the blank wall as if there were a mirror on it, leaning backward on his ash stick, Tayeh was drying off his face with a handkerchief. Fatmeh rose and went silently to the basin and fetched a glass of water for him. From his pocket, Tayeh pulled a flat half-bottle of Scotch and poured some in. Not for the first time it occurred to Charlie that they knew each other very well, in the manner of close colleagues, even lovers. They talked together a moment; then Fatmeh turned and faced her again, while Tayeh put her last question.

"What is this in his letter: 'The plan we agreed over the grave of my father'-explain this also. What plan?"

She started to describe the manner of his death, but Tayeh impatiently cut her short.

"We know how he died. He died of despair. Tell us about the funeral."

"He asked to be buried in Hebron-in El Khalil-so they took him to the Allenby Bridge. The Zionists wouldn't let him cross. So Michel and Fatmeh and two friends carried the coffin up a high hill, and when evening came they dug a grave at a place where he could look down into the land the Zionists stole from him."

"Where is Khalil while they are doing this?"

"Absent. He's been away for years. Out of touch. Fighting. But that night, while they were filling in the grave, he suddenly showed up."

"And?"

"He helped fill in the grave. Then he told Michel to come and fight."

"Come and fight?" Tayeh repeated.

"He said it was time to attack the Jewish entity. Everywhere. There was to be no distinction any more between Jew and Israeli. He said the whole Jewish race was a Zionist power base and that the Zionists would never rest until they had destroyed our people. Our only chance was to lift the world up by the ears and make it listen. Again and again. If innocent life was to be wasted, why should it always be Palestinian? The Palestinians were not going to imitate the Jews and wait two thousand years to get back their homeland."

"So what was the plan?" Tayeh insisted, unimpressed.

"Michel should come to Europe. Khalil would arrange it. Become a student, but also a fighter."

Fatmeh spoke. Not for very long.

"She says her small brother had a big mouth, and that God was wise to close it when he did," said Tayeh and, beckoning to the boys, he limped quickly ahead of her down the stairs. But Fatmeh put a hand on Charlie's arm and held her back, then yet again stared at her with a frank but friendly curiosity. Side by side, the two women returned along the corridor. At the door to the clinic, Fatmeh again stared at her, this time with undisguised bewilderment. Then she kissed Charlie on the cheek. The last Charlie saw of her, she had recovered the baby and was once more swabbing its eyes, and if Tayeh hadn't been calling to her to make haste, she would have stayed and helped Fatmeh for the rest of her life.

"You must wait," Tayeh told her as he drove her up to the camp. "We were not expecting you, after all. We did not invite you."

She thought at first sight that he had brought her to a village, for the terraces of white huts that clambered down the hillside looked quite attractive enough in the headlights. But as the drive continued, the scale of the place began to reveal itself, and by the time they had reached the hilltop, she was in a makeshift town built for thousands, not hundreds. A grizzled, dignified man received them, but it was Tayeh on whom he lavished his warmth. He wore polished black shoes and a khaki uniform pressed into razor-sharp creases, and she guessed he had put on his best clothes for Tayeh's coming.

"He is our headman here," Tayeh said simply, introducing him. "He knows you are English, otherwise nothing. He will not ask."

They followed him to a sparse room lined with sporting cups in glass cases. On a coffee table at the centre lay a plate piled high with packets of cigarettes of different brands. A' very tall young woman brought sweet tea and cakes, but no one spoke to her. She wore a headscarf, a traditional full skirt, and flat shoes. Wife? Sister? Charlie could not make her out. She had bruises of grief beneath her eyes and seemed to move in a realm of private sadness. When she had gone, the headman fixed Charlie with a ferocious stare and delivered a sombre speech with a distinct Scottish accent. He explained without smiling that during the Mandate years he had served in the Palestinian police, and still drew a British pension. The spirit of his people, he said, had been greatly strengthened by its suffering. He supplied statistics. In the last twelve years, the camp had been bombed seven hundred times. He gave the casualty figures and dwelt upon the proportion of dead women and children. The most effective weapons were American-built cluster bombs; the Zionists also dropped booby traps disguised as children's toys. He gave an order and a boy disappeared and returned with a battered toy racing-car. He lifted off the casing and revealed wiring and explosive inside. Maybe, thought Charlie. Maybe not. He referred to the variety of political theory among Palestinians, but earnestly assured her that, in the fight against Zionism, such distinctions disappeared.

"They bomb us all," he said.

He addressed her as "Comrade Leila," which was how Tayeh had announced her, and when he had finished, he declared her welcome and handed her gratefully to the tall sad woman.

"For justice," he said, by way of good night.

"For justice," Charlie replied.

Tayeh watched her go.

The narrow streets had a candlelit darkness. Open drains ran down the centre; a three-quarter moon drifted above the hills. The tall girl led the way; the boys followed with machine guns and Charlie's shoulder bag. They passed a mud playing-field and low huts that could have been a school. Charlie remembered Michel's football, and wondered too late whether he had won any silver cups for the headman's shelves. Pale blue lights burned over the rusted doors of the air-raid shelters. The noise was the night noise of exiles. Rock and patriotic music mingled with the timeless murmur of old men. Somewhere a young couple was feuding. Their voices welled into an explosion of pent-up fury.

"My father apologises for the sparseness of the accommodation. It is a rule of the camp that buildings should not be permanent, lest we forget where our true home is. If there is an air raid, please do not wait for the sirens, but follow the direction in which everybody is running. After a raid, please be sure to touch nothing that is lying on the ground. Pens, bottles, radios-nothing. "

Her name was Salma, she said with her sad smile, and her father was the headman.

Charlie allowed herself to be ushered forward. The hut was tiny, and clean as a hospital ward. It had a handbasin and a lavatory and a rear courtyard the size of a pocket handkerchief.

"What do you do here, Salma?"

The question seemed momentarily to puzzle her. To be here was already an occupation.

"So where did you learn your English?" Charlie said.

In America, Salma replied; she was a graduate in biochemistry from the University of Minnesota.

There is a terrible, yet pastoral peace that comes from living for a long time among the world's real victims. In the-camp, Charlie experienced at last the sympathy that life till now had denied her. Waiting, she joined the ranks of those who had waited all their lives. Sharing their captivity, she dreamed that she had extricated herself from her own. Loving them, she imagined that she was receiving their forgiveness for the many duplicities that had brought her here. No sentries were assigned to her, and on her first morning, as soon as she woke, she set to work cautiously probing the limits of her freedom. There seemed to be none. She walked the perimeter of the playing fields and watched small boys with hunched shoulders straining bitterly to achieve the physique of manhood. She found the clinic and the schools and the tiny shops that sold everything from oranges to family-size bottles of Head and Shoulders shampoo. In the clinic, an old Swedish woman talked to her contentedly about God's will.

"The poor Jews cannot rest while they have us on their consciences," she explained dreamily. "God has been so hard on them. Why can't he teach them how to love?"

At midday Salma brought her a flat cheese pie and a pot of tea, and when they had lunched in her hut they climbed together through an orange grove to a hilltop very like the spot where Michel had taught her to shoot his brother's gun. A range of brown mountains stretched along the western and southern horizons.

"Those to the east are Syria," said Salma, pointing across the valley. "But those"-she moved her arm southward then let it fall in a sudden gesture of despair-"those are ours, and that is where the Zionists will come from to kill us."

On the way down, Charlie glimpsed army trucks parked under camouflage netting and, in a coppice of cedar trees, the dull glint of gun barrels pointed south. Her father came from Haifa, all of forty miles away, Salma said. Her mother was dead, machine-gunned by an Israeli fighter plane as she left the shelter. She had a brother who was a successful banker in Kuwait. No, she said with a smile, in answer to the obvious question; men found her too tall, and too intelligent.

In the evening Salma took Charlie to a children's concert. Afterwards they went to a schoolroom and, with twenty other women, glued lurid patches to children's tee-shirts for the great demonstration, using a machine like a big green waffle-iron that kept fusing. Some of the patches were slogans in Arabic, promising the total victory; some were photographs of Yasir Arafat, whom the women called Abu Ammar. Charlie stayed up most of the night with them and became their champion. Two thousand shirts, the right sizes, all done in time, thanks to Comrade Leila.

Soon her hut was full of children from dawn to dusk, some to speak English with her, some to teach her to dance and sing their songs. And some to hold her hand and march up and down the street with her, for the prestige of being in her company. As to their mothers, they brought her so many sugar biscuits and cheese pies that she could have held out here for ever, which was what she wanted to do.

So who is she? Charlie wondered, addressing her imagination to yet another unfinished short story, as she watched Salma make her sad and private way among her people. It was only gradually that an explanation began to suggest itself. Salma had been out in the world. She knew how Western people talked of Palestine. And she had seen more clearly than her father just how far away were the brown mountains of their homeland.

The great demonstration took place three days later, starting on the playing field in the middle of the morning heat and progressing slowly round the camp, through streets overflowing with crowds and emblazoned with hand-embroidered banners that would have been the pride of any English Women's Institute. Charlie was standing on the doorstep of her hut holding up a little girl who was too young to march, and the air attack began a couple of minutes after the model of Jerusalem had been carried past her shoulder-high by half a dozen kids. First came Jerusalem, represented-Salma explained-by the Mosque of Omar done in gold paper and sea shells. Then came the children of the martyrs, each holding an olive branch and wearing an all-night tee-shirt. Then, like a continuation of the festivities, came the jolly little tattoo of cannon fire from the hillside. But no one screamed or started to move away. Not yet. Salma, who was standing beside her, did not even lift her head.

Until then, Charlie had not really thought about aircraft at all. She had noticed a couple, high up, and admired their white plumes as they lazily circled the blue sky. But it had not occurred to her, in her ignorance, that the Palestinians might possess no planes, or that the Israeli Air Force might take exception to fervent claims to their territory made within walking distance of their border. She had been more interested in the uniformed girls dancing to each other on the tractor-drawn floats, tossing their machine guns back and forth to the rhythm of the crowd's handclap; in the fighting boys with strips of red kaffiyeh bound Apache-style round their foreheads, posing on the backs of lorries with their machine guns; in the unflagging ululation of so many voices from one end of the camp to the other-did they never get hoarse?

Also, at the precise moment, her eye had been drawn to a small side-show directly in front of where she and Salma stood-a child being chastened by a guard. The guard had taken off his belt and folded it, and was slapping the child across the face with the loop, and for a second, while she was still considering whether to intervene, Charlie had the illusion, amid so much conflicting din around her, that the belt was causing the explosions.

Then came the whine of aircraft turning under strain, and a lot more fire from the ground, though surely it was too light and small to impress something so fast and high up. The first bomb, when it struck, was almost an anti-climax: if you hear it, you're still alive. She saw its flash a quarter of a mile away on the hillside, then a black onion of smoke as the noise and blast swept over her at the same time. She turned to Salma and shouted something at her, raising her voice as if a storm were blowing, though everything by then was surprisingly quiet; but Salma's face was fixed in a stare of hatred as she looked into the sky.

"When they want to hit us, they hit us," she said. "Today they are playing with us. You must have brought us luck."

The significance of this suggestion was too much for Charlie, and she rejected it outright.

The second bomb fell and it seemed farther away, or perhaps she was less impressionable: it could fall anywhere it liked except in these packed alleys, with their columns of patient children waiting like tiny, doomed sentries for the lava to roll down the mountain. The band struck up, much louder than before; the procession started, twice as brilliant. The band was playing a marching song and the crowd was clapping to it. Unfreezing her hands, Charlie set down her little girl and started to clap too. Her hands stung and her shoulders ached, but she went on clapping. The procession drew to the side; a jeep raced by, lights flashing, followed by ambulances and a fire engine. A pall of yellow dust hung behind them like battle smoke. The breeze dispersed it, the band resumed, and now it was the turn of the fishermen's union, represented by a sedate yellow van decked in pictures of Arafat, with a giant paper fish, painted red, white, and black, on its roof. After it, led by a band of pipers, came yet another river of children with wooden guns, singing the words to the march. The singing swelled, the whole crowd was taking part in it, and Charlie, words or none, was singing her heart out.

The planes disappeared. Palestine had won another victory.

"They are taking you to another place tomorrow," Salma said that evening as they walked on the hillside.

"I'm not going," said Charlie.

The planes returned two hours later, just before dark, when she was back in her hut. The siren started too late and she was still running for the shelters as the first wave came in-two of them, straight out of an air display, deafening the crowd with their engines-will they ever pull out of the dive? They did, and the blast of their first bomb threw her against the steel door, though the noise was not as bad as the earthquake that accompanied it, and the hysterical swimming-pool screams that filled the black, rank smoke on the other side of the playing field. The thud of her body alerted someone inside, the door opened, and strong women's hands pulled her into the darkness and forced her onto a wooden bench. At first she was stone deaf, but gradually she heard the whimpering of terrified children, and the steadier but fervent voices of their mothers. Someone lit an oil lamp and fixed it to a hook at the centre of the ceiling, and for a while it seemed to Charlie in her giddiness that she was living inside a Hogarth print that had been hung the wrong way up. Then she realised Salma was beside her, and she remembered she had been with her ever since the alarm had sounded. Another pair of planes followed-or was it the first pair making a second run?-the oil lamp swung, and her vision righted itself as a stick of bombs approached in careful crescendo. She felt the first two like blows on her body-no, not again, not again, oh please. The third was the loudest and killed her outright, the fourth and fifth told her she was alive after all.

"America!" a woman shouted suddenly, in hysteria and pain, straight at Charlie. "America, America, America!" She tried to get the other women to accuse her also, but Salma told her gently to be quiet.

Charlie waited an hour, but it was probably two minutes, and when still nothing happened she looked at Salma to say "Let's go," because she had decided that the shelter was worse than anywhere. Salma shook her head.

"They are waiting for us to come out," she explained quietly, perhaps thinking of her mother. "We cannot come out before dark."

The dark came and Charlie returned alone to her hut. She lit a candle because the electricity was off, and the last thing she saw in the whole room was the sprig of white heather in the tooth mug above her handbasin. She studied the kitschy little painting of the Palestinian child; she stepped into the courtyard where her clothes still hung on the line-hooray, they're dry. She had no means of ironing, so she opened a drawer of her tiny clapboard chest and folded the clothes into it with a camp dweller's concentration upon neatness. One of my kids put it there, she told herself gaily when the white heather once more forced itself upon her vision. The jolly one with gold teeth I call Aladdin. It's a present from Salma on my last night. How sweet of her. Of him.

"We are a love-affair," Salma had said as they parted. "You'll go, and when you've gone, we'll be a dream."

You bastards, she thought. You rotten, killing Zionist bastards. If I hadn't been here, you'd have bombed them to Kingdom Come.

"The only loyalty is to be here" Salma had said.