The Little Drummer Girl

twenty-three

It was the end of the line. It was the worst place of all her lives this far, a place to forget even while she was there, her bloody boarding school with rapists added, a forum stuck out in the desert and played with live ammunition. The battered dream of Palestine lay five hours' back-breaking drive behind the hills, and in place of it they had this tatty little fort, like a film set for a Beau Geste remake, with yellow stone battlements and a stone staircase and half its side bombed out, and a sandbagged main gate with a flagpole on it that slapped its frayed ropes in the scalding wind and never flew a flag. No one slept in the fort that she knew of. The fort was for administration and interviews; and lamb and rice three times a day; and the turgid group discussions till after midnight at which the East Germans harangued the West Germans and the Cubans harangued everybody, and an American zombie who called himself Abdul read a twenty-page paper on the immediate achievement of world peace.

Their other social centre was the small-arms range, which was not a disused quarry on a hilltop, but an old barrack hut with the windows blocked and a line of electric light-bulbs rigged from the steel beams, and leaking sandbags round the walls. The targets were not oil cans either, but brutish man-sized effigies of American marines, with painted grimaces and fixed bayonets and rolls of sticky brown paper at their feet to patch up their bullet-holes after you had shot them. It was a place constantly in demand, often at dead of night, full of boisterous laughter and groans of competitive disappointment. One day a great fighter came, some kind of terrorist V.I.P. in a chauffeur-driven Volvo, and the place was cleared while he shot in it. Another day a bunch of very wild blacks burst in on Charlie's class, and loosed off magazine after magazine without paying the smallest attention to the young East German in command.

"That satisfy you, whitey?" one of them bellowed over his shoulder, in a rich South African accent.

"Please-oh yes-very good," said the East German, very thrown by their discrimination.

They swaggered away, laughing their heads off, leaving the marines holed like colanders, with the result that the girls' first hour of that day was spent patching them from head to toe.

For living quarters, they had the three long huts, one with cubicles for women; one without cubicles for men; and a third with a so-called library for the training staff-and if they invite you to the library, said a tall Swedish girl called Fatima, don't expect too much in the way of reading. To wake them in the morning, they had a belch of martial music over a loudspeaker they couldn't turn off, followed by physical exercises on a sand flat smeared with lines of sticky dew like gigantic snail tracks.

But Fatima said the other places were worse. Fatima, to believe her version of herself, was a training freak. She had been trained in the Yemen, and in Libya, and in Kiev. She was playing the circuit like a tennis pro until somebody decided what to do with her. She had a three-year-old son, called Knut, who ran around naked and looked lonely, but when Charlie talked to him he cried.

Their guards were a new kind of Arab she hadn't met till now and didn't need to meet again: strutting, near-silent cowboys whose game was humiliating Westerners. They postured on the perimeters of the fort and rode six up in jeeps at breakneck speed. Fatima said they were a special militia raised on the Syrian border. Some were so young Charlie wondered their feet could reach the pedals. At night, till Charlie and a Japanese girl raised hell, the same kids arrived in raiding parties of twos and threes and tried to persuade the girls to take a ride into the desert. Fatima usually went, so did an East German, and they came back looking impressed. But the rest of the girls, if they bothered, played safe with Western instructors, which made the Arab boys even crazier.

All the trainers were men, and for morning prayers they ranged themselves before the comrade students like a rabble army while one of them read an aggressive condemnation of the day's arch-enemy: Zionism, Egyptian treachery, European capitalist exploitation, Zionism again, and a new one to Charlie called Christian expansionism-but perhaps that was because it was Christmas Day, a feast celebrated by determined official neglect. The East Germans were cropped and sullen and pretended that women bored them; the Cubans were by turns flamboyant, homesick, and arrogant, and most of them stank and had rotting teeth, except for gentle Fidel, who was everybody's favourite. The Arabs were the most volatile and acted toughest, screaming at the stragglers and, more than once, spraying bullets at the feet of the supposedly inattentive, so that one of the Irish boys bit clean through his finger in a panic, to the great amusement of Abdul the American who was watching from a distance, which he often did, smirking and slopping after them like a stills man on a film set, taking notes on a pad for his great revolutionary novel.

But the star of the place during those first insane days was a bomb-crazed Czech called Bubi, who on their first morning shot his own combat hat along the sand, first with a Kalashnikov, then with a massive.45 target pistol, and lastly, to finish the brute off, with a Russian grenade, which blew it fifty feet in the air.

Lingua franca for political discussion was O-level English with a bit of French here and there, and if Charlie ever got home alive she swore in her secret heart that she would dine out on those cretinous midnight exchanges concerning the "Dawn of the Revolution" for the rest of her unnatural life. Meanwhile, she laughed at nothing. She had not laughed since the bastards blew up her lover on the road to Munich; and her recent vision of the agony of his people had only intensified her bitter need for retribution.

You will treat everything with a great and lonely seriousness, Joseph had told her, himself as lonely and serious as he could wish her. You will be aloof, maybe a little crazy, they are used to that. You will ask no questions, you will be private to yourself, day and night.

Their numbers vacillated from the first day. When their lorry left Tyre, their party was five boys and three girls and conversation was forbidden by order of two guards with cordite smears on their faces who rode with them in the back while their lorry bucked and slithered over the stony hill trail. A girl who turned out to be Basque managed to whisper to her that they were in Aden; two Turkish boys said they were in Cyprus. They arrived to find ten other students waiting, but by the second day the two Turks and the Basque had vanished, presumably at night when lorries could be heard arriving and leaving without lights.

For their inauguration they were required to swear an oath of loyalty to the Anti-Imperialist Revolution and to study the "Rules for This Camp," which were set out like the Ten Commandments on a flat space of white wall in the Comrades' Reception Centre. All comrades to use their Arab names at all times, no drugs, no nudity, no swearing by God, no private conversations, no alcohol, no cohabitation, no masturbation. While Charlie was still wondering which of these injunctions to break first, a recorded address of welcome, no credits, was played over the loudspeaker.

"My comrades. Who are we? We are the ones with no name, no uniform. We are the escaped rats from the capitalist occupation. From the pain-ridden camps of the Lebanon-we come! And shall fight the genocide! From the concrete tombs of Western cities-we come! And find each other! And together we shall light the torch on behalf of eight hundred million starving mouths across the world!"

But when it was over, she felt a cold sweat on her back and a pounding anger in her breast. We shall, she thought. We shall, we shall. Glancing at an Arab girl beside her, she saw the same fervour in her eye.

Day and night, Joseph had said.

Day and night, therefore, she strove-for Michel, for her own mad sanity, for Palestine, for Fatmeh and for Salma and the bombed children in the Sidon prison; driving herself outward in order to escape the chaos inside; gathering together the elements of her second character as never before, welding them into a single combative identity.

I am a grieving, outraged widow and I have come here to take up my dead lover's fight.

I am the awakened militant who has wasted too long on half measures and now stands before you sword in hand.

I have put my hand on the Palestinian heart; I am pledged to lift the world up by its ears to make it listen.

I am on fire but I am cunning and resourceful. I am the sleepy wasp that can wait all winter long to sting.

I'm Comrade Leila, a citizen of the world revolution.

Day and night.

She played this part to its limit, from the angry snap with which she performed her unarmed combat to the unyielding glower with which she regarded her own face in the mirror as she savagely brushed out her long black hair with its red roots already showing. Until what had begun as an effort of will became a habit of mind and body, a sickly, permanent, solitary anger that quickly communicated itself to her audience, whether staff or students. Almost from the first, they accepted the certain strangeness in her, which gave her distance. Perhaps they had seen it in others before her; Joseph said they had. The cold-eyed passion she brought to the weapon training sessions-which extended from hand-held Russian rocket launchers through bomb-making with red circuit wire and detonators to the inevitable Kalashnikov-impressed even the ebullient Bubi. She was dedicated, but she was apart. Gradually she felt them defer to her. The men, even the Syrian militia, ceased to proposition her indiscriminately; the women gave up their suspicion of her striking looks; the weaker comrades started timidly to gather to her, and the strong to acknowledge her as an equal.

There were three beds in her dormitory but to begin with she had only one companion-a tiny Japanese girl who spent much time kneeling in prayer, but to fellow mortals spoke no word of any language but her own. Asleep, she ground her teeth so loudly that one night Charlie woke her up, then sat beside her, holding her hand while she wept silent Asian tears till the music belched and it was time to get her up. Soon afterwards, without explanation, she too vanished, to be replaced by two Algerian sisters, who smoked rancid cigarettes and seemed to know as much about guns and bombs as Bubi did. They were plain girls to Charlie's eye, but the training staff held them in veneration for some unexplained feat of arms against the oppressor. In the mornings they were to be seen wandering sleepily out of the training staff's quarters in their woollen jump-suits as the less favoured were finishing their unarmed combat. Thus Charlie for a while had the dormitory to herself, and though Fidel, the gentle Cuban, appeared one night, scrubbed and brushed like a chorister, to press his revolutionary love for her, she maintained her pose of stiff-jawed self-denial and granted him not so much as a kiss before sending him on his way.

The next to apply for her favours after Fidel was Abdul the American. He called on her late one night, knocking so softly that she expected to see one of the Algerian girls, since both regularly forgot their keys. By now, Charlie had decided that Abdul was a permanency of the camp. He was too close to the staff, he had too much licence, and no function but to read his dreary papers and quote Marighella in a rambling Deep South accent, which Charlie suspected was put on. Fidel, who admired him, said he was a Vietnam deserter who hated imperialism and had come here by way of Havana.

"Hi," said Abdul, and slipped past her, grinning, before she had a chance to slam the door on him. He sat on the bed and started to roll himself a cigarette.

"Blow," she said. "Scram."

"Sure," he agreed, and went on rolling his cigarette. He was tall and balding and, seen at close quarters, very thin. He wore Cuban fatigues and a silky brown beard that seemed to have run out of hair.

"What's your real name, Leila?" he asked.

"Smith."

"I like it. Smith." He repeated the name several times in different keys. "You Irish, Smith?" He lit the cigarette and offered her a pull. She ignored it. "I hear you are the personal property of Mr. Tayeh. I admire your taste. Tayeh's a very picky guy. What d'you do for a living, Smith?"

She strode to the door and pulled it open, but he stayed on the bed, grinning at her in a weakly, knowing way through his cigarette smoke.

"You don't want to screw?" he enquired. "Pity. These Frauleins are like Barnum's baby elephants. Thought we might raise the standard a little. Demonstrate the Special Relationship."

Languidly he got up, dropped his cigarette at her bedside, and ground it with his boot.

"You don't have a little hash for a poor man, do you, Smith?"

"Out," she said.

Passively acceding to her judgment, he shuffled towards her, then stopped and lifted his head, and stayed still; and to her embarrassment she saw that his exhausted, characterless eyes were filled with tears, and there were lumps of childish supplication round his jaw.

"Tayeh won't let me jump off the merry-go-round," he complained. His Deep South had given way to East Coast ordinary. "He fears my ideological batteries have run low. And rightly, I'm afraid. I kind of forgot the reasoning about how every dead baby is a step towards world peace. Which is a drag, when you happen to have killed a few. Tayeh is being very sporting about it. Tayeh's a sporting man. 'If you want to go, go,' he says. Then he points at the desert. Sportingly."

Like a puzzled beggar, he took her right hand in both of his and stared into the empty palm. "My name is Halloran," he explained, as if he himself had trouble remembering it. "For Abdul, read Arthur J. Halloran. And if you are ever passing a U.S. Embassy someplace, Smith, I'd be awfully grateful if you'd drop a note in to say that Arthur Halloran, formerly of Boston and the Vietnam show, latterly of less official armies, would like to hurry home and pay his debt to society before those crazy Maccabees come over the hill and zap the lot of us. Will you do that for me, Smith, old girl? I mean when the chips are down, us Anglos are a cut above the field, don't you think?"

She could barely move. An irresistible drowsiness had come over her like the first feelings of cold in a very wounded body. She wanted only to sleep. With Halloran. To give him the comfort he asked and extract it in return. Never mind if in the morning he would inform on her. Let him. All she knew was she could not face, for one more night, this hellish empty cell.

He was still holding her hand. She let him, hovering like a suicide on the window-ledge who stares longingly into the street far below. Then, with a huge effort, she freed herself, and with both hands together shoved his unresisting, emaciated body into the corridor.

She sat on her bed. It was the same night, definitely. She could smell his cigarette. See the stub of it at her feet.

If you want to go, go, said Tayeh. Then he pointed at the desert. Tayeh is a very sporting man.

There is no fear like it, Joseph had said. Your courage will be like money. You will spend and spend, and one night you will look in your pockets and you'll be bankrupt and that is when the real courage begins.

There is only one logic, Joseph had said: you. There can be only one survivor: you. One person you can trust: you.

She stood at the window, worrying about the sand. She had not realised sand could climb so high. By day, tamed by the scalding sun, it lay docile, but when the moon shone, as now, it swelled into restive cones that dodged from one horizon to another, so that she knew it was only a matter of time before she heard it spilling through the windows, stifling her in her sleep.

Her interrogation began next morning and lasted, she reckoned afterwards, one day and two half nights. It was a wild, unreasoning process, depending on whose turn it was to scream at her and whether they were challenging her revolutionary commitment or accusing her of being a British or Zionist or American informer. For as long as it lasted, she was excused all tuition, and between sessions, ordered to remain in her hut under house arrest, though no one seemed to bother when she took to wandering around the camp. The shifts were divided between four Arab boys of great fervour working in pairs and barking their prepared questions from pages of handwritten notes, and they got angriest when she failed to understand their English. She was not beaten, though it might have been easier if she had been, for at least she would have known when she was pleasing them and when not. But their rages were quite frightening enough and sometimes they would take turns shouting at her, keeping their faces close to hers, covering her with spit, and leaving her with a sickening migraine. Another trick was to offer her a glass of water, then throw it in her face as she was about to take it. But the next time they met, the boy who had instigated this scene read out a written apology in front of his three colleagues, then left the room in deep humiliation. Another time they threatened to shoot her for her known attachment to Zionism and the British Queen. But when she still refused to confess to these sins, they seemed to lose interest, and told her instead proud stories about their home villages, which they had never seen, and how they had the most beautiful women, and the best olive oil and the best wine in the world. And that was when she knew she had come home to sanity again; and to Michel.

An electric punkah turned on the ceiling; on the walls hung grey curtains partly concealing maps. Through the open window, Charlie could hear the intermittent thud of bombing practice from Bubi's range. Tayeh had taken the sofa, and laid one leg along it. His wounded face looked white and ill. Charlie stood in front of him like a naughty girl, her eyes lowered and her jaw clamped with rage. She had tried to speak once, but Tayeh had upstaged her by fishing his whisky bottle from his pocket and taking a swig from it. With the back of his hand he wiped his mouth each way as if he had a moustache, which he had not. He was more contained than she had known him, and somehow less at ease with her.

"Abdul the American," she said.

"So?"

She had prepared it. In her mind, she had practised it repeatedly: Comrade Leila's high sense of revolutionary duty overcomes her natural reluctance to rat on a fellow soldier. She knew the lines by heart. She knew the bitches at the forum who had spoken them. To deliver them, she kept her face turned away from his and spoke with a harsh, mannish fury.

"His real name is Halloran. Arthur J. Halloran. He's a traitor. He asked me, when I leave, to tell the Americans that he wants to go home and face trial. He frankly admits to harbouring counter-revolutionary beliefs. He could betray us all."

Tayeh's dark gaze had not left her face. He held his ash walking stick in both hands, and was tapping the end of it lightly on the toe of his bad leg, as if to keep it awake.

"Is this why you asked to see me?"

"Yes."

"Halloran came to you three nights ago," he remarked, looking away from her. "Why did you not tell me earlier? Why wait three days?"

"You weren't here."

"Others were. Why did you not ask for me?"

"I was afraid you would punish him."

But Tayeh did not seem to think that Halloran was on trial. "Afraid," he repeated, as if that were a grave admission. "Afraid! Why should you be afraid for Halloran? For three whole days? Do you secretly sympathise with his position?"

"You know I don't."

"Is this why he spoke to you so frankly? Because you gave him reason to trust you? I think so."

"No."

"Did you sleep with him?"

'No."

"So why should you wish to protect Halloran? Why should you fear for the life of a traitor when you are learning to kill for the revolution? Why are you not true to us? You disappoint me."

"I am not experienced. I was sorry for him and I did not wish him harmed. Then I remembered my duty."

Tayeh seemed increasingly confused by the whole conversation. He took another pull of whisky.

"Sit down."

"I don't need to."

"Sit down."

She did as he ordered. She was looking fiercely to one side of him, at some hated spot on her own private horizon. In her mind she had passed the point where he had any right to know her. I have learnt what you sent me here to learn. Blame yourself if you do not understand me.

"In a letter you wrote to Michel, you speak of a child. You have a child? His?"

"I was talking about the gun. We slept with it."

"What type of gun?"

"A Walther. Khalil gave it to him."

Tayeh sighed. "If you were me," he said at last, turning his head away from her, "and you had to deal with Halloran-who asks to go home, but who knows too much-what would you do with him?"

"Neutralise him."

"Shoot him?"

"That's your business."

"Yes. It is." He was considering his bad leg once more, holding his walking stick above it and parallel to it. "But why execute a man who is already dead? Why not let him work for us?"

"Because he's a traitor."

Once again, Tayeh seemed wilfully to misunderstand the logic of her position.

"Halloran approaches many people in this camp. Always with a reason. He is our vulture, showing us where there is weakness and disease. Pointing the way to potential traitors. Don't you think we would be silly to get rid of such a useful creature? Did you go to bed with Fidel?"

"No."

"Because he is a dago?"

"Because I didn't want to go to bed with him."

"With the Arab boys?"

"No."

"You are too fastidious, I think."

"I wasn't fastidious with Michel."

With a sigh of perplexity, Tayeh took a third pull of whisky. "Who is Joseph!" he asked, in a mildly querulous tone. "Joseph. Who, please?"

Was the actress in her dead at last? Or was she so reconciled with the theatre of the real that the difference between life and art had disappeared? None of her repertoire occurred to her; she had no sense of selecting her performance. She did not consider falling over her feet and lying still on the stone floor. She was not tempted to embark on a wallowing confession, trading her own life for everything she knew, which she had been told was her final, permissible option. She was angry. She was sick to death of having her integrity dragged out and dusted down and subjected to fresh scrutiny every time she reached another milestone in her march towards Michel's revolution. So she flung straight back at him without thinking-a card flipped off the top of the pack-take it or leave it, and to hell with you.

"I don't know a Joseph."

„"Come. Think. On Mykonos. Before you went to Athens. One of your friends, in casual conversation with an acquaintance of ours, was heard to make a reference to Joseph, who joined your group. He said Charlie was quite captivated by him."

There were no barriers left, no twists. She had cleared them all, and was running free.

"Joseph? Ah, that Joseph!" She let her face register the belated recollection: and as it did so, to cloud in disgust.

"I remember him. He was a greasy little Jew who tagged on to our group."

"Don't talk about Jews like that. We are not anti-Semitic, we are merely anti-Zionist."

"Tell me another," she snapped.

Tayeh was interested. "You are describing me as a liar, Charlie?"

"Whether he was a Zionist or not, he was a creep. He reminded me of my father."

"Was your father a Jew?"

"No. But he was a thief."

Tayeh thought about this for a long time, using first her face, then her whole body as a term of reference for whatever doubts still lingered in his mind. He offered her a cigarette but she didn't take it: her instinct told her to make no step towards him. Once more he tapped his dead foot with his stick. "That night you spent with Michel in Thessalonika-in the old hotel-you remember?"

"What of it?"

"The staff heard raised voices from your room late at night."

"So what's your question?"

"Don't hurry me, please. Who was shouting that night?"

"No one. They were snooping at the wrong bloody door."

"Who was shouting?"

"We weren't shouting. Michel didn't want me to go. That's all. He was afraid for me."

"And you?"

It was a story she had worked up with Joseph: her moment of being stronger than Michel.

"I offered him his bracelet back," she said.

Tayeh nodded. "Which accounts for the postscript in your letter: 'I am so glad I kept the bracelet.' And of course-there was no shouting. You are right. Forgive my simple Arab trick." He took a last searching look at her, trying once more, in vain, to resolve the enigma; then pursed his lips, soldier-like, as Joseph sometimes did, as a prelude to issuing an order.

"We have a mission for you. Get your possessions and return here immediately. Your training is complete."

Leaving was the most unexpected madness of all. It was worse than end of term; worse than dumping the gang at Piraeus harbour. Fidel and Bubi clutched her to their breasts, their tears mixing with her own. One of the Algerian girls gave her a wooden Christ-child as a pendant.

Professor Minkel lived on the saddle that joins Mount Scopus to French Hill, on the eighth floor of a new tower close to the Hebrew University, one of a great cluster on the skyline which have caused pain to Jerusalem's luckless conservationists. Every apartment looked down on the Old City, but the trouble was, the Old City looked up at every apartment too. Like its neighbours, it was a fortress as well as a skyscraper, and the positioning of its windows was determined by the most favourable arcs of fire if an attack were to be riposted. Kurtz made three wrong tries before he found the place. He lost himself first in a shopping centre built in concrete five feet deep, then again in a British cemetery devoted to the fallen of the First World War. "A Free Gift from the People of Palestine," read the engraving. He explored other buildings, mostly the gifts of millionaires from America, and came finally upon this tower of hewn stone. The name signs had been vandalised and so he pressed a bell at random and unearthed an old Pole from Galicia who spoke only Yiddish. The Pole knew which building all right-this one as you see me!-he knew Dr. Minkel and admired him for his stand; he himself had attended the venerated Krakow University. But he also had a lot of questions on his own account, which Kurtz was obliged to answer as best he could; like where did Kurtz come from originally? Well, my heaven, did he know so-and-so? And what was Kurtz's business here, a grown man, eleven in the morning when Dr. Minkel should be instructing future fine philosophers of our people?

The lift engineers were on strike, so Kurtz was obliged to take the staircase, but nothing could have dampened his good spirits. For one thing, his niece had just announced her engagement to a young boy in his own service-though not before time. For another, Elli's Bible conference had passed off happily; she had given a coffee party at the end of it and, to her great contentment, he had managed to be present. But best of all, the Freiburg breakthrough had been followed by several reassuring pointers, of which the most satisfactory was obtained but yesterday, by one of Shimon Litvak's listeners, testing a newfangled directional microphone on a rooftop in Beirut: Freiburg, Freiburg, three times in five pages, a real delight. Sometimes luck treated you that way, Kurtz reflected as he climbed. And luck, as Napoleon and everybody in Jerusalem knew, was what made good generals.

Reaching a small landing, he paused to collect his breath a little, and his thoughts. The staircase was lit like an air-raid shelter, with wire cages over the light-bulbs, but today it was the sounds of his own childhood in the ghettos that Kurtz heard bouncing up and down the gloomy well. I was right not to bring Shimon, he thought. Sometimes Shimon puts a chilly note on things; a surface lightness would improve him.

The door of number 18D had a steel-plated eyehole and locks all down one side of it, and Mrs. Minkel undid them one by one like boot buttons, calling "Just one moment, please," while she got lower and lower. He stepped inside and waited while she patiently replaced them. She was tall and fine-looking, with blue eyes very bright, and grey hair pinned in an academic bun.

"You are Mr. Spielberg from the Ministry of the Interior," she informed him with a certain guardedness as she gave him her hand. "Hansi is expecting you. Welcome. Please."

She opened the door to a tiny study and there her Hansi sat, as weathered and patrician as a Buddenbrook. His desk was too small for him, and had been so for many years; his books and papers lay stacked about him on the floor with an order that could not have been haphazard. The desk stood askew to a window bay, and the bay was half a hexagon, with thin smoked windows like arrow slits, and a bench seat built in. Rising carefully, Minkel picked his way with unworldly dignity across the room until he had reached the one small island that was not claimed by his erudition. His welcome was uneasy and as they sat themselves in the window bay, Mrs. Minkel drew up a stool and sat herself firmly between them, as if intent upon seeing fair play.

An awkward silence followed. Kurtz pulled the regretful smile of a man obliged by his duty. "Mrs. Minkel, I fear there are a couple of things on the security side which my office insists I am to discuss with your husband alone in the first instance," he said. And waited again, still smiling, until the Professor suggested she make a coffee, how did Mr. Spielberg like it?

With a warning glance at her husband from the doorway,

Mrs. Minkel reluctantly withdrew. In reality there could have been little difference between the two men's ages; yet Kurtz was careful to speak up to Minkel because that was what the Professor was accustomed to.

"Professor, I understand that our mutual friend, Ruthie Zadir, spoke to you only yesterday," Kurtz began, with a bedside respectfulness. He could understand this very well, for he had stood over Ruthie while she made the call, and listened to both sides of the conversation in order to get the feel of this man.

"Ruth was one of my best students," the Professor observed, with an air of loss.

"She is surely one of ours too," said Kurtz, more expansively. "Professor, are you aware, please, of the nature of the work in which Ruthie is now engaged?"

Minkel was not really used to answering questions outside his subject, and he required a moment's puzzled thought before replying.

"I feel I should say something," he said, with awkward resolution.

Kurtz smiled hospitably.

"If your visit here concerns the political leaning- sympathies-of present or former students under my charge, I regret that I am unable to collaborate with you. These are not criteria which I can accept as legitimate. We have had this discussion before. I am sorry." He seemed suddenly embarrassed, both by his thoughts and by his Hebrew. "I stand for something here. When we stand for something, we must speak out, but most important is to act. That is what I stand for."

Kurtz, who had read Minkel's file, knew exactly what he stood for. He was a disciple of Martin Buber, and a member of a largely forgotten idealistic group that between the wars of '67 and '73 had championed a real peace with the Palestinians. The rightists called him a traitor; sometimes, when they remembered him these days, so did the leftists. He was an oracle on Jewish philosophy, on early Christianity, on the humanist movements in his native Germany, and on about thirty other subjects as well; he had written a three-volume tome on the theory and practice of Zionism, with an index as long as a telephone directory.

"Professor," said Kurtz, "I am well aware of your posture in these matters and it is surely no intention of mine to seek to interfere in any way with your fine moral stand." He paused, allowing time for his assurance to sink in. "May I take it, by the way, that your forthcoming lecture at the University of Freiburg also touches upon this same issue of individual rights? The Arabs-their basic liberties-isn't that your subject on the twenty-fourth?"

The Professor could not go along with this. He did not deal in careless definitions.

"My subject on that occasion is different. It concerns the self-realisation of Judaism, not by conquest, but by the exemplification of Jewish culture and morality."

"So how does that argument run exactly?" Kurtz asked benignly.

Minkel's wife returned with a tray of homemade cakes. "Is he asking you to inform again?" she demanded. "If he's asking, tell him no. Then when you've said no, say no again, until he hears. What do you think he'll do? Beat you with a rubber truncheon?"

"Mrs. Minkel, I surely am asking your husband no such thing," said Kurtz, quite unperturbed.

With a look of patent disbelief, Mrs. Minkel once more withdrew.

But Minkel barely paused. If he had noticed the interruption at all, he ignored it. Kurtz had asked a question; Minkel, who renounced all barriers to knowledge as unacceptable, proposed to answer it.

"I will tell you exactly how the arguments run, Mr. Spielberg," he replied solemnly. "As long as we have a small Jewish state, we may advance democratically, as Jews, towards our Jewish self-realisation. But once we have a larger state, incorporating many Arabs, we have to choose." With his old mottled hands, he showed Kurtz the choice. "On this side, democracy without Jewish self-realisation. On that side, Jewish self-realisation without democracy."

"And the solution, therefore, Professor?" Kurtz enquired.

Minkel's hands flew in the air in a dismissive gesture of academic impatience. He seemed to have forgotten that Kurtz was not his pupil.

"Simple! Move out of the Gaza and the West Bank before we lose our values! What other solution is there?"

"And how do the Palestinians themselves respond to this proposal, Professor?"

A sadness replaced the Professor's earlier assurance. "They call me a cynic," he said.

"They do?"

"According to them, I want both the Jewish state and world sympathy, so they say I am subversive of their cause." The door opened again, and Mrs. Minkel entered with the coffee pot and cups. "But I am not subversive," the Professor said hopelessly-though he got no further, owing to his wife.

"Subversive?" Mrs. Minkel echoed, slamming down the crockery and colouring purple. "You are calling Hansi subversive? Because we speak our hearts about what is happening to this country?"

Kurtz would not have been able to stop her if he had tried, but in the event he made no effort to. He was content to let her run her course.

"In the Golan, the beatings and the torture? On the West Bank, how they treat them, worse than the S.S. In the Lebanon, in Gaza? Here in Jerusalem, even, slapping the Arab kids around because they are Arabs! And we should be subversive because we dare to talk about oppression, merely because no one is oppressing us-Jews from Germany, subversive in Israel?"

"Aber, Liebchen - " the Professor said, with an embarrassed fluster.

But Mrs. Minkel was clearly a lady who was used to making her point. "We couldn't stop the Nazis, now we can't stop ourselves. We get our own country, what do we do? Forty years later, we invent a new lost tribe. Idiocy! And if we don't say it, the world will. The world says it already. Read the newspapers, Mr. Spielberg!" As if warding off a blow, Kurtz had lifted his forearm until it was between her face and his. But she had not nearly finished. "That Ruthie," she said, with a sneer. "A good brain, studies three years under Hansi here. And what does she do? She joins the apparatus."

Lowering his hand, Kurtz revealed that he was smiling. Not in derision, not in anger, but with the confused pride of a man who truly loved the astonishing diversity of his people. He was calling "Please," he was appealing to the Professor, but Mrs. Minkel still had a wealth to say.

Finally, however, she stopped, and when she had done so, Kurtz asked her whether she too would not sit down and listen to what he had come to talk about. So she perched herself on the stool once more, waiting to be appeased.

Kurtz picked his words very carefully, very kindly. What he had to say was about as secret as a secret could be, he said. Not even Ruthie Zadir-a fine officer, handling many secrets every day-not even Ruthie was aware of it, he said: which was not true, but never mind. He had come not about the Professor's pupils, he said, and least of all to accuse him of being subversive or to quarrel with his fine ideals. He had come solely about the Professor's forthcoming address in Freiburg, which had caught the attention of certain extremely negative elements. Finally he came clean.

"So here's the sad fact," he said, and drew a long breath. "If some of those Palestinians, whose rights you have both been so bravely defending, have their way, you will make no speech at all on the twenty-fourth of this month in Freiburg. In fact, Professor, you will never make a speech again." He paused, but his audience showed no sign of interrupting. "According to information now available to us, it is evident that one of their less academic groups has singled you out as a dangerous moderate, capable of watering the pure wine of their cause. Just as you described to me, sir, but worse. A protagonist of the Bantustan solution for Palestinians. As a false light, leading the weak-brained into one more fatal concession to the Zionist jackboot."

But it took far, far more than the mere threat of death to persuade the Professor to accept an untested version of events.

"Excuse me," he said sharply. "That is the very description of myself which appeared in the Palestinian press after my speech at Beer Sheva."

"Professor, that is precisely where we got it from," said Kurtz.