The Little Drummer Girl

twenty-five

Once more, he was beautiful. He was Michel full-grown, with Joseph's abstinence and grace and Tayeh's unbothered absolutism. He was everything she had imagined when she was trying to turn him into somebody she was looking forward to. He was broad-shouldered and sculptured, with the rarity of a precious object kept from sight. He could not have walked into a restaurant without the talk dying round him, or walked out of it without leaving a kind of relief in his wake. He was a man of the outdoors condemned to hiding in small rooms, with the pallor of the dungeon in his complexion. He had drawn the curtains and put on the bedside light. There was no chair for her and he was using the bed as a carpenter's bench. He had tossed the pillows on the floor beside the box and sat her in her place while he went to work, and he was talking all the time that he worked, half to himself and half to her. His voice knew only attack: a thrusting, forward march of thoughts and words.

"They say Minkel's a nice person. Maybe he is. When I read about him, I too said to myself-this old fellow Minkel, maybe he's got some courage to say those things. Maybe I would respect him. I can respect my enemy. I can honour him. I have no problem concerning this."

Having dumped the onions in a corner, he was fishing out a succession of small packages from the box with his left hand and unwrapping them one by one while he used his right to hold them down. Desperate to concentrate on something, Charlie tried to commit the whole lot to memory, then gave up: two new supermarket torch batteries in a single pack, one detonator of the type she had used at the fort for training, with red wires sprouting from the crimped end. Penknife. Pliers. Screwdriver. Soldering iron. A coil of fine red wire, steel staples, copper thread. Insulating tape, a torch bulb, assorted lengths of wooden dowelling. And a rectangular piece of softwood as a base for the device. Taking the soldering iron to the handbasin, Khalil plugged it into a nearby power point, causing a smell of burning dust.

"Do the Zionists think of all the nice people when they bomb us? I don't think so. When they napalm our villages, kill our women? This I doubt very much. I do not think the terrorist Israeli pilot, sitting up there, says to himself, those poor civilians, those innocent victims.' " He talks like this when he is alone, she thought. And he is alone a lot. He talks to keep his faith alive; and his conscience quiet. "I have killed many people whom I would no doubt respect," he said, back at the bed. "The Zionists have killed many more. But I kill only for love. I kill for Palestine and for her children. Try to think like this also," he advised her piously, interrupting himself as he glanced at her. "You are nervous?"

"Yes."

"It's natural. I too am nervous. Are you nervous in the theatre?"

"Yes."

"It is the same. Terror is theatre. We inspire, we frighten, we awaken indignation, anger, love. We enlighten. The theatre also. The guerrilla is the great actor of the world."

"Michel wrote me that too. It's in his letters."

"But I told it to him. It was my idea."

The next parcel was wrapped in oil paper. He opened it with respect. Three half-pound sticks of Russian plastic. He laid them in pride of place at the centre of the eiderdown.

"The Zionists kill for fear and for hate," he announced. "Palestinians for love and justice. Remember this difference. It is important." The glance again, swift and commanding. "You will remember this when you are afraid? You will say to yourself 'for justice'? If you do, you will no longer be afraid."

"And for Michel," she said.

He was not entirely satisfied. "And for him also, naturally," he conceded, and from a brown paper bag shook two household clothespegs onto the bed, then brought them to the bedside light to compare their simple mechanisms. Observing him from so near, she noticed a patch of creased white skin where the cheek and lower ear seemed to have been melted together and cooled again.

"Why do you put your hands over your face, please?" Khalil enquired, out of curiosity, when he had selected the better peg.

"I was tired for a moment," she said.

"Then wake up. Be alert for your mission. Also for the revolution. You know this type of bomb? Did Tayeh teach it to you?"

"I don't know. Maybe Bubi did."

"Then pay attention." Sitting beside her on the bed, he picked up the wood base and with a ballpoint pen briskly drew some lines on it for the circuit. "What we make is a bomb for all occasions. It works as a timer-here-also as a booby trap-here. Trust nothing. That is our philosophy." Handing her a clothespeg and two drawing-pins, he watched while she pushed the pins into either side of the peg's mouth, "I am not anti-Semitic, you know that?"

"Yes."

She gave him back the clothespeg, he took it to the handbasin and set to work soldering wires to the heads of the two drawing-pins.

"How do you know?" he demanded, puzzled.

"Tayeh told me the same. So did Michel." And so did about two hundred other people, she thought.

"Anti-Semitism, this is a strictly Christian invention." He again returned to the bed, this time bringing Michel's open briefcase with him. "You Europeans, you are anti-everybody. Anti-Jew, anti-Arab, anti-black. We have many great friends in Germany. But not because they love Palestine. Only because they hate Jews. That Helga -you like her?"

"No."

"Me neither. She is very decadent, I think. You like animals?"

"Yes."

He sat next to her, the briefcase on the bed beside him. "Did Michel?"

Choose, never hesitate, Joseph had said. It is better to be inconsistent than to be uncertain.

"We never talked about them."

"Not even about horses?"

And never, never correct yourself.

"No."

From his pocket, Khalil had pulled a folded handkerchief, and from the centre of the handkerchief a cheap pocket watch with the glass and hour hand removed. Setting it beside the explosive, he took up the red circuit wire and unwound it. She had the base-board on her lap. He took it from her, then grasped her hand and placed it so that she could hold the staples while he lightly tapped them home, fixing the red wire to the board according to the pattern he had drawn. Next, returning to the basin, he soldered the wires to the battery while she cut up lengths of insulating tape for him with the scissors.

"See," he said proudly as he added the watch.

He was very near her. She felt his nearness like a heat. He was stooped like a cobbler to his last, engrossed by his work.

"Was my brother religious with you?" he asked, taking up a light-bulb and twisting a pared end of wire to it.

"He was an atheist."

"Sometimes he was an atheist, sometimes he was religious. Other times he was a silly little boy, too much with women and ideas and cars. Tayeh says you were modest at the camp. No Cuban boys, no Germans, nobody."

"I wanted Michel. That's all I wanted, Michel," she said, too emphatically to her own ear. But when she glanced at him, she could not help wondering whether their brotherly love had been quite as infallible as Michel had proclaimed, for his face had set into a scowl of doubt.

"Tayeh is a great man," he said, implying perhaps that Michel was not. The bulb lit. "The circuit is good," he announced and, reaching gently past her, picked up the three sticks of explosive. "Tayeh and myself-we died together. Did Tayeh describe to you this incident?" he asked, as with Charlie's help he began taping the explosive tightly together.

"No."

"The Syrians caught us-cut here. First they beat us. This is normal. Stand up, please." From the box he had extracted an old brown blanket, which he made her stretch across her chest for him while he deftly sliced it into strips. Their faces across the blanket were very close. She could smell the warm sweetness of his Arab body.

"In the course of beating us they make themselves very angry, so they decide to break all our bones. First fingers, then arms, then legs. Then they break our ribs with rifles."

The knife point through the blanket was inches from her body. He cut swiftly and cleanly, as if the blanket were something he had hunted and killed. "When they finish with us, they leave us in the desert. I am glad. At least we die in the desert! But we don't die. A patrol of our commandos finds us. For three months Tayeh and Khalil lie side by side in hospital. Snowmen. Covered in plaster. We have some nice conversations, we become good friends, we read some good books together."

Folding the strips into neat military piles, Khalil addressed himself to Minkel's cheap black briefcase, which she noticed for the first time was opened from the back, by way of the hinges, while the fastenings at the front were still firmly closed. One by one he laid the folded strips inside, until he had built up a soft platform for the bomb to lie on.

"You know what Tayeh said to me one night?" he enquired as he did this. " 'Khalil,' he said, 'for how much longer do we play the nice guys? Nobody helps us, nobody thanks us. We make great speeches, we send fine orators to the United Nations, and if we wait another fifty years, maybe our grandchildren, if they're alive, they get a little piece of justice.' " Interrupting himself, he showed her how much with the fingers of his good hand. " 'Meanwhile our brother Arabs kill us, the Zionists kill us, the Falangists kill us, and those of us who remain alive go into their diaspora. Like the Armenians. Like the Jews themselves.' " He became cunning. " 'But if we make a few bombs-kill a few people-make a slaughterhouse, just for two minutes of history-' "

Without finishing the sentence, he took up the device and solemnly, with great precision, laid it inside the case.

"I need spectacles," he explained with a smile, and shook his head like an old man. "But where should I go for them-a man like me?"

"If you were tortured like Tayeh, why don't you limp like Tayeh?" she demanded, growing suddenly loud in her nervousness.

Delicately, he removed the light-bulb from the wires, leaving the pared ends free for the detonator.

"The reason I do not limp is because I prayed to God for strength, and God gave it me so that I could fight the real enemy and not my brother Arabs."

Handing her the detonator, he looked on approvingly while she attached it to the circuit. When she had finished, he took what wire remained and, with a deft, almost unconscious movement, wound it like wool round the tips of his dead fingers, until he had made a little dummy. Then wound two strands horizontally for a belt.

"You know what Michel wrote to me before he died? In his last letter?"

"No, Khalil, I do not know," she replied as she watched him toss the dummy into the briefcase.

"Please?"

"No, I said no, I don't know."

"Posted only hours before his death? 'I love her. She is not like the others. It is true that when I first met her she had the paralysed conscience of a European'-here, wind the watch, please-'also she was a whore. But now she is an Arab in her soul and one day I shall show her to our people and to you.' '^:

There remained the booby trap, and for this they had to work in still closer intimacy, for he required her to loop a length of steel wire through the fabric of the lid, then he himself held the lid as low as possible while her small hands led the wire to the dowelling in the clothespeg. Gingerly now, he took the whole contraption to the basin once more, and, with his back to her, refitted the hinge-pins with a blob of solder for each side. They had passed the point of no return.

"You know what I told to Tayeh once?"

"No."

^“ Tayeh, my friend, we Palestinians are very lazy people in our exile. Why do we have no Palestinians in the Pentagon? In the State Department? Why are we not yet running the New York Times, Wall Street, the CIA? Why are we not making Hollywood movies about our great struggle, getting ourselves elected Mayor of New York, head of the Supreme Court? What is wrong with us, Tayeh? Why are we without enterprise? It is not enough that our people become doctors, scientists, schoolmasters. Why do we not run America as well? Is it because of this that we have to use bombs and machine guns?' '

He was standing strictly before her, holding the briefcase by its handle like a good commuter.

"You know what we should do?"

She didn't.

"March. All of us. Before they destroy us for ever." Offering her his forearm, he lifted her to her feet. "From the United States, from Australia, Paris, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon-from everywhere in the world where there are Palestinians. We take ships to the borders. Planes. Millions of us. Like a great tide which nobody can turn back." He handed her the briefcase, then began swiftly gathering up his tools and packing them in the box. "Then all together, we march into our homeland, we claim our houses and our farms and our villages, even if we have to knock down their towns and settlements and kibbutzim in order to find them. It wouldn't work. You know why not? They would never come." He dropped to a crouch, examining the threadbare carpet for tell-tale traces. "Our rich would not be able to sustain their social-economic drop in lifestyle " he explained, ironically emphasising the jargon. "Our merchants would not leave their banks and shops and offices. Our doctors would not give up their smart clinics, the lawyers their corrupt practices, our academics their comfortable universities." He was standing before her, and his smile was a triumph over all his pain. "So the rich make the money and the poor do the fighting. When was it any different?"

She walked ahead of him down the stairs. Exit one tart, carrying her little box of tricks. The Coca-Cola van stood in the forecourt still, but he strode past it as if he had never seen it in his life and climbed into a farmer's Ford, a diesel with bales of straw strapped to the roof. She got in beside him. Hills again. Pine trees laden on one side with fresh wet snow. Instructions, Joseph-style. Charlie, do you understand? Yes, Khalil, I understand. Then repeat it to me. She did. It is for peace, remember that. I will, Khalil, I will: for peace, for Michel, for Palestine; for Joseph and Khalil; for Marty and the revolution and for Israel, and for the theatre of the real.

He had stopped beside a barn and put out the headlights. He was looking at his watch. From down the road a torch flashed twice. He reached across her and pushed open her door.

"His name is Franz and you will tell him you are Margaret. Good luck."

The evening was moist and quiet, the street lamps of the old city centre hung over her like caged white moons in their iron brackets. She had made Franz drop her at the corner because she wanted the short walk across the bridge before she made her entrance. She wanted the puffed look of someone stepping in from outdoors, and the nip of cold on her face, and the hatred back in her mind. She was in an alley among low scaffolding, which closed round her like a spindly tunnel. She passed an art gallery full of self-portraits of a blond, unpleasing boy in spectacles, and another next to it with idealised landscapes that the boy would never enter. Graffiti screamed at her but she could not understand a word until she suddenly read "Fuck America." Thanks for the translation, she thought. She was in the open air again, climbing concrete steps strewn with sand to beat the snow, but they were still slippery underfoot. She reached the top and saw the glass doors of the university library to her left. The lights were still burning in the students' cafe. Rachel and a boy were sitting tensely at the window. She passed the first marble totem-pole, she was on the treewalk high above the carriageway, crossing to the farther side. Already the lecture hall rose ahead of her, its strawberry stone turned to blazing crimson by the floodlighting. Cars were pulling up; the first members of the audience were arriving, climbing the four steps to the front entrance, pausing to shake hands and congratulate one another on their immense prominence. A couple of security men perfunctorily checked ladies' handbags. She kept walking. The truth will make you free. She passed the second totem-pole, heading for the town staircase.

The briefcase was dangling in her right hand and she felt it brushing her thigh. A whining police siren made her shoulder muscles convulse in terror, but she kept going. Two police motorcycles with whirling blue lights pulled up, cossetting a shiny black Mercedes with a pennant. Usually when grand cars passed, she turned her head away in order not to give the occupants the satisfaction of being looked at, but tonight was different. Tonight she could walk tall; she had the answer in her hand. So she stared at them and was rewarded by a glimpse of a florid, overfed man in a black suit and silver tie: and a sullen wife with three chins and a mink rug. For great lies we need naturally a great audience, she remembered. A camera flashed and the eminent couple ascended to the glass door, admired by at least three passers-by. Soon, you bastards, she thought, soon.

At the bottom of the steps turn right. She did so and kept going till she reached the corner. Be sure you do not fall into the stream, Helga had said for extra humour; Khalil's bombs are not waterproof, Charlie, and nor are you. She turned left and began skirting the building, following a pebble pavement on which the snow had failed to settle. The pavement widened and became a courtyard, and in its centre, beside a group of concrete flower tubs, stood a police caravan. In front of it, two uniformed policemen were preening at each other, lifting their boots and laughing, then scowling round at anyone who dared watch. She was not fifty feet from the side door, and she began to feel the calm that she was waiting for-the sensation, almost of levitation, that came over her when she stepped on stage and left her other identities behind her in the dressing-room. She was Imogen from South Africa, long on courage, short on grace, hastening to assist a great liberal hero. She was embarrassed-dammit, she was embarrassed to death-but she was going to do the right thing or bust. She had reached the side entrance. It was closed. She tried the door handle but it didn't turn. Dither. She put the flat of her hand on the panel and pushed but it wouldn't budge. She stood back and stared at it, then looked round for someone to help her, and by then the two policemen had stopped flirting with each other and were eyeing her suspiciously, but neither came forward.

Curtain up. Go.

"I say, excuse me," she called to them. "Do you speak English?"

Still they did not move. If there was a distance to be covered, then let her do the walking herself. She was only a citizen, after all, and a woman at that.

"I said do you speak English? Englisch -sprechen Sie? Someone needs to give this to the Professor. Immediately. Will you come over here, please?"

Both scowled, but only one of them came over to her. Slowly, as befitted his dignity.

"Toilette nicht hier," he snapped, and tipped his head up the road where she had come from.

"I don't want the toilet. I want you to find somebody who will give this briefcase to Professor Minkel. Minkel," she repeated, and held up the briefcase.

The policeman was young and did not care for youth. He did not take the briefcase from her, but he made her hold it while he pressed the catch and ascertained that it was locked.

Oh boy, she thought: you just committed suicide and you're still scowling at me.

"Offnen," he ordered.

"I can't open it. It's locked." She let a note of desperation enter her voice. "It's the Professor's, don't you understand? For all I know, it's got his lecture notes in it. He needs it for tonight." Turning from him, she beat loudly on the door. "Professor Minkel? It's me, Imogen Baastrup from Wits. Oh God."

The second policeman had joined them. He was older and dark-jawed. Charlie appealed to his greater wisdom. "Well, do you speak English?" she said. At the same moment, the door opened a few inches and a goatish male face peered at her with deep suspicion. He spoke something in German to the nearer policeman, and Charlie caught the word "Amerikanerin" in his reply.

"I am not American," she retorted, now nearly in tears. "My name is Imogen Baastrup, I'm from South Africa, and I'm bringing Professor Minkel's briefcase to him. He lost it. Would you kindly give him this immediately, because I'm sure he's desperate for it. Please!"

The door opened wide enough to reveal the rest of him: a pudgy, mayoral-looking man of sixty or more in a black suit. He was very pale, and to Charlie's secret eye he was very frightened too.

"Sir. Do you speak English, please? Do you?"

Not only did he speak it, he had sworn oaths in it. For he said "I do" so solemnly that there would be no going back on it for the rest of his life.

"Then will you please give this to Professor Minkel with Imogen Baastrup's compliments and tell him she's sorry, the hotel made a stupid muddle, and I'm greatly looking forward to hearing him tonight-

She held out the briefcase but the mayoral man refused to take it. He looked at the policeman behind her, and seemed to receive some faint reassurance from him; he looked at the briefcase again, and then at Charlie.

"Come this way," he said, like a stage butler earning his ten quid a night, and stood aside to admit her.

She was appalled. This wasn't in the script. Not in Khalil's or Helga's or anybody else's. What happened if Minkel unlocked it under her very eyes?"

"Oh I can't do that. I have to take my place in the auditorium. I haven't got my ticket yet! Please!"

But the mayoral man had his orders too, and he had his fears, for as she shoved the briefcase at him he leapt away from it as if it were on fire.

The door closed, they were in a corridor with lagged pipes running along the ceiling. Briefly they reminded her of the overhead pipes at the Olympic Village. Her reluctant escort walked ahead of her. She smelled oil and heard the repressed thunder of a furnace; she felt a wave of heat across her face and considered fainting or being sick. The handle of the briefcase was drawing blood, she could feel the warm slime of it trickling between her fingers.

They had reached a door marked "Vorstand." The mayor man tapped and called, "Oberhauser! Schnelll" As he did so, she looked desperately back and saw two fair boys in leather jackets in the corridor behind her. They carried machine guns. Christ Almighty, what is this? The door opened, Oberhauser stepped in first and stood quickly aside as if disowning her. She was in a movie set for Journey's End. Wings and rear stage were sandbagged, great bales of wadding lined the ceiling, held in place by chicken wire. Sandbag barriers made a zigzag walkway from the door. Centre stage stood a low coffee table with a tray of drinks. Beside it, in a low armchair, sat Minkel like a waxwork staring straight through her. Opposite him his wife, and next to him a tubby German woman with a fur stole whom Charlie took to be Oberhauser's wife.

So much for the talent, and crammed into the wings among the sandbags was the rest of the unit, in two distinct groups, their spokesmen shoulder to shoulder at the centre. The home side was led by Kurtz; to his left stood a randy, middle-aged man with a weak face, which was Charlie's swift dismissal of Alexis. Next to Alexis stood his wolf-boys, their hostile faces turned towards her. Facing them stood bits of the family she already knew, with strangers added, and the darkness of their Jewish features in contrast to their German counterparts was one of those images that would remain a tableau in her memory for as long as she lived. Kurtz the ringmaster had his finger to his lips, and his left wrist lifted for him to study his watch.

She started to say "Where is he?" and then, with a rush of joy, and anger, she saw him, apart from everyone as usual, the fraught and lonely producer on his first night. Coming swiftly to her, he placed himself a little to one side, leaving her a path to Minkel.

"Say your piece to him, Charlie," he instructed her quietly. "Say what you would say and ignore everyone who is not at the table"-and all she needed was the clack of the clapperboard in her face.

His hand came near to her own, she could feel the hairs touching her skin. She wanted to say "I love you-how are you?" But there were other lines to say, so she took a deep breath and said them instead, because that was, after all, the name of their relationship.

"Professor, a most terrible thing has happened," she began in a rush. "The stupid hotel people sent your briefcase to my room with my luggage, they saw me talking to you, I suppose, and there was my luggage and there was your luggage and somehow that crazy boy just took it into his dumb head that it was my case-" She turned to Joseph to tell him she'd run dry.

"Give the briefcase to the Professor," he ordered.

Minkel was standing up, looking wooden and far away in his mind, like a man receiving a long prison sentence. Mrs. Minkel was making a show of smiling. Charlie's knees were paralysed, but with Joseph's hand on her elbow, she managed to topple forward, holding the case out to him while she said some more lines.

"Only I didn't see it till half an hour ago, they'd shoved it in the cupboard there, and my dresses were all hanging down over it, then when I did see it and I read the label, I nearly had a-blue fit-"

Minkel would have accepted the briefcase, but no sooner did she offer it than other hands spirited it to a large black box lying on the floor with heavy cables snaking from it. Suddenly everyone seemed scared of her and was cowering behind the sandbags. Joseph's strong arms gathered her after them; his hand shoved her head down until she was looking at her own waist. But not before she had seen a deep-sea diver muffled in a heavy bomb suit wade towards the box. He wore a helmet with a thick glass visor, and under it a surgical mask to stop it fogging from inside. A muffled order commanded silence.

Joseph had drawn her to him and was half smothering her with his own body. Another order signalled a general relief; heads rose again, but still he held her down. She heard the sounds of feet departing in orderly haste, and when at last he released her, she saw Litvak hastening forward with what was evidently a bomb of his own, a more obvious affair than Khalil's, with trailing wires not yet connected. Joseph meanwhile was leading her firmly back to the centre of the room.

"Continue your explanations," he ordered in her ear. "You were describing how you read the label. Go on from there. What did you do?"

Take a deep breath. Speech continues.

"Then when I asked at reception they said you were out for the evening, you had this lecture down at the university; so I just hopped a cab and-I mean I don't know how you can forgive me. Look, I must fly. Good luck, Professor, have a great speech."

On a nod from Kurtz, Minkel had taken a key chain from his pocket and was pretending to select a key, even though he had no briefcase to play with. But Charlie, under Joseph's urgent guidance, was already making for the door, half walking, half carried by his arm round her waist.

I won't do it, Jose, I can't. I've spent my courage like you said. Don't let me go, Jose, don't. Behind her she heard muffled orders and the sounds of hasty footsteps as everyone seemed to beat a retreat.

"Two minutes," Kurtz called after them in warning.

They were back in the corridor with the two fair boys and their machine guns.

"Where did you meet him?" Joseph asked, in a low fast voice.

"A Hotel Eden. A sort of brothel on the edge of town. Next to a chemist. He's got a red Coke van, FR stroke BT something something 5. And a clapped-out Ford saloon. I didn't get the number."

"Open your bag."

She did so. Fast, the way he talked. Taking out her little clock radio, he replaced with a similar one from his own pocket.

"It is not the same device that we used before," he warned swiftly. "It will receive on one station only. It will still tell the time, but it has no alarm. But it transmits, and it tells us where you are."

"When?" she said stupidly.

"What are Khalil's orders to you now?"

"I'm to walk down the road and keep walking-Jose, when will you come? -for Christ's sake!"

His face had a haggard and desperate seriousness, but there was no concession in it.

"Listen, Charlie. Are you listening?"

"Yes, Jose. I am listening."

"If you press the volume button on your clock radio-not turn it, but press it-we shall know he is asleep. Do you understand?"

"He won't sleep like that."

"What do you mean? How do you know how he sleeps?"

"He's like you, he's not the kind, he's awake all day and night. He's-Jose, I can't go back. Don't make me."

She was staring pleadingly at his face, still waiting for it to yield, but it had set rigidly against her.

"He wants me to sleep with him, for God's sake! He wants a wedding night, Jose. Doesn't that stir you slightly? He's taking me over where Michel left off. He didn't like him. He's going to even the score. Do I still go?"

She held him so fiercely that he had difficulty breaking her grasp. She stood against him with her head down, against his chest, wanting him to take her back into his protection. But instead he put his hands under her arms and straightened her, and she saw his face again, locked and bolted, telling her that love was not their province: not his, not hers, and least of all Khalil's. He started her on her journey, she shook him off and went alone; he took a step after her and stopped. She looked back and hated him; she closed her eyes and opened them, she let out a deep breath.

I'm dead.

She stepped into the street, straightened herself and, crisp as a soldier and quite as blind, marched briskly up a narrow street, passing a seedy nightclub displaying illuminated photographs of girls of thirty-something baring unimpressive breasts. That's what I should be doing, she thought. She reached a main road, remembered her pedestrian drill, looked left and saw a medieval gate tower with a sign for McDonald's hamburgers written tastefully across it. The lights turned green for her, she kept going and saw high black hills blocking the end of the road and a pale, clouded sky twisting restively behind them. She glanced round and saw the Cathedral spire following her. She turned to her right and walked more slowly than she had ever walked in her life, down a leafy avenue of patrician houses. Now she was counting to herself. Numbers. Now she was saying rhymes. Jose Goes Down Town. Now she was remembering what had happened in the lecture hall, but without Kurtz, without Joseph, and without the murderous technicians of the two unreconciled sides. Ahead of her, Rossino was pushing his motorbike silently out of a gateway. She walked up to him, he handed her a helmet and a leather jacket, and as she started to put them on, something made her look back in the direction she had come from, and she saw a lazy orange flash stretch towards her down the damp cobble like the path of the setting sun, and she noticed how long it stayed on the eye after it had disappeared. Then at last she heard the sound she had been dully expecting: a distant yet intimate thud, like a breaking of something unmendable deep inside herself; the precise and permanent end to love. Well, Joseph, yes. Goodbye.

At the same second exactly, Rossino's engine burst into life, ripping the damp night apart with its roar of triumphant laughter. Me too, she thought. It's the funniest day of my life.

Rossino drove slowly, keeping to small roads and following a carefully thought-out route.

You drive, I'll follow. Maybe it's time I became Italian.

A warm drizzle had cleared away much of the snow, but he drove with respect for the bad surface, and for his important passenger. He was yelling joyful things at her and seemed to be having a great time, but she wasn't interested in sharing his mood. They passed through a big gateway and she shouted "Is this the place?" without knowing or caring from Adam what place she was talking about, but the gateway gave on to an unmade road over hills and valleys of private forest, and they crossed them alone, under a bobbing moon that used to be Joseph's private property. She looked down and saw a sleeping village draped in a white shroud; she smelt Greek pine trees and felt her warm tears being dashed away by the wind. She held Rossino's trembling, unfamiliar body tucked into her own, and told him: Help yourself, there's nothing left.

They descended a last hill, came out of another gateway, and entered a road lined with bare larches like the trees in France on family holidays. The track climbed again, and as they reached the crest, Rossino cut the engine and coasted down a footpath into a forest. He opened a saddle bag and pulled out a bundle of clothes and a handbag, and tossed them to her. He held a torch, and while she changed he watched her by the light of it, and there was a moment when she stood half naked in front of him.

You want me, take me; I'm available and unattached.

She was without love and without value to herself. She was where she had started, and the whole rotten world could screw her.

She poured her junk from one handbag to the other, powder compact, tampons, bits of money, her packet of Marlboros. And her cheap little radio alarm clock for rehearsals-press the volume, Charlie, are you listening! Rossino took her old passport and handed her a new one, but she didn't bother to find out what nationality she had become.

Citizen of Nowheresville, born yesterday.

He gathered up her old clothes and dumped them into the saddle bag, together with her old shoulder bag and spectacles. Wait here but look towards the road, he said. He'll shine a red light twice. He had been gone barely five minutes before she saw it winking through the trees. Hooray, a friend at last.