The Little Drummer Girl

twenty-six

Khalil took her arm and almost carried her to the shiny new car because she was weeping and trembling so much she wasn't very good at walking. After the humble clothes of a van driver, he seemed to have put on the full disguise of the unimpeachable German manager: soft black overcoat, shirt and tie, groomed and swept-back hair. Opening her door, he took off the overcoat and tucked it solicitously round her as if she were a sick animal. She had no idea how he expected her to be, but he seemed less shocked by her condition than respectful of it. The engine was already running. He turned the heating on full.

"Michel would be proud of you," he said kindly, and considered her a moment by the interior light. She started to answer, but broke out weeping again instead. He gave her a handkerchief; she held it in both hands, twisting it round her fingers while the tears fell and fell. They set off down the wooded hillside.

"What happened?" she whispered.

"You have won a great victory for us. Minkel died as he was opening the briefcase. Other friends of Zionism are reported to be severely wounded. They are still counting." He spoke in savage satisfaction. "They speak of outrage. Shock. Coldblooded murder. They should visit Rashidiyeh one day. I invite the whole university. They should sit in the shelters and be machine-gunned as they come out. They should have their bones broken and watch their children being put to torture. Tomorrow the whole world will read that Palestinians will not become the poor blacks of Zion."

The heating was powerful, but it was still not enough. She pulled his coat more tightly round her. Its lapels were of velvet and she could smell its newness.

"You want to tell me how it went?" he enquired.

She shook her head. The seats were plush and soft, the engine quiet. She listened for cars but heard none. She looked in the mirror. Nothing behind, nothing in front. When was there ever? She caught Khalil's dark eye staring at her.

"Don't worry. We look after you. I promise. I am glad you are in grief. Others when they kill, they laugh and triumph. Get drunk, tear off their clothes like animals. All this I have seen. But you-you weep. This is very good."

The house was beside a lake and the lake was in a steep valley. Khalil drove past it twice before he turned into the drive, and his eyes as he scanned the roadside were Joseph's eyes, dark and purposeful and all-seeing. It was a modern bungalow, a rich man's second home. It had white walls and Moorish windows and a sloping red roof where the snow had not managed to lie. The garage was joined to it. He drove in and the doors closed. He switched off the engine and drew a long-barrelled automatic pistol from inside his jacket. Khalil, the one-handed shooter. She stayed in the car, staring at the toboggans and the firewood stored along the back wall. He opened the door.

"Walk after me. Three metres, no closer."

A steel side door led to an interior corridor. She waited, then went after him. The drawing-room lights were already lit, a wood fire was burning in the grate. Pony-skin sofa. Suburban rustic furniture. A log table laid for two. In an ice bucket on its wrought-iron stand, one bottle of vodka.

"Stay here," he said.

She stood at the centre of the floor, clutching her handbag in both hands, while he moved from room to room, so silently that the only sound she heard was the opening and closing of cupboards. She began to shiver again, violently. He returned to the drawing-room, put away his gun, dropped into a couch before the fire, and set to work to build it into a blaze. To keep away the animals, she thought, watching him. And the sheep safe. The fire roared and she sat before it on the sofa. He switched on the television. It showed an old black-and-white movie from the taverna on the hilltop. He did not turn up the sound. He placed himself before her.

"Would you like some vodka?" he asked politely. "I do not drink, but you must please yourself."

She would, so he poured some for her, far too much.

"You want to smoke?"

He handed her a leather box and lit her cigarette for her.

The lighting in the room brightened; her glance went swiftly to the television and she found herself staring straight into the exciting, over-expressive features of the weaselly little German she had seen not an hour earlier at Marty's side. He was posed beside the police van. Behind him she could see her bit of pavement and the side door of the lecture hall, fenced off with fluorescent tape. Police cars, fire engines and ambulances bustled in and out of the cordoned area. Terror is theatre, she thought. The background changed to a shot of green tarpaulins, erected to keep the weather out while the search continued. Khalil turned up the sound and she heard the wailing of ambulances behind the sleek, well-modulated voice of Alexis.

"What's he saying?" she asked.

"He's leading the investigation. Wait. I tell you."

Alexis vanished, and was replaced with a studio shot of Oberhauser unscathed.

"That's the idiot who opened the door to me," she said.

Khalil held up his hand to her to be quiet. She listened and realised, with a detached curiosity, that Oberhauser was giving a description of herself. She caught "Sud Afrika" and a reference to brown hair; she saw his hand lift to describe her spectacles; the camera switched to a trembling finger pointing to a pair similar to those which Tayeh had given to her.

After Oberhauser came our artist's first impression of the suspect, which looked like nobody on earth, except possibly an old advertisement for a liquid laxative that had featured large at railway stations ten years earlier. After that came one of the two policemen who had spoken to her, adding his own shamefaced description.

Switching off the set, Khalil again came and stood before her.

"You allow?" he asked shyly.

She picked up her handbag and put it the other side of her so that he could sit down. Did it hum? Bleep? Was it a microphone? What the hell did it do?

Khalil spoke precisely-a seasoned practitioner offers his diagnosis.

"You are a little bit at risk," he said. "Mr. Oberhauser remembers you, so does his wife, so do the policemen, and so do several people in the hotel. Your height, your figure, your spoken English, your acting talent. Also unfortunately there was an Englishwoman who overheard part of your conversation with Minkel and believes you are not South African at all, but English. Your description has gone to London, and we know that the English already have bad thoughts about you. The region here is on full alert, road blocks, spot checks, everybody is falling over his feet. But you will not worry." He took her hand and held it firmly. "I shall protect you with my life. Tonight we shall be safe. Tomorrow we shall smuggle you to Berlin and send you home."

"Home," she said.

"You are one of us. You are our sister. Fatmeh says you are our sister. You have no home, but you are part of a great family. We can make you a new identity, or you can go to Fatmeh, live with her as long as you wish. Though you never fight again, we shall take care of you. For Michel. For what you have done for us."

His loyalty was appalling. Her hand was still in his, his touch powerful and reassuring. His eyes shone with a possessive pride. She got up and walked from the room, taking her handbag with her.

A double bed, the electric fire lit, both bars regardless of expense. A bookshelf of Nowheresville bestsellers: I'm OK-You're OK, The Joy of Sex. The corners of the bed turned down. The bathroom lay beyond it, pine-clad, sauna adjoining. She took out the radio and looked at it, and it was her old one, down to the last scratch: just a little heavier, stronger in the hand. Wait until he sleeps. Until I do. She stared at herself. That artist's impression wasn't so bad after all. A land for no people, for a people with no land. First she scrubbed her hands and fingernails, then on an impulse she stripped and treated herself to a long shower, if only to stay away from the warmth of his trust for a little longer. She doused herself with body lotion, helping herself from the cabinet above the basin. Her eyes interested her; they reminded her of Fatima the Swedish girl at the training school-they had the same furious blankness of a mind that had learned to renounce the perils of compassion. The same self-hate exactly. She returned to find him laying food on the table. Cold meats, cheese, a bottle of wine. Candles, already lit. He pulled back a chair for her in the best European style. She sat down; he sat opposite her and began eating at once, with the natural absorption he gave to everything. He had killed and now he was eating: what could be more right? My maddest meal, she thought. My worst and maddest. If a violinist comes to our table, I'll ask him to play "Moon River."

"You still regret what you have done?" he asked, as a matter of interest, like "Has your headache gone?"

"They're pigs," she said and meant it. "Ruthless, murderous-" She started to weep again but caught herself in time. Her knife and fork were shaking so much she had to put them down. She heard a car pass; or was it an aeroplane? My handbag, she thought chaotically-where did I leave it? In the bathroom, away from his prying fingers. She picked up her fork again and saw Khalil's beautiful, untamed face studying her across the guttering candlelight exactly as Joseph's had done on the hilltop outside Delphi.

"Maybe you are trying too hard to hate them," he suggested, as a cure.

It was the worst play she had ever been in, and the worst dinner party. Her urge to smash the reunion was the same as the urge to smash herself. She stood up and heard her knife and fork clatter to the floor. She could just see him through the tears of her despair. She started to unbutton her dress, but her hands were in such disorder that she couldn't make them work for her. She went round the table to him and he was already getting up as she hauled him to his feet. His arms came round her; he kissed her, then lifted her across his body, and bore her like his wounded comrade to the bedroom. He laid her on the bed and suddenly, by God knew what desperate chemistry of her mind and body, she was taking him. She was upon him and undressing him; she was drawing him into her as if he were the last man on earth, on the earth's last day; for her own destruction and for his. She was devouring him, suckling him, cramming him into the screaming empty spaces of her guilt and loneliness. She was weeping, she was shouting to him, filling her own deceiving mouth with him, turning him over and obliterating herself and Joseph's memory beneath his fierce body's weight. She felt his surge but clasped him defiantly inside her long after his movement had ceased, her arms locked round him as she hid herself from the advancing storm.

He was not asleep, but he was already dozing. He lay with his tousled dark head on her shoulder, his good arm thrown carelessly across her breast.

"Salim was a lucky boy," he murmured, with a smile in his voice. "A girl like you, that's a cause to die for."

"Who says he died for me?"

"Tayeh said this was possible."

"Salim died for the revolution. The Zionists blew up his car."

"He blew himself up. We read many German police reports of this incident. I told him never to make bombs, but he disobeyed me. He had no talent for the task. He was not a natural fighter."

"What's that noise?" she said, pulling away from him.

It was a patter, like paper crackling, a row of dotted sounds, then nothing. She imagined a car rolling softly over gravel with its engine off.

"Someone is fishing on the lake," Khalil said.

"At this time of night?"

"You never fished at night?" He laughed drowsily. "You never took a little boat on the sea, with a lamp, and caught fishes with your hands?"

"Wake up. Talk to me."

"Better to sleep."

"I can't. I'm afraid."

He began to tell her a story of a night mission he had made into the Galilee long ago, he and two others. How they were crossing the sea in a rowing boat, and it was so beautiful that they lost all sense of what they had come for, and fished instead. She interrupted him.

"It wasn't a boat," she insisted. "It was a car, I heard it again. Listen."

"It was a boat," he said sleepily.

The moon had found a space between the curtains, and shone towards them across the floor. Getting up, she went to the window and without touching the curtains stared out. Pine woods lay all around, the moonpath on the lake was a white staircase reaching downward to the centre of the world. But there was no boat anywhere and no light to lure the fish. She returned to the bed and his right arm slipped across her body, drawing her to him, but when he sensed her resistance he gently drew away from her and turned languidly onto his back.

"Talk to me," she said again. "Khalil. Wake up." She shook him fiercely, then kissed him on the lips. "Wake up," she said again.

So he roused himself for her, because he was a kind man, and had appointed her his sister.

"You know what was strange about your letters to Michel?" he asked. "The gun. 'From now on, I shall dream of your head on my pillow, and your gun beneath it'-lovers' talk. Beautiful lovers' talk."

"Why was it strange? Tell me."

"I had exactly such a conversation with him once. Precisely on this very matter. 'Listen, Salim,' I told him. 'Only cowboys sleep with their guns under the pillow. If you remember nothing else I teach you, remember this. When you are in bed, keep your gun at your side where you can hide it better, and where your hand is. Learn to sleep that way. Even when you have a woman.' He said he would. Always he promised me. Then he forgot. Or found a new woman. Or a new car."

"Broke the rules then, didn't he?" she said and, seizing his gloved hand, considered it in the half darkness, pinching each dead finger in turn. They were of wadding, all but the smallest and the thumb.

"So what did this lot?" she demanded brightly. "Mice? What did this lot, Khalil? Wake up."

He took a long time to answer. "One day in Beirut, I am a little stupid like Salim. I am in the office, the post comes, I am in a hurry, I am expecting a certain parcel, I open it! This was an error."

"So? What happened? You opened it and there was a bang, was there? Bang go your fingers. That how you did your face too?"

"When I woke up in hospital, there was Salim. You know something? He was very pleased I had been stupid. 'Next time, before you open a parcel, show it to me or read the postmark first,' he says. 'If it comes from Tel Aviv, better you return it to the sender.' '

"Why do you make your own bombs then? If you've only got one hand?"

The answer was in his silence. In the twilit stillness of his face as it lay turned to her, with its straight, unsmiling fighter's stare. The answer was in everything she had seen since the night she had signed on with the theatre of the real. For Palestine, it ran. For Israel. For God. For my sacred destiny. To do back to the bastards what the bastards did to me. To redress injustice. With injustice. Until all the just are blown to smithereens, and justice is finally free to pick herself out of the rubble and walk the unpopulated streets.

Suddenly he was demanding her, and no longer to be resisted.

"Darling," she whispered. "Khalil. Oh Christ. Oh, darling. Please."

And whatever else whores say.

It was dawn, but still she would not let him sleep. With the pale daylight, a wakeful light-headedness possessed her. With kisses, with caresses, she used every wile she knew to keep him present with her, and his passion burning. You're my best, she whispered to him, and I never award first prizes. My strongest, my bravest, my most clever lover of all time. Oh, Khalil, Khalil, Christ, oh please. Better than Salim? he asked. More patient than Salim, more cherishing, more grateful. Better than Joseph, who sent me to you on a plate.

"What's the matter?" she said as he suddenly disengaged from her. "Did I hurt you?"

Instead of answering, he reached out his good hand and with a commanding gesture lightly pinched her lips together. Then lifted himself stealthily on his elbow. She listened with him. The clatter of a waterbird lifting from the lake. The shriek of geese. The crowing of a cockerel, the chiming of a bell. Foreshortened by the snowbound countryside. She felt the mattress lift beside her.

"No cows," he said softly, from the window.

He was standing at the side of the window, still naked, but with his gun looped by its belt over his shoulder. And for a second, in the extremity of her tension, she imagined the mirror image of Joseph standing facing him, red-lit by the electric fire, separated from him only by the thin curtain.

"What do you see?" she whispered at last, unable to bear the tension any more.

"No cows. And no fishermen. And no bicycles. I see much too little."

His voice was tense with action. His clothes lay beside the bed where she had thrown them in their frenzy. He pulled on his dark trousers and white shirt, and buckled the gun into place beneath his armpit.

"No cars, no passing lights," he said evenly. "Not one labourer on his way to work. And no cows."

"They've gone to milking."

He shook his head. "Not for two hours do they go for milking."

"It's the snow. They're keeping them indoors."

Something in her voice caught his ear; the quickening in him had sharpened his awareness of her. "Why do you apologise for them?"

"I don't. I'm just trying-

"Why do you apologise for the absence of all life around this house?"

"To quell your fears. Comfort you."

An idea was growing in him-a terrible idea. He could read it in her face, and in her nakedness; and she in turn could feel his suspicion form. "Why do you wish to quell my fears? Why are you more frightened for me than for yourself?"

"I'm not."

"You are a wanted woman. Why are you so able to love me? Why do you speak of my comfort, and not of your own safety? What guilt is in your mind?"

"None. I didn't like killing Minkel. I want to get out of this whole thing. Khalil?"

"Is Tayeh right? Did my brother die for you after all? Answer me, please," he insisted, very, very quietly. "I wish for an answer."

Her whole body begged for his reprieve. The heat in her face was terrible. It would burn for ever.

"Khalil-come back to bed," she whispered. "Love me. Come back."

Why was he so leisurely if they were all around the house? How could he stare at her like this while the ring tightened round him every second?

"What is the time, please?" he asked, still staring at her. "Charlie?"

"Five. Half past. What does it matter?"

"Where is your clock? Your little clock. I require to know the time, please."

"I don't know. In the bathroom."

"Stay where you are, please. Otherwise I shall perhaps kill you. We shall see."

He fetched it, and handed it to her on the bed.

"Kindly open it for me," he said, and watched her while she wrestled with the clasp.

"So what is the time, please, Charlie?" he asked again, with a terrible lightness. "Kindly advise me, from your clock, what hour of the day it is."

"Ten to six. Later than I thought."

He snatched it from her and read the dial. Digital, twenty-four-hour. He switched on the radio and it gave a wail of music before he switched it off again. He held it to his ear, then weighed it appreciatively in his hand.

"Since last night when you left me, you have not had much time to yourself, I think. Is that so? None, in fact."

"None."

"Then how did you buy new batteries for this clock?"

"I didn't."

"Then why is it working?"

"I didn't need to-they hadn't run out-it goes for years, just on one set-you buy special ones-long life-

She had reached the end of her invention. All of it, for all time, here and for ever after, because by now she had remembered the moment on the hilltop when he had stood her outside the Coca-Cola van to search her, and the moment when he dropped the batteries into his pocket before returning the clock to her shoulder bag and tossing the bag into the van.

He had lost interest in her. The clock had all his attention.

"Bring me that imposing radio beside the bed, please, Charlie. We make a little experiment. An interesting technological experiment relating to high-frequency radio."

She whispered, "Can I put something on?" She pulled on her dress and took the bedside radio to him, a modern thing in black plastic, with a speaker like a telephone dial. Placing the clock and the radio together, Khalil switched on the radio and worked through the channels until suddenly it let out a wounded wail, up and down like an air-raid warning. Then he picked up the clock, pushed back the hinged flap of the battery chamber with his thumb, and shook the batteries onto the floor, much as he must have done last night. The wailing stopped dead. Like a child who has performed a successful experiment, Khalil lifted his head to her and pretended to smile. She tried not to look at him, but could not help herself.

"Who do you work for, Charlie? For the Germans?"

She shook her head.

"For the Zionists?"

He took her silence for yes.

"Are you Jewish."

"No."

"Do you believe in Israel? What are you?"

"Nothing," she said.

"Are you Christian? Do you see them as the founders of your great religion?"

Again she shook her head.

"Is it for money? Did they bribe you? Blackmail you?"

She wanted to scream. She clenched her fists, and filled her lungs, but the chaos choked her, and she sobbed instead. "It was to save life. It was to take part. To be something. I loved him."

"Did you betray my brother?"

The obstructions in her throat disappeared, to be replaced by a mortal flatness of tone. "I never knew him. I never spoke to him in my life. They showed him to me before they killed him, the rest was invented. Our love-affair, my conversion- everything. I didn't even write the letters, they did. They wrote his letters to you too. The one about me. I fell in love with the man who looked after me. That's all there is."

Slowly, without aggression, he reached out his left hand and touched the side of her face, apparently to make sure that she was real. Then looked at the tips of his fingers, and back at her again, somehow comparing them in his mind.

"And you are the same English who gave away my country," he remarked quietly, as if he could hardly believe the evidence of his eyes.

He lifted his head and as he did so, she saw his face snatch away in disapproval and then, under the force of whatever Joseph had shot him with, catch fire. Charlie had been taught to stand still when she pulled the trigger, but Joseph didn't do that. He didn't trust his bullets to do their work, but ran after them, trying to beat them to the target. He rushed through the door like an ordinary intruder, but instead of pausing, hurled himself straight forward as he fired. And he fired with his arms at full stretch, to reduce the distance still more. She saw Khalil's face burst, she saw him spin round and spread his arms to the wall, appealing for its help. So the bullets went into his back, ruining his white shirt. His hands flattened against the wall-one leather, one real-and his wrecked body slipped to a rugger player's crouch as he tried desperately to shove a way through it. But by that time, Joseph was close enough to kick his feet away from under him, hastening him on his last journey to the ground. After Joseph came Litvak, whom she knew as Mike, and had always, as she now realised, suspected of an unhealthy nature. As Joseph stood back, Mike knelt down and put a last precise shot into the back of Khalil's neck, which must have been unnecessary. After Mike came about half the world's executioners, in black frogmen's clothes, followed by Marty and the German weasel and two thousand stretcher bearers and ambulance drivers and doctors and unsmiling women, holding her, cleaning the vomit off her, guiding her down the corridor and into God's fresh air, though the sticky warm smell of blood clogged her nose and throat.

An ambulance was being backed to the front door. There were bottles of blood inside and the blankets were red too, so at first she refused to get in. In fact, she resisted quite hard and must have lashed out, because one of the women holding her suddenly let her go and swung away with her hand to her face.

She had gone deaf, so she could only vaguely hear her own screaming, but her main concern was to get her dress off, partly because she was a whore, partly because there was so much of Khalil's blood on it. But the dress was still more unfamiliar to her than it had been last night, and she couldn't fathom whether it had buttons or zip, so she decided not to bother with it after all. Then Rachel and Rose appeared either side of her, and each grabbed an arm exactly as they had done in the Athens house when she first arrived there for her audition for the theatre of the real; the experience told her that further resistance was futile. They led her up the steps to the ambulance and sat either side of her on one of the beds. She looked down and saw all the silly faces staring at her-the tough little boys with their heroes' scowls, Marty and Mike, Dimitri and Raoul, and other friends as well, some of them not yet introduced. Then the crowd parted, and Joseph emerged, considerately having got rid of the gun with which he had shot Khalil, but still unfortunately with quite a lot of blood over his jeans and running shoes, she noticed. He came to the foot of the steps and looked up at her, and at first it was like staring into her own face, because she could see exactly the same things in him that she hated in herself. So a sort of exchange of character occurred, where she assumed his role of killer and pimp, and he, presumably, hers of decoy, whore, and traitor.

Till suddenly, as she continued to stare at him, a surviving spark of outrage kindled in her, and gave her back the identity that he had stolen from her. She stood up, and neither Rose nor Rachel was in time to hold her down; she drew an enormous breath, and she shouted "Go" at him-or so at least it sounded to herself. Perhaps it was "No". It hardly mattered.