The Little Drummer Girl

by John le Carré

  Seated before the dying evening sunlight, Schwili laid out his precious inks and pens and stationery, everything to its appointed place, as if tomorrow were his big exam. Then he took off his cuff-links and slowly rubbed his palms together to warm them, though it was warm enough even for an old prisoner. Then he removed his hat. Then he pulled at each finger one by one, loosening the joints with a salvo of little snapping noises. Then he settled to wait, as he had waited all his adult life.

  The star they were all poised to receive flew into Munich punctually the same evening by way of Cyprus. No flashing cameras celebrated his arrival, for he was got up as a stretcher case attended by an orderly and a private doctor. The doctor was genuine, if his passport was not; as to Yanuka, he was a British businessman from Nicosia being rushed to Munich for heart surgery. A file of impressive medical papers bore this out, but the German airport authorities paid them not a glance. One uncomfortable sight of the patient’s lifeless face told them all they needed to know. An ambulance rushed the party in the direction of the city hospital, but in a side street turned off and, as if the worst had happened, slipped into the covered courtyard of a friendly undertaker. At the Olympic Village, the two Argentinian photographers and their friends were seen to manhandle a wicker laundry basket marked ‘GLASS DELICATE’ from their battered minibus to the service lift, and no doubt, said the neighbours, they were adding one more extravagance to their already inflated stock of equipment. There was amused speculation about whether the stamp dealers downstairs would complain about their tastes in music: Jews complained of everything. Upstairs, meanwhile, they unpacked their prize and, with the doctor’s help, established that nothing was broken from the voyage. Minutes later, they had laid him carefully on the floor of the padded priesthole where he could be expected to come round in about half an hour, though it was always possible that the light-proof hood which they had tied over his head would retard the waking process. Soon after that, the doctor departed. He was a conscientious man and, fearing for Yanuka’s future, had sought assurances from Kurtz that he would not be asked to compromise his medical principles.

  Sure enough, in less than forty minutes they saw Yanuka pull against his chains, first the wrists and then the knees, and then all four together, like a chrysalis trying to burst its skin, till presumably he realised that he was trussed face downward; for he paused, and seemed to take stock, then let out a tentative groan. After which, with no further warning, all hell broke loose as Yanuka gave vent to one anguished, sobbing roar after another, writhed, bucked, and generally threw himself about with a vigour that made them doubly grateful for his chains. Having observed this performance for a while, the interrogators withdrew and left the field to the guards until the storm raged itself out. Probably Yanuka’s head had been crammed with hair-raising stories about the brutality of Israeli methods. Probably in his bewilderment he actually wanted them to live up to their reputation and make his terrors come true. But the guards declined to oblige him. Their orders were to play the sullen jailers, to keep their distance and inflict no injury, and they obeyed them to the letter, even if to do so cost them dear – Oded the baby, in particular. From the moment of Yanuka’s ignominious arrival in the apartment, Oded’s young eyes had darkened with hatred. Each day that passed, he looked more ill and grey, and by the sixth his shoulders had gone rigid, just from the tension of having Yanuka under their roof alive.

  At last, Yanuka seemed to drop off to sleep again and the interrogators decided it was time to make a start, so they played sounds of morning traffic, switched on a lot of white light, and together brought him breakfast – though it was not yet midnight – loudly ordering the guards to unbind him and let him eat like a human being, not a dog. Then they themselves solicitously untied his hood, for they wanted his first knowledge of them to be their kind, un-Jewish faces gazing at him with fatherly concern.

  ‘Don’t you ever put these things on him again,’ one of them said quietly to the guards, in English, and with an angry heave symbolically tossed both hood and chains into a corner.

  The guards withdrew – Oded in particular with theatrical reluctance – and Yanuka consented to drink a little coffee while his two new friends looked on. They knew he had a raging thirst because they had asked the doctor to induce one before he left, so the coffee must have been tasting wonderful to him, whatever else was mixed into it. They knew also that his mind was in a state of dreamlike fragmentation and therefore undefended in certain important areas – for instance, when compassion was on offer. After several more visits conducted in this way, some with only minutes between them, the interrogators decided it was time to take the plunge and introduce themselves. In outline, their plan was the oldest in the game, but it contained ingenious variations.

  They were Red Cross observers, they said in English. They were Swiss subjects, but resident here in the prison. What prison, where, they were not at liberty to reveal, though they gave clear hints it might be Israel. They produced impressive prison passes in well-thumbed plastic cases, with stamped photographs of themselves and red crosses done in wavy lines like banknotes to prevent easy forgery. They explained that their job was to make sure that the Israelis observed the rules for prisoners of war laid down by the Geneva Convention – though, God knew, they said, that wasn’t easy – and to provide Yanuka’s link with the outside world, in so far as prison regulations allowed this. They were pressing to get him out of solitary and into the Arab block, they said, but they understood that ‘rigorous interrogation’ was to start any day, and that until then the Israelis intended willy-nilly to keep him in isolation. Sometimes, they explained, the Israelis simply lost themselves in their own obsessions, and forgot about their image completely. They pronounced ‘interrogation’ with distaste, as if they wished they knew a better word. At this point Oded came back in, as instructed, and pretended to busy himself with the sanitation. The interrogators at once stopped speaking until he left.

  Next they produced a big printed form and helped Yanuka to complete it in his own hand: name here, old fellow, address, date of birth, next of kin, that’s the way, occupation – well, that would be student, wouldn’t it? – qualifications, religion, and sorry about all this but it’s regulations. Yanuka complied accurately enough, despite an initial reluctance, and this first sign of collaboration was noted by the Literacy Committee downstairs with quiet satisfaction – even if his handwriting was puerile on account of the drugs.

  Taking their leave, the interrogators handed Yanuka a printed booklet setting out his rights in English and, with a wink and a pat on the shoulder, a couple of bars of Swiss chocolate. And they called him by his first name, Salim. For an hour, from the adjoining room, they watched him by infra-red light as he lay in the pitch dark, weeping and tossing his head. Then they raised the lighting and barged in cheerfully, calling out, ‘Look what we’ve got for you; come on, wake up, Salim, it’s morning.’ It was a letter, addressed to him by name. Postmark Beirut, sent care of the Red Cross, and stamped ‘Prison Censor Approved’. From his beloved sister Fatmeh, who had given him the gilded charm to wear round his neck. Schwili had forged it, Miss Bach had compiled it, Leon’s chameleon talent had supplied the authentic pulse of Fatmeh’s censorious affection. Their models were the letters Yanuka had received from her while he was under surveillance. Fatmeh sent her love and hoped Salim would show courage when his time came. By ‘time’ she seemed to mean the dreaded interrogation. She had decided to give up her boyfriend and her office job, she said, and resume her relief work in Sidon because she could no longer bear to be so far from the border of her beloved Palestine while Yanuka was in such desperate straits. She admired him; she always would; Leon swore it. To the grave and beyond, Fatmeh would love her gallant, heroic brother; Leon had seen to it. Yanuka accepted the letter with pretended indifference, but when they left him alone again, he fell into a pious crouch, with his head turned nobly sideways and upward like a martyr waiting for the sword, while he clutched Fatmeh’s words
to his cheek.

  ‘I demand paper,’ he told the guards, with panache, when they returned to sweep out his cell an hour later.

  He might as well not have spoken. Oded even yawned.

  ‘I demand paper! I demand the representatives of the Red Cross! I demand to write a letter under the Geneva Convention to my sister Fatmeh! Yes!’

  These words also were favourably greeted downstairs, since they proved that the Literacy Committee’s first offering had gained Yanuka’s acceptance. A special bulletin was immediately transmitted to Athens. The guards slunk off, ostensibly to take advice, and reappeared bearing a small stack of Red Cross stationery. They also handed Yanuka a printed ‘Advice to Prisoners’, explaining that only letters in English would be forwarded, ‘and only those containing no hidden message’. But no pen. Yanuka demanded a pen, begged for one, screamed at them, wept, all in slow motion, but the boys retorted loudly and distinctly that the Geneva Convention said nothing about pens. Half an hour later, the two interrogators bustled in full of righteous anger, bringing a pen of their own, stamped ‘For Humanity’.

  Scene by scene, this charade continued over several more hours while Yanuka in his weakened state struggled vainly to reject the offered hand of friendship. His written reply to Fatmeh was a classic: a rambling three-page letter of advice, self-pity, and bold postures, providing Schwili with his first ‘clean’ sample of Yanuka’s handwriting under emotional stress, and Leon with an excellent foretaste of his English prose-style.

  ‘My darling sister, in one week now I face the fateful testing of my life at which your great spirit will accompany me,’ he wrote. That news too was the subject of a special bulletin: ‘Send me everything,’ Kurtz had told Miss Bach. ‘No silences. If nothing’s happening, then signal to me that nothing is happening.’ And to Leon, more fiercely, ‘See she signals me every two hours at least. Best is every hour.’

  Yanuka’s letter to Fatmeh was the first of several. Sometimes their letters crossed; sometimes Fatmeh answered his questions almost as soon as he had put them; and asked him her own questions in return.

  Start at the end, Kurtz had told them. The end, in this case, was miles of seemingly irrelevant small talk. For hour upon hour the two interrogators chatted to Yanuka with unflagging geniality, fortifying him, as he must have thought, with their stolid Swiss sincerity, building up his resistance against the day when the Israeli henchmen dragged him off to his inquisition. First, they sought his opinions on almost everything he cared to discuss, flattering him with their respectful curiosity and responsiveness. Politics, they shyly confessed, had never really been their field: their inclination had always been to place man above ideas. One of them quoted from the poetry of Robert Burns, who turned out quite by chance to be a favourite with Yanuka also. Sometimes it almost seemed they were asking him to convert them to his own way of thinking, so receptive were they to his arguments. They asked him for his reactions to the Western world now that he had been there for a year or more, first generally, then country by country, and listened entranced to his unoriginal generalisations: the self-interest of the French; the greed of the Germans; the decadence of the Italians.

  And England? they enquired innocently.

  Oh, England was the worst of all! he replied decisively. England was decadent, bankrupt, and directionless; England was the agent of American imperialism; England was everything bad, and her greatest crime was to have given his country to the Zionists. He wandered away into yet another diatribe against Israel, and they let him. They did not wish at this early stage to kindle the least suspicion in him that his travels in England were of special interest. They asked him instead about his childhood – his parents, his home in Palestine – and it was observed with silent satisfaction that he never once mentioned his elder brother; that even now, big brother was written out of Yanuka’s life entirely. With so much going for them, they noted, Yanuka would still talk only of matters he considered harmless to his cause.

  They listened with unflinching sympathy to his stories of Zionist atrocities, and to his reminiscences about his days as goalkeeper with his camp’s victorious football team in Sidon. ‘Tell us about your best match,’ they urged. ‘Tell us about your best save ever. Tell us about that cup you won, and who was there when the great Abu Ammar himself pressed it into your hand!’ Haltingly, shyly, Yanuka obliged them. Downstairs the tape-recorders turned and Miss Bach entered one nugget after another into her machine, only pausing to pass interim bulletins to Samuel the pianist for dispatch to Jerusalem, and to his counterpart, David, in Athens. Leon meanwhile was in his private heaven. Eyes half closed, he was immersing himself in Yanuka’s idiosyncratic spoken English: in his impulsive, rushing style of delivery; his spurts of literary flourish; his cadence and vocabulary; his unheralded changes of theme, which occurred practically in mid-sentence. Across the passage from him, Schwili penned and muttered to himself and chortled. But sometimes, Leon noticed, he broke off and lapsed into despair. A few seconds later, Leon would see him padding softly round his room, pacing out its dimensions with an old prisoner’s empathy for the luckless boy above.

  To talk about the diary, they had a different bluff, and a far more hazardous one. They put it off until the third real day, by which time they had picked him as clean as they knew how by the simple conversational methods. Even then, they insisted on Kurtz’s say-so before they went ahead, so nervous were they of breaking the eggshell of Yanuka’s trust in them at a point where they had no time left to resort to other methods. The watchers had found it on the day after Yanuka’s kidnapping. They had marched into his flat, three of them, wearing canary overalls with badges describing them as members of a commercial cleaning firm. A house key and an almost genuine letter of instruction from Yanuka’s landlord gave them all the authority they needed. From their canary van they fetched vacuum cleaners, mops, and a stepladder. Then they closed the door and drew the curtains and for eight full hours went through that flat like locusts, till there seemed to be nothing left they had not probed, photographed, and put back in its rightful place before laying dust over it from a puffer. And among their finds, wedged behind a bookcase in a spot handy for the telephone, was this brown leather-clad pocket diary, a handout from Middle East Airlines that Yanuka must somehow have come by. They knew he kept one; they had missed it among his effects when they grabbed him. Now, to their joy, they had found it. Some entries were in Arabic, some in French, some in English. Some were indecipherable in any language, others in a none too private word-code. Mostly, the jottings related to forward appointments, but a few had been added retrospectively: ‘Met J, phoned P.’ In addition to the diary, they discovered another prize they had been looking out for: a plump manila envelope containing a wad of receipts, kept against the day when Yanuka got round to making up his operational accounts. On instruction, the team purloined that also.

  But how to interpret the crucial entries in the diary? How to decipher them without Yanuka’s help?

  How therefore to obtain Yanuka’s help?

  They considered an increase in his drug intake, but decided against it. They feared he might unhinge completely. To resort to violence was to throw all their hard-earned goodwill out of the window. Besides, as professionals they genuinely deplored the very thought. They preferred to build on what they had already established – on fear, on dependence, and on the imminence of the fearful Israeli interrogation still to come. So first they brought him an urgent letter from Fatmeh, one of Leon’s briefest and best: ‘I have heard that the hour is very near. I beg you, I pray you, to have courage.’ They switched on the lights for him to read it, switched them off again, and stayed away longer than was customary. In the pitch darkness, they played muffled screams to him, the clanging of distant cell doors, and the sounds of a slumped body being dragged in chains along a stone corridor. Then they played the funeral bagpipes of a Palestinian military band and perhaps he thought he was dead. Certainly he lay still enough. They sent him the guards, who stripped him,
chained his hands behind his back, and put irons on his ankles. And left him again. As if for ever. They heard him whispering, ‘Oh no,’ on and on.

  They dressed Samuel the pianist in a white tunic and gave him a stethoscope, and had him listen, without interest, to Yanuka’s heart rate. All in the dark still, but perhaps the white coat was just visible to him as it flitted round his body. Again they left him. By the infra-red light they watched him sweating and shuddering, and at one point he appeared to contemplate killing himself by butting his head against the wall, which in his chained state was about the only uninhibited movement he could make. But the wall was deep in kapok, and if he had beaten himself against it all year, he would have had no satisfaction from it. They played more screams to him, then made an absolute silence. They fired one pistol shot in the darkness. It was so sudden and clear that he bucked at the sound of it. Then he began howling, but quietly, as if he couldn’t get the volume to rise.

  That was when they decided to move.

  First the guards walked into his cell, purposefully, and lifted him to his feet, one arm each. They had dressed themselves very lightly, like people prepared for strenuous activity. By the time they had dragged his shaking body as far as the cell door, Yanuka’s two Swiss saviours appeared and blocked their way, their kindly faces the very picture of concern and outrage. Then a long-delayed, passionate argument broke out between the guards and the Swiss. It was waged in Hebrew and therefore only partly comprehensible to Yanuka, but it had the ring of a last appeal. Yanuka’s interrogation had still to be approved by the governor, said the two Swiss: Regulation 6, para 9 of the Convention laid down emphatically that no intensive duress could be applied without the authority of the governor and the presence of a doctor. But the guards could not give a fig for the Convention, and said so. They had had the Convention till it was coming out of their noses, they said, indicating where their noses were. There was nearly a scuffle. Only Swiss forbearance prevented it. It was agreed instead that they would all four go to the governor now for an immediate ruling. So they stormed off together, leaving Yanuka in the dark yet again, and quite soon he was seen to hunch up to the wall and pray, though he could have had no earthly idea, by then, where the East was.