The darkness was making her dizzy. I’m going to fall over. Lucky I’m sitting down. He was at the glass table, inspecting the contents of her handbag, much as Helga had done in Cornwall. She heard a snatch of music as he fiddled with her little clock radio, and a clunk as he set it aside. This time we play no tricks, Joseph had said. You take your very own model, no substitutes. She heard him flipping through her diary while he puffed. He’s going to ask me what ‘off games’ means, she thought. See M . . . meet M . . . love M . . . ATHENS!! . . . He asked her nothing. She heard a grunt as he sat himself gratefully on the sofa; she heard the crackle of his trouser seat on stiffened chintz. A tubby man wearing expensive body oil and handmade shoes and smoking a Havana cigar sits himself gratefully on a tart’s sofa. The darkness was hypnotic. Her hands were still linked on her lap but they were someone else’s. She heard the snap of an elastic band. The letters. We shall be very cross with you if you do not bring the letters. Cindy, you have just paid for your music lessons. If only you knew where I was going when I called on you. If only I did.
The darkness was making her a little mad. If they imprison me, I’ve had it – claustrophobia’s my worst thing. She was reciting T. S. Eliot to herself, something she had learned at school the term they sacked her: about time present and time past all being contained in time future. About all time being eternally present. She hadn’t understood it then and she didn’t now. Thank God I didn’t take in Whisper, she thought. Whisper was a scurrilous black lurcher who lived across the road from her, and his owners were going abroad. She imagined Whisper sitting beside her now, wearing dark glasses too.
‘You tell us the truth, we don’t kill you,’ said a man’s voice softly.
It was Michel! Almost. Michel is almost alive again! It was Michel’s accent, Michel’s beauty of cadence, Michel’s rich and drowsy tone, produced from the back of the throat.
‘You tell us everything you told to them, what you did for them already, how much they pay you, that’s okay. We understand. We let you go.’
‘Keep your head still,’ Helga snapped from behind her.
‘We don’t think you betrayed him like betray, okay? You were frightened, you got in too deep, so now you play along with them. Okay, that’s natural. We are not inhuman people. We take you out of here, we drop you at the edge of town, you tell them everything that happened to you here. We still don’t mind. So long as you come clean.’
He sighed, as if life were becoming a burden to him.
‘Maybe you develop a dependence on some nice policeman guy, yes? You do him a favour. We understand those things. We’re committed people but we are not psychopaths. Yes?’
Helga was annoyed. ‘Do you understand him, Charlie? Answer or you will be punished!’
She made a point of not answering.
‘When did you first go to them? Tell me. After Nottingham? York? It doesn’t matter. You went to them. We agree. You got frightened, you ran to the police. “This crazy Arab boy is trying to recruit me as a terrorist. Save me, I do whatever you tell me.” That how it happened? Listen, when you go back to them, it’s still no problem. You tell them what a heroine you are. We’ll give you some information you can take to them, make you feel good. We’re nice people. Reasonable. Okay, let’s get to business. Let’s not fool around. You’re a nice lady but out of your depth. Let’s go.’
She was at peace. A profound lassitude had come over her, brought on by isolation and blindness. She was safe, she was in the womb, to begin again or to die peacefully, however nature disposed. She was sleeping the sleep of infancy or old age. Her silence enchanted her. It was the silence of perfect freedom. They were waiting for her – she could feel their impatience but had no sense of sharing it. Several times she went so far as to think of what she might say, but her voice was a long way from her and there seemed no point in going to fetch it. Helga spoke some German, and though Charlie couldn’t understand a word of it, she recognised as clearly as if it were her own language the note of bewildered resignation. The fat man answered and he sounded quite as perplexed, but not hostile. Maybe – maybe not, he seemed to be saying. She had an impression of the two of them disclaiming responsibility for her as they passed her back and forth between them: a bureaucratic hassle. The Italian joined in, but Helga told him to shut up. The discussion between the fat man and Helga resumed and she caught the word ‘logisch’. Helga is being logical. Or Charlie isn’t. Or the fat man is being told he should be.
Then the fat man said, ‘Where did you spend the night after you telephoned Helga?’
‘With a lover.’
‘And last night?’
‘With a lover.’
‘A different one?’
‘Yes, but they were both policemen.’
She reckoned that if she hadn’t had the glasses on, Helga would have hit her. She stormed up to her and her voice rasped with anger as she flung a volley of orders at her – not to be impertinent, not to lie, to answer everything immediately and without sarcasm. The questions began again and she answered wearily, letting them drag the answers out of her, sentence by sentence, because ultimately it was none of their damn business. In Nottingham what room number? In Thessalonika what hotel? Did they swim? What time did they arrive, eat; what drinks did they have sent up to their room? But gradually, as she listened first to herself and then to them, she knew that, this far at least, she had won – even though they made her wear the sunglasses when she left, and keep them on her till they had driven her a decent distance from the house.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
It was raining as they landed in Beirut and she knew it was a hot rain, because the heat of it came into the cabin while they were still circling and made her scalp itch again from the dye that Helga had made her put on her hair. They flew in over cloud like rock that burned red hot under the plane’s lights. The cloud stopped and they were low over the sea, skimming to destruction in the approaching mountains. She had a recurring nightmare that went the same way, except that her plane was flying down a crowded street with skyscrapers either side. Nothing could stop it, because the pilot was making love to her. Nothing could stop it now. They made a perfect landing, the doors opened, she smelt the Middle East for the first time, greeting her like a homecomer. The hour was seven in the evening, but it could have been three in the morning, for she knew at once that this was not a world that went to bed. The uproar in the reception hall reminded her of Derby Day before the ‘off’; there were enough armed men in different uniforms to begin their own war. Clutching her shoulder bag to her chest, she shoved her way towards the immigration queue and discovered to her surprise that she was smiling. Her East German passport, her false appearance, which five hours ago at London Airport had been matters of life and death to her, were trivial in this atmosphere of restless, dangerous urgency.
‘Take the left queue, and when you show your passport ask to speak to Mr Mercedes,’ Helga had commanded as they sat in the Citroën in the car park at Heathrow.
‘What happens if he looses off at me in German?’
The question was beneath her. ‘If you get lost, take a taxi to the Commodore Hotel, sit in the foyer, and wait. That is an order. Mercedes like the car.’
‘Then what?’
‘Charlie, I think actually you are being a bit stubborn and a bit stupid. Please stop this now.’
‘Or you’ll shoot me,’ Charlie suggested.
‘Miss Palme! Passport. Pass. Yes, please!’
Palme was her German name. Pronounced ‘Pal-mer’, Helga had said. It was spoken by a small, happy Arab with a day’s growth of beard and curly hair and immaculate, threadbare clothes. ‘Please,’ he repeated, and plucked at her sleeve. His jacket was open and he had a big silver automatic shoved into his waistband. There were twenty people between herself and the immigration officer, and Helga hadn’t said it would be like this at all.
‘I am Mr Danny. Please. Miss Palme. Come.’
She gave him her passport and he dived awa
y with it into the crowd, holding his arms wide for her to follow in his wake. So much for Helga. So much for Mercedes. Danny had vanished, but a moment later he reappeared looking very proud, clutching a white landing-card in one hand and in the other a big official-looking man in a black leather coat.
‘Friends,’ Danny explained, with a patriot’s grand smile. ‘Everybody friends of Palestine.’
Somehow she doubted it, but faced with his enthusiasm she was too polite to say so. The big man looked her over gravely, then studied the passport, which he handed to Danny. Lastly, he studied the white card, which he posted into his top pocket.
‘Willkommen,’ he said, with a swift diagonal nod, but it was an invitation to hurry.
They were at the doors as the fight broke out. It began small, as something that a uniformed official had apparently said to a prosperous-looking traveller. Suddenly both were shouting and passing their hands very close to each other’s faces. Within seconds, each man had acquired champions, and as Danny guided her to the car park, a group of soldiers in green berets were hobbling towards the scene, unslinging their machine guns on the way.
‘Syrians,’ Danny explained, and smiled philosophically at her as if to say that every country had its Syrians.
The car was an old blue Peugeot full of stale cigarette smoke, and it was parked beside a coffee stall. Danny opened the back door and dusted the cushions with his hand. As she got in, a boy slipped in beside her from the other side. As Danny started the engine, another boy appeared and sat himself in the passenger seat. It was too dark for her to see their features, but she could see their machine guns clearly. They were so young that for a moment she had difficulty in believing that their guns were real. The boy beside her offered her a cigarette and was sad when Charlie declined.
‘You speak Spanish?’ he enquired with the greatest courtesy, by way of an alternative. Charlie did not. ‘Then you forgive my English language. If you would speak Spanish, I would speak perfectly.’
‘But your English is wonderful.’
‘This is not true,’ he replied reprovingly, as if he had already identified a Western perfidy, and lapsed into a troubled silence.
A couple of shots rang out behind them, but nobody remarked on them. They were approaching a sandbagged emplacement. Danny stopped the car. A uniformed sentry stared at her, then waved them through with his machine gun.
‘Was he Syrian too?’ she asked.
‘Lebanese,’ said Danny, and sighed.
But she could feel his excitement all the same. She could feel it in all of them – a keening, a quickness of eye and mind. The street was part battlefield, part building site; the passing street lamps, those that worked, revealed it in hasty patches. Stubs of charred tree recalled a gracious avenue; new bougainvillaea had begun to cover the ruins. Burnt-out cars, peppered with bullet-holes, lay around the pavements. They passed lighted shanties, with garish shops inside, and high silhouettes of bombed buildings broken into mountain crags. They passed a house so pierced with shellholes that it resembled a gigantic cheese-grater balanced against the pale sky. A bit of moon, slipping from one hole to the next, kept pace with them. Occasionally, a brand-new building would appear, half built, half lit, half lived in, a speculator’s gamble of red girders and black glass.
‘Prague I was two years. Havana, Cuba, three. You have been to Cuba?’
The boy next to her seemed to have recovered from his disappointment.
‘I have not been to Cuba,’ she confessed.
‘Now I am official interpreter, Spanish Arabic.’
‘Fantastic,’ said Charlie. ‘Congratulations.’
‘I interpret for you, Miss Palme?’
‘Any time,’ said Charlie, and there was much laughter. Western woman was reinstated after all.
Danny was braking the car to a walking pace and lowering his window. Dead ahead of them in the centre of the road a brazier glowed, and round it sat a group of men and boys in white kaffiyehs and bits of khaki battledress. Several brown dogs had made their own encampment close to them. She remembered Michel in his home village, listening to the tales of travellers, and thought, Now they have made a village in the street. As Danny dipped his lights, an old, beautiful man stood up, rubbed his back, shuffled over to them, machine gun in hand, and leaned his lined face into Danny’s window until they could embrace. Their conversation flowed timelessly back and forth. Ignored, Charlie listened to every word, imagining that she could somehow understand. But, looking past him, she had a less comfortable vision: standing in a motionless half-circle, four of the old man’s audience had their machine guns trained upon the car, and not one of them was above fifteen years old.
‘Our people,’ said Charlie’s neighbour, with reverence, as they continued on their way. ‘Palestinian commandos. Our part of town.’
Michel’s part too, she thought proudly.
You will find them an easy people to love, Joseph had told her.
Charlie spent four nights and four days with the boys, and loved them singly and collectively. They were the first of her several families. They moved her constantly, like a treasure, always by dark, always with the greatest courtesy. She had arrived so suddenly, they explained, with charming regret; it was necessary for our Captain to make certain preparations. They called her ‘Miss Palme’ and perhaps they really thought it was her name. They returned her love for them, yet they asked her nothing personal and nothing obtrusive; they maintained in every sense a shy and disciplined reticence, which made her curious about the nature of the authority that governed them. Her first bedroom was at the top of an old shell-torn house empty of all other life except for the absent proprietor’s parrot, which had a smoker’s cough and produced it every time someone lit a cigarette. Its other trick was to squawk like a telephone, which it did in the dead hours, causing her to steal to the door and wait for it to be answered. The boys slept on the landing outside, one at a time, while the other two smoked, drank tiny glasses of sweet tea, and kept up a campfire murmur over their card games.
The nights were eternal, yet no two minutes were the same. The very sounds were at war with one another, first lying off at a safe distance, then advancing, then grouping, then falling upon each other in a skirmish of conflicting dins – a burst of music, the scream of car tyres and sirens – followed by the deep silence of a forest. In that orchestra, gunfire was a minor instrument: a drumbeat here, a tattoo there, sometimes the slow whistle of a shell. Once she heard peals of laughter, but human voices were few. And once, in early morning after an urgent tapping at her door, Danny and the two boys tiptoed together to her window. Going after them, she saw a car parked a hundred yards along the street. Smoke poured out of it; it lifted and rolled itself onto its side like someone turning over in bed. A puff of warm air pushed her back into the room. Something fell off a shelf. She heard a thud inside her head.
‘Peace,’ said Mahmoud, the prettiest, with a wink; and they all retired, bright-eyed and confiding.
Only the dawn was predictable, when from crackling loudspeakers wailed the muezzin, summoning the faithful to prayer.
Yet Charlie accepted everything, and gave herself entirely in return. In the unreason around her, in this unlooked-for truce for meditation, she found at last a cradle for her own irrationality. And since no paradox was too great to bear amid such chaos, she found a place in it for Joseph too. Her love for him, in this world of unexplained devotions, was in everything she heard and looked at. And when the boys, over tea and cigarettes, regaled her with brave stories of their families’ sufferings at the hands of the Zionists – just as Michel had done, and with the same romantic relish – it was her love for Joseph once more, her memory of his soft voice and rare smile, that opened her heart to their tragedy.
Her second bedroom was high up in a glittering apartment house. From her window, she could stare into the black façade of a new international bank, and past it to the unmoving sea. The empty beach with its deserted beach-huts was like a holiday
resort permanently out of season. A single beachcomber had the eccentricity of a Christmas Day bather at the Serpentine. But the strangest thing in that place was the curtains. When the boys drew them for her at night, she noticed nothing odd. But when the dawn came, she saw a line of bullet-holes running in a wavy snake across the window. That was the day she cooked the boys omelettes for breakfast, then taught them gin rummy for matches.
On the third night, she slept above some sort of military headquarters. There were bars over the windows and shell-holes on the staircase. Posters showed children waving machine guns or bunches of flowers. Dark-eyed guards lounged at every landing, and the whole building had a rackety, Foreign Legion air.
‘Our Captain will see you soon,’ Danny assured her tenderly, from time to time. ‘He is making preparations. He is a great man.’
She was beginning to learn the Arab smile that explained delay. To console her in her waiting, Danny told her the story of his father. After twenty years in the camps, it seemed the old man had grown light-headed with despair. So one morning before sunrise he packed his few belongings into a bag, together with the deeds of his land, and without telling his family, set off across the Zionist lines with the aim of reclaiming his farm in person. Hastening after him, Danny and his brothers arrived in time to see his little crooked figure advance farther and farther into the valley until a landmine blew him up. Danny related all this with a puzzled exactness, while the other two patrolled his English, interrupting to rephrase a sentence when its syntax or cadence displeased them, nodding like old men to approve a phrase. When he had finished, they asked her a number of grave questions about the chastity of Western women, of which they had heard disgraceful but not wholly uninteresting things.
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