The Little Drummer Girl

by John le Carré

  Her name was Salma, she said with her sad smile, and her father was the headman.

  Charlie allowed herself to be ushered forward. The hut was tiny, and clean as a hospital ward. It had a handbasin and a lavatory and a rear courtyard the size of a pocket handkerchief.

  ‘What do you do here, Salma?’

  The question seemed momentarily to puzzle her. To be here was already an occupation.

  ‘So where did you learn your English?’ Charlie said.

  In America, Salma replied; she was a graduate in biochemistry from the University of Minnesota.

  There is a terrible, yet pastoral peace that comes from living for a long time among the world’s real victims. In the camp, Charlie experienced at last the sympathy that life till now had denied her. Waiting, she joined the ranks of those who had waited all their lives. Sharing their captivity, she dreamed that she had extricated herself from her own. Loving them, she imagined that she was receiving their forgiveness for the many duplicities that had brought her here. No sentries were assigned to her, and on her first morning, as soon as she woke, she set to work cautiously probing the limits of her freedom. There seemed to be none. She walked the perimeter of the playing fields and watched small boys with hunched shoulders straining bitterly to achieve the physique of manhood. She found the clinic and the schools and the tiny shops that sold everything from oranges to family-size bottles of Head and Shoulders shampoo. In the clinic, an old Swedish woman talked to her contentedly about God’s will.

  ‘The poor Jews cannot rest while they have us on their consciences,’ she explained dreamily. ‘God has been so hard on them. Why can’t he teach them how to love?’

  At midday Salma brought her a flat cheese pie and a pot of tea, and when they had lunched in her hut they climbed together through an orange grove to a hilltop very like the spot where Michel had taught her to shoot his brother’s gun. A range of brown mountains stretched along the western and southern horizons.

  ‘Those to the east are Syria,’ said Salma, pointing across the valley. ‘But those’ – she moved her arm southward, then let it fall in a sudden gesture of despair – ‘those are ours, and that is where the Zionists will come from to kill us.’

  On the way down, Charlie glimpsed army trucks parked under camouflage netting and, in a coppice of cedar trees, the dull glint of gun barrels pointed south. Her father came from Haifa, all of forty miles away, Salma said. Her mother was dead, machine-gunned by an Israeli fighter plane as she left the shelter. She had a brother who was a successful banker in Kuwait. No, she said with a smile, in answer to the obvious question; men found her too tall, and too intelligent.

  In the evening Salma took Charlie to a children’s concert. Afterwards they went to a schoolroom and, with twenty other women, glued lurid patches to children’s tee-shirts for the great demonstration, using a machine like a big green waffle-iron that kept fusing. Some of the patches were slogans in Arabic, promising the total victory; some were photographs of Yassir Arafat, whom the women called Abu Ammar. Charlie stayed up most of the night with them and became their champion. Two thousand shirts, the right sizes, all done in time, thanks to Comrade Leila.

  Soon her hut was full of children from dawn to dusk, some to speak English with her, some to teach her to dance and sing their songs. And some to hold her hand and march up and down the street with her, for the prestige of being in her company. As to their mothers, they brought her so many sugar biscuits and cheese pies that she could have held out here for ever, which was what she wanted to do.

  So who is she? Charlie wondered, addressing her imagination to yet another unfinished short story, as she watched Salma make her sad and private way among her people. It was only gradually that an explanation began to suggest itself. Salma had been out in the world. She knew how Western people talked of Palestine. And she had seen more clearly than her father just how far away were the brown mountains of their homeland.

  The great demonstration took place three days later, starting on the playing field in the middle of the morning heat and progressing slowly round the camp, through streets overflowing with crowds and emblazoned with hand-embroidered banners that would have been the pride of any English Women’s Institute. Charlie was standing on the doorstep of her hut holding up a little girl who was too young to march, and the air attack began a couple of minutes after the model of Jerusalem had been carried past her shoulder-high by half a dozen kids. First came Jerusalem, represented – Salma explained – by the Mosque of Omar done in gold paper and sea shells. Then came the children of the martyrs, each holding an olive branch and wearing an all-night tee-shirt. Then, like a continuation of the festivities, came the jolly little tattoo of cannon fire from the hillside. But no one screamed or started to move away. Not yet. Salma, who was standing beside her, did not even lift her head.

  Until then, Charlie had not really thought about aircraft at all. She had noticed a couple, high up, and admired their white plumes as they lazily circled the blue sky. But it had not occurred to her, in her ignorance, that the Palestinians might possess no planes, or that the Israeli Air Force might take exception to fervent claims to their territory made within walking distance of their border. She had been more interested in the uniformed girls dancing to each other on the tractor-drawn floats, tossing their machine guns back and forth to the rhythm of the crowd’s handclap; in the fighting boys with strips of red kaffiyeh bound Apache-style round their foreheads, posing on the backs of lorries with their machine guns; in the unflagging ululation of so many voices from one end of the camp to the other – did they never get hoarse?

  Also, at the precise moment, her eye had been drawn to a small sideshow directly in front of where she and Salma stood – a child being chastened by a guard. The guard had taken off his belt and folded it, and was slapping the child across the face with the loop, and for a second, while she was still considering whether to intervene, Charlie had the illusion, amid so much conflicting din around her, that the belt was causing the explosions.

  Then came the whine of aircraft turning under strain, and a lot more fire from the ground, though surely it was too light and small to impress something so fast and high up. The first bomb, when it struck, was almost an anti-climax: if you hear it, you’re still alive. She saw its flash a quarter of a mile away on the hillside, then a black onion of smoke as the noise and blast swept over her at the same time. She turned to Salma and shouted something at her, raising her voice as if a storm were blowing, though everything by then was surprisingly quiet; but Salma’s face was fixed in a stare of hatred as she looked into the sky.

  ‘When they want to hit us, they hit us,’ she said. ‘Today they are playing with us. You must have brought us luck.’

  The significance of this suggestion was too much for Charlie, and she rejected it outright.

  The second bomb fell and it seemed farther away, or perhaps she was less impressionable: it could fall anywhere it liked except in these packed alleys, with their columns of patient children waiting like tiny, doomed sentries for the lava to roll down the mountain. The band struck up, much louder than before; the procession started, twice as brilliant. The band was playing a marching song and the crowd was clapping to it. Unfreezing her hands, Charlie set down her little girl and started to clap too. Her hands stung and her shoulders ached, but she went on clapping. The procession drew to the side; a jeep raced by, lights flashing, followed by ambulances and a fire engine. A pall of yellow dust hung behind them like battle smoke. The breeze dispersed it, the band resumed, and now it was the turn of the fishermen’s union, represented by a sedate yellow van decked in pictures of Arafat, with a giant paper fish, painted red, white, and black, on its roof. After it, led by a band of pipers, came yet another river of children with wooden guns, singing the words to the march. The singing swelled, the whole crowd was taking part in it, and Charlie, words or none, was singing her heart out.

  The planes disappeared. Palestine had won another victory.

&nb
sp; ‘They are taking you to another place tomorrow,’ Salma said that evening as they walked on the hillside.

  ‘I’m not going,’ said Charlie.

  The planes returned two hours later, just before dark, when she was back in her hut. The siren started too late and she was still running for the shelters as the first wave came in – two of them, straight out of an air display, deafening the crowd with their engines – will they ever pull out of the dive? They did, and the blast of their first bomb threw her against the steel door, though the noise was not as bad as the earthquake that accompanied it, and the hysterical swimming-pool screams that filled the black, rank smoke on the other side of the playing field. The thud of her body alerted someone inside, the door opened, and strong women’s hands pulled her into the darkness and forced her onto a wooden bench. At first she was stone deaf, but gradually she heard the whimpering of terrified children, and the steadier but fervent voices of their mothers. Someone lit an oil lamp and fixed it to a hook at the centre of the ceiling, and for a while it seemed to Charlie in her giddiness that she was living inside a Hogarth print that had been hung the wrong way up. Then she realised Salma was beside her, and she remembered she had been with her ever since the alarm had sounded. Another pair of planes followed – or was it the first pair making a second run? – the oil lamp swung, and her vision righted itself as a stick of bombs approached in careful crescendo. She felt the first two like blows on her body – no, not again, not again, oh please. The third was the loudest and killed her outright, the fourth and fifth told her she was alive after all.

  ‘America!’ a woman shouted suddenly, in hysteria and pain, straight at Charlie. ‘America, America, America!’ She tried to get the other women to accuse her also, but Salma told her gently to be quiet.

  Charlie waited an hour, but it was probably two minutes, and when still nothing happened she looked at Salma to say, ‘Let’s go,’ because she had decided that the shelter was worse than anywhere. Salma shook her head.

  ‘They are waiting for us to come out,’ she explained quietly, perhaps thinking of her mother. ‘We cannot come out before dark.’

  The dark came and Charlie returned alone to her hut. She lit a candle because the electricity was off, and the last thing she saw in the whole room was the sprig of white heather in the tooth mug above her handbasin. She studied the kitschy little painting of the Palestinian child; she stepped into the courtyard where her clothes still hung on the line – hooray, they’re dry. She had no means of ironing, so she opened a drawer of her tiny clapboard chest and folded the clothes into it with a camp dweller’s concentration upon neatness. One of my kids put it there, she told herself gaily when the white heather once more forced itself upon her vision. The jolly one with gold teeth I call Aladdin. It’s a present from Salma on my last night. How sweet of her. Of him.

  ‘We are a love-affair,’ Salma had said as they parted. ‘You’ll go, and when you’ve gone, we’ll be a dream.’

  You bastards, she thought. You rotten, killing Zionist bastards. If I hadn’t been here, you’d have bombed them to Kingdom Come.

  ‘The only loyalty is to be here,’ Salma had said.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Charlie was not alone in watching the time pass and her life unfold before her eyes. From the moment she had crossed the line, Litvak, Kurtz, and Becker – her whole former family, in fact – had been forced, in one way and another, to harness their impatience to the alien and desultory tempo of their adversaries. ‘There is nothing so hard in war,’ Kurtz liked to quote to his subordinates – and assuredly to himself as well – ‘as the heroic feat of holding back.’

  Kurtz was holding back as never before in his career. The very act of withdrawing his ragged army from its English shadows appeared – to its foot soldiers, at least – more like a defeat than the victories they had so far scored but scarcely celebrated. Within hours of Charlie’s departure, the Hampstead house was given back to the diaspora, the radio van stripped, its electronic equipment shipped as diplomatic baggage to Tel Aviv, somehow in disgrace. The van itself, its false plates removed, its engine numbers sheared from their casings, became yet another burnt-out roadside wreck somewhere between Bodmin Moor and civilisation. But Kurtz did not linger for these obsequies. He returned hot-foot to Disraeli Street, chained himself reluctantly to the desk he hated, and became that same coordinator whose functions he had derided to Alexis. Jerusalem was enjoying a balmy spell of winter sunshine, and as he hastened from one secret office building to another, fighting off attacks, begging resources, the gold stone of the Walled City mirrored itself in the shimmering blue sky. For once, Kurtz drew little solace from the sight. His war machine, he said later, had become a horse-drawn carriage with the horses pulling different ways. In the field, despite all Gavron’s effort to prevent him, he was his own man; at home, where every second-class politician and third-class soldier saw himself as some kind of genius at intelligence, he had more critics than Elijah and more enemies than the Samaritans. His first battle was for Charlie’s continued existence and perhaps for his own too, a kind of obligatory scene that started the moment Kurtz set foot in Gavron’s office.

  Gavron the Rook was already standing, his arms lifted, shaping for the brawl. His shaggy black hair was more disorderly than ever.

  ‘Had a nice time?’ he squawked. ‘Eaten some good meals? You have put on some weight out there, I see.’

  Then bang and they were off, their raised voices echoing everywhere while they screamed and shouted at each other and hammered the table with clenched fists like a married couple having a cathartic quarrel. What had become of Kurtz’s promises of progress? the Rook demanded. Where was this great reckoning he had spoken of? What was this he heard about Alexis, when he had specifically instructed Marty not to proceed with this man?

  ‘Do you wonder that I lose faith in you – so much invention and money, so many orders disobeyed, so few results?’

  As a punishment, Gavron obliged him to attend a meeting of his guidance committee, which by now could talk of nothing but the ultimate recourse. Kurtz had to lobby his heart away, even to obtain a modification of their plans.

  ‘But what have you got going, Marty?’ his friends begged him in low urgent voices in the corridors. ‘Give us a hint at least, so that we know why we are helping you.’

  His silence offended them, and they left him feeling more like a shabby appeaser.

  There were the other fronts to fight on too. To monitor Charlie’s progress through enemy territory, he was obliged to go cap in hand to the department that specialised in the maintenance of grass-roots courier lines and listening posts along the north-east seaboard. Its director, a Sephardi from Aleppo, hated everyone but hated Kurtz particularly. A trail like that could take him anywhere! he objected. What about his own operations? As to providing field support for three of Litvak’s watchers merely to give the girl a sense of hominess in her new surroundings, such feather-bedding was unknown to him, it could not be done. It cost Kurtz blood, and all sorts of underhand concessions, to obtain the scale of collaboration he required. From these and similar deals, Misha Gavron remained callously aloof, preferring to allow the market forces to find their natural solution. If Kurtz believed enough, he would get his way, he told his people secretly; a little curbing, added to a little of the whip, did such a man no harm, said Gavron.

  Reluctant to leave Jerusalem even for a night while these intrigues continued, Kurtz consigned Litvak to the European shuttle as his emissary charged with strengthening and recasting the surveillance team, and to prepare by all possible means for what they all prayed would be the final phase. The carefree days of Munich, when a couple of boys on double shift could meet their needs, were over for good. To maintain a full-time watch on the heavenly trio of Mesterbein, Helga, and Rossino, whole platoons of fieldmen had to be levied – all German-speakers and many of them rusty from disuse. Litvak’s suspicion of non-Israeli Jews only added to the headache, but he would not yield: they
were too soft in action, he said; too divided in their loyalties. On Kurtz’s orders, Litvak also flew to Frankfurt for a clandestine meeting with Alexis at the airport, partly in order to obtain his help in the surveillance operation, and partly – as Kurtz had it – ‘to test his spine, a notably uncertain article’. In the event, the renewal of their acquaintance was a disaster, for the two men loathed each other on sight. Worse still, Litvak’s opinion confirmed the earlier prediction of Gavron’s psychiatrists: that Alexis should not be trusted with a used bus-ticket.

  ‘The decision is taken,’ Alexis announced to Litvak, even before they had sat down, in a furious, half-whispered, half-coherent monologue that kept slipping into falsetto. ‘I never go back on a decision; it is known of me. I shall present myself to my Minister as soon as this meeting is over, and make a clean breast of everything. For a man of honour there is no alternative.’ Alexis, it quickly developed, had suffered not merely a change of heart but a full-blown political realignment:

  ‘Nothing against Jews, naturally – as a German, one has one’s conscience – but from recent experiences – a certain bomb incident – certain measures one has been forced – blackmailed – into undertaking – one begins also to see reasons why historically the Jews have attracted persecution. Forgive me.’

  Litvak, with his locked-in glower, forgave him nothing.

  ‘Your friend Schulmann – an able man, impressive – persuasive also – your friend is without all moderation. He has performed unlicensed acts of violence on German soil; he is showing a degree of excess which has too long been attributed to us Germans.’

  Litvak had had enough. His expression white and sickly, he had turned his eyes away, perhaps to conceal their fire. ‘Why don’t you call him up and tell him all that yourself?’ he suggested. So Alexis did. From the airport telephone office, using the special number Kurtz had given him, while Litvak stood at his side, holding the spare earpiece to his head.