CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
It was the end of the line. It was the worst place of all her lives this far, a place to forget even while she was there, her bloody boarding school with rapists added, a forum stuck out in the desert and played with live ammunition. The battered dream of Palestine lay five hours’ back-breaking drive behind the hills, and in place of it they had this tatty little fort, like a film set for a Beau Geste remake, with yellow stone battlements and a stone staircase and half its side bombed out, and a sandbagged main gate with a flagpole on it that slapped its frayed ropes in the scalding wind and never flew a flag. No one slept in the fort that she knew of. The fort was for administration and interviews; and lamb and rice three times a day; and the turgid group discussions till after midnight at which the East Germans harangued the West Germans and the Cubans harangued everybody, and an American zombie who called himself Abdul read a twenty-page paper on the immediate achievement of world peace.
Their other social centre was the small-arms range, which was not a disused quarry on a hilltop, but an old barrack hut with the windows blocked and a line of electric light-bulbs rigged from the steel beams, and leaking sandbags round the walls. The targets were not oil cans either, but brutish man-sized effigies of American marines, with painted grimaces and fixed bayonets and rolls of sticky brown paper at their feet to patch up their bullet-holes after you had shot them. It was a place constantly in demand, often at dead of night, full of boisterous laughter and groans of competitive disappointment. One day a great fighter came, some kind of terrorist VIP in a chauffeur-driven Volvo, and the place was cleared while he shot in it. Another day a bunch of very wild blacks burst in on Charlie’s class, and loosed off magazine after magazine without paying the smallest attention to the young East German in command.
‘That satisfy you, whitey?’ one of them bellowed over his shoulder, in a rich South African accent.
‘Please – oh yes – very good,’ said the East German, very thrown by their discrimination.
They swaggered away, laughing their heads off, leaving the marines holed like colanders, with the result that the girls’ first hour of that day was spent patching them from head to toe.
For living quarters, they had the three long huts, one with cubicles for women; one without cubicles for men; and a third with a so-called library for the training staff – and if they invite you to the library, said a tall Swedish girl called Fatima, don’t expect too much in the way of reading. To wake them in the morning, they had a belch of martial music over a loudspeaker they couldn’t turn off, followed by physical exercises on a sand flat smeared with lines of sticky dew like gigantic snail tracks. But Fatima said the other places were worse. Fatima, to believe her version of herself, was a training freak. She had been trained in the Yemen, and in Libya, and in Kiev. She was playing the circuit like a tennis pro until somebody decided what to do with her. She had a three-year-old son, called Knut, who ran around naked and looked lonely, but when Charlie talked to him he cried.
Their guards were a new kind of Arab she hadn’t met till now and didn’t need to meet again: strutting, near-silent cowboys whose game was humiliating Westerners. They postured on the perimeters of the fort and rode six up in jeeps at breakneck speed. Fatima said they were a special militia raised on the Syrian border. Some were so young Charlie wondered their feet could reach the pedals. At night, till Charlie and a Japanese girl raised hell, the same kids arrived in raiding parties of twos and threes and tried to persuade the girls to take a ride into the desert. Fatima usually went, so did an East German, and they came back looking impressed. But the rest of the girls, if they bothered, played safe with Western instructors, which made the Arab boys even crazier.
All the trainers were men, and for morning prayers they ranged themselves before the comrade students like a rabble army while one of them read an aggressive condemnation of the day’s arch-enemy: Zionism, Egyptian treachery, European capitalist exploitation, Zionism again, and a new one to Charlie called Christian expansionism – but perhaps that was because it was Christmas Day, a feast celebrated by determined official neglect. The East Germans were cropped and sullen and pretended that women bored them; the Cubans were by turns flamboyant, homesick, and arrogant, and most of them stank and had rotting teeth, except for gentle Fidel, who was everybody’s favourite. The Arabs were the most volatile and acted toughest, screaming at the stragglers and, more than once, spraying bullets at the feet of the supposedly inattentive, so that one of the Irish boys bit clean through his finger in a panic, to the great amusement of Abdul the American, who was watching from a distance, which he often did, smirking and slopping after them like a stills man on a film set, taking notes on a pad for his great revolutionary novel.
But the star of the place during those first insane days was a bombcrazed Czech called Bubi, who on their first morning shot his own combat hat along the sand, first with a Kalashnikov, then with a massive .45 target pistol, and lastly, to finish the brute off, with a Russian grenade, which blew it fifty feet in the air.
Lingua franca for political discussion was O-level English with a bit of French here and there, and if Charlie ever got home alive she swore in her secret heart that she would dine out on those cretinous midnight exchanges concerning the ‘Dawn of the Revolution’ for the rest of her unnatural life. Meanwhile, she laughed at nothing. She had not laughed since the bastards blew up her lover on the road to Munich; and her recent vision of the agony of his people had only intensified her bitter need for retribution.
You will treat everything with a great and lonely seriousness, Joseph had told her, himself as lonely and serious as he could wish her. You will be aloof, maybe a little crazy, they are used to that. You will ask no questions, you will be private to yourself, day and night.
Their numbers vacillated from the first day. When their lorry left Tyre, their party was five boys and three girls and conversation was forbidden by order of two guards with cordite smears on their faces who rode with them in the back while their lorry bucked and slithered over the stony hill trail. A girl who turned out to be Basque managed to whisper to her that they were in Aden; two Turkish boys said they were in Cyprus. They arrived to find ten other students waiting, but by the second day the two Turks and the Basque had vanished, presumably at night when lorries could be heard arriving and leaving without lights.
For their inauguration they were required to swear an oath of loyalty to the Anti-Imperialist Revolution and to study the ‘Rules for This Camp’, which were set out like the Ten Commandments on a flat space of white wall in the Comrades’ Reception Centre. All comrades to use their Arab names at all times, no drugs, no nudity, no swearing by God, no private conversations, no alcohol, no cohabitation, no masturbation. While Charlie was still wondering which of these injunctions to break first, a recorded address of welcome, no credits, was played over the loudspeaker.
‘My comrades. Who are we? We are the ones with no name, no uniform. We are the escaped rats from the capitalist occupation. From the pain-ridden camps of the Lebanon – we come! And shall fight the genocide! From the concrete tombs of Western cities – we come! And find each other! And together we shall light the torch on behalf of eight hundred million starving mouths across the world!’
But when it was over, she felt a cold sweat on her back and a pounding anger in her breast. We shall, she thought. We shall, we shall. Glancing at an Arab girl beside her, she saw the same fervour in her eye.
Day and night, Joseph had said.
Day and night, therefore, she strove – for Michel, for her own mad sanity, for Palestine, for Fatmeh and for Salma and the bombed children in the Sidon prison; driving herself outward in order to escape the chaos inside; gathering together the elements of her assumed character as never before, welding them into a single combative identity.
I am a grieving, outraged widow and I have come here to take up my dead lover’s fight.
I am the awakened militant who has wasted too long on half-
measures and now stands before you sword in hand.
I have put my hand on the Palestinian heart; I am pledged to lift the world up by its ears to make it listen.
I am on fire but I am cunning and resourceful. I am the sleepy wasp that can wait all winter long to sting.
I’m Comrade Leila, a citizen of the world revolution.
Day and night.
She played this part to its limit, from the angry snap with which she performed her unarmed combat to the unyielding glower with which she regarded her own face in the mirror as she savagely brushed out her long black hair with its red roots already showing. Until what had begun as an effort of will became a habit of mind and body, a sickly, permanent, solitary anger that quickly communicated itself to her audience, whether staff or students. Almost from the first, they accepted the certain strangeness in her, which gave her distance. Perhaps they had seen it in others before her; Joseph said they had. The cold-eyed passion she brought to the weapon-training sessions – which extended from hand-held Russian rocket launchers through bomb-making with red circuit wire and detonators to the inevitable Kalashnikov – impressed even the ebullient Bubi. She was dedicated, but she was apart. Gradually she felt them defer to her. The men, even the Syrian militia, ceased to proposition her indiscriminately; the women gave up their suspicion of her striking looks; the weaker comrades started timidly to gather to her, and the strong to acknowledge her as an equal.
There were three beds in her dormitory but to begin with she had only one companion – a tiny Japanese girl who spent much time kneeling in prayer, but to fellow mortals spoke no word of any language but her own. Asleep, she ground her teeth so loudly that one night Charlie woke her up, then sat beside her, holding her hand while she wept silent Asian tears till the music belched and it was time to get her up. Soon afterwards, without explanation, she too vanished, to be replaced by two Algerian sisters, who smoked rancid cigarettes and seemed to know as much about guns and bombs as Bubi did. They were plain girls to Charlie’s eye, but the training staff held them in veneration for some unexplained feat of arms against the oppressor. In the mornings they were to be seen wandering sleepily out of the training staff’s quarters in their woollen jump-suits as the less favoured were finishing their unarmed combat. Thus Charlie for a while had the dormitory to herself, and though Fidel, the gentle Cuban, appeared one night, scrubbed and brushed like a chorister, to press his revolutionary love for her, she maintained her pose of stiff-jawed self-denial and granted him not so much as a kiss before sending him on his way.
The next to apply for her favours after Fidel was Abdul the American. He called on her late one night, knocking so softly that she expected to see one of the Algerian girls, since both regularly forgot their keys. By now, Charlie had decided that Abdul was a permanency of the camp. He was too close to the staff, he had too much licence, and no function but to read his dreary papers and quote Marighella in a rambling Deep South accent, which Charlie suspected was put on. Fidel, who admired him, said he was a Vietnam deserter who hated imperialism and had come here by way of Havana.
‘Hi,’ said Abdul, and slipped past her, grinning, before she had a chance to slam the door on him. He sat on her bed and started to roll himself a cigarette.
‘Blow,’ she said. ‘Scram.’
‘Sure,’ he agreed, and went on rolling his cigarette. He was tall and balding and, seen at close quarters, very thin. He wore Cuban fatigues and a silky brown beard that seemed to have run out of hair.
‘What’s your real name, Leila?’ he asked.
‘Smith.’
‘I like it. Smith.’ He repeated the name several times in different keys. ‘You Irish, Smith?’ He lit the cigarette and offered her a pull. She ignored it. ‘I hear you are the personal property of Mr Tayeh. I admire your taste. Tayeh’s a very picky guy. What d’you do for a living, Smith?’
She strode to the door and pulled it open, but he stayed on the bed, grinning at her in a weakly, knowing way through his cigarette smoke.
‘You don’t want to screw?’ he enquired. ‘Pity. These Fräuleins are like Barnum’s baby elephants. Thought we might raise the standard a little. Demonstrate the Special Relationship.’
Languidly he got up, dropped his cigarette at her bedside, and ground it with his boot.
‘You don’t have a little hash for a poor man, do you, Smith?’
‘Out,’ she said.
Passively acceding to her judgment, he shuffled towards her, then stopped and lifted his head, and stayed still; and to her embarrassment she saw that his exhausted, characterless eyes were filled with tears, and there were lumps of childish supplication round his jaw.
‘Tayeh won’t let me jump off the merry-go-round,’ he complained. His Deep South had given way to East Coast ordinary. ‘He fears my ideological batteries have run low. And rightly, I’m afraid. I kind of forgot the reasoning about how every dead baby is a step towards world peace. Which is a drag, when you happen to have killed a few. Tayeh is being very sporting about it. Tayeh’s a sporting man. “If you want to go, go,” he says. Then he points at the desert. Sportingly.’
Like a puzzled beggar, he took her right hand in both of his and stared into the empty palm. ‘My name is Halloran,’ he explained, as if he himself had trouble remembering it. ‘For Abdul, read Arthur J. Halloran. And if you are ever passing a US Embassy someplace, Smith, I’d be awfully grateful if you’d drop a note in to say that Arthur Halloran, formerly of Boston and the Vietnam show, latterly of less official armies, would like to hurry home and pay his debt to society before those crazy Maccabees come over the hill and zap the lot of us. Will you do that for me, Smith, old girl? I mean when the chips are down, us Anglos are a cut above the field, don’t you think?’
She could barely move. An irresistible drowsiness had come over her like the first feelings of cold in a very wounded body. She wanted only to sleep. With Halloran. To give him the comfort he asked and extract it in return. Never mind if in the morning he would inform on her. Let him. All she knew was she could not face, for one more night, this hellish empty cell.
He was still holding her hand. She let him, hovering like a suicide on the window-ledge who stares longingly into the street far below. Then, with a huge effort, she freed herself, and with both hands together shoved his unresisting, emaciated body into the corridor.
She sat on her bed. It was the same night, definitely. She could smell his cigarette. See the stub of it at her feet.
If you want to go, go, said Tayeh. Then he pointed at the desert. Tayeh is a very sporting man.
There is no fear like it, Joseph had said. Your courage will be like money. You will spend and spend, and one night you will look in your pockets and you’ll be bankrupt and that is when the real courage begins.
There is only one logic, Joseph had said: you. There can be only one survivor: you. One person you can trust: you.
She stood at the window, worrying about the sand. She had not realised sand could climb so high. By day, tamed by the scalding sun, it lay docile, but when the moon shone, as now, it swelled into restive cones that dodged from one horizon to another, so that she knew it was only a matter of time before she heard it spilling through the windows, stifling her in her sleep.
Her interrogation began next morning and lasted, she reckoned afterwards, one day and two half-nights. It was a wild, unreasoning process, depending on whose turn it was to scream at her and whether they were challenging her revolutionary commitment or accusing her of being a British or Zionist or American informer. For as long as it lasted, she was excused all tuition and, between sessions, ordered to remain in her hut under house arrest, though no one seemed to bother when she took to wandering around the camp. The shifts were divided between four Arab boys of great fervour working in pairs and barking their prepared questions from pages of handwritten notes, and they got angriest when she failed to understand their English. She was not beaten, though it might have been easier if she had been, for at least she w
ould have known when she was pleasing them and when not. But their rages were quite frightening enough and sometimes they would take turns shouting at her, keeping their faces close to hers, covering her with spit, and leaving her with a sickening migraine. Another trick was to offer her a glass of water, then throw it in her face as she was about to take it. But the next time they met, the boy who had instigated this scene read out a written apology in front of his three colleagues, then left the room in deep humiliation.
Another time they threatened to shoot her for her known attachment to Zionism and the British Queen. But when she still refused to confess to these sins, they seemed to lose interest, and told her instead proud stories about their home villages, which they had never seen, and how they had the most beautiful women, and the best olive oil, and the best wine in the world. And that was when she knew she had come home to sanity again; and to Michel.
An electric punkah turned on the ceiling; on the walls hung grey curtains partly concealing maps. Through the open window, Charlie could hear the intermittent thud of bombing practice from Bubi’s range. Tayeh had taken the sofa, and laid one leg along it. His wounded face looked white and ill. Charlie stood in front of him like a naughty girl, her eyes lowered and her jaw clamped with rage. She had tried to speak once, but Tayeh had upstaged her by fishing his whisky bottle from his pocket and taking a swig from it. With the back of his hand he wiped his mouth each way as if he had a moustache, which he had not. He was more contained than she had known him, and somehow less at ease with her.
‘Abdul the American,’ she said.
‘So?’
She had prepared it. In her mind, she had practised it repeatedly: Comrade Leila’s high sense of revolutionary duty overcomes her natural reluctance to rat on a fellow soldier. She knew the lines by heart. She knew the bitches at the forum who had spoken them. To deliver them, she kept her face turned away from his and spoke with a harsh, mannish fury.
The Little Drummer Girl Page 50