Rachel came, having resumed her studies at university, and she was frank and sweet and relaxed, quite different from the harder version Charlie had first met in Athens. Dimitri was also back at school, she said; Raoul was thinking of reading medicine and maybe becoming an army doctor; on the other hand, he just might take up archaeology. Charlie smiled politely at these items of family news – Rachel told Kurtz it was like talking to her grandmother. But in the longer run, neither her North Country origins nor her jolly middle-class English ways made their desired impact on Charlie, and after a while, still politely, Charlie asked whether she might please be left alone again.
Meanwhile within Kurtz’s service a number of valuable lessons had been added to the great sum of technical and human knowledge that formed the treasury of its many operations. Non-Jews, despite the inherent prejudice against them, were not only usable, but sometimes essential. A Jewish girl might never have held the middle ground so well. The technicians were also fascinated by the business of the batteries in the clock radio; it’s never too late to learn. An expurgated case history was duly assembled for training use, to great effect. In a perfect world, it was argued, the case officer should have noticed when he made the swap that the batteries were missing from the agent’s model. But at least he put two and two together when the homing signal stopped, and went in straight away. Becker’s name, of course, appeared in none of this; quite apart from the question of security, Kurtz had heard no recent good of him and was not disposed to see him canonised.
And in the late spring at last, as soon as the Litani basin was dry enough for tanks, Kurtz’s worst fears and Gavron’s worst threats were fulfilled: the long-awaited Israeli push into Lebanon occurred, ending that present phase of hostilities or, according to where you stood, heralding the next one. The refugee camps that had played host to Charlie were sanitised, which meant roughly that bulldozers were brought in to bury the bodies and complete what the tanks and artillery bombing raids had started; a pitiful trail of refugees set off northward, leaving their hundreds, then their thousands, of dead behind. Special groups eradicated the secret places in Beirut where Charlie had stayed; of the house in Sidon only the chickens and the tangerine orchard remained. The house was destroyed by a team of Sayaret, who also put an end to the two boys Kareem and Yasir. They came in at night, from the sea, exactly as Yasir, the great intelligence officer, had always predicted, and they used a special kind of American explosive bullet, still on the secret list, that has only to touch the body to kill. Of all this – of the effective destruction of her brief love-affair with Palestine – Charlie was wisely spared all knowledge. It could unhinge her, the psychiatrist said; with her imagination and self-absorption, she could perfectly easily hold herself responsible for the entire invasion. Better to keep it from her, therefore; let her find out in her own good time. As to Kurtz, for a month or more he was hardly seen, or, if seen, hardly recognised. His body seemed to shrink to half its size, his Slav eyes lost all their sparkle, he looked his age, whatever that was, at last. Then one day, like a man who has shaken off a long and wasting illness, he returned, and within hours, it seemed, had vigorously resumed his strange running feud with Misha Gavron.
In Berlin, Gadi Becker at first floated in a vacuum comparable to Charlie’s; but he had floated there before, and was in certain ways less sensitive to its causes and effects. He returned to his flat, and to his failing business prospects; insolvency was once more round the corner. Though he spent days arguing on the telephone with wholesalers, or else hauling boxes from one side of the storeroom to the other, the world slump seemed to have hit the Berlin garment industry harder and further than any other. There was a girl he sometimes slept with, a rather stately creature straight out of the thirties, warm-hearted to a fault and even, to appease his inherited standards, vaguely Jewish. After several days’ futile reflection, he phoned her and said he was temporarily in town. Just for a few days, he said; maybe only one. He listened to her joy at his being back, and to her light-hearted remonstrations at his disappearance; but he listened also to the unclear voices of his own inner mind.
‘So come round,’ she said when she had finished scolding him.
But he didn’t. He could not approve of the pleasure she might give him.
Scared of himself, he hastened to a fashionable Greek nightclub he knew of, run by a woman of cosmopolitan wisdom and, having at last succeeded in getting drunk, watched the guests smash the plates too eagerly, in the best German-Greek tradition. Next day, without too much planning, he began a novel about a Berlin-Jewish family that had fled to Israel and then uprooted itself again, unable to come to terms with what was being done in the name of Zion. But when he looked at what he had written, he consigned his notes first to the waste-paper basket and then, for security reasons, to the grate. A new man from the Bonn Embassy flew up to visit him, and said he was the replacement for the last man: if you need to communicate with Jerusalem or anything, ask for me. Without seeming to be able to prevent himself, Becker embarked on a provocative discussion with him about the State of Israel. And he ended with a most offensive question, something he claimed to have culled from the writings of Arthur Koestler, and evidently adapted to his own preoccupation: ‘What are we to become, I wonder?’ he said. ‘A Jewish homeland or an ugly little Spartan state?’
The new man was hard-eyed and unimaginative and the question clearly annoyed him without his understanding the meaning of it. He left some money and his card: Second Secretary, Commercial. But more significantly he left a cloud of doubt behind him, which Kurtz’s telephone call next morning was certainly intended to disperse.
‘What the hell are you trying to tell me?’ he demanded roughly, in English, as soon as Becker had picked up the phone. ‘You’re going to start muddying the nest, then come on home where nobody pays you any attention.’
‘How is she?’ Becker said.
Kurtz’s response was perhaps deliberately cruel, for the conversation took place just when he was at his lowest. ‘Frankie’s just fine. Fine in her mind, fine in her appearance, and for some reason beyond me she persists in loving you. Elli spoke to her only the other day and formed the distinct impression that she did not regard the divorce as binding.’
‘Divorces aren’t intended to be binding.’
But Kurtz as usual had an answer. ‘Divorces aren’t intended, period.’
‘So how is she?’ Becker repeated, with emphasis.
Kurtz had to harness his temper before replying. ‘If we are speaking of a mutual friend, she is in good health, she is being healed, and she never wants to see you again – and may you remain young for ever!’ Kurtz ended with an unbridled shout, and rang off.
The same evening, Frankie rang – Kurtz must have given her the number out of spite. The telephone was Frankie’s instrument. Others might play the violin, the harp, or the shofar, but for Frankie it was the telephone every time.
Becker listened to her for quite a time. To her weeping, at which she was unequalled; to her cajolements, and her promises. ‘I’ll be whatever you want me to be,’ she said. ‘Just tell me and I’ll be it.’
But the last thing Becker wanted was to invent anybody.
It was not long after this that Kurtz and the psychiatrist decided the time had come to throw Charlie back into the water.
The tour was called A Bouquet of Comedy, and the theatre, like others she had known, served as a Women’s Institute and a play school, and no doubt as a polling booth at election times as well. It was a lousy play and a lousy theatre, and it came at the lower end of her decline. The theatre had a tin roof and a wooden floor, and when she stamped, bullet puffs of dust came up between the blocks. She had begun by taking only tragic parts, because after one nervous look at her Ned Quilley had assumed that tragedy was what she wanted; and so, for her own reasons, had Charlie. But she discovered quickly that serious parts, if they meant anything to her at all, were too much for her. She would cry or weep at the most incongruous places, an
d several times she had to fake an exit in order to get hold of herself.
But more frequently it was their irrelevance that got to her; she had no stomach any more – and, worse, no understanding – for what passed for pain in Western middle-class society. Thus comedy became, after all, the better mask for her, and through it she had watched her weeks rotate between Sheridan and Priestley and the latest modern genius, whose offering was described in the programme as a soufflé flashing with barbed wit. They had played it in York but, thank God, bypassed Nottingham; they had played it in Leeds and Bradford and Huddersfield and Derby; and Charlie for one had yet to see the soufflé rise, or the wit flash, but probably the fault was in herself, for in her imagination she went through her lines like a punchdrunk boxer who must either slug away or go down for good.
All day long, when she was not rehearsing, she lounged about like a patient in a doctor’s waiting-room, smoking and reading magazines. But tonight, as the curtain rose once more, a dangerous sloth replaced her nervousness and she kept wanting to fall asleep. She heard her voice run up and down the scale, felt her arm reach this way, her foot step that way; she paused for what was normally a safe laugh, but struck instead an uncomprehending quiet. At the same time, pictures from the forbidden album began to fill her mind: of the prison in Sidon and the line of waiting mothers along the wall; of Fatmeh; of the schoolroom in the camp at night, ironing on the slogans for the march; of the air-raid shelter, and the stoic faces staring at her, wondering whether she was to blame. And of Khalil’s gloved hand drawing its crude claw marks in his own blood.
The dressing-room was communal, but when the interval came, Charlie did not go to it. Instead she stood outside the stage door, in the open air, smoking and shivering and staring down the foggy Midland street, and wondering whether she should simply walk, and keep walking until she fell down or got hit by a car. They were calling her name and she could hear slamming doors and running feet, but the problem seemed to be theirs, not hers, and she left them to it. Only a last – a very last – sense of responsibility made her open the door and wander back in.
‘Charlie, for Christ’s sake! Charlie, what the bloody hell!’
The curtain rose and she found herself once more on stage. Alone. Long monologue, while Hilda sits at husband’s desk and pens a letter to her lover: to Michel, to Joseph. A candle burned at her elbow and in a minute she would pull open the drawer of the desk in search of another sheet of paper, and find – ‘Oh no!’ – her husband’s unposted letter to his mistress. She began writing and she was in the motel in Nottingham; she stared into the candle flame and saw Joseph’s face glinting at her across the table in the taverna outside Delphi. She looked again and it was Khalil, dining with her at the log table in the house in the Black Forest. She was saying her lines and miraculously they were not Joseph’s, not Tayeh’s, not Khalil’s, but Hilda’s. She opened the desk drawer and put in a hand, missed a beat, drew out a sheet of handwriting in puzzlement, lifted it, and turned to give the audience their look. She rose to her feet, and with an expression of growing disbelief, advanced to the front of the stage and began to read aloud – such a witty letter, so full of neat cross-references. In a minute her husband, John, would enter left in his dressing-gown, advance upon the desk, and read her own unfinished letter to her lover. In a minute there would be an even wittier cross-cut of their two letters, and the audience would roll about in delirium, which would turn to ecstasy when the two deceived lovers, each roused by the other’s infidelities, fell together in a lecherous embrace. She heard her husband enter, and it was the cue for her to raise her voice: indignation replaces curiosity as Hilda reads on. She grasped the letter in both hands, turned, and took two paces left front in order not to mask John.
As she did so, she saw him – not John but Joseph, quite distinctly, seated where Michel had sat in the centre of the stalls, staring up at her with the same dreadfully serious concern.
At first, she was really not surprised at all; the divide between her inner and outer world had been a flimsy affair at the best of times, but these days it had virtually ceased to exist.
So he’s come, she thought. And about time too. Any orchids, Jose? No orchids at all? No red blazer? Gold medallion? Guccis? Maybe I should have gone to the dressing-room after all. Read your note. I’d have known you were coming, wouldn’t I? Baked a cake.
She had stopped reading aloud because there was really no point in acting any more, even though the prompter was unashamedly belting out the lines to her and the director was standing behind him waving his arms like someone fighting off a swarm of bees; they were both in her line of vision, somehow, though she was staring at Joseph exclusively. Or perhaps she was imagining them, because Joseph had become so real at last. Behind her, husband John, with no conviction at all, had started inventing lines to cover for her. You need a Joseph, she wanted to tell him proudly; our Jose here will do you lines for all occasions.
There was a screen of light between them – not a screen so much as an optical partition. Added to her tears, it had started to upset her vision of him, and she was beginning to suspect he was after all a mirage. From the wings, they were shouting at her to come off; husband John had marched downstage – clonk, clonk – and taken her kindly but firmly by the elbow as a preliminary to consigning her to the bin. She supposed that in a minute they would pull the curtain on her and give that little tart – what’s-her-name, her understudy – the chance of her lifetime. But her concern was to reach Joseph and touch him and make sure. The curtain closed, but she was already walking down the steps to him. The lights went up, and yes it was Joseph, but when she saw him so clearly he bored her; he was just another member of her audience. She started up the aisle and felt a hand on her arm and thought: Husband John again, go away. The foyer was empty except for two geriatric duchesses who presumably were the management.
‘See a doctor, dear, I should,’ said one of them.
‘Or sleep it off,’ said the other.
‘Oh leave it out,’ Charlie advised them happily, using an expression she had never used before.
No Nottingham rain was falling, no red Mercedes waiting to receive her, so she went and stood at a bus-stop, half expecting the American boy to be aboard, telling her to look out for a red van.
Joseph came towards her down the empty street, walking very tall, and she imagined him breaking into a run in order to beat his own bullets to her, but he didn’t. He drew up before her, slightly out of breath, and it was clear that someone had sent him with a message, most likely Marty, but perhaps Tayeh. He opened his mouth to deliver it, but she prevented him.
‘I’m dead, Jose. You shot me, don’t you remember?’
She wanted to add something about the theatre of the real, how the bodies didn’t get up and walk away. But she lost it somehow.
A cab passed and Joseph hailed it with his free hand. It didn’t stop, but what can you expect? The cabs these days – a law to themselves. She was leaning on him and she would have fallen if he hadn’t been holding her so firmly. Her tears were half blinding her, and she was hearing him from under water. I’m dead, she kept saying, I’m dead, I’m dead. But it seemed that he wanted her dead or alive. Locked together, they set off awkwardly along the pavement, though the town was strange to them.
The Little Drummer Girl Page 59