That night as every night, the audience was meant to approve the punishments brought down on emu, but in Bluey’s performance there was always such a yearning to span all forms of mastery that during the sequence people could frequently be heard weeping.
CHAPTER EIGHT:
In the Pit II
McCloud, who often found it hard to wait for a sandwich to be made or for his call to be put through to some administrator, assumed an unusual patience in that great fusebox where he sat cross-legged with Cale and Daniel Stone. If he had known he must wait twenty minutes here, he would have invested himself into the cramp of his legs, into his fierce desire to urinate, into the prickly sweat which broke from him now that the plane sat hotly in the morning sun. The Mediterranean morning sun, as they all agreed it must be.
But since he did not know how long all this would take, what span of confinement Taliq had in mind, he let his pains grow remote from him, external, a kind of luggage.
“What about Larnaca?” said Daniel Stone suddenly. “That’s an airport hijackers seem to use.”
“This isn’t Larnaca,” Cale told him. Cale was perfunctory and dismissive. “Even with a tailwind, we haven’t been flying long enough.”
Cale turned awkwardly toward McCloud. “You ever been to North Africa before?”
“No. I’d imagine, though, you have.” Why else the question?
“Oh yes, son! I was an officer in Britain’s now much correctly booed-at attack on the Suez Canal. Thirty-one years ago. If I’d been shot then, I would have died happy but knowing fuck-all. Now I know fuck absolutely everything. I can look this chap Taliq in the eye. I even profess to know what drives a fellow like him. Perhaps it’s time I was shot. I know too fucking much.”
McCloud said, “I’m not so sure I do. The dancers are still educating me.”
“Come on. You don’t really mean that, sonny Jim. It’s okay to manage them—it’s as good a way as any to make a living. But when it comes to the indigenes, Aborigines, natives, first-comers, and so on, I subscribe to what D. H. Lawrence says, you know. When he was down there at that ranch in New Mexico. Well; he went to see the Pueblos dance and said it was all twilight stuff. He said those Europeans who want to idealize this stuff are renegades. What do you think of that?”
“I think he was a man of his day,” said McCloud, not wanting to waste time being angry.
“And you’re not a man of yours? Just because we’ve had a few scares—Three Mile Island and Chernobyl and so on—does that make primitives desirable, wiser, niftier? Christ! I mean, it’s charming and all. But as I said to you earlier, let’s not call it art.”
McCloud was tempted to tell him about the elders who had come to Whitey in a dream and urged him to release the embargoed dances and the painting which skirted the very edge of danger, but he resisted it. Cale was the sort of rock against which all such dreams shattered.
“Lawrence used to beat his wife as well, Mr. Cale,” McCloud said instead. “Not secretly, either. He boasted about it. Do you think that’s a good idea of his, too?”
“Jesus Christ!” cried Cale, hooting. “An Aussie intellectual. A fucking living contradiction in terms! An oxymoron in underpants!”
But there was a sort of acknowledgment in Cale’s laughter and even a pleading that allowances be made.
McCloud chose to smile warily, someone bringing up a tender subject. “You were so much in need of a drink last night. You don’t seem to need one now.”
“Oh,” said Cale lightly, “I’m the worst sort of pisspot. I’m an alcoholic by choice, not by need. Nicotine—now there’s a genuine addiction. Whereas I drink only from boredom, and I love to talk people—stewards, pub owners—into bending the letter of the liquor laws. They’re nectar, those drinks. Nips of whiskey which violate some silly sod’s law. I particularly enjoy booze in nations where having a snort is subject to penalties of flogging and jail. But in other circumstances, if the stuff’s not there, I don’t climb up the fusebox.”
Creaking internally in small ways, the plane remained on the earth.
They heard a reverberation from beyond the pit, as if someone were striking the outer skin of the aircraft with a wrench. They listened to it, faces raised. Like a sailor deep in some quarter of a hostile sea, McCloud felt a smothering alarm.
The noise ceased. Even Cale and Stone did not try to discuss what it meant. The possibilities were too numerous or terrible. Was it plane maintenance? Was it sabotage on behalf of the passengers or sabotage on behalf of Taliq? Were armed men joining the plane to reinforce Taliq or—for some reason equally as frightening to the three men in the electronics bay—to take his life? Had all the passengers been let go; and had these three been forgotten or retained for special purposes?
Twenty seconds or more passed, and their breath grew normal again. You could see Cale actually gather himself for further conversation.
But as a result of a sudden illumination whose origin he couldn’t guess at, but which grew from his philosophic accommodation to the cries of his body, McCloud spoke first. “Taliq … he won’t bring us out of here yet. Surely he’ll be busy dealing with authorities on the ground?”
Stone was engaged at the time in slow flexings of his neck, maybe doing exercises he remembered his masseur recommending. “He’ll ask for something no one’s likely to deliver,” he said as if that much were obvious. “Cale’s right about one aspect. What we’re seeing is probably an attempt to prevent rapprochement. Okay. So the exploit works of its own nature. But they might as well tack on a shopping list. Something specific they want. The release of political prisoners.…”
“Indeed,” said Cale. “Indeed.” He conveyed to McCloud that he was gratified by the rate at which Stone was catching on. “And there’s another possibility with Taliq’s little enterprise you no doubt wouldn’t countenance, Mr. Stone.”
Stone stopped doing his exercises. “How can you know that? I’ll countenance any damned thing. Don’t for God’s sake tell me what’s within my powers to contemplate. You don’t know that.” He raised his hand. “Oh, forgive me! We understand you know everything. It’s just that that fact doesn’t seem to have done us much good. So just tell me what you have in mind. I’m willing as the next man to run it under the light.”
Cale adjusted his underwear. “Okay, sonny, here it comes! There are voices in Israel who don’t want reconciliation either. Israel has accumulated its record of shame, too, and I regret that. Because the boys upstairs will no doubt bore us with the details over coming hours or even days.”
“Oh Jesus!” Stone cried. Angry now and not as concerned with tidy gesture, he cast his eyes wildly upward. “You mean that the wicked Zionists themselves buy a raid from the Arabs? So they’ll have a reason for keeping things as they are? That’s what you’re saying?”
“It seems to have happened in the past,” said Cale. “And you and I acknowledge that. An innocent like Mr. McCloud here—it’s news to him. But it’s not news to me as a journalist. Nor to you as a—what is it?—computer contractor?”
“Jesus Christ! I am a computer contractor! I have my master’s from MIT and my doctorate from Cal Tech on the wall of my den! They were bought with student loans and at some price of time and effort. And I resent your whole supercilious Limey drift, Cale. There’s one thing I agree with those Arabs about! You and your fucking empire made this grief for all of us! Scratch any human misery of this century and you guys are behind it!”
“Oh yes?” asked Cale. “But, my boy, I didn’t drive the poor sodding Palestinians out of the orange groves of Haifa! My government didn’t make those nifty emergency laws to cover the Gaza strip land grab. Heaps of paternalistic folly—oh yes, that’s us all over, and I confess to it! We permitted the conditions for your success over the Arabs. We didn’t actually drive the spike into the poor bastards’ hearts!”
“That same tired old Limey mind trick!” said Stone. “‘Our intentions were too good! The mean natives took advantage of us.…’” H
e appealed to McCloud. “Only one thing more pitiable than the argument is that all the sons-of-bitches actually believe it!”
As a witness to Stone’s outcry, McCloud thought there was the same bored mischief still working in Cale as had earlier caused him to try so hard to lever a drink out of the steward; as—for that matter—in his literate quoting of D. H. Lawrence. Had Lawrence ever written those words, or had Cale composed them himself? That question was obviously the sort of trouble Cale liked to raise in the mind.
Now, not having got quite the display of chagrin out of McCloud which he needed to soothe his ennui or terror, and with the Zionist Hack placard still waiting beneath him on the floor, he was enjoying more success by transforming himself among the electrical fuses into a Jew baiter than he’d got earlier as a derider of native culture.
“Come on, Cale,” McCloud appealed out of what he thought was fairness. “Mr. Stone is an American citizen. He didn’t drive the Palestinians out, either.”
“Fair crack of the whip, eh, cobber?” asked Cale, imitating the idiom in which the Barramatjara spoke. “Who put the weapons in the Israelis’ hands? Good American Bar Mitzvah boys like Stone here.”
“Don’t be so fucking offensive,” Stone told him.
“Are you saying you haven’t had a hand?”
“Naturally I cherish the concept of that state.”
“Ah, yes. Cherish.…”
Stone sat forward, asserting his right to his proper space in the pit in the face of Cale’s imperial spread of flesh. “Mr. McCloud has it right. You fucking conservatives are the worst anti-Semites! Except you hate and fear the Arabs worse than you hate and fear us. And besides that, we’re better business. Or we were until Arab oil entered the picture.”
“Kindly don’t call me an anti-Semite, man,” said Cale, pointing his finger with apparent passion at Stone. About the real intensity behind the movement, though, it was hard to guess. “I pushed Arabs around for you when I was a young officer. I wrote glowing reports about your fucking kibbutzim and your moshavim. And I’m a Zionist—it says so on my label.”
“Okay,” Stone called, settling the air with his hands. “But you commit the worst crime in your goddamn head. You think we’ve got Satanic cleverness! You believe we’re cleverer than anyone else! You look at me and you think I’m full of fucking snakelike cunning. Brighter than the Japanese and twice as alien! Admit it!”
There was a sudden and—McCloud thought—theatrical calm, as if Cale were orchestrating it.
Cale, of course, chose when to break it. “Those Palestinians upstairs didn’t arrest us without a basis,” he announced. “Poor bloody McCloud is the innocent. For him the rap is—as they say—bum. But they knew that you and I had had an effect on them, old son. On whatever miseries they believe they bear on earth. You and I have made things happen contrary to their interests. So like me, you probably are a cunning bastard. I’m willing to believe that. That doesn’t take a leap of faith.”
Stone began to laugh. “Cunning, Mr. Cale? My father came to New York in 1948. He opened a handbag repair shop in Spring Street in lower Manhattan. His clients were Jews as proud as himself, and the poorer Poles and Italians. Gentrification and high rent drove the poor old son-of-a-bitch out in the early seventies. They needed his shop for the bar of a rib joint! During his life he went every day, morning and night, to the Orthodox synagogue down on East Broadway, even though cataracts had just about blinded him by the age of sixty. This is cunning? This is Satanic?
“Sure, he lectured my brother and me to excel academically and not goof off like the Italians. This—again I ask the question—is cunning? And I suppose you think it’s a cliché that he was crippled by the age of sixty-five—fallout from SS beatings he took in Birkenau. It was cunning of him, I’m sure you’ll agree, not to seek any compensation from the West German government, though New York was full of lawyers who could have arranged it for him! ‘They won’t put a price on my suffering,’ he used to say.
“But see, the problem with New York is you can’t sit still without either freezing or frying. You can’t lie down with crippled joints. The Rome of the modern world and its climate is unlivable! Its climate gives you pneumonia. Of which in time, and far too early, he died. And this cunning Jew, this superconspirator, this agent of the anti-Christ and of Mossad—in your view of things his life crawled with cunning. His life was substantially different from your father’s, Cale, or from McCloud’s father’s. Because he was the evil force behind everything that went wrong on earth!”
In this narrow space, amid the leads in their colored plastic sleeves, amid the color-coded fuses and levers, Cale threw his arms about dangerously and seemed well pleased with what he’d got from Stone. “Oh, the irony! Interspersed only with the piquant and flagrant paranoia. All because I merely suggest that it might be certain rabid elements in Mossad who were paying Taliq and his boys for this little excursion! And not so much Taliq and the boys. Paying the people behind Taliq. That’s all I wanted to infer. A mere thread of possibility.…”
“So I may be shot,” Stone kept on. “I—a Jew—may be shot. A Jew! And even that is the fault of the Jews?”
Stone was so seriously affronted that McCloud could see the small population of this hole might fall away into fragments: even as the dance troupe might have done if Bluey’s sighting of the dead had been an authentic vision. The idea frightened him primitively. It was as if anger might burn up all the oxygen in the electronics bay.
“Gentlemen,” he said, “for sweet Christ’s sake! If you know so much about Taliq and the others, you ought to know they want us fighting like this.”
“The piety of the boy!” said Cale. “Listen, let me tell you something. The world is complicated. And nothing is more complicated than malice. And those who won’t see that, sonny Jim, are dead!”
Bladder ache seemed less significant now to McCloud than a weariness which came down on him. The three of them, he and his fellow condemned, seemed to him to be fatally deprived of any grandeur. The secrets were all known by Cale and were all banal. The earth was a complicated but cheap equation, and if McCloud was condemned by Taliq, that was cheap, too, the result of a finite outlay of funds by the secret police of some government. The sadness of his lack of deeper worth, of Cale’s, of Stone’s, caused him all at once to slump.
“Move up there, old chap,” Cale reproached him.
There was without warning a surge of engines. New air washed into the pit, tempered by the engines.
“We’re going to take off again,” Stone remarked dryly. “It must be the Jews’ fault.”
CHAPTER NINE:
The Upstairs Dispensation
The plane had leveled itself in the sky, and the air in the pit grew polar again. McCloud noticed now how gray and unfashionable even the handsome Mr. Stone looked. That might be what they are doing. They are curing us here. As soon as we look despicably gray and less than human, they’ll bring us out and exhibit us for trial.
When the hatch above was opened, McCloud was at first aware of it more by sound than by any other factor. He looked up. Hasni, the one who had begun the journey beside Pauline, stared down with such gentle inquiry that McCloud hoped for a moment the boy was bringing some sort of reprieve.
“You have taken your placards off,” he said leniently. “Put your placards back on.”
McCloud was quick to obey and thought the other two were also. They didn’t want that hatch shut again. There was shuffling and sorting in the pit. “Mine’s ‘Zionist Hack,’ I think,” said Cale, pretending to be exercised by his search for the right placard and smiling crookedly. He nonetheless donned it like something he was accustomed to.
“Stand up,” Hasni said just as uninsistently.
Their labels reassumed, they all stood, wincing with cramp.
In the first-class cabin, when McCloud at last climbed up from the electronics pit, daylight had turned the window shades beige. Stubble was beginning to appear on the faces of the few bu
sinessmen left there. Some of them slept. None of them were attending to their briefcases anymore. Wrapped in their blankets, they looked like an aristocracy who were certain their rights were about to be canceled.
He noticed too as, half-blinded with the pain of it, he moved from leg to leg, that Daisy Nakamura’s seat was empty.
“Have they shot anyone?” McCloud whispered to one of the businessmen.
The man shook his head marginally. He didn’t want Hasni to spot him either affirming or denying.
“Where did we land?”
The businessman’s eyes flickered. He didn’t know. Or perhaps for some reason, because of the mark of condemnation McCloud wore, he wasn’t telling.
Hasni shepherded them to the base of the spiral staircase and let them use a toilet one at a time. Because of an obscure sense of honor, McCloud insisted on going last. Since Hasni would not let the door be shut, McCloud heard the other two voiding themselves. He closed his eyes, trying to suppress his own bladder by mental suasion. When his time came, he felt an unutterable sense of thanks. But since Stone and Cale—on emerging from the water closet—showed no gratitude for this brief mercy, neither did he.
At Hasni’s order, they hobbled up the stairwell. McCloud was aware that stiffness made him look ridiculous, a hateful dodderer. His limbs, Taliq might argue, as crippled as his moral sense. The plane by contrast felt smooth and cold as a knife in this highest quarter of a Mediterranean day.
At the top of the stairs, in the front seats, one of the Palestinian boys, Musa, slept embracing his automatic rifle, his radio twittering on his hip. (It reminded McCloud straight away of the threatened Plastique in the luggage hold.) Musa’s armless cricketing sweater hung voluminously on him, as if he’d borrowed it from some West Indian pace bowler at whatever British university or polytechnic he attended. McCloud could see the gooseflesh on his bare lower arms.
Farther along, alone and reflectively sipping orange juice, Bluey sat by a window. He had a window shade half-open and was staring forth. At first McCloud felt a spasm of fear for this illicit behavior of Bluey’s, but then understood it must be allowed. The inhabitants of this upper deck, eligible because of the sufferings of their race, were allowed to squint out at the day. Not all of them, it seemed. But Bluey, at least.
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