The Secret Pilgrim Part 16

An Arab freak? I wondered.

A crazed Zionist? There had been a few of those.

Stoned? A high-school war tourist on the hippy trail, searching for kicks in the city of the d.a.m.ned? Changing direction, he had begun talking to the receptionist, but at an angle facing into the lobby, already searching for the person he was enquiring for. Which was when I saw the red spots scattered over his cheeks and forehead, like hives or chicken pox, but more vivid. The bedbugs had eaten him in some stinking hostel, I decided. He had stuck his head through the windscreen of a clapped-out car. He started walking towards me. Stiffly again, without expression. Purposefully, a man used to being looked at. Angrily, the eyeshade dangling from his hand. Glowering at me blindly through his black gla.s.ses as I sat drinking. A woman had taken his arm. She wore a skirt and could have been the nurse who had given him his headscarf. They stood before me. Me and no one else.

"Sir? This is Sol, sir," she said - or Mort, or Syd, or whatever. "he's asking whether you're the journalist, sir."

I said I was a journalist.

"From London, sir, visiting? Are you the editor, sir? Are you influential, sir?"

Influential I doubted, I said with a deprecating smile. I was on the managerial side, here on a brief swing.

"And going back to London, sir? Soon?"

In Beirut you learn not to talk in advance about your movements. "Pretty soon," I conceded, though the truth was I was planning to return south again next day.

"Can Sol speak with you a moment, sir, just speak? Sol needs very much to speak with a person who has influence with the major Western newspapers. The journalists here, he feels they've seen it all, they're jaded. Sol needs a voice from outside."

I made s.p.a.ce and she sat beside me while Sol very slowly lowered himself into a chair-this covered, silent, very clean man in his long football sleeves and headscarf. Seated finally, he laid his wrists over his knees, holding the eyeshade in both hands. Then he gave a long sigh and began to murmur to me.

"There's this thing I've written, sir. I'd like, please, to have it printed in your newspaper."

His voice, though soft, was educated and polite. But it was lifeless and, like his movements, economical, as if each word hurt him to produce. Inside the lenses of his very dark gla.s.ses, I saw that his left eye was smaller than his right. Narrower. Not swollen, not closed by a punch, just altogether smaller than its partner, taken from a different face. And the spots were not bites, not hives, not cuts. They were craters, like the pockmarks of small-arms fire on a Beirut wall, stamped with heat and speed. Like craters also, the skin around them had risen but not closed.

His story followed without my asking for it. He was a relief volunteer, sir, a third-year medical student from Omaha. He believed in peace, sir. And he had been in this bombing, sir, down by the Corniche, in this restaurant that had been one of the worst-hit places, just wiped out, you should go down there and take a look, a place called Akhbar's, sir, where a lot of Americans went, there was this car bomb and car bombs are the worst. You can't get worse than car bombs for surprise.

I said I knew that.

Almost everyone in the restaurant had died except himself, sir, the people nearest the wall just blew apart, he continued, unaware that he had painted my own worst nightmare for me. And now lie had this thing he had written, he felt he had to say it, sir, a sort of mild statement about peace, which he needed to print in my newspaper, maybe it would do some good, he was thinking of like this weekend or maybe Monday. He'd like to donate the fee to charity. He guessed it could be like a couple of hundred dollars, maybe more. In the Beirut hospitals, that still bought people a piece of hope.

"We need a pause, sir," he explained, in his dead voice as the woman fished a wad of typescript from his pocket for him. "A pause for moderation. Just a break between wars to find the middle way."

Only in the Commodore in Beirut could it have seemed natural that a bomb-shocked peace-seeker should be pleading a hopeless cause to a journalist who wasn't one. Nevertheless I promised to do what I could. When I had done my business with the man I was waiting for - who knew nothing, of course, had heard nothing, but perhaps, sir, if I spoke to Colonel Asme in Tyre? - I settled in my room and with a gla.s.s at my elbow began to read his offering, determined that, if it had any reasonable chance of publication, I would twist the arm of one of our numberless Fleet Street friendlies when I returned to London, and see it done.

It was a tragic piece, and quickly it became unreadable: a rambling, emotional appeal to Jews, Christians and Muslims alike to remember their own mothers and children, and live together in love. It urged the middle ground of compromise and gave inaccurate examples from history. It proposed a new religion "like Joan of Arc would have given us only the English wouldn't let her, so they burned her alive, disregarding her screams and the will of the ordinary people."

This great new movement, he said, would "bind the Semitic races in a spiritual brotherhood of love and tolerance."

Then it lost its way completely, and resorted to capital letters, underlining, and rows of exclamation marks. So that by the time I reached the end, it had ceased to be what it set out to be at all, and was talking about "this whole family, kids and grandparents, that was sitting up beside the wall nearest to the epicentre."

And how they had all been blown to pieces, not once, but over and over again, each time Sol allowed himself to look into his anguished memory.

Suddenly I was writing the piece for him. To her. To Annie. First in my mind, then in the margin of his pages, then on a fresh sheet of A4 paper from my briefcase, which was quickly covered so I took another. I was sweating, the sweat was pouring off me like rain; it was that kind of Beirut night, quiet till now but with a damp, itchy heat rolling off the mountains and an evil grey smog like gunsmoke draping itself across the sea. I was writing, and wondering if she would, ring again. I was writing as the bombed boy, to a girl I didn't know. I was writing-as I saw to my dismay when I awoke next morning-pretentious junk. I was proclaiming maverick affections, mouthing great sentiments, pontificating about the unbreakable cycle of human evil, about man's endless search for reasons to do the wrong thing.

A pause, the boy had said. A pause for moderation, a break between wars. I put him right on that. I put Annie right on it too. I told them that the only pauses in the history of human conflict had been pauses not for moderation but excess, pauses for the world to redivide itself, for the thugs and the victims to find each other, for greed and deprival to regroup. I wrote like an adolescent bleeding heart, and when the morning came and I saw the pages of my handwriting strewn over the floor around the empty whisky bottle, I could not believe this was the work of anyone I knew.

So I did the only thing I could think of. I put them in the handbasin and cremated them, then broke up the ash and scattered it in the lavatory and flushed it into the body-blocked sewers of Beirut. And when I had done that, I took myself for a punis.h.i.+ng pelt along the waterfront, running as hard as I could go from whatever was coming after me.

I was running towards Hansen, away from myself, but I had one more stop to make along the way.

My German girl, Britta, turned out to be in Israel, in the middle of the Negev Desert, in a compound of stark grey huts near a village called Revivim. The huts had a ploughed strip round them, and a double perimeter of barbed-wire fencing with a manned watchtower at each corner. If there were other European prisoners in the compound apart from her, I was not introduced to them. Her only companions that I saw were young Arab girls, mainly from poor villages in the West Bank or the Gaza, who had been talked or bullied by their Palestinian comrades into committing acts of savagery against the hated Zionist occupiers, most often planting bombs in marketplaces or tossing them into civilian buses.

I arrived there by jeep from Beersheeba, driven by a hardy young Colonel of Intelligence whose father, while still a boy, had been trained as a Night Raider by the eccentric General Wingate during the British Mandate. The Colonel's father remembered Wingate squatting naked in his tent by candlelight, drawing out the battle plan in the sand. Every Israeli soldier seems to talk about his father and a good few talk about the British. After the Mandate, they think they know us for what we probably still are: anti-Semitic, ignorant and imperialist, with just enough exceptions to redeem us. Dimona, where the Israelis store their nuclear. a.r.s.enal, was up the road.

My sense of unreality had not left me. To the contrary, it had intensified. It was as if I had lost the distance from the human condition that is essential to our trade. My feelings and the feelings of others seemed to count more with me-than my observations. It is quite easy in the Lebanon, if you drop your guard, to develop an unreasoning hatred of Israel. But I had succ.u.mbed to a serious dose of the disease. Trudging through the mud and stench of the shattered camps, crouching in the sandbagged hovels, I convinced myself that the Israeli thirst for vengeance would not be stilled until the accusing eyes of the last Palestinian child had been closed for good.

Perhaps my young Colonel got a hint of this, for though I had flown in from Cyprus it was still only a few hours since I had left Beirut, and something of what I felt may still have been legible in my face.

"You get to see Arafat?" he asked, with a moody smile as we drove along the straight road.

"No, I didn't."

"Why not? He's a nice guy."

I let that go.

"Why do you want to see Britta?"

I told him. There was no point in not doing so. It had taken all London's powers of persuasion to get me the interview with her at all, and my hosts were certainly not going to let me speak to her alone.

"We think she may be willing to talk to us about an old boyfriend," I said.

"Why would she do that?"

"He jilted her. She was angry with him."

"Who's the boyfriend?" - as if he didn't know.

"He's Irish. He has the rank of adjutant in the IRA. He briefs bombers, reconnoitres targets, supplies the equipment. She lived underground with him in Amsterdam and Paris."

"Like George Orwell, huh? Down and Out?"

"Like George Orwell."

"How long ago he jilted her?"

"Six months."

"Maybe she's not angry any more. Maybe she'll tell you go suck. For a girl like Britta, six months is a h.e.l.l of a long time."

I asked whether she had talked much in her captivity. It was a delicate question, since the Israelis were still not saying how long they had been holding her, or how they had obtained her in the first place. The Colonel was broadfaced and brown-skinned. His family came originally from Russia. He wore parachute wings on his short-sleeved khaki s.h.i.+rt. He was twenty-eight, a Sabra, born in Tel Aviv, engaged to a Sephardi from Morocco. His father, the Night Raider, was now a dentist. All this he had told me in the first few minutes of our acquaintance, in a guttural English he had captured singlehanded.

"Talked?" he repeated with a grim smile, in answer to my question. "Britta? That lady didn't stop talking since she became a resident."

Knowing a little of Israeli methods, I was not surprised, and I shuddered inwardly at the prospect of questioning a woman who had been subjected to them. It had happened to me in Ireland: a man b.u.t.toned to the neck who had stared at me like a dead man and confessed to everything.

"Do you interrogate her yourself?" I asked, noticing afresh his thick brown forearms and the uncompromising set of his jaw. And thinking, perhaps, of Colonel Jerzy.

He shook his head. "Impossible."

"Why?" He seemed about to tell me something, then changed his mind.

"We got experts," he said. "s.h.i.+n Bet guys, smart like Britta. Take their time with her. Family."

I had heard about this loving family too, though I didn't say so. The Zionists had lured her into a trap, a bloodshot-eyed informant had whispered to me in Tyre. She had left the camps and gone to Athens with her new boyfriend, Said, and three of Said's friends, he said. Good boys. All able. The plan had been to shoot down an El A1 plane as it made its approach to Athens airport. The boys had got themselves a hand-held rocket launcher and a rented house on the flight path. Britta's job, as an unsuspicious-looking European, was to stand in a phone box at the airport with a thirty dollar shortwave receiver and relay the control tower's instructions to the boys on the roof as the plane came in. Everything had been set fair, said my bone-weary informant. The rehearsals had gone like a dream. But on the day, the operation had fouled up.

Listening to him, I had filled in the rest of the story for myself, imagining how the Service would have done the job if we'd had the foreknowledge: two teams to a.s.sault the roof and the phone box simultaneously; the target plane, forewarned and empty, landing safely at Athens airport; the plane's homeward journey to Tel Aviv with the terrorists chained in their seats. I wondered what they would do with her. Whether they would put her on trial or trade her for favours in return.

"What happened to the boys she was with in Athens?"

I asked the Colonel, ignoring London's injunction to show no curiosity in such matters.

"Boys? She knows nothing from boys. Athens? Where's Athens already? She's an innocent German tourist on vacation in Eilat. We kidnapped her, we drugged her, we imprisoned her, now we're framing her for propaganda. She invites us to prove the contrary because she knows we can't. You want any more information? Ask Britta, be our guest."

His mood mystified me, the more so when, as we got out of the jeep, he laid a hand on my shoulder and wished me a sort of luck. "She's all yours," he said. "hazel tov. " I was beginning to dread what I might find.

A dumpy little woman in army uniform received us in her clean office. Prison staff never go short of cleaners, I thought. She was Captain Levi and she was Britta's unlikely gaoler. She spoke English the way a small-town American schoolmistress might speak it, but more slowly, with greater care. She had twinkly eyes and short grey hair and a look of kindly resignation. She had the dusty complexion of prison life, but when she put her hands together you felt she ought to be knitting for her grandchildren.

"Britta is very intelligent," she said apologetically. "For an intelligent man to question an intelligent woman, that's sometimes difficult. Do you have a daughter, sir?"

I was not about to fill in my character profile for her so I said no, which happened also to be the truth.

"A pity. Never mind. Maybe you still get one. A man like you, you have time. You speak German?"

"Yes."

"Then you are lucky. You can communicate with her in her language. That way you get to know her better. Britta and I, we can speak only English together. I speak it like my late husband, who was American. Britta speaks it like her late lover, who was Irish. Tel Aviv says we are to allow you two hours. Will you be happy with two hours? If you need more, we shall ask them-maybe they say yes. Maybe two hours will be too much. We shall see."

"You are very kind," I said.

"Kind, I don't know. Maybe we should be less kind. Maybe we are making kind too much. You will see."

And with this, she sent for coffee and for Britta, while the Colonel and myself took up our places along one side of the plain wood table.

But Captain Levi did not sit at the table, I supposed because she was not part of the interview. She sat beside the door on a straight kitchen chair, her eyes lowered as if in preparation for a concert. Even when Britta walked in between two young wardresses, she only lifted her eyes as far as was necessary to watch the three women's feet pa.s.s her to the centre of the room and halt. One wardress pulled back a chair for Britta, the second unlocked her handcuffs. The wardresses left, and we settled to the table.

And I would like to paint for you the scene exactly as I saw it from where I sat: with the Colonel to my right, and Britta opposite us across the table, and the bowed grey head of Captain Levi almost directly behind her, but slightly to the left, wearing a reminiscent expression that was half a smile. Throughout our discussion she stayed like that, still as a waxwork. Her part-smile of familiarity never altered and never went away. There was concentration in her pose, and something of effort, so that I wondered whether she was straining to pick out phrases and words she could identify, perhaps train from a combined knowledge of Yiddish and English, for Britta, being a Bremen girl, spoke a clear and authoritarian German, which makes comprehension easier.

And Britta, without a doubt, was a fine sample of her breed. She was "blond as a bread roll," as they say up there, tall and deep-shouldered and well-grown, with wide rather insolent blue eyes and a strong, attractive jaw. She had Monica's youth and Monica's height as well; and, as I could not avoid speculating, Monica's sensuality. My suspicion that they had been maltreating her vanished as soon as she walked in. She held herself like a ballerina, but with more intelligence and more of life's reality than is to be found in most dancers. She would have looked well in tennis gear or in a dirndl dress, and I suspected that in her time she had worn both. Even her prison tunic did not diminish her, for she had made herself a cloth belt out of something, and tied it at the waist, and she had brushed her fair hair over her shoulders in a cape. Her first gesture when her hands were freed was to offer me one, at the same time dropping a schoolgirl bob, whether out of irony or respect it was too soon to tell. Her grasp was like a boy's, but lingering. She wore no make-up but needed none.

"Und mit wem hab' ich die Ehre?" she enquired, either courteously or impishly. And whom do I have the honour to address? "I'm a British official," I said.

"Your name, please?"

"It's unimportant."

"But you are very important!"

Prisoners when they are brought up from their cells often say silly things in their first flush, so I answered her with consideration.

"I'm working with the Israelis on aspects of your case. That's all you need to know."

"Case? I am a case? How amusing. I thought I was a human being. Please sit down, Mr. n.o.body," she said, doing so herself.

So we sit as I have described, with Captain Levi's face behind her, a little out of focus like its expression. The Colonel had not stood up to greet Britta, and he barely bothered to look at her now she was sitting before him. He seemed suddenly to be without expectation. He glanced at his watch. It was of dull steel and like a weapon on his brown wrist. Britta's wrists were white and smooth like Monica's, but chafed with red rings from the handcuffs.

Suddenly she was lecturing me.

She began at once, as if she were resuming a tutorial, and in a sense she was, for I soon realised she lectured everyone this way, or everyone whom she had dismissed as bourgeois. She said she had a statement to make which she would like me to relay to my "colleagues," as she called them, since she felt that her position was not being sufficiently appreciated by the authorities. She was a prisoner of war, just as any Israeli soldier in Palestinian hands was a prisoner of war, and ent.i.tled to the treatment and privileges set out in the Geneva Convention. She was a tourist here, she had committed no crime against Israel; she had been arrested solely on the strength of her trumped-up record in other countries, as a deliberate act of provocation against the world proletariat.

I gave a quick laugh, and she faltered. She was not expecting laughter.

"But look here," I objected. "Either you're a prisoner of war or you're an innocent tourist. You can't be both."

"The struggle is between the innocent and the guilty," she retorted without hesitation, and resumed her lecture. Her enemies were not limited to Zionism, she said, but what she called the dynamic of bourgeois domination, the repression of natural instincts, and the maintenance of despotic authority disguised as "democracy."

Again I tried to interrupt her, but this time she talked straight through me. She quoted Marcuse at me and Freud. She referred to the rebellion of sons in p.u.b.erty against their fathers, and the disavowal of this rebellion in later years as the sons themselves became the fathers.

I glanced at the Colonel, but he seemed to be dozing.

The purpose of her "actions" she said, and those of her comrades, was to arrest this instinctual cycle of repression in all its forms-in the enslavement of labour to materialism, in the repressive principle of "progress" itself-and to allow the real forces of society to surge, like erotic energy, into new, unfettered forms of cultural creation.

"None of this is faintly interesting to me," I protested. "Just stop, please, and listen to my questions."

Acts of so-called "terrorism" had therefore two clear purposes, she continued, as if I had never spoken, of which the first was to disconcert the armies of the bourgeois-materialist conspiracy, and the second to instruct, by example, the pit-ponies of the earth, who had lost all knowledge of the light. In other words, to introduce ferment and awaken consciousness at the most repressed human levels.

She wished to add that though she was not an adherent of Communism, she preferred its teachings to those of capitalism, since Communism provided a powerful negation of the ego-ideal which used property to construct the human prison.

She favoured free s.e.xual expression and-for those who needed them-the use of drugs as a means of discovering the free self as contrasted with the unfree self that is castrated by aggressive tolerance.

I turned to the Colonel. There is an etiquette of interrogation as there is about everything else. "Do we have to go on listening to this nonsense? The lady is your prisoner, not mine," I said. For I could hardly lay the law down to her across his table.

The Colonel lifted his head high enough to glance at her with indifference. "You want to go back down, Britta?" he asked her. "You want bread and water for a couple of weeks?"

His German was as bizarre as his English. He seemed suddenly a lot older than his age, and wiser.

"I have more to say, thank you."

"If you're going to stay up here, you answer his questions and you shut up," said the Colonel. "It's your choice. You want to leave now, it's fine by us."

He added something in Hebrew to Captain Levi, who nodded distantly. An Arab prisoner entered with a tray of coffee - four cups and a plate of sugar biscuits - and handed them round meekly, a coffee cup for each of us and one for Captain Levi, the biscuits at the centre of the table. An air of la.s.situde had settled over us. Britta stretched out her long arm for a biscuit, lazily, as if she were in her own home. The Colonel's hand crashed on the table just ahead of her as he removed the plate from her reach. "So what do you wish to ask me, please?"

Britta enquired of me, as if nothing at all had happened. "Do you wish me to deliver the Irish to you? What other aspects of my case could interest the English, Mr. n.o.body?"

"If you deliver us one particular Irishman, that will be fine," I said. "You lived with a man named Seamus for a year."

She was amused. I had provided her with an opening. She studied me, and seemed to see something in my face she recognised. "Lived with him? That is an exaggeration. I slept with him. Seamus was only for s.e.x," she explained, with a mischievous smile. "He was a convenience, an instrument. A good instrument, I would say. I was the same for him. You like s.e.x? Sometimes another boy would join us, maybe sometimes a girl. We made combinations. It was irrelevant but we had fun."