The Little Drummer Girl

by John le Carré

  ‘I was not enraptured! I thought you were way over the top, and I had a damn good mind to tell you so!’

  He was unrepentant. ‘Whatever you felt at the time, here in the Nottingham motel, under my hypnotic influence, you instantly revise your memory. Though you could not see my face, you tell me, my words have remained seared in your memory ever since. Why not? . . . Come, Charlie! It is in your letter to me!’

  She was not to be drawn. Not yet. Suddenly, for the first time since Joseph’s story had begun, Michel had become a separate, living creature for her. Till this moment, she realised, she had unconsciously used Joseph’s features to describe her imaginary lover, and Joseph’s voice to characterise his declamations. Now, like a cell dividing itself, the two men were independent and conflicting beings, and Michel had acquired his own dimension in reality. She saw again the unswept lecture-room with its curling photograph of Mao and its scratched school benches. She saw the rows of unequal heads, from Afro to Jesus and back again, and Long Al slumped at her side in a state of alcoholic boredom. And on the podium she saw the isolated, unreadable figure of our gallant representative from Palestine – shorter than Joseph, maybe a fraction stockier as well, though it was hard to tell, for he was muffled in his black mask and his shapeless khaki blouse, and his black-and-white kaffiyeh. But younger – that for certain – and more fanatical. She remembered his fish-like lips, expressionless within the ragged cage. She remembered the red handkerchief tied defiantly round his neck, and the gloved hands gesticulating to his words. Most of all, she remembered his voice: not guttural, as she had expected, but literary and considerate, in macabre contrast to his bloodthirsty message. But not Joseph’s either. She remembered how it paused, un-Joseph-like, to rephrase an awkward sentence, hunted for grammatical aptness: ‘The gun and the Return are one for us . . . an imperialist is whoever does not aid us in our revolution . . . to do nothing is to endorse injustice . . .’

  ‘I loved you immediately,’ Joseph was explaining, in the same pretended tone of retrospection. ‘Or so I tell you now. As soon as the lecture was over, I enquired who you were, but I did not feel able to approach you before so many people. I was also aware that I was unable to show you my face, which is one of my greatest assets. I therefore decided to seek you out at the theatre. I made enquiries, tracked you to Nottingham. Here I am. I love you infinitely, signed Michel!’

  As if making amends, Joseph put on a show of fussing over her welfare, refilling her glass, ordering coffee – medium sweet, the way you like it – did she want to wash? No thanks, I’m fine. The television was showing news footage of a grinning politician descending the gangway of an aeroplane. He made the bottom step without mishap.

  His ministrations complete, Joseph glanced significantly round the taverna, then at Charlie, and his voice became the essence of practicality.

  ‘So then, Charlie. You are his Joan. His love. His obsession. The staff have gone home, the two of us are alone in the dining-room. Your unmasked admirer, and you. It is after midnight and I have been talking far too long, though I have scarcely begun to tell you what is in my heart, or ask you about yourself, whom I love beyond comparison, such an experience is entirely new to me, etcetera. Tomorrow is Sunday, you have no commitments, I have rented a room in the motel. I make no attempt to persuade you. That is not my way. Perhaps I am also too respectful of your dignity. Or perhaps I am too proud to think you need persuading. Either you will come to me as a comrade-in-arms, a true, free lover, soldier to soldier – or you will not. How do you respond? Are you suddenly impatient to return to the Astral Commercial and Private Hotel, near the railway station?’

  She stared at him, and then away from him. She had half a dozen facetious answers ready but suppressed them. The hooded, totally separate figure at the forum was once more an abstraction. It was Joseph, not the stranger, who had put the question. And what was there to say when, in her imagination, they were already lying in bed together, Joseph’s cropped head resting on her shoulder, Joseph’s strong wounded body stretched along her own, while she willed his true nature out of him?

  ‘After all, Charlie – as you told us yourself – you have been to bed with many men for less, I would say.’

  ‘Oh, much less,’ she agreed, developing a sudden interest in the plastic salt-pourer.

  ‘You are wearing his expensive jewellery. You are alone in a dismal city. It’s raining. He has enchanted you – flattered the actress, inspired the revolutionary. How can you possibly refuse him?’

  ‘Fed me too,’ she reminded him. ‘Even if I was off meat.’

  ‘He is everything a bored Western girl ever dreamed of, I would say.’

  ‘Jose, for Christ’s sake,’ she muttered, not even able to look at him.

  ‘So then,’ he said briskly, signalling for the bill. ‘Congratulations. You have met your soulmate at last.’

  A mysterious brutality had entered his manner. She had the ridiculous feeling that her acquiescence had angered him. She watched him pay the bill, she saw him pocket the receipt. She stepped after him into the night air. I’m the twice-promised girl, she thought. If you love Joseph, take Michel. He’s pimped me for his phantom in the theatre of the real.

  ‘In bed, he tells you that his real name is Salim, but that is a great secret,’ said Joseph casually as they got into the car. ‘He prefers Michel. Partly for security, partly because he is already slightly in love with European decadence.’

  ‘I like Salim better.’

  ‘But you use Michel.’

  Just whatever you all say, she thought. But her passivity was a deception, even to herself. She could feel her anger on the move, still far down but rising, rising.

  The motel was like a low factory block. At first there was no space to park; then a white Volkswagen minibus lumbered forward to make room for them, and she glimpsed the figure of Dimitri at the wheel. Clutching the orchids as Joseph had instructed her, she waited while he pulled on his red blazer, then followed him across the tarmac to the front porch; but reluctantly, keeping her distance. Joseph was carrying her shoulder bag as well as his smart black grip. Give that back, it’s mine. In the foyer, out of the corner of her eye, she saw Raoul and Rachel standing under the vile strip-lighting, reading notices about tomorrow’s tours. She glowered at them. Joseph went to the desk and she drew close to watch him sign the register, though he had specifically told her not to. Arab name, nationality Lebanese, address an apartment number in Beirut. His manner disdainful: a man of position, ready at any time to take offence. You’re good, she thought ruefully, while she tried to hate him. No wasted gestures but plenty of style, and you make the part your own. The bored night manager cast her a lustful glance, but showed none of the disrespect she was accustomed to. The porter was loading their luggage onto an enormous hospital trolley. I’m wearing a blue kaftan and a gold bracelet and underwear from Persephone of Munich and I’ll bite the first peasant who calls me a tart. Joseph took her arm and his hand burned her skin. She pulled free of him. Sod off. To the strains of canned Gregorian plainsong, they followed their luggage down a grey tunnel of pastel-painted doors. Their bedroom was double-bedded, grande luxe, and sterile as an operating theatre.

  ‘Christ!’ she exploded, staring round her in black hostility.

  The porter turned to her in surprise but she ignored him. She spotted a bowl of fruit, a bucket of ice, two glasses, and a vodka bottle waiting beside the bed. A vase for the orchids. She dumped them into it. Joseph tipped the porter, the trolley gave a departing shriek, and suddenly they were alone, with a bed the size of a football field, two framed Minoan bulls in charcoal providing the tastefully erotic atmosphere, and a balcony with an unspoilt view of the car park. Taking the vodka bottle from the bucket, Charlie poured herself a stiff one and flopped onto the edge of the bed.

  ‘Cheers, old man,’ she said.

  Joseph was still standing, watching her without expression. ‘Cheers, Charlie,’ he replied, though he had no glass.

 
‘So what do we do now? Play Monopoly? Or is this the big scene we bought our tickets for?’ Her voice rose. ‘I mean, who the hell are we in this? Just for information. Who? Right? Just who?’

  ‘You know very well who we are, Charlie. We are two lovers enjoying our Greek honeymoon.’

  ‘I thought we were in a Nottingham motel.’

  ‘We are playing both parts at once. I thought you understood that. We are establishing the past and the present.’

  ‘Because we are so short of time.’

  ‘Let us say, because human lives are at risk.’

  She took another pull of vodka, and her hand was as steady as a rock because that was how her hand went when the black mood got into her. ‘Jewish lives,’ she corrected him.

  ‘Are they different from other lives?’

  ‘I’ll say they bloody are! Jesus Christ! I mean Kissinger can bomb the poor bloody Cambodians till the cows come home. Nobody lifts a finger. The Israelis can hack the Palestinians to pieces any time. But a couple of rabbis knocked off in Frankfurt or whatever – I mean that’s a real grade-one prime-beef international disaster, isn’t it?’

  She was staring straight past him at some imaginary enemy, but out of the corner of her eye she saw him take a firm step in her direction, and for a brilliant moment she really thought he was going to remove her choices for good. But instead he walked past her to the window and unlocked the door, perhaps because he needed the drumming of the traffic to drown her voice.

  ‘They are all disasters,’ he replied unemotionally, looking out. ‘Ask me what the inhabitants of Kiryat Shmonah feel when the Palestinian shells come down. Ask them in the kibbutzim to tell you about the whining of the Katyusha rockets, forty at a time, while they hide their children in the shelters pretending it is all a game.’ He paused and gave a kind of bored sigh, as if he had listened too often to his own arguments. ‘However,’ he added, in a more practical tone, ‘on the next occasion you use that argument, I suggest you please remember that Kissinger is a Jew. That also has a place in Michel’s somewhat elementary political vocabulary.’

  She put her knuckles in her mouth and discovered she was weeping. He came and sat beside her on the bed, and she waited for him to put his arm round her or offer more wise arguments or simply take her, which was what she would have liked best, but he did nothing of the kind. He was content to let her mourn, until gradually she had the illusion that he had somehow caught her up, and they were mourning together. More than any words could have done, his silence seemed to mitigate what they had to do. For an age, they stayed that way, side by side, till she allowed her choking to give way to a deep, exhausted sigh. But he still did not move – not towards her, not away from her.

  ‘Jose,’ she whispered hopelessly, taking his hand once more. ‘Who the hell are you? What do you feel inside all those barbed-wire entanglements?’

  Raising her head, she began to listen to the sounds of other lives in adjoining rooms. The querulous burbling of a sleepless child. A strident marital argument. She heard a footfall from the balcony and glanced round in time to see Rachel in a towelling tracksuit, armed with a sponge-bag and a thermos flask, stepping over the threshold into the room.

  She lay awake, too exhausted to sleep. Nottingham was never like this. From next door came the muffled sound of telephoning and she thought she recognised his voice. She lay in Michel’s arms. She lay in Joseph’s. She longed for Al. She was in Nottingham with the love of her life, she was safe in her own bed back in Camden, she was in the room her bloody mother still called the nursery. She lay as she had lain as a child after her horse had thrown her, watching the picture-show of her life and exploring her mind as she had tentatively explored her body, feeling out each bit in turn, testing it for damage. A mile away on the other side of the bed, Rachel lay reading Thomas Hardy in paperback by the light of a tiny lamp.

  ‘Who’s he got, Rache?’ she said. ‘Who darns his socks and cleans out his pipes for him?’

  ‘Better ask him, hadn’t you, dear?’

  ‘Is it you?’

  ‘Wouldn’t work, would it? Not in the long run.’

  Charlie dozed, still trying to figure him out. ‘He was a fighter,’ she said.

  ‘The best,’ said Rachel contentedly. ‘Still is.’

  ‘How did he pick his quarrels then?’

  ‘They were picked for him, weren’t they?’ Rachel said, still deep in her book.

  Charlie tried a dare: ‘He had a wife once. What happened to her?’

  ‘Sorry, dear,’ said Rachel.

  ‘“Did she jump or was she pushed?” one asks oneself,’ Charlie mused, ignoring the rebuff. ‘I’ll say one bloody does. Poor bitch, she’d have to be about six chameleons just to ride on a bus with him.’

  She lay still a while.

  ‘How did you get into this lot, Rache?’ she asked, and, to her surprise, Rachel laid her book on its stomach and told her. Her parents were Orthodox Jews from Pomerania, she said. They had settled in Macclesfield after the war and become wealthy in the weaving industry. ‘Branches in Europe and a penthouse in Jerusalem,’ she said, unimpressed. They had wanted Rachel to go to Oxford and into the family firm, but she had preferred to study Bible and Jewish history at the Hebrew University.

  ‘It just happened,’ she replied when Charlie pressed her about the next step.

  But how? Charlie persisted. Why? ‘Who picked you, Rache, what do they say?’

  Rachel was not telling how or who, but she was telling why. She knew Europe and she knew anti-Semitism, she said. And she had wanted to show those stuck-up little sabra war heroes at the university that she could fight for Israel as well as any boy.

  ‘So what’s Rose then?’ said Charlie, forcing her luck.

  Rose was complicated, Rachel replied, as if she herself were not. Rose had done Zionist Youth in South Africa, and come to Israel not knowing whether she should have stayed put and fought apartheid.

  ‘She sort of tries harder because she doesn’t know which she should be doing,’ Rachel explained, and, with a firmness that ended further discussion, went back to her Mayor of Casterbridge.

  A surfeit of ideals, thought Charlie. Two days ago I had none. She wondered whether she had any now. Ask me in the morning. For a while she indulged drowsily in headlines. ‘FAMOUS FEMALE FANTASIST MEETS REALITY.’ ‘JOAN OF ARC BURNS PALESTINIAN ACTIVIST.’ Well, Charlie, yes, good night.

  Becker’s room lay a few yards down the corridor and it had twin beds, which was the nearest the hotel came to acknowledging that anyone was single. He lay on one and stared at the other, with the telephone on the table between them. In ten minutes it would be one-thirty, and one-thirty was the time. The night porter had his tip, and had promised to put through the call. He was very wakeful, as often at this hour. To think too brightly and come down too slowly. To get everything to the front of your head and forget what is behind. Or what is not. The phone rang on time and Kurtz’s voice greeted him immediately. Where is he, Becker wondered. He heard canned music in the background and rightly guessed a hotel. Germany, he remembered. A hotel in Germany talks to a hotel in Delphi. Kurtz spoke English because it was less conspicuous, and he spoke with an overlay of casualness that should not alarm the unlikely eavesdropper. Yes, everything was fine, Becker assured him; the deal was going through nicely, and he foresaw no immediate snags. What about the latest product? he asked.

  ‘We are getting a lot of first-rate cooperation,’ Kurtz assured him, in the fulsome tone he used for rallying his far-flung troops. ‘You go right down to the warehouse as soon as you like, you will surely not be disappointed in the product. And another thing.’

  Becker seldom completed his telephone conversations with Kurtz as a rule, nor Kurtz with him. It was an odd thing between them that each vied to be the first to get out of the other’s company. This time, however, Kurtz listened all the way to the end, and so did Becker. But as he put down the receiver, Becker caught sight of his attractive features in the mirror, and
stared at them with sharp distaste. For a moment, they were like a wrecker’s light to him, and he had a morbid and overwhelming wish to extinguish them for good: Who the hell are you? . . . What do you feel? He drew closer to the mirror. I feel as if I am looking at a dead friend, hoping he will come alive. I feel as if I am searching for my old hopes in someone else, without success. I feel that I am an actor, as you are, surrounding myself with versions of my identity because the original somehow went missing along the road. But in truth I feel nothing, because real feeling is subversive and contrary to military discipline. Therefore I do not feel, but I fight and therefore I exist.

  In the town he walked impatiently, striding wide and looking hard ahead of him, as if walking bored him, and the distance, as ever, were too short. It was a town waiting for attack, and over twenty years or more he had known too many towns in that condition. The people had fled the streets, there was not a child to be heard. Knock down the houses. Shoot whatever moves. The parked charabancs and cars lay abandoned by their owners, and God alone knew when they would see them next. Occasionally, his quick glance slipped to an open doorway or the entrance to an unlit alley, but observation was habitual to him and his stride did not relent. Reaching a side street, he lifted his head to read the name but again swept past, before turning swiftly in to a building site. A gaudy minibus was parked among tall stacks of bricks. The masts of a washing-line drooped beside it, disguising thirty feet of thread aerial. Faint music issued from inside. The door opened, the barrel of a pistol pointed at his face like one eye scanning him, then vanished. A respectful voice said, ‘Shalom.’ He stepped inside and closed the door behind him. The music did not quite drown the unsteady chatter of the little teleprinter. David, the operator from the Athens house, was crouched over it; two of Litvak’s boys kept him company. With no more than a nod, Becker sat down on the padded bench and began to read the fat bundle of tearsheets set aside for his arrival.