The Little Drummer Girl

by John le Carré

  They were supporting him under the arms, and as he flopped down the wood stairs his Gucci shoes kept missing their mark, which seemed to embarrass him, for a flickering smile came over him and he gazed shamefully at his errant feet.

  They were bringing him towards her and she wasn’t sure she could stand it. She turned to Joseph to tell him so, and saw his eyes looking straight at her and heard him say something, but in the same moment the family-size tape-recorder started speaking very loud and as she swung round, there was dear Marty in his cardigan stooped over the deck, twiddling the knobs to get the volume down.

  The voice was soft and heavily accented exactly as she remembered it from the forum. The words were slogans of defiance read with uncertain zest.

  ‘We are the colonised! We speak for the native against the settled! . . . We speak for the mute, we feed the blind mouths and encourage the mute ears! . . . We, the animals with patient hooves, have finally lost our patience! . . . We live by the law that is born each day under fire! . . . The entire world except us has something to lose! . . . We will fight anyone who appoints himself the caretaker of our land!’

  The boys had arranged him on the sofa, across the horseshoe from her. His balance was not at all good. He was leaning forward with a heavy list, using his forearms to shore himself up. His hands lay on top of each other as if chained, but only by the gold bangle they had put on him to get his costume right for the show. The bearded boy stood sulking behind him, his clean-shaven companion sat devoutly at his side, and as his recorded voice continued triumphant in the background, she saw Michel’s lips slowly moving, trying to catch up with the words. But the voice was too fast for its owner, too strong. Gradually he gave up trying and instead pulled a silly grin of apology, reminding her of her father after his stroke.

  ‘Acts of violence are not criminal . . . when carried out in opposition to force used by a state . . . deemed criminal by the terrorist.’ A rustle of paper as he turned to a new page. The voice grew puzzled and unwilling. ‘I love you . . . you are my freedom . . . Now you are one of us . . . Our bodies and our blood are mixed . . . you are mine . . . my soldier . . . please, why do I say this? Together we shall put the match to the fuse.’ A puzzled silence. ‘Please, sir. What is this, please? I ask you.’

  ‘Show her his hands,’ Kurtz ordered when he had switched off the machine.

  Picking up one of Michel’s hands, the clean-shaven boy swiftly unfolded it, offering it to her like a trade sample.

  ‘As long as he was in the camps, his hands were hard from manual work,’ Kurtz explained, coming down the room to join them. ‘Now he’s a great intellectual. Lot of money, lot of girls, good food, an easy time. That right, little fellow?’ Approaching the sofa from behind, he laid the flat of his thick hand on Michel’s head and turned it round to face him. ‘You’re a great intellectual, that right?’ His voice was neither cruel nor teasing. He might have been talking to his own erring son – he had the same sad fondness in his face. ‘You get your girls to do the work for you, don’t you, little fellow? One girl, he actually used her as a bomb,’ he explained to Charlie. ‘Put her on a plane with some nice-looking luggage, the plane blew up. I guess she never even knew she’d done it. That was bad manners, wasn’t it, little fellow? Very bad manners towards a lady.’

  She recognised the smell that she had not been able to place: it was the aftershave lotion that Joseph had laid out in every bathroom they had never shared. They must have smeared some on him for the occasion.

  ‘Don’t you want to speak to this lady?’ Kurtz was asking. ‘Don’t you want to welcome her to our villa here? I’m beginning to wonder why you don’t cooperate with us any more!’ Gradually, under his persistence, Michel’s eyes woke, and his body straightened slightly in obedience. ‘You want to greet this pretty lady politely? You want to wish her good day? Good day? You want to tell her good day, little fellow?’

  Of course he did: ‘Good day,’ said Michel, in a listless version of the voice in the tapes.

  ‘Don’t answer,’ Joseph warned her softly from her side.

  ‘Good day, madame,’ Kurtz insisted, still without the least rancour.

  ‘Madame,’ said Michel.

  ‘Have him write something,’ Kurtz ordered, and let him go.

  They sat him at a table and put a pen and a sheet of paper before him, but he couldn’t manage much. Kurtz didn’t care about that. See how he holds his pen, he was saying. See the way his fingers shape naturally for the Arab script.

  ‘Maybe in the middle of the night you woke up once and found him doing his accounts. Okay? So this is how he looked.’

  She was talking to Joseph but only in her mind. Get me out. I think I’m dying. She heard the bump of Michel’s feet as they took him up the stairs and out of hearing, but Kurtz allowed her no respite, just as he allowed none to himself. ‘Charlie, we have one further stage of this thing. I think we should go through with it now, even if it costs a little effort. Some things have to be done.’

  The drawing-room was very quiet, just an apartment somewhere. Holding Joseph’s arm, she followed Kurtz upstairs. She didn’t know why, but she found it helpful to limp a little, like Michel.

  The wooden handrail was still sticky from sweat. The steps had strips of stuff like emery paper on them, but when she trod on them the expected rasping sound did not result. She picked out these details with accuracy because there are times when details can supply the only link with reality. A lavatory door stood open, but when she took a second look she realised that there was no door, only a doorway, and no chain hanging from the cistern; and she supposed that if you were dragging a prisoner around all day, even one who was doped out of his mind, you had to think of these things, you had to get your house in order. Not till she had pondered earnestly on each of these important issues did she allow herself to admit that she had entered a padded room with a single bed shoved against the far wall. And on the bed Michel again, naked except for his gold medallion, his hands clutched over his crotch and hardly a crease where his belly folded. The muscles of his shoulders were full and round, the muscles of his chest were flat and broad, the shadows beneath them crisp as lines of India ink. On an order from Kurtz, the two boys stood him up and pulled away his hands. Circumcised, well grown, beautiful. Silently, with scowling disapproval, the bearded boy pointed to the white birthmark like a milkstain on the left flank, and the smeared scar of a knife-wound on the right shoulder; and the endearing rivulet of black hair that ran downward from the navel. Silently they turned him round, and she remembered Lucy and her favourite kind of back: a spine recessed in muscle. But no bullet-holes, nothing at all to spoil the sheerness of his beauty.

  They stood him up again, but by then Joseph had apparently decided that Charlie might have had enough of a good thing, for he was leading her down the stairs, fast, one arm locked around her waist and the other grasping her wrist so tight it hurt. In the lavatory off the hall she paused long enough to vomit, but all she wanted after that was to get out. Out of the apartment, out of sight of them, out of her own mind and skin.

  She was running. It was sports day. She was running as fast as she could; the concrete teeth of the surrounding skyline were bobbing past her from the other direction. The roof gardens were linked for her by dinky brick paths, toy-town signposts pointed her to places she could not read, overhead pipes of blue and yellow plastic made streaks of colour above her head. She was running as far as she could, upstairs and downstairs, taking a keen horticultural interest in the variety of vegetation on her way, the tasteful geraniums and stunted flowered shrubs and cigarette ends and the patches of raw earth like unmarked graves. Joseph was at her side and she was yelling at him to go, go away; an elderly couple sat on a bench grinning nostalgically at this lovers’ tiff. She ran the whole length of two platforms this way, till she reached a fence and a sheer drop into a car park, but she didn’t commit suicide because she’d decided already that she wasn’t the type, and besides she wanted to live wit
h Joseph and not die with Michel. She stopped and she was scarcely panting. The run had done her good; she should run more often. She asked him for a cigarette but he hadn’t one. He drew her to a bench; she sat on it, then stood up in order to assert herself. She had learned that emotional scenes did not play effectively between people who were walking, so she stood still.

  ‘I advise you to keep your sympathy for the innocent,’ Joseph warned her, calmly cutting in upon her invective.

  ‘He was innocent till you invented him!’

  Mistaking his silence for disarray, and his disarray for weakness, she paused and affected to contemplate the monstrous skyline. ‘“It’s necessary,”’ she said scathingly. ‘“I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t necessary.” Quote. “No sane court on earth would condemn us for what we are asking you to do.” Quote again. Your words, I think. Care to take them back?’

  ‘No, I don’t think so.’

  ‘I don’t think so. Well, you’d better be awfully sure, hadn’t you? Because if there are any doubts around here, I’d rather they were mine.’

  Still standing, her attention shifted to a point immediately ahead of her, somewhere in the belly of the opposite building, which she now studied with the earnestness of a potential buyer. But Joseph had remained seated, which somehow made the scene all wrong. They should have been face to face in close-up. Or he behind her, looking at the same distant chalkmark.

  ‘Mind if we add up a few things?’ she enquired.

  ‘Please do.’

  ‘He has killed Jews.’

  ‘He has killed Jews and he has killed innocent bystanders who were not Jews and did not have any position in the conflict.’

  ‘I’d like to do a book, actually, on the guilt of all these innocent bystanders you go on about. I’d start with your Lebanese bombings and fan out from there.’

  Seated or not, he came back faster and harder than she had bargained for. ‘That book has been done, Charlie, and it is called the Holocaust.’

  With her thumb and forefinger she made a little spyhole, and squinted through it at a distant balcony. ‘On the other hand, you personally have killed Arabs, I take it.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Lots?’

  ‘Enough.’

  ‘But only in self-defence. Israelis only ever kill in self-defence.’ No reply. ‘“I have killed enough Arabs,” signed “Joseph”.’ Still she got no rise from him. ‘Well that’s a turn-up for the book, I will say. An Israeli who’s killed enough Arabs.’

  Her tartan skirt was from Michel’s trousseau. It had pockets either side, which she had only recently discovered. Thrusting her hands into them, she made the skirt swing while she pretended to study the effect.

  ‘You are bastards, aren’t you?’ she asked carelessly. ‘You are definitely bastards. Wouldn’t you say so?’ She was still looking at her skirt, really interested in the way it filled and turned. ‘And you are the biggest bastard of them all actually, aren’t you? Because you get it both ways. One minute our bleeding heart, the next our red-toothed warrior. Whereas all you really are – when it comes down to it – is a bloodthirsty, landgrabbing little Jew.’

  Not only did he stand up, but he hit her. Twice. Having first removed her sunglasses. Harder and faster than she had ever been hit before, and on the same side of the face. The first blow was so heavy that a cussed triumph made her thrust her face against the direction of it. Quits, she thought, remembering the Athens house. The second was a fresh explosion in the same crater, and when it was over he pushed her down onto the bench, where she could cry her heart out, but she was too proud to shed another tear. Did he hit me for his sake or for mine? she wondered. She hoped desperately it was for his own; that at the twelfth hour of their mad marriage she had finally penetrated his reserve. But one glance at his closed face and sparse, unbothered stare told her that she, not Joseph, was the patient. He was holding out a handkerchief to her but she waved it vaguely away.

  ‘Forget it,’ she muttered.

  She took his arm and he walked her slowly back along the concrete walkway. The same old couple smiled at them as they passed. Children, they told each other – as we were once. One minute quarrelling like murderers; the next back to bed to make it even better than before.

  The lower apartment was much like the upper one except that it possessed no balcony and no prisoner, and sometimes while she read or listened she managed to convince herself that she had never been upstairs at all – upstairs was a chamber of horrors in the dark attics of her mind. Then she would hear the bump of a packing case through the ceiling as the boys cleared up their photographic equipment and generally prepared for the end of term, and she had to admit that upstairs was as real as downstairs after all: more real, since the letters were fabrications, whereas Michel was flesh.

  They sat in a ring, the three of them, and Kurtz began with one of his preambles. But his style was a lot crisper and less roundabout than usual, perhaps because she was a proven soldier now, a veteran ‘with a whole basket of exciting new intelligence already to her credit’, as he put it. The letters were in a briefcase on the table, and before opening it he reminded her once more of the ‘fiction’, a word he had in common with Joseph. The fiction was that she was not only a passionate lover, but a passionate correspondent who in Michel’s long absences was deprived of all other outlets. Explaining this, he pulled on a pair of cheap cotton gloves. The letters were therefore not a mere sideshow in the relationship; they were ‘the only place you could live aloud, dear’. They recorded her increasingly obsessive love for Michel – often with disarming frankness – but also her political reawakening and her transition to a ‘global activism’ that took for granted the ‘linkage’ of anti-repressive struggles anywhere in the world. Put together, they comprised the diary of ‘an emotionally and sexually aroused person’ as she advanced from vaguely focused protest to wholesale activism, with its implicit acceptance of violence.

  ‘And since we could not rely on you, in the circumstances, to provide us with the full variety of your literary style,’ he ended as he unlocked the briefcase, ‘we decided to compose the letters for you.’

  Naturally, she thought. She glanced at Joseph, who was sitting straight-backed and uncommonly innocent, with his palms pressed virtuously together between his knees, like a man who had never hit anyone in his life.

  They were in two brown wrapped packages, one much larger than the other. Selecting the smaller first, Kurtz clumsily opened it with his gloved fingertips and spread the papers flat. She recognised the black, schoolboy writing of Michel. He unwrapped the second and, like a dream come true, she recognised the handwriting as her own. Michel’s to you are in photostat, dear, Kurtz was saying; we have the originals waiting for you in England. Your own letters, now, they’re the originals, so they belong to Michel, don’t they, dear?

  ‘Naturally,’ she said, this time aloud, and on an instinct glanced in Joseph’s direction, but this time quite specifically at his locked-up hands so intent upon disowning authorship.

  She read Michel’s letters first because she felt she owed him the attention. There were a dozen, and they varied from the frankly sensual and passionate to the brief and authoritarian. ‘Kindly in your letters be sure to number. If you do not number, do not write. I cannot enjoy your letters if I do not know I receive them all. This for my personal safety.’ Between passages of ecstatic praise for her acting came arid exhortations to perform only ‘rôles of social significance which can awaken awareness’. At the same time she was to ‘avoid public acts that reveal your true politics.’ She was to go to no more radical forums, attend no more demonstrations or rallies. She was to conduct herself ‘in the bourgeois manner’, appearing to accept capitalist standards. She should let it be thought she had ‘renounced to the revolution’ while secretly ‘continuing, by all means, with your radical reading’. There were many confusions of logic, many lapses of syntax, many misspellings. There was talk of ‘our soon reunion’, meaning presumabl
y in Athens, and there were a couple of coy references to white grapes, vodka, and taking ‘plenty of sleep before we are together again’.

  As she read on, she began to form a new and humbler picture of Michel, one that came suddenly much closer to their prisoner upstairs. ‘He’s a baby,’ she muttered. She glanced accusingly at Joseph. ‘You built him up so much. He’s a kid.’

  Receiving no answer, she turned to her own letters to Michel, picking them up gingerly, as if they solved a great mystery. ‘Schoolbooks,’ she said aloud, with a stupid smile, as she took a first nervous look at them, and this was because, thanks to poor Ned Quilley’s archives, the old Georgian had been able to reproduce not merely Charlie’s exotic taste in stationery – the backs of menus, bills, the headed notepaper of hotels and theatres and boarding houses along her route – but had caught, to her mounting awe, the spontaneous variations in her writing, from the infantile scrawls of early sadness to the passionate woman in love; to the goodnight scribble of the bone-weary actress holed out in the sticks and longing for a little light relief; to the would-be erudite copperplate of the revolutionary who troubled to write out a lengthy passage of Trotsky, but missed the second ‘r’ in ‘occurred’.

  Thanks to Leon, her prose was given no less exactly; Charlie actually blushed to see how perfectly they had imitated her lurid hyperbole, her lapses into awkward, incomplete philosophising, her rampant, violent fury against the ruling Tory government. Unlike Michel’s, her references to their lovemaking were graphic and explicit; to her parents abusive; to her childhood wrathful and unavenged. She met Charlie the romancer, Charlie the penitent, and Charlie the hardnosed bitch. She met what Joseph called the Arab in her – the Charlie who was in love with her own rhetoric, whose notions of truth were inspired less by what had happened than by what should have happened. And when she had read them all through, she put the two piles together and, head in hands, read them again as a complete correspondence – her five letters to his every one, her answers in reply to his questions, his evasions in reply to hers.