The Little Drummer Girl

by John le Carré

  ‘His real name is Halloran. Arthur J. Halloran. He’s a traitor. He asked me, when I leave, to tell the Americans that he wants to go home and face trial. He frankly admits to harbouring counter-revolutionary beliefs. He could betray us all.’

  Tayeh’s dark gaze had not left her face. He held his ash walking stick in both hands, and was tapping the end of it lightly on the toe of his bad leg, as if to keep it awake.

  ‘Is this why you asked to see me?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Halloran came to you three nights ago,’ he remarked, looking away from her. ‘Why did you not tell me earlier? Why wait three days?’

  ‘You weren’t here.’

  ‘Others were. Why did you not ask for me?’

  ‘I was afraid you would punish him.’

  But Tayeh did not seem to think that Halloran was on trial. ‘Afraid,’ he repeated, as if that were a grave admission. ‘Afraid? Why should you be afraid for Halloran? For three whole days? Do you secretly sympathise with his position?’

  ‘You know I don’t.’

  ‘Is this why he spoke to you so frankly? Because you gave him reason to trust you? I think so.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Did you sleep with him?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘So why should you wish to protect Halloran? Why should you fear for the life of a traitor when you are learning to kill for the revolution? Why are you not true to us? You disappoint me.’

  ‘I am not experienced. I was sorry for him and I did not wish him harmed. Then I remembered my duty.’

  Tayeh seemed increasingly confused by the whole conversation. He took another pull of whisky.

  ‘Sit down.’

  ‘I don’t need to.’

  ‘Sit down.’

  She did as he ordered. She was looking fiercely to one side of him, at some hated spot on her own private horizon. In her mind she had passed the point where he had any right to know her. I have learned what you sent me here to learn. Blame yourself if you do not understand me.

  ‘In a letter you wrote to Michel, you speak of a child. You have a child? His?’

  ‘I was talking about the gun. We slept with it.’

  ‘What type of gun?’

  ‘A Walther. Khalil gave it to him.’

  Tayeh sighed. ‘If you were me,’ he said at last, turning his head away from her, ‘and you had to deal with Halloran – who asks to go home, but who knows too much – what would you do with him?’

  ‘Neutralise him.’

  ‘Shoot him?’

  ‘That’s your business.’

  ‘Yes. It is.’ He was considering his bad leg once more, holding his walking stick above it and parallel to it. ‘But why execute a man who is already dead? Why not let him work for us?’

  ‘Because he’s a traitor.’

  Once again, Tayeh seemed wilfully to misunderstand the logic of her position.

  ‘Halloran approaches many people in this camp. Always with a reason. He is our vulture, showing us where there is weakness and disease. Pointing the way to potential traitors. Don’t you think we would be silly to get rid of such a useful creature? Did you go to bed with Fidel?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Because he is a dago?’

  ‘Because I didn’t want to go to bed with him.’

  ‘With the Arab boys?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You are too fastidious, I think.’

  ‘I wasn’t fastidious with Michel.’

  With a sigh of perplexity, Tayeh took a third pull of whisky. ‘Who is Joseph?’ he asked, in a mildly querulous tone. ‘Joseph. Who, please?’

  Was the actress in her dead at last? Or was she so reconciled with the theatre of the real that the difference between life and art had disappeared? None of her repertoire occurred to her; she had no sense of selecting her performance. She did not consider falling over her feet and lying still on the stone floor. She was not tempted to embark on a wallowing confession, trading her own life for everything she knew, which she had been told was her final, permissible option. She was angry. She was sick to death of having her integrity dragged out and dusted down and subjected to fresh scrutiny every time she reached another milestone in her march towards Michel’s revolution. So she flung straight back at him without thinking – a card flipped off the top of the pack – take it or leave it, and to hell with you.

  ‘I don’t know a Joseph.’

  ‘Come. Think. On Mykonos. Before you went to Athens. One of your friends, in casual conversation with an acquaintance of ours, was heard to make a reference to Joseph, who joined your group. He said Charlie was quite captivated by him.’

  There were no barriers left, no twists. She had cleared them all, and was running free.

  ‘Joseph? Ah, that Joseph!’ She let her face register the belated recollection: and as it did so, to cloud in disgust.

  ‘I remember him. He was a greasy little Jew who tagged on to our group.’

  ‘Don’t talk about Jews like that. We are not anti-Semitic, we are merely anti-Zionist.’

  ‘Tell me another,’ she snapped.

  Tayeh was interested. ‘You are describing me as a liar, Charlie?’

  ‘Whether he was a Zionist or not, he was a creep. He reminded me of my father.’

  ‘Was your father a Jew?’

  ‘No. But he was a thief.’

  Tayeh thought about this for a long time, using first her face, then her whole body as a term of reference for whatever doubts still lingered in his mind. He offered her a cigarette but she didn’t take it: her instinct told her to make no step towards him. Once more he tapped his dead foot with his stick. ‘That night you spent with Michel in Thessalonika – in the old hotel – you remember?’

  ‘What of it?’

  ‘The staff heard raised voices from your room late at night.’

  ‘So what’s your question?’

  ‘Don’t hurry me, please. Who was shouting that night?’

  ‘No one. They were snooping at the wrong bloody door.’

  ‘Who was shouting?’

  ‘We weren’t shouting. Michel didn’t want me to go. That’s all. He was afraid for me.’

  ‘And you?’

  It was a story she had worked up with Joseph: her moment of being stronger than Michel.

  ‘I offered him his bracelet back,’ she said.

  Tayeh nodded. ‘Which accounts for the postscript in your letter: “I am so glad I kept the bracelet.” And of course – there was no shouting. You are right. Forgive my simple Arab trick.’ He took a last searching look at her, trying once more, in vain, to resolve the enigma; then pursed his lips, soldier-like, as Joseph sometimes did, as a prelude to issuing an order.

  ‘We have a mission for you. Get your possessions and return here immediately. Your training is complete.’

  Leaving was the most unexpected madness of all. It was worse than end of term; worse than dumping the gang at Piraeus harbour. Fidel and Bubi clutched her to their breasts, their tears mixing with her own. One of the Algerian girls gave her a wooden Christ-child as a pendant.

  Professor Minkel lived on the saddle that joins Mount Scopus to French Hill, on the eighth floor of a new tower close to the Hebrew University, one of a great cluster on the skyline which have caused pain to Jerusalem’s luckless conservationists. Every apartment looked down on the Old City, but the trouble was, the Old City looked up at every apartment too. Like its neighbours, it was a fortress as well as a skyscraper, and the positioning of its windows was determined by the most favourable arcs of fire if an attack were to be riposted. Kurtz made three wrong tries before he found the place. He lost himself first in a shopping centre built in concrete five feet deep; then again in a British cemetery devoted to the fallen of the First World War: ‘A Free Gift from the People of Palestine’ read the engraving. He explored other buildings, mostly the gifts of millionaires from America, and came finally upon this tower of hewn stone. The name signs had been vandalised and so he pressed a bel
l at random and unearthed an old Pole from Galicia who spoke only Yiddish. The Pole knew which building all right – this one as you see me! – he knew Dr Minkel and admired him for his stand; he himself had attended the venerated Kraków University. But he also had a lot of questions on his own account, which Kurtz was obliged to answer as best he could: like where did Kurtz come from originally? Well, my heaven, did he know so-and-so? And what was Kurtz’s business here, a grown man, eleven in the morning when Dr Minkel should be instructing future fine philosophers of our people?

  The lift engineers were on strike, so Kurtz was obliged to take the staircase, but nothing could have dampened his good spirits. For one thing, his niece had just announced her engagement to a young boy in his own service – though not before time. For another, Elli’s Bible conference had passed off happily; she had given a coffee party at the end of it and, to her great contentment, he had managed to be present. But best of all, the Freiburg breakthrough had been followed by several reassuring pointers, of which the most satisfactory was obtained but yesterday, by one of Shimon Litvak’s listeners, testing a new-fangled directional microphone on a rooftop in Beirut: Freiburg, Freiburg, three times in five pages, a real delight. Sometimes luck treated you that way, Kurtz reflected as he climbed. And luck, as Napoleon and everybody in Jerusalem knew, was what made good generals.

  Reaching a small landing, he paused to collect his breath a little, and his thoughts. The staircase was lit like an air-raid shelter, with wire cages over the light-bulbs, but today it was the sounds of his own childhood in the ghettos that Kurtz heard bouncing up and down the gloomy well. I was right not to bring Shimon, he thought. Sometimes Shimon puts a chilly note on things; a surface lightness would improve him.

  The door of number 18D had a steel-plated eyehole and locks all down one side of it, and Mrs Minkel undid them one by one like boot buttons, calling, ‘Just one moment, please,’ while she got lower and lower. He stepped inside and waited while she patiently replaced them. She was tall and fine-looking, with blue eyes very bright, and grey hair pinned in an academic bun.

  ‘You are Mr Spielberg from the Ministry of the Interior,’ she informed him with a certain guardedness as she gave him her hand. ‘Hansi is expecting you. Welcome. Please.’

  She opened the door to a tiny study and there her Hansi sat, as weathered and patrician as a Buddenbrook. His desk was too small for him, and had been so for many years; his books and papers lay stacked about him on the floor with an order that could not have been haphazard. The desk stood askew to a window bay, and the bay was half a hexagon, with thin smoked windows like arrow slits, and a bench seat built in. Rising carefully, Minkel picked his way with unworldly dignity across the room until he had reached the one small island that was not claimed by his erudition. His welcome was uneasy, and as they sat themselves in the window bay, Mrs Minkel drew up a stool and sat herself firmly between them, as if intent upon seeing fair play.

  An awkward silence followed. Kurtz pulled the regretful smile of a man obliged by his duty. ‘Mrs Minkel, I fear there are a couple of things on the security side which my office insists I am to discuss with your husband alone in the first instance,’ he said. And waited again, still smiling, until the Professor suggested she make a coffee; how did Mr Spielberg like it?

  With a warning glance at her husband from the doorway, Mrs Minkel reluctantly withdrew. In reality there could have been little difference between the two men’s ages; yet Kurtz was careful to speak up to Minkel because that was what the Professor was accustomed to.

  ‘Professor, I understand that our mutual friend, Ruthie Zadir, spoke to you only yesterday,’ Kurtz began, with a bedside respectfulness. He could understand this very well, for he had stood over Ruthie while she made the call, and listened to both sides of the conversation in order to get the feel of his man.

  ‘Ruth was one of my best students,’ the Professor observed, with an air of loss.

  ‘She is surely one of ours too,’ said Kurtz, more expansively. ‘Professor, are you aware, please, of the nature of the work in which Ruthie is now engaged?’

  Minkel was not really used to answering questions outside his subject, and he required a moment’s puzzled thought before replying.

  ‘I feel I should say something,’ he said, with awkward resolution.

  Kurtz smiled hospitably.

  ‘If your visit here concerns the political leanings – sympathies – of present or former students under my charge, I regret that I am unable to collaborate with you. These are not criteria which I can accept as legitimate. We have had this discussion before. I am sorry.’ He seemed suddenly embarrassed, both by his thoughts and by his Hebrew. ‘I stand for something here. When we stand for something, we must speak out, but most important is to act. That is what I stand for.’

  Kurtz, who had read Minkel’s file, knew exactly what he stood for. He was a disciple of Martin Buber, and a member of a largely forgotten idealistic group that between the wars of ’67 and ’73 had championed a real peace with the Palestinians. The rightists called him a traitor; sometimes, when they remembered him these days, so did the leftists. He was an oracle on Jewish philosophy, on early Christianity, on the humanist movements in his native Germany, and on about thirty other subjects as well; he had written a three-volume tome on the theory and practice of Zionism, with an index as long as a telephone directory.

  ‘Professor,’ said Kurtz, ‘I am well aware of your posture in these matters and it is surely no intention of mine to seek to interfere in any way with your fine moral stand.’ He paused, allowing time for his assurance to sink in. ‘May I take it, by the way, that your forthcoming lecture at the University of Freiburg also touches upon this same issue of individual rights? The Arabs – their basic liberties – isn’t that your subject on the twenty-fourth?’

  The Professor could not go along with this. He did not deal in careless definitions.

  ‘My subject on that occasion is different. It concerns the self-realisation of Judaism, not by conquest, but by the exemplification of Jewish culture and morality.’

  ‘So how does that argument run exactly?’ Kurtz asked benignly.

  Minkel’s wife returned with a tray of homemade cakes. ‘Is he asking you to inform again?’ she demanded. ‘If he’s asking, tell him no. Then when you’ve said no, say no again, until he hears. What do you think he’ll do? Beat you with a rubber truncheon?’

  ‘Mrs Minkel, I surely am asking your husband no such thing,’ said Kurtz, quite unperturbed.

  With a look of patent disbelief, Mrs Minkel once more withdrew.

  But Minkel barely paused. If he had noticed the interruption at all, he ignored it. Kurtz had asked a question; Minkel, who renounced all barriers to knowledge as unacceptable, proposed to answer it.

  ‘I will tell you exactly how the arguments run, Mr Spielberg,’ he replied solemnly. ‘As long as we have a small Jewish state, we may advance democratically, as Jews, towards our Jewish self-realisation. But once we have a larger state, incorporating many Arabs, we have to choose.’ With his old mottled hands, he showed Kurtz the choice. ‘On this side, democracy without Jewish self-realisation. On that side, Jewish self-realisation without democracy.’

  ‘And the solution, therefore, Professor?’ Kurtz enquired.

  Minkel’s hands flew in the air in a dismissive gesture of academic impatience. He seemed to have forgotten that Kurtz was not his pupil.

  ‘Simple! Move out of the Gaza and the West Bank before we lose our values! What other solution is there?’

  ‘And how do the Palestinians themselves respond to this proposal, Professor?’

  A sadness replaced the Professor’s earlier assurance. ‘They call me a cynic,’ he said.

  ‘They do?’

  ‘According to them, I want both the Jewish state and world sympathy, so they say I am subversive of their cause.’ The door opened again, and Mrs Minkel entered with the coffee pot and cups. ‘But I am not subversive,’ the Professor said hopeless
ly – though he got no further, owing to his wife.

  ‘Subversive?’ Mrs Minkel echoed, slamming down the crockery and colouring purple. ‘You are calling Hansi subversive? Because we speak our hearts about what is happening to this country?’

  Kurtz would not have been able to stop her if he had tried, but in the event he made no effort to. He was content to let her run her course.

  ‘In the Golan, the beatings and the torture? On the West Bank, how they treat them, worse than the SS? In the Lebanon, in Gaza? Here in Jerusalem, even, slapping the Arab kids around because they are Arabs! And we should be subversive because we dare to talk about oppression, merely because no one is oppressing us – Jews from Germany, subversive in Israel?’

  ‘Aber, Liebchen –’ the Professor said, with an embarrassed fluster.

  But Mrs Minkel was clearly a lady who was used to making her point. ‘We couldn’t stop the Nazis, now we can’t stop ourselves. We get our own country, what do we do? Forty years later, we invent a new lost tribe. Idiocy! And if we don’t say it, the world will. The world says it already. Read the newspapers, Mr Spielberg!’ As if warding off a blow, Kurtz had lifted his forearm until it was between her face and his. But she had not nearly finished. ‘That Ruthie,’ she said, with a sneer. ‘A good brain, studies three years under Hansi here. And what does she do? She joins the apparatus.’

  Lowering his hand, Kurtz revealed that he was smiling. Not in derision, not in anger, but with the confused pride of a man who truly loved the astonishing diversity of his people. He was calling, ‘Please,’ he was appealing to the Professor, but Mrs Minkel still had a wealth to say.

  Finally, however, she stopped, and when she had done so, Kurtz asked her whether she too would not sit down and listen to what he had come to talk about. So she perched herself on the stool once more, waiting to be appeased.

  Kurtz picked his words very carefully, very kindly. What he had to say was about as secret as a secret could be, he said. Not even Ruthie Zadir – a fine officer, handling many secrets every day – not even Ruthie was aware of it, he said; which was not true, but never mind. He had come not about the Professor’s pupils, he said, and least of all to accuse him of being subversive or to quarrel with his fine ideals. He had come solely about the Professor’s forthcoming address in Freiburg, which had caught the attention of certain extremely negative elements. Finally he came clean.