Part 16 (2/2)

”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.”

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