Palme was her German name. Pronounced "Pal-mer," Helga had said. It was spoken by a small, happy Arab with a day's growth of beard and curly hair and immaculate, threadbare clothes. "Please," he repeated, and plucked at her sleeve. His jacket was open and he had a big silver automatic shoved into his waistband. There were twenty people between herself and the immigration officer, and Helga hadn't said it would be like this at all.
"I am Mr. Danny. Please. Miss Palme. Come."
She gave him her passport and he dived away with it into the crowd, holding his arms wide for her to follow in his wake. So much for Helga. So much for Mercedes. Danny had vanished, but a moment later he reappeared looking very proud, clutching a white landing-card in one hand and in the other a big official-looking man in a black leather coat.
"Friends," Danny explained, with a patriot's grand smile. "Everybody friends of Palestine."
Somehow she doubted it, but faced with his enthusiasm she was too polite to say so. The big man looked her over gravely, then studied the passport, which he handed to Danny. Lastly, he studied the white card, which he posted into his top pocket.
"Willkommen,"he said, with a swift diagonal nod, but it was an invitation to hurry.
They were at the doors as the fight broke out. It began small, as something that a uniformed official had apparently said to a prosperous-looking traveller. Suddenly both were shouting and passing their hands very close to each other's faces. Within seconds, each man had acquired champions, and as Danny guided her to the car park, a group of soldiers in green berets were hobbling towards the scene, unslinging their machine guns on the way.
"Syrians," Danny explained, and smiled philosophically at her as if to say that every country had its Syrians.
The car was an old blue Peugeot full of stale cigarette smoke, and it was parked beside a coffee stall. Danny opened the back door and dusted the cushions with his hand. As she got in, a boy slipped in beside her from the other side. As Danny started the engine, another boy appeared and sat himself in the passenger seat. It was too dark for her to see their features, but she could see their machine guns clearly. They were so young that for a moment she had difficulty in believing that their guns were real. The boy beside her offered her a cigarette and was sad when Charlie declined.
"You speak Spanish?" he enquired with the greatest courtesy, by way of an alternative. Charlie did not. "Then you forgive my English language. If you would speak Spanish, I would speak perfectly."
"But your English is wonderful."
"This is not true," he replied reprovingly, as if he had already identified a Western perfidy, and lapsed into a troubled silence.
A couple of shots rang out behind them, but nobody remarked on them. They were approaching a sandbagged emplacement. Danny stopped the car. A uniformed sentry stared at her, then waved them through with his machine gun.
"Was he Syrian too?" she asked.
"Lebanese," said Danny, and sighed.
But she could feel his excitement all the same. She could feel it in all of them--a keening, a quickness of eye and mind. The street was part battlefield, part building site; the passing street lamps, those that worked, revealed it in hasty patches. Stubs of charred tree recalled a gracious avenue; now bougainvillea had begun to cover the ruins. Burnt-out cars, peppered with bullet-holes, lay around the pavements. They passed lighted shanties, with garish shops inside, and high silhouettes of bombed buildings broken into mountain crags. They passed a house so pierced with shell holes that it resembled a gigantic cheese-grater balanced against the pale sky. A bit of moon, slipping from one hole to the next, kept pace with them. Occasionally, a brand-new building would appear, half built, half lit, half lived in, a speculator's gamble of red girders and black glass.
"Prague I was two years. Havana, Cuba, three. You have been to Cuba?"
The boy next to her seemed to have recovered from his disappointment.
"I have not been to Cuba," she confessed.
"Now I am official interpreter, Spanish Arabic."
"Fantastic," said Charlie. "Congratulations."
"I interpret for you, Miss Palme?"
"Any time," said Charlie, and there was much laughter. Western woman was reinstated after all.
Danny was braking the car to a walking pace and lowering his window. Dead ahead of them in the centre of the road a brazier glowed, and round it sat a group of men and boys in white kaffiyehs and bits of khaki battledress. Several brown dogs had made their own encampment close to them. She remembered Michel in his home village, listening to the tales of travellers, and thought, now they have made a village in the street. As Danny dipped his lights, an old, beautiful man stood up, rubbed his back, shuffled over to them, machine gun in hand, and leaned his lined face into Danny's window until they could embrace. Their conversation flowed timelessly back and forth, Ignored, Charlie listened to every word, imagining that she could somehow understand. But, looking past him, she had a less comfortable vision: standing in a motionless half circle, four of the old man's audience had their machine guns trained upon the car, and not one of them was above fifteen years old.
"Our people," said Charlie's neighbour, with reverence, as they continued on their way. "Palestinian commandos. Our part of town."
Michel's part too, she thought proudly.
You will find them an easy people to love,Joseph had told her.
Charlie spent four nights and four days with the boys, and loved them singly and collectively. They were the first of her several families. They moved her constantly, like a treasure, always by dark, always with the greatest courtesy. She had arrived so suddenly, they explained, with charming regret; it was necessary for our Captain to make certain preparations. They called her "Miss Palme" and perhaps they really thought it was her name. They returned her love for them, yet they asked her nothing personal and nothing obtrusive; they maintained in every sense a shy and disciplined reticence, which made her curious about the nature of the authority that governed them. Her first bedroom was at the top of an old shell-torn house empty of all other life except for the absent proprietor's parrot, which had a smoker's cough and produced it every time someone lit a cigarette. Its other trick was to squawk like a telephone, which it did in the dead hours, causing her to steal to the door and wait for it to be answered. The boys slept on the landing outside, one at a time, while the other two smoked, drank tiny glasses of sweet tea, and kept up a camp fire murmur over their card games.
The nights were eternal, yet no two minutes were the same. The very sounds were at war with one another, first lying off at a safe distance, then advancing, then grouping, then falling upon each other in a skirmish of conflicting dins--a burst of music, the scream of car tyres and sirens--followed by the deep silence of a forest. In that orchestra, gunfire was a minor instrument: a drumbeat here, a tattoo there, sometimes the slow whistle of a shell. Once she heard peals of laughter, but human voices were few. And once, in early morning after an urgent tapping at her door, Danny and the two boys tiptoed together to her window. Going after them, she saw a car parked a hundred yards along the street. Smoke poured out of it; it lifted and tolled itself onto its side like someone turning over in bed. A puff of warm air pushed her back into the room. Something fell off a shelf. She heard a thud inside her head.
"Peace," said Mahmoud, the prettiest, with a wink; and they all retired, bright-eyed and confiding.