The planes disappeared. Palestine had won another victory.
"They are taking you to another place tomorrow," Salma said that evening as they walked on the hillside.
"I'm not going," said Charlie.
The planes returned two hours later, just before dark, when she was back in her hut. The siren started too late and she was still running for the shelters as the first wave came in--two of them, straight out of an air display, deafening the crowd with their engines--will they ever pull out of the dive? They did, and the blast of their first bomb threw her against the steel door, though the noise was not as bad as the earthquake that accompanied it, and the hysterical swimming-pool screams that filled the black, rank smoke on the other side of the playing field. The thud of her body alerted someone inside, the door opened, and strong women's hands pulled her into the darkness and forced her onto a wooden bench. At first she was stone deaf, but gradually she heard the whimpering of terrified children, and the steadier but fervent voices of their mothers. Someone lit an oil lamp and fixed it to a hook at the centre of the ceiling, and for a while it seemed to Charlie in her giddiness that she was living inside a Hogarth print that had been hung the wrong way up. Then she realised Salma was beside her, and she remembered she had been with her ever since the alarm had sounded. Another pair of planes followed--or was it the first pair making a second run?--the oil lamp swung, and her vision righted itself as a stick of bombs approached in careful crescendo. She felt the first two like blows on her body--no, not again, not again, oh please. The third was the loudest and killed her outright, the fourth and fifth told her she was alive after all.
"America!" a woman shouted suddenly, in hysteria and pain, straight at Charlie. "America, America, America!" She tried to get the other women to accuse her also, but Salma told her gently to be quiet.
Charlie waited an hour, but it was probably two minutes, and when still nothing happened she looked at Salma to say "Let's go," because she had decided that the shelter was worse than anywhere. Salma shook her head.
"They are waiting for us to come out," she explained quietly, perhaps thinking of her mother. "We cannot come out before dark."
The dark came and Charlie returned alone to her hut. She lit a candle because the electricity was off, and the last thing she saw in the whole room was the sprig of white heather in the tooth mug above her handbasin. She studied the kitschy little painting of the Palestinian child; she stepped into the courtyard where her clothes still hung on the line--hooray, they're dry. She had no means of ironing, so she opened a drawer of her tiny clapboard chest and folded the clothes into it with a camp dweller's concentration upon neatness. One of my kids put it there, she told herself gaily when the white heather once more forced itself upon her vision. The jolly one with gold teeth I call Aladdin. It's a present from Salma on my last night. How sweet of her. Of him.
"We are a love-affair,"Salma had said as they parted."You'll go, and when you've gone, we'll be a dream."
You bastards, she thought. You rotten, killing Zionist bastards. If I hadn't been here, you'd have bombed them to Kingdom Come.
"The only loyalty is to be here"Salma had said.
twenty-two
Charlie was not alone in watching the time pass and her life unfold before her eyes. From the moment she had crossed the line, Litvak, Kurtz, and Becker--her whole former family, in fact--had been forced, in one way and another, to harness their impatience to the alien and desultory tempo of their adversaries. "There is nothing so hard in war," Kurtz liked to quote to his subordinates--and assuredly to himself as well--"as the heroic feat of holding back."
Kurtz was holding back as never before in his career. The very act of withdrawing his ragged army from its English shadows appeared--to its foot soldiers, at least--more like a defeat than the victories they had so far scored but scarcely celebrated. Within hours of Charlie's departure, the Hampstead house was given back to the diaspora, the radio van stripped, its electronic equipment shipped as diplomatic baggage to Tel Aviv, somehow in disgrace. The van itself, its false plates removed, its engine numbers sheared from their casings, became yet another burnt-out roadside wreck somewhere between Bodmin moor and civilisation. But Kurtz did not linger for these obsequies. He returned hot-foot to Disraeli Street, chained himself reluctantly to the desk he hated, and became that same coordinator whose functions he had derided to Alexis. Jerusalem was enjoying a balmy spell of winter sunshine, and as he hastened from one secret office building to another, fighting off attacks, begging resources, the gold stone of the Walled City mirrored itself in the shimmering blue sky. For once, Kurtz drew little solace from the sight. His war machine, he said later, had become a horse-drawn carriage with the horses pulling different ways. In the field, despite all Gavron's effort to prevent him, he was his own man; at home, where every second-class politician and third-class soldier saw himself as some kind of genius at intelligence, he had more critics than Elijah and more enemies than the Samaritans. His first battle was for Charlie's continued existence and perhaps for his own too, a kind of obligatory scene that started the moment Kurtz set foot in Gavron's office.
Gavron the Rook was already standing, his arms lifted, shaping for the brawl. His shaggy black hair was more disorderly than ever.
"Had a nice time?" he squawked. "Eaten some good meals? You have put on some weight out there, I see."
Then bang and they were off, their raised voices echoing everywhere while they screamed and shouted at each other and hammered the table with clenched fists like a married couple having a cathartic quarrel. What had become of Kurtz's promises of progress? the Rook demanded. Where was this great reckoning he had spoken of? What was this he heard about Alexis, when he had specifically instructed Marty not to proceed with this man?
"Do you wonder that I lose faith in you--so much invention and money, so many orders disobeyed, so few results?"
As a punishment, Gavron obliged him to attend a meeting of his guidance committee, which by now could talk of nothing but the ultimate recourse. Kurtz had to lobby his heart away, even to obtain a modification of their plans.
"But what have you got going, Marty?" his friends begged him in low urgent voices in the corridors. "Give us a hint at least, so that we know why we are helping you."
His silence offended them, and they left him feeling more like a shabby appeaser.