From Hebron, it seems, Becker drove northward up the Jordan Valley to Beit She'an, an Arab town resettled by the Jews when it was left empty in the war of ‘48. Having dawdled there long enough to admire the Roman amphitheatre, he continued at a slow pace to Tiberias, which is fast becoming the modern spacity of the north, with giant new American-style hotels along the waterfront, a lido, many cranes, and an excellent Chinese restaurant. But his interest there seemed to be slight, for he did not stop, but merely drove slowly, peering out of the window at the skyscrapers as if counting them. He surfaced next at Metulla, at the very northern border with Lebanon. A ploughed strip with several depths of wire marked the frontier, named in better days The Good Fence. On one side, Israeli citizens stood on an observation platform, gazing with bewildered expressions through the barbed wire into badland. On the other, the Lebanese Christian militia drove up and down in all manner of transport, receiving their Israeli supplies for the interminable blood feud against the Palestinian usurper.
But Metulla in those days was also the natural terminus for courier lines running up to Beirut, and Gavron's service maintained a discreet section there to administer its agents in transit. The great Becker presented himself in the early evening, leafed through the section's logbook, asked some desultory questions about the location of United Nations forces, left again. Looking troubled, the section Commander said. Maybe sick. Sick in his eyes and his complexion.
"So what the devil was he looking for?" Kurtz asked of the Commander when he heard this. But the Commander, a prosaic man and dulled by secrecy, could offer no further theories. Troubled, he repeated. The way agents look sometimes when they come in from a long run.
And still Becker kept driving, till he reached a twisting mountain road ripped by tank tracks, and continued by way of it to the kibbutz where, if anywhere, he kept his heart: an eagle's-nest perched high above the Lebanon on three sides. The place first became a Jewish habitation in ‘48, when it was established as a military strong point to control the only east-west road south of the Litani. In ‘52, the first young sabra settlers arrived there to live the hard, secular life that was once the Zionist ideal. Since then, the kibbutz had endured occasional shellings, apparent affluence, and a worrying depletion in its membership. Sprinklers were playing on the lawns as Becker arrived; the air was sweet with the scent of red and pink roses. His hosts received him shyly, and with great excitement.
"You have come to join us finally, Gadi? Your fighting days are over? Listen, there is a house waiting for you. You can move in tonight!"
He laughed, but did not say yes or no. He asked for a couple of days' work, but there was little they could give him; it was the slack season, they explained. The fruit and cotton were all picked, the trees pruned, the fields ploughed in readiness for the spring. Then, because he insisted, they promised he might dole out the food in the communal dining-room. But what they really wanted of him was his opinion on the way the country was going--from Gadi, who, if anyone, can tell us. Which meant, of course, that they wished him most of all to hear their own opinions--of this rackety government, of the decadence of Tel Aviv politics.
"We came here to work, to fight for our identity, to turn Jews into Israelis, Gadi! Are we to be a country finally--or are we to be a showcase for international Jewry? What is our future, Gadi? Tell us!"
They addressed these questions to him with a trusting liveliness, as if he were some kind of prophet among them, come to give fresh inwardness to their outdoor lives, they could not know--not at first, anyway--that they were speaking into the void of his own soul. And whatever happened to all our fine talk of coming to terms with the Palestinians, Gadi? The great mistake was in ‘67, they decided, answering their own questions as usual: in ‘67 we should have been generous; we should have offered them a proper deal. Who can be generous if not the victors? "We are so powerful, Gadi, and they so weak!"
But after a while, these insoluble issues became too familiar to Becker, and in keeping with his introverted mood he took to sauntering about the camp alone. His favourite spot was a smashed watchtower that looked straight down into a little Shiite town, and north-eastward to the Crusader bastion of Beaufort, at that time still in Palestinian hands. They saw him there on his last evening with them, standing clear of any cover, as close to the electronic border fence as he could get without actually setting off the alarms. He had a light side and a dark side because of the setting sun, and he seemed, by his erect posture, to be inviting the whole Litani basin to know that he was there.
Next morning, he had returned to Jerusalem and, having presented himself at Disraeli Street, spent the day wandering the city's streets where he had fought so many battles and seen the shedding of so much blood, his own included. And still he seemed to question everything he saw. He stared in dazed bewilderment at the sterile arches of the recreated Jewish quarter; he sat himself in the lobbies of the tower hotels that now wreck the Jerusalem skyline, and brooded over the parties of decent American citizens from Oshkosh, Dallas, and Denver who had come in their jumbo-loads, in good faith and middle age, to keep in touch with their heritage. He peered into the little boutiques that sold hand-embroidered Arab kaftans and Arab artefacts guaranteed by the proprietor; he listened to the innocent chatter of the tourists, inhaled their costly scents, and heard them complain, but with comradely politeness, about the quality of the New York-style cuts of prime beef, which were not somehow just the way they tasted back home. And he spent a whole afternoon in the Holocaust Museum, worrying over the photographs of children who would have been his age if they had lived.
Having heard all this, Kurtz cut short Becker's leave and put him back to work. Find out about Freiburg, he told him. Comb the libraries, the records. Find out who we know there, get the layout of the university. Get architects' drawings and town plans. Work out everything we need and double it. By yesterday.
A good fighting man is never normal, Kurtz told Elli, to.console himself. If he's not plain stupid, he thinks too much.
But to himself Kurtz marvelled to discover how deeply his unrecovered ewe-lamb could still anger him.
twenty-three
It was the end of the line. It was the worst place of all her lives this far, a place to forget even while she was there, her bloody boarding school with rapists added, a forum stuck out in the desert and played with live ammunition. The battered dream of Palestine lay five hours' back-breaking drive behind the hills, and in place of it they had this tatty little fort, like a film set for a Beau Geste remake, with yellow stone battlements and a stone staircase and half its side bombed out, and a sandbagged main gate with a flagpole on it that slapped its frayed ropes in the scalding wind and never flew a flag. No one slept in the fort that she knew of. The fort was for administration and interviews; and lamb and rice three times a day; and the turgid group discussions till after midnight at which the East Germans harangued the West Germans and the Cubans harangued everybody, and an American zombie who called himself Abdul read a twenty-page paper on the immediate achievement of world peace.
Their other social centre was the small-arms range, which was not a disused quarry on a hilltop, but an old barrack hut with the windows blocked and a line of electric light-bulbs rigged from the steel beams, and leaking sandbags round the walls. The targets were not oil cans either, but brutish man-sized effigies of American marines, with painted grimaces and fixed bayonets and rolls of sticky brown paper at their feet to patch up their bullet-holes after you had shot them. It was a place constantly in demand, often at dead of night, full of boisterous laughter and groans of competitive disappointment. One day a great fighter came, some kind of terrorist V.I.P. in a chauffeur-driven Volvo, and the place was cleared while he shot in it. Another day a bunch of very wild blacks burst in on Charlie's class, and loosed off magazine after magazine without paying the smallest attention to the young East German in command.
"That satisfy you, whitey?" one of them bellowed over his shoulder, in a rich South African accent.
"Please--oh yes--very good," said the East German, very thrown by their discrimination.