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 hopelessly--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 S.S. 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.
"So here's the sad fact," he said, and drew a long breath. "If some of those Palestinians, whose rights you have both been so bravely defending, have their way, you will make no speech at all on the twenty-fourth of this month in Freiburg. In fact, Professor, you will never make a speech again." He paused, but his audience showed no sign of interrupting. "According to information now available to us, it is evident that one of their less academic groups has singled you out as a dangerous moderate, capable of watering the pure wine of their cause. Just as you described to me, sir, but worse. A protagonist of the Bantustan solution for Palestinians. As a false light, leading the weak-brained into one more fatal concession to the Zionist jackboot."
But it took far, far more than the mere threat of death to persuade the Professor to accept an untested version of events.
"Excuse me," he said sharply. "That is the very description of myself which appeared in the Palestinian press after my speech at Beer Sheva."
"Professor, that is precisely where we got it from," said Kurtz.
twenty-four
She flew into Zürich in early evening. Storm flares lined the runway and blazed before her like the path of her own purpose. Her mind, as she had desperately prepared it, was an assembly of her old frustrations, matured and turned upon the rotten world. Now she knew there was not a shred of good in it; now she had seen the agony that was the price of Western affluence. She was who she had always been: an angry reject, getting her own back; with the difference that the Kalashnikov had replaced her useless tantrums. The flares sped past her window like burning wreckage. The plane touched down. But her ticket said Amsterdam, and theoretically she had still to land. Single girls returning from the Middle East are suspect, Tayeh had said, at her final briefing in Beirut. Our first task is to give you a more respectable provenance. Fatmeh, who had come to see her off, was more specific:Khalil has ordered that you acquire a fresh identity when you arrive.
Entering the deserted transit lounge, she had the feeling of being the first pioneer ever to set foot there. Canned music played but there was nobody to hear it. A smart shop sold chocolate bars and cheese, but it was empty. She went to the lavatory and considered her appearance at leisure. Her hair bobbed, and dyed a vague brown. Tayeh himself had hobbled round the Beirut flat while Fatmeh butchered it. No make-up, no sex appeal, he had ordered. She wore a heavy brown suit and a pair of vaguely astigmatic spectacles to scowl through. All I need is a boater and a crested blazer, she thought. She had come a long way from Michel's revolutionary poule de luxe.
Give my love to Khalil,Fatmeh had told her as she kissed her goodbye.
Rachel was standing beside her at the next basin, but Charlie saw straight through her. She didn't like her, didn't know her, and it was sheer coincidence that Charlie put her open handbag between them, her packet of Marlboros on top, in the way that Joseph had instructed her. And she didn't see Rachel's hand either, swapping the Marlboros with a packet of her own, or her quick, reassuring wink in the mirror.
I have no life but this one. I have no love but Michel and no loyalty except to the great Khalil.
Sit as close to the departures board as you can get, Tayeh had ordered. She did so, and from her little case took a book on Alpine plants, broad and slim like a schoolgirls' annual. Opening it, she perched it on her lap at an angle that allowed the title to be seen. She was sporting a round badge saying "Save the Whale" and that was the other sign, said Tayeh, because from now on Khalil requires that there always be two things: two plans, two signs, in everything a second system in case the first fails; a second bullet in case the world is still alive.