"You feel you are among enemies here?"
"Oh, Christ, what gave you that idea? I mean anybody who kidnaps me is a friend for life," she retorted, and to her surprise won a burst of spontaneous laughter in which everyone seemed free to join. Except for Joseph, that is, who was too busy at his reading, as she could hear by the faint rustle as he turned the pages over.
Kurtz bore in on her a little harder. "So put our minds at rest for us," he urged, still beaming heartily. "Let us forget that you are in some sense captive here. May Israel survive or must all of us here pack up our belongings and go back to our former countries and start over again? Maybe you would prefer us to take a piece of Central Africa? Or Uruguay? Not Egypt, thank you, we tried it once and it wasn't a success. Or shall we re-disperse ourselves over the ghettos of Europe and Asia while we wait for the next pogrom? What do you say, Charlie?"
"I just want you to leave the poor bloody Arabs alone," she said, parrying again.
"Great. And how do we do that specifically?"
"Stop bombing their camps. Driving them off their land. Bulldozing their villages. Torturing them."
"Ever looked at a map of the Middle East?"
"Of course I have."
"And when you looked at the map, did you once wish the Arabs would leave us alone?" said Kurtz, as dangerously cheerful as before.
To her confusion and fear was added plain embarrassment, as Kurtz had probably intended. Faced with such bald reality, her flip phrases had a schoolroom cheapness. She felt like a fool, preaching to the wise.
"I just want peace," she said stupidly; though, as a matter of fact, it was true. She had a decent vision, when it was allowed her, of a Palestine magically restored to those who had been hounded from it in order to make way for more powerful, European custodians.
"In that case, why don't you take a look at the map again and ask yourself what Israel wants," Kurtz advised her contentedly, and stopped for a break that was like a commemorative silence for the loved ones unable to be with us here tonight.
And this silence became more extraordinary the longer it lasted, since it was Charlie herself who helped preserve it. Charlie, who minutes before had been screaming blue murder at God and the world, now suddenly had nothing to add. And it was Kurtz, not Charlie, who finally broke the spell with what sounded like a prepared statement for the press.
"Charlie, we are not here to attack your politics. You will not believe me at this early stage--why should you?--but we like your politics. Every aspect of them. Every paradox and good intention. We respect them and we need them; we do not laugh at them at all, and in due course I surely hope we may return to them and discuss them openly and creatively. We are aiming to address the natural humanity in you, that is all. We are aiming at your good, caring, human heart. Your feelings. Your sense of right. We mean to ask nothing of you which conflicts in any wise with your strong and decent ethical concerns. Your polemical politics--the names you give to your beliefs--well, we would like to put them on a back burner. Your beliefs themselves--the more confused they are, the more irrational, the more frustrated--Charlie, we respect them totally. On this premise, you will surely sit with us a little longer and hear us out."
Once again, Charlie hid her response under a fresh attack: "If Joseph's Israeli," she demanded, "what the hell's he doing driving round in a dirty great Arab car?"
Kurtz's face broke into that ploughed and wrinkled smile which had so dramatically betrayed his age to Quilley. "We stole it, Charlie," he replied cheerfully, and his admission was followed at once by another round of laughter from the kids, in which Charlie was half tempted to take part. "And the next thing you want to know, Charlie," he said--thus incidentally announcing that the Palestinian issue was, at least for the time being, safely stored away on that back burner he had spoken of--"is what are you doing here among us and why have you been dragged here in such a roundabout and unceremonious fashion. I will tell you. The reason, Charlie, is that we want to offer you a job. An acting job."
He had hit calm water and his bountiful smile showed he knew it. His voice had become slow and deliberate, as if he were announcing the number of the lucky winners: "The biggest part you ever had in your life, the most demanding, the most difficult, surely the most dangerous, and surely the most important. And I don't mean money. You can have money galore, no problem, name your figure." His big forearm swept away financial considerations. "The part we have in view for you combines all your talents, Charlie, human and professional. Your wit. Your excellent memory. Your intelligence. Your courage. But also that extra human quality to which I already referred. Your warmth. We chose you, Charlie. We cast you. We looked at a big field, many candidates from many countries. We came up with you and that's why you're here. Among fans. Everybody in this room has seen your work, everybody admires you. So let's get the atmosphere right. On our side there is no hostility. There is affection, there is admiration, there is hope. Hear us out. It's like your friend Joseph said, we are good people, the same as you. We want you. We need you. And there are people out there who are going to need you even more than we do."
His voice had left a void. She had known actors, just a few, whose voices did that. It was a presence, by its remorseless benevolence it became an addiction, and when it ceased, as it did now, it left you stranded. First Al gets his big part, she thought, in an instinctive rush of elation, and now I do. The madness of her situation was still quite clear to her, yet it was all she could manage to bite back a grin of excitement that was tickling at her cheeks and trying ‘to get out.
"So that's how you do your casting, is it?" she said, mustering a sceptical tone once more. "Knock ‘em over the head and drag ‘em in handcuffed? That's your usual way, I suppose."
"Charlie, we are surely not claiming that this is usual drama," Kurtz replied equably, and once more left the initiative with her.
"A part what in, anyway?" she said, still fighting the grin.
"Call it theatre."
She remembered Joseph and the fun fading from his face, and his clipped reference to the theatre of the real. "So it's a play then," she said. "Why don't you say so?"
"In a sense it is a play," Kurtz agreed.
"Who writes it?"
"We handle the plot, Joseph does the dialogue. With a lot of help from you."
"Who's the audience?" She made a gesture towards the shadows. "These little charmers?"
Kurtz's solemnity was as sudden and awesome as his goodwill. His worker's hands found each other on the table, his head came forward over them, and not even the most determined sceptic could have denied the conviction in his manner. "Charlie, there are people out there who will never get to watch the play, never even know it's running, yet who will owe you for as long as they live. Innocent people. The ones you've always cared about, tried to speak for, march for, help. In everything that follows from here on, you have to keep that notion before you in your head, or you will lose up and you will lose yourself, no question."
She tried to look away from him. His rhetoric was too high, too much. She wished he would train it on someone else.
"Who the hell are you to say who's innocent?" she demanded rudely, again forcing herself against the tide of his persuasion.
"You mean we as Israelis, Charlie?"
"I mean you," she retorted, skirting the dangerous ground.
"I would prefer to turn your question around a little, Charlie, and say that in our view somebody has to be very guilty indeed before he needs to die."