Her refusal only saddened him. "Charlie, I have ceased to understand you. My confidence in you is ebbing."
"Then it can bloody well ebb! Find someone else to kick around! Why should I play parlour games with a bunch of Israeli thugs? Go and car-bomb some more Arabs. Get out of my hair. I hate you! All of you!"
Saying this, Charlie had a most curious intimation. She decided that they were only half listening to her words, and with the other half of their attention studying her technique. If somebody had called out "Let's take that one again, Charlie, maybe a little slower," she would not have been a bit surprised.
But Kurtz meanwhile had his point to make and nothing on his Jewish God's earth--as she by now well knew--was going to stop him.
"Charlie, I do not understand your evasion," he insisted. His voice was recovering its pace. Its power was undiminished. "I do not understand the discrepancies between the Charlie you are giving and the Charlie we have on record. Your first visit to this revolutionary school took place on July fifteenth last year, a two-day course for novices on the general subject of colonialism and revolution, and yes, you all went by bus, a group of acting people, Alastair included. Your second visit took place a month later, also with Alastair, on which occasion you and your fellow students were addressed by a so-called Bolivian exile who declined to give his name, also by a similarly anonymous gentleman claiming to speak for the provisional wing of the Irish Republican Army. You generously signed both of those organisations a personal cheque for five pounds, and we have photocopies of the cheques right here."
"It was for Al! He was broke!"
"The third time you went was a month later, when you took part in a very pathetic discussion on the work of the American thinker Thoreau. The group's verdict on that occasion, to which you subscribed, was that when it came to militancy, Thoreau was an irrelevant idealist with little practical understanding of activism--in short, a bum. You not only supported that verdict but initiated a supplementary resolution calling for greater radicalism on the part of all comrades."
"It was for Al! I wanted them to accept me! I wanted to please Al! I'd forgotten it next day!"
"Come October, you and Alastair were back there, this time for a particularly apposite session on the subject of bourgeois Fascism in Western capitalist societies, at which you played a leading r?le in group discussions, regaling your comrades with many mythical anecdotes regarding your criminal father, your inane mother, and your repressive upbringing generally."
She had stopped protesting. She had stopped thinking or seeing. She had blurred her gaze and taken a piece of the inside flesh of her mouth between her teeth and she was softly biting it as a punishment. But she couldn't stop listening, because Marty's voice didn't allow that.
"And the very last occasion occurred, as Mike here reminded us, in February this year, when you and Alastair graced a session whose theme you have obstinately dismissed from your memory, except for a moment previously when you lapsed into abuse of the State of Israel. This time the discussion was devoted exclusively to the lamentable expansion of world Zionism and its link with American imperialism. The leading performer was a gentleman purportedly representing the Palestinian revolution, though he declined to say which wing of that great movement he belonged to. He also refused in the most literal sense to reveal himself, since his features were hidden behind a black balaclava helmet, which gave him a becomingly sinister air. Do you still not recall this speaker?" He left her no time to answer. "His theme was his own heroic life as a great warrior and killer of Zionists. The gun is my passport to my homeland,' he declared. ‘We are no longer refugees! We are a revolutionary people.' He caused a certain alarm around him and one or two voices, not your own, felt he had gone a little far." He paused, but still she did not speak. He moved his watch closer to him and smiled at her a little wanly. "Why don't you tell us these things, Charlie? Why do you flop from place to place not knowing which lie to tell us next? Did I not assure you that we need your past? That we like it very much?"
Again he waited patiently for her answer, but in vain. "We know your father never went to prison. You never had the bailiffs in, nobody took your pony from you. The poor gentleman suffered a small, incompetent bankruptcy, injuring nobody except a couple of local bank managers. He was discharged with honour, if that is the expression, long before his death; a few friends raised a little money between them, and your mother remained a proud and devoted wife to him. It was never your father's fault that you left school prematurely, it was your own. You had made yourself, let us say, a little too available to several boys in the local town, and word of this had duly gotten back to the school staff. You were accordingly expelled from the school in haste as a corrupting and potentially scandalous element, and returned to your grossly over-indulgent parents, who as usual forgave you for your transgressions, to your great frustration, and did their best to believe everything you told them. Over the years you have spun an ingenious fiction around the incident in order to make it bearable, and you have come to believe in it yourself, though secretly the memory still turns you inside out and drives you in many strange directions." Yet again, he transferred his watch to a safer spot on the table. "We're your friends, Charlie. Do you think we would ever blame you for such a thing? Do you think we do not understand that your politics are the externalisation of a search for dimensions and responses not supplied to you when you most needed them? We're your friends, Charlie. We're not mediocre, bored, apathetic, suburban, conformist. We want to share with you, to make use of you. Why do you sit there deceiving us when all we wish to hear from you, from start to end, is the unadorned objective truth? Why do you hinder your friends, instead of giving us your full-hearted trust?"
Her anger swept over her like a red-hot sea. It lifted her, it cleansed her; she felt it swell and she embraced it like her one true ally. With the calculation of her trade, she let it take command of her entirely, while she herself, that tiny gyroscopic creature deep inside that always managed to stay upright, tiptoed gratefully to the wings to watch. Anger suspended her bewilderment and dulled the pain of her disgrace; anger cleared her mind and made her vision brilliant. Taking a step forward, she lifted her fist to swipe at him, but he was too senior, too daunting, he had been hit too much before. Besides, she had unfinished business just behind her.