She was still fiddling with the bracelet. "Well, I might have missed out on some of them," she admitted carelessly--only to look up and meet head on with his granite disapproval. "Oh Christ," she said.
"Charlie, I warn you most sincerely never to tease Michel with your Western wit. His sense of humour is capricious, and stops well short of jokes against himself, particularly when made by women." A pause for the admonition to sink in. "Very well. The food is dreadful, but you are totally indifferent to it. He has ordered steak and does not know that you are going through one of your vegetarian phases. You chew some in order not to offend him. In a later letter you tell him it was the worst steak you ever ate, but also the best. All you can think of while he is talking is his animated, passionate voice and his beautiful Arab face across the candle. Yes?"
She hesitated, then smiled. "Yes."
"He loves you, he loves your talent, he loves Saint Joan. ‘For the British colonialists she was a criminal,' he tells you. ‘So were all freedom fighters. So was George Washington, so was Mahatma Gandhi, so was Robin Hood. So are the secret soldiers of the Irish freedom struggle.' These are not exactly new ideas he is expressing, as you appreciate, but in his fervent Oriental voice, so full of--what shall we say, animal naturalness?--they have a hypnotic effect upon you; they give new life to the old clichés, they are like a rediscovery of love. ‘For the British,' he tells you, ‘whoever fights the terror of the colonialist is himself a terrorist. The British are my enemies, all but you. The British gave away my country to the Zionists, they shipped the Jews of Europe to us with orders to turn the East into the West. Go and tame the Orient for us, they said. The Palestinians are trash, but they will make good coolies for you! The old British colonisers were tired and defeated, so they handed us over to the new colonisers who had the zeal and the ruthlessness to cut the knot. Don't worry about the Arabs, the British said to them. We promise to look the other way while you deal with them.' Listen. Are you listening?"
Jose, when was I not?
"Michel is a prophet to you tonight. Nobody has ever before concentrated the full force of his fanaticism on you alone. His conviction, his commitment, his devotion--they all shine out of him as he speaks. In theory, of course, he is already preaching to the converted, but in reality he is planting the human heart into the ragbag of your vague left-wing principles. That too you tell him in a later letter, whether or not it is logical that a ragbag should acquire a human heart. You want him to lecture you: he does. You want him to play upon your British guilt: he does that too. Your protective cynicism is swept aside completely. You are renewed. How apart he is from your middle-class prejudices, still not eradicated! From your lazily formed Western sympathies! Yes?" he enquired softly, as if she had asked a question. She shook her head and he was away again, filled with the borrowed fervour of his Arab surrogate.
"He ignores entirely that you are already in theory on his side; he demands your total obsession with his cause, a new conversion. He throws statistics at you as if you had caused them yourself. Over two million Christian and Muslim Arabs driven from their homeland and disenfranchised since 1948. Their houses and villages bulldozed--he tells you how many--their land stolen under laws they had no part in making--he recites the number of dunams--one dunam is a thousand square metres. You ask him and he tells you. And when they reach exile their brother Arabs slaughter them and treat them like scum and the Israelis bomb their camps and shell them because they continue to resist. Because to resist being dispossessed is to be a terrorist, whereas to colonise, and to bomb refugees, to decimate a population--these are unfortunate political necessities. Because ten thousand dead Arabs are not worth one dead Jew. Listen." He leaned forward and grasped her wrist. "There is not a Western liberal who will hesitate to speak out against the injustices of Chile, South Africa, Poland, Argentina, Cambodia, Iran, Northern Ireland, and other fashionable trouble spots." His grasp tightened. "Yet who has the simple courage to tell out loud the cruellest joke in history: that thirty years of Israel have turned the Palestinians into the new Jews of the earth? You know how the Zionists described my country before they seized it? ‘A land without a people for a people without land.'We did not exist!In their minds, the Zionists had already committed genocide; all that remained for them was the fact. And you, the British, were the architects of this great vision. You know how Israel was born? A European power made a present of an Arab territory to a Jewish lobby. And did not consult a single inhabitant of the territory concerned. And that power was Britain. Shall I describe to you how Israel was born?... Is it late? You are tired? Must you go home to your hotel?"
As she gave him the answers he wanted, she still found time to marvel inside herself at the paradoxes of a man who could dance with so many of his own conflicting shadows, and still stand up. A candle burned between them. It was jammed in a greasy black bottle and under constant attack by an old drunk moth that Charlie occasionally pushed away with the back of her hand, making the bracelet sparkle. By its glow, as Joseph spun his story round her, she watched his strong, disciplined face alternate with Michel's like two images overlaid upon a single photographic plate.
"Listen. Are you listening?"
Jose, I am listening. Michel, I am listening.
"I was born of a patriarchal family in a village not far from the town of El Khalil, which the Jews call Hebron." He paused, his dark eyes vigorously upon her."El Khalil," he repeated. "Remember the name, it is of great importance to me for many reasons. You remember Khalil? Say it!"
She said it. El Khalil.
"El Khalil is a great centre for the pure faith of Islam. In Arabic the word means a friend of God. The people of El Khalil or Hebron are the élite of Palestine. And I will tell you a small joke that will make you laugh very much. There is a belief that the only place from which the Jews were never exiled is the Hebron mountain south of the city. It is therefore possible that Jewish blood flows in my veins. Yet I am not ashamed. I am not anti-Semitic, only anti-Zionist. You believe me?"
He did not wait to be assured; he did not need to.
"I was the youngest of four brothers and two sisters. Everyone worked on the land, my father was the mukhtar, or chief, selected by the wise elders. Our village was famous for its figs and grapes, for its fighters, and for its women, as beautiful and obedient as you are. Most villages are famous for one thing only. Ours was famous for many."
"Naturally," she murmured. But he was a long, long way from being teased.
"It was most famous of all, however, for the wise counsels of my father, who believed that Muslims should make a common society with Christians and Jews, exactly as their prophets lived harmoniously together in Heaven under one God, I talk to you a great deal about my father, my family, and my village. Now and later. My father admired the Jews. He had studied their Zionism and he liked to summon them to our village and speak with them. He obliged my elder brothers to learn Hebrew. As a boy, I listened at night to the menfolk singing songs of ancient wars. By day, I took my grandfather's horse to the water and heard the tales of travellers and pedlars. When I describe to you this paradise, I sound as if I am speaking real poetry to you. I can do that. I have the gift. How in our village square we danced the dabke and listened to the oud, while the old men played backgammon and smoked their narjeels."