Doubtfully she raised her own glass to him.
"To tiny, gallant Israel," he said. "To her amazing survival, thanks to an American subsidy of seven million dollars a day, and the entire might of the Pentagon dancing to her tune." Without drinking, he put his glass down again. She did the same. With the gesture, to her relief, the melodrama seemed temporarily over. "And you, Charlie, you listen. Overawed. Amazed. By his romanticism, his beauty, his fanaticism. He has no reticence. No Western inhibitions. Does it play--or does the tissue of your imagination reject the disturbing transplant?"
Taking his hand, she began exploring the palm with the tip of her finger. "And his English is up to all this, is it?" she asked, buying time.
"He has a jargon-ridden vocabulary and an impressive store of rhetorical phrases, questionable statistics, and tortuous quotations. Despite this, he communicates the excitement of a young and passionate mind, and an expanding one."
"And what's Charlie doing all this time? I'm just stuck there, am I, with egg on my face, hanging on his every word? Do I encourage him? What am I doing?"
"According to the script, your performance is practically irrelevant. Michel is half hypnotising you across the candle. That is how you describe it to him later in one of your letters. ‘As long as I live, I will never forget your lovely face across the candlelight on that first night we were together.' Is that too lurid for you, too kitschy?"
She gave him back his hand. "What letters? Where are we getting letters from all the time?"
"For the moment, let us agree only that you will later write to him. Let me ask you again, does it play? Or shall we shoot the writer and go home?"
She took a drink of wine. Then another. "It plays. So far it plays."
"And the letter--not too much--you can live with it?"
"If you can't let it all hang out in a love-letter, where can you?"
"Excellent. Then that is how you write to him, and that is how the fiction runs so far. Except for one small point. This is not your first meeting with Michel."
Not stagily at all, she put down her glass with a snap.
A new excitement had taken hold of him: "Listen to me," he said, leaning forward, and the candlelight struck his bronzed temple like sunlight on a helmet. "Listen to me," he repeated. "You are listening?"
Again, he did not bother to wait for her answer.
"A quotation. A French philosopher.'The greatest crime is to do nothing because we fear we can only do a little.' Does it ring a bell with you?"
"Oh Jesus," said Charlie softly, and on an impulse folded her arms across her breast in self-protection.
"Shall I go on?" He went on anyway. "Does this not remind you of someone?'There is only one class war and it is between the colonialists and the colonised, the capitalists and the exploited. Our task is to bring the war home to those who make it. To the racist millionaires, who see the Third World as their private farm. To the corrupt oil-rich sheikhs who have sold the Arab birthright.' " He paused, observing how her head had slipped between her hands.
"Jose, stop," she muttered. "It's too much. Go home."
" To the imperialist warmongers, who arm the Zionist aggressors. To the mindless Western bourgeoisie who are themselves the unconscious slaves and perpetuators of their own system.' ‘ He was barely whispering, yet his voice was all the more penetrating on account of it. "'The world tells us we should not attack innocent women and children. But I tell you there is no such thing as innocence any more. For every child who dies of hunger in the Third World, there is a child in the West who has stolen his food--
"Stop it," she repeated through her fingers, now all too certain of her ground. "I've had enough. I surrender."
But he continued his recitation. "'When I was six, I was driven from our land. When I was eight, I joined the Ashbal. ‘ ‘What is Ashbal, please?' Come, Charlie. That was your question. Was it not you who asked me--you who put up your hand--‘What is Ashbal, please?' How did I reply?"
"Children's militia," she said, her head between her hands. "I'm going to be sick, Jose. Now."
"When I was ten, I crouched in a home-made shelter while the Syrians poured rockets into our camp. When I was fifteen, my mother and my sister were killed in a Zionist air raid.' Go on, please, Charlie. Complete my life story for me."
She had grasped his hand again, this time with both of hers, and was gently beating it against the table in reproof.
" ‘If children can be bombed, they can also fight,' " he reminded her. "And if they colonise? What then? Go on!"
"They must be killed," she muttered unwillingly.
"And if their mothers feed them, and teach them to steal our homes and bomb our people in their exile?"
"Then their mothers are in the front line with their husbands. Jose--"
"So what do we do about them?"
"They must be killed also. But I didn't believe him then, and I don't now."
He ignored her protests. He was making his protestations of eternal love. "Listen. Through the eye holes of my black balaclava helmet, while I was inspiring you with my message at the forum, I observed your enraptured face upon me. Your red hair. Your strong, revolutionary features. Is it not ironic that on the first occasion that we met, it was I who was on stage, and you who were among the audience?"
"I was not enraptured! I thought you were way over the top, and I had a damn good mind to tell you so!"
He was unrepentant. "Whatever you felt at the time, here in the Nottingham motel, under my hypnotic influence, you instantly revise your memory. Though you could not see my face, you tell me, my words have remained seared in your memory ever since. Why not?... Come, Charlie! It is in your letter to me!"
She was not to be drawn. Not yet. Suddenly, for the first time since Joseph's story had begun, Michel had become a separate, living creature for her. Till this moment, she realised, she had unconsciously used Joseph's features to describe her imaginary lover, and Joseph's voice to characterise his declamations. Now, like a cell dividing itself, the two men were independent and conflicting beings, and Michel had acquired his own dimension in reality. She saw again the unswept lecture-room with its curling photograph of Mao and its scratched school benches. She saw the rows of unequal heads, from Afro to Jesus and back again, and Long Al slumped at her side in a state of alcoholic boredom. And on the podium she saw the isolated, unreadable figure of our gallant representative from Palestine--shorter than Joseph, maybe a fraction stockier as well, though it was hard to tell, for he was muffled in his black mask and his shapeless khaki blouse, and his black-and-white kaffiyeh. But younger--that for certain--and more fanatical. She remembered his fish-like lips, expressionless within the ragged cage. She remembered the red handkerchief tied defiantly round his neck, and the gloved hands gesticulating to his words. Most of all, she remembered his voice: not guttural, as she had expected, but literary and considerate, in macabre contrast to his bloodthirsty message. But not Joseph's either. She remembered how it paused,un-Joseph-like, to rephrase an awkward sentence, hunted for grammatical aptness:"The gun and the Return are one for us... an imperialist is whoever does not aid us in our revolution... to do nothing is to endorse injustice..."