"As long as he was in the camps, his hands were hard from manual work," Kurtz explained, coming down the room to join them. "Now he's a great intellectual. Lot of money, lot of girls, good food, an easy time. That right, little fellow?" Approaching the sofa from behind, he laid the flat of his thick hand on Michel's head and turned it round to face him. "You're a great intellectual, that right?" His voice was neither cruel nor teasing. He might have been talking to his own erring son--he had the same sad fondness in his face. "You get your girls to do the work for you, don't you, little fellow? One girl, he actually used her as a bomb," he explained to Charlie. "Put her on a plane with some nice-looking luggage, the plane blew up. I guess she never even knew she'd done it. That was bad manners, wasn't it, little fellow? Very bad manners towards a lady."
She recognised the smell that she had not been able to place: it was the aftershave lotion that Joseph had laid out in every bathroom they had never shared. They must have smeared some on him for the occasion.
"Don't you want to speak to this lady?" Kurtz was asking. "Don't you want to welcome her to our villa here? I'm beginning to wonder why you don't co-operate with us any more!" Gradually, under his persistence, Michel's eyes woke, and his body straightened slightly in obedience. "You want to greet this pretty lady politely? You want to wish her good day? Good day? You want to tell her good day, little fellow?"
Of course he did: "Good day," said Michel, in a listless version of the voice in the tapes.
"Don't answer," Joseph warned her softly from her side.
"Good day,madame,"Kurtz insisted, still without the least rancour.
"Madame," said Michel.
"Have him write something," Kurtz ordered, and let him go.
They sat him at a table and put a pen and a sheet of paper before him, but he couldn't manage much. Kurtz didn't care about that. See how he holds his pen, he was saying. See the way his fingers shape naturally for the Arab script.
"Maybe in the middle of the night you woke up once and found him doing his accounts. Okay? So this is how he looked."
She was talking to Joseph but only in her mind. Get me out. I think I'm dying. She heard the bump of Michel's feet as they took him up the stairs and out of hearing, but Kurtz allowed her no respite, just as he allowed none to himself. "Charlie, we have one further stage of this thing. I think we should go through with it now, even if it costs a little effort. Some things have to be done."
The drawing-room was very quiet, just an apartment somewhere. Holding Joseph's arm, she followed Kurtz upstairs. She didn't know why, but she found it helpful to limp a little, like Michel.
The wooden handrail was still sticky from sweat. The steps had strips of stuff like emery paper on them, but when she trod on them the expected rasping sound did not result. She picked out these details with accuracy because there are times when details can supply the only link with reality. A lavatory door stood open, but when she took a second look she realised that there was no door, only a doorway, and no chain hanging from the cistern; and she supposed that if you were dragging a prisoner around all day, even one who was doped out of his mind, you had to think of these things, you had to get your house in order. Not till she had pondered earnestly on each of these important issues did she allow herself to admit that she had entered a padded room with a single bed shoved against the far wall. And on the bed Michel again, naked except for his gold medallion, his hands clutched over his crotch and hardly a crease where his belly folded. The muscles of his shoulders were full and round, the muscles of his chest were flat and broad, the shadows beneath them crisp as lines of India ink. On an order from Kurtz, the two boys stood him up and pulled away his hands. Circumcised, well grown, beautiful. Silently, with scowling disapproval, the bearded boy pointed to the white birthmark like a milk stain on the left flank, and the smeared scar of a knife-wound on the right shoulder; and the endearing rivulet of black hair that ran downward from the navel. Silently they turned him round, and she remembered Lucy and her favourite kind of back: a spine recessed in muscle. But no bullet-holes, nothing at all to spoil the sheerness of his beauty.
They stood him up again, but by then Joseph had apparently decided that Charlie might have had enough of a good thing, for he was leading her down the stairs, fast, one arm locked around her waist and the other grasping her wrist so tight it hurt. In the lavatory off the hall she paused long enough to vomit, but all she wanted after that was to get out. Out of the apartment, out of sight of them, out of her own mind and skin.
She was running. It was sports day. She was running as fast as she could; the concrete teeth of the surrounding skyline were bobbing past her from the other direction. The roof gardens were linked for her by dinky brick paths, toy-town signposts pointed her to places she could not read, overhead pipes of blue and yellow plastic made streaks of colour above her head. She was running as far as she could, upstairs and downstairs, taking a keen horticultural interest in the variety of vegetation on her way, the tasteful geraniums and stunted flowered shrubs and cigarette ends and the patches of raw earth like unmarked graves. Joseph was at her side and she was yelling at him to go, go away; an elderly couple sat on a bench grinning nostalgically at this lovers' tiff. She ran the whole length of two platforms this way, till she reached a fence and a sheer drop into a car park, but she didn't commit suicide because she'd decided already that she wasn't the type, and besides she wanted to live with Joseph and not die with Michel. She stopped and she was scarcely panting. The run had done her good; she should run more often. She asked him for a cigarette but he hadn't one. He drew her to a bench; she sat on it, then stood up in order to assert herself. She had learned that emotional scenes did not play effectively between people who were walking, so she stood still.
"I advise you to keep your sympathy for the innocent," Joseph warned her, calmly cutting in upon her invective.
"He was innocent till you invented him!"
Mistaking his silence for disarray, and his disarray for weakness, she paused and affected to contemplate the monstrous skyline. " ‘It's necessary,' " she said scathingly. " ‘I wouldn't be here if it wasn't necessary' Quote. ‘No sane court on earth would condemn us for what we are asking you to do.' Quote again. Your words, I think. Care to take them back?"
"No, I don't think so."
"I don't think so. Well, you'd better be awfully sure, hadn't you? Because if there are any doubts around here, I'd rather they were mine."
Still standing, her attention shifted to a point immediately ahead of her, somewhere in the belly of the opposite building, which she now studied with the earnestness of a potential buyer. But Joseph had remained seated, which somehow made the scene all wrong. They should have been face to face in close-up. Or he behind her, looking at the same distant chalk mark
"Mind if we add up a few things?" she enquired.
"Please do."
"He has killed Jews."
"He has killed Jews and he has killed innocent bystanders who were not Jews and did not have any position in the conflict."
"I'd like to do a book, actually, on the guilt of all these innocent bystanders you go on about. I'd start with your Lebanese bombings and fan out from there."
Seated or not, he came back faster and harder than she had bargained for. "That book has been done, Charlie, and it is called the Holocaust."
With her thumb and forefinger she made a little spyhole, and squinted through it at a distant balcony. "On the other hand, you personally have killed Arabs, I take it."
"Of course."
"Lots?"
"Enough."
"But only in self-defence. Israelis only ever kill in self-defence." No reply. " I have killed enough Arabs,' signed ‘Joseph.' " Still she got no rise from him. "Well that's a turn up for the book, I will say. An Israeli who's killed enough Arabs."
Her tartan skirt was from Michel's trousseau. It had pockets either side, which she had only recently discovered. Thrusting her hands into them, she made the skirt swing while she pretended to study the effect.