How had it come about that I had never felt so contemptible and troubled as on that day when I realized that a foreign agent, whom Tel Aviv in its kindness had removed for me here, had been lost forever? After all, history is full of agents who have been thrown into jails and forgotten there, who have been executed, who have disappeared. Why had this particular one touched me? Was it my direct link with his life? Or had the professional agent in me perhaps been moved to pity for the agent-of-conscience motivated by ideology? For the first time I understood his letter as a very private inventory of emotional possessions and I grasped the full depth of the sadness. I read it once again in my mind. I cannot remember any literary text so clearly and sharply, with all the precise conjunctions and prepositions. Wasn't there a single book meaningful enough to be engraved in me the way that letter was?
Then I realized that not only had books disappeared from my memory, but most things of significance as well, as though the eighteen years of Vincent's existence had disappeared like a growth that has been removed. Then I thought about the many minute facts I needed in order to fill out Danny Simon's life. What, in fact, was the priest's name? Yvonne's surname? Scheckler's first name? Michel's age?
And what had really happened to Anton Khamis?
The can in my cupboard was becoming increasingly unimportant, as was the detonator which had not yet been created, the mission which was not yet fully defined and all those other matters which I could not implement until the doctor's fate was clarified.
I needed someone to help me, to augment the call I would send to Tel Aviv, someone who would add weight to what might be regarded as the inappropriate appeal of an aging, emotional agent.
I thought of the captain. When I found him it was already five in the afternoon. He was sitting alone in the empty dining room, spreading a thick layer of jam on a slice of bread. The shutters facing west were closed, blocking the stream of dust swirling in the wind outside.
"What's happened?" I asked. "Where is everyone?"
"Mostly outside, patrolling. I sent the cooks to bring them supper in the field."
"Why is it so quiet...?"
"Curfew." He bit a round crescent into the slice of bread. "It's time to set things straight."
"And the refugees in the garden?"
"Don't worry, they found new places."
I sat down on the bench facing him.
"I need your help..." His eyes rested on me, waiting and ready. "There was a doctor here who looked after the whole village. He was arrested and something went wrong. He can't be found. I'd like you to ask HQ, explain..."
"What's it got to do with me?"
"The local people will appreciate it greatly," I said quickly. "...You'll be able to get their cooperation, to set things straight easily, without imposing curfew and without danger, just a few symbolic patrols..."
He gave me a friendly smile. "You don't know these Arabs. No one will be grateful."
"They love him very much..."
"They don't love anyone. They're dense, burnt-out. I've been in this war from day one. I've seen them poking through what was left of their homes, burying their families and starting to walk. There's no hate or love or any other emotion left in them. They examine you with a dog's logic, the harm you can cause them or the benefit you can provide..."
"Even dogs respond to attempts to draw near..."
"Draw near?" he was beginning to get angry. "Think for a minute and tell me a single dispute between two peoples which was resolved by drawing near? The refugees we evacuated from the garden, they can tell you about drawing near. For years they lived together, in the same streets, sometimes in the same houses. Moslems, Druse, Christians, even Jews... They hosted one another, mingled, married. So what? Did it stop them slaughtering each another when the war broke out?" He stood up, went to the window and roughly opened one of the shutters.
"All troubles begin with drawing near, when people go out of their own area into territory that belongs to someone else." With a circular movement he gestured towards the empty garden, stopping opposite a building which was mostly covered by ground. "There's an old wine-cellar there. Reinforcements arrive tomorrow. We'll divide the men into groups. While one group is patrolling the other will work. We'll dismantle the bricks one by one and build a wall, just like the one at the front, and enclose the garden from all sides..."
"Wouldn't it be simpler just to put guards there?"
"Guards are human. They can be appealed to, talked to. Today they're standing here, tomorrow they move a bit further in... I like things to be clear. Walls are a line about which there's no arguing." He closed the shutters noisily. "And if you've got some comment, if you want to preach or something, think about the refugees you saw here and remember - that's what a defeated side looks like in the Middle East...
***
At eight in the evening, when it was completely dark, I wrapped myself in a dark coat I'd taken off a hook at the back of the repair-shop, went through the garden, crossed the line where the wall would be erected and plunged into the warm night.
First I circled the Athenaeum, looking at the large, vulnerable building from the outside. The guard at the gate was picking his nose in a halo of light. When the first patrol moved loudly down the road, I descended into the courtyards. Filtered strips of light came through closed shutters onto the rocky ground. Shadows fell across balconies, as the night crept up from the valleys. As I continued walking the feeling that I was alone diminished. Other figures, quickly and silently, emerged from the blackness and disappeared immediately. Brief, terse messages were being sent from one house to another, from one window to another. Fires flickered on the mountain slope, deep in the orchards. The sheet-tents of the refugees dispersed by the captain flashed among the trees like great scattered teeth. The night was filled with the sounds of chatter within - conversations, shouts, the sounds of love, laughter and sometimes fights. The army ruled the streets, life continued to flow in the spaces in-between.
In the pine wood the tops of the trees in the wind sounded like the sea. The priest was standing on his doorstep, peering into the night, a captain whose ship has run aground on a reef. I approached him slowly. He recognized me straightaway and moved back slightly.
"Good evening," I called out to him before he could disappear inside.
He had the advantage of the height afforded by the entrance steps. I had the darkness.
"Anything new?" he asked. The mere events of that day, especially the encounter with the evasive entries in the logbook of the detention camp, were enough to give me an idea of the evil he was attributing to me.
"I've already told you," I explained impatiently, "without your cooperation I can help very little..."
He smiled sourly.
"You have nothing to fear from me."
"That's not what you implied the last time..."
"Things change..."
"Not always for the better."
"I'm your only chance of getting him back," I leaned my head against the stone wall. "And you're playing games with me. What kind of friend are you?"
"I'm prepared to be arrested in his place." He stretched out his hands to some imaginary handcuffs.
"That's very gallant, but it won't help Anton or clear you..."
"Clear me of what?" he asked gloomily.
"I've been patient," I said with a tremendous sense of release. "I waited, restrained myself, but don't think that I didn't know who you really were all the time."
He looked at me with surprise. "Who do you think I am?"
Staring straight back at him I said, "Our agent here, in Dura."
His eyes seemed to flash in the darkness. "That's not true," he said softly. "That's a lie."
I went up the stairs and stood facing him.
"Come along," I ordered him.
I gripped his arm. When we were halfway down the path which led from the house, the headlamps of a patrol jeep threw its beam on us.
"Get in," a soldier roared in
Arabic.
"It's me," I shouted back. "Simon, from Intelligence."
"Need any help?" His tone had changed.
"I can manage," I replied, feeling a kind of exultation from that fleeting moment of soldierly shouting. "Thanks."
The Morris was in its usual place. The boot was not locked and opened at the press of a button. I felt about among the assorted junk inside it. Then I lit a match. The transmitter was not there.
"What have you done with it?" I asked.
The priest said nothing.
"I want to know!" I drew nearer.
"Do you intend to strike me," he hissed softly, "or just to frighten me, like the way you got the woman?"
I took a step backwards, into the darkness. He did not even look at me, just turned back to the path and, with his shuffling steps, disappeared into the house. The door remained open, perhaps because of the heat. I drew closer and saw him sit down at his table to read a book, indifferent to my presence. The darkness still gave me an advantage, but by then it no longer mattered.
***
Now the dark coat was particularly useful. Going down into the wadi, I kicked up some small stones. A patrol passing above called out: "Who's there?" I kept quiet. After they had gone I walked carefully, as near as possible to the sides of the rocks.
In order not to stand out against the skyline, I climbed diagonally to the vegetable garden. The dogs began to growl. There was no time to pause. An over-large moon rose proudly above the ridge. By its light, the ruin, at the top of the mountain, shone like an enchanted house. I approached it slowly and looked in through the window. The floor was clean. The mattress covered with the bedding. Yvonne was sitting on it, her knees drawn up beneath a wide, white gown.
I jumped in. For a long moment we looked at one another. Then I took off my coat, crouched down before her and put my face close.
"Did you see him?"
I said nothing. The enormous moon was reflected in each of her eyes. Her expression demanded an answer. In all the frantic going on I had forgotten to think what I would tell her.
"This time it was hard," I said.
The frustration in my voice was genuine and she responded immediately.
"What has happened to him?"
I still did not speak. She belonged to him, all of her, and I did not want to make it easier for her.
She rose. "You're hiding something."
"They wouldn't let me get to him," I put my hand out to bring her back.
She looked at me suspiciously.
"I made a fuss," I said in a weary voice.
She took another step away.
"I shouted at the clerk, at the quartermaster, even at the doctor there..."
She headed towards the window. How could I satisfy her? "And then I went to the camp commander."
"And what did you discover?" she asked harshly.
Where would this lie lead? "It seems that whatever he was arrested for is serious."
She stepped back. "It's time you told me what it was."
"I don't know exactly, I can only assume that it's something serious, maybe spying..."
"You can only assume? But you arrested him."
"And you lived with him."
"Not in the way you think..." She fell silent, embarrassed.
"How can you expect me to help you if you don't tell me everything?"
She said softly: "He never told me much."
"Try to remember. Men say all kinds of things inadvertently, at the dinner table, in bed..."
"We haven't met in bed for several years now," she blurted out. "In the beginning we did, a bit, but then that ended too."
Lightly I touched her leg, under her robe. She sat down as if she were dizzy.
"He was afraid of close ties. When I first knew him, in Beirut, he was apprehensive about us. I came from an upper class family and he was a refugee. Afterwards, too, when the war got worse and the Rolls was all that was left of my magnificent family, he still felt a gap. He said that he feared the moment I would open my eyes and see him in his true light."
The letter came back to me. What had he written about the blind opening their eyes?
"...But I felt," she continued, "that it wasn't me he really feared, but something else so overwhelming that there was no room for me anymore..."
"Another woman?"
She hesitated. "It was more like a big secret."
Something swift, perhaps a night creature, passed in the brush beyond the wall. For a long moment we were quiet.
Then she added: "We are good friends, loyal to one another. He taught me much of what I know. For years I read the books he loved, listened to his music, learned from him..."
That was the part I did not like to hear.
"Was the priest ignorant of that secret too?" I interrupted.
She shrugged her shoulders. "Even if he knew, he wouldn't say. Theirs is a strange, secret friendship, in which Anton is the stronger. Anton was drawn to politics, so the two of them founded a political circle. Anton loved André Gide, so they both read André Gide. Have you ever heard of a priest reading André Gide?"
"He hated the church..." I remembered dimly, wondering whether to tell her that the priest, perhaps the whole village, knew. What did they do to collaborators in that place? I watched as she wet her lips with her tongue. She had better leave, perhaps even tonight. Somewhere she must still have relatives...
"Relatives! Perhaps his relatives know something..."
"They were all killed in Galilee, in ‘48. There's only an aunt left."
"Where is she?"
"In Paris. She wrote to him occasionally... I remember the address, there was something special about it: Number one, the Alley of the Iron Chick."
The warmth in her voice belonged, as usual, to other times, when I played no part. Cold chill came in through the cracks in the walls, magnifying a knot of despair that was growing rapidly. I shivered, feeling superfluous. I felt on the floor for my coat. "Do you want me to leave now?"
She did not reject the idea immediately, but thought for a long moment, her lower lip between her teeth. Then, unexpectedly, she arched herself at me with that soft, wavelike movement of hers.
I kissed her lips, and found them warm and responsive. She tried to both take off her robe and undo the buttons of my shirt at the same time. I enclosed her naked body in my arms and she opened to me.
I could not do nothing.
A languor spread from one limb to another. The nucleus within me melted into a tepid lump. My body disintegrated, down to the last atom, into a freezing, hostile, seabed.
Yvonne embraced me more tightly, holding me to her, mixing the scars of her soul with the cold that gripped me. My heart went out to her with the soft amity of a dog who has discovered in another the lonely smell of the same neighborhoods. She brought her lips close to mine and put her hand on my cheek. The silence was such that I could hear the darkness falling and the dew descending on the ancient stones. I fell asleep.
After some minutes, or maybe hours, an awareness that something was happening exploded within me. I looked up at her. With horror, she was staring at something behind my back. Her hands held the edge of the sheet tightly around her body. As I turned my head to look, the metallic taste of fear was already in my mouth.
Michel was standing in the window, his Viking hair falling over his eyes. I waited for the usual tossing movement. It did not come. Instead he stepped forward slowly, painfully, leaving large stains of mud on the floor. Only when he was right next to us did I see that he had no weapon and that he was in some kind of self-imposed blindness. His eyes saw us, but his brain would not. Below, from the clinic, the dogs began to bark. Dogs in the village answered them. With a sudden movement Michel snatched my coat from the floor and sprang back into the night.
Again we were alone. After another moment the event might have seemed an illusion, were it not for Yvonne's face, which expressed everything. I went to sit beside her. But our bodies had lost the scen
t of affinity, replaced by the unpleasant smell of anxiety.
I swallowed a mouthful of sour saliva. "What will happen to you now?"
"I don't know."
I wondered if she knew about the rifle and the way it had come into Michel's possession. I held her hand. "Maybe you should talk to him, explain that it's all for Anton's benefit..."
"Do you suspect me of bringing up a stupid boy?"
In silence we gathered our clothes, which had been scattered in a circle round the old tree. We passed one another and she was again in my arms.
"I don't know what's going to happen now," she whispered as though continuing a previous thought I had missed. "I’m afraid of what Michel might do. I also fear what might happen to Anton at the detention camp, and what might happen to us all when he comes back..."
My caress of her was a kind of promise. I kissed her forehead and her eyes, drinking in the scent of her hair. She lay her head on my chest for a long moment.
"Rely on me," I said.
She gave me the warmest of smiles and disappeared through the window.
A moment later it was all lies and I did not believe a word that had been said, a thing that had happened.
***
A cool sun was lighting up the hazy sky when I left the ruin and walked down the path. I had no weapon, nor did I have a coat. The village was still under curfew and it could not have been a worse time to be out: four thirty in the morning. All the same, I felt protected.
Nearing the bridge I went off the path and advanced carefully. Bulrushes grew profusely along the wadi, their leaves wild white tufts, which seemed to tell tales of the fair-haired boy finding refuge among them. The crow from the summit of the sycamore cackled clear cries of warning. But Michel was asleep, on a tangle of roots at the base of a bush, protected from the world by a cascading forelock. ‘Protect Michel from ignorance, as well as from knowledge...’ I remembered the sentences in their order. His face was enveloped in the softness of childhood. My coat covered his shoulders. I jumped over and imprisoned him inside it with a single pull of the zip.