Cold Light (92 page)

N
ext day, at the King David, a young Israeli colonel in uniform came to discuss the Beirut trip. He was probably a public-relations colonel, not a combat colonel. How to tell?

He seemed to direct his conversation to Ian, but she cut into their conversation, saying, ‘I was in Beirut – the year doesn’t matter – before the last war; the Second World War, that is. I’d really love to see it again.’ She beamed at Colonel Yizhar. ‘Back then, I spent many nights at the Kit Kat Club.’

What a heavy curtain the Second World War was for the young – a divider of the generations. Yet for her it was part of the continuous flow of her life. There was no great division caused by the war or the Great Depression and the present.

‘I wouldn’t call it sightseeing,’ Yizhar said, laughing, a hint of dismissal. But then he looked at her directly for the first time, maybe interested in what she had said, trying to imagine her Beirut.

Ian tried to put her off and, in his knowing male voice, said, ‘It’s a bit rough up there, Edith. There’s a civil war – and more – going on. One of us should stay alive to make the final report.’

She dismissed the objection with a glance, which she hoped was withering. ‘I’ve been in tough places and done what would be considered rather dangerous things in my time,
Ian
,’ she said. ‘In Beirut, I carried a revolver. I had to fire shots, I remember, at some intruder or bandit. A bomb was thrown in the street. A grenade.’

She should not have used the word bandit.

This definitely caught the attention of Yizhar, who asked about the pistol.

‘It was what was known as a purse pistol – point two five calibre. Silver-plated, an ivory handle.’

Yizhar nodded, somewhat impressed. ‘And the Kit Kat Club? You were there in the days of glittering Beirut. Paris of the East.’

She told them she had also been a member of the Club St George and the Colorado. ‘Great days.’

‘What were you doing there? Apart from nightclubbing,’ Ian asked, he too showing interest, ‘and shooting at
bandits
.’

‘I was with the League of Nations.’ She played herself down. ‘A humble officer. Counting camels.’ She said the trip would mean a lot to her.

‘All care, no responsibility,’ Yizhar said. ‘This trip is officially invisible.’

‘Of course.’ She began to babble. ‘I came across from Paris on the old Orient-Taurus Express . . .’ But she saw that she had lost their attention.

After Yizhar had left, Ian said, ‘We’d better take our hip- flasks, Edith, the Colorado is probably closed.’

She would indeed take her hip-flask, and if the Colorado was open, maybe Jerome would be there, playing away, staring out, expressionless, into the crowd, looking for a pretty young woman. She would go to him in the break, visit him in the
chambre d’artiste
, and he would recognise her and show great pleasure, saying, ‘Ah,
ma belle vamp australienne.
’ Then he would open his arms to her and she would open herself to him.

Next morning, as they gathered in the lobby, she was amused to see that Ian had his safari-suit pockets stuffed with gear – as far as she could see, maps, binoculars, a camera, a SW radio. And, following the Israeli custom, he also carried a litre plastic bottle of water.

‘You are prepared,’ she said. ‘The good boy scout that you are.’

He was a little embarrassed and said officiously, ‘We are going into a war zone, Edith.’

She wondered if he had ever been in a war zone. She guessed not. She was dressed for the outdoors: slacks and sturdy shoes. A scarf. A wide-brimmed, rather rakish white hat of woven straw. A tight weave with a red band. In her capacious bag she, too, was the good girl guide – a sweater; water; her pistol in its case with six bullets; toiletries; underwear, if they for whatever reason had to stay overnight; some first aid and her flask. She felt guilty about the pistol – she knew she should have asked Yizhar about taking it. Oh well.

On the road to Beirut, she sat in the back, the two men in the front. Yizhar said to them, ‘I have to repeat that this is dangerous country, although we are in a non-military vehicle. Even though we’re staying in the Christian zone, it’s still dangerous.’ He was not in uniform, but on the floor were his machine gun and a military radio from which static and scratchy voices spoke occasionally on the network in Hebrew. From time to time, Yizhar would lean down, take up the radio and speak.

They passed tanks and all sorts of military vehicles going north – water tankers, petrol tankers, canvas-covered troop trucks, tanks on low-loaders – and refugees crowded on any moving vehicle, going south.

She had seen all this before, at least twice in her life – Spain and France – the artillery and tanks on trains crossing Europe in the night, draped in tarpaulins with leather-capped barrels. She had seen the bright faces of young troops leaving and waving on troop trains; she had seen silent, sullen, exhausted faces on their return. And refugees fleeing, bicycles and hand-carts.

She drifted in and out of the present. When she was in Beirut before the war, her clothes, she remembered, had been the most stylish of her life.

She looked at Ian, who seemed to be enlivened by the chaos surrounding them, as they drove their space capsule through it all, leaning out the window to take photographs. Silly photographs that would be miniature images without the dust, without the smell, without the sweat, without any flavour.

He leaned down and picked up Yizhar’s machine gun, a new-looking Uzi.

Yizhar said, ‘I hope you know something about guns, if you’re going to play about with it.’

Ian said he’d had cadet training. ‘Isn’t the Uzi being phased out?’ he asked, showing his warrior credentials.

She too had an urge to hold the machine gun, and asked if she could see it. Ian glanced at Yizhar, who nodded, and Ian handed it gingerly back to her.

Something so lethal yet with a balanced and compact aesthetic. And, yes, shapely.

Yizhar said that the Uzi was still used by rear-echelon troops and officers as a personal weapon – ‘and artillery and tanker drivers; personnel like that’.

She let the men be the know-alls. She recalled herself lecturing the pacifists at the time of the World Disarmament Conference in 1932. ‘To those of you women here today, I say that we must not surrender these deliberations to those who say that military matters are men’s matters. Pacifists – which I know many of you are – have to learn about machine guns and grenades and artillery, and not turn away in moral disgust.’ When democracy or the world was shaky or in danger of collapse, good people had to take up arms, learn the skills of defence. Non-violent resistance would not have worked against the Nazis or any immoral authoritarian state. With them, it was submission or resistance, leading to death of oneself or of many others who did not wish it. One hoped that the submission was temporary and would be relieved by some dramatic change of circumstance.

Of all human ingenuity and design, it was the design of weapons that was the most transfixing and horror-filled, and yet, still, a highly intricate product of intelligence.

‘Just don’t touch the trigger, Edith,’ Ian said.

The two men went on talking guns.

Her pistol had come from a strange admirer, an eccentric American showman who wanted to support the League and had come to Geneva with a troupe of showgirls to ‘promote’ the League; she had joined his procession – a naive mistake – but still, back then she had thought it a rather splendid advertising idea for the League.
Très modern
. Ambrose had taught her to shoot the pistol. After a time, there had been an armoury in the
Palais des Nations
at the League for the concierges and guards. She sometimes did some target-shooting there in the basement.

‘Of all the weapons, the machine gun is most full of evil intent,’ she said, firmly handing back the machine gun. ‘But with a shapely beauty.’

They didn’t comment; too much was happening outside.

There was no beauty to the A-bomb, even in its geometry. Scraper, now dead, would have something to say about its geometry and its relation to the universe. She could not yet see the will or the machinery in the IAEA or elsewhere that could stop some final mad destructive use of these weapons, and the partial destruction of the planet. There had for a long time been a dream that one day the weapons would be so powerful that no one would dare use them, and they would bring about a permanent stalemate – perfect deterrence.

Had the second half of her life – devoted to the peaceful use of uranium – been yet another lost cause? Was the world too hard to manage sensibly? Did it always move on towards its own destruction? Were we the one species that wished to become extinct? Were we destined for extinction as part of the order of things? Or were the destructive ones always ultimately successfully contested and defied by those who were driven by impulses of enhancement, progressive amendment? Was there a balance of deterrence here? Was the evolutionary direction of all species towards survival?

Armaments were the ultimate instrument of distrust; that was the wisdom inherent in armaments. And, Gandhi aside, armed rebellion by citizens was sometimes the only answer to tyranny.

On they drove through Sidon, past the refugees with scarves and bundled possessions, who were piled like baggage on their carts and cars and utilities. Some were sitting in the open luggage compartments of cars. ‘When I was here before the war, I never travelled down to the south. We went to the mountains.’

Some lines from
Othello
came to her mind:

My allegiance
, she thought,
has always been to the republic of the mind, not to a country or the state
.

She blocked the rain of memories and returned to the present. Was she beginning to
live in the past
, as it was said of the old? Was much of her knowledge and experience now out-of-date? She had fought against this happening.

Something caught Yizhar’s attention and his face tightened. He pulled the car over and stopped, leaving the engine running, and said to Ian, ‘You’d better drive, I’ll ride shotgun for a while. Remember, no matter what happens, keep driving. There are no traffic police here, no rules. If we hit anything or if anyone tries to wave us down, just keep driving.’

He got out and came around to take Ian’s passenger seat as Ian slid across.

She looked out the window but could not see what had caught Yizhar’s attention.

Of course, she should have made her life with Ambrose. She had been disloyal to him and to her values of open free-love. She had witnessed great events and participated in great events. She had met and talked with fascinating people who had made history, but the thing that the outsider could not see was how she had bungled her inner life. Only Ambrose would see that. She wished he would have been more insistent that she go back with him to London. But he must have known that nothing would have changed her mind. Her mind had been locked by passion. Passion promised everything but assured nothing. She had done her self-recrimination, though. That was over now. She would silently lament without recrimination. Perhaps she could join up with him again. There was a good possibility of a position at the IAEA – Sigvard would find her something. Ambrose and she could live in Vienna. They both liked Vienna.
You did not have to be born in Vienna to be Viennese; you were Viennese if you simply lived there.

She recalled another line from
Othello
, and said aloud or in her head, she was unsure – there was now a good deal of noise coming from the disorder around the car – ‘One that loved not wisely but too well.’ She had loved not too wisely, nor too well. But she had tried with all her might.

Yizhar raised the Uzi from his lap and clicked off the safety catch. Ian slowed, but she couldn’t see what the problem was.

‘Keep driving,’ Yizhar said, forcefully but in a cool voice. ‘Whatever happens, don’t stop. Speed up.’

Ian accelerated.

She heard the pock-pock of shooting not far off – she knew it was shooting – but she couldn’t see who was shooting. Or at whom.

Ian said with a controlled voice, ‘We’re hit.’

She heard a thud behind her, turned and saw a starburst crack in the back windscreen, then felt and heard the thud of another bullet entering the upholstery of the seat beside her. She looked down at the torn seat. The pock-pock of more gunfire. She felt she was falling backwards in time. She saw a handsome Ambrose in a silk dressing-gown, leather slippers, a cravat, sitting on a sofa in their rooms at the Hotel Canberra, a brandy glass in hand. He was smiling. He was about to tell her a secret.

Her heart stopped.