The Pigeon Tunnel (10 page)

13

Theatre of the Real: dances with Arafat

This is the first of four joined-up stories about my journeyings for
The Little Drummer Girl
, between 1981 and 1983. My subject was the Palestine–Israel conflict. The drummer girl in question was Charlie, a character inspired by my half-sister Charlotte Cornwell, who is fourteen years my junior. ‘Drummer' because in my story Charlie roused the combative emotions of protagonists on both sides to the conflict. At the time of writing, Charlotte was a well-known stage and television actress (the Royal Shakespeare Company, the
TV
series
Rock Follies
), but also a militant advocate of the political far left.

In my novel, Charlie, also an actress, is recruited by a charismatic Israeli counter-terrorist agent named Joseph to play the leading role in what he calls the Theatre of the Real. By representing herself as the radical freedom fighter she has so far
imagined
herself to be – thus Joseph – by playing herself for
real
, in other words, and raising her acting skills to new heights under Joseph's direction, she will make herself attractive to a nest of Palestinian and West German terrorists, and by so doing, save
real
, innocent lives. Torn between her compassion for the plight of the Palestinians that she has been sent to betray, her recognition of the Jewish right to a homeland, not to mention her attraction to Joseph, Charlie becomes the twice-promised woman in the twice-promised land.

The task I set myself was to share the journey with her; to be swayed, as Charlie is swayed, by the arguments hurled at her by each side, and to undergo, as best I could, her contradictory surges of loyalty, hope and despair. And that was how, on New Year's Eve 1982, at
a mountainside school for the orphans of those who had died in the struggle for Palestinian liberation, otherwise called the martyrs, I came to be dancing the
dabke
with Yasser Arafat and his high command.

My journey to Arafat had been frustrating, but he was at that time a man so luridly portrayed as the elusive, wily, terrorist-turned-statesman that anything more comfortable would have been a disappointment. My first stop was the late Patrick Seale, the Belfast-born, Oxford-educated British journalist, Arabist and alleged British spy who had succeeded Kim Philby as the
Observer
newspaper's correspondent in Beirut. My second stop, on Seale's advice, was a Palestinian military commander loyal to Arafat named Salah Tamari, whom I first met on one of his regular visits to Britain. In Odin's restaurant in Devonshire Street, while Palestinian waiters gazed on him in breathless awe, Salah confirmed to me what I had been told by everyone I consulted: if you want to go deep among the Palestinians, you have to have the Chairman's blessing.

Tamari said he would put in a word for me, but I must go through official channels. I was trying to. Equipped with introductions from both Tamari and Seale, I had twice made an appointment to see the Representative of the Palestine Liberation Organization at the League of Arab States office in Green Street in Mayfair, twice endured the scrutiny of dark-suited men on the pavement, twice stood in a glass coffin in the doorway while I was scanned for secret weapons, and twice been politely turned away for reasons beyond the Representative's control. And the reasons very probably
were
beyond his control. A month earlier his predecessor had been shot dead in Belgium.

In the end I flew to Beirut anyway, and booked myself into the Commodore Hotel because it was owned by Palestinians, and because it was known for its indulgence towards journalists, spies and similar fauna. Until now, my researches had been confined to
Israel. I had spent days with Israeli Special Forces, sat in nice offices and talked to present and past chiefs of Israeli Intelligence. But the Palestine Liberation Organization's public relations office in Beirut lay in a devastated street behind a ring of corrugated-iron barrels filled with cement. Armed men with forefingers on their trigger guards scowled at my approach. In the half-darkness of the waiting room you were greeted by yellowing propaganda magazines printed in Russian and, in cracked glass cases, displays of shrapnel and unexploded antipersonnel bomblets recovered from Palestinian refugee camps. Curling photographs of slaughtered women and children were drawing-pinned to the weeping walls.

The private sanctum of Mr Lapadi, the Representative, is no more cheerful. Seated behind a desk with a pistol at his left hand and a Kalashnikov at his side, he has a pallid, exhausted glower.

‘You write for newspaper?'

Partly. Partly I'm writing a book.

‘You are human zoologist?'

I'm a novelist.

‘You are here to make profit from us?'

To understand your cause at first hand.

‘You will wait.'

And keep waiting, day after day, night after night. I lie in my hotel room counting bullet holes in the curtains as the morning light comes up. I crouch in the Commodore's cellar bar in the small hours, listening to the musings of the exhausted war correspondents who have forgotten how to sleep. A night comes when I am eating a ten-inch-long spring roll in the Commodore's cavernous, airless dining room. A waiter whispers excitedly in my ear:

‘Our Chairman will see you now.'

My first thought is chairman of the hotel group. He is going to throw me out, I haven't paid my bill, I have insulted someone in the bar or he wants me to sign a book. Then slowly the penny drops. I follow the waiter to the lobby and step into pouring rain. Armed fighters in jeans hover around a sand-coloured Volvo estate car with
its rear door open. Nobody speaks, so I don't. I climb into the back of the Volvo, fighters leap in either side of me, another sits himself in the front seat next to the driver.

We are racing through a smashed city in pouring rain with a chase Jeep on our tail. We are changing lanes. We are changing cars, we are darting down side streets, bumping over the central reservation of a busy dual carriageway. Oncoming traffic is scurrying for the kerb. We are switching cars again. I am being patted down for the fourth or sixth time. I am standing on a rain-swept pavement somewhere in Beirut, surrounded by armed men in streaming capes. Our cars have vanished. A street door opens, a man beckons us into a bullet-pocked apartment house with empty windows and no lights. He gestures us up a tiled staircase lined by ghostly armed men. After two flights we reach a carpeted landing and are ushered into an open lift that stinks of disinfectant. It jerks upwards and stops with a huge jolt. We have arrived in an L-shaped living room. Fighters of both sexes are propped against the walls. Surprisingly, no one is smoking. I remember that Arafat doesn't like cigarette smoke. A fighter starts to pat me down for the umpteenth time. The unreason of fear overtakes me.

‘Please. I've been searched enough.'

Opening his hands as if to show there's nothing in them, he smiles and backs away.

At a desk in the smaller part of the L sits Chairman Arafat, waiting to be discovered. He wears a white keffiyeh and khaki shirt with crisp box-creases, and totes a silver pistol in a holster of plaited brown plastic. He doesn't look up at his guest. He's too busy signing papers. Even when I am led to a carved-wood throne at his left side, he's too busy to notice me. Eventually his head lifts. He smiles ahead of him as if remembering something happy. He turns to me and at the same time leaps to his feet in surprised delight. I leap to mine. Like complicit actors we're gazing into each other's eyes. Arafat is always on stage, I've been warned. And I'm telling myself that I'm on stage too. I'm a fellow performer, and we have a live audience out there, maybe
thirty strong. He leans back and reaches out both hands to me in greeting. I take hold of them and they're soft as a child's. His bulging brown eyes are fervent and imploring.

‘Mr David!' he cries. ‘Why have you come to see me?'

‘Mr Chairman,' I reply in the same high tone. ‘I have come to put my hand on the Palestinian heart!'

Have we been rehearsing this stuff? He is already guiding my right hand to the left breast of his khaki shirt. It has a button-down pocket, perfectly ironed.

‘Mr David, it is
here!
' he cries fervently. ‘It is
here!
' he repeats for the benefit of our audience.

The house is on its feet. We're an instant hit. We enter an Arab embrace, left, right, left. The beard is not bristle, it's silky fluff. It smells of Johnson's Baby Powder. Releasing me, he keeps a hand possessively on my shoulder as he addresses our audience. I may walk freely among his Palestinians, he declaims – he who never sleeps in the same bed twice, handles his own security and insists he is married to nobody but Palestine. I may see and hear whatever I wish to see and hear. He asks me only that I write and speak the truth, because only the truth will set Palestine free. He will entrust me to the same chief of fighters that I met in London – Salah Tamari. Salah will provide me with a hand-picked bodyguard of young fighters. Salah will take me to South Lebanon, Salah will instruct me in the great struggle against the Zionists, he will introduce me to his commanders and their troops. All Palestinians I encounter will speak to me with total frankness. He asks me to be photographed with him. I decline. He asks me why. His expression is so radiant and teasing that I risk a truthful answer:

‘Because I expect to be in Jerusalem a little before you are, Mr Chairman.'

He laughs heartily, so our audience laughs too. But it's a truth too far, and I'm already regretting it.

After Arafat, anything else feels normal. All the young fighters of Fatah were under Salah's military command, and I had eight of them as my personal bodyguard. Their average age was seventeen at most, and they slept or didn't sleep in a ring round my bed on the top floor with orders to keep watch from my window for the first sign of enemy attack from land, air or sea. When boredom overcame them, which it easily did, they would take a pot shot with their pistols at any passing cat lurking in the bushes. But most of the time they spent murmuring among themselves in Arabic, or practising their English on me whenever I was about to fall asleep. At the age of eight they had joined the Palestinian boy scouts, the Ashbal. At fourteen they were reckoned fully fledged fighting men. According to Salah, there was no one to touch them when it came to aiming a hand-held rocket down the barrel of an Israeli tank. And my poor Charlie, star actress in the Theatre of the Real, will love them all, I am thinking, as I scribble down her thoughts in my battered notebook.

With Salah to guide me and Charlie as my familiar, I visit Palestinian outposts on the Israeli border and, to the putter of Israeli spotter planes and bursts of occasional gunfire, listen to fighters' tales – real or imagined, I don't know – of night raids by rubber boat across the Galilee. It isn't their derring-do that they boast of.
To be there
is already enough, they insist: to live the dream, even for a few hours, at the risk of death or capture; to pause your stealth boat in mid-crossing, breathe the scent of the flowers and olive trees and farmlands of your own homeland, to listen to the bleating of the sheep on your own hillsides – t
hat
is the real victory.

With Salah at my side, I walk the wards of the children's hospital in Sidon. A seven-year-old boy with his legs blown off gives us the thumbs-up. Charlie has never been more present. Of the refugee camps, I remember Rashidieh and Nabatieh, townships in their own right. Rashidieh is famous for its football team. The pitch, which is of dust, has been bombed so often that matches can be arranged only at short notice. Several of its best footballers are martyrs to the cause. Their photographs are propped among the silver cups they
won. In Nabatieh, an old Arab man in a white robe notices my brown English shoes, and something colonial about my walk.

‘You are British, sir?'