"I don't know a Joseph."
„"Come. Think. On Mykonos. Before you went to Athens. One of your friends, in casual conversation with an acquaintance of ours, was heard to make a reference to Joseph, who joined your group. He said Charlie was quite captivated by him."
There were no barriers left, no twists. She had cleared them all, and was running free.
"Joseph? Ah, that Joseph!" She let her face register the belated recollection: and as it did so, to cloud in disgust.
"I remember him. He was a greasy little Jew who tagged on to our group."
"Don't talk about Jews like that. We are not anti-Semitic, we are merely anti-Zionist."
"Tell me another," she snapped.
Tayeh was interested. "You are describing me as a liar, Charlie?"
"Whether he was a Zionist or not, he was a creep. He reminded me of my father."
"Was your father a Jew?"
"No. But he was a thief."
Tayeh thought about this for a long time, using first her face, then her whole body as a term of reference for whatever doubts still lingered in his mind. He offered her a cigarette but she didn't take it: her instinct told her to make no step towards him. Once more he tapped his dead foot with his stick. "That night you spent with Michel in Thessalonika-in the old hotel-you remember?"
"What of it?"
"The staff heard raised voices from your room late at night."
"So what's your question?"
"Don't hurry me, please. Who was shouting that night?"
"No one. They were snooping at the wrong bloody door."
"Who was shouting?"
"We weren't shouting. Michel didn't want me to go. That's all. He was afraid for me."
"And you?"
It was a story she had worked up with Joseph: her moment of being stronger than Michel.
"I offered him his bracelet back," she said.
Tayeh nodded. "Which accounts for the postscript in your letter: 'I am so glad I kept the bracelet.' And of course-there was no shouting. You are right. Forgive my simple Arab trick." He took a last searching look at her, trying once more, in vain, to resolve the enigma; then pursed his lips, soldier-like, as Joseph sometimes did, as a prelude to issuing an order.
"We have a mission for you. Get your possessions and return here immediately. Your training is complete."
Leaving was the most unexpected madness of all. It was worse than end of term; worse than dumping the gang at Piraeus harbour. Fidel and Bubi clutched her to their breasts, their tears mixing with her own. One of the Algerian girls gave her a wooden Christ-child as a pendant.
Professor Minkel lived on the saddle that joins Mount Scopus to French Hill, on the eighth floor of a new tower close to the Hebrew University, one of a great cluster on the skyline which have caused pain to Jerusalem's luckless conservationists. Every apartment looked down on the Old City, but the trouble was, the Old City looked up at every apartment too. Like its neighbours, it was a fortress as well as a skyscraper, and the positioning of its windows was determined by the most favourable arcs of fire if an attack were to be riposted. Kurtz made three wrong tries before he found the place. He lost himself first in a shopping centre built in concrete five feet deep, then again in a British cemetery devoted to the fallen of the First World War. "A Free Gift from the People of Palestine," read the engraving. He explored other buildings, mostly the gifts of millionaires from America, and came finally upon this tower of hewn stone. The name signs had been vandalised and so he pressed a bell at random and unearthed an old Pole from Galicia who spoke only Yiddish. The Pole knew which building all right-this one as you see me!-he knew Dr. Minkel and admired him for his stand; he himself had attended the venerated Krakow University. But he also had a lot of questions on his own account, which Kurtz was obliged to answer as best he could; like where did Kurtz come from originally? Well, my heaven, did he know so-and-so? And what was Kurtz's business here, a grown man, eleven in the morning when Dr. Minkel should be instructing future fine philosophers of our people?
The lift engineers were on strike, so Kurtz was obliged to take the staircase, but nothing could have dampened his good spirits. For one thing, his niece had just announced her engagement to a young boy in his own service-though not before time. For another, Elli's Bible conference had passed off happily; she had given a coffee party at the end of it and, to her great contentment, he had managed to be present. But best of all, the Freiburg breakthrough had been followed by several reassuring pointers, of which the most satisfactory was obtained but yesterday, by one of Shimon Litvak's listeners, testing a newfangled directional microphone on a rooftop in Beirut: Freiburg, Freiburg, three times in five pages, a real delight. Sometimes luck treated you that way, Kurtz reflected as he climbed. And luck, as Napoleon and everybody in Jerusalem knew, was what made good generals.
Reaching a small landing, he paused to collect his breath a little, and his thoughts. The staircase was lit like an air-raid shelter, with wire cages over the light-bulbs, but today it was the sounds of his own childhood in the ghettos that Kurtz heard bouncing up and down the gloomy well. I was right not to bring Shimon, he thought. Sometimes Shimon puts a chilly note on things; a surface lightness would improve him.
The door of number 18D had a steel-plated eyehole and locks all down one side of it, and Mrs. Minkel undid them one by one like boot buttons, calling "Just one moment, please," while she got lower and lower. He stepped inside and waited while she patiently replaced them. She was tall and fine-looking, with blue eyes very bright, and grey hair pinned in an academic bun.
"You are Mr. Spielberg from the Ministry of the Interior," she informed him with a certain guardedness as she gave him her hand. "Hansi is expecting you. Welcome. Please."
She opened the door to a tiny study and there her Hansi sat, as weathered and patrician as a Buddenbrook. His desk was too small for him, and had been so for many years; his books and papers lay stacked about him on the floor with an order that could not have been haphazard. The desk stood askew to a window bay, and the bay was half a hexagon, with thin smoked windows like arrow slits, and a bench seat built in. Rising carefully, Minkel picked his way with unworldly dignity across the room until he had reached the one small island that was not claimed by his erudition. His welcome was uneasy and as they sat themselves in the window bay, Mrs. Minkel drew up a stool and sat herself firmly between them, as if intent upon seeing fair play.
An awkward silence followed. Kurtz pulled the regretful smile of a man obliged by his duty. "Mrs. Minkel, I fear there are a couple of things on the security side which my office insists I am to discuss with your husband alone in the first instance," he said. And waited again, still smiling, until the Professor suggested she make a coffee, how did Mr. Spielberg like it?
With a warning glance at her husband from the doorway,
Mrs. Minkel reluctantly withdrew. In reality there could have been little difference between the two men's ages; yet Kurtz was careful to speak up to Minkel because that was what the Professor was accustomed to.
"Professor, I understand that our mutual friend, Ruthie Zadir, spoke to you only yesterday," Kurtz began, with a bedside respectfulness. He could understand this very well, for he had stood over Ruthie while she made the call, and listened to both sides of the conversation in order to get the feel of this man.
"Ruth was one of my best students," the Professor observed, with an air of loss.
"She is surely one of ours too," said Kurtz, more expansively. "Professor, are you aware, please, of the nature of the work in which Ruthie is now engaged?"