The Rainy Day Man: Contemporary Romance (Suspense and Political Mystery Book 1) (19 page)

             
"Let's get out of here," he said when I went out.  "They're starting to ask questions..."

             
The clerk was waiting beside the command car.  "Did you find him?"

             
"No," I said.  "You've lost him."

             
He smiled tensely.  "We've never lost anyone yet.  He simply didn't get here.  Try the other camps..."

             
"Ask him," I gestured towards Scheckler.

             
Scheckler gave a mollifying smile.  "If he's not registered, that means he wasn't here," he said without even turning his face away from me. 

             
The clerk agreed complacently.  From the other side of the network of fences, prisoners called to me, beckoning me over. 

             
"They cause problems the whole time," the clerk said.  "Anyone who isn't in uniform gets them going.  They're sure you're a journalist or a Red Cross representative."  Maybe there, inside the camp, I could find an explanation?  The clerk followed my gaze.  "If you go near them," he warned, "there'll be an uproar."

             
A moment later he was gone and the loudspeaker demanded again, "Pen leaders, pen leaders..."  We sped down Shit Road.  In one of the encampments beyond the fences there was a new commotion.  The group around the campfire, the one we had seen on our way in, had swelled to the size of a platoon.  They were drawn up in what was almost military formation and were throwing whatever they could lay their hands on at a fire truck, which was replying with jets of water too short and too weak.  The remains of other campfires, improvised stoves and mud cookers, were thrown around.  It was hard to decide which side more deserved sympathy - those who were cooking themselves a meal or four young soldiers, who were struggling with the water-hoses. 

             
"Jews," Scheckler said bitterly, "always manage to be on the side that gets fucked.  In the stories my father told me about the German camps, they were always inside and the power was outside, with the guards.  Now, when we're the guards, the power is inside..."

The barbed-wire barrier was moved aside for us.  The two soldiers we had left behind hopped into the command car.  The MP at the gate passed a large mirror beneath the vehicle and looked under the hood.  The events of the morning stuck in my throat like the taste of regurgitated food.  The evening, which till then had seemed far off and predictable, was now nearby and uncontrollable. 

"Tell her that you saw him," Scheckler said suddenly.

             
My hand, which was about to wave to the MP, froze in mid- movement.  Scheckler engaged the gears and laughed silently. 

             
"There are no secrets in Dura."

***

              Things had changed during our absence.  The road at the entrance to the village was blocked by a long curl of barbed wire with three paratroopers in charge of it.  Scheckler's vendors had vanished from the Athenaeum wall.  The large building was empty and the air too clear and transparent.

             
Dura was afflicted with uncertainty, oppressed by a mysterious, ghostly force, into which Scheckler and his five soldiers immediately disappeared. Alone in my room, I tapped my ear with my hand.  Had I gone deaf?  The sound reverberated in my eardrum.  Had the others all vanished?  I peered through the window into the garden, where refugee families were silently packing up their belongings.

             
Then I noticed, that the captain, the commander of the paratroops, was there too. One of the refugees,an old man with a few days' growth, which gave his face the dark, prickly look of a poisonous fruit, went over to him and appealed to him about his heap of unnecessary objects: cooking utensils for which there was no stove, toys with which there was no room to play, electrical appliances for which it was doubtful whether a socket could be found.  I suddenly wondered what appeal Anton had made to the people who had spirited him away.

             
The old man called to a woman in black and, without a word, pulled a bundle out from beneath her clothing.  When he opened it something gold scintillated brightly in the sunlight.  It was as if the war had burst into that playground all at once.  The captain's head wobbled in consternation.  His hand shot out to reject the gift.

One has to stand on a summer's day at the window of a requisitioned hotel and watch a group of refugees being expelled from a garden in which the tired remains of flowerbeds and paths are then revealed, to realize how little personal integrity counts.  If, on that morning of the second of August, we had stood Anton up against the wall we would at least have been spared the hypocrisy and dissembling.  In the hearts of his relatives there would have been a clear memory, something to recoil from, to cling to and on the strength of which to continue with their lives.

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.