Cannibals and Missionaries (21 page)

The wonder came from another source. Unnoticed, the Arab guard had moved closer during the recitation. He now touched Van Vliet’s elbow. “I hear this poem before. Yes. Many times. From a Japanese comrade—Japanese Red Army.” Old Tennant was the first to recover his wits. “You know Japanese? How clever of you. Such a difficult language. We used to go there, porcelain-hunting, my friend and I, between the wars. Staying in the charming Japanese inns, where they took such good care of us—” “No,” interrupted the Arab. “He translate.” “Into Arabic? Dear me!” “English. Japanese know only English. Not Arab tongues, not French.”
“Vous êtes francophone, monsieur?”
Aileen asked, adopting a social tone too. “Yes. No. For us, French is colonial tongue.” His face darkened. “And you, Deputy, how you know this poem? My comrade love it very much. He love this Yoshitsune.” The gaze turned on Van Vliet was accusatory. In the face of that scowl—and of the submachine gun swinging from the plump shoulder—he felt unable to explain how he had come into possession of the “poem,” which in fact was a travel sketch in prose. From the Arab’s point of view, he had stolen it, he supposed, in his character of colonialist. And actually he could not remember where and how he had acquired the little Penguin Classic, with a wash drawing of Bashō, wearing a sort of nightcap, on the cover-probably in an airport bookstall. “How you know it?” the Arab repeated. In his terms, of course, he had the right to ask; he had established his own claim to those lines—they had come to him, by inheritance, from a comrade-at-arms. With compassion, Van Vliet pictured the circumstances: a training camp in Lebanon or Syria, tents or improvised barracks, long, cold desert nights, the moon, a homesick Japanese youngster wrapped in a burnoos or army blanket, chattering of a feudal warrior-hero betrayed, in the end, by his wicked half-brother. He looked for a soft answer to turn away wrath. The gruffness and fat were misleading; this was a youth, not a full-fledged man. “I think I must have found the book in a shop.” Diplomatically he avoided the mercantile word “bought.” “And you must not be surprised. We Dutch are a curious people and we are curious about Japan, which has much in common with Holland.” “Sea people,” said the Arab, nodding. “Sea people are imperialistic. River people not so much.” Having laid down the general statement, he showed his white teeth in a large, quite friendly smile. Contact had been made.

“And your comrade?” asked Sophie. “Where is he now?” “In prison,” the Arab said curtly. “They torture him.” The pastor made a clucking noise indicative of sympathy. “Who?” “The Israeli.” “Come now,” Aileen protested. “The Israelis don’t torture prisoners.” “You ought to qualify that, Miss Simmons,” put in the pastor, with a quick inter-faith smile for the Arab. “We don’t
know
that they don’t.” Charges to that effect, he reminded her, had been made by the Syrians before the UN. “Charges aren’t proof,” she retorted. “I’ll take the Israelis’ word any day over the Syrians’.” “I’d
prefer
to take their word,” said the pastor. “I guess we all would. I mean, as a Christian, I don’t want to think that anybody is torturing anybody.” “What does that
mean,
Reverend?” Aileen said irritably. “Why ‘as a Christian’?” The Reverend gave one of his boyish laughs. “Heck, I’m all tangled up. What I’m trying to say is that if we do incline to take the Israelis’ word, it’s not because we don’t believe the Syrians.” “Then what is it, man?” exclaimed Cameron. The Bishop held out an oar to his floundering disciple. “Frank means that our faith teaches us not to be over-ready to believe the worst of our fellow-men, whoever they are. In charity, until we know more, he would like to give the Israelis the benefit of the doubt.”

The Arab had moved off—out of hearing, Van Vliet trusted. He wished the Americans would close the debate or adjourn it sine die. But Aileen, like a wailing echo, persisted. “I never heard that the Israelis were torturing Japanese prisoners, did you, Senator Jim?” “Let’s leave it that they’re just torturing Syrians—all in the family. You’d like that better, wouldn’t you? And now be quiet, can’t you? Our friend’s flash point may be lower than you guess.”

Van Vliet’s fondness for the Senator was increasing by leaps and bounds. Aileen and the dominie, in their obliviousness, were illustrating the worst of what he had heard of the American character. A people given to argumentation, someone had said. And, whatever the subject, the debate was always between themselves—as though only their own opinions counted—and was settled when they reached a conclusion or simply got tired, as the world had watched them do in Vietnam. At least Sophie had held her peace; perhaps, being Jewish, she lacked the authority to pontificate conferred on the others as a birthright. No one had asked him his opinion, but his work with Amnesty had convinced him that all prisoners were tortured; the difference was one of degree. Prison itself was a torture, and especially excruciating to violent revolutionaries of today’s school, who lacked the patience of the old revolutionaries; they could not accept incarceration as a stage, like puberty, in their political development. This young gunman, for example, would never be able to “mature” quietly, pent up in a Western jail while awaiting trial by authorities whose legitimacy he did not recognize. To him and his comrades, detention was per se unjust.

In that context, the committee’s “mission” to Iran must appear as the height of frivolity—in the stern eyes of actionists a punishable offense. For this young hijacker, surely, the Shah’s crimes against humanity were of minimal interest in comparison with the
fact
of his comrade’s detention in an Israeli jail. Not to mention the honor roll of other comrades ripe for liberation: the Price sisters, held by the English, Andreas Baader, Ulrike Meinhof, Gudrun Esslin, confined in Helmut’s cells, the adjutants of “Carlos” in Giscard’s hands…. And no committee of Western liberals felt the call to investigate their conditions of detainment, though the courtroom in Stuttgart was only an hour’s flight away. Instead, as the hijackers would see it, the conscience of the West was busy looking the other way, at the mote in the Shah’s eye.

Henk was not sure he saw it in quite that light himself. But they had a point. One might not concur in the notion that violence in self-ordained hands was above the “bourgeois” law, but did it follow that agents of terror had forfeited all their human rights when they treated themselves as sacred instruments? That indeed seemed to be the prevailing assumption in liberal-minded circles. The capture of a terrorist could hardly be expected to produce universal grief, yet the usual reaction “Good riddance,” of which he too had occasionally been guilty, had its own barbarity.

As for the charge of frivolity, you could find considerable evidence of it in this ill-starred expedition. To be honest, he had been aware from the start that curiosity had played a leading part in his decision to join: the lure of the bazaars, carpets, miniatures, minarets, rose water in the cookery, Shiraz, Persepolis if there was time. Curiosity too about the Americans—where did such a group fit in their system?—desire to know Carey in a working relationship; speculations about the Shah and his consort. And he had probably hoped for a poem or two as a by-product.

Yet he felt no strong urge to condemn himself for impurity of motives; if a good deed was able to embrace a few stolen pleasures, so much the better. He was no Calvinist. Besides, in the committee’s defense, it could be argued that liberal observers could not be present in all the world’s jails and courtrooms simultaneously; unlike God, the liberal was limited by ubiety. Nevertheless, why pick on the Shah? If the truth were known, Henk feared, Reza Pahlavi’s enormities had been chosen for this group’s attention not just because he had an attractive country with an agreeable winter climate but for a still less pardonable motive: his regime was an easy target. Every good soul was opposed to torture, but it suited the Western soul’s book to be able to attest to it in a distant land ruled by an oil monarch who was neither friend nor foe. A foe would not admit your committee, and to find fault with a friend would give pain. If your committee were to find evidence of torture in Israel, it would meet with little sympathy for its “courage” on its return. And if it failed to find evidence, it would be accused of conducting a whitewash. For liberals, the Shah was ideal; only his ambassadors would write angry letters to the newspapers. And his victims, always described as youths of good middle-class families and of respectable political antecedents, were ideal victims from a liberal point of view-guilty of nothing more than advocacy. The only embarrassment, for the committee, would be to discover a few terrorists among them—unlikely, as domestic terrorists were executed there with great promptitude.

Henk sighed. Involuntarily, he looked at his watch. Fifteen minutes before one. He hoped that these young bandits were not going to become his surrogate conscience for the duration, however that was to be reckoned, in hours, days, or weeks. It occurred to him that he might be experiencing in his own person a thing he had read about with slight disgust in the newspapers: the incredible tendency on the part of hostages-bank tellers, air stewardesses, motherly middle-aged passengers—to “see the good side” of their kidnappers: “They behaved to us like perfect gentlemen,” “He was as sweet as he could be.” Some carried it to the point of actually falling in love with them; he remembered the Swedish bank employee who greeted her release by announcing her engagement to the leading criminal. Henk would not say that his own symptoms were in any way amorous. Nor did he think that he was in the process of being converted to a terrorist outlook: observing terror at close quarters, he felt more than ever the futility and waste of it. But, being at close quarters, he could not fail to glimpse their point of view, which caused him to turn about and look at his own party with freshened eyes.

Yet he was feeling something else: pity for the hijackers. Their brief life-expectancy moved him as he studied the moony countenance of the machine-gunner, the soft baby-fat cheeks and incipient dewlaps. Within a year, in all likelihood, this boy would be dead; prison would only be an unwelcome reprieve—if held too long, he would hang himself. There were no active middle-aged terrorists or grizzled retired terrorists. He was a warrior, born to a short life, like the sulky Achilles or his friend’s idol Yoshitsune. And, whatever he had been taught in his training camp, he would not really expect his ideas to live after him. Today’s arch-revolutionaries had no faith in a future life for their ideas; it was gone, like the Christian faith in God’s design.

If, thanks to this calfish specimen, Henk’s own days or minutes were now numbered, at least he had had his full share of life’s rewards and amusements. The fact that he had just celebrated, after a fashion, his thirty-eighth birthday (where, by the way, was that magazine with the horoscope?) suddenly seemed rather indecent, an actuarial disproportion that was like being overweight in a time of world hunger. And the pity he felt for the
kapers,
even that brute of a woman, was sharpened by irritation with the sheer folly of their enterprise. The optimum result they could hope for would be to gain the release of a few fellow-terrorists, to engage in more hijackings, daring raids, and kidnappings—a vicious circle, for most would be shot or returned to jail. The ransom money they might extort could only serve to finance a new round of suicidal operations; unlike the normal criminal, they knew of no other use for it. A food distribution, were they to include it in their demands, would turn into a grotesque scene from Brueghel.

Could reason make them see the vicious circle they were spinning in? That they were all doomed to violent and pointless extinction, on the model of their hero, Che? They would hardly be open to dissuasion at this stage. It would be pointless to make the effort, even if he were summoned again. A plea coming from him addressed to their own self-interest would not be recognized as such, however feelingly it was expressed. But later a time might come. If they got their helicopter and were put down with their freight of captives on the lonely polder, a new chapter could open. Under those circumstances, it might not be impossible, for example, to “reach” the machine-gunner, evidently the most susceptible member of the team. Bashō, as had been demonstrated, was the soft spot in his warrior’s carapace. The cluster of tender sentiment surrounding the poet and the Japanese guerrilla might be the point of entry.

If the youth was responsive to poetry, in principle he was salvageable, though it was true, Henk sadly recalled, that here in Holland some of the worst SS men had been lovers of Rilke and Hölderlin—his father, the magistrate, had cited the fact ironically when he had gone to witness against them at their trials. Still, poetry, as a frail
trait d’union,
the thin edge of the wedge, was a hope—the only one available. That Henk had been led by a queer chain of coincidences to recite those lines could be taken for a sign from Heaven, showing him the right way. But the plump gloomy boy, however open to softer influences he might prove to be, was subordinate to the others. Even if he could be gently detached from them, at night as he stood watch, how in fact could he help? He had only the one weapon. And should one aim after all at corrupting a minor? That was what it would amount to. Henk shook his head, feeling distaste for the train of thought he had been pursuing. Once again he despaired.

Sophie gripped his hand; he raised his eyes. The woman was standing in the doorway, her pistol peeping from her blouse. She had an announcement to make. A light meal was going to be served. As soon as they had eaten, the prisoners were to gather their hand baggage and proceed to the first-class cabin, where disembarkation would take place. A helicopter was standing by. “And Sapphire?” asked Victor hoarsely, speaking for the first time today; there were cake-crumbs in his two-day-old beard. “You will leave your cat,” said the woman. “The hostesses will dispose of it. And you will not be needing the carrier.”

Before Van Vliet de Jonge left the cabin, he retrieved the copy of
Elle.
In captivity he would have time, finally, to peruse his birthday horoscope. But in the aisle the young Arab abruptly took the magazine from him and stood frowning at the cover, which showed a pretty blonde girl wearing a blue-and-white crocheted cap—the winter sports number. His eyes slowly rose and met Van Vliet’s with a look of childish mischief—was he inviting the deputy to a hand-to-hand struggle for possession of a French cover girl? Then with a grunt, as if to denote relinquishment, he handed the fashion magazine back. His white teeth flashed in a broadening, still mischievous smile as he helped himself instead to a cigar from the deputy’s pocket.