primitive groping of the fool Yevsei. Thirty-six hours, just a day and a half, nothing in time, and on her back in the grass with that stupid, oafish idiot. Could have been David.
Harvested by her fantasies, the rounded walls of the cabin burgeoned in on her, restricting and claustrophobic. Rebecca was not one to weep, not unless there was a sudden pain, but a deep depression swamped her as she lay on her side on the hardened seats. Always there had been a forest path or a side alley that was good for escape, and now nothing but the barricaded doors with their pressurized locks and the tiny windows with their reinforced glass.
She called to David. 'Have you talked with them? Have you talked with the British?'
'You were sleeping and we did not wish to wake you. We have talked to them.' Had only seen his back since she had woken, and now he turned his face to her. The night had not refreshed him.
Haggard and unshaven, eyes dulled and deadened. Only the lines of sympathy at his mouth suggested he had news difficult to tell.
'What did they say about the fuel?'
'They said there would be none. That we should surrender. We would fly no further, they said.'
'What do we do, David?' Simple, little more than a whisper, oblivious of the passenger behind who made his way to the lavatory.
' Isaac says we fight them.'
'He said the same last night, before I slept, while you rested. What does that mean?'
Isaac says we must make them listen to us, that we must show our strength.'
'What strength do we have?'
'Only the passengers. The guns are nothing – against us they have an army. There are only the passengers.'
' Isaac said last night that if we were hard with the passengers then the British would bend. He said they have done so in the past.
'That is what Isaac believes.' David, remote and lost to her, listened to her questions, but his replies were mechanical.
'What do you believe, David? Not what Isaac says, but what is your thought?' Those who are caught in the winter snows, hikers and climbers and those whose cars fail them, and lose the will to go on, and cannot maintain the fight, want only to sleep, the sure and certain way to death.
David, uncaring, uninvolved. Had to raise him – lift him again before he was lost. 'You have to know what you want, David. You have your own mind.'
' I don't know. Believe me, I don't know. It was Isaac who thought of the plane as a way of escape. We all agreed and now we must stand with him.'
'And they will kill us here, kill us in the plane?'
' Isaac thinks we can make them surrender to us. He has told them they have till ten o'clock. It is that on your watch now, but you have not allowed for the time difference. They have two more hours.'
' If they do not surrender by the time that you have given?'
'Then we will shoot a passenger, where they can see it, where they will understand.' He motioned to another to come forward in the queue. They were discussing the passengers as would a collective manager and the responsible person from the abattoir. Rebecca sat up, reaching forward so that her fingers were on David's hand.
'And if we shoot one and they still do not surrender?'
'We shoot another. Isaac does not believe it will be easy. He has changed, our Isaac, has made himself of steel. He is the fighter. The last night we were in the hut I was angry, roused by him, because he thought that it was easy. He knows now what we face. A few days back, if you had asked me of
Isaac, I would have said he was not capable of this strength
'And you, David, where is your strength?'
'Perhaps it was never present, perhaps it was just a figment, something we created. Remember when we were in the woods, when we talked, when we planned. It is different here, Rebecca.
When we talked did you know it would end like this? Do you believe that I knew that it could end like this? Think, Rebecca, think and tell me if I knew the road that I was leading you on.'
'You told us that we must fight them…'
'Nothing but words, slogans, phrases. There was no reality there, nothing of the soldiers, the guns, or what has happened to Moses.'
'Why are you saying this to me now?'
'Because this is no time for deception. Past and gone, that moment. I talked us into coming here, Rebecca. I talked and you listened. You and Isaac and Moses, you all listened to me. That's why we are here.'
'And now that we are here, you will fight?'
He did not answer, as if the tiredness had come again, but just looked at her, as if she were new to him, and a stranger. Then the shrug and the smile, and pushing his fingers in his hair.
'Take your gun, arm it, and go to the back. Check that the seat belts are fastened, that the passengers not in the queue are strapped in.'
She walked forward, putting a swing in her hips that she told herself was the hallmark of command, face set, measured stride, pistol gripped. Find something to do, occupy yourself, make work and business, hasten the clock hands, that it might cut out the awfulness they had so casually discussed. Right to the back of the aircraft. Check the fastenings that Isaac had made last night and that held the trolley across the aisle, check them and re-check them, absorb time, use it and waste it, bury it and destroy it. What does a man or a woman…? Why think of a man, think of a woman, or a girl not yet an adult, not yet opened, penetrated, known… what does she do in the basement cells in the hours before they take her out and kneel her in the yard and place the policeman's pistol at the nape of her neck? Tortured, agonized, revolving mind, and how to occupy it, must find something that time shall be lost. Straps secure. Begin on the passengers.
Some still with their hands raised because the order was never rescinded. Others ignoring the dictum now that it was not demanded and sitting with their arms folded and fists clenched on their knees. Some seeking comfort from the gesture, some defiance, some just to hide the stains at their trousers and skirts, those for whom the snail-like pace of the toilet queue had been intolerable.
How few of them she knew, how few she would recognize if she walked past them on a pavement tomorrow. The American? Yes, she would remember him. The Italians? Perhaps, but not because of who they were, or what they stood for; only the ornaments, the cut of the clothes, the whispered conspiracy of their chatter. The schoolmasters and the headmaster? They would not fade because she had experience of such people. Would she know the pilot, sitting away to the front, never speaking since she had been ordered back from the flight deck, know her if they bumped into each other in the street at the bus halt, disputed the right to a purchase of stockings in the store, collided laden with bags at a street crossing? She did not know. Yet a choice must be made among them, that was what Isaac had told David, and he had not disagreed. Academic problem, should have taken it to the professor, perhaps he would have helped them, discussed it at a seminar. The tall one or the thin one, the fat one or the fidgeter, the foreigner or the… she pressed her lids tight shut, blocking the sight of the domed head rising above the seat rest. That was the one who had been chosen.
It was the American whose voice she heard.
'Not much going on out there, Miss, just tanks and soldiers. Not much action from the petrol tankers. Not like they're about to refuel you.'
Never had been able to stare him through, she thought, not from the first time, and not now.
Couldn't muster the scorn or the indifference, not from the time she'd first been aware of his presence, and the foreign brightness and ebullience of his garments. Handkerchief still at his head – not needed now, but worn proudly as a trophy, stain showing and somewhat awry, so that the wound it was supposed to hide was partly visible. Wife's hand at his arm, counselling caution, and ignored.
'Nearly a dozen hours since we touched down. They'd have filled you by now if they were going to. Don't you think so, Miss?'
A frosted, splintered-ice smile and even with the strangeness of the language and the difficulties she had in following his words She could touch the changing mood, the spirit of aggression and attack. 'They've screwed you, Miss, screwed you proper. I'll take a bet with you, and any money you have and give you odds if you know what that
