Warlight(52)

Our building housed a central map room where giant charts floated loosely in midair, so that they could be pulled down on a roller and gathered like landscapes into your arms. I would go there every day to eat a solitary lunch, sitting on the floor, the banners barely moving above me in that nearly windless room. For some reason I was at ease there. Perhaps it was the memory of those distant lunches with Mr. Nkoma and the others, as we waited to receive his casually illicit stories. I went there with the drawing after having it copied onto a transparency and began projecting the slide onto various maps. It took two full days before I found its exact match, on a map whose altitude lines fitted neatly against my original drawing. What I now had, by linking the chalk hill drawing to its reality on a large, specifically named map, was a precise location. Which was where I now knew my mother had once briefly been based with a small unit sent in, as the report had stated, to loosen the linch-pins of a post-war guerrilla group. Where one of them was killed and two of them were captured.

The hand-drawn map suggested intimacy, and I was curious to discover whose intimacy it was, since the drawing, at one time useful, had been saved in a favourite Balzac paperback. My mother had thrown nearly everything else away from that period when they were all doing god knows what, destroying the linch-pins. In our warren we had often come upon cases where the survivors of political violence had taken up the burden of vengeance, sometimes into the next generations. “How old were they?” I half remember my mother asking Arthur McCash the night of our kidnapping.

“People behave disgracefully sometimes,” my mother had once said to me, when I and three boys in the Fifth Form were temporarily suspended from school for stealing books from Foyles bookshop on Charing Cross Road. Now, these many years later, reading fragments of what clearly were silent political killings committed in other countries, I was appalled not only by my mother’s activities, but that she had put my theft in a similar category. She’d been shocked at the stealing of books. “People behave disgracefully!” A mockery of herself perhaps along with her judgement of me.

“What did you do that was so terrible?”

“My sins are various.”





One afternoon a man knocked on my cubicle wall. “You speak Italian, don’t you? Your file says so.” I nodded. “Come with me. The bilingual in Italian is ill today.”

I followed him up a flight of stairs to a section occupied by those fluent in languages, aware that whatever the job was his status was higher than mine.

We entered a windowless room and he handed me a heavy set of earphones. “Who is it?” I asked.

“Doesn’t matter, just translate.” He switched on the machine.

I listened to the Italian voice, at first forgetting to translate, until he waved his arms. It was a recording of an interrogation, a woman doing the questioning. The audio wasn’t good—it seemed to have been done in something cave-like, full of echoes. Also, the man being questioned was not Italian and wasn’t being helpful. The recording kept being turned off then switched on again, so there were gaps of time. The interrogation was clearly at an early stage. I had read and heard enough of these now to know they would knock the ground out from under the man later on. For now he was protecting himself by seeming uninterested. His answers wandered. He went on about cricket, complained about some inaccuracies in Wisden. They got him off the topic by asking him bluntly about a massacre of civilians near Trieste and about the English involvement with Tito’s Partisans.

I leaned forward, stopped the machine, and turned to the man beside me. “Who is this? It would help to have a context.”

“You don’t need that—just tell me what the Englishman is saying. He works with us, we need to know if anything important was revealed.”

“When is…?”

“Early forty-six. The war is officially over, but…”

“Where is it happening?”

“It’s a recording we captured after the war, from one of the remnants of Mussolini’s puppet government—Mussolini already strung up but some of his followers still around. It was found in an area outside Naples.”

He signalled me to put on the headphones and started the tape again.

Gradually, after several time jumps in the tape, the Englishman began talking—but about women he’d met here and there, details about the bars they went to, what kind of clothes they wore. And if they had spent the night together. He was easy with the information, offering data that was obviously unimportant: the hour a train got into London, et cetera, et cetera. I turned the machine off.

“What’s wrong?” my colleague asked.

“It’s useless information,” I said. “He’s just talking about his affairs. If he’s a political prisoner he hasn’t revealed anything political. Only what he specifically likes about women. He doesn’t seem to like crudeness.”

“Who does. He’s being clever. He’s one of our best. This is stuff that interests only a wife or husband.” He turned the tape back on.

Then the Englishman was talking about a parrot that had been found in the Far East, which had lived for decades with a tribe that was now extinct, its whole vocabulary lost. But a zoo had the parrot and it turned out the creature still knew the language. So the man and a linguist were attempting to re-create the language from that one bird. The man was obviously tiring but kept talking, almost as if this way he could delay specific questions. He had been useless to the interrogators so far. The woman was clearly looking for someone, identifications, place-names they could link to a map, a town, a killing, the failure of an expected victory. But then he spoke about one woman’s “air of solitude,” and in another pointless aside, about a pattern of birthmarks on her upper arm and neck. And suddenly I realized this was something I had seen as a child. And had slept against.