How to Betray Your Country by James Wolff (pocket ebook reader txt) 📗

“Bravo, bravo – so seductive!” He patted August on the shoulder, pulled away and beamed. “I can tell you are a good publisher. But it remains your book until the very end. You choose the title, you choose the cover. If it is an anthology you surround it with voices saying many different things. You write the introduction and – this is most important of all – you write the conclusion. Never mind the unreliable narrator, this is more a case of the unreliable editor.”

“If your chapter is good enough, the readers will recognize that. As your editor I’ll be able to guide you in the right direction. And bestsellers can do very well indeed. To give you an idea, we’d be willing —”

“Please, let me stop you there. It is late, I am old, and the music from the wedding is beginning to give me a headache.” He signalled to the barman that he wanted to pay for both of their drinks. “And I want to make my escape before you offer me an advance, Tom, and I have to say no, and then things become awkward between us.”

“There’s really no need to go. You might have misunderstood what I am proposing.”

“It is entirely possible. Metaphors are such a minefield, would you not agree?”

“Can I give you my card?” asked August. “I’d very much like to stay in touch.”

The professor smiled and said, “Even better, Tom, I will give you something, entirely free of charge, for your next anthology. I will tell you a story that you are free to edit as you wish and share with your colleagues.

“Do you remember I told you that I come from a small village in the West Bank? My great-great-grandfather was a lemon farmer, and he passed the land down to his son, who passed it down to my grandfather and then to my father. All of my childhood memories are of this place.

“A long time before I was born, my grandfather was shot dead among his lemon trees. The man who shot him was an English soldier searching for a boy who had thrown stones at a jeep. It was an accident, really. The soldier was running across the uneven ground in the darkness and his rifle was not secure. He tripped and fell over and somehow he fired his weapon. My grandfather was helping him chase the boy because he admired the British very much and because boys who throw stones at jeeps are the same boys who steal lemons. When he saw what had happened, the English soldier threw his rifle away – this is what he was punished for later on, not for shooting an innocent man – and ran to my grandfather to try to stop the bleeding. After the funeral this soldier came to see my grandmother every week. He was heartbroken. She would shout at him and chase him from our land with a stick but still he came back the next week. Sometimes he would bring chocolate or cigarettes and leave them at the gate. It caused him many problems, this behaviour of his. He wasn’t promoted, he didn’t want to carry his gun, his colleagues didn’t trust him. I think he was sent home early. My grandmother received a letter from him in July 1949. By this time he was married with a small baby and working as a gardener and teaching himself Arabic in the village library every Saturday.

“Now what was a man like this – kind, gentle, thoughtful – doing in a foreign country he did not understand, chasing a boy across uneven ground in the darkness with a rifle in his hands? What was he doing there? Do you have an answer, Tom? Why does a good man find himself doing such bad things when he puts on his country’s uniform? I do not know the answer to this. I do not know if the soldier ever found out the answer to this. I can only tell you what I think, which is that I never had the opportunity to meet my grandfather, and this makes me very sad, because from everything I heard he was a kind and honourable man.”

He put his magazine back in his jacket pocket.

“I have enjoyed having a drink with you, Tom,” he said. “My only advice, as an old man to a young man, is that you should think carefully before putting on your country’s uniform.”

He checked that he had his room key, patted August twice on the shoulder, and walked out of the bar.

Over the long night that followed, during which everything bled together – August chasing Martha through a moonlit lemon grove, her stone-filled pockets rattling like a convict’s chains – the idea came to him with the full force of nocturnal logic that somehow she was the only alternative to a life lived in uniform. He hadn’t even been conscious of wearing one before that point. In his first days in the job everything had been so overwhelming that he hadn’t noticed the scratching and chafing of new cloth, and now he was startled to discover that in places his skin had already grown so tough that it was hard to distinguish it from the uniform. Things that would have horrified him once now seemed commonplace. He floundered on the life raft of his vast hotel bed. It was all her fault. She had thrown a stone and shattered his windscreen. She had made him drive into a ditch.

He saw her again exactly one week later, back in London. It hadn’t been difficult to find her office. After an hour he was on his second newspaper and his third cup of tea. His hair was neatly combed and he was wearing a dark-blue suit and his favourite red knitted tie. He used the time to work out the answers to the crossword but didn’t fill them in, and he imagined scenes