State of Siege

When they had gone, I got a flashlight out of my suitcase and examined the pistol. It had a full magazine in it and there was a round in the breech. Rosalie watched intently, and when I had unloaded it to make sure that I knew how it worked, she asked if she might handle it.

The possession of the pistol obviously pleased her a great deal more than it pleased me. I remembered how, when I had wakened her the first night, thinking that there were thieves getting into the apartment, her first thought had been to ask if I had a revolver.

When I had shown her how to load and fire it and had explained the safety catch, I thought that I had better try to modify her enthusiasm for the thing.

“Pistols are not really very much use except for frightening people,” I said.

“Colonel Roda would not agree with you.”

“The General was six feet away and Roda wasn’t expecting it. I’ve seen people miss a target in broad daylight with a pistol at that range.”

“But if anyone attacks us, we can kill him.”

“The fact that you have a pistol can be more dangerous than being unarmed. A soldier might not kill an unarmed civilian, but if he sees someone facing him with a gun in his hand, he may shoot rather than take a chance.”

“I think it is better to have it.”

“As long as we don’t have to use it, it’s fine.”

“You had a revolver.”

“There was a time up in Tangga when there were a lot of snakes about, and sometimes they got into our rooms. So I had a revolver. But the only time I tried to use it I missed, and after that I kept a shot-gun. I left that behind.”

“Then the pistol is no good?” She sounded bitterly disappointed.

“It’s an excellent pistol, and, as you say, it’s better to have it than not. But what we need at this moment is somewhere to go when the fighting starts.”

“When it starts? What is all that going on over there?”

There was, indeed, a fierce machine-gun and mortar battle going on around the College of Agriculture on the far side of the square. Some of Sanusi’s troops had dug themselves in in the College grounds, and now the Government infantry were having to ferret them out.

“When it starts here, I mean. It’s not going to be easy for them to take this building. They’ll have to do it floor by floor. I don’t want to be here when they start throwing grenades about.”

“But where is there to go?”

“The roof would be safer. It’s not so enclosed. I want to try and find the way up there. Will you come with me or would you sooner stay here?”

“I will come with you.”

I hung the pistol by its trigger guard on a nail at the back of the cupboard, and we went out on to the terrace.

A car outside the big building at the end of the Telegraf Road was on fire, and the immobilised tank was using armour-piercing shot to break up a sandbagged defence position in one of the corner shops. The smoke and the glare and the noise made it all seem like a sequence from a somewhat improbable war film. The glare, however, was useful.

We went along the terrace past the bathhouse to the barrier wall which had been dislocated by the shell burst. There was a gap between the wall and the balustrade, and it was not too difficult to squeeze through. Beyond it we had to walk carefully. This terrace did not broaden out as Jebb’s did, and the rubble was piled up against the balustrade. Farther along, where the balustrade had broken away and fallen down into the roadway, it was impassable; but by going through what should have been the bed and living rooms, it was possible to get round on to the terrace again beyond the obstruction. No more barrier walls had yet been erected, and from there on it was easy. I knew that somewhere on that floor there must be a stairway up to the roof. What I had wanted to find was a way of getting to it without being seen or having to pass the sentry stationed outside the apartment. By going along the terraces of the unfinished apartments for most of the way, it was possible to reach the stairway without using any of the passage visible to the sentry.

The roof was quite flat with an eighteen-inch parapet running round it. At intervals along the parapet concrete blocks had been let in to hold the guy wires for the radio masts. There were the usual water tanks and ventilating shafts.

The sounds of the battle for the College of Agriculture had died down, and we had just started to walk over to the parapet, when there was a bright flash from somewhere way across the square, a stab of pain in my ears and the whole building jumped as if it had been dynamited. For one absurd instant, I even thought that it had. Then there was another flash, and the same thing happened again. General Ishak had brought his guns into action.