Shake Off (21 page)

I
was surprised at where you could fly to from Glasgow. Flights left every couple of hours to London. There were flights to Paris, to Athens, to Rome. I could go to Paris, get new documents from my painter-forger woman, then go back to London. But then I remembered that I couldn’t go to Paris as I no longer had my Swiss passport and I’d need a visa. I daydreamed about other destinations on the flight board that I could go to with Helen, all of them inaccessible to me. My options were limited.

I bought two one-way tickets to Heathrow from a Britannia Airways counter, and left one there for Helen to pick up. The flight left in forty minutes and I wanted to leave ringing her until it was called, so I wandered around, bought a
Glasgow Herald
and some Sellotape, all the while struggling with the longing to go back to Helen. In a toilet cubicle I taped what money I had left into the middle section of the newspaper, then folded it in three. With any luck it would be the last time I’d have to carry money or documents like this. I put the newspaper in my bag and took the worn envelope out of my jacket pocket and held it up, shook it, felt it. Now was not the time to open it. Soon, but not now.

As soon as the first call for the London flight came I rang the phone box next to Helen. My heart was pumping extra hard. She picked up on the third ring.

“Michel?”

“Helen, I’ve booked—”

“Michel, he’s here. The man from the beach, I’ve seen him.”

“Has he seen you?”

“No, I don’t think so. He came through the entrance with a couple of other men and they went straight up to departures.”

“You did well to spot them,” I said. They’re close, I thought, but didn’t look around. I gave Helen the flight number and told her where I’d left her ticket. “I’ll watch you go through passport control and make sure you’re OK.” She didn’t say anything. I could hear the second call for the flight being announced where Helen was as well as around me. It was a strange sensation, as if there was a parallel world on the other side of the line, but I attributed it to codeine withdrawal symptoms.

“Helen?”

“You’re not coming with me, are you,
ma belle?
” Her voice was flat. She was right, although I had at least hoped to tell her face to face. Now that they were in the airport I couldn’t risk it. “Don’t do this to me, Michel. Don’t be another man who fucks off. Don’t do it.”

I shook my head until I remembered that she couldn’t see me.

“I’m putting you in danger, I can’t stay here, can’t even be seen with you.” I looked out of the kiosk but couldn’t see them.

“Don’t pretend this is about me, that you’re so fucking noble.” Her sobs came down the phone. It had the odd effect of making me feel strong. I needed to be stronger than she was; we couldn’t both fall apart at the same time. I pushed another coin into the slot and waited for her to speak. She blew her nose.

“Where will you go?” she asked.

“I don’t know. I just know I can’t stay in England anymore.” I sounded cold and distant, even to myself. I heard her sniff and blow her nose again.

“You bastard,” she said, less strangled, and I could visualize her face setting into its hard mask. “I knew it when I saw you walk off with your case. All that fucking crap about needing two cases—you planned this all along.”

The truth was I hadn’t, not consciously anyway, but I didn’t say anything.

“I’ll get in touch with you when I’ve sorted myself out,” I said. “I just need to sort all this out.” I waved my hand as if to capture what “all this” was.

“You’ll get in touch with me? Jesus, you sound like I’ve just fucking auditioned and you have to consider whether I was any good.”

“That’s not what I meant,” I said. A pause, then her voice came over clear and strong.

“OK, listen Michel. Get yourself sorted out. Deal with what happened with your family—I don’t know, maybe you should have a memorial service or something, get a tombstone erected, get it out of your system.” She stopped and let out a long sigh. Her voice softened. “Grieve for them properly.” I looked down at my shoes, brand new this morning, to go with my suit; your shoes should always match your clothes. The shoes had little perforations in the top; I had no idea what they were for. I had a strange awareness of myself, as if I were someone else waiting to use the phone, looking in, and I hated what I saw: my shoes, my suit, even my face.

“Are you still there, Michel?” she asked, exasperated.

“Yes. Yes I am.”

“Have a good life,
ma belle
.” She slammed the phone down and I was left with a buzzing in my ear. I depressed and released the hook switch and, out of habit, dialed the speaking clock.

From a vantage point I watched Helen pick up her ticket from the Britannia Airways desk. I wanted to see her go through security so I’d know she was safe; I didn’t think they would concern themselves with her once we split up. If I was expecting her to look out for me, I was disappointed. Even at this distance I could see her face was expressionless and her movements mechanical, as if sedated. It didn’t look like anyone was watching her, which was the key thing, the thing I focused on. She walked through the barrier and glanced back once, but she didn’t see me. Then she was gone. Her disappearance from view caused a constriction in my chest and a burning in my eyes.

I didn’t have much time. At a British Airways counter I consulted on flights. After a discussion with the man behind the desk, I paid cash for a one-way ticket, traveling with British Airways to Athens, then, after a couple of hours’ transit, with Olympic Airlines to Beirut. I had an hour before the flight. I looked for the busiest and most public coffee shop and sat down at a small table in the middle.

I took the envelope from inside my jacket and put it on the table. I sipped my coffee. I slit the frayed envelope open at the top with a teaspoon, taking my time. A clammy hand clutched mine. By my side stood the slopey-shouldered man, breathing hard. He sat down opposite, keeping his hand on mine and his grey-blue eyes locked on me. He had two scabbing contusions on his forehead where I’d hit him last night and his pale freckled skin was glossy with sweat. His eyes flicked to the envelope.

“Maybe you’ll regret doing that,” he said. “Although I’m surprised you haven’t already looked.” He sounded well spoken, with a careful enunciation, but with a slight accent, maybe Dutch. I was aware of someone else at my shoulder; I looked round to see a muscular man with a crew cut, his right hand inside his cagoule. A smaller guy, obviously a graduate of the same training school, stood behind him at the entrance to the coffee shop; he could have been the guy who’d spoken to Helen on the beach. These men were not the people who had followed me to Foyles. Sure, they were on the same side, led by the man sitting opposite me, but following people was not their business. I figured they wouldn’t try anything with all these people around us. If they’d wanted to kill me, they would have done it at the house, where they’d missed their chance. I looked at the man opposite, noticing that some of the freckles were actually midge bites.

“I want to see what all the trouble was about,” I said.

He studied my face and made a decision. “OK, you have a right to see it, even if you can’t keep it.” He slowly removed his hand and glanced at the man at my shoulder, who sat down beside me, dragging his chair up against mine.

From the envelope I pulled out three or four pages folded in three. I straightened them out on the table. The first was in
Hebrew
. A smiling headshot of a young Abu Leila was in the top right-hand corner. It looked like a form of some kind, the spaces filled in by hand. I could at least read a date: 20/11/1945. A date of birth? I looked at the second sheet. Another photocopied form, but in color, and another date, this time December 1982. An older Abu Leila, looking intently at the camera, epaulettes on his shoulders. Epaulettes denoting a major. A major in the Israeli army. I went cold. Know your enemy, he’d said. A large blue diagonal stamp cut across the form, at the top of which was a crest with a menorah on either side with olive branches meeting at some Hebrew beneath. No, you can’t learn Hebrew, he’d said. I looked up at the pale-faced man who was smiling at me, but the smile wasn’t reflected in his eyes. I looked down at the third sheet: a picture of Abu Leila being pinned with a medal, just one other man in a suit present. I felt sick. I looked at the papers again, but they had blurred.

The pale-faced man snatched the sheets from my hand. Everything beyond the table became indistinct, the sounds muted. I tried to stand up but the big man gripped my forearm with iron fingers. The pale face said, “Where are you going, cockroach?”

“I’m going home,” I said.

“Home?”

“Beirut,” I said.

“OK, cockroach. We can find you there if we need to squash you.” I shook off the grip on my arm, picked up my bag and stood up. The flight to Athens was being called. I brushed past the smaller crew-cut at the café entrance and walked steadily to the departure gate without looking back.

T
he ragtag group of ten- to twelve-year-old students in my weekly French class would probably never have an opportunity to use the language, but I was motivated by the hope that at least one of them might find it helpful in breaking from the confines of the refugee camp that I had left over ten years ago.

One cold and damp November afternoon, a few days after the fall of the Berlin Wall, two weeks after Canada publicly asked Israel to explain the fraudulent use of its passports and three months after being back in Beirut, I left the UN-run school and went to the small grocery store nearby, where I bought tinned beans, cheese, eggs and tomatoes, and as I stepped back onto the muddy street a voice beside me said, “It’s not Harrods, for sure.” I turned to see Khalil, the thin balding man I’d met in Harrods. He was in a black coat worn at the elbows and carried an ancient Samsonite briefcase. The scar on his chin looked whiter than I remembered, or maybe the stubble was longer.

“It has everything I need,” I told him.

“Good to see you again, Michel.” He shook my hand firmly. “I would like to have that conversation about Abu Leila now.”

I shrugged, checking the street for his backup. The dark weather had cleared the boggy street of most people. He leaned in, smelling of fresh cigarette smoke. “You can be sure I’m alone. You have finished teaching for the afternoon, I think.”

It was a visit I had been waiting for, hoping for, even, although, since I was associated with Abu Leila, I was half-expecting there to be no conversation, just three or four shots to the head. I made a joke to that effect as we walked to my rented apartment. Khalil looked genuinely hurt at the suggestion.

“We are not animals,” he said.

My place was on the top floor of a seven-story building on the outskirts of the camp. It had a balcony big enough for one person to stand on. The rent was low because of the eagle-eye view of the camp where I worked. Sometimes I stood there early in the morning watching it come to life. Sometimes I stood there long before dawn.

Khalil looked out of the balcony door and said, “You can keep an eye on things from up here, for sure.”

I took his coat and he sat on my only armchair, coughing phlegm into a handkerchief and taking out some cigarettes and a gold lighter.

“What about Abu Leila?” I asked, thinking of him kneeling before me in Berlin, his glasses bloodied and shattered.

Khalil wiped his small mouth. “What about him?”

“You said that you weren’t animals. He was shot on the street like an animal.”

Khalil snorted. “Did you see what was in the envelope from the West Bank?”

I nodded. Why bother pretending otherwise?

“He was responsible for the death of at least five operatives in the Territories and the arrest and torture of many more. He gave away many secrets, the most damaging being political. Is that reason enough?” He coughed again into his handkerchief and I had no answer, just questions.

“How do you know what was in the envelope?” I asked.

He stopped coughing and raised his watering eyes to me, dabbing at them with his handkerchief in a disarmingly feminine manner.

“Because, my son, I put it there.”

Khalil paid three long visits to my small apartment, and on the first made it clear that he needed to know everything.

“Everything?” I asked, thinking of Helen and me making love in Tufnell Park and Scotland. He stopped looking for things in his open briefcase and looked at me over the lid instead.

“Let me tell you, Michel, that some were of the opinion that I should bring you to Damascus to have this discussion, let us say, under less pleasant circumstances, and keep you there until we were satisfied. I told them it would be counter-productive.” He cleared his throat. “I wasn’t wrong, was I?”

“I’ll answer any questions you have,” I reassured him. I just wouldn’t volunteer anything, I thought.

He stayed for hours at a time, and wrote down every detail in a black notebook. Every so often he would take out a grainy photograph from his battered case and show it to me. It would always be of Abu Leila with some individual or in a group, taken from a distance, and Khalil would want to know if I had ever seen the other people in Berlin. Recounting the complete pointlessness of my life, describing the empty shell that had been created by seeing the contents of the envelope, was unpleasant. Although I had gone through it all in my head since being back, often standing on my balcony in the dark, speaking it out loud made it real, brought the sham into keen relief. I was embarrassed in the telling of it, more than anything, like someone who has been the butt of a cruel practical joke.

At the end of his second visit Khalil said, “You were just a pawn in Abu Leila’s dangerous game of chess, Michel.”

What is it with professional liars and chess? I thought of Abu Leila’s first visit to the apartment not three kilometers from where we were sitting, and his chess analogy. I hated him now, of course, even though I wanted to believe that everything he had told me was still true.

It was only on the third and final visit that Khalil asked me about the envelope I had opened in Glasgow.

“Did Abu Leila look inside it? Before he was executed?” he asked. He was intent on my answer. I recalled our last meeting in the KaDeWe, our walk down the Ku’Damm—the envelope was still sealed and inside the newspaper when I had taken it from next to his lifeless body. Khalil was visibly disappointed at this information. I understood that Khalil had meant Abu Leila to see the contents before his execution, and for it to be found on his body—that was its purpose; a death sentence for him, and to let Mossad know that the PLO knew. But neither Mossad nor Khalil, for different reasons, wanted anyone else to know. It was a setback for Mossad, which thrived on appearing infallible, and embarrassing for the PLO, given Abu Leila’s seniority and length of service. All of which explained why Khalil had wanted the envelope back, and why the Israelis had come after it. “And how was he on that day?” Khalil was asking.

“What?”

“Abu Leila, how was his demeanor?”

“He wanted to go to the Kranzler Café. He’d just bought cigarettes at KaDeWe.” I didn’t tell him that he was about to discuss my future.

“I told him that smoking would kill him, for sure,” Khalil said, without a smile. Of course Khalil must have known that Abu Leila would be on the street, they must have been watching us in the KaDeWe. How stupid was I?

“What was his real name?” I asked.

He fiddled with his gold lighter. “Amir Serfati. He was a Moroccan Jew, what they call a Mizrahi. His parents emigrated to Israel in ’54.”

I rubbed my temples. I recalled the Moroccan novels he had given me, the Moroccan food he liked, his talk of Arab Jews being the original Jews.

Khalil smiled. “What? Did you think he was Palestinian?” He lit a cigarette and blew out smoke in a thin stream. “He was organizing the meeting in Cambridge to coax out those people interested in this silly idea of one state.”

“Coax them out?”

“Yes, to get rid of them. The plan was to hit the house in Cambridge. He wanted to deal us a deadly blow.”

I shook my head in disbelief. I said I couldn’t imagine the Israelis carrying out such an operation in the UK, and why on a group of people who were marginal in the PLO?

“You’re being obtuse, Michel. You were an important part of the plan, your involvement would have made it look like it was us that had arranged it. You found the place, organized security. Abu Leila would have made sure that information implicating you fell into the hands of British Intelligence, left a few clues to help them along, to make the right connections. Of course he didn’t know I was onto him.”

Abu Leila—I couldn’t think of him as Amir Serfati—always said the Israelis were good at dissembling. He would have known, since he was the father of all dissemblers. He’d said the meeting was contrary to the Old Man’s plans, so it would look like the Old Man had sanctioned the hit. If it was true, it was clever: get rid of the people who are a threat and blame it on their own, using me as the fall guy.

This had been my purpose all along, then, to be a conduit that would lead people to the wrong conclusion. I felt sick.

“But if I’d been arrested I would—”

Khalil cut me off with a laugh, but it wasn’t joyous. “Arrested? If you’d been alive to be arrested. You would have been linked to Abu Leila, which would have pointed to us. He would still be in place and sowing lies and division among us, you would have been branded a traitor.”

I rubbed my whole face, trying to wash it clean. I didn’t want to believe that Abu Leila would have allowed me to be sacrificed. Instead I asked, “So there were no Israeli delegates?”

“Yes, there were, that was the beauty of the plan, for sure.” Khalil grew animated. “Although the plan was to martyr the Palestinians—and I think you met some of the assassination team in Scotland—Abu Leila’s meeting would also have exposed the closet Israelis pursuing this one-state idiocy, even before they left Israel. They have no political future, of course, and have been charged with disloyalty to the state.”

He started coughing again and I went to stand at the balcony doors, looking down at the camp. I could tell roughly where my house used to be; it had been bulldozed flat in the second siege of ’88, but by referencing other parts of the camp, like the hospital, I knew where it had stood. Someone had built an unofficial memorial to those that had been killed in ’82 but I had yet to visit it. I turned to look at Khalil, who was gathering his things into his case.

“What of the Palestinians who were going to attend, what’s happened to them?”

Khalil snapped his case shut.

“They also have no political future. In a way Abu Leila did us a favor, exposing these people; what they were planning undermined the sanctioned contacts.”

“You mean the talks in Oslo?” I said, to shock him. It worked, for he sat up straight and frowned.

“What do you know about Oslo?”

“Abu Leila said they would fuck us at Oslo,” I said.

Khalil winced, picked up his cigarettes and lighter then stood, holding his Samsonite at his side.

“I think we’re finished, Michel.”

“Am I in the clear?”

“As far as I’m concerned you were in the clear when I saw you in Harrods. I can’t speak for the Jews, of course. I suppose we’re both relying on your silence and discretion.” He cocked his head and raised his eyebrows to indicate that it was a question, not just a statement.

“Even if I had any evidence, who would I tell? And who would believe it if I did?” I asked.

He smiled thinly. “No one,” he said.