Shake Off

by Mischa Hiller

  My next job was to change the $75,000 into shekels. This meant I had to pick up the money from Tufnell Park and take it to a money changer in Notting Hill. It was run like any other bureau de change, except it was owned by an Armenian who laundered money. You gave him large amounts of cash and he split it up into small transactions, redistributing it through the banks, all for a hefty percentage, of course. I had to leave the money with him in a plastic bag and go and wait in a café for a couple of hours while he sorted it out. When I picked the bag up it was a lot heavier than when I had left it, a testament to the poor value of the shekel compared to the dollar. I disliked hanging around there; I suspected that, like Lemi, he was involved in the drugs business and would possibly be of interest to the police.

  Six

  Esma avoided me for several days after the incident on my bed, and had stopped coming into my room to flick her duster. This had made bedtime even more of an ordeal for me, and I reverted to rocking my head again. But one night I heard my door open and, fearing it was my foster aunt or uncle coming to tell me off, I turned my face to the mattress, pressed my pillow hard over my head and pretended to be asleep. But I could smell Esma, a soapy medicinal smell. Her hair was on my back before her hands and lips, and she muttered something in Kurdish that included my name. I turned over and she wiped my wet cheeks, sliding under the cover with me. We explored each other in the dark until we were breathing fast and shallow. Then we lay face to face, our noses touching, and used our hands on each other until hers were sticky and mine were wet. We lay together for a bit, catching our breath. In a fit of whispered giggling we searched for her underwear in the tangle of sheets—then she was gone. The next morning she’d stripped my bed and washed my sheets, and had to do it again for three days running. On the fourth day, a Friday, I trudged back from school in the afternoon to find she had gone to her village, as she did every weekend. I spent an interminable three nights and two days waiting for the moment when I could race back from school on Monday, but she wasn’t at home, and when I enquired about her I was told she wasn’t returning. I hadn’t dared ask why in case they’d become aware of our nightly trysts. The next day Esma was replaced by an old woman who smelled of homemade yoghurt rather than soap and I went back to rocking my head.

  Abu Leila continued to visit me intermittently in Beirut, always talking with my aunt and uncle before spending time alone with me. We would sometimes walk on the American University campus opposite the International School, and Abu Leila would explain the Palestinian struggle for self-​determination, how it needed to be fought on many fronts and on different levels. Sometimes Abu Leila would talk as if I wasn’t there, speaking of internal politics and machinations that I didn’t understand, mentioning people that I didn’t know. He always talked of the Palestinians in the third person, as if they were a people he didn’t belong to. Then he would catch himself and tell me to focus on my studies, tell me that my language skills were second to none, that I was destined for important things.

  So I studied a lot of books given to me by Abu Leila, right up until I left for Cyprus. Sometimes Abu Leila had to explain them to me, as many of the books were in French and English (they weren’t available in Arabic) and at that time I was still struggling a bit with them.

  “You need to know your enemy,” he’d told me, giving me history books and pamphlets. I read how Zionists believed in the inalienable right of Jews to Palestine, and how it emerged from the belief that creating a Jewish state was the answer to anti-Semitism. So I read about anti-Semitism, and began to understand the relentless nature of it through the ages, from Tsarist Russia onwards. Then I came to the Holocaust, the seemingly natural culmination of all this centuries-old hatred expressed in a whole industry of death. My only knowledge of the Holocaust until then was my father’s mention of Hitler, when, aged nine, I had asked him why he and Mama had left Palestine.

  “Hitler is to blame,” was all my father had said, in that infuriating way he had of trying to explain things in one sentence. I knew all about the Jews coming to Palestine, every Palestinian did; they’d been coming for years before the diaspora. But nobody had properly explained to me the reason why the Jews had come, apart from that their religion told them to. I’d never contemplated the reasons—it didn’t seem to matter—until Abu Leila explained it to me.

  Some years later, during the 1982 siege of Beirut by Israel, and several weeks before the day of the killings, we’d been sheltering in a hospital bunker as Israeli F16s dropped bombs when my father decided to angrily expand on his original comment.

  “If Hitler had finished what he’d started we wouldn’t be cowering here being shelled by these people.” I hadn’t understood what he’d meant at the time, and two months later my father was dead so I couldn’t ask him. It was only after listening to Abu Leila and reading the books he’d given me that I understood, and was ashamed of the sentiments my father had expressed. When I’d related my father’s comments to Abu Leila, he said my father was an ignorant and uneducated man trying to make sense of a helpless situation in which he couldn’t protect his family from the phosphorous and cluster bombs.

  “What is true is that Palestinians are paying the price for the Holocaust,” he said, “a uniquely European crime that they are taking a beating for. But it is the Europeans and Russians who are responsible for the persecution that preceded it—it goes back a long way.” So I learned that those bombs were dropped by the direct descendants of people who’d been forced to live in camps such as the one I was living in at the time, although they were then called ghettos. I learned that the same people who called Palestinians “two-legged animals” were the descendants of people who had suffered endless jibes and dehumanization. I found it difficult to reconcile these two things. In my reading about the Holocaust I discovered that the Nazis, having invaded Poland, used sympathetic Ukrainians, who hated the Poles, to “cleanse” the villages and ghettos of Jews for them and to work in the concentration camps. These were tasks they took on with relish and imaginative cruelty. I thought of the fascist Phalangists in Beirut, let into Sabra camp by the Israelis, who sealed it to stop anyone escaping. When I pointed this out to Abu Leila he told me that I had described what was called an “irony” in English, and that people inevitably repeated history, changing its presentation to suit the present.

  “It’s like a child who is beaten by his parents. If he grows up to be a parent himself he will probably also beat his children,” he said.

  “How does it stop then?” I asked, thinking of us, sooner or later, with our own country oppressing someone less fortunate—maybe Kurds like Esma, maybe the Bedouin; no state liked a roaming people after all.

  “Self-awareness,” was Abu Leila’s response. “You have to be constantly vigilant of your own behavior and make sure the price you pay for self-preservation does not come at someone else’s expense.”

  Abu Leila also gave me the poetry of Palestinian Mahmoud Darwish, the writings of the Lebanese mystic Kahlil Gibran, the love poetry of the Syrian poet Nizar Qabbani, the plays of Egyptian Naguib Mahfouz, and the novels of Abdul-Rahman Munif, whose books are banned in his native Saudi Arabia. But he saved his real admiration for Moroccan writers like Tahar Ben Jelloun, who wrote in French.

  “This is to build an appreciation of your own literary culture,” he’d said. But I had to leave all the poetry and books behind when I went to Cyprus, apart from Gibran, because he was consistent with my cover of being a Lebanese student. That was when I handed over my refugee card, as Abu Leila had refused to let me take anything that gave a clue to my heritage or past in Beirut. Given what Abu Leila had told me about the importance of remaining connected to the past, I understood that this also was an “irony,” but said nothing.

  Seven

  A couple of days later, after a morning of attending lectures at SOAS, I picked up Lemi the Turk’s modified case from Victoria Station and took it back to Tufnell Park. I had filled a shelf in my bedsit with some of the books I had
n’t been allowed to take to Cyprus from Beirut, and widened my interest along the way. As a concession to Abu Leila, the poetry books were bilingual, and some of the novels were translations to “help” with my English. I laboriously removed the panel from the bath and took the shekels and the sealed envelope from the bulging zip-lock case. Back in my room, I removed the lining from the case as instructed by the Turk. I layered the money and the envelope into the false bottom of the case and had to pad it with newspaper to prevent the money from sliding around and to make it as uniform as possible. With the money inside and the bottom back in place, I checked it to make sure it looked and felt OK. I put the case in my wardrobe and heated up a can of minestrone soup on my single gas ring.

  I’d finished my soup and was washing the bowl in the tiny sink when I heard shouting in the hall: a woman’s voice. Then a door slammed hard enough for my own door to rattle in its frame. I carried on washing up; these were just the noises of communal living.

  I opened my door to go to the bathroom and was surprised to see the young woman from next door sitting on the bottom step of the stairs, smoking a cigarette. She looked just as startled to see me.

  “I’m sorry, I didn’t realize you were in,” she said. “I wouldn’t have slammed the door.”

  I shrugged to indicate that it was nothing. She was dark-haired but very English—if I was asked to point out a typically English girl to someone she would be that girl, even though she wasn’t particularly fair-skinned. Her hair was wavy and just reached her shoulders, and I’d studied enough women to be able to tell that it had been expensively cut. She pushed it behind her ears to keep it from her face.

  “Are you all right?” I asked. I could hear a man sobbing in her room, and wondered what sort of woman could make a man cry. She rolled her dark eyes and pointed her cigarette towards the door.

  “I’m fine, just having a little man trouble,” she said. She was not a real smoker; she held the cigarette awkwardly, like she didn’t know what to do with it in between puffs. And when she did put it in her mouth it was held gently between her lips as if she was afraid to damage it by clamping too hard. She was probably smoking because it was what people do in times of stress, a physical indication of it. I have never smoked, and avoided going with women who did because of the smell and taste. I stood awkwardly, not wanting to go to the bathroom knowing that she was sitting just outside and not wanting to go back into my room because it would look like I’d come out to see what the noise was. She, on the other hand, looked completely at ease on the stairs, leaning back, her elbows on the steps behind her, lifting one arm to puff on her cigarette. She was barefoot, dressed in jeans and a white T-shirt. When she leaned back on the stairs I could see that she had no breasts to speak of. She wore a chunky man’s watch with a stainless-steel strap that slid up and down her arm when she lifted her hand.

  “You could wait in my room,” I said, and as soon as the words left my mouth I wanted to take them back. She looked at me briefly then stood up, pushing her rucked jeans down her long legs. She was tall, even in her bare feet, though not as tall as me.

  “OK, just for a minute,” she said. Back in my room I went to clear the only chair but she sat on my narrow bed before I’d finished, her back against the wall, crossing her long legs. She flexed a narrow bare foot and I wanted to reach out and touch it, to run a finger along the arch. She scrunched up her face at the cigarette and offered it to me. I took it, running it under the tap and putting it in the bin before filling the kettle, having offered to make tea. I’d left the door ajar as a gesture of my honorable intentions, but wasn’t sure she noticed or even cared—she was looking around my room with interest.

  “I’ve never been in any of the other rooms in this house,” she said.

  “Is he your boyfriend?” I asked, pointing to the wall that adjoined her room. She was studying the books on the shelf over my bed.

  “Not really. I think he likes to pretend he is.” She reached for a book. “I see you like Kahlil Gibran.”

  “Yes, I do.” How stupid I sounded. I poured boiling water onto tea leaves in my small teapot.

  “He’s married though. He sometimes forgets that when he drinks,” she said. She looked at me to gauge my reaction. It took me a second to realize she wasn’t talking about Gibran. I gave no response, because I wasn’t sure whether she was looking for approval or trying to shock me. I poured the tea and sat on the chair at the bottom of the bed, wondering what kind of a man drank at lunchtime and cried over a woman. I passed her a mug and watched her fold her legs underneath her so she was sitting on her bare feet. She looked comfortable and relaxed, considering that a man was sniveling in her room while she was sitting on another man’s bed. I liked that she wasn’t embarrassed. I didn’t know what to say, so I drank my tea.

  “Do you think men are weaker than women?” she asked, pushing her hair from her face and tucking it behind her ears—a wasted effort as it fell back immediately.

  “That’s not a fair question when you have a man crying in your room.”

  She laughed, and it was an artless, instinctive, surprisingly masculine sound that I wanted to hear again. I began to feel more relaxed about her being in my room.

  “I suppose I should go and see whether he’s OK.” She unfolded her legs and got off the bed.

  I stood up. “I’m Michel, by the way.”

  She stood at the door and pushed her hair back again. She was only half a head shorter than me.

  “As in ‘Michelle, ma belle,’ like in the song?” She smiled and offered me her hand to shake. I saw a playfulness in her eyes, an arching of her eyebrows. I shook my head, not knowing what song she meant, just that ma belle was wrong for the masculine. Her hand was cool and soft, and, unusually for a woman, her grip was firm. “I’m Helen, Michel. Thanks for the tea and the use of your room as a refuge.” I smiled and started to close the door behind her but she pushed it back open, sticking her head close to my ear. I was drawn to a small mole or piercing on her left earlobe and I could smell the shampoo on her shiny hair. “I’ll try to keep the noise down,” she said in a low voice. Then she was gone.

  I washed her cup. She was the first person to have been in my room other than the landlord, who emptied the electricity meter of coins when he picked up the rent.

  Eight

  The next morning I sat in a coffee shop in the outpatients department of University College Hospital near Euston Square station. It looked out over the entrance and I could see everyone who came and went. Before coming to the hospital I’d taken the case by taxi to Euston Station and deposited it in left luggage. A jaundiced man in pajamas and a hospital gown sat at the next table. He had a needle in his forearm which was connected to a drip hanging from a wheeled stand. I didn’t understand why they let sick people wander around like that. I drank what passed for coffee in England and watched the elderly and the infirm walk the corridor past the coffee shop. I couldn’t wait to get my business done so I could leave. My eyes tracked an olive-skinned man in glasses and a white coat as he came out of the lift and passed me by. He left through the main exit. I’d rung him last night, pretending to be his cousin. During our conversation I had mentioned another imaginary cousin working in the Gulf, which was the signal to meet in this location. We had several “relatives,” each designating a different place to meet. I finished my watery coffee and watched people come and go before getting up to follow him.

  On a side street around the corner from the entrance to the outpatients department was a service area with unmarked double doors that led into the bowels of the hospital. Inside and down some steps was a long corridor with hissing pipes running the length of the ceiling. The walls and floor were unpainted concrete. Ramzi, the doctor I had followed in, was waiting just inside the door. We shook hands and I looked around. Cleaners, delivery people and the lower strata of hospital staff were walking by. They were mostly black or Asian and took no interest in us. I noted that Ramzi had grown sideburns since we’d last
met; it was fashionable among certain men at the time. Ramzi was a fellow Palestinian, although he was born to a Christian family near Jerusalem on the West Bank, not in a Lebanese refugee camp. He was going to visit the Occupied Territories in a couple of days, traveling via Jordan.

  “So, are you all set?” I asked in English.

  “How many more of these trips do I need to do?” Ramzi asked in careful English, accentuating the “e” at the end of “these.” I switched to Arabic for the benefit of passersby.

  “I’m not sure what you mean,” I said. Ramzi had couriered stuff back and forth to the Occupied Territories for a couple of years without much complaint. He used to stop over in Germany before I came to the UK, and his trips were financed by money I gave him.

  “I mean I have a wife and she wants to start a family.” Ramzi had told me about his new wife the last time we’d met. She was a Palestinian from Nablus who worked as a lab technician in this very hospital, where Ramzi was a senior house officer. From what I could gather, Abu Leila had paid indirectly for Ramzi’s medical training, although you wouldn’t think it the way he was talking now. On his last but one trip to the West Bank six months ago Ramzi had taken this woman with him, along with another adapted suitcase. They’d come back married. Abu Leila had been angry at this development, mainly because he’d not been forewarned. He worried that Ramzi would develop new priorities and told me we would have to cultivate another courier. It looked like he might be right.