Shake Off

by Mischa Hiller

  “You’ll protect me from the nasty man, won’t you, Michel?” she said in a mock girlish voice, huddling against my arm. I supposed she was making fun of me, perhaps it was the wine. But I knew that if it came to it I would protect her, and she probably knew that too.

  Back in Tufnell Park we sat in her room, me in her armchair and her cross-legged on the bed. I drank proper coffee from a fragile china cup with an elephant on it and worried that I might break it. She had insisted on putting on some “gentler” jazz, and it sounded more bearable than what we had listened to earlier, soothing even. A bedside lamp covered by a silk scarf gave the room a reddish glow. I thought about whether we would sleep together, whether the time was right. I thought about it only because I cared what would happen the following day, and the day after that. Helen closed her eyes and sat with her back against the wall. I watched her neck and the line of her jaw. I thought of Fadia alone, and of Ramzi in prison, but tried to distract myself by concentrating on Helen’s face—her long lashes curling up from her closed eyes. She was behaving as if I wasn’t there, not in a bad way, just as if she was comfortable in my presence.

  “My bed is on the other side of that wall,” I said.

  She opened her eyes, but only slightly. “I know,” she said, her voice soft. “I’ve imagined you lying there, just six inches away.”

  We looked at each other and she patted the bed. I went to sit on it and she ran her fingers up and down my forearm.

  “I love your arms,” she said. “It’s like you have cables running under the skin.” I undid her buttons with my free hand and opened the shirt. As I suspected, she wore no brassiere, but then she hardly needed it. “Do you think I’m too small, Michel?”

  “I think you are just right,” I said, moving my fingers gently over her chest. She smiled and started to remove her shirt.

  “You too,” she ordered. So I took off my shirt.

  Afterwards, we lay side by side on her bed, and I wondered how she slept on it with her Greek lover Zorba, or whatever his name was, who was twice my size. She was asleep, breathing easily. I felt good, peaceful. I had been with maybe fifteen women before Helen. With the exception of Esma (who didn’t count), and perhaps Antanasia in Berlin, sleeping with women had always been an insular experience, one where we were both doing our own thing, stuck in our own individual bubbles of gratification. With Helen I understood what had been missing: there’d been no overlap, no intersection. With Helen there was overlap, my experience was tied to hers, I wanted her to feel good. I told her how good it felt while we were doing it and she told me how good it felt and it fired us up even more. I looked down at her, a sheen of sweat still showing between her breasts. Like strawberries, her nipples were. Her neck had gone red, the redness spreading like a rash from her throat down her chest. I wondered whether she knew it happened, whether someone else had told her. I slipped gently off the bed, picked up the key to my room and tiptoed to the door. I put her door on the latch and checked that she was still asleep. I went onto the landing, still naked, half-expecting to see Zorba, even at this late hour. In my room I took an open packet of codeine from the dresser next to the bed and popped three tablets, putting one back. I downed the tablets with water and went back into her room. She stirred as I got into bed.

  “Where were you, ma belle?”

  I smiled at the endearment, but it wasn’t the time to correct her grammar. “Bathroom,” I said.

  “I was afraid you’d gone.” She put her head on my chest and was soon asleep again. I lay awake for a while, matching my breathing with hers.

  Nineteen

  I woke in Helen’s bed but Helen was gone. The only trace of her was several dark hairs on her pillow. There was a note propped up on the bedside table.

  “Gone to UCL,” it said. “Last night great, let’s do it again! See you tonight?”

  I had a look around her room. I wasn’t looking for anything in particular, just curious. Of course it crossed my mind that Helen might be more than she presented—after all, she had arrived in the house after I had. Although, if she was suspect, looking around her room would provide no clues; if she had anything to hide she wouldn’t leave a trace of it here, just as I left no trace of my real activities in my room. She had the luxury of a small desk, which I examined without disturbing anything. I didn’t want to open any drawers, in case the contents had been carefully arranged to make it obvious if they’d been gone through. I did discover from papers on her desk that she was at University College London (which explained the acronym on the note) and that her faculty was within a mile of SOAS and five minutes from where Ramzi worked at UCH. I flicked through an anthropological journal on the desk, stopping at a smarmy-looking headshot of her tutor. It was over an article that Helen and he had jointly published, although her name was under his and in smaller letters. It said that he was an authority on Near Eastern burial sites. I memorized his name just because I didn’t like the look he’d given me the other day. A jealous Greek was not someone I needed on my tail.

  As I got dressed I considered various scenarios of how Helen and I had got together and whether the whole thing had been engineered. I tried to forget our lovemaking and be objective, but it was too difficult, so after a while I gave up.

  I went out to make some phone calls. I rang three letting agencies in Cambridge, told them what I wanted, then rang them back an hour later to see what they’d come up with, all from three different phone boxes. I settled on an efficient-sounding woman who was eager to do business; she’d lined up four places, the others had managed three between them. She wanted me to come up and have a look at the properties as soon as possible. I told her I’d be up on Friday, two days away.

  Later I sat in the SOAS canteen drinking tea, thinking about my last day in Moscow. Vasily had arrived early, to take me to the airport. I remember giving him my battery-operated electric razor, because he had admired it when I’d first arrived.

  “It’s a symbol of Western decadence,” I said.

  He laughed but I could see he was touched. “You will understand that I cannot give you anything in return?”

  “You’ve given me a whole new world,” I said.

  Vasily had insisted we sit together on the sofa for a minute because it was a Russian tradition to rest briefly just before embarking on a journey.

  It was late at night and Helen and I were both in the bath, facing each other, me with my back to the taps. We couldn’t stretch our legs out fully.

  “What’s the most dangerous thing you have ever done?” Helen asked.

  I panicked at the question, thinking that she was testing me, that she knew who I was. Perhaps she had been planted in the house after all—it was all horribly possible despite my earlier rationalizations. I was a fool to get involved with someone living in the same house. I was a fool to get involved with anyone at all.

  “What do you mean?” I asked. I sank into the water to my chin, but that just made my knees stick out even more. They looked like hard and hairy islands.

  “Well, I once went hang gliding, which is quite dangerous.”

  I smiled and contemplated the line of water across her chest, her breasts forming little peninsulas in the water.

  “Well?” she said. “Has the cat got your tongue?”

  I had to remember what that meant: the cat getting your tongue.

  “I think the most dangerous thing I’ve done is to get into this bath with you,” I said.

  “You think I’m dangerous, do you?” She flicked water at me. “What do you think I’m going to do to you?” She ran her hands up my legs to my knees. I put a foot on her stomach. I was hypnotized by the light of the candles, the herbal smell of the bath, the low timbre of her voice, her soapy touch. I let my eyes relax and my vision blur. She became a ghostly apparition, shifting in the water before me. “What are you doing this summer?” she asked.

  I was alert again. I was making sure a secret meeting was going to take place between arch enemies with a vie
w to creating a single, secular state for them to live in together—and by the way, we were bathing on top of a lot of cash and forged passports and an envelope that Mossad were desperate to get their hands on.

  “I don’t know yet,” was what I actually said.

  “You’re not going home to Lebanon, to see your family?”

  I shifted in the water. “I don’t have any family,” I said. “Well, only a distant relative in Berlin.” It was always useful to have a distant relative up your sleeve.

  She sat forward and took my hands, looking me in the face. “What happened to them?”

  “They were murdered,” I said, although I had meant to say killed. I always say killed because that was what I had agreed with Abu Leila: killed by a bomb. Murdered had slipped out.

  “I’m sorry. Was it in the war?” I nodded. “Poor baby.” She started to kiss my hands. I heard the front door open and close downstairs and the candles flickered from the draught that traveled upstairs and under the door, as it had done several times that evening. The flames nearly went out but then recovered. We heard footsteps on the stairs, but they stopped on our landing. Someone knocked at one of the doors. It wouldn’t be the landlord at this time of night, and it wouldn’t be for me.

  “Elena, agapi mou?” It was her tutor’s whiny voice. Helen leaned forward to snuff out the candles behind me so he wouldn’t see the light under the bathroom door. She put her fingers to my lips. Her face was close to mine.

  “I can’t bear to be without you, my sweet,” he said, his voice slurred. My eyes grew accustomed to the light from the window. Helen sat back slowly with her face in her hands. I decided that this needed to stop and put my hands on the side of the bath to get out, but Helen put her hands on mine to restrain me. She shook her head violently and mouthed a silent “Please!” Her expression was desperate, so I sat back slowly so as not to slosh the water. I thought that if he came to the bathroom door, I would have to confront him. He started whimpering into her door. He was a sorry specimen, that was for sure. I couldn’t understand why he had a key to the front door but not her room. Helen sank her head into the water until only her face was exposed and she was looking at the ceiling. It meant that her behind was pushed down against me. She had to lift her legs and put them on either side of my head. Perhaps she couldn’t hear him with her ears underwater. In the dark the steaming water looked like hot oil. We waited for two minutes like this, then I heard him go downstairs and the front door opening and closing.

  I leaned over her, taking my weight with my forearms on the sides of the bath. “I think he’s definitely over you,” I said.

  She raised her head out of the water. “Stop it, it’s not funny.”

  “Why does he have a key to the house?”

  She put her arms around my neck. I dropped my pelvis between her legs.

  “Because I gave it to him.”

  She wrapped her long legs around my waist and pulled me down. I was pushing at her, ready.

  “No, not in the bath,” she said. We got out of the water and I thought she wanted to go into her room but she stood dripping before the full-length mirror, putting her hands either side of it and spreading her feet, sticking her behind out. This was a different Helen to last night. Last night was looking each other in the eye and whispering and kissing; this was something else. I stood behind her and ran one hand over her stomach, using the other to guide myself into her. Despite her length, she still had to lift her heels off the floor to get the angle right. When I was inside her I held still and we looked at each other in the mirror.

  “Why doesn’t he have a key to your room then, if he has a key to the house?” I asked.

  “I changed the lock to my room because he wouldn’t give me the keys back,” she gasped. That explained him trying to open her door when I’d caught him outside her room before. She pushed against me and said, “Are you going to interrogate me or fuck me?”

  Twenty

  One of my first tasks after finishing training in Moscow was to go to Geneva, buy six tiny Minox cameras and bring them back to Berlin for Abu Leila to take through to the East. Abu Leila said they were for the Russians, a “thank you” for my training. Each camera was no bigger than a Swiss army knife and you could fit two of them inside an empty cigarette packet. They were used primarily to photograph documents, and produced a tiny negative that was easy to smuggle or put in a dead-letter drop. The Soviets had tried to make their own version of the camera but it had proved unreliable. I told the supplier that they were for a pharmaceutical company that was having an exercise to test their own security against rival companies. I “thanked” the Russians on a number of occasions for a couple of years after I said goodbye to Vasily, although it was never anything heavy, just making the odd pick-up of documents or microfilm and taking them to West Berlin, where Abu Leila would take it across through diplomatic channels. Then it all just stopped, although sometimes it was difficult to know whether I was doing things for Abu Leila or for someone else, as nothing I did was explained to me.

  In fact, the Cambridge meeting was the first time I’d understood the purpose behind my actions. I’d delivered packages without knowing their contents, passed on telephone messages that I didn’t understand, made large payments of money to people at airports, checked names against public records and carried out countersurveillance for Abu Leila when he held meetings in West Berlin. I didn’t know what these meetings were about, but since I was a student and looked like one, no one paid me any heed when I wandered around with my books. The meetings were always in public places (steakhouses were a favorite of his) and usually involved only one other person. I even heard Abu Leila talking Hebrew at the start of some of these trysts, before I’d moved out of earshot. I would scout the venue beforehand, looking for the telltale surveillance box, and would also watch the target go into the venue (always first) before giving Abu Leila the all-clear.

  Only once did we have a situation where the meeting had to be aborted. I had arrived at the restaurant where the tref was to happen an hour beforehand, to make sure that whoever Abu Leila was meeting didn’t have backup. I had checked the inside of the restaurant, then gone to sit in a café across the road with my newspaper to watch for the target, with the intention of scouting the neighborhood afterwards for any company he may have attracted. He arrived with two other men, and the three of them stood outside the restaurant chatting before he went in alone. The two men then came over and sat at a table next to mine. They were wide men in suits, speaking Arabic with a Syrian accent, discussing their flight plans to Romania the following day. I assumed they worked for one of the many Syrian intelligence agencies. I left the café and walked the two blocks to where Abu Leila was waiting in a taxi. I put my newspaper in a bin as I passed him, the signal to abort the meeting.

  Afterwards, when we met up in East Berlin, Abu Leila said they were probably Syrian Air Force intelligence operatives, since most of the Syrian security services (there were many) were preoccupied with spying on their own population, as well as Palestinians living in Syria. Most Arab countries thought of the Palestinians they hosted as an undesirable revolutionary force that needed to be contained and tolerated rather than welcomed, despite the supportive rhetoric you might hear spouted. The last thing they wanted were subversive ideas of democracy or free speech trickling into their own populations.

  Ask any Palestinian who they’d rather be interrogated by, an Arab or an Israeli, and they’d be hard pressed to choose between them.

  Ramzi would be suffering, that’s for certain, and I thought of him as I passed UCH, where both he and Fadia worked. I had just sat my “viva” at SOAS (it was, as Jack would have said, “a piece of piss”) and was on my way to meet Helen for lunch. I thought of the beautiful, angry Fadia, alone and pregnant. Maybe I should have felt guilty. I felt bad for her, but not responsible. They have an expression, the English, about making an omelet: you cannot do it without breaking eggs.

  I met Helen in a café off the
Euston Road. It was run by Italians who did an all-day English breakfast. When we’d ordered, she said, “Niki wants me to go on a field trip this summer, to visit some ancient burial grounds in Turkey. It’s related to my thesis.”

  Niki would be short for her supervisor’s name, Nikolos, as I had seen on the article in her room. I asked a question I didn’t want to ask. “And will Professor Niki be going on this trip as well?”

  She shook her head but did not look up from her plate.

  “No, I don’t think so.”

  My chest and throat became constricted by her lie. “Will you be gone the whole summer?”

  “No, it’s only for a week or two. Anyway, I don’t know that I’ll be going yet.” This was another lie, I thought. “I’ll probably go up to Scotland as well, my mother has a house there.” We ate for a while without looking at each other, mopping our plates with toast. My face must have betrayed my feelings, for she said, “You mustn’t get too attached to me, Michel. I’m not worth it.”

  I looked at her for a few seconds and I got a glimpse of a different, more mature person. “You seem so sure of yourself but you are like a leaf, going whichever direction the wind blows. You don’t know what you want so you just do whatever’s easiest, whatever someone suggests to you,” I said.

  She crossed her arms and looked out of the window. Maybe I had gone too far. She turned back to me and said in a low voice, “And what about you, ma belle, do you know what you want or where you’re heading? Are you so different to me?”

  “It’s mon beau, not ma belle. Belle is for a woman.”

  She stood up, scraping her chair back in the process. I paid the bill and caught up with her outside. Then, as if nothing had taken place between us, she asked, “Have you ever been to Scotland?” I shook my head. It was true, I had never been. “Perhaps you’d like to come up for a few days. It’s on the beach.”