Shake Off

by Mischa Hiller

  I ran a bath and while it filled did an inventory of what was underneath it. I saw the article I’d torn out of Le Monde. I had a lot of other material on the massacre, culled from hours spent in libraries reading newspapers on a microfiche machine. I’d printed out anything of interest—interviews, stories and pictures. I’d requested official reports by various agencies. I’d read books by journalists, tearing out pages relevant to that day. It was all collated in a large folder in my safety deposit box underneath Harrods.

  I wasn’t sure what I was going to do with all this information. I had an idea that I wanted to punish the people responsible. But who I would punish and how wasn’t yet clear to me.

  After Moscow I’d had five weekends of training in East Berlin before leaving for London. It took place mostly in Potsdam, but sometimes in Beeskow, south-east of Berlin, where I was driven from East Berlin by an elderly man who spoke not once in the ten times we were together. The training involved the use of weapons, self-defense, interrogation techniques and technical surveillance. I would go over on a Friday night and come back on Sunday afternoon, staying in a cell-like room. I shot various handguns at paper targets in sound-proofed basements. I stripped the same weapons and reassembled them with a stopwatch going, all weapons you could carry about your person. The training was all given in a deadpan manner that lacked the humor of Vasily and his comrades. To kill someone you need to shoot them at least four or five times in the head, just to make sure. And it needs to be up close with a hand-held weapon. You have to put it right up against the head or very close to it, otherwise you could miss; some weapons give a massive kick, and any shot following the first could go wild. If you can’t get close enough to kill the target with your first shot, then you will need to incapacitate them with a body shot first and finish the deed close up, a coup de grâce. All this I learned so as to understand what I might be up against, not so that I might put these things into practice—this was made clear to me when I asked Abu Leila about it. In the back of my mind though, I pictured the men on that black day. I had seen those that took part, at least in the beginning, when they’d come into our house and interrupted our dinner, although some had worn ski masks to cover their faces. I couldn’t even be sure of the numbers involved: at least five and possibly as many as eight. People had come and gone. I could still hear their voices, but only one name was used, and it wasn’t in the article I was holding. I made a big effort to learn everything I was being taught by the Stasi. They told Abu Leila I practiced with uncommon zeal.

  I counted the money in the zip-lock bag and put it back with the Greek and Swiss passports. I removed the fat envelope I had retrieved from Fadia, weighing it and holding it to the light before putting it back in the bag with everything else; I was still awaiting instruction from Abu Leila.

  Lying in the bath, I wondered whether it was possible for me to have a real relationship with Helen. The obstacles were big, not least of all Abu Leila, to whom it would be a betrayal. I visualized myself telling him, but cringed at the thought. I would have to tell her the truth about myself, and no amount of insistence on my part that I would stick to the cover story would convince him otherwise. And why would it? The reality was that the attraction of having a relationship was in part telling her about my life, sharing its burdens. I’d given up much for a greater cause: I couldn’t mix with certain people, had to deny my origins, couldn’t travel to my place of birth. I lied to everyone I met and had no real friends. I envied Ramzi his wife. To have someone like Fadia who worried about your well-being so much she would take such a risk for you—that would be something.

  I got out of the bath. I was beginning to feel sorry for myself. I reminded myself again of the people who hadn’t survived the massacre at Sabra, and what had happened to those that had some years later. It was these events that had led me to use codeine for the first time.

  I’d been at university in West Berlin for a year when news reports came through of another attack on the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps. This time it was by Syrian-backed Amal (Shia Muslims) rather than Israeli-backed Phalangists (Maronite Christians)—incongruously united in their desire to rid Lebanon of all Palestinians. Within two weeks my end of the camp, the Sabra end, had been defeated and the inhabitants had either fled to the adjoining Shatila camp or been killed. After a year-long ceasefire Amal attacked the Shatila end, but the inhabitants were better prepared and put up a stiff resistance against a force ten times mightier. They were besieged for six months, with no help apart from some occasional shelling of the besiegers by friendly leftist factions situated in the mountains overlooking Beirut. Women and children were shot down by snipers as they tried to sneak out to find water, food and greatly needed medical supplies. Others were shot trying to retrieve the fallen. A year later and near starvation—this was just as I was graduating from my second year—the camp residents had asked Islamic leaders for dispensation to eat the dead. I had found the whole situation very difficult, and was desperate to do something, although I didn’t know what. Abu Leila convinced me I was already doing the right thing.

  “Your time will come, Michel,” he’d said, as we drank coffee on the upper floor of the Kranzler café on the Ku’Damm on one of Abu Leila’s rare forays into West Berlin. “You need to stay focused on the bigger picture, look to the longer term.” He waved a cigarette as he spoke, drawing a hazy vision in Turkish smoke. At the time I didn’t think to ask him to be more specific, but I was angry. Angry because I was having to relive something that should not have happened the first time, never mind a second. Angry because nobody did anything about it—nobody. Angry because I didn’t know how to express my anger and because Abu Leila appeared insensitive to my feelings.

  I’d left him at the Kranzler and gone to a party with some people from university. This was unusual for me, as I never attended parties. If I’d been a drinker I would have got drunk, but I wasn’t; it had made me sick when I’d tried it in Cyprus. A woman at the party, on learning I was teetotal, offered me a cannabis cigarette. I declined, telling her I didn’t smoke. She made it her mission to find something for me.

  “You don’t look right, you need something to make you right,” she’d said. She returned later with a pack of codeine from the bathroom.

  “They’re my mother’s. They’ll give you happy thoughts,” she said, passing me a glass of water.

  She wasn’t lying. It did make me feel right, righter than I’d ever felt, and I told her so. I also told her, as we lay on her bed—the party raging below—that I loved her. We didn’t have sex because it didn’t cross our minds; it’s not that type of drug. That night was the first night that I slept without rocking my head, or even feeling the need to.

  After my bath I went into Westminster to check my PO box. The only thing in it was a postcard postmarked the previous day. It was a picture of Big Ben and on the back all it said was, “I miss you a lot.”

  It meant Ramzi was back and wanted to meet.

  Twenty-Four

  I absently scanned faces at the other tables while sitting waiting for Ramzi in the outpatients’ café at UCH: an elderly couple drinking tea, two doctors eating wilting sandwiches that the English like to make, a couple with a pasty child in a wheelchair and a tube in her nose, a man in a jacket and tie reading yesterday’s Sunday Times. I could read the headline from where I was sitting: “Israel in Hostage Swap Bid with Iran.” I was so absorbed in straining to read the subheading that I didn’t notice Ramzi until he was standing right in front of me. We were meant to meet in the service area like we had last time, so I felt wrong-footed when he sat down. He put a can of Fanta and a Mars bar on the table.

  I don’t know what I was expecting but he didn’t look too bad to my eyes. He was bouncing his leg up and down under the table and glancing around nervously. It was contagious, and I started to look around the place myself, more worried about his wife Fadia turning up than anything else. I was sure, now that I’d met her, that she had primed him to cut ties with m
e. In fact, I was surprised that he had contacted me at all, but maybe he still felt some responsibility to what we were doing. I concentrated on getting some facts.

  “Was it bad?” I asked. He broke the metal seal on the can of Fanta and unwrapped the Mars bar. I drank from a bottle of water. The place was busy with patients and their relatives, clinics being in full swing this time of the morning.

  “I was held in the Russian Compound,” he said, as if this answered my question. The Russian Compound was a prison in Jerusalem built by the Turks and still used by the Israelis. It was notorious among Palestinians. “Do you know what al-shabah is?” I knew what it was, it meant ghost, but he was going to tell me anyway. “They make you sit on a stool, so low that you have to squat on it. Then they tie your hands to the wall so your arms are stretched. Then they put a cloth sack over your head,” he said. “A sack that stinks of piss. You panic because you think that you will suffocate.” He took a mouthful of Mars bar and spoke while chewing. “They leave you there for hours until your arms and legs go numb. It gives you a terrible pain in the shoulders after a while.” He showed me his wrists; they were still marked from the plastic ties used to bind them.

  “What reason did they give for stopping you?” I asked.

  “They don’t need a reason,” he said, “but they were interested in my luggage.”

  “But you didn’t have the case,” I said. “You gave it to Fadia.”

  “Fadia insisted that she take the case once she realized what was going on, that I was planning to take it back across. She knew about it because I’d given it to the taxi driver on the way in and it turned up on the way back. It was her that insisted we go across separately.” He looked at me to see whether I had anything to say. “She was insistent,” he repeated. I nodded sympathetically; I imagined she would be. She could easily have told him to dump the case though, rather than bring it through herself, so I had to admire her for that. I asked Ramzi why she hadn’t just left it.

  “She did want to leave it at first, she was going to leave it with the driver, but he said that it was very important it left the country and that he would get into trouble if he took it back. He was a different driver, not the one who picked us up.”

  “A different driver?”

  He nodded and took a bite of chocolate and a swig of drink. I asked him to describe the new driver. A thin balding man with designer stubble, except for where a small scar on his chin meant no hair could grow.

  “And Fadia wasn’t stopped?”

  He shook his head. “Fadia said that since she was pregnant it made sense for her to carry it. She moved her clothes into the case in the taxi. The driver agreed that this was a good idea.”

  A new driver, and one with opinions. We talked some more. I asked for names and dates and asked the same questions in different ways, just to check his story.

  Essentially he’d been stopped at the bridge once Fadia had gone through, accused of being a member of a terrorist organization, then taken straight back to Jerusalem to the Russian Compound and left to stew with the sack on his head for a couple of days. Once Fadia realized he wasn’t coming across she had sorted out a lawyer for him when she got to Amman, although Ramzi said he might as well have been a postman for all the good he did.

  “Of course this whole business has made her stressed,” Ramzi said.

  I needed to get to the heart of things before I let him go. “What questions did they ask you?” I asked. “I’m sure it was hard going, you’ll have had to have told them something.”

  He finished his chocolate and scrunched up the wrapper. “If I’d had the case on me I would have said something, because the evidence would have been there. But I didn’t tell them about the case because they weren’t concerned with it. The truth is they didn’t ask me anything.” He drank some more, swilled it around his mouth and said, “I didn’t tell them about you, if that’s what’s worrying you.”

  I ignored that and continued, “And the driver, did they ask about him?” The taxi driver was the only link Ramzi had to Abu Leila’s network on the West Bank.

  He shook his head. “They asked me no questions, that was the thing, they just ripped my cases apart. In the end they had to let me go. They took me before a judge to apply for an extra seven days’ detention, but surprisingly she said they had to let me go.” I studied him for evidence of lying but I could see nothing beyond nervous energy.

  “OK, I’ll let you get back to work,” I said.

  “Did you speak to the man,” he asked, “like we discussed last time?”

  “I think you should concentrate on your family from now on,” I said. He had become a liability, obviously burned and on the enemy’s radar. Even if he wasn’t, his wife made things too difficult, although based on her performance at the crossing she would have been of more use than he was.

  “You mean I’m no longer any use to you,” he said, a sneer on his lips, although he was probably just masking his relief. I could have reminded him that he was the one that wanted out, but I was already compiling my report in my head and wanted to get it down on paper before it faded. Then he sat up in his seat and cleared his throat. “Fadia, well, Fadia and I, we are starting a medical charity. We want to organize for doctors and medical technicians here to go to Gaza and train people there, a sort of exchange program, if you will. Obviously this does not sit well with what I’ve been doing to help you and the man.” He looked different when he said this, betraying an enthusiasm and confidence I hadn’t seen before. It made me aware that my dealings with people were very limited and that they had whole other lives that I didn’t know about.

  “Good luck with that,” I said, shaking his hand.

  “You need it more than I do, my friend,” he said, clapping me on the back in a familiar manner that betrayed his relief at not having to see me again.

  I stepped into the street, glad to be out of the hospital and away from Ramzi.

  After leaving Ramzi I went over to Euston Station. I needed to speak to Abu Leila, or at least leave him a message to let him know that Ramzi had been released. Was it good news or not? I wasn’t sure. Certainly Abu Leila’s network in the Territories was compromised in some way, but the Israelis didn’t seem to care if Ramzi knew—or perhaps they wanted it known. I stood in a phone booth and looked out onto the station hall, half-empty after the morning rush. I was formulating what I would say on the phone. I watched as parents tried to herd children and luggage to the right platform; the summer holidays were starting. A man standing by the escalators and looking up at the departures board caught my attention. He looked familiar, but I wasn’t sure where I’d seen him before. I turned around and made the call to the answerphone, just saying that Ramzi was out and that the competition were possibly aware that he was a member of the sales team. I told him that I would follow up with a more detailed report. I hung up and dialed the speaking clock. It came to me, as the voice on the other end told me it was 11:36, where I’d seen the man in the hall before. It was in the café at the hospital, reading yesterday’s Sunday Times. He’d changed his appearance somehow, but had the same rounded shoulders. I turned around to see if he was still there, but he’d disappeared.

  Twenty-Five

  I stepped onto a bus going towards Leicester Square as soon as I exited Euston Station. I was keen to get my report written and sent off as soon as I could; seeing the same man twice made me anxious. It could have been coincidence, of course; Euston was the nearest train station to the hospital so it wasn’t impossible. But still, training had taught me that I couldn’t dismiss these things lightly.

  Inside Westminster Reference Library I grabbed my big dictionary from the shelf and went to my desk. Only two other library users were seated, one of whom was the tramp sleeping at his desk, wrapped in his coat despite the heat. As I passed him I held my breath, knowing from experience that he would smell. An elderly woman sat at one of the microfiche viewers, which whined as it sped back through years of newspaper headlines. I had u
sed the same machine myself many times in my research. I sat in my usual place, with my back to the wall and overlooking most of the desks. No one could pass me without my seeing them approach, which gave me time to cover what I was writing. I started to jot down the account of my conversation with Ramzi, leaving out nothing because I’d been taught never to judge what was or wasn’t important.

  I’d got to the bit about Ramzi’s wife Fadia calling a lawyer from Amman, and looked up to give my eyes a rest from the small print of the dictionary. Someone else had come into the library and was poring over a book some three rows away. He looked up at the window and I recognized him as the man at Euston Station, the same one I’d seen when meeting with Ramzi. Twice was a coincidence, three times was not. He had taken off his tie, of course, and was now jacketless. He’d even combed his fair hair differently. But it was him. He had the same pale face and rounded shoulders, which he couldn’t disguise. I was aware of someone else moving among the book stacks to my right, but looked down at the desk again so as not to appear concerned. I was annoyed with myself because I’d not noticed them come in to the library. I slipped my incomplete report into my pocket and scrunched it up, my first thought being that I should get rid of it immediately. I felt trapped and had to work hard to slow my beating heart—an exercise I’d learned in Moscow. I resisted the urge to get up and run. I imagined Vasily beside me, telling me what I should be looking for.

  I wondered what size of team was waiting outside, it could be anything from five to ten on foot, maybe more in backup vehicles. If they were the “competition” then there wouldn’t be so many, as they would have had to come from Israel or use the few people they had here. I looked at my watch. I was due to meet Helen in an hour and wanted to confirm their presence before then, or at the very least lose them. I didn’t want her connected to me.