Where to Find Me

by Alba Arikha

  “What’s your name?” I ask her.

  “Claire Betts,” she answers, in a faint voice. “We were supposed to go to Aden in a week. Start a new life. Not finish one.”

  She falls on her knees and covers her face with her hands, and I hold her against me and she begins to howl and cannot stop; she has a dainty pearl necklace around her neck, and she howls on her knees and now so do I – for her, for James, for my mother and father, for the black of death and for the pale green of Claire’s dress which James saw one last time before dying.

  Now there are paramedics and policemen everywhere. They lift Claire up. Someone places a blanket over James’s face. Claire turns around as she walks away, and she looks at me, almost as if she wanted to tell me something. Then she disappears into the cloud of black smoke, the smell of burning, and into the dust.

  *

  The sun is impossibly hot, impossibly heavy. I don’t remember getting home. Perhaps someone walked me there. The same man who had picked me up? My head is throbbing so violently I cannot see straight. I’m in bed. Mordechai and Sonia have come to see me. They feed me and take care of me. But the light hurts my eyes. The heat is unbearable. I vomit a few times. Then I fall asleep. I wake up at dawn to the sound of the muezzin’s call for prayers behind the Old City walls.

  The next day, Mordechai sits me down in his kitchen. “Ezra won’t be coming back,” he says. He explains why. He heard about Ezra and Shlomo. His brother told him. He knows about most of the Irgun members, because his brother has been working for the British intelligence for the past four years, helping them track down the radical elements within the community. Ezra, who was the second in command of the organization, is the mastermind.

  “What?” I gasp. “The mastermind?”

  “Yes,” says Mordechai. “My brother was about to close in on Ezra and his friends before this happened. A serious slip-up. I’m told they managed to arrest a few hundred of them. They’re all at the Rafiah detention camp. But they want Ezra. They got Shlomo, but they want Ezra. And Shlomo won’t give him up.”

  I cannot speak for a long while. Mordechai’s words have clogged my throat. I can hear myself breathing quickly.

  “I’m sorry to have to tell you,” Mordechai says, squeezing my hand gently, “but I thought that you should know.”

  “He never went to Haifa,” I finally murmur. “He was here the whole time… He lied to me over and over again. He wasn’t working for the British but against them…”

  Mordechai nods slowly. “He wasn’t the only one. Right now, in this country, everyone is plotting against each other. You cannot trust anyone.”

  “Including you?”

  He smiles. “I suppose so, yes. Including me. But I’m one of the good ones,” he hastens to add.

  I fall silent.

  “Why did he do it, do you think?” I finally ask.

  Mordechai removes a pack of cigarettes from his shirt pocket and lights one. “In retaliation for the Black Sabbath raids,” he says, blowing the smoke away. “He and his friends wanted to strike where it would hurt most. And they didn’t go at it gingerly. They used TNT which was hidden inside seven milk churns, 50 kg of explosives per churn. Ezra is the one who drove the van dressed as a Sudanese waiter, and who placed the churns inside the basement kitchen of the restaurant before leaving the premises. The bomb went off at 12.37 p.m. Three separate phone calls were made, warning the hotel that the explosives were about to go off. The one thing my brother and his men don’t understand is why the hotel dismissed the calls. But they’ll focus on that later. The important thing now is to catch Ezra and his fanatical comrades.”

  Mordechai finishes his cigarette and crushes it forcefully with the tip of his nicotine-stained finger. “The death toll is approaching ninety people.” He lifts his head and looks at me. “We are now witnessing the last days of the British Mandate, mark my words. The Irgun has won its battle. Palestine will from now on be left to its own devices.”

  Everything he says shocks me to the core. How could I not have known? How could I have been so naive? Because I loved Ezra. I was blinded by my love for him. I curse him. I loathe him now. I’m ashamed of him. Ashamed of myself. The image of James Betts floats through my mind. His body lying on the ground. His wife kissing his closed eyelids. I would like to find her and tell her what I know. I would like to find her and say how sorry I am.

  “There was a woman,” I say to Mordechai. “Her name was Claire Betts, and I saw her in the rubble next to her husband, kissing him a last goodbye. It was devastating.”

  Mordechai nods. “It’s terrible. I’m sorry. For her, for us, for England.”

  Then a thought occurs to me. “Does your brother know that you’re telling me all of this? And how did he find out about Ezra?”

  “He had an informer – and yes, he knows.”

  “Who was it?”

  He lights another cigarette. “I have no idea.”

  “I bet you it was Lotta,” I mutter. “I’m sure it was her…”

  “I don’t know,” he says, smoking. “I think that Ezra tried to recruit her, but it didn’t work.”

  I freeze. “Did he try to recruit me, do you think?”

  Mordechai looks at me and smiles. “I wouldn’t be able to tell you. Only you know, Flora. No one else. So let me ask you this question: did he try to recruit you?”

  I shake my head. “No. He never said a thing. I suppose I’m not committed enough to this country.”

  He takes another puff of his cigarette. “But you were committed to him. Do you have any idea where he might be?”

  I shake my head again. “No idea. Whatever he did tell me was clearly a lie. You should try speaking to Lotta. He didn’t lie to her. They were very close.”

  “Yes, I know. She’s being interrogated as we speak.”

  I turn abruptly towards him. “What do you mean by ‘I know’? Did they have an affair?”

  He looks at me. “Do you still care?”

  “No,” I retort. “I don’t.”

  “Good. He was a traitor and she was in love with him. That’s why we think she might have information. That’s why they’re holding her. Because she was angry with him for loving you, not her.”

  The following day a party of British officers shows up at Mordechai’s. My room is searched, my identity card checked. I am driven to a police station for questioning. A tall English officer with an alert face and a cut-glass accent sits behind a wooden desk. The room is stiflingly hot, and there is a smell of stale tobacco in the air. I tremble, despite the heat. The officer asks me questions about Ezra: how we met, what I knew about his job, his friends. I mention Shlomo and Lotta, and the Arab passport forger from Jaffa. The officer presses me for details about the forger, but there isn’t much I can tell him other than what Ezra shared with me.

  “I never suspected anything,” I say. “I had no idea that Ezra led a double life – no idea at all.” It is the truth, and I can tell that the officer believes me.

  “If I had known,” I add, “I would have left him.”

  “Yes, but would you have reported him?” he asks, his eyes settling on mine.

  “Of course I would have,” I answer firmly. “I would have had no problem with that.”

  But I wonder. And I can tell, by the way he looks at me, that the officer does too.

  “We are looking for Ezra Radok,” he states firmly, “and we will find him. He has killed ninety people.” He pauses. “No one can be allowed to get away with killing that number of people. No one.”

  There is another interrogation: another officer, a new set of questions. About my last evening with Ezra, then Lotta, then Ezra again. I answer as well as I can and must sound convincing, because they let me go. “We’ll be in touch if we need to talk to you again,” I am told.

  I wait a few days. I hear about more arrests, Ada being o
ne of them, though I’m not sure why. All I know is that I must leave. My time has come. The land of milk and honey has turned charcoal-black. Ezra is still on the run. If they catch him, he will probably be hanged. I cannot stand the thought. That the man I loved and touched and kissed and trusted might be hanged. Because I do believe that although he lied about his covert activities, he did truly love me. I could feel it. One cannot pretend to love. Nor can one pretend to hate. And now I hate him. He cannot get away with what he’s done. Still, I must leave before they find him, if they do. They might never. Knowing him, they might never.

  He is a murderer, yet I loved him. He is a murderer who betrayed me. He is a murderer whom I trusted with all my heart.

  If there is a lesson to be learnt, it is that I must not love again.

  Not for many years to come.

  Later, I found out that Mordechai lied to me as well.

  There was no brother. The brother was him. Mordechai. He was the agent working for the British. He was looking out for me, Yael told me. And he knew I was innocent. He knew many things. What those things were, she didn’t elaborate and I didn’t ask.

  The image I carry as I sail away is not of Ezra, but of Claire Betts clasping her dead husband, and the way she turned round and looked at me, standing in her blood-stained pale-green dress, under the heat of that impossible midday sun.

  Hannah

  1

  We were friendly with all of our neighbours on Oxford Gardens, except for Mrs Dobbs, who lived across the way. She was a grey-haired, rather elegant lady of indeterminate age who, despite her slow gait and lined face, had a certain aloof self-sufficiency about her, which hinted at an interesting history.

  For four years we tried to befriend her. My father, based on the fact that she had once complimented him on one of his plays, was convinced that she had been someone or done something important. “There’s a secret there, waiting to be deciphered. Or plucked, like ripe fruit.”

  “Good luck and good plucking,” said my mother.

  My father had an infectious ebullience about him, which touched most of those who crossed his path. But not Mrs Dobbs.

  She remained immune to our niceties, our invitations to tea, the fact that my father was renowned in his field. She was always polite – how do you do, yes what a lovely day – but no more than the minimum required.

  From what we gathered, she lived alone and had no children, no relations. The neighbours told us that her husband had died in 1981. He had been a famous concert pianist, Henry Dobbs, and a gentle man. They could often hear him play, and he was very good indeed. I know this because as soon as my father found out who her husband was he bought two of his records and played them at full volume, hoping the familiar sound of her husband’s Schubert interpretation might entice Mrs Dobbs into our house.

  I still remember what that Schubert record looked like. On the front was a photograph of Henry Dobbs, a man with a large mane of white hair sitting at a piano. Underneath it was a quote which my father liked to read out loud: “Dobbs’s superb virtuosity never supplants his heart-rending musicality. If Glenn Gould were to have an heir, Henry Dobbs would be him.”

  “Imagine that!” my father would exclaim. “Imagine that such an impressive man was married to that very warm and delightful woman.”

  But if anything, hearing Gould’s heir apparent blasting from our sitting-room window defeated my father’s purpose, because now, whenever she saw him, Mrs Dobbs barely said hello, as if he had offended her in some way. So my father stopped playing his records and declared that it was a relief, because Henry Dobbs really wasn’t such a great pianist after all, so why bother.

  Occasionally Mrs Dobbs had visitors. Once I saw an elegant man with a cane standing by her front door. He wiped his feet on her doormat before entering. There was also an older woman, and a young man carrying a violin, who rang our doorbell by mistake.

  “Is this the house of Flora Dobbs?” he asked with a strong accent.

  I pointed him in the right direction. “That was a German accent,” my mother declared, as soon as he had gone. “There must be some German connection there.”

  We told my father when he came home. “Her name is Flora,” I said to him. “And Mum thinks Flora has a German connection.”

  “German?”

  His face sank. “She’s a Kraut. Of course she’s a Kraut. That would explain everything.”

  “What would it explain?” I asked.

  “Never mind,” my father sighed.

  “I don’t think she’s a Kraut,” my mother ventured. “I’ve heard her speak, and she doesn’t sound German.”

  My father turned towards her. “You say you heard her speak? As in more than three words?”

  My mother gave it some thought. “I can’t really remember how many words it was,” she finally said.

  I couldn’t understand what all the fuss was about. I didn’t really care whether or not Mrs Dobbs had a connection to anything German or otherwise. As far as I was concerned, she was a lady my brother Ben and I often passed on our way to school, who wore flowing skirts and lived in a slightly grubby street in Notting Hill, like us. When it rained, she carried an umbrella that was too large for her small frame. She used public transport. We knew this because we often saw her struggling to get aboard the 31 bus. But we didn’t find her particularly interesting. She was old, at least to our eyes, and she was curt and unfriendly.

  “I wonder where she’s off to,” my mother said, when Ben mentioned seeing her get on the bus.

  I shrugged my shoulders. “I don’t know. And anyway, who cares?”

  “There’s something mysterious about her, that’s all,” my mother said.

  Eventually, my parents gave up conjecturing. And as the years went by and Ben and I grew older, leaner and pimplier, Flora Dobbs seemed to remain just as she had always been, stuck in time, a mysterious lady of indeterminate age who wanted nothing more than to be left alone.

  *

  In 1986, I received a letter of acceptance to the sixth form at St Paul’s School. I was sixteen years old and thrilled. When I got home, my father opened a bottle of champagne and my mother had to remind him that Ben and I were too young to drink. So my parents drank the champagne instead, and we got into the car and drove to a nearby French bistro to celebrate, even though Ben had to get up early to go on a school trip to France.

  He was surly, as he often was, and nearly destroyed the evening, not by being boisterous or rude, but through the harshness of his silence.

  What Ben had witnessed as a young child had settled inside him like a chemical. His stability had been challenged. And as he turned into a young man, that instability became part of his DNA.

  I watched my brother grow like a sick plant. I saw how his roots became tangled and contorted, how the blossoming of his youth was stunted, contaminated by a rampant intruder. He was still beautiful. He would always be. But his beauty was tainted by guilt. Deep, solidified guilt, like mortar. He seldom communicated. He kept his head lowered when he walked, when he talked, when he ate. There were moments of respite, but few of them. When they happened, we latched on to them, trying to keep Ben going for as long as we could, attempting to draw him in, to make him laugh, to ask him questions, to hold what we loved of him until the tentacles of his mind drew him back into their Stygian, muted fold.

  It was painful to watch. I could see lines on my mother’s face that hadn’t been there before. My father, vivacious outside the house, was tense around his own son. I assured my parents that Ben would climb out of the hole of his own accord. “Most teens do,” I added, though I wondered how true that was. I was after all still a teen myself.

  “Of course he’ll grow out of it,” said my mother, trying to sound reassuring.

  “Is that right?” my father mumbled.

  After nearly five years, Ben’s behaviour had sapped the energy
from my tired parents. Although I shared their concerns, I blamed them for allowing my brother to drag them into his vortex of negativity. The atmosphere at home had become stifling and heavy. Silence-heavy. Tiptoe-heavy. Ben-heavy.