Disengaged

by Mischa Hiller

  ‘I didn’t realize how much I’ve missed the sex,’ she said, turning to rest her head on his chest. ‘And I suppose I’ve been keeping myself busy so as not to miss you. I’ve been determined to be angry with you but actually it’s hard work being angry all the time.’ She moved off his chest and propped herself up on her elbow, pulling the sheet over her chest. ‘I’ve kept something from you, too.’ Here it comes, he thought. This is it, the confession he’d wanted her to make but didn’t want to hear.

  ‘You mean other than this big charity you’ve formed, and your imminent visit to Afghanistan?’

  She lay on her back to look at the ceiling, and again they were facing forward, like they had been in the bathroom all night, to release their confidences. Except this time he wanted to see her.

  ‘You know I’ve been sleeping in the spare room; I can’t sleep in this bed on my own,’ she said.

  ‘I could come home.’ When she didn’t respond, he added, ‘If you want.’

  ‘There’s something else we need to talk about before we—’

  ‘I’ve spoken to Rami,’ he said, ‘if that’s what it is.’

  Her body hardened beside him. ‘He told you?’

  ‘Yes. He thought it was why I was dissolving the partnership; he didn’t really understand why else I would want to.’

  ‘But you haven’t said anything to me.’

  ‘I haven’t really had a chance,’ he said. ‘Plus I felt it was up to you, really, to tell me. I wanted it to come from you, not for me to confront you with it. Do you understand?’

  ‘Yes, of course I understand. Jules, it was just—’

  ‘No, listen. I really don’t want to know the details, believe it or not. It doesn’t matter to me any more. I can sort of understand why it happened.’

  She turned to him and put her head back on his shoulder. He had thought about the where and when, but hadn’t dwelled on it. Better to think of it in the abstract than have details. It’s the details that would hurt.

  ‘I’m sorry, but I want you to know it didn’t happen here, in the house,’ she said, softly. He stroked her hair and felt her relax. ‘And I feel a bit stupid about the whole sordid detective thing, with Naomi.’

  ‘Yes, where the hell did that come from?’

  ‘It was Cassie, she arranged it for me. We got drunk over lunch and she somehow convinced me you were seeing someone else. In fact, she organized the whole thing for me.’

  ‘So we’re square on the whole Naomi thing, right?’

  She moved her head up and down on his chest.

  ‘Speaking of the pneumatically enhanced Cassie, there’s something I haven’t told you about her.’

  She lifted her head. ‘What is it?’

  ‘It’s something so shocking that my own secret will look pathetic in comparison.’

  She sat up and leaned on his chest, her hair tickling his face. ‘Tell me, you bastard.’

  Over breakfast, when Sheila had recovered from the excitement of learning about Cassie, claiming to have suspected it all along, then shrieking, ‘Oh my god, I shared a bed with her!’, and Julian was thinking about how to propose moving back home, she slapped her forehead.

  ‘I nearly forgot – I have got something I’ve been meaning to give you,’ she said, dashing upstairs. She came down carrying a leather journal, the one he’d seen in Boris’s taxi and the house in Onslow Square.

  ‘What the fuck?’

  ‘It was in my overnight case, you know, the one I took … the one I had at the Onslow Square house. He must have put the journal in there.’

  Julian recalled Boris stuffing things into her case before handing it to him.

  ‘I haven’t opened it. I’m assuming he must have put it in there for you.’

  FIFTY-ONE

  She didn’t want to mislead Jules. She wasn’t the sort to play games, or one of those women who liked to ‘manage’ their spouses. She did not want to change him, nor did he, she believed, want to change her, or ‘improve’ her, or point out her faults, of which she knew there were many. They were just not that kind of couple. She had mooted this idea that they live apart permanently, but nearby, and in theory it did appeal to her. But waking up without him, excluding the days when he stayed over before going back to his studio flat, left her disconcerted, out of sorts.

  Julian was familiar. He was woven into the fabric of her life. He was great to be around and affectionate, physical. He touched her and held her hand. He made her laugh, which, she’d come to realize, was very important in a world that seemed only to get darker by the day. Yes, he could be broody, but that seemed to have eased somewhat. And there were other traits of his that she wasn’t crazy about, like his dismissiveness and cynicism, but at least now she had an understanding of where they came from. But given his reaction to what she was doing with Gulnar, even that seemed to have lessened, or at least he was keeping it to himself. Another positive was that the panic attacks and mysterious ailments that had dogged Julian over the years had also abated. He had taken up running and was on some weird carb-free diet, of which the benefits were increasingly visible, especially during sex, when she secretly watched him in the mirror opposite the bed. His gut had receded, and the muscles in his arms and legs were now visible. Since that night when he’d first come round – he really should have pushed to see her earlier – they’d been enjoying more time in bed than ever before. She was getting hot and bothered just thinking about it.

  She should be concentrating on what she was doing, namely preparing for her trip to Kabul and beyond. The Foreign Office website advised against all but essential travel to Kabul and advised against going anywhere else in the country. Her visa had come through without a problem, her ticket was booked and she travelled in three days’ time. She was excited and apprehensive at the same time. But her senses, she noticed, were enhanced. She’d developed an interest in things that had simply occupied her periphery before, things brought briefly into focus before disappearing. But these things were important, they deserved a greater scrutiny, if only for the self-serving reason that what happened out in the world had consequences back here. She had come to understand that.

  As for what Julian had done for the Russians, it was illegal, of course, or had been. But was it wrong? Misguided, yes. In her mind, if he’d been a communist then he should have been a communist openly, but he seemed to have been motivated more by a desire to curb any military and technological advantage the West might have had over the Soviets than an ideological stance against capitalism or pro-communism. He’d genuinely thought he could make a difference, but had become disillusioned, unsure of who he was, where he belonged. She suspected that, like her, he’d wanted to tread a different path from the one most people trod, one she had trodden herself for many years before understanding that something was missing.

  Although she’d been angry with him for not confiding in her, not to mention disappointed and shocked, he’d actually become more attractive to her after his revelation, although obviously she hadn’t told him this. Nor had she told him the full consequences of what had happened with Rami; she considered that her secret punishment. He didn’t need to know, any more than she needed to know what had really gone on between him and Naomi in that hotel room for an hour. None of this mattered in the broad scheme of their relationship; they were just bumps in the road.

  Jules was no longer the boring guy who developed gaming software, or whatever it was, whose existence was measured by the number of contracts his company won. All she could do now was smile when she thought that her Julian used to be a bloody spy.

  She was glad that he would be back in the house when she returned from her travels. It would be something to look forward to.

  FIFTY-TWO

  At first, Julian couldn’t make sense of Boris’s leather-bound diary. It was written in a mixture of Russian, Hebrew and English. It contained glued-in newspaper clippings, mainly articles from newspapers, some in English, some in Hebrew. The handwritten English en
tries (written in a variety of pens and pencil) were quotes from books, mostly political in nature, dealing with Judaism and Zionism. There were also bibliographical references to books that must have been the ones he was carting around in his taxi.

  After a run he showered and poured himself a beer and sat down with the journal, his bare feet resting on the badly constructed flatpack coffee table in his studio apartment. Not being able to read Russian or Hebrew, and unlikely to be able to go to anyone who could, he concentrated on the English entries, starting from the beginning. An hour in and on his second beer, Julian thought he had a picture of Boris’s state of mind leading up to his suicide.

  The newspaper clippings he was able to read, mostly from an English-language Israeli daily, were stories ranging from the detention of Palestinian children for stone throwing, to human rights reports of Jewish settlers on the West Bank carrying out so-called ‘price-tag’ attacks on Palestinian villages, to decrees from rabbis against mingling with Arabs, to demonstrations against African immigrants. These were all surpassed in number by the clippings on Iran, with reference to ex-Mossad or CIA officials declaring that no credible nuclear threat existed from Iran. There were several pages of handwritten notes referring to the International Atomic Energy Agency and the Nuclear Proliferation Treaty. Under the latter he had written:

  Iran signatory, Israel not. Iran issued fatwa against owning nuclear weapons. Iran made serious offer in 2005. Iran is only NPT signatory not allowed to develop nuclear energy. Iranian nuclear weapon development = dangerous delusion to serve what purpose?

  One well-thumbed page attracted his attention, titled ‘Three Walls’, the page divided into three sections:

  a) Shoah

  One long Shoah. Ongoing. ‘Never again’. Sacred. Dwarfs all else. Post-traumatic stress syndrome [Trauma needs to be dealt with otherwise Just 2% of youth feel committed to democratic principles after studying Shoah]. Fear Defensiveness militarisation (Hitlers are everywhere.) Aggressiveness Iran.

  b) Israel

  Nakba = catastrophe, mythologizing (e.g. making the desert ‘bloom’), destroyed villages, ethnic cleansing – Ajjur, Baysamun, Beit Dajan, Danna, Iqrit, Lubya, Zarnuqa, etc. Everything justified by a) is OK.

  c) Election

  People either have Jewish souls or they don’t.

  Jewishness is a state of being, a level of consciousness, not something you are born into. Oppression negates Judaism. Zionism is the flip side of Judaism. Chosenness is not imposed, it means choosing to act in a positive way.

  When, tired from reading, he closed the diary, Julian discovered a small strip of tissue paper on the table. He picked it up, knowing instantly what it was. Boris had placed it in the diary; a way of knowing whether it had been opened without his knowledge. He’d taught Julian the same trick for using on his front door, or his desk at work; trapping something small enough to be un-noticeable between the door and frame to see if anyone had opened it. But then Boris had obviously wanted him to see this, although for what purpose wasn’t clear. Was it to explain what he had been up to? He was none the wiser. Had Boris been working for Iran? It seemed inconceivable but then Julian was no longer surprised by anything. The email address he’d given Boris from the Iranian woman? What was that for? The ‘criss-cross’ business he’d mentioned.

  It was past midnight when he got into his sagging bed. He was relieved to be moving back in to the house when Sheila was in Afghanistan; she’d said that she wanted him to be there when she got back, but she was happy with the current arrangement until then. Afghanistan was her milestone for moving forward, it seemed. He was OK with that. No arguments, no sulking, and most importantly, no bloody panic attacks. In fact, he’d cancelled his appointment with Dr Truby, told her the triangle thing had worked and that she shouldn’t be so free and easy with it if she still wanted two holidays abroad every year. He too had decided to apply himself to something different: the project Nizar had asked him to get involved in. A further meeting with him had fleshed out some of the bones and sparked some ideas of his own.

  But his thoughts, as he turned off the light, were of Boris. He couldn’t sleep, and it wasn’t just the lack of support in the mattress; something niggled him. Then, just as he was drifting off, it yanked him back into consciousness. He sat up and switched on the light. This was the thing: Boris hadn’t wanted Julian to have the journal, he just hadn’t wanted it to fall into the hands of his masters, for them to understand the real state of his mind, his disillusionment and what that might mean. He’d wanted the drone control board to go back to Israel and to be placed in the drones without any suspicion to fall on it at all. The email address he had passed on from the enigmatic woman from Iran had been a form of quid pro quo.

  He wondered, as he turned off the light and settled back down, what had become of her.

  FIFTY-THREE

  When Mojgan arrived back in Tehran via Germany and Turkey, nobody met her, so she went straight to their apartment. Except now it was her apartment. Before even unlocking the door she knocked on her neighbour’s door across the hall to give her the Herceptin she’d acquired. She had to put up with a couple of minutes of gushing, tearful gratitude before being able to establish that nobody had come to Mojgan’s apartment, no unknown visitors had rung her doorbell or asked about her.

  Once in her own place she crashed, spending thirteen hours asleep before waking to find his things everywhere, sensing his absence, smelling the sweat in his shirt in the laundry basket, crying and ignoring the ringing phone. On the third day her neighbour knocked on her door, concerned for her, or maybe just nosy. She stood in the hall with a plate of rice and lamb. Mojgan took the food, so as not to appear ungrateful, and closed the door. She picked at the rice, threw the rest away, and after a decent interval placed the washed plate outside the neighbour’s front door.

  On the fourth day she picked up the ringing phone, because at some point she had to, and someone from the ministry that she didn’t know asked her to come to an address not far from where she lived. They told her to be there at nine the following morning. It was the precise nature of this arrangement that alerted her to the fact that this was no ordinary debriefing. Before she hung up she asked him whether she could have Farsheed’s things from Baku and what had happened to his body. Had he been brought home? Had he been buried properly?

  ‘I don’t know, sister. There are no things,’ he said, hanging up.

  She got there thirty minutes early, dressed head to toe in black, standing outside an unprepossessing residential building; one of many used by the intelligence ministry for a variety of purposes, including interviewing people. In fact, the department that Farsheed headed up, or had headed up, and where she worked was housed in such an innocuous-looking building, the many rooms converted to offices. She was met by a young woman and waited for an hour before being summoned. The questioning, by strangers, was polite at first, even friendly. They asked her about the mission in London. They asked her about the instructions she had received from Farsheed. They did not ask her how she felt about the death of Farsheed or indeed offer any condolences. This she took as a sign. After lunch Farsheed’s boss came in, accompanied by a man she didn’t know. The boss was the man she had spoken to from London, the very man she had often complained to in meetings, and she became aware of how vulnerable she now was without Farsheed by her side, aware that part of her bravery at challenging those in charge had come from the fact that she was Farsheed’s wife. Now she was just his widow. This awareness was reinforced at the afternoon session, which was no longer about the mission in London, but turned into something else. It became about all the questions she’d ever asked, all the objections she’d ever made, all the times she’d wanted clarification about something, all the phone taps she’d questioned, the Internet traffic she’d wondered about monitoring, the things she’d said in meetings. All the things that Farsheed had both despaired of, and loved about her. She shrugged her shoulders at this line of questioning.

&n
bsp; ‘Are we not allowed to question?’ she asked, rhetorically.

  At the end of the day a woman gave her a cardboard box with what she said were Farsheed’s things in it, the things he’d had with him in Baku. At home she went through the box, but the contents were disappointingly impersonal; some programming reference books, a shoebox with some battered plastic chess pieces inside and a history book about Ku¯rošé Bozorg. She suspected that they’d gone through his things already, that anything of interest to them was being kept. His phone, for instance, his laptop. But who knows what disappeared with him in the car.

  She looked across the room at his other chess set, one made of heavy carved pieces, with a board inlaid with mother-of-pearl. A family heirloom made in Shiraz, it was always laid out with some chess problem. She would often see him, from the comfort of the bed after lovemaking, standing naked (except for his glasses) at the board, studying it for what seemed like an eternity, until she would doze off, contented.

  Sometimes when she was alone she liked to feel the heft of the pieces.

  ‘Have you been touching the chess board again?’ he would ask, mockingly stern; she obviously did not put the pieces back to his liking.

  ‘Is it a crime,’ she would respond, all innocent, ‘to fondle the king in your absence?’ This would provoke him into chasing her laughing into the bedroom where she would let him administer a fitting ‘punishment’, after which they both had to shower. Her vision blurred once again as she tried to put the plastic pieces back in their box.

  The next day’s interrogation moved on to conversations she’d had, or might have had, with Farsheed; the interrogators claimed they had details of their plotting. Had he relayed these conversations to his boss? Her mind reeled with the possibility that they’d been monitored. All their conversations about politics had been in open places, nothing had been committed to email, and they had confided in nobody else. No, it soon became apparent that the questions were couched only in generalities, there was nothing specific they could pin on her; they were fishing. The other man, the one she didn’t know, with the groomed regulation beard and collarless suit, asked her about Farsheed. It was him they were interested in, not her, he said. Had Farsheed met with people from the opposition, or contacted pro-monarchists abroad? What were his views on reforms, or the separatist groups? Had he expressed any doubts to her? Yes, they had consciously lived their lives in doubt, but she said nothing, repeatedly pointing out the great things he had done for the service, for the country. How he had built up the cyber-intelligence department of the ministry. These people knew nothing. They eat their own because they constantly see any questioning from their own as a threat from the outside. It is like a disease. She grew increasingly tired but decided she would no longer be afraid.