Final Stop, Algiers: A Thriller

by Mishka Ben-David

  All of this ran through my mind in seconds, but it seemed as though my confusion had rooted me to the spot facing the Shalom plaque, the candlesticks and the menorah for too much precious time. I began to feel an urgency, and I hurried upstairs.

  There I found Ron’s room. It was quite dark, but I didn’t want to turn on a light. Next to one wall there was a weightlifting bench with a barbell and heavy weights on the rack, and next to it dumbbells that also looked pretty heavy. Along the other walls there were a double bed and bookshelves, containing mostly travel books, science fiction and sports magazines. On a small desk, there was a pile of letters, which I made out to be from Ron. I switched on the desk lamp and photographed the one on top, and a random sampling of the others lower down in the pile. It would have taken too long to photograph them all. I saw some photograph albums underneath the desk and leafed through two of them, taking care to touch only the outside edges of the pages. One contained pictures from Ron’s childhood, the other was from his teenage years.

  Here are Ron and his parents in the garden of the old house that I’d visited only a few days before. Leo is grinning, standing by a barbecue and little Ron is taking what may have been his first steps towards his mother’s outstretched arms … And here’s Ron again, perhaps three years old by now, wearing a sailor suit, on the deck of a cruise ship. I remembered a picture like this one, in my own album, of myself in an almost identical sailor suit, on the beach in Haifa, with the ships in the port in the background. I turned the pages, enthralled by my alternative childhood, a green childhood amongst little cottages and forests, lakes and rivers. I and the bearded man – Ron that is, with Leo – swimming in a river, sailing on a lake, climbing a hill and skiing down it, with his pretty mother in the background. I photographed two of the pictures and moved on to the second album.

  Until now, I had been gripped by the nostalgia of someone looking at photographs of his distant childhood, with landscapes clouded by mists of oblivion and youthful parents, both belonging and not belonging there. But the second album hit me with an awareness of my own unfulfilled youth. For page after page, I saw how the little boy shed his puppy fat and morphed into a sturdy, handsome teenager. His parents appeared in fewer photos, replaced by friends. And the more Ron stopped being Mickey, the more his muscles thickened and his facial features became clearly defined, the more friends there were around him, as he became the centre of the photographs, the focal point.

  What had made him like this? What was it about Canadian life that had not allowed him to remain what he was, and what I had also been, the chubby, friendly-looking boy on the sidelines? Or more to the point, what had enabled him to escape from this genetic trap in which I had remained ensnared?

  I had always been one of the gang, but never its focal point. Never the leader. Different qualities, or a different appearance, were apparently needed to be at the centre, somewhere that I had never aspired to be, either because I knew I couldn’t or because it simply wasn’t my natural position. Is an alpha male born to be an alpha male, or does his environment make him one? Does every soldier, in Napoleon’s adage, carry the marshal’s baton in his knapsack or are there those who are meant to be marshals while still in their mothers’ wombs, and others who are not? I didn’t have the answers, but I did have a clear sense that the toddler in the sailor suit on the cruise ship and the toddler in the sailor suit on the Haifa beach carried the identical kit in their rucksacks. Something had caused them to grow up differently.

  The gap became still more tangible when my browsing brought me to the period when Ron’s male buddies were replaced by girls. They were all so pretty, all these leggy, Waspy blondes with blue eyes that surrounded him, first in cheerleader uniforms around the football captain, and then, one at a time, clinging to his arm, or cuddling up to his chest. Ron, you fucker, I whispered to my dead double, you fucked all the beauties in your class, something I could only dream of.

  I photographed some of the pictures. After transmitting the material to the Office, I’d be able to make prints of some to carry in my wallet as part of my cover.

  The phone rang, and I jumped. I went out into the hall, and stopped to hear the message on the answering machine.

  “This is the home of Dianne and Dr Leo Friedlich,” said a pleasant female voice and after the request to leave a message, I heard a young woman saying, “Hi mom and dad. Where are you?”

  A little girl’s voice could be heard in the background, and then the message continued: “It’s Marcy. I took Bonnie out of school because she didn’t feel well, and we’re on our way to you.”

  Time for me to clear out. But an almost irresistible urge made me peek into the parents’ bedroom. The curtains were open and the room was bathed in sunlight. An ordinary bedroom, with an en suite bathroom, an unmade bed, a cupboard, and a bookshelf. As I turned to leave, my eyes went back of their own accord to the books. Did I see right? Hebrew letters? There was a Jewish prayer book, and beside it a slim volume, in Hebrew. The title caught my eye, Memories of a Beloved Land. And underneath that, in small type, A Lament. The author’s name wasn’t given.

  I opened the book. I must be crazy, I said to myself. What a great news story it would make: “Israeli Spy Nabbed in Break-in Reading a Book of Hebrew Poems.” But what the heck was this little book doing here? Did someone give it to them? The Friedlichs apparently must have some connection with Israel, I thought as I scanned the first lines which seemed to be predicting an Arab conquest of Tel Aviv.

  Downtown Tel Aviv, and Ramat Gan, looked like a little Manhattan From Tel Aviv U or from Ayalon freeway (now Istiqlal Highway).

  Splendid skyscrapers, Azrieli’s towers, white on blue, kind of Zionist; anyway, the bombs wrecked it, they say.

  Nothing left but a bent steel skeleton, a monument screaming to heaven.

  I was enthralled and horrified. I wanted to take the book with me, but couldn’t. I had no idea how important it was to them, or whether they’d notice it was missing or not, and in any case I couldn’t have anything in Hebrew on me.

  The front door could have opened at any minute, and I would be in big trouble, but I quickly photographed several more pages.

  A car outside blew its horn.

  I leaped up as if I’d been bitten by a snake. Idiot! I wiped the cover of the book with my sleeve, in case I’d left prints, shoved it back into its place next to the prayer book, and zipped downstairs to the front door. A fast peek through the eyehole showed me the coast was clear. I pulled my sleeve over my hand and turned the door handle, pushed the latch button and went out, closing the door behind me.

  I tried to walk away slowly, so as not to arouse the suspicions of passersby, but I wanted to be clear of the place as soon as possible. If it had been Marcy who blew the horn and she’d seen me she’d probably think I was Ron. But it wasn’t her. I walked away from the house towards my car at the corner of the street when I heard a car drawing up behind me. Like Lot’s wife, like a novice at espionage, I turned around. It was a red mini-van. Marcy, who I recognized from the photos, was manoeuvring into a parking space, but her six or seven-year-old daughter saw me.

  “Mommy, look,” the childish and rather hysterical voice reached me as I quickened my pace. I could barely breathe as I slid into the car, turned on the engine and drove off into the traffic. Only after a few blocks, when I saw the mini-van wasn’t following me did I take a deep breath and try to get my heartbeat down to normal.

  It was obvious that I had to report my actions, so I transmitted a message to HQ describing what I had done. The reply came within minutes: Udi is on his way. Remain in your hotel room until he arrives.

  It sounded ominous, as befitted my departure from regular procedures. For doing things like this they threw trainees out of their course without blinking. I thought I’d have to stay in the room for at least two days before Udi showed up, and that didn’t seem reasonable to me.

  I had a bottle of Glenfiddich single malt, on which I had spent fifty Canadian
dollars, and I wasn’t sorry. This was what I needed to settle the raging in my mind. When I finally managed to gather my thoughts, I transferred the photos from my camera to my laptop and began to decipher the certificates, the pictures and the letters.

  At the end, there were the poems in Hebrew. On the screen I read one about nightlife in Tel Aviv, ending with another allusion to the city under Arab rule:

  Tel Aviv at night was amazing

  The promenade between the hotels and the sea,

  The sea of people, walking, jogging, juggling

  Bauhaus buildings on Rothschild Ave., restaurants all around.

  The Sheinkin area, the Florentine neighbourhood

  And the women

  Right out of Toulouse Lautrec.

  The Old Port compound with its

  Cafés, wooden promenade, and all those people.

  Like London’s Docklands, like New York’s Pier 17

  Like the waterfront.

  The beach, the bars everywhere.

  But booze is banned in this new

  Sharia-law land.

  The shock that hit me had nothing to do with the quality of these poems, if they were poems at all. It was connected to the dual realities depicted here: the one the poet was familiar with, and that I also knew, although I wasn’t a Tel Aviv night owl, and the one that he or she was imagining, but was depicting in the same realistic way, that made me see it actually happening. A similar future was foreseen for Jerusalem, I discovered when I clicked on the arrow to the right of the poetic depiction of Tel Aviv, and this text came up:

  There were full bars in Jerusalem too,

  All the alleyways around Nahalat Shiv’a

  Are crowded, bar, restaurant, bar, restaurant

  Also the whole of downtown

  Girls strapless and in hot pants,

  A city full of booze and sex.

  That’s what kids do today, old man

  You think these are your times

  With your campfires and sing songs?

  They are not, but neither are they the youngsters’

  When a girl can go out only if she’s wearing a burka.

  Whoever wrote this, perhaps some Israeli street poet, perhaps someone Leo Friedlich met at his synagogue, must have done so before the Second Intifada, perhaps in the lull between the First and Second Intifadas, because now the cafés were empty, in both Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. The songs described some time past, and a remarkably scary future.

  I decided to move on and examine the photographs.

  There was Ron skiing on snow and on water, riding a water scooter and waving; sitting on a big Honda motorbike, with a beautiful girl behind him whose hair would soon be blowing in the wind. The man knew how to live well, something I had never learned.

  Suddenly it dawned on me: I did what was necessary, what I was good at, and what attracted me; this included being in the army, being an officer, and being an artist but simply enjoying life wasn’t something that had ever occurred to me. Not that I don’t go to the beach. I do, and I like sunbathing and swimming. And it’s not that I don’t go to restaurants. I do, and although I’m no connoisseur, I like food. And I watch films and sometimes plays as well, but all of these were a kind of light dessert to the so-called “real” things in life. How was it that I’d never just hung out with the gang in a bar or a café, just to kid around and laugh at life? Why shouldn’t the most important thing be to get some fun out of life?

  I had no answers. To be like that would have required a reboot of the disc which had programmed my upbringing. It had never crossed my mind that I could live without commitments, to my surroundings and to myself, simply so that I could enjoy life. But it seems as though my Canadian double had, and had a really good time doing so.

  I read the letters from him that I’d photographed. The oldest was from Katmandu, right after he’d completed a twenty-day trek around the Annapurna range, and he wrote that he felt like “the king of the world”. In the next, from Vietnam, he said it was simply unbelievable what the Canadians had allowed their American neighbours to do there, and what for? For another scrap of influence? “The generals should be hanged. All the generals,” he wrote.

  So maybe he wouldn’t have become a company commander …

  Three letters were from India, and in them I was dismayed to note a clear mental deterioration. The first was a balanced, philosophical epistle from Dharamsala after attending a Vipassana meditation workshop for beginners, combined with an introductory course on Buddhism. Ron distinguished clearly between what he got out of it – it seemed to him a good way of looking at life (how to avoid trying to hold onto things, because everything changes, both the holder and the thing that is held and holding on brings distress) – and the spiritual concept of reincarnation which he perceived as totally detached from reason. (“How can I spend an hour meditating on the gratitude I feel for being a human and not a cat in this incarnation, when the whole business of reincarnation seems absurd to me?” he wrote, winning another plus mark from me.) India had been an unfulfilled goal of mine ever since my pre-army days, and I thought that this was exactly how I would have reacted had I been sitting there like him on “a slanted wooden stool that relaxes your legs but kills your ass”.

  In the second letter he wrote that he’d made friends with a beautiful Danish woman, the loveliest woman he’d ever met, and after two days with her he’d discovered that she’d been living there for months, making a living by dealing in drugs. She travelled freely around the villages of the stunningly beautiful Parvati valley, where high-grade hashish was grown, and he’d fallen in love with her beauty, her daring, and he thought he’d found his ideal partner. The third letter was quite confused, the handwriting jerky and judging by what could be understood from it, the Danish woman had not returned from one of her expeditions and he was trying to get rid of the drugs she’d left in their room, but he did not exactly understand what was happening to him or what he should do.

  I felt a pang in my heart. I knew what had eventually happened to him, starting in India and ending up in Sinai. How rapidly he had fallen from the heights of insight in Dharamsala to his lonely death in a Bedouin shack!

  I felt sorrow gradually spreading inside me. How easy it was to fall. And what a waste it was. Now it was no longer the death of some Canadian junkie who looked a lot like me. Now it was the death of the alternative life that could have been mine if, for example, my grandfather had taken advantage of his service in the Jewish Brigade of the British army and migrated to a Commonwealth country instead of going to Palestine, where one bloody war awaited him, then another, and yet another for him and his son, and finally a war that almost killed his son. There was plenty still to come for his grandson too, for me.

  Sitting in an armchair, with the mellow Glenfiddich warming my throat and my chest and my belly and my thoughts, I began to feel that it was the dead Ron Friedlich flowing through my bloodstream and trickling into my brain. Ron had exposed me to a different reality, one that could have been my own. It could have been me. I was who I was, that couldn’t be lost. The son of my parents, the grandson of my grandparents. I was born in a hard country, one for which we will always have to fight, we and our children after us, unless what was hinted at in the frightening poems by that anonymous poet actually transpired, God forbid. But nevertheless, there was no reason for me not to take from Ron the things that I could, the things I liked about him. Tomorrow, I thought, I would enroll at a gym. It would even be good for my cover, and the Office would pay.

  I went back to study the photos I’d taken, trying to reconstruct Ron’s family life, focusing on the pictures of Marcy, his sister and her daughter, who may have recognized Ron in me, and while I was doing this, there was a knock on my door. I thought for a moment of deleting the pictures, but instead just closed the computer. To my amazement, it was Udi. Only then did I remember that the knock had been an agreed signal.

  “You fucking idiot,” he said as he came in. “You don’t kno
w how much I feel like punching you in the nose.”

  Udi placed his bag by the wall and shut the door with his foot. I saw an Air Canada sticker, with the codes YVR and YTO on the bag, and I understood he’d arrived at the inland flight terminal here from Vancouver. He undid his sloppily knotted tie, took off his jacket, which wasn’t an exact match with his trousers, and tossed it onto the back of the nearest armchair.

  “Your luck I happened to be in Canada, or you would have been grounded, and perhaps sent back to Israel for a disciplinary hearing.”

  I replied by relating to the part of the sentence that suited me more. “I see you came from Vancouver.”

  Udi followed my eyes and understood. “So now you’re not only a hero, but also smart. Nice. Get me a drink and start talking.”

  I recounted everything I had done so far, stressing all the considerations that led me to break into the Friedlich place. To persuade him that the risk had been not only reasonable but also worth taking, I showed him the copies I’d taken of the certificates, photographs and letters, which had almost completed the puzzle. I now knew almost everything about Ronald Friedlich that could come up in an interrogation, apart from his time at university.

  When I came to the poetry book, Udi tensed up.

  “Erase them all right away.”

  “But it’s strange, isn’t it?”

  Udi didn’t see it as I did.

  “As strange as finding a book of poems in Italian or French. And as you’ve told me they are Jews, it’s even less strange. Now, erase it. You don’t want to have to explain what it is, do you?”