“Perhaps it means the family has some connection with Israel. Don’t we want to know?”
“You erase it. We know what we want and need to know. And erase it not only from your computer but also from your head.”
There and then, before his eyes, I deleted the poems, one screen after the other, picking up, as I did so, a few lines here and there.
“Now, reformat. If there’s anything important on your disc, send it to the Office.”
“All the pictures are on the D drive, the rest’s on C,” I said and I entered the reformat order.
“I don’t know what to do with you,” said Udi when I’d finished, pursing his lips. “Your information gathering has been going very well, and I have something to compare it with.” I assumed he was referring to some other operative establishing cover in Vancouver who had evidently not collected as much as I had, but was sticking to the rules. “On the other hand, you’re a loose cannon. I don’t know what to expect next. And that we cannot afford.”
I explained all the contingency responses I’d prepared before the break-in, but Udi cut me short because that wasn’t the issue.
“A wild horse …” I tried to remind him, but Udi replied with the Talmudic epithet for an ox which has gored someone and must be restrained.
“You are on the verge of getting fired,” and he really meant it. “You can now assume without any doubt that you cannot do anything like this again and stay in the organization.”
I was relieved, and sensed from his expression that Udi actually appreciated what I had done. Perhaps he would have done the same.
“OK, before you kick me out, can you tell me if anything came of the information I collected in Cyprus?”
“You really are cut off here, huh?” said Udi suppressing what I imagined was a hint of a smile. “Keep abreast of the news. Two of your clients over there were preparing explosives to be shipped to Gaza on a fishing boat. You tipped us off about the link between them. They had already done it a few times, with the Hamas naval force picking the stuff up. This time we doctored it and they had a “work accident” in Limassol port. The two are off our list now, as is another dear friend, who we didn’t know about.”
A huge feeling of satisfaction filled my chest. My very first operational expedition had yielded results. Less weaponry in Gaza, and fewer weaponry dispatchers in Cyprus.
“Good, so I earned the cost of my ticket and upkeep,” I tried my luck, when Udi failed to compliment me directly.
“You’re not in a position to joke or to collect citations: you have a large overdraft,” he warned. “From now on, I want a double message every evening. What you did that day, and what you’ve planned for the next day, and you don’t do what you’ve planned without an explicit go-ahead from me.”
I felt slighted, but had no option but to live with it. I didn’t respond.
“I’ll try to see you next week. Until then, do not stray even an inch from the straight and narrow. Dir balak,” he added using an Arabic phrase meaning “be careful” that’s found its way into Israeli slang.
“By the way, how did you feel when you saw the parents?” he asked, as he donned his coat.
“Awful,” I replied. I didn’t want to let him into the complicated emotions that the sight of the Friedlichs had aroused in me, and neither into my thoughts about the alternative life that had revealed itself to me. Udi was a man whose motivations were clear-cut, and not abstract.
“”Bullshit,” he said.
Before leaving, he turned to me at the door and said, “Personally there’s nothing that pisses me off more than two-faced morality. I’m an asshole who has killed people, blown them up, burned them, framed them. You name it, I’ve done it. But I don’t allow myself to cry over the people I did it to. Not only when they were shits who deserved it, but also when they were the innocent people I used for the cause. You have to do that reckoning before and not after you pull the trigger. You don’t cry for someone and shoot him at the same time. If you’re crying, you don’t shoot. So don’t blubber about the poor parents, and then break into their house so you can do your job better, the job that in the end is preventing them from knowing what’s happened to their son.”
I closed the door behind him.
I picked up the camera to delete the pictures, something I should have done as soon as I’d transferred them to the laptop. While doing this, I came across the poems that were still on the camera’s memory card.
I called each of them up onto the screen, one after the other, reading and erasing. I don’t know how many I’d skipped when I was photographing, and what had transformed their content from memories of a beloved, occupied land to descriptions of the war in which it was destroyed. The lines were packed close on the small screen of the camera, and it was hard to read them, but I took in the harsh words as if I’d been hypnotized.
My wife wouldn’t leave without the boys.
The young one, who’d just enlisted,
Called from the Valley
To tell us that tanks from Syria and Jordan
And Palestinian police from Jenin
Were racing to get to Kfar Tabor,
And our big boy, a reservist,
Texted us from the Ramon Crater,
That quite a large force of ours is forming there
And looks like there’s going to be
An inverted Masada.
What an eye for an image he has.
My wife wouldn’t leave without them,
Not on evac day number one
Nor on day two or three.
Later on they said the Americans
Themselves are getting out.
Holders of US passports
Should come to the roof of the embassy
And the sooner the better,
but my wife wouldn’t, not without our boys.
What would you have done,
In our place?
I had no answer. But I heard the anguished cry:
My sons, my sons,
What is life without you?
Your splendid curls, my young one,
That you shed before enlisting
On the eve of the war.
And you my big boy
You took on your lean shoulders
All the weight of
The eternity of Israel.
But eternity let us down.
My sons, my sons,
Why am I still alive?
Half-drunk after another shot of whisky, I continued reading the appallingly, shockingly understated accounts of the last days before the country fell. I don’t know what happened to the poet’s sons in his vision, his nightmare, but I know what he did in the end, because he asked
And when we suddenly meet
If we suddenly meet
In a Brooklyn side street
Shall we hug? Laugh? Cry?
Tears came into my eyes. Alone in the Toronto hotel, far from my family, the thread of events depicted with almost no lamentation was too hard to bear. Precisely because they seemed so plausible.
There was nothing I could do with the emotional baggage these words burdened me with. I could only go on with what I had started.
5.
Encounter at Trinity College
THE NEXT DAY, I headed for the university.
I was not at all sure that Ron Friedlich had gone to university in Toronto. There was no bachelor’s or master’s diploma on the wall of his parents’ home, and perhaps he had studied at some faraway college that gave him a football scholarship, or perhaps he hadn’t studied at all after graduating from high school. If indeed he had gone to college here, it could have been at any one of the three campuses in the city. I decided to begin my search at the St George campus of the University of Toronto.
The entrance was on Bloor Street, very close to my hotel and almost adjoining the Royal Ontario Museum, with its new ultra-modernist glass and aluminium entrance building. Two stone pillars topped by clusters of lamps on iron pedestals sto
od on either side of the gate. From there, a paved footpath led to the heart of the campus, wending its way between green lawns and leafy trees. The path was called Philosopher’s Walk, and it really had that kind of a quality. Within a few paces, the glass and steel structures of the city were left behind and instead, on either side of the path, there were the brown or grey stone buildings of the different colleges and faculties, with pillared porticoes and bas-relief cornices, and American ivy that was changing colour from red to brown before shedding its leaves covering the walls.
I decided that unless I found evidence to the contrary, this would be where Ron had studied. All I had to do was to pick a college and a faculty. It would of course be better if I discovered the truth, and that’s what I was there for, but it wasn’t an easy task. I had already learned there were seven colleges on the campus. Where to begin?
A large, grey stone building loomed ahead, its fourth floor built into a tiled roof, also grey. A path that forked off from Philosopher’s Walk led to a wide entrance in the middle of the ground floor, and my feet led me there.
Just after passing through the entrance, I found myself in the quadrangle of what seemed like a castle, consisting of four buildings almost identical to the one I had passed though. The courtyard was made up of perfectly symmetrical rectangles and flower-shaped patterns resembling the Greek letter “chi” which represents Christ, delineated by greenery and narrow pathways.
Several students sitting on benches in the corners of the courtyard followed me with their eyes, and I decided to go through a doorway in the building furthest from them. I found myself in a long, white, arched corridor with niches in the walls, hanging lamps diffusing a yellow light, and a floor paved with small red tiles. It was empty. At one end was an office and from the other end came the pleasant sound of singing voices. I went in the latter direction. On the way, I passed a large noticeboard with pictures of twelve smiling young people on it and “Trinity College” in big letters at the top. There was a crest with an elk or a moose and a unicorn on either side of a shield with a cross painted on it, and underneath that, in smaller letters, University of Toronto. Over the pictures was the heading “Academic Dons”.
I continued down the corridor and the singing grew louder until I found myself entering a chapel, a tall, splendid structure made of white marble. At the far end, in a loft, a small choir was singing. I was standing in Trinity Chapel and a plaque on my left informed me that it was dedicated to members of Trinity college who fell in World War II.
The pure voices enthralled me, and I sat down in one of the pews. Despite my atheism, church choral singing had done that to me before. A young man sat next to me. He looked at his watch and muttered that he was waiting for his girlfriend, who enjoyed her choir practices too much. From him I learned that unlike most North American universities, the colleges here were not educational frameworks but rather organizational ones. It was at their colleges that students resided, ate, had social functions, belonged to sports teams and so on. Academically, the thousands of students affiliated to a certain college belonged to one of the various university-wide faculties, such as arts and sciences, engineering, or business.
This would make my search still more complicated.
When I left the chapel after absorbing more of the sublime singing, I called at the office at the opposite end of the corridor. Next to the heavy wooden door was a bench and on the wall above it a tapestry of the college emblem and the sign “Registrar” in large letters. Where to begin if not here?
Here I would not be able to evade my resemblance to Ron. If he had been enrolled here, he would have left only a few years before, and certainly would not have looked different from the way I looked now. If someone remembered him, or if they took out his file with a photograph in it, the question would arise. I was his cousin, and yes, people always said we looked alike. I decided to set aside the claim that I was Ron himself. I would try to stay with the cousin version. It would be better. It would stave off unwanted questions about the resemblance, and would, at most, elicit a smile.
I took a deep breath and went into the reception area, with chairs for people who were waiting. I told the woman behind the counter that a friend of mine was applying for admission to Cambridge and needed a copy of his diploma and his transcripts, a word that I’d made a point of learning. She asked me if I was sure he’d been a student at Trinity College and with a pretended bashfulness I gave her the reply that I’d prepared: he’d given me the name of the college three times and I’d forgotten each time. But how many Ron Friedlichs could there be?
“The thing is, I’ve only got the lists of students who were at our college. And in any case, the diploma and transcripts would be at the faculty in which he studied, but I’ll do what I can. Meanwhile, make yourself a coffee,” she added, pointing to a small kitchenette, as she began making phone calls.
I was standing with my back to the kitchenette door, stirring my coffee, when my blood froze.
“I thought I recognized that voice, and the accent, although it has improved somewhat.”
I turned around slowly, my coffee cup trembling in my hand.
“Take a sip, or you’ll spill it,” said Niki, with a hesitant smile. “And maybe you’d better sit down,” she said, and indeed, my knees were feeling a little weak. I was overcome by a mixture of joy and horror, and a thousand butterflies were fluttering around in my stomach. The best thing that could happen to me was happening, at the worst time. Who would I say I was? What would I tell her? I didn’t want to tie myself, the Israeli that Niki knew, to Ron Friedlich and the documents in his name that I had asked for.
Niki herself seemed unshaken, although slightly pale, and just as lovely as she had been when we parted nearly a decade before. She looked me up and down, and stood there, as if waiting for the next move. A big hug? A muttered evasion?
We glanced at each other’s hands. There were no rings on my fingers, and she wore one that didn’t look like a wedding band. Her body bore no signs of having given birth; she was still slight and girlish, wearing a shirt with buttons down the front and a skirt that covered her knees. I stole a glance at her feet, and her toes were still pointing inwards, though not as sharply as then. Niki saw my glance, and her eyes became distant, remembering, warm. She took a small step towards me.
Before I could move, the woman who had been on the reception desk appeared in the door of the kitchenette. “Ron Friedlich was enrolled in the Arts and Science Faculty, and they’re ordering up a copy of his BA diploma from the central registrar, but you’ll need a power of attorney from Mr Friedlich.” At that point she took in the situation. “You know each other?” she asked.
“A little. I’ll handle this,” said Niki, signalling to me to follow her into one of the rooms leading off the main hall, from which she had probably seen me approaching the reception desk.
I thanked the woman in a faint voice, and walked behind Niki, in a bit of a tizzy. I really did not want her to handle it, and make me have to lie to her as well.
The drab walls of the office were covered with shelves of box files. Near the window were some pretty bonsai trees in pots. This wasn’t a room for receiving the public, because apart from Niki’s chair on the other side of the desk there were no other chairs. I put my cup on the desk, trying not to let my trembling hand spill coffee on the piles of paperwork, and went to get a chair from the hall. As I turned, I saw on the wall next to the door one of the sketches I had made, with a passionate yearning, of Niki in the club in Asakusa. I walked up to it. There were marks and creases from what it had been through. I ran my finger over the outline of the sketched figure. For a second I was back there, drunk, in love, heartbroken. I turned around slowly. Niki was sitting upright, biting her lip, tears in her eyes.
My heart was pounding and a wave of emotion rose inside me and was about to burst through my throat. But Niki looked at me, even more upright, and put a finger to her lips, signalling to me to be quiet.
“I unde
rstand you need someone’s paperwork,” she said, her first words tremulous but her voice gradually settling down. “But you don’t have a power of attorney from him?”
I shook my head.
“And I understand you need it now?”
I nodded.
“I’ll get it for you,” she said. “Will you follow me?”
I nodded again.
“Would you like to drink your coffee first?”
All I wanted was to get out of there. I took one sip and said, “That will do.”
“So let’s go.”
Niki picked up a short fur jacket and beckoned me to follow her. I stopped at the drawing once more and again stroked it lightly with my fingers. We left the room and I headed for the exit.
“No, it’s this way,” said Niki, pointing in the opposite direction, and just as in that previous incarnation in Tokyo, I found myself scurrying in her wake.
We left by the main entrance doors with its grandiose portico with marble pillars, and the building’s spire soaring over it, and descended the broad stone steps crossing a lawn where a large sign bearing the name of the college stood, and came to a wide and busy avenue, Hoskin Avenue. Niki suggested we make our way to the faculty building through the subterranean passageways to get out of the cold.
She still had the same way of walking with those short steps, her calves were still smooth, muscular and shapely and her skirt was tight enough to outline her cute little bottom. I hurried to close the gap between us, just like then. In one of the semi-dark passages, with no one else around, Niki stopped and turned to me.
“I don’t know, and at the moment I don’t want to know, what brought you here,” she said. “I don’t know, and at the moment I don’t want to know what you’ve been through until now, if you’re married, if you’ve got kids. I just want …” and then, throwing herself into my arms she continued “… for you to hold me, hold me tight.” She pressed her face into my chest. “Tighter. As if you’ll never let go.”
Final Stop, Algiers: A Thriller Page 13
