I wrapped myself around Niki and I wrapped her around me, trying to draw a little more heat out of her body to stop the icy tentacles in my mind from spreading, but Niki picked up on my silence and asked, “What do we do now.”
“I don’t want to lose you again Niki,” I groaned with genuine passion, without the faintest idea of how to avoid that happening.
“Do you have to fly back to London? Or Cambridge?” she asked. And before I realized what she was talking about she added, “To give Ronald Friedlich his paperwork?”
I searched for the right words. How could I both avoid lying and avoid confessing, both leave the door open for more and hint that the door could close at any time.
“Ron Friedlich and London are only a small piece of a big puzzle,” I said. “And you are a big piece in a very big puzzle that is my life.” I said no more, and Niki, very attentive to my words, didn’t ask any more questions. We made love again, and then Niki said she had to get up, go home, put on normal clothes and get to work on time. We arranged that I’d pick her up that afternoon at five.
After she’d left, I felt confused and lost, exactly as I’d been back then, but this time, ostensibly, the decision was mine. Ostensibly, because a long and tortuous past that I could not cut myself off from, stretching back way before the day Niki had first come into my life, was haunting me, and I had to satisfy it before I could satisfy the fresh lust and love that had awoken in me.
I decided that in the meantime I’d say nothing to Udi, and that I’d continue getting to know the presumed city where I had grown up, but from now on with Niki.
The days before Udi’s return to Toronto were among the most magical of my life. And I could also draw up an exhaustive daily report on the parts of the city I’d visited, and where I’d be going the next day, places known only to the locals. One evening Niki took me to Gerard Street, the site of Little India, which I very quickly learned was actually little Pakistan, but with the same cultural accoutrements as India: restaurants serving chicken tikka masala, shops selling silk scarves, songs in Urdu over the loudspeakers, and posters advertising Bollywood movies.
We strolled around Chinatown, along Spadina Avenue, with signs in Mandarin and shops selling Chinese remedies, but it was Japanese food that we wanted. Nearby, Niki showed me Kensington market, a short colourful street with small wooden buildings and magnificent roofs painted in gaudy shades of red and turquoise blue – with each bottom floor housing a delightful little shop. There were all kinds of paintings, textiles and clothing from India and other Far Eastern places, lots of Buddhist writings on wall hangings, oriental carpets, as well as the sorts of clothes that people used to wear in the Sixties. I thought it would have suited us to be hippies, had we been around then. Especially Niki, and perhaps I’d have tagged along after her. I was glad Niki thought I’d like what I saw, and I really did: the people, the atmosphere, the textiles – which were far from cheap, to my surprise. Nevertheless, I bought her a floral blouse, and with the coming winter in mind, a thick colourful shawl.
“And what about you?” Niki asked.
I stammered something. I didn’t see myself wearing these clothes. A sorrowful expression flickered across her lovely face, slight disappointment perhaps. Me and my stodginess, I rebuked myself. No, I could never have been a hippie, even if I’d been around then. But why shouldn’t I walk around in a sarwal? What was stopping me from looking like a New-Age type? Well, I told myself, because I wasn’t like that, regrettably. Regrettably? I wasn’t so sure. I was too rational, too rooted in the ground. I didn’t really want to be different. Perhaps if I’d been Ron.
We wandered in the direction of Jenny’s bar-café, from which sounds of music were emanating. In the doorway stood an elderly man with a guitar, perhaps a relic of the Sixties, and another oddball in a kilt, and some black guys who were tapping the beat with their feet, and once again we were in heaven. I can be different. In the right circumstances.
The sun was setting, pink clouds were gathering in the sky and all the colours of the street glowed in the spectacular twilight. I asked Jenny, the ageing hippie who owned the place, for a sheet of paper and coloured pencils and she brought me some. On a little table outside, with the guitarist, the Scot and the black guys looking on sympathetically, I drew the street in quick lines, and Niki, in a shop full of vivid Chinese wall hangings, spreading out one inscribed with: “The past is history, tomorrow is a mystery, today is a gift.”
This made me into something of a tourist attraction myself, and soon a little crowd gathered around to watch, and some snapped photos of me as I drew. An instinct told me to get away, but, on the surface at least, it fit in with my cover so I kept going. Nonetheless, I was jolted when I feared that one of the tourists taking pictures of me was the girl with the sweet smile from the Hard Rock Café and the City Hall. So they were actually tailing me? Was it possible that I had gone and reawakened the suspicion of the authorities when I was sniffing around the Friedlich residence, or making inquiries at the schools and the university? The girl’s face was obscured by the camera and then she turned away, so I couldn’t verify my apprehension. A professional tail, on the other hand, if it really were the Canadians, would have photographed me surreptitiously, without attracting my attention. No, it must have been my imagination.
At not too late an hour, after the by now customary “my place or yours”, we began our nightly lovefest.
From the first time I went to her apartment I saw that it was a far better love nest than my hotel suite. Niki lived in the Old Town neighbourhood, on the corner of Adelaide and Church, opposite St James Cathedral and a few hundred yards away from the lake, no more than a stone’s throw from anywhere we wanted to go. Her building was one of a few huge apartment blocks thirty or forty storeys high, made of a steel skeleton and giant bluish windows facing the lake.
Access to a brightly-lit lobby, faced in brown marble, was gained by punching in a code. There were a few sofas in the lobby, a mirror and another door, which required a key to open it. A key was also needed for the elevator, which whisked us up to the 32nd floor and opened onto the hall of her apartment. Sometimes we couldn’t wait until we got to the bedroom and made love on the soft, thick, white carpet, or on the designer sofa overlooking the stunning lake.
I wondered how Niki could afford an apartment like this in a lake-view building, and she told me her father paid half the rent because he wanted her to live in a good place. I also wondered how Niki lasted in her job, because we never slept at night, and only in the morning, after she left for work, did I fall into a deep, exhausted sleep.
When I woke up, and there wasn’t much time left before she was due to get back, I dared to step out onto the balcony and the way I felt there reminded me why I wasn’t the right material to be a paratrooper. At times, I’d buy groceries at the nearby St Lawrence Market, which was situated in an old brewery building and was full of people and activity all the time. At other times, I would have lunch at one of the food stalls there.
Occasionally, to salve my conscience, I performed a manoeuvre to see if I was being tailed, but I never detected anyone. That doesn’t mean I am clean, I told myself. Clearly I wasn’t a target who justified a twenty-four hour surveillance operation by the Canadian Secret Service. Perhaps I was just being “sampled” every now and again, but even that seemed unlikely to me. Why should they? Thinking about it unsettled me, but that feeling melted away as soon as Niki showed up, with the glowing green gleam in her eyes. It was like a traffic light telling me, “Go. The coast is clear. You can get to wherever you wish.”
When I stayed put, I surfed the Internet, visiting Israeli sites and updating myself on events at home, and sometimes I’d switch on the camera and like someone poking around in an old wound, I couldn’t resist the exquisite pain and read some of the poems that I hadn’t deleted.
It was hard to read on the little camera screen and I quickly skimmed through those whose first lines didn’t grab me, erasing one afte
r the other. The mystery of the writer preoccupied me. It could be a triviality, as Udi had said. Some friend of the family, an Israeli expat perhaps? Maybe not. It must have been there, on the title page and on the cover. What a pity I’d been in such a hurry and hadn’t noticed it.
As I went on reading it was clear to me that these words had been written here, in Canada:
Of course there was no choice
But to get a state, and
It wasn’t just the Holocaust:
Herzl was right,
I must admit, from my American exile,
A people must have a land.
What Zionism did was a great triumph
In the annals of human endeavour.
One plank after another, we found in the waves
And some rope, and we tied them together
And we had a raft
And then a dinghy
And then a sailing boat
And then a ship,
A destroyer, with guns.
Nothing to be ashamed of,
A home for millions of refugees.
We made deserts bloom
Won Nobel Prizes,
A stable democracy
A high-tech powerhouse
And a light unto the farmers of the world.
I was happy to be part of it,
Until it was no longer there.
My heart was caught in a vice of amazement and anxiety. I didn’t have the strength to read further. I was sorry that I had begun. I knew the poems were telling me something, but I didn’t know what. Could I surrender? Just drop out? Not be part of that enterprise that I loved so much and believed in, and was even proud of? Be a dejected emigrant, listening to Israeli pop music on CDs?
I debated endlessly, the way they do in Israeli youth movements, but with myself: to live with a bent back in exile, or to die upright in the homeland? This was the choice those lines laid on my doorstep, by forecasting the collapse of the Zionist dream, of Israel. The author, apparently, had made his choice: he had fled to America.
When Niki remembered I was an artist, and I told her that I’d already visited the big galleries, she suggested we go down to the Harbourfront Centre, a complex of buildings on the lake. Here, unlike Pier 17 in New York, or London’s Docklands, or even Tel Aviv port and the lively marina in Herzliyah, artists’ workshops were the main element and not shops and restaurants.
I’d stayed away from the waterfront so far because of the icy winds blowing in over the lake. Now we walked as quickly as we could to the complex, trying to avoid the gusts. The tourist yachts were battened down for the winter and moored along the stone promenade, though a few were still making the trip to the nearby islands. The restaurants by the shore were mostly empty.
At the entrance to the complex, under the Harbourfront Centre sign, there was an ice skating rink, overlooked by popular restaurants. Niki told me that in summer it was a sea-water pool, with boats.
We hurried inside and I saw that the entire length of the structure was one big space housing workshops for artists and craftspeople. We watched ceramicists, painters and sculptors at work. It was a concept that was new to me, and it seemed a little odd. But when I saw my counterparts doing their thing, my fingers itched.
“You can make yourself a little gallery here, if we stay in Toronto,” Niki whispered, and I felt a cold shiver, because I had told myself exactly the same thing a moment before, and had immediately rejected the idea; but the temptation was so great that I feared I would not be able to withstand it. In order to clear the thought from my mind, I dragged her to the ice rink and agreed to skate, although it was something I’d never done before.
Niki slipped into her rented skates with ease and glided gracefully out to the centre of the rink where she executed some pretty dance steps while she waited for me. There were other beginners but they moved gingerly along the railing and I decided to plunge in and slid directly towards Niki, something that of course ended in a painful crash onto my backside and a loud, unrestrained peal of happy laughter from her. Once I had gained a little steadiness and confidence, I tried to imitate her steps, but that, too, ended in another few painful encounters between my butt and the ice, and now some of the other skaters permitted themselves to laugh at my expense. I was amazed at myself. I’d never been so liberated as to paint in the street in front of a crowd and certainly not to make a fool of myself in public. Something in me had changed. The nail driving into my heart had broken through the hard shell that had encased it, revealing a new being, a happy being, as colourful as the scene at Kensington Market: the charcoal sketches of the Nazi trains and the burned out tanks had been left behind.
We ended the evening with a hot chocolate at one of the cafés and with the usual question – your place or mine – but this time, after we’d decided on my place, and I’d paid and we got up to leave, I spotted a burly figure in a dark corner of the café. I needed no more than a split second to recognize that big head with its close-cropped, grey-flecked hair. We stepped out, and I asked Niki to wait a moment. I went back into the café and approached Udi. His blank expression stopped me in my tracks, and only then did I recall his orders: he was a ghost. Only he could come to me, never me to him. I turned around and left.
“Do you have something to do with that man?” Niki asked.
“Not at the moment,” I replied rather opaquely, and she didn’t press the point. Udi would certainly want to talk to me tonight. Should I return alone to my hotel? Resentment surged inside me.
“Come, we’re going to your place,” I said, abruptly changing the plan.
“So you do have something to do with that man,” she said, but I didn’t reply and again she let it drop.
“You’re not the same,” said Niki, after our first love-making. “Not at all,” she added after the second. There wasn’t a third time. My spirits had clouded over, and I was torn. When Niki went to work, I went to my hotel, a decision taking shape in my mind. I would not break up with Niki, and if Udi insisted, I’d tell him that this was the end of the connection between us. I would go to Ron Friedlich’s parents to tell them their son had died in Sinai and had been buried by the Bedouin. I felt that this unfortunate couple was burdening me with a heavy weight.
Udi was sitting in a wedge of sunlight shining between two tall buildings and illuminating a narrow space near the entrance to the café across from the Town Inn Suites, wrapped in an overcoat. In front of him was one full cup of coffee plus two empty cups. He caught sight of me a moment before I saw him, and signalled to the waiter. I went into the hotel without waiting for him, and just after I’d locked my door, came the knock we’d agreed upon.
“No thank you, I’ve had mine,” said Udi, though I hadn’t offered him anything, “but pour yourself one. You look exhausted.” Then he glanced around the room and added, “Your room resembles that of a smelly old bachelor. Not surprising you went to her place and not here.”
“Actually, she doesn’t mind being here,” I saw fit to fire back at him.
“Bravo. A man’s man. Now, start spilling the beans. I’ve read all your reports and there wasn’t a word there about a girl or about you sleeping somewhere else.”
There was a clear tone of rebuke there, and I remembered that I was still in a kind of trial period.
I poured coffee for both of us, tidied the room a bit and sat facing him at the table in the kitchenette.
“I’m waiting,” he said.
I decided to begin with Japan. Clearly, that was the only way I could explain how my connection with Niki in Toronto had happened so quickly, and had been inevitable once we met. Udi listened in silence, now and then writing something in a notebook made of rice paper, which would disintegrate in a glass of water.
“Yes, after I saw you humiliating yourself with her on the ice rink like a little boy, I understood that the two of you were in love.”
When he said that, I realized how right he was. We were kindred spirits: Niki had brought me great joy and I
had the feeling that this was a good foundation for a life together.
Udi looked alternately at me and at his notes, and said, “So the girl knows you’re an Israeli, and knows you asked for Ronald Friedlich’s papers so you could take them to him in Cambridge. What else does she know? Your full name? How long you are here for? What for? What you do for a living?”
It was obvious that he was interested in the security angles, and not the romance.
After I satisfied him that I had kept my Mossad status a complete secret, and that Niki never asked difficult questions, he said, “I had her checked last night. There’s nothing in the files about her. Apparently she’s clean.”
“How did you check her?”
“You went to her place, right? And there’s a name on the mail box, right?”
It was very naïve of me to assume Udi wouldn’t have had me tailed.
“Didn’t you notice anything?” He threw an envelope onto the tabletop.
The first picture was of Niki holding a wall hanging in Kensington Market with me in the background, drawing. It was obvious who’d taken it. The girl with the cute smile.
I stammered something. What was I to say? That I suspected something but didn’t do anything about it?
“She’s a novice, but she ate you up without salt. She’s a trainee with another squad, and you were her target for a few days. From her reports I know quite a few things you didn’t put in yours during those days.”
That’s probably what brought him here. After the Friedlich residence episode, I’d thought Udi was going to fire me, and I was thinking the same thing now, but I was in for a surprise.
“About your complacency, and your idiosyncratic way of interpreting orders, we’ll speak another time. But about the girl, I have weighed it up and it actually suits me. She can give you excellent cover.”
Final Stop, Algiers: A Thriller Page 15
