THRILLER: The Galilee Plot: (International Biological Terror, The Mossad, and... A Self-contended Couple)

by Shlomo Kalo

  “Yes,” the American lady agreed without hesitation, “Joe Stalin was paranoid too.”

  “That’s right,” my wife backed her up with excessive warmth and added by way of emphasis: “No one comes out from under a communist regime without a touch of paranoia in his heart.”

  Later, she admitted to me that she was telling the truth as she had experienced it and that she had been rather surprised by my reaction, exceeding any logical boundaries, and added: “It’s true that we have to be careful after the incident with Mr Abd Rahman, but here everything is calm… We’ve known those people for more than a month now and they’ve known us.”

  “All the same,” I retorted, “you have no conception of the other reality.”

  “You mean the communist reality?”

  I had no option but to confirm this. The atmosphere had been spoiled, and we agreed that it was time to leave the café.

  The next day we happened to be in the area. I asked my wife to wait for me while I went to the familiar toilets.

  “Take care, don’t let the American lady see you!”

  “No need to worry!” I assured her. The moving staircase carried me up four floors to the familiar café. I stood in the doorway and glanced briefly at our regular table – with the two-seater bench. A corpulent, middle-aged American man was sitting there. The “American lady” moved across, stood behind him, and with undisguised anger, began pulling back curtains and opening windows. Wind and sun flooded in, swamping the American who tried in vain to compress his big body. I turned to the toilets. On the way out I met the large American, who scanned me with a suspicious look, and asked:

  “Are you Swiss, sir?”

  “No.”

  “Tourist?”

  “Yes.”

  “Me too. These Swiss guys – weird or what?”

  “I don’t think so,” I gave my honest opinion.

  “I just sat down for a few minutes in this café” – he pointed with his heavy chin at “our” seat, now deserted. “Some lady comes along, don’t know if she’s quite sane or not, tries every which way she can to make me move. I asked her – why? She said – you’re taking the place of a charming couple who may be arriving here soon. Isn’t that crazy?” the American asked in a self-righteous voice.

  “Crazy,” I agreed, and hurriedly took my leave of him, running to the downward escalator.

  My wife responded to the story:

  “Poor woman! She’s going to be keeping our place for us for days to come. She’ll be so disappointed! Let’s hope it doesn’t interfere with her psychiatric treatment – you and your communist paranoia!”

  I shared this hope.

  Chapter Fourteen

  We sat in our spacious, familiar room, and didn’t switch on the television.

  “Interested?” I asked and handed her the remote control.

  “Not at all. I prefer the quiet, the sights, the rain falling calmly, mercifully I would say.” And then she added: “The weather forecasts have got it completely wrong.”

  “Not completely,” I commented.

  “It seems, the weather forecasters aren’t doing their job properly. Or perhaps,” she added, “this profession isn’t an exact science.”

  “A science, yes, and exact – yes, but all the same, it depends on who is doing it”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” my wife asked, her curiosity aroused, “What are you referring to?”

  “Getting the job done is what counts. In other words” – I gave the answer in advance to the question, or perhaps, a flood of questions, “they aren’t doing a conscientious job.”

  “What is a conscientious job?”

  “A job done by someone who loves it and is a believer.”

  “That sounds a bit idealistic,” she commented, with some justification.

  “A story occurs to me,” I countered, “about professions and the way they are practised. It’s a story that’s all true, and it’s from an Arab source.”

  “I’m all ears.”

  “In fact,” I said, “I heard it from Amin Abu Halil, one fine evening in New York City. We were sitting in my room, going through material that he was going to be tested on, and the subject of choosing professions came up. Amin claimed that according to the ancient Arab perception, still valid today, a man is predestined to a certain profession, even if he thinks it’s his own choice. In fact, God guides him towards it. And this is the story that Amin told me.

  “In the Muslim world, a few decades ago, pilgrims to Mecca complained to the sovereign, King Ibn Saud, about a small Muslim tribe, living in the mountains, all of whose members practised a single trade, exclusively, handed down from father to son and grandson and great grandson, for centuries. And the trade, on which this small mountain tribe subsisted – was plunder.

  “King Ibn Saud sent a high-powered delegation to talk to the dignitaries of the tribe and demand that they abandon their ancient profession, and stop harassing decent Muslims in their efforts to uphold the commandment of Hajj, supreme among commandments.

  “The dignitaries of the tribe listened attentively to the eminent delegation, considered what they had to say, and gave an unequivocal answer:

  For as long as the tribe has existed, it has made its living from robbing pilgrims, a profession enjoined upon us by Allah, and we know no other trade. Nor have we any intention of learning another trade and dishonouring the tradition of our forefathers. We regret this defiance of His Majesty the King.

  “Ibn Saud, ‘His Majesty’ was enraged. He sent an even more high-powered delegation, with a categorical command to pass on:

  This plunder is to be stopped immediately and at any price. I shall not tolerate any such profession in my kingdom, a profession that derives not from Allah but the laziness of mankind, those who are weak in mind and in body and under the influence of Satan. If I hear of any further acts of pillage against holy pilgrims, I shall not leave a remnant or a relic of this rebellious tribe, I shall exterminate and destroy and leave no trace of it on God’s holy earth and under His clear skies. This is my command, given to you by divine right.

  “This time, the small tribe made no reply at all to the distinguished delegation, for better or worse. And in fact, Ibn Saud displayed exemplary patience, until the next Hajj, when a column of pilgrims was attacked and robbed by the practitioners of that ancient profession. He mustered his soldiers and led them down to the sea, where they all bathed, put on their warlike headgear, took up their ancient swords, and prayed. And King Ibn Saud addressed his troops, and made them swear to destroy and exterminate every living thing in that tribal encampment, whether man or beast, and burn the encampment and let no one evade the avenging sword of God, and obliterate the memory of this rebellious tribe, from the face of the holy earth and from under the clear skies of God. And as he said, so it was. The well-drilled army attacked with their ancient curved swords, set alight everything that would burn and slaughtered, over one whole day, all that belonged to that rebellious tribe, man and beast, people irrespective of age and sex.”

  I admitted this was an interesting story.

  “And it’s all true. No Scheherazade here! ” Amin assured me.

  Chapter Fifteen

  We caught colds. With everything that goes with catching cold – especially abroad. Pains in the joints, difficulty breathing, runny noses, coughing, low temperature, using tissues by the ton and a strong desire to go home. A sense of home, powerful and radical, incomparable, unambiguous certitude that it exists. Or as my wife, with the deepest roots in the homeland, summed it up: “Abroad has exhausted itself!”

  In my youth, in my schooldays, my classmates made persistent efforts to make me aware I was a foreigner. The country, which I, like them, called my country, was not my country in any sense whatsoever, in any way at all. I argued. I claimed that both my grandfathers fought to liberate our country from Turkish rule, I said “our country” in a faltering voice, because I knew I couldn’t hope to convince my classmates, no
t under any circumstances, not at all. And all the patriotic songs, giving wings to the young spirit, which we sang in class with youthful, irresistible enthusiasm, did not apply to me. They applied to all the others, not me. Because I wasn’t a son of the land that I called my country. I was an alien plant. More than that – I wasn’t wanted. From one eternity to the next. My new homeland I didn’t love. But it was the only homeland offered to me. I needed a homeland as a child needs a supportive, affectionate mother, loving or not.

  Catching a cold wasn’t the reason behind the primeval sacred longings – honest, powerful, revered, sincere. Rather it was the age-old pain of the orphan, forever a fugitive, the acute self-awareness, growing more intense, consuming every part – good or bad, sincerity that nothing can resist, the truth that you have a homeland and you’re prepared to sacrifice everything for it – however pathetic this may be, theatrical and staged – and there’s nothing to compare with it. And this is what my wife declared as a natural, self-evident conclusion: “Abroad has exhausted itself!” And it wasn’t the illness, which of course we had to contend with, the first priority being to find a suitable answer for my wife, a concise answer to her question: “What is illness?”

  The answer:

  In the Middle Ages, they called man a “microcosm”; i.e. a miniaturised copy of the world, which exists by virtue of preservation of divine justice and the balance of natural forces – and as it has turned out, they were absolutely right. “Progress” and “culture”, which try to make out of every object and every topic something synthetic, have ignored some important issues, opposing the excess of arrogance that suffuses them.

  “The person who dispels God from his presence, and he is the average person today, lives on his senses. Believing only in the senses, devoted to the senses and dying by them. You could say, man tries to derive sensual pleasure from everything.”

  “Like for example?” she interjected.

  “Like for example, eating not because you’re hungry and you need nourishment, but as often as possible, for the pleasure of the palate alone – and the result is?” I addressed the question to my audience and she was not slow to answer:

  “Sickness.”

  “And when one tries to make sexual indulgence a principle of life, the result is?”

  “AIDS.”

  “That’s the modern outcome. Alongside AIDS march those famous war heroes – syphilis, gonorrhoea, and in recent times, chlamydia trachomatis and herpes. And no doubt, sexual promiscuity will have further surprises in store for us. And finally, at the moment, pain-killing drugs such as morphine, cocaine and similar substances, are turning into sources of sensual pleasure, with results that are known only too well. And in case I haven’t told you this before, in the fifties I knew a doctor called Serr, a Jew of Polish origin, sent by the Germans to the death-camps. He told me, and later he published an article about it in a prestigious medical journal, that in one of the camps he found some of his former patients, including cases of acute heart disease, cancer and diabetes. He examined them again after several months spent in the extermination camp, and could find no symptoms of those serious medical conditions. He reported on this to the German doctor who was his superior, and the latter, genius that he was, ordered the execution of those patients, although they had been cured, by the lethal hunger and other privations suffered in the camp, of diseases that were reckoned incurable.”

  “German genius indeed,” my wife concurred. “What’s to be done?” she demanded to know.

  “From everything you have heard, what is the conclusion?”

  “Not to over-indulge.”

  “Bull’s-eye!” I declared. “In all senses, in all sectors.”

  “And in the meantime, what are we going to do about the illness we’re suffering from?”

  “We must methodically probe the crevices of our consciousness, bring out and replay the fantasies we’ve entertained recently, the plans we’ve made for the future, the visible things and the invisible, and when we find the black sheep, we’ll expel them with courage and without compromise, a total expulsion.”

  A few days passed. One morning we both rose and found, that of all the pains, in all parts of the body, of all the appeals for mercy – no trace was left. And then my wife put a question that she had been keeping for a suitable time, and the time was now:

  “What about all those invisible creatures?” she asked, and added by way of clarification, “Microbes, viruses?”

  “If body and mind are in balance,” I answered her calmly, “they can come to terms with them, just as an efficient housewife comes to terms with the dirt in her house. She has vacuum cleaners and other instruments available to her and her home is always clean and sparkling, like yours in fact.”

  “So it’s good to be a housewife.”

  “It’s excellent to be a housewife, if that is what you really want to be. If you’re a housewife and you don’t want to be a housewife, it will make you ill, and your family too.”

  And although I am opposed, totally opposed, to anything betraying the slightest hint of preaching, and what I have just finished writing gives off a distinct and more or less tolerable whiff of childish sermonising, and you, my reader, are no doubt proud of your intellectual atheism – try all the same to retain in your memory what you have just read. I hope you don’t need it, and if it turns out that you do need it, don’t be ashamed to make the necessary use of it. You have nothing to lose, except a morsel of pride which is of no real value at all, and may you and yours be well.

  Chapter Sixteen

  In the evening, the phone once again shattered the blessed silence of the room. My wife and I both ran to the phone. She got there first, and picked up the receiver with an air of triumph.

  “Shmulik!” she announced, handing over to me.

  “Ask him,” she added as an afterthought, “to stop sending us all these demons from Hell.”

  I took the receiver.

  “Please tell your wife,” Shmulik responded, having evidently overheard her, “that we’re not the ones sending you demons from Hell, these or any others.” It seemed that Shmulik had been kept well-informed. Now he wanted to hear an account from first hand a “full account” as he put it. I complied willingly enough.

  “Mr Abd Rahman came here to pay a courtesy call. His name means ‘merciful’ but he doesn’t live up to it.”

  I told him everything. He uttered a grunt of satisfaction.

  “The version you gave to the police inspector was very good,” he concluded, “just make sure you stick to it all the way. It’s possible they’ll call you in for another interview. Sometimes, in democratic countries, the police are working under pressure from the government and from the public, who demand to know everything in detail, as precise as possible and the more sensational the better. Remember what you said and don’t deviate from it to left or right. Until they realise they have no prospect of getting anything more out of you, even a fabricated or imaginary version. I’m having to watch what I say in this conversation too. It’s very possible that interested parties, and there’s no shortage of them, are eavesdropping on us at this moment, with all ears.”

  Later, when we met back at home, Shmulik told me more:

  “Your assessment of Mr Rahman was quite correct. He had done this a number of times. And if you want to know, one of the passports he held was an Israeli one. He was a Bedou from this country, husband to five wives and father to more than thirty offspring, all of them supported out of national insurance. Recently he’s earned millions from his special talent, shooting accurately over a considerable distance from any position required, however impossible it may be. He got a contract on you and set out to do the job. Our services took it on themselves to stop him, and they hired the good offices of Paul Atlas, Abd Rahman’s sworn competitor. Mr Atlas went everywhere Mr Rahman went, even following him to the toilet if that was necessary. He went into your hotel and sat down not far from Mr Rahman, trying to find a suitable position,
that wouldn’t look suspicious and would give him the best prospect of taking him out in time, as it was obvious Rahman was determined to act, and soon. Paul Atlas wasn’t favourably impressed by you. You struck him as physically weak and he said he wouldn’t bet on you. Everything happened with unexpected speed and Mr Paul Atlas did a sterling job, at the right moment and in the right way, and earned 20,000 dollars, in ready cash, from his employers, one of whom was the one talking to you now. It occurs to me, that a suitable post at the Nes Ziona Biological Institute might appeal to you. One way or the other, we were all relieved with the way it worked out and I guess you were too, your wife as well. We’ve been drinking to your health,” and he concluded this conversation with the vehement Biblical exhortation: “Be strong and bold!” I responded with a “Be strong and bold!” no less vehement than his.

  The next day I was recalled to the police station. They wanted to know about the phone conversation I had held yesterday – who was the other speaker, what was it about, and what were my connections with him. It seems one of the hotel employees had leaked to them the information about the call, and because the conversation had been in Hebrew, they were not much the wiser. With commendable composure I declared I wasn’t prepared to answer these questions and I concluded – playing the slighted tourist – I wasn’t obliged to either.

  The business of upholding the law is something which the Swiss police evidently take very seriously. The officer turned to me and with plain and emphatic brusqueness he declared:

  “You’re not a fool. You know that when a top-ranking hitman is sent to take you out, there’s nothing casual about it. I haven’t a shadow of a doubt you know perfectly well why he came after you, and you know perfectly well it’s my duty to get something logical out of you. Give me a line to follow, a line with something solid behind it, as to who wanted to eliminate you and why, and I’ll leave you alone. You have my word as an officer. Around here, the word of an officer counts for a great deal more than any other kind of promise, oath or solemn vow. Help me Sir, and I can help you.”