Shake Off (10 page)

B
ack at King’s Cross Station I left a message on the Berlin answer machine to the effect that I’d sorted out the accommodation and identified several opportunities for an actual meeting place. I got on the bus up to Tufnell Park. I’d left Rachel three months’ rent and filled out some paperwork back at her office. I didn’t pursue my curiosity about her, although I sensed that she would have been willing, particularly after her two glasses of white wine at lunch. She’d shown me around town and the colleges and I’d pretended to be interested in all that history. On the other hand, I didn’t give her, as Jack might say, the cold shoulder. I told her I would be back in Cambridge over the summer and would look her up: it would be useful to have a local contact there. I had her business card in my wallet, her home number written on the back in fountain pen. I even got a kiss on the cheek in the car, when she dropped me off. I was glad when I was on the train, it was hard work playing Roberto Levi all morning, even though I did get a bit of a kick out of the whole thing.

It was early evening when I knocked on Helen’s door.

“Michel, at last, you’re here.” Wearing a strappy summer dress and sticking an earring into her earlobe, she looked like she was ready to go out. She took in my clothes. “You’re looking expensively stylish—been on a date, have we?” I shook my head but she wasn’t interested in my answer. She grabbed something from her room then came out into the hall.

“Looks like you’re going on a date yourself.” She twirled on some shoes with a slight heel, a third of the size of Rachel’s.

“You approve?” She pulled a wrap around her shoulders. The whole effect was offset by her masculine watch.

“I take great pleasure in your appearance,” I said.

“You’re such a smoothie, but I’m so glad you’re here.” She pulled on my sleeve. “Come with me, Michel.”

“Where are we going?”

“My departmental end-of-year party. I need you there.” She stood holding a small handbag covered in little shiny sequins. How could I have even thought about sleeping with Rachel? Everything about her now seemed so contrived and overdone as I stood next to Helen. The truth was that spending time with Rachel had made me ache for Helen.

“Can’t we go into your room so I can take more pleasure in your appearance?”

She smacked me on the arm with her handbag. “Later, when we come back. I want you to, I really do.” She kissed me and pulled me by the hand down the stairs I had just come up.

Twenty minutes on the upper deck at the back of the bus and it hit me, where we were going. I stopped caressing her neck. “Won’t Professor Zorba be at this party?” I asked.

“Yes, he will, and his name isn’t Zorba.” She pulled her shawl over her shoulders where I had tugged it to expose her lovely skin. She said, “He’ll be there with his wife.”

I thought about it for a minute, him being there with his wife. “So are we going as a couple?”

“Yes, we are. I want them to see us together.” She put her head on my shoulder and squeezed my thigh. “Aren’t you pleased?”

I had to consider whether I was pleased. “It depends,” I said reluctantly.

She sat up and frowned at me. “On what exactly?”

“On whether the idea is for him to see us together or for his wife to.”

She gave me a look. “That’s a shitty thing to say.” Maybe she did want me to be there for her sake, or to show him that she’d moved on. But maybe she’d thought this up with him last night, perhaps after they’d had sex. They’d possibly had a laugh about it when she explained how easy it would be to get me to come along and play boyfriend for the evening. Perhaps she even teased him with the idea that she might have to sleep with me afterwards. I tried to rein in my thoughts but instead I just saw him on top of her. “Why don’t you go home then, Michel, if it’s going to be a problem for you?” The bus had turned onto Euston Road.

“I’m sorry,” I said, although I wasn’t sure what for. “I didn’t get much sleep last night.”

“Neither did I, as it happens.”

“I don’t want to know what you were doing.”

She snapped her head round. “What’s that supposed to fucking mean? You really are behaving like an arsehole, Michel.” She took out a tissue from her bag and blew into it. I put my arm around her but she shook it off. She shredded the wet tissue. “I was with Maria, an old schoolfriend. We were talking most of the night.” I gave her a cotton handkerchief, which she blew into noisily. “We were talking about how I always manage to fuck things up.” She looked at me. “I was telling her about you, about how you might be different.” This said as if to suggest that maybe she’d got it completely wrong.

“I’m sorry, Helen. I imagined all kinds of stupid things—I don’t know what to say…” Her mascara had smudged onto her cheeks. I told her that I didn’t think we should go to the party.

“I thought it would be a good idea, but maybe you’re right.” She blew her nose again and gave me my wet handkerchief back. “They all hate me anyway.”

“I don’t believe that,” I said.

“Then you’re a fool—I’ve been sleeping with the head of the department, remember.” Her voice was full of bitter self-loathing.

“You can’t tell who you’re going to fall in love with,” I said, although I found the idea of her being in love with him nauseating.

She snorted. “Love has nothing to do with it, Michel. You really don’t know me at all.” She pulled away again and looked out onto Euston Station.

“Then we need to get to know each other better,” I said, pulling her back to me.

She relaxed into my shoulder. “Is that so? And how do you propose we do that?”

I had rehearsed the answer to this. “Eating, talking and making love,” I said.

“You’re such a charmer,” she said, sniggering in my ear and prodding my ribs. “Seriously though, I like those suggestions—I’m just not sure I like the order they’re in.”

We did eat first though, at a vegetarian Indian restaurant behind Euston Station. I resisted the urge to ask her if she’d taken Zorba there or whether she was still going to Turkey with him, and I was pleased that I didn’t spoil the mood. We ate, then took the bus back to Tufnell Park.

After we had made love she told me she was going to visit her mother in the morning. I asked her whether her father was still alive, as she never mentioned him. We were lying naked on her bed, her throat and chest still flushed. The window was open and a cool breeze dried the sweat on us. She’d chosen a different scarf to cover her bedside lamp; one that blocked out most of the light. She had a drawer full of silk scarves, and one was still tied to her right wrist, although I’d undone the other end from the bedstead. I had to repeat the question about her father.

“Do you have to think about whether he’s alive?” I joked.

She sighed. “I want to believe he’s alive, but I haven’t seen or heard from him since he disappeared three years ago, so I’m not sure.”

I looked at her. She had that look I’d seen on her face once before, like she was older than her years. “Disappeared?”

“Yes. Mum and I came home one evening after a girls’ night out to find that he had cleared out all his things. Clothes, papers, letters, books, toothbrush, even his umbrella. Everything that was his. It was as if he was trying to expunge himself from our lives. There was no note, nothing. He was just gone.”

I had to think about what she had told me. After a minute I asked, “Did you try to find him?”

“What do you think? The police said it was not unknown for men to disappear like that, although usually they just leave everything behind. Apparently it was unusual that he took all his things. My mother thinks that he may have had another woman somewhere. He traveled a lot, he was—maybe still is—a successful businessman.”

“What about his business? Surely—”

“Michel, we followed up every lead. He’d sold the business some weeks before leaving. We were well provided for. It was all very carefully planned.”

“So what do you think happened to him?” I asked.

“I don’t know; maybe he had another family somewhere. Or maybe he committed suicide.”

“What do you think?” I asked.

She turned away from me but I held her close. “I don’t know. It was more important than us, whatever it was.” I started to mutter platitudes but I could see she’d set her face hard so I shut up. “He did leave one thing,” she said. She reached out to the bedside table and put something cold and metallic in my hand. I could tell without holding it up to the light that it was her big stainless-steel watch.

B
efore Helen left the house to visit her mother the next morning she kissed me and said, “I’ve not told anyone about my father, Michel, except for Maria.” Maria, I recalled, was the friend she’d been with two nights ago, someone she’d known since school, someone she confided in. I was pleased to be a fellow confidant; it answered an unspoken question, although I wondered whether Zorba had used the scarves in the same way I had. I tried to put that from my mind. Did it even matter? Yes, somehow it did. The more I thought about it, the more it mattered. What did she see in that fool? I did extra sit-ups until I could do no more and had to lie on the floor till the fiery ache in my belly subsided. It was a first for me, that business with the scarves. I’d found the whole thing disturbing and exciting, but I didn’t want to reflect on why it was disturbing, just as I didn’t want to reflect on why I hadn’t gone back into the house after Mama’s screams had ended and the men had left.

I ran a bath and while it filled did an inventory of what was underneath it. I saw the article I’d torn out of
Le Monde
. I had a lot of other material on the massacre, culled from hours spent in libraries reading newspapers on a microfiche machine. I’d printed out anything of interest—interviews, stories and pictures. I’d requested official reports by various agencies. I’d read books by journalists, tearing out pages relevant to that day. It was all collated in a large folder in my safety deposit box underneath Harrods.

I wasn’t sure what I was going to do with all this information. I had an idea that I wanted to punish the people responsible. But who I would punish and how wasn’t yet clear to me.

After Moscow I’d had five weekends of training in East Berlin before leaving for London. It took place mostly in Potsdam, but sometimes in Beeskow, south-east of Berlin, where I was driven from East Berlin by an elderly man who spoke not once in the ten times we were together. The training involved the use of weapons, self-defense, interrogation techniques and technical surveillance. I would go over on a Friday night and come back on Sunday afternoon, staying in a cell-like room. I shot various handguns at paper targets in sound-proofed basements. I stripped the same weapons and reassembled them with a stopwatch going, all weapons you could carry about your person. The training was all given in a deadpan manner that lacked the humor of Vasily and his comrades. To kill someone you need to shoot them at least four or five times in the head, just to make sure. And it needs to be up close with a hand-held weapon. You have to put it right up against the head or very close to it, otherwise you could miss; some weapons give a massive kick, and any shot following the first could go wild. If you can’t get close enough to kill the target with your first shot, then you will need to incapacitate them with a body shot first and finish the deed close up, a
coup de grâce
. All this I learned so as to understand what I might be up against, not so that I might put these things into practice—this was made clear to me when I asked Abu Leila about it. In the back of my mind though, I pictured the men on that black day. I had seen those that took part, at least in the beginning, when they’d come into our house and interrupted our dinner, although some had worn ski masks to cover their faces. I couldn’t even be sure of the numbers involved: at least five and possibly as many as eight. People had come and gone. I could still hear their voices, but only one name was used, and it wasn’t in the article I was holding. I made a big effort to learn everything I was being taught by the Stasi. They told Abu Leila I practiced with uncommon zeal.

I counted the money in the zip-lock bag and put it back with the Greek and Swiss passports. I removed the fat envelope I had retrieved from Fadia, weighing it and holding it to the light before putting it back in the bag with everything else; I was still awaiting instruction from Abu Leila.

Lying in the bath, I wondered whether it was possible for me to have a real relationship with Helen. The obstacles were big, not least of all Abu Leila, to whom it would be a betrayal. I visualized myself telling him, but cringed at the thought. I would have to tell her the truth about myself, and no amount of insistence on my part that I would stick to the cover story would convince him otherwise. And why would it? The reality was that the attraction of having a relationship was in part telling her about my life, sharing its burdens. I’d given up much for a greater cause: I couldn’t mix with certain people, had to deny my origins, couldn’t travel to my place of birth. I lied to everyone I met and had no real friends. I envied Ramzi his wife. To have someone like
Fadia
who worried about your well-being so much she would take such a risk for you—that would be something.

I got out of the bath. I was beginning to feel sorry for myself. I reminded myself again of the people who hadn’t survived the massacre at Sabra, and what had happened to those that had some years later. It was these events that had led me to use codeine for the first time.

I’d been at university in West Berlin for a year when news reports came through of another attack on the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps. This time it was by Syrian-backed Amal (Shia Muslims) rather than Israeli-backed Phalangists (Maronite Christians)—incongruously united in their desire to rid Lebanon of all Palestinians. Within two weeks my end of the camp, the Sabra end, had been defeated and the inhabitants had either fled to the adjoining Shatila camp or been killed. After a year-long ceasefire Amal attacked the Shatila end, but the inhabitants were better prepared and put up a stiff resistance against a force ten times mightier. They were besieged for six months, with no help apart from some occasional shelling of the besiegers by friendly leftist factions situated in the mountains overlooking Beirut. Women and children were shot down by snipers as they tried to sneak out to find water, food and greatly needed medical supplies. Others were shot trying to retrieve the fallen. A year later and near starvation—this was just as I was graduating from my second year—the camp residents had asked Islamic leaders for dispensation to eat the dead. I had found the whole situation very difficult, and was desperate to do something, although I didn’t know what. Abu Leila convinced me I was already doing the right thing.

“Your time will come, Michel,” he’d said, as we drank coffee on the upper floor of the Kranzler café on the Ku’Damm on one of Abu Leila’s rare forays into West Berlin. “You need to stay focused on the bigger picture, look to the longer term.” He waved a cigarette as he spoke, drawing a hazy vision in Turkish smoke. At the time I didn’t think to ask him to be more specific, but I was angry. Angry because I was having to relive something that should not have happened the first time, never mind a second. Angry because nobody did anything about it—nobody. Angry because I didn’t know how to express my anger and because Abu Leila appeared insensitive to my feelings.

I’d left him at the Kranzler and gone to a party with some people from university. This was unusual for me, as I never attended parties. If I’d been a drinker I would have got drunk, but I wasn’t; it had made me sick when I’d tried it in Cyprus. A woman at the party, on learning I was teetotal, offered me a cannabis cigarette. I declined, telling her I didn’t smoke. She made it her mission to find something for me.

“You don’t look right, you need something to make you right,” she’d said. She returned later with a pack of codeine from the bathroom.

“They’re my mother’s. They’ll give you happy thoughts,” she said, passing me a glass of water.

She wasn’t lying. It did make me feel right, righter than I’d ever felt, and I told her so. I also told her, as we lay on her bed—the party raging below—that I loved her. We didn’t have sex because it didn’t cross our minds; it’s not that type of drug. That night was the first night that I slept without rocking my head, or even feeling the need to.

After my bath I went into Westminster to check my PO box. The only thing in it was a postcard postmarked the previous day. It was a picture of Big Ben and on the back all it said was, “I miss you a lot.”

It meant Ramzi was back and wanted to meet.