Shake Off (22 page)
Authors: Mischa Hiller
A
week after Khalil’s last visit I went to the main post office in downtown Beirut, still scarred with the acne of many wars. I took a circuitous route, changing buses several times and walking a lot. Not because I thought anyone was still interested in me; I’d spent the week making sure nobody was. It was mainly to work up the nerve to do what I was about to do. It also gave me a chance to reflect on what Khalil had revealed. When I’d walked him to the front door for the last time he’d turned and stopped.
“You know we could use someone with your skills,” he said. I couldn’t help laughing, but he’d been serious and frowned at my frivolity. “So you’re happy living here, teaching kids, interpreting for the Western media and charity workers, no money, no prospects?”
I shrugged, trying to remember whether I’d told him about the interpreting, but I hadn’t.
“And the cause?” he persisted. “You could go back to Europe, we could get you a passport.” I imagined flying to London and knocking on Helen’s door in Tufnell Park. I doubted she was still there.
“The cause will carry on with or without me.” I gestured to the balcony door and said, “Maybe the cause is in the camp, not in Europe.”
“I’m not so sure about that,” he’d said. “Your beloved camp will be around for some time, that’s for sure.”
When he was gone I went to the shelf above the bed in my small bedroom, a bedroom the size of my room in Tufnell Park. Some of these books I’d been made to leave behind when I moved from Beirut the first time, and some were new. I pulled out a slim volume of Kahlil Gibran’s poetry and aphorisms in English. It was the edition Helen had given me in Scotland, taken from her mother’s untidy shelves. Inside the flap was written—and I only saw this a few weeks after coming home—“Michel. See page 12. Helen X.”
I let it fall open to page twelve, where a few lines were messily underlined; she must have done it sometime between leaving the house in Scotland and taking the taxi to the airport.
It was but yesterday I thought myself a fragment
quivering without rhythm in the sphere of life.
Now I know that I am the sphere, and all life
in rhythmic fragments moves within me.
Was she referring to herself, to me or to both of us? I think I understood it in relation to myself. Maybe I was finding a way to become myself again, discovering some peace, even a small purpose. I was learning to master my own destiny, not an easy thing to do having been enslaved without realizing it.
* * *
Many questions remained unanswered, only one of which still haunted me as I made my way to the post office. What was Abu Leila going to say to me just before he was killed? He’d wanted to discuss my future. Was it going to be more dissembling, something to make sure I fulfilled the role that Khalil (another dissembler) said was planned for me? I chose to believe otherwise. I chose to believe that it was going to be something more, that perhaps he was going to warn me. Maybe I was deluding myself but the more probable alternative was too much to bear for the moment.
I waited in line until a counter was free in the post office. Since returning to Beirut, when I’d had time to muse on everything that had happened, go over every detail of my life in the new light of Abu Leila’s deception—every conversation, every book he’d given me, every task I’d been asked to perform—I’d regretted spending all that time reading about Jewish history and the Holocaust. I wanted to reject everything to do with him, to purge myself of his influence. But I couldn’t really do it, any more than I could purge myself of the day of the killings or of meeting Helen. You couldn’t wipe things clean and start again, you had to deal with events, to incorporate them into your being without letting them cripple you.
The truth is that my eyes had been opened by him to things that I probably wouldn’t otherwise have become aware of. So thanks to Abu Leila, or Amir Serfati, I had at least come to know my enemy, and to know him firsthand. “We are a family of uprooted gypsies, outsiders wherever we go,” he’d told me. I’d thought at the time he was referring to Palestinians, but perhaps he’d been referring to Jews.
Maybe, after his pretense at being Palestinian for so long, he’d meant both.
I made it to the front of the queue and was directed to a counter. A pretty headscarfed young woman smiled at me. I told her I wanted to open a new PO box and handed her my Lebanese passport. After she had done the paperwork I asked to send a telegram in English.
“Where to?” the woman asked. Her scarf only half-
covered
her head, as if she thought, as I did, that it was a shame to completely hide her glossy black hair. I slipped a piece of paper through the gap in the glass; I wanted it to be accurate. I pointed at the paper.
“That’s the address,” I said. I had written everything out in capitals. “The message is below.”
She examined it carefully and said, “I have a cousin studying in London.”
I smiled at this information. “Is that so? What’s she studying?”
“She wants to become a doctor.” She stuck out the tip of her tongue as she painstakingly wrote Helen’s name and the University College address out on the telegram slip, taking her time over the word “anthropology.” I had no idea if
Helen
was still at the college, but I was hoping that someone would forward it to her. And even if it was forwarded I had no idea if she would respond, but then you can spend your whole life wondering and waiting.
The woman looked up at me, holding the paper I’d given her. “Is this all you want to say?”
I nodded. She copied it out slowly and then turned it around and asked me to check it.
I read the message: “Dearest Helen. Have sorted myself out. Would love to hear from you.”
“That’s perfect,” I said. “Put my PO box as the return address.”
“How do you want to sign it?”
“Just Michel,” I said.
“Dear God,” she said, addressing the heavens, “you can’t send a telegram to a woman without signing off in a manner that shows your intentions.”
She was right. I smiled at her and thought about it.
“OK. Sign it ‘
Ton beau
,’” I said, feeling the embarrassment in my face.
She looked at me and smiled. “Well, let’s hope she thinks so, yes?”
I laughed out loud. Loud enough to attract the attention of everyone in the post office, but I didn’t care.
I would like to thank those who gave this book
verisimilitude.
And thanks, Fran, for making things better.
Reading Group Guide
Shake Off
By Mischa Hiller
The author of
Shake Off
is interviewed by his Mulholland Books editor, Wes Miller.
Let me start by saying
Shake Off
was one of those novels I just knew we needed for the Mulholland Books list as soon as I started reading it. The degree to which you bring readers into Michel’s world—a world in which almost anything is either a weapon or a tool, in which everyone Michel meets may be trying to lead him astray—is just astounding.
One of the things I’ve noticed about
Shake Off,
rereading that evocative first chapter, is how absolutely chockful of seemingly genuine tradecraft the opening section is. Had you done deep research into the tricks of the espionage trade in writing
Shake Off
? Were there books or individuals (whether you can tell us about them or not) that were particularly useful in crafting such an air of authenticity? And did you always know you’d start the novel with what is practically a how-to on the art of subterfuge, or was this something that came later as you were figuring out how to introduce Michel’s world to readers?
Well, let
me
start off by saying how proud I am to be published by Mulholland, whose list includes some great writers. To answer your question: yes, I did a lot of research, but I was also lucky to have access to someone who had gone through this kind of training. There are books you can buy that detail surveillance and countersurveillance, but it’s the little insights that make it real, like trainee surveillance officers using dead-letter drops to get their paychecks.
I felt the training was an integral part of the book in the sense that it is part of what makes Michel and explains his paranoia. A lot of spy books imply that this sort of constant subterfuge can be lived with easily, without any effect. My premise was that actually the whole idea of living a lie is quite damaging.
I should add here that it’s not just the tradecraft that’s written with such command in
Shake Off
—it’s the sense of alienation with which Michel views his surroundings. It’s something I personally responded to in an unexpected way. You and I have never actually discussed this before, but we are both mixed race—you’re half Palestinian, half British, and I’m of Chinese, German, and Irish descent. I’m not sure if your heritage was something I knew about you when I started reading
Shake Off,
and Michel himself is not biracial, but at least to me, the way Michel describes his sense of not quite belonging to his surroundings (something I know I’ve at times struggled with) was extremely well-taken and quite emotionally accurate.
Was cultural alienation something you’d known you wanted to write about, or a theme that grew naturally out of the genre as seen through your own particular cultural perspective? (Did you begin wanting to write a spy novel, or by wanting to write about a Christian orphan from the Sabra refugee camps?)
That’s an interesting question. This idea of belonging and identity is something that interests me, no doubt, and I recently wrote an essay on what it means to me to be of mixed race, and the challenges this poses (in terms of belonging and acceptance) and the advantages it can provide, especially as a writer, in terms of being able to look at things “from the side,” as it were. I mentioned in a previous blog post about how I drew on my own feelings when imparting the alienation Michel felt in the book, and of his being a fish out of water. One could say that this was a theme I wanted to explore to some extent, and indeed the outcome of the book is his way of addressing this loss of identity. As for wanting to write a spy novel or a book about someone from the camp, I think both came to me simultaneously. What would happen, I thought, if an orphan was groomed for espionage and placed in an alien environment? Also, I did think, how great it would be to have a Palestinian protagonist in a thriller.
I’ve given much thought to genre and subgenre in the years I’ve spent working exclusively with suspense fiction since the launch of Mulholland Books. I’ve heard it said that it’s often those moments outside of those expected from the conventions of the form that affect you the most strongly. (Michael Connelly and Mark Billingham touched on this in their conversation on MulhollandBooks.com earlier this summer—the “looking out the window” moments from Connelly’s Bosch novels being some of Billingham’s favorites—and there’s a TED talk with JJ Abrams where he mentions subgenre in discussing the unspoken reasons a film like
Jaws
becomes part of the cultural lexicon.)
Shake Off
does this better than most in the slow introduction of Helen, Michel’s flatmate, into Michel’s otherwise almost hermetically sealed life—their budding romance is the reason that suddenly this nail-biter of paranoia, dead drops, and clandestine missions becomes an almost lyrically written love story as well. Many, many writers struggle with the idea of subgenre and romance in particular—do you have any tips to share with any colleagues who might be reading? What would you (humbly) say about writing Helen and Michel’s story makes their relationship seem more genuine than most? And are Helen and Michel based on any people in particular or do they serve as amalgams of people you’ve known?
I am pleased, as reviews and readers have suggested, that I have managed to escape the confines of the genre. To me this is the greatest compliment I can be paid as a writer. Genre can be limiting (both in terms of writing and what people will read), so if, as a writer, you can fuse more than one genre, or transcend the genre you are ostensibly writing in, without pretention or creating a horrible mess, then you may be onto something. You can appreciate this effect better in great films, as you mentioned; they are about something greater than the plot, which is often incidental.
For me,
Shake Off
could easily be about Michel and Helen’s relationship, with some spying and politics that get in the way, rather than the other way round, and my only advice would be to give as much thought and weight to one aspect of a book as you do another. Unfortunately, a lot of books, and films, bolt something on (usually the “love interest”) rather than weave it in, but it is obvious and therefore unsatisfying.
Michel and Helen are not based on particular people, but there are aspects in each that I have observed in others and myself.
Your earlier novel
Sabra Zoo
focused on the Sabra and Shatila massacre of 1982 in Beirut, Lebanon. Michel Khoury is a survivor of the Sabra massacre, an event that haunts him throughout the novel. I believe you were living in Beirut at the time of the Sabra and Shatila massacre—what was it like, being in Sabra then? How would you describe living in cities torn apart by sectarian violence to Americans, whose almost sole point of reference would have to be the events of 9/11?
It is difficult to explain what it is like to people who haven’t experienced it, which I guess is why some of us write books about it. I suppose, therefore, people could do worse than read
Sabra Zoo
to get a feel for what it was like in Lebanon at that time. But there are other fine books that deal with conflicts in a serious and sensitive fashion. A couple of years ago, after
Sabra Zoo
was published, I read
Half of a Yellow Sun
by Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche, which is set against the Nigeria-Biafra war of which I was completely ignorant. It is a powerful book that I felt had effectively tackled the Nigerian Civil War in a way that I had aspired to do with
Sabra Zoo
for the Lebanon Civil War.
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a crucial part of the drama of
Shake Off
. While in a less astute writer’s hands, treatment of the conflict might have seemed more didactic and overtly polemical, because of the work you’ve done in crafting Michel as such a seemingly real and empathetic character, the Palestinian perspective (and the Israelis’ as well, through Michel’s reading and education) comes through in remarkably nuanced fashion. For me, those sections of
Shake Off
that address the conflict head-on reminded me in a way of some of Dave Eggers’s later work—another testament to
Shake Off
’s complexity.
Given that you’ve done such great work in depicting the nuances of the conflict—to such a degree that you’ve made even this self-professed Apathetic American feel deeply for the plight of Michel and those like him—what is your view of the current Israeli-Palestinian conflict? Fully realizing what an impossible question this is, what do you think it would take for a solution to be reached—and would there ever be one that will satisfy both ends of the negotiations?
Well, I am pleased that it has had this effect, and I’ve had emails from people expressing similar sentiments. Fiction is a great way to give narratives that are rarely heard an airing, and I thought Eggers did that brilliantly with
Zeitoun
.
This is probably not the forum to propose a detailed solution to the Israel-Palestine problem, but I would start with the naive and basic premise that everyone living there should have equal rights.
The PLO is still active and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is still unresolved. Given this, why did you decide set
Shake Off
in 1989, before the end of the Cold War, instead of the modern day? Other than the later historical landmarks that would influence parts of the story (the Madrid conference of 1991, the Oslo Accords, etc.), would you say that this novel could at least in spirit be set in modern times?
Yes, it could be set now, but that was such a fascinating time—a year that culminated in the fall of the Berlin wall—with the PLO still being supported by the Soviet Union and its allies within the context of the Cold War. Also, the spying game was a lot more interesting then because it was still people-driven rather than technology driven. Intelligence officers today spend more time in front of a screen than talking to agents. A contemporary book would therefore look different, but there is certainly still plenty of political intrigue to mine.
This interview originally appeared on mulhollandbooks.com.
