Yasmine (15 page)

Before returning to London, Kabi met Siomka, his chief, for a regular briefing. But even before the coffee was brought in, Siomka told him, “We’ve decided to change your field of activity.”

Kabi was astonished. He pulled his chair closer to the chief’s desk and, looking straight into his eyes said, “May I ask why?”

“After the war, the head of the Mossad decided it was time to update our priorities. We’ve concluded that we need to invest a major effort in Iraq and the Persian Gulf, and who better for this mission than you. You’re to go to Khorramshahr. The area is swarming with Iraqi Shi’ite smugglers, an ideal site for agent recruitment.”

He offered Kabi a cigarette, and watched him staring blankly at the ashtray.

“Khorramshahr?” Kabi said at last, stunned.

Siomka took off his glasses and said in a softer tone, “I know it sounds like being exiled to the ends of the earth, but it isn’t. The region is beautiful and exciting, and I’m sure you won’t be sorry. Incidentally, London will wait for you, and one day we’ll send you back there. You’re leaving in two weeks, and in the meantime learn a little basic Persian, so you can get around. Anyway, you will hardly need it in Khorramshahr – they mostly
speak Iraqi Arabic there. Our head of station in Iran, Amram Teshuvah, is expecting you. You coordinate your cover with him.” With this he ended the interview and stood up.

Kabi left the chief’s office with the mission file in his hand. Inside he found the name of a Persian teacher who lived in Tel Aviv and decided to look him up straight away. Why Khorramshahr? He had become familiar with London, and even liked the place. There he had found Miss Sylvia, the legendary English teacher from his school in Baghdad; he had renewed contact with George Imari, his childhood friend and relative, and had also managed to recruit a few agents. Iran had never interested him. Now and then he read something about the Shah, and noticed the beautiful Soraya, sister of King Farouk of Egypt, who had become Queen of Iran, and who aroused his pity when the Shah cast her off because she was infertile.

In Tel Aviv he went into Braun’s bookshop on Allenby Street and searched for titles in English about the geography and history of Iran. He found what he was looking for and a saleswoman took his order and promised to send the books to his address.

Kabi then found a public telephone to call the Persian teacher, who immediately invited him to his house on Aliyah Street.

The elderly and infirm man set him times for their lessons, but added, “Always make sure that I’m home before you come from our holy city. Unfortunately, I spend much of my time in the emergency ward.”

From the very first lesson Kabi realised that he had a first-rate teacher, and his own familiarity with Arabic characters which were fortunately also used in Persian, made study all the easier. The lilt of the language as spoken by the old man also pleased
him, and he made a point of imitating it. In the following days the teacher also taught him the vocalisation of the muezzin in Iranian mosques, and lent him tapes of prayers and Quranic readings in the Iranian manner.

Two weeks later, close to midnight, Kabi landed in Tehran and took a room in the Kiyan Hotel. The next morning he met Amram Teshuvah in the hotel lobby; Amram was a stocky, moustachioed type who invariably had a cheap local cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth. He briefed Kabi, set him targets and tasks and handed him a file of information including maps and phone numbers to learn by heart. It was decided that he would present himself as Amir Abbas Mahmoud, an Iraqi from Baghdad who had emigrated to London when the Ba’ath Party came to power.

Before he left, Amram said, “I suggest that you tour the city.”

Amir Abbas Mahmoud, alias Kabi, sat in the hotel lobby, drinking coffee and watching the guests. He was especially intrigued by the sheikhs in their traditional robes, presumably visiting from the Gulf principalities and Saudi Arabia. His time in Europe had taught him that the first hours in a strange city were most instructive in absorbing its atmosphere and sensing its pulse, and he looked forward to touring the place on his own. Outside he found himself swallowed up by the crowd – Kurds in their colourful garments, slant-eyed people from Khorasan, Turkomen who looked like the pictures of Genghis Khan’s horsemen, Tehran’s ragged poor, wandering aimlessly, and peasants in rubber sandals from different regions. He listened to their voices and tried in vain to identify their dialects. Was this the famous Persian diversity he had read about?

Wherever he went he saw the eyes of the Shi’ites’ revered Imam Ali, which reminded him of the Shi’ite town of Kifl that he and his family used to enter when they made a pilgrimage to the tomb of the Prophet Ezekiel. Once, when was a child, and they were passing through the market he had innocently touched an apple. The stall-holder was furious, screaming “Unclean Jew!” a cry that still reverberated in his soul. To placate the man, his father had bought the whole box of apples and later threw them all on a rubbish heap…

As he walked he attracted pedlars like leeches, and began to fear that he was being followed. To shake them off, he went into a small mosque and prayed like a regular Shi’ite.

In the south of the city, on the bank of a canal, he saw women washing clothes and sellers of food washing big tin bowls. The bowls were for serving
Kale pache
, a greasy soup made from the heads and feet of sheep which, once cooked, were proudly displayed on wooden benches beside the cauldrons of soup.

Walking north he noted that the canals, which carried the melted snow from the Alborz mountains, were running cleaner. The streets also looked different, lined with tall chestnut trees. In the Shemiran district there were grand houses, fine villas, and Niavaran Palace, the home of the Shah. Here the women were wearing European dresses and the men fashionable suits and ties.

That night, in the hotel room in alien Tehran, where he had never expected to be, Kabi lay awake for a long time. When at last he fell asleep he dreamed of his beloved Uncle Hizkel, whom they had left behind, imprisoned in Baghdad. He woke up in alarm, drank some water and tried to calm down.

In the morning Amram Teshuvah took him to Tehran’s bazaar. Kabi was astounded – it was many times bigger than the souk in Jerusalem, or even Baghdad’s Souk el-Sharja. There were countless shops selling superb carpets, scores selling gold jewellery, and crowds of women in traditional robes that enfolded them from head to foot.

Amram stopped at an unimposing shop where a money-changer sat on a bench in the doorway, stacking handfuls of coins in a mechanical way. They both went inside the long narrow shop and, behind a coarse cotton screen at the end, they entered a side chamber furnished with a Persian rug, a Damascene table and cane armchairs in the middle. There they waited a while until they were joined by a grey-haired man with big ears and a furtive manner.

Teshuvah introduced him: this was their contact man, an agent and spy handler who was famous in the Mossad. Kabi was curious. The man looked like any one of the money-changers in the market, not in the least like a living legend. Settling in an armchair the contact man took out a string of beads and rolled them deftly, chatting easily with Amram Teshuvah about everything and nothing. Not once did they mention their work.

The next day Kabi flew to Abadan with the contact man, who talked at length about Shi’ite mourning customs. Kabi noted that he was still discussing extraneous matters, as though they were not in the midst of an important mission. Preparing to land, the plane passed through Iraqi air-space, between Basra, the city of palms, and Kuwait. The landscape that revealed itself was enchanting – the Shatt al-Arab waterway flowed through the great yellow desert, flanked as far as the eye could see by tall date palms.

“Khorramshahr,” said the contact man, pointing to the city
they were approaching. “It has the Shatt al-Arab to the west and the Karoun to the northwest.”

“So much water…we should be so lucky.”

A wave of moist heat smelling of rotten cabbage hit them when they emerged from the plane. The smell clung to nose, face, hair, clothes – everything. Kabi feared he’d never get rid of it. It was the petroleum stink of the huge oil refineries in Abadan which, prevented from evaporating by the humidity, turned the air into soup. The contact man seemed unperturbed by the stench and Kabi didn’t know what to make of this strange and mysterious man. He wanted to be alone, to bemoan his fate for landing him in this hole. How the hell would he live with this smell, the humidity and the infernal heat? The contact man launched into another leisurely lecture, this time about the climate. Kabi wanted to tell him to shut up but didn’t dare. They boarded a taxi and drove straight to a used-car lot, where they bought a second-hand jeep.

All the way to Khorramshahr the contact man sang sad Iranian songs and the heat grew worse and worse. Kabi remembered that someone had told him before he left for Tehran, “Some days in that region the temperature reaches 115 degrees. The tar melts on the roads and you feel the end of the world is coming.”

The landscape actually looked familiar – an abundance of palm trees lined up in endless avenues, fellahin watering their fields, standing in channels with their gowns hitched up to their sashes, digging in the muddy loess soil.

“These are the Mediyyah, Iraqi Arabs who speak a dialect of their own and inhabit the marshes in the border area. These people are your clay, with them you will make your bricks,” said the contact man. He put his hand on Kabi’s shoulder and
looked at him as if seeing him for the first time. “You look like them. You’ll easily blend into the local landscape, and everything will be all right.” These last words he said in Hebrew.

They stopped beside a big single-storey house. A man wearing a keffiyeh tied around his head opened the door and greeted the contact man with a kiss as if he were a brother. They exchanged greetings in the Iraqi-Muslim Arabic that Kabi knew so well.

In the living room, a boy brought them chai with sugar cubes. “Amir Abbas Mahmoud is my new associate here in Khorramshahr,” said the contact man. “Please regard him as a member of the family.”

“
Ala ayni wa’ala rasi
, upon my eyes and upon my head,” promised the host. “You’re Shi’ite?” he asked Kabi, who nodded.

“
Ya Ali
!” said the host, naming the revered imam. He led them to an adjoining apartment consisting of two furnished rooms. He showed them the rooms and made Amir Abbas Mahmoud swear that if he needed anything at all he would not hesitate to ask for it.

Kabi fondled the moustache he’d begun to grow from the moment he was told he was going to the Iran/Iraq border, and carried his two cases into the apartment, his mind already on his mission to acquire agents and find smugglers who had connections in the military, the CIA and the Iraqi government. At first glance they all looked the same, humble Muslims dressed in robes and keffiyehs. The heat and humidity exhausted him.

“Let’s go out for chai,” said the contact man. He led Kabi to a
chaikhaneh
, a shadowy tea-house with stools and tables made of unpolished wood, as in the common tea-houses in Iraq. Kabi looked at the big copper samovars, the heaps of charcoal and
small pots of concentrated tea, and was elated by the old familiar sight. They put sugar cubes in their mouths, drank strong fragrant tea from small glasses, smoked a narghile and played
mahbous
, a variety of backgammon that called for skill, ingenuity and patience. The contact man’s game was surprising, full of unexpected moves, but, none-the-less, he lost two games in a row. Although Kabi thought it was impolite to beat his host, he didn’t want to lose intentionally as the man was shrewd enough to notice.

“How do we operate here?” he asked.

“Money and women. Sometimes also men, mainly adolescent boys and children. But don’t make the mistake that Amram and the Europeans make. Your best prospect is not a man who lives with another man, but a man who likes to screw both men and women, preferably a pretty young arse…”

“And ideology and other motivations?”

“No ideology or anything else, just what I told you.” The contact man signalled to the waiter to bring another narghile, and leaned closer to Kabi: “This waiter is an encyclopedia. He knows all there is to know about the leading families in Iraq, and who has influence where. Grease his palm now and then, but don’t be too generous or he’ll take it for granted.”

After a short silence the contact man said, “You played
mahbous
with much patience. That’s what’s needed in our work. Remember that. And don’t stay too long in that house. Get the most out of it, then find yourself a small place of your own.” He stood up and asked Kabi to drive him to the airport.

In the evening there was a knock on his door. It was his landlord. “Mister Abbas Mahmoud, it’s your first evening in our town, please do us the honour of dining with us.”

Entering the main house with his host, he saw that the table was already laid. There was a jingle of bracelets, followed by the covered arms of the lady of the house passing dish after dish through a small hatch, her ten-year-old son carrying them to the table.

Kabi was especially delighted with the roasted fish, which reminded him of
samak masgouf
, a Baghdadi delicacy popular on summer nights on Jazeera, the island in the Tigris. He would have exclaimed in excitement, but had to maintain an air of respectability.

At the end of the meal his host offered him a glass of arrack, and Kabi feared a trap. If he did not drink he might offend his host, but drinking it would damage his cover as a Muslim. He refused, and remained adamant even when his host misquoted the scripture, saying, “The Quran forbids us to drink wine, not arrack…”

His first night in Khorramshahr seemed endless, filled with weird dreams, sudden awakenings and longing for home and for Sandra. What a fool I am, he thought, I should have proposed to her, put my life in order. I might even have brought her here. How will I survive in this isolation? He felt comfortable with Sandra and thought he might marry her in the end. Why did he always hold back? What was it about love that made him recoil from plunging into it? Only once had he felt its full intensity – with Amira, the daughter of a dove flyer in Baghdad. She had lit a fire in him, caressed him, drew him into herself. He would never forget their first kiss, flavoured with quince preserve and her special scent – sheer bliss. Then the profound calm when they lay side by side on the bank of the Tigris, under a silvery canopy of moonlight. The next day she had left Baghdad unannounced and emigrated to Israel; he
did not know why and was shocked to the core. Since then he had feared such tigresses. But Sandra was right for him, everybody said so, he thought, and fell asleep.