Shake Off

by Mischa Hiller

  Left alone, I tried the television in the living room but it was dead. I picked up the Dostoyevsky that Vasily had left and started to read.

  Different people came to the Moscow apartment over the summer. One man came with a shoe box and a rolled-up plastic play mat. We moved the coffee table out of the way and he unfurled the mat, which had streets and buildings drawn on it. They were not like European streets though, they were more like American streets, straight and parallel and in blocks. He took a selection of toy cars from the box. He didn’t speak English, so Vasily had to translate.

  “He says you are the red car.”

  “But I want to be the blue car,” I said, and although Vasily laughed he did not translate my joke. The red car was the target and the other cars were following it. I moved the red car on the mat and the man moved the other cars, to show that wherever I went they would follow, although “follow” isn’t an accurate description. Despite what you see in films, some of the cars will be in front of the target car and some will be on other streets parallel to it.

  Evenings were spent alone reading. I read Dostoyevsky until I was sick of him, so Vasily took me to a bookshop where they had a small selection of English books. We bought some Dashiell Hammett, which they stocked because he was a communist. Driving back to my apartment, Vasily said he had read John le Carré, although you couldn’t buy him in the USSR. He said that all KGB trainees read him for the tradecraft.

  “He has been in the business,” he said. “You can tell.”

  I contemplated all this as I lay in bed the morning after finding Helen’s unconscious lover. I contemplated it because I experienced the same disorientation upon waking that I had my first morning in Moscow. The bewilderment you might get, I imagined, from too much alcohol, or, in my case, too much opiate, or when you don’t know how you got to the place you have woken up in, or even who you are. Something about those first few minutes of the day can either make or break the rest of it. I usually overcame it by doing my push-ups and sit-ups until my arms and stomach ached.

  I hid the Le Monde article under the bath and went to lessons at SOAS for a couple of hours. Then I checked my PO box in Westminster, taking surveillance countermeasures along the way, using the underground. Going underground forces any surveillance behind you (rather than parallel and in front) and they hate that. Carrying out that maneuver often exposed them, particularly when few passengers were about.

  All this and more I learned in my summer in Moscow, practicing on Moscow streets against the KGB. The idea, said Vasily, was to do it without making it obvious that you were doing it, otherwise you were advertising your guilt. He would come with me, and we began by me trying to spot any surveillance in the first place, without trying to avoid it. He said that they were using KGB trainees for the exercise.

  “They have to learn too,” he said. I found the trainees too easy to spot. Their clumsy efforts at trying to change their appearance by taking off jackets and coats and putting on hats did not help them. I could spot their individual gait and mannerisms, the way they muttered self-consciously into microphones hidden under their sleeves. I could spot their obvious mirroring of my actions: if I stopped, they stopped too; if I moved, they moved. They had no subtlety. Afterwards I would have to recount to Vasily how many people I had seen and where. He gave me no feedback on these efforts, but, smiling one morning, he said that an experienced team had replaced the trainees. “I do not even know if they will be there or not,” he said, “sometimes they will be busy following real spies.” I enjoyed these games and learned to be constantly alert, memorizing faces and looking for places that would force a team behind me or up close. Sometimes, though, you decide to do things that don’t require you to be constantly, if metaphorically, looking over your shoulder. So you take a few days off, go to the cinema, sit in the park, stay at home and read a book. In fact, it’s a good thing to do if you have any suspicion that you’re being followed.

  “Make them bored,” said Vasily. “A bored surveillance team is a careless one,” he said. “After a few days they might even call it off. Do anything odd or different though, give them just one idea that you know what you are doing and they will stick to you like dog shit on the bottom of a shoe.”

  So you have to be on continual alert: every public place is a potential meeting place; every alley or public toilet could be a dead-letter drop; every street, store and restaurant needs to be assessed for its countersurveillance potential. You need to be constantly on the look-out for places to cache money and documents. Everyday objects must be considered potential concealers of microphones or cameras. Every person you meet could either be an agent wanting to get close or a possible recruit to the cause. Every woman that talks to you wants to trap you with the promise of sex. Every postcard has a hidden meaning. Everybody behind you could be following you, and it is your job to shake them off.

  Fourteen

  When I got back to Tufnell Park I lay down. I must have fallen asleep as I was woken by knocking, and the light in the room had changed. Helen was at the door.

  “Hello.” She waved at me by holding up her hand and wiggling her fingers. “I want to repay you for what you did yesterday.” In my dopey state I thought she wanted to give me money; perhaps some English etiquette I was unsure of. I stood in my bare feet and ran my hand through my tangled hair. She looked different, like she had a little make-up on. Not much, but enough to make a difference. “I’d like to take you out to dinner,” she said. I’d never been asked out to dinner before.

  “You don’t have to pay me back,” I said.

  She shrugged and pushed back her hair.

  “OK then. Let’s just go to dinner. We can go Dutch, if you like.”

  I was trying to remember what going Dutch meant, and for some reason I looked behind me into my room, as if something there could rescue me from making a decision.

  “Do you have a girl in there?” she asked, trying to look past me.

  I smiled and shook my head.

  “Then maybe you have better plans for tonight?”

  My plans consisted of heating up a ready-made meal of meat and vegetables and gravy. I was going to eat it from the plastic container it came in so I’d only have a fork to wash up.

  “I have no plans,” I said. “Give me fifteen minutes to get dressed.”

  We went around the corner to a Chinese restaurant on the high street. She was telling me how good it was and asking if I had been before. She looked great, in simple linen trousers and a shirt. They were understated but looked expensive. Her hair was pinned back for a change, and she had little dangly earrings on, like silver peas. She still had the enormous stainless-steel man’s watch on, and for some reason I found it reassuring. I chose a table in the corner and sat down with my back to the wall, where I could see the door. I worried about being on a date initiated by a woman.

  “So tell me how you learned to open doors like that,” she said.

  I’d forgotten to concoct a story to explain the lock-picking, so I smiled stupidly in order to buy time to think. “It’s just something I picked up,” I said.

  “Picked up where? Prison?”

  I told myself that these were innocent questions.

  “Relax,” she said. “You look like a deer caught in headlights.”

  I sat back in my chair and tried to smile. My knee was springing up and down under the table in a rapid displacement of nervous energy. A waiter approached.

  “Perhaps we need a drink,” she said.

  “I don’t drink alcohol,” I told her, wishing I did.

  “Then we’ll drink green tea,” she said. “It has the same effect.” We ordered, and while we waited for our food we sipped our pale tea.

  “I’ve sent him back to his wife,” she said. I kept a blank face, even though I knew who she was referring to. “You know, my pretend boyfriend?”

  “It’s none of my business,” I said, glad at least that the subject had been changed.

  “Well, you ha
ve become involved in a way, and I feel I owe you an explanation.”

  She didn’t owe me an explanation but I understand that sometimes women have to talk through their problems—they don’t want a solution necessarily, just someone to listen. She told me that she was a postgraduate anthropology student and that he was her supervisor and that they naturally spent a lot of time together because of her work on her PhD.

  “We attended the same field trip and things got out of hand.” I didn’t want to hear this but I let her carry on. “He told me I made him feel complete,” she said, as if this explained everything. Our food arrived and we were quiet as they laid the dishes out.

  “And how did he make you feel?” I asked, when the waiters were gone.

  “Do you ever feel that you are only living half your life, like something is beyond you, just out of reach?” I nodded, although truthfully I didn’t know what she was talking about. She put rice on her plate. “I feel like that all the time, like there must be more to life, something more real than…” She waved her chopsticks around. “Anyway, I have something missing, a gap. A gap…I let other people fill.”

  I supposed she meant men. We ate our food. She asked me what I was studying and I told her about the language course.

  “It doesn’t sound like you need it,” she said.

  “It’s a requirement,” I lied.

  “And then what? What do you want to do?”

  I was flummoxed by the question, it wasn’t something anyone had asked me before. I didn’t know what Abu Leila had in mind. Maybe he didn’t know, or maybe he hadn’t told me yet.

  “English literature,” I said. It just popped into my head.

  We ate: she used her chopsticks and savored her food, making noises of satisfaction when she liked something. Her big watch slid down her forearm when she raised her hand.

  I used a fork and ate quickly without much noticing the food; I’d forgotten how hungry I was. Occasionally I looked around the room at the other diners, or at people coming through the door, checking for anyone who looked like they were in the business. We didn’t talk for a while but I didn’t feel uncomfortable, like you do sometimes when you struggle to make conversation. We looked at each other with our mouths full of food and she smiled at me with her eyes.

  “You don’t say much, do you?” she said.

  I shrugged. “Does that bother you?”

  She shook her head. “No, I like it.” She removed sauce from her chin with her napkin. “I find that men can’t wait to talk about themselves. But not you.” I wondered how many men she’d based that generalization on. “I hate the fact that I talk too much,” she said.

  “Then try shutting up.”

  She laughed her natural, muscular laugh and made a zipping motion across her lips. They brought us more tea and we sat drinking it. She looked at me over her cup and I looked back. I winked at her to make her say something. She stuck her tongue out at me. I rolled my eyes. She batted her eyelashes. We kept up this silliness until the waiter came and put the bill on our table.

  We walked back to the house more slowly than we had left it. I asked her to explain anthropology. She said it was a big subject but that in a nutshell it was the comparative study of humankind. I told her I was no wiser.

  “Well,” she said, becoming animated, “different societies deal with the same universal events in different ways. My area of interest is death. More specifically, I’m interested in how different cultures cope with death. That’s what my thesis is on: I’m comparing the burial rites of ancient Turks with those of a Celtic tribe of the same period, looking at what they have in common and what they do differently.”

  We walked a bit more, and when we were near our house she asked me where I was from. I told her I was from Lebanon—avoiding saying I was Lebanese.

  “Is that why you don’t drink, for religious reasons?”

  “As a matter of fact, I’m not a Muslim,” I said.

  “No, of course you’re not.”

  “Why wouldn’t I be?”

  “I don’t know. I’m sorry, I haven’t quite got my anthropological stripes yet. As you can see, I have yet to hone my cultural awareness skills before I’m awarded them. Am I babbling again?”

  “A little,” I said, smiling.

  She zipped her mouth. Could she be as nervous as I felt? She seemed so self-assured. We both took our keys out to open the door but I got to the lock first. Upstairs we stood on our shared landing. We kissed each other on the cheek, my right hand resting gently on her hip with hers on my arm. I hoped that she wouldn’t ask me into her room; I certainly wouldn’t ask her into mine. Maybe because I could still see her naked tutor on her bed, or maybe I didn’t want yet another brief encounter. I was certainly still wary of her. Besides, we hadn’t had the usual pre–one-night-stand dance of easy compliments and accelerated physical contact.

  “Shall we do that again?” she asked. I thought she meant the kiss, but when she turned to her door I understood she meant dinner.

  “I would like that,” I said.

  I lay on my bed in the dark and listened to her running a bath. I wondered if she was using her herbal bath oil. Later, I had to make myself get out of bed to take some codeine because I’d forgotten to take any and had nearly fallen asleep.

  Fifteen

  Teaching me the art of picking locks was the responsibility of a short, bald Russian whose face had the vodka-​induced ruddiness of many Muscovites I had come across. He arrived with Vasily one morning, carrying a bag that clattered when he put it on the floor. Like my surveillance trainer, he only spoke Russian, so Vasily was on hand, although by then I was practicing my own attempts at Russian on anyone I came in contact with. He had a basic lock which he had dismantled, and he showed me the brass bits laid on the table like a dismembered clock. He matched the pieces to a cross-sectional drawing of a lock with Russian labels. He explained that picking was an art—because you cannot see what you are doing—and the resistance in your fingers becomes your guide. It is such a tactile thing, yet at the same time abstract—in that you have to mentally visualize what you cannot see—that it becomes addictive.

  Later, when I arrived in London, I bought myself a picking set from a company that supplied locksmiths and hid it in the unused garden at Tufnell Park. I hadn’t used it on Helen’s lock because possession of it would need even more explaining than the skill itself. The only time I’d used it was when the man I usually bought codeine from disappeared for three weeks. I had allowed myself to run out completely. I thought I could cope without it for a few days but I was wrong. I picked my way into a nursing home (where the English keep their old people) two streets from my bedsit. I got through a back door, an office door and a drugs cabinet all in a matter of minutes.

  The day after dinner with Helen I was standing in a phone box near SOAS calling Ramzi. He was due back two days ago and should have sent a postcard to let me know he was in London and wanted to meet. I needed to get the case from him; it would have papers in it for Abu Leila from the Territories. I watched students walking past as I dialed, talking about their plans for the coming summer. I was filled with vague despondency. The receiver felt heavy as I took it from the hook. It rang for a while and a part of me was relieved that I’d have to hang up, but then a woman’s greeting replaced the ringing. I was taken aback; it was usually Ramzi at the other end. I took her to be Ramzi’s wife. She didn’t sound happy.

  “It’s Muneer, is Ramzi there?” I asked in Arabic.

  “Muneer?” she asked, as if I had insulted her.

  “His cousin from Qatar,” I said, sticking to the cover Ramzi and I used.

  “He has no cousin from Qatar,” she said.

  This didn’t sound good.

  “Is Ramzi there?”

  “You’re the guy who gave Ramzi the case, aren’t you?”

  I should have put the phone down at that point but I needed to know what was going on. I wondered how much Ramzi had told her.

  “
Is he there?”

  “No, he isn’t here, you shit, I’ve had to leave him in an Israeli prison!” She was shouting and I pulled the receiver from my ear, glad I was in an enclosed phone box. “He took your fucking case in for you but they stopped him on the bridge when we were coming out.” The earpiece buzzed with the force of her voice.

  “What about the case? Was he bringing the case back?” I asked, thinking of the papers that were supposed to come back for Abu Leila.

  “The case, the case? Did you hear what I said, you cowardly shit? They’ve got Ramzi. Do you understand? Do you know what they do to people in prison?”

  I knew exactly what they did to people in prison, I’d heard the reports; it had even been in the English newspapers. I needed to know what had happened to the case though.

  “Have you got the case?” I asked.

  “I want to know what’s so interesting about this case?” she shouted. Before I could answer she called me two Arabic words I had never heard a woman use before and I jumped as I heard a loud crash in the earpiece. There were two other loud crashes and the line went dead. I hung up. She must have been hitting the receiver very hard on something.

  Vasily once told me that if you had planned for a crisis then you couldn’t have one. It seemed an optimistic pronouncement that I challenged with the observation that the definition of a crisis was that it was by nature unforeseen.

  “OK,” he’d said, “Let me explain it like this. It is inevitable that things will sometimes go bad. You just need to contain it when it happens.”

  I needed to get a message to Abu Leila. I gave myself some time before ringing his emergency answerphone in West Berlin; I wanted to think. So I went to a large Waterstone’s bookshop nearby and browsed for a bit. I picked up Primo Levi’s If This Is a Man, which I had read in Cyprus all those years ago. I bought the book and went outside to make the call.