“Look at me, ma belle—we’ll get through this together.”
I followed her as she carried the tray up to her mother’s room, where she had changed the bedding. She lit some candles and the incense stick. We sat on the bed with the tray between us. She opened the packet.
“How many?” I hid my face in my hands.
“I’ve been taking three, sometimes four,” I said into my palms.
She said nothing, clicking out eight little white, perfectly formed capsules. We took one each and drank some water, then another, until they were all gone. I told her we should lie down.
We started off lying face to face, then lay on our backs, holding hands. Outside, the surf pushed in and pulled out. Each time, it pulled out a bit further and longer until I worried about it not coming back in again. It was pulling me with it but I held onto Helen and it was OK. Then the ebb and flow became synchronized with her breathing and it slowed right down, which meant that she was controlling the sea.
Forty-Three
Helen was subdued in the morning, waking up after some difficulty, and only when I had taken her breakfast in bed. She ate it with a distant look in her eyes that worried me; I shouldn’t have let her take four tablets at once, not the first time.
“You don’t have to take them again,” I said.
“I’ll take them as long as you’re still taking them,” she said, but then spent most of the morning in bed. I watched the beach with the binoculars and popped up to see her every now and then.
“You’re like a jack-in-the-box,” she said, on my fourth visit. “Run me a bath.” I sat by the bath as she soaked, washed her back, read some poetry to her, passed her the pumice stone, washed her front.
“What do they want with you?” she asked. “These Mossad people.”
“I’m not sure,” I said. I told her about the envelope coming from the West Bank, Abu Leila’s shooting, going back to Tufnell Park, entering her room, hearing people in mine, meeting Khalil and ending up in Cambridge. I expected her to fly off the handle, as Jack would have put it, but she was remarkably sanguine.
“Lucky for you that you were creeping around my room. Did you try on my underwear?”
“I wasn’t creeping. I missed you, that’s all. I couldn’t sleep.”
“I’m teasing you, silly. Why Cambridge, of all places?”
So I told her about the Cambridge meeting that Abu Leila had set up, the house I had rented. She nodded at my explanation and relaxed into the bath. I didn’t mention Rachel; I didn’t see the point. Rachel was no competition to Helen. I told myself that to balance this omission I wouldn’t mention my knowing that Zorba had been with her in Turkey. In time she would learn what I had done to him at the station, but for now I would live in the moment.
“Do you think he was killed because of this meeting?”
“I’m not sure, I think that’s how they found the house, but to be honest I don’t even know who killed him.” I could see her mulling it over; I’d already told her that the meeting hadn’t been sanctioned by Arafat.
“You mean it was Palestinians, not Israelis, that killed him?”
I shrugged noncommittally. I had admitted the possibility to myself, but couldn’t do so to someone else. I didn’t mention that the killers hadn’t been after the envelope. She squinted at me, as if trying to get me in focus.
“You’re very calm for someone who was shot at,” she said.
“It wasn’t me that was shot at,” I said. It seemed so long ago now, even though it was just seven days earlier.
“So what’s in the envelope?” she asked, after some moments’ silence.
“I don’t know.”
“What do you mean you don’t know?” She looked incredulous. “You’re carrying this thing around that people have come several thousand miles to recover and you don’t even know what’s in it?” I said nothing. What would she say if I told her it had been smuggled out by a heavily pregnant woman? “Aren’t you even curious?”
I told her I wasn’t, that it wasn’t mine to open.
She shook her head in disbelief. “What are you going to do with it then?”
“I don’t know,” I said, and I honestly didn’t.
“But that’s ridiculous,” she said, sitting up and in the process sluicing water over the edge of the bath. “It might tell you why Abu Leila was killed, or even who killed him.”
How to explain to this English rose my growing fear of what I might find inside, even though I knew I would have to face it at some point? I couldn’t properly articulate it but my fears were tied up with the fact that opening it meant breaking Abu Leila’s trust, and not opening it was the only act of loyalty that still remained to me, a demonstration of allegiance to the dead man who was not my father. And breaking his trust could only mean a terrible punishment in the form of the truth, and the truth was something he had taught me should be avoided. Helen was staring at me in expectation.
“I can’t explain it,” I said. “I’d have to explain everything.”
She stood up and let the water drip away. “Then that is what you will have to do,” she said. “But now you must dry me.”
So every day of our detoxification I told Helen a new thing, a new bit of my story, a new truth, usually as we cleaned the beach in the evening or sat on the deck, or inside when it rained, as it did often here, even in August. I worked backwards: telling her the things I did for Abu Leila, the trips I had taken, the people I had met, the unknown messages I had passed, the money I had laundered. On the second or third night—I can’t remember—I brought down all my passports and identification documents from my bag and laid them neatly out on the kitchen table. My hands shook as I called her into the kitchen. She sat down and studied the neatly arranged patchwork of my life.
“Are any of these real?” she asked.
I picked up the Lebanese passport. “This is, in the sense that it isn’t a forgery—but it’s not me, I’m not Lebanese.”
She took it from me and opened it. “Michel Khoury,” she read, then flicked through it. “Your student visa runs out in a couple of weeks.” She put it down. She read through the other documents. “Tell me something—is Michel your real name?”
“Yes. Yes, it’s my real name.”
She picked up a UK driving license—a driving license for someone who couldn’t drive. She put it down and picked up another document, a French carte de séjour, then a British National Insurance card, a German Personalausweis, an Italian carta d’identità.
“You like the name Roberto, huh?” My face burned, but thankfully she wasn’t looking.
“It’s just a name,” I said. I gathered up the documents, bundled them together, and went to take them back upstairs. I got as far as the kitchen door.
“Michel.”
I looked back at her.
“Thank you.”
* * *
The day after showing her the documents we were walking the beach, picking up rubbish under a patchy sky. One minute the sun would emerge victorious, only to withdraw again after a new ambush by the dark clouds. I had my jacket on, with the envelope inside it.
I told Helen about Abu Leila, my time at university in Berlin, in Cyprus with Jack. All this stuff poured out of me.
At some point she interrupted me. “I don’t like the sound of this Abu Leila,” she said.
I thought I’d misheard.
“He was a good man,” I said.
She picked up a half-eaten sandwich covered in sand with her grabber and placed it in her plastic bag. “I didn’t say he wasn’t—I just think he took advantage of your situation really.” She stopped picking up rubbish and looked at me. “If you think about it, he used you for his own purposes.”
“Rubbish. He helped me,” I said. “He sent me to a good school and to university. He educated me. He was like a father to me.”
“He did it for a reason, Michel. Not because he was fond of you. He needed you to follow a certain path, his path.”
/> I dropped my gathered sticks and stomped on past her down the tide mark, blind with anger. I reached the tip of the crescent and strode up a path in the rise, climbing for a long while before sitting in the long grass. The wind came in gusts off the sea and knocked the grass flat. I could see Helen walking back along the line where the sand became dunes, a small figure, no bigger than my thumbnail. I remembered a conversation in Berlin where Abu Leila himself had told me that “my purpose was now being played out” in London. I remembered him telling me, in Cyprus, that I would be going to Berlin, telling me that I should study German at The English School in Nicosia, that I would go to Moscow, that I would do this, do that. I tried to think of a time when he had asked me whether I’d wanted to do any of these things, but I struggled to think of one. But then wasn’t I a soldier of sorts, even though I had no uniform? Wasn’t I part of a grander plan that called for sacrifice and putting your own interests last? Hadn’t we shaken hands in Beirut all those years ago? I’d known nothing else, no other life, after all. Where would I have been without Abu Leila? Nowhere, I would have answered, were he still alive. But I dared to allow myself to imagine an alternative path I might have taken. Perhaps I would have stayed with my foster family, perhaps I would have gone on to study to be a doctor like Ramzi, set up a practice in Beirut, maybe even in the camp, looking after my people. These thoughts felt like a betrayal of everything Abu Leila had done for me.
Down on the beach I saw a man step out of the dunes several meters in front of Helen; she would have to acknowledge his presence either by stopping or avoiding him. From this distance it looked like he was looking out to sea. She walked in front of him and stopped. He was talking to her. She nodded and pointed out over the grey water. His shape or posture didn’t ring any bells with me; it was not my slopey-shouldered friend, although I wished I had the binoculars with me. They talked for a minute, then Helen walked on and the man watched her walk away. He stood there until she reached the house, then turned and walked back into the dunes. I could see him for a while until the path disappeared into the trees.
Back at the house I found Helen in the kitchen peeling potatoes.
“Are you OK?” she asked.
I nodded.
“I’m sorry if I upset you.”
I told her it was nothing, that I’d overreacted.
“Who was that man on the beach?” I asked.
“What, are you spying on me now?” As if I spied on everyone else.
“No, of course not. My question is whether you know him.”
She shook her head. “Do I have to report to you every time I talk to a strange man?”
I kept my voice even; had she not listened to anything I’d told her? “Yes, you do—at the moment I think it would be a good idea,” I said.
She put the peeler down and looked up. “Oh my God, do you think they might have followed us up here?”
“Only if they’ve connected us in some way.” I thought of Zorba retching on his shoes outside Euston. If they had picked me up at Euston after following Helen there from Tufnell Park, or indeed followed me from Cambridge Station, they might have seen me attack him. No doubt he’d have been happy to direct them here. It was the only way they could have found me—I’d been detected as a result of my own jealous rage.
“Should we call the police?”
I repressed an urge to laugh. “And tell them what, exactly?” She made a small pyramid out of the potato peel.
I sat down opposite her. “Tell me about the man,” I said.
Forty-Four
On the final day of Helen’s home-concocted codeine withdrawal plan we sat outside a place advertised as a café by day and a bistro by night. Tonight we were to have no codeine, and we’d just been shopping for food and treats to take home. I drank a bitter lemon, Helen drank wine, making the one glass last. We were in the small village nearest the house, a ten-minute drive. We watched holidaymakers straggle back from the beach in a long weary line that ended in the town’s only hotel. The sun hung low and the damned midges gathered, looking for exposed flesh. Two women in bikinis came towards us, and clearly they were mother and teenage daughter. They had sarongs wrapped around their waists to cover their thighs. The daughter glanced at us as she approached, still at an age where she was self-conscious about her developing womanhood. The mother too looked at us, or rather at me, protective of her daughter, assessing my threat as a sexual predator. I looked away, embarrassed. Helen nudged me and moved her head closer to mine.
“Does Michel wish Helen had tits like that?” she asked. She was serious.
I laughed and shook my head, unsure whether she was referring to mother or daughter. “I think Michel has his hands full with Helen as she is,” I said. “Any more and he wouldn’t be able to handle her.”
Helen stuck her lower lip out as the women passed. “Still, Helen sometimes wishes that she was endowed with more.”
Last night I’d had a blow-by-blow account of her encounter with the man on the beach. Helen described him as being in his forties, fit and good-looking “in a swarthy kind of way,” although I wasn’t sure if that was just to rile me. She had recounted their conversation, adding needless and stupid descriptions in an attempt to ridicule the exercise and make me jealous.
According to her, he had a slight accent, “More than you do,” she’d said. “And no, he didn’t look Jewish.” I’d said nothing because I hadn’t asked; I knew she was trying to get a rise out of me. Anyway, I knew from experience that it was stupid to rely on looks to make such a judgment. And besides, his being Jewish or not told me nothing. I was left with an uneasy feeling about the encounter though, and Helen had agreed to let me know if anyone else approached her or if she saw him again.
To my relief we left the café and walked back to the car; I hated sitting out with people about, I was reminded of how much observing and memorizing of faces I usually had to do, something I’d had a break from at the house, apart from the obsessive beach-watching. Helen had something planned for when we got home, some more burning of incense, some ceremonial destruction of the remaining tablets. It was just symbolic, I told her, but she said that was precisely what I needed.
“People have had rituals since they started sitting around fires, Michel, with good reason. Trust me, I’m doing a PhD in rituals.”
So I trusted her. We went back to the house before it got dark—to comb the beach for rubbish left by the day-trippers. I kept to the tide mark, picking up the things washed in by the sea: a long bleached bone, a bottle with no message in it, several bits of frayed blue nylon rope that would take a thousand years to degrade, an old flip-flop worn thin by the sun and sea.
In the house I lit a fire and Helen went into the kitchen, returning with a tray on which sat a plate holding the remaining pills. Next to it was a mortar and pestle, similar to one used by Mama to grind garlic with salt. I laughed at Helen, but she just smiled and handed me the pestle. I put three of the tablets in the wooden bowl, like tiny, perfectly formed cloves of garlic, and tapped them lightly with the pestle. They split into fragments.
“We need them turned into powder, Michel, not smaller pills.” I ground them down, adding three more. I hoped she would leave the room so I could pocket some of the tablets for emergencies, but she stood opposite me throughout, until every last tablet was pulverized.
Then we went to the fire, and I wanted to sniff or lick some of the powder before the inevitable, but it was a fleeting, if strong, desire.
“Say goodbye to the pills, ma belle.”
I poured the powder onto the fire and it burned with a bright orange flame, sending white smoke up the chimney. The mortar felt like I’d emptied it of lead, not powder. I also felt a lightness in my chest, a clearing in my head. “There’s more to burn,” I said.
Helen looked surprised. “You have more pills?”
“No, not pills.” I ran upstairs to the bedroom and pulled a chair to the middle of the room. In the ceiling was the hatch into the roof
and I pushed it open and felt about for my Harrods bag, which wasn’t where I thought I’d left it. But then I found it and pulled it down. Inside were the passports and papers and money and newspaper cuttings and reports, and I took it all, leaving the money, which I put back, and went downstairs. I checked for the envelope, which I had carried on my person at all times since leaving Tufnell Park.
As Helen watched, I put everything, apart from the Lebanese passport, in one pile. I picked up the Swiss passport and put it on top of the Lebanese passport—might I still need it? The truth was I just felt vulnerable without it, and besides, since Berlin it was no longer usable. If I was going to do this then I would do it properly. I put it on the fire. Helen squeezed my hand as we watched it burn. It curled and crackled in the flame. I put the Greek passport on next; it burned with a blue flame. They, and other documents, all burned in different colors that we were convinced reflected their respective national flags but in reality were all the same blues and oranges and greens.
When some false company notepaper and business cards and fake utility bills had gone, we were left with just my macabre mementoes of the massacre. The cuttings and copies of reports: a European Union report, the official PLO account, the Israeli Report of the Commission of Inquiry into the events at the refugee camps in Beirut—the so-called “Kahan” Report, a UN effort running to 300 pages. Everyone had investigated, questioned, taken evidence, examined the photos, watched the TV footage and written a report to tell everyone else how terrible it was. No one, not one cocaine-addled whisky-soaked Maronite Phalangist, not one obese cynical Zionist general, not one conniving pseudo-fascist puppet warlord had been brought to justice. Who would bring them to justice? Who would do it? The PLO? According to Abu Leila, they were more interested in making deals in Norway with the people who had let it happen. The Arab nations? A craven, rhetoric-filled group that were either beholden to the West, to whom they sold oil, or too busy suppressing their own people. The Lebanese government? There’s a funny thing—the very people who had carried out the massacre were now ministers in the government. Their leader, the man who stood on the Israeli command center roof overlooking the flare-lit camp, was minister for tourism, according to the clipping I’d found in Le Monde. And the West? The West wrung its liberal hands, but to them it was a small thing in a big picture, something that did not concern them directly, something that Third World people did to each other.
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