“It has everything I need,” I told him.
“Good to see you again, Michel.” He shook my hand firmly. “I would like to have that conversation about Abu Leila now.”
I shrugged, checking the street for his backup. The dark weather had cleared the boggy street of most people. He leaned in, smelling of fresh cigarette smoke. “You can be sure I’m alone. You have finished teaching for the afternoon, I think.”
It was a visit I had been waiting for, hoping for, even, although, since I was associated with Abu Leila, I was half-expecting there to be no conversation, just three or four shots to the head. I made a joke to that effect as we walked to my rented apartment. Khalil looked genuinely hurt at the suggestion.
“We are not animals,” he said.
My place was on the top floor of a seven-story building on the outskirts of the camp. It had a balcony big enough for one person to stand on. The rent was low because of the eagle-eye view of the camp where I worked. Sometimes I stood there early in the morning watching it come to life. Sometimes I stood there long before dawn.
Khalil looked out of the balcony door and said, “You can keep an eye on things from up here, for sure.”
I took his coat and he sat on my only armchair, coughing phlegm into a handkerchief and taking out some cigarettes and a gold lighter.
“What about Abu Leila?” I asked, thinking of him kneeling before me in Berlin, his glasses bloodied and shattered.
Khalil wiped his small mouth. “What about him?”
“You said that you weren’t animals. He was shot on the street like an animal.”
Khalil snorted. “Did you see what was in the envelope from the West Bank?”
I nodded. Why bother pretending otherwise?
“He was responsible for the death of at least five operatives in the Territories and the arrest and torture of many more. He gave away many secrets, the most damaging being political. Is that reason enough?” He coughed again into his handkerchief and I had no answer, just questions.
“How do you know what was in the envelope?” I asked.
He stopped coughing and raised his watering eyes to me, dabbing at them with his handkerchief in a disarmingly feminine manner.
“Because, my son, I put it there.”
Khalil paid three long visits to my small apartment, and on the first made it clear that he needed to know everything.
“Everything?” I asked, thinking of Helen and me making love in Tufnell Park and Scotland. He stopped looking for things in his open briefcase and looked at me over the lid instead.
“Let me tell you, Michel, that some were of the opinion that I should bring you to Damascus to have this discussion, let us say, under less pleasant circumstances, and keep you there until we were satisfied. I told them it would be counter-productive.” He cleared his throat. “I wasn’t wrong, was I?”
“I’ll answer any questions you have,” I reassured him. I just wouldn’t volunteer anything, I thought.
He stayed for hours at a time, and wrote down every detail in a black notebook. Every so often he would take out a grainy photograph from his battered case and show it to me. It would always be of Abu Leila with some individual or in a group, taken from a distance, and Khalil would want to know if I had ever seen the other people in Berlin. Recounting the complete pointlessness of my life, describing the empty shell that had been created by seeing the contents of the envelope, was unpleasant. Although I had gone through it all in my head since being back, often standing on my balcony in the dark, speaking it out loud made it real, brought the sham into keen relief. I was embarrassed in the telling of it, more than anything, like someone who has been the butt of a cruel practical joke.
At the end of his second visit Khalil said, “You were just a pawn in Abu Leila’s dangerous game of chess, Michel.”
What is it with professional liars and chess? I thought of Abu Leila’s first visit to the apartment not three kilometers from where we were sitting, and his chess analogy. I hated him now, of course, even though I wanted to believe that everything he had told me was still true.
It was only on the third and final visit that Khalil asked me about the envelope I had opened in Glasgow.
“Did Abu Leila look inside it? Before he was executed?” he asked. He was intent on my answer. I recalled our last meeting in the KaDeWe, our walk down the Ku’Damm—the envelope was still sealed and inside the newspaper when I had taken it from next to his lifeless body. Khalil was visibly disappointed at this information. I understood that Khalil had meant Abu Leila to see the contents before his execution, and for it to be found on his body—that was its purpose; a death sentence for him, and to let Mossad know that the PLO knew. But neither Mossad nor Khalil, for different reasons, wanted anyone else to know. It was a setback for Mossad, which thrived on appearing infallible, and embarrassing for the PLO, given Abu Leila’s seniority and length of service. All of which explained why Khalil had wanted the envelope back, and why the Israelis had come after it. “And how was he on that day?” Khalil was asking.
“What?”
“Abu Leila, how was his demeanor?”
“He wanted to go to the Kranzler Café. He’d just bought cigarettes at KaDeWe.” I didn’t tell him that he was about to discuss my future.
“I told him that smoking would kill him, for sure,” Khalil said, without a smile. Of course Khalil must have known that Abu Leila would be on the street, they must have been watching us in the KaDeWe. How stupid was I?
“What was his real name?” I asked.
He fiddled with his gold lighter. “Amir Serfati. He was a Moroccan Jew, what they call a Mizrahi. His parents emigrated to Israel in ’54.”
I rubbed my temples. I recalled the Moroccan novels he had given me, the Moroccan food he liked, his talk of Arab Jews being the original Jews.
Khalil smiled. “What? Did you think he was Palestinian?” He lit a cigarette and blew out smoke in a thin stream. “He was organizing the meeting in Cambridge to coax out those people interested in this silly idea of one state.”
“Coax them out?”
“Yes, to get rid of them. The plan was to hit the house in Cambridge. He wanted to deal us a deadly blow.”
I shook my head in disbelief. I said I couldn’t imagine the Israelis carrying out such an operation in the UK, and why on a group of people who were marginal in the PLO?
“You’re being obtuse, Michel. You were an important part of the plan, your involvement would have made it look like it was us that had arranged it. You found the place, organized security. Abu Leila would have made sure that information implicating you fell into the hands of British Intelligence, left a few clues to help them along, to make the right connections. Of course he didn’t know I was onto him.”
Abu Leila—I couldn’t think of him as Amir Serfati—always said the Israelis were good at dissembling. He would have known, since he was the father of all dissemblers. He’d said the meeting was contrary to the Old Man’s plans, so it would look like the Old Man had sanctioned the hit. If it was true, it was clever: get rid of the people who are a threat and blame it on their own, using me as the fall guy.
This had been my purpose all along, then, to be a conduit that would lead people to the wrong conclusion. I felt sick.
“But if I’d been arrested I would—”
Khalil cut me off with a laugh, but it wasn’t joyous. “Arrested? If you’d been alive to be arrested. You would have been linked to Abu Leila, which would have pointed to us. He would still be in place and sowing lies and division among us, you would have been branded a traitor.”
I rubbed my whole face, trying to wash it clean. I didn’t want to believe that Abu Leila would have allowed me to be sacrificed. Instead I asked, “So there were no Israeli delegates?”
“Yes, there were, that was the beauty of the plan, for sure.” Khalil grew animated. “Although the plan was to martyr the Palestinians—and I think you met some of the assassination team in Scotland—Abu L
eila’s meeting would also have exposed the closet Israelis pursuing this one-state idiocy, even before they left Israel. They have no political future, of course, and have been charged with disloyalty to the state.”
He started coughing again and I went to stand at the balcony doors, looking down at the camp. I could tell roughly where my house used to be; it had been bulldozed flat in the second siege of ’88, but by referencing other parts of the camp, like the hospital, I knew where it had stood. Someone had built an unofficial memorial to those that had been killed in ’82 but I had yet to visit it. I turned to look at Khalil, who was gathering his things into his case.
“What of the Palestinians who were going to attend, what’s happened to them?”
Khalil snapped his case shut.
“They also have no political future. In a way Abu Leila did us a favor, exposing these people; what they were planning undermined the sanctioned contacts.”
“You mean the talks in Oslo?” I said, to shock him. It worked, for he sat up straight and frowned.
“What do you know about Oslo?”
“Abu Leila said they would fuck us at Oslo,” I said.
Khalil winced, picked up his cigarettes and lighter then stood, holding his Samsonite at his side.
“I think we’re finished, Michel.”
“Am I in the clear?”
“As far as I’m concerned you were in the clear when I saw you in Harrods. I can’t speak for the Jews, of course. I suppose we’re both relying on your silence and discretion.” He cocked his head and raised his eyebrows to indicate that it was a question, not just a statement.
“Even if I had any evidence, who would I tell? And who would believe it if I did?” I asked.
He smiled thinly. “No one,” he said.
Fifty
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.
Acknowledgments
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
An interview with 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.
Shake Off Page 21