“More boxes?” he asked quietly. “Don’t you have any more boxes?”
“More?” said the merchant.
“Yes,” hissed Levi. Yes, you scrofulous, lice-ridden old bastard. Go get the other fucking boxes.
The merchant disappeared into a closet at the back of the one-room shop. He emerged carrying four boxes decorated with inlaid mother-of-pearl. One showed the Great Mosque at Mecca and the Kaaba stone; a special box for Saudi customers. One showed a naked houri. Big tits and a flabby stomach. One showed the flag of Palestine, which made it subversive.
And one showed an elephant.
Levi feigned interest in the box with the naked woman. He looked at it closely. Then at the one of the elephant. Then at the naked woman. Then he took the elephant in his hands.
“How much?” said Levi.
The merchant looked at him through very narrow eyes. What did he know? That a foreigner wanted to buy one box out of a hundred. That he insisted on this box, which had only arrived yesterday and did not even have a price tag yet?
“As you like,” said the merchant. It was the time-honored beginning of negotiations with a foreigner. Make him start the bidding, for in his nervousness, he will almost certainly offer too much.
Levi thought a moment. He wanted to make a reasonable offer, but he had no idea what the box was actually worth.
“Fifty,” said Levi. “Fifty pounds.”
The merchant clucked his tongue and gave Levi a look of reproach. He reached for the box, shaking his head.
“How much?” asked Levi again.
The merchant took out a piece of paper. He wrote out the number 500.
“What?” asked Levi in genuine astonishment. “Five hundred Syrian pounds?”
The merchant nodded.
“Impossible,” said Levi. He took the piece of paper and wrote out 100. The merchant shook his head.
“No, no. Four hundred.”
“Two hundred,” offered Levi. I don’t believe this, he said to himself. This is the worst moment of my life. I’m nearly paralyzed with fear. And I’m standing here haggling with an asshole merchant about the price of a wooden box.
“Three hundred,” said the merchant.
You sick, demented bastard, thought Levi. But another voice told him, Play the game.
“Two hundred and fifty.”
The merchant looked Levi in the eye, measuring the limits of extortion. He could see the fear and the need, without knowing why.
“Three hundred.”
“Okay,” said Levi. Who gives a shit? This is insane.
The merchant wrapped the box carefully in tissue paper, then in brown paper, which he tied with a neat string.
“Fatura?” said the merchant, using the Arabic word for receipt.
“Yes,” said Levi. Why not?
“How much?” asked the merchant with a corrupt smile that was all gums and saliva.
You crooked Arab camel jockey, son of a whore, are you really asking whether to falsify the receipt? Is that what you think this is all about? Taking a cheap little wooden box through customs with a phony receipt?
“Three hundred,” said Levi. He could not help but laugh as he said it. As the sound of laughter came out of his parched throat, he felt something snap inside him.
“As you like,” said the merchant.
Levi walked out of the shop clutching his parcel. He lit a cigarette. It was the best taste of his life. He saw a soldier, strolling down the arcade, gun in hand. He should have been scared, but he wasn’t anymore. The absurdity of the encounter in the shop had cleansed him, momentarily, of fear. He walked slowly through the souk, stopping in one stall to buy some pistachios for the trip home. As he bought them, he realized: I am going to make it. That is why I have bought the nuts. They aren’t a cover for anything. I’m going to eat them on the way home.
He had one more bad moment, at the Syrian border. That was always the worst time, leaving any country. The security forces know that is their last shot, so they play games. They invent reasons to ask questions and make you squirm.
In Levi’s case, it was the way he said the word marhaba—hello—to the border guard. He rolled the “r” slightly. Which would be fine, normally. Except that the one thing that every Arab policeman knows about native Hebrew speakers is that they roll their “r’s” making a sound in the back of their throat. But then, so do many Frenchmen from Marseilles.
The border guard studied Levi’s passport. He checked in his book. He took it back to show his superior, a fat colonel. The colonel came out and asked Levi questions. What had he been doing in Syria? Where had he been? Who had he seen?
Levi answered the questions serenely. He knew why. His nerves were finally broken. There was nothing left to feel scared with. The colonel finally sent him on his way. Levi drove across the border into Lebanon, eating pistachios.
Levi didn’t see the fruit of his labor until many months later. It was sent to Tel Aviv, where a Mossad officer decoded the message that had been hidden in the box with the mother-of-pearl elephant. It proved to be an extraordinary piece of intelligence.
The message from the Palestinian agent in Damascus said that the leadership of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine had concluded that there was an American agent inside Fatah. The reason they were so sure, the agent reported, was that the Old Man had boasted to the PFLP leaders a few months ago that he had a secret channel to the White House. When the radicals called him a liar, the Old Man said that he had obtained the secret text of an American peace plan more than a year ago.
The agent in Damascus didn’t know the identity of the American contact in Fatah. But he reported the guesses made by the PFLP leadership. The American agent had to be someone high up in the Fatah intelligence network. Only an intelligence man would be given the job of intermediary, the radicals said. The most likely suspect, concluded the agent’s report, was the young man who had risen so quickly in the Rasd—the Old Man’s pet, Jamal Ramlawi.
PART VII
1971–May 1972
31
Beirut; Spring 1971
Mohammed Nasir Makawi, known as Abu Nasir, was a dark, intense man with a thin face and a thick mustache. He was Fatah’s chief of intelligence and he looked the part. His eyes were deeply set and so ringed with circles that they seemed to be perpetually in shadow. Like many of the best Arab intelligence officers, he had a deadpan, expressionless face that gave nothing away.
Abu Nasir lived in Beirut, on the sixth floor of a building on the Rue Verdun, a busy street that sloped southward from the center of West Beirut toward Corniche Mazraa and the sea. He worried about the security and planned to install a blast-proof metal door at the entrance to the apartment. He wasn’t sure what to do about electronic surveillance. One of his Russian friends had advised him that the only way to be certain you weren’t bugged was to build new walls, ceiling, and floorboards on top of the old ones—covering over any hidden microphones. That seemed like too much work. So Abu Nasir played the radio.
The apartment was sparsely furnished. A brown couch with too much stuffing, an easy chair covered in the same fabric, a large television set that dominated the living room, a small wooden table, and a cheap, machine-made tapestry that spelled out the name of Allah in elaborate Arabic script. The only real decoration was a large nargilleh pipe, which stood next to the easy chair. The blinds were drawn tight, which added to the dark and desolation of the room.
Abu Nasir sat on his brown couch, watching a banal Egyptian soap opera on Lebanese television. He was waiting for his young deputy, Jamal Ramlawi.
Jamal was late. He is romancing some young woman, Abu Nasir thought to himself. That is his weakness. He had called Jamal that morning at the apartment where he was staying in Fakhani. Come by this evening for a talk, Abu Nasir had said. Just you and me. I will explain to you what we are planning. As he made the invitation, Abu Nasir had heard the voice of a woman in background, singing in Italian.
The b
ell rang. One long and two short. Abu Nasir opened the door and embraced Jamal. The young man was dressed more neatly than usual, in gray trousers and a blue shirt rather than his usual jeans and leather jacket. His hair was slicked back against his head. The younger man kissed his host twice, and then a third time. Abu Nasir looked almost frail in the embrace of his young protégé.
Abu Nasir excused himself to fix coffee. That was part of life in the shadows: You learned to mend your own trousers, sew your own buttons, make your own coffee. He filled the pot half-full with coffee that had been ground to a fine powder, added four tablespoons of sugar, poured in a little water, and let the rich mixture come to a boil three times. The result was a thick black sludge, sweet and syrupy on the tongue.
When the coffee was done, Abu Nasir carried the pot and two small cups into the living room and poured one cup for Jamal. He poured another for himself, settled down in the easy chair, and lit up the water pipe. He sucked on the wooden mouthpiece until the room was thick with smoke. The gaunt man old man seemed oblivious to anything but his own concerns. Sucking on his pipe, blowing out the smoke. Measured, calculating.
“Have I ever told you about my village in Palestine?” asked Abu Nasir eventually, putting aside the pipe and lighting a cigarette.
“No, Uncle,” said Jamal.
“Perhaps I should tell you the story,” said Abu Nasir, as if he had not quite made up his mind.
“You would do me an honor.”
“It is quite a long story, I am afraid.”
“I would like to hear it, Uncle.”
The older man nodded.
Abu Nasir liked to tell stories: long, meandering tales whose meaning or relevance often wasn’t evident until the last chapter. But there was always a lesson—precise and perfectly fashioned—that would come into view slowly like the outline of a castle emerging from a thick fog. Nobody ever interrupted Abu Nasir. As he talked, he would fix his gaze on his listener. Clouds of cigarette smoke would billow around his face and blow gently away with the rise and fall of his voice.
“Do you remember the old Jaffa Road in Palestine that ran from Jerusalem to the sea?” Abu Nasir began.
“No, Uncle, I don’t.”
“Of course you don’t. You were too young, so I’ll tell you about it. The road climbed from the coast up through the hills surrounding Jerusalem. Just before it reached the city, on the last steep hillside, if you looked to the left you could see a fine Arab village, with an arc of stone houses arrayed against the hillside.
“That was the village of Lifta, and it was the home of my family for many generations.”
“Lifta,” said Abu Nasir again, repeating the word quietly, as if the very sound was a remnant of his lost village. “I feel as if I can remember every detail of it, though I left more than twenty years ago. The cool of the stone house in the summer; the smell of bread baking on hot rocks in the courtyard; sleeping on the roof in the summer with my father; the taste of water from the well that I thought must be bottomless.
“I watched Lifta change. Jerusalem kept pushing west toward us in the 1930s. Jews coming from Europe settled along the Jaffa Road, in a suburb called Romema. We didn’t think too much about it. Jews had lived in that area since anyone could remember. And besides, some of our villagers were making money selling land to the Jews.”
“You sold land to the Jews?” asked Jamal.
“We were naive. And we were greedy. Liftawis owned so much land—nearly to the walls of the Old City—that we didn’t mind losing just a little bit of it. And a bit more. What did we care? We were getting rich. People said that Lifta was becoming the richest village in Palestine, which made us all feel happy and proud.
“My father was one of the richest. He made money and he built himself a grand house up on the hilltop, away from the old village of Lifta and near the Jews. That was a mark of how successful he was. It was the biggest house in the area and people from Romema would come and stare at it. My father was a very modern man. He believed in progress and sent me to high school. I would walk along the Jaffa Road to school, past the shops and markets and coffeehouses, and think how lucky we were. We took no precautions in those days. We never thought about it! The Jews were all around us. We were their landlords. What could possibly happen to us?
“As I got older, I noticed that Romema was getting bigger and Lifta was getting smaller. You couldn’t even tell where Lifta was anymore, except for the stone houses of the old village on the hillside. It was all suburbs. But nobody worried. We were building and expanding and making money. There were a few young boys from the village who skirmished from time to time with the Jews along the Jaffa Road and tried to convince us that disaster was coming. But nobody in Lifta paid very much attention to them. We were so trusting and naive that we were lulled almost to sleep.”
“You were fools,” said Jamal.
Abu Nasir didn’t answer. He looked at Jamal with the expression of bemused tolerance that older men have for impetuous young men who imagine that they have invented bravery and cunning.
“The world of Lifta was destroyed in one night,” continued Abu Nasir. “I remember the date. It was December 29, 1947. The village elders had gone to a coffeehouse along the Jaffa Road to drink coffee and smoke the nargilleh. It was a room like this! Full of smoke and talk and dreams.
“The Jews kicked in the door of the coffeehouse and began shooting. Six of the old men were killed, including the moukhtar. I was asleep but I heard the shooting that night, and the wailing of the women. I thought the world was coming to an end. It was as if the entire village had been awakened suddenly from a dead sleep and we were terrified. Everyone thought the Jews would be coming next to their house! No one slept for the rest of the night.
“The next morning people began packing their bags. Nobody could explain exactly why. But the reason was obvious. They were terrified. The world of Lifta had been built on illusions, and when the illusions were destroyed, everything else collapsed. People took small suitcases and told each other they wouldn’t be gone long. They went nearby, to East Jerusalem or Ramallah or El Bireh. They would be back in two weeks—a month at most—when the situation calmed down and the fighting stopped. But the fighting didn’t stop. It got worse and worse, and by the next winter the war for Palestine was over. We had lost our village.”
“Or given it away,” said Jamal.
“You are right, my fine young man. We gave our village away. But that wasn’t the worst thing that happened that night in December 1947.”
“What could be worse than that?”
“The worst thing was that we lost our self-respect. The men of Lifta panicked and fled like women, and most of them are still running. Even now, many of them can’t bear to admit what happened. They have invented a myth about why they left, which they tell their children and grandchildren.”
“A myth?”
“A myth of terror. They claim that they left Lifta only after Begin and the Irgun had destroyed Deir Yassin! Every Palestinian knows about Deir Yassin. It is the incarnation of evil, and it is everyone’s excuse for defeat. And to this day, our elders tell themselves that they left Lifta only after the slaughter of the 250 poor villagers of Deir Yassin.
“But, Jamal, I will tell you something. It is a lie! The people of Lifta fled four months before Deir Yassin! They are cowards, even now. Scattered, homeless, landless. They have lost everything. And still they cannot face the truth.”
“They are pathetic,” said Jamal.
“Perhaps. But their emotions are human and timeless. And that is why I am telling you this sad story of my village. Because it is our story today. Do you doubt me? Do you think that we have learned our lesson and it cannot happen again? Listen to me for a moment more.
“After the catastrophe of 1948, many of the people of Lifta went to Amman. They had lost their village and their country. But in Jordan they were at least among brother Arabs, with passports and the rights of citizenship. The Liftawis built homes and bus
inesses. They made a little money and perhaps they bought a car, or a bigger house, or they sent their children to university. Or perhaps they moved to Kuwait or Saudi Arabia and made even more money.”
“I know people like that,” said Jamal.
“Of course you do,” answered Abu Nasir. “They are all around you. They are the face of our people, struggling, hoping, trying to survive. The Liftawis were no better or worse than the people of any other village. They made friends with the Jordanians. They grew comfortable. They believed in the liberation of Palestine, perhaps even in the dream of returning to Lifta. They supported the fedayeen and gave us money and time. They believed they had learned the lesson that to survive in a world like this, you must be strong.
“Now I will tell you the saddest part of my story. During the fighting in Amman last September, I visited a family from my village. From Lifta. They were living in Jebel Hussein near one of the Jordanian Army positions. Do you know where that is?”
“Of course,” said Jamal.
“I asked them for help. I told them that our fighters needed their house to stop the advance of the King’s army. I pleaded, but they refused. They told me the fighting would be over soon and they would be safe. They didn’t want to have the fedayeen so close. What harm could come to them from the Jordanians? They had done nothing wrong.”
“What happened to them?” asked Jamal.
“They are all dead. The whole family was killed when an artillery shell hit their house. I cried when I heard the news, even after what had happened. Here were people who had been driven like dogs from their home in Lifta only to die like dogs in Amman!”
Jamal shook his head with a mixture of sadness and contempt.
“Now I will shock you by saying something,” continued Abu Nasir. “Our people hate Menachem Begin, don’t they? That is an article of faith for us, isn’t it?”
Agents of Innocence Page 27