“It’ll be great working with you,” he said.
Clearly the little matter of the extra job as a postal service didn’t merit a mention. It was all part of the same mundane package to him.
When he fell silent, I asked: “The people you work for, Toby. How far would they go to get me to do it?”
He cocked his head in one short half-turn.
“They wouldn’t pay you, if that’s what you mean.” He overemphasised his words to show he was joking.
“That’s not what I mean,” I said sweetly and smiled. “Would they put child pornography on someone’s computer?”
Toby sat back slightly and pursed his lips against a thin line of coffee foam. Then he wiped it like a boy, on the back of his hand.
“What?”
“They put child pornography on my husband’s computer.”
Pause. “Who did?”
“Somebody at your end.”
He tried to look like he was taking the allegation seriously.
“Why would anyone do that?” he said.
I smiled and let a little silence run out.
“Never mind,” I said. “It doesn’t matter.”
He stared at the table and drew the corners of his mouth down, rubbing his palms slowly together, in a praying position. I took this to indicate not so much disbelief, but that he simply wasn’t prepared to go there, not into the deranged dysfunction of a client’s married life.
“It’s OK, Toby. I’m not paranoid. I’m sound. But it’s true.”
He looked like he had something to say, took a decision and leaned in on the table.
“Look, Natalie, they don’t do that. They wouldn’t know how to. We just want you to speak at a conference. And to help us a little with a drop.” He paused, then he said: “I’m sorry.”
I suppose he was being sympathetic, breaking it to me that he couldn’t offer me a way out of the discovery of Adrian’s horrific online habits.
“I believe you, Toby,” I said, because actually he wouldn’t know. Too young, too unworldly, and that was some sort of comfort. “But it doesn’t matter. That’s not why I’m doing it. I’m doing it because I want to. I want to go. The time is right.”
I realise now that that’s the truth of it. The men from the ministry were offering me an escape, an exit from a life that wasn’t just wearing me down, it was killing me. I do wonder whether I’d have gone even if I’d known how it was going to turn out. The awful truth is that I suspect I might. No, I know I would have gone anyway. It was no longer about what I wanted to do. Something bigger and stronger than me had taken over. All I had to do was obey. I was no longer in control.
Part 2
11
I was wearing the half-smile of the incredulous, palms upwards on my knees, jaw slightly dropped. Toby was weaving in his hatchback through the Jerusalem traffic like a native. He was shaking his head.
“I tell you he came on to me, Toby.”
“I just don’t believe it.”
“Is that you don’t believe me as in you think I’m making it up, or as in you’re amazed and can barely warrant it?”
Toby carried on shaking his head and hooted at a cyclist.
I’d come strangely to like the boy Toby. We’d flown out via Switzerland, where we’d had an overnighter to collect a briefing from some UN worker bees – they don’t like to be called drones – about the projected $10 billion aid budget for the occupied territories. That was so I could speak “with some authority” about it at the conference. I took that as a clear signal that I was meant to talk their book.
I didn’t mind that, if the money was real, and I guess Zurich was meant to show me that too. I’d emailed Sarah, who was already in Jerusalem, and reckoned on her telling me what to say. I was obeying her and, now that Adrian was finished, I reckoned we were back on the same page.
We seemed an odd couple, Toby and me – he the young spook, me the washed-up aidie – to have this geopolitical power play performed just for us. It was like some silly case of mistaken identity, or like we’d won a competition to see how the peace process worked. I couldn’t or wouldn’t take it too seriously, especially in our down time and would send it up to Toby. Did he think Tel Aviv would get a Disneyland? Were we on commission? Could I get a photograph with the cheque – perhaps one of those giant charity ones – at the Shrine of the Holy Sepulchre?
“I’m just saying Americans don’t do that kind of thing. They’re too worried about getting into trouble. It wouldn’t happen.”
“But I’m telling you it did, Toby. Maybe he couldn’t resist me.”
“Now you are making it up.”
“Well, thank you very much, Tobes, you’re a gent.”
I didn’t care whether Toby believed me or not. In fact, I rather suspected that he was required not to believe me, otherwise he’d be in possession of salient information that he may have to report. So it was probably easier to keep it at the level of regular banter. For Toby’s sake, I didn’t tell him that I’d damned nearly crippled the American jerk. Maybe ruined his reproductive prospects.
We’d been introduced at a networking event ahead of the conference. Toby had taken his responsibilities as my escort very seriously, installing me in one of his office’s low-rise apartments in a leafy enclave of suburban Jerusalem, and had rarely left me alone as the conference approached. It was convened at the Mount Scopus campus of Jerusalem University, to the north-east of the city – a sort of white concrete affair that could have been one of England’s more modern universities. We’d sat in the sun on a low wall outside the complex we were using for the conference, next to a small evergreen tree set in a huge concrete planter at an incongruous angle of some forty-five-degrees, so that it had to be supported with a wire hawser.
“Incapability Brown been at the weedkiller?” I said, or something like that.
“Best not say that to anyone else,” said Toby. “It’s a monument to nine who were killed in the cafe here in a Hamas attack, mostly Israelis but Americans too.”
“Sorry. When?”
“A few years ago.”
Mine was to be the middle day of the conference. The media would come for the mid-morning set piece, my little keynote largely drafted by UN staff, then some photo calls. It was during one of the seemingly interminable breaks for coffee and cakes, during which Toby would circulate me around the various conference catchments – Palestinian Arabs, other Arabs, academic Israelis, political Israelis, UN officials, visiting bishops and archbishops, Quartet reps, the party of the junior minister from the Foreign Office, media. And this one American that I counted, called Kevin Schreiber.
“Is he CIA?” I asked Toby.
“No, he isn’t CIA,” he answered with a cod weariness that I didn’t understand. “He works with our office.”
“The Foreign Office?”
“Yes, sort of.”
Schreiber was tall and thin with neat white hair, fit and quite handsome in an uninteresting sort of way. He talked easily and fluently, if in a rather monotone fashion. It seemed odd to talk in such a matter-of-fact way in a crowded room about the little bit of street diplomacy that had brought us together.
“It’s really very straightforward. Toby will bring you to my hotel tomorrow and we’ll run you through the briefing. There’s nothing to it.” I’ve run through this time and again since. It was all meant to be so simple. And, in one respect I suppose it was.
Toby drove me over when the first day of the conference finished. Schreiber was staying at the American Colony in East Jerusalem. Of course he was. It’s a discreet old hotel, built in the Ottoman style, and just right for a sleazy diplomat like Schreiber. Toby pulled up at the front and my door was opened. Toby stayed put.
“Aren’t you coming?”
“Not my side of the business. Do you want to get a cab back, or shall I wait?”
I said I’d get a cab. Schreiber had what I imagined would be called a Junior Suite. Everything with dinky little arches – the
windows in clutches of three, the separation of his lounge and office area from the bedroom. He poured white wine as soon as I arrived without asking if I wanted any, and we sat next to each other on the sofa looking at his laptop. That should have given me a heads-up – it all felt too intimate from the start.
The briefing was laughable by any standard. It consisted of a single photograph of a cafe with red signage in Arabic that I didn’t recognise and a Google map of some East Jerusalem lanes, to which he pointed with a pencil. The address on a piece of paper handed to Toby would have been fine. But Schreiber wouldn’t have been able to practise his Boston charm that way.
I had to laugh in his face when he told me solemnly that “I cannot describe the man you will be meeting, because I don’t know who he is.”
“Well, that’s rather the point, isn’t it?” He must have thought I was flirting.
“He will know your name and he will be looking for a woman.” He refilled my glass. “Do you mind if I ask how you got that scar across your eyebrow?”
“I was in a car crash.”
“It’s really very attractive.”
“It speaks very highly of you too, Mr Schreiber.”
He leaned in, leering, and I could smell white-wine breath.
“Where do I get my envelope?”
“What envelope would that be?” I rolled my eyes and moved away up the sofa like a coy maid in a play. “Oh, that. Toby will give it to you.”
“Then I guess that’s all I need to know.” I stood and grabbed my jacket.
“Need you really go? I thought we might have a drink, get to know each other better.” He exited the other end of the sofa and barred my way to the door.
“No offence, Schreiber, but I think I’d rather die.”
“Aw,” he pulled a little baby reproachful face, “that’s not very Christian,” and he moved in on me, pushing me against the wall.
I looked up at him and placed both hands on his shoulders for balance. Then my right knee found the inside of his thigh like a locating rail and glided its delivery into his slack little sack, like a kitten in a purse. He hissed through his nose and stood back, his arms hanging as if in a paralysed dance move as he fought the urge to grab his groin. In truth, it hadn’t been too hard a jab.
A gasp. “You little bitch.”
“Now you’re on the money, Schreiber,” I said and swung out the door.
And that, more or less, is what I was telling Toby about as we drove past the Colony for my errand the following day. We were in good spirits, the boring conference was over, I was looking forward to a few days off in Jerusalem and, though I wasn’t going to say so, knocking around with Toby for a while.
“What are your plans?”
“I don’t know. I may visit some aidie friends. I’ve got some working with the Bulldozed.” I’d tried to call Sarah but she hadn’t replied. Nor had I seen her at the conference centre. I should have thought that was strange, but I suppose I just thought she was frantically busy. She probably was.
“Where’s the envelope, Tobes?”
Toby theatrically slapped his forehead like he’d forgotten it and I sharply palmed his shoulder. He pulled a manila one from his inside pocket. It had nothing written on it, but it was no bigger than a private letter.
“Is that it? I was expecting something larger, Tobes.” It was an attempt at innuendo.
I watched the white sprawl of affluent inner-city Jerusalem passing. The new Jerusalem, the unholy city, dressed as a whore for her pimp. Could this be where it all began and would end? For me, maybe, but I didn’t know that then. I was still somewhere safer and, as Toby drove, something in the high Holy Land light made me think of being happy in other trucks, my feet on the dash, like the one in Sudan, or like the one in Beirut, one hundred and fifty miles or so to the north.
If I hold my nose, I can still taste the dust from breeze-block buildings caking my outer lip, there in Lebanon, when the Church started to send me on missionary work. The smell of fruit and urine as I walked the hopeless alleyways, one foot either side of the central-running drain, laundry drying high enough overhead to catch some of the sky. The narrow-lipped children, eyebrows raised at the Western woman in clean, pale cotton. And I smiled into the deadpan faces, with their pastel-shaded charity clothing, and the brilliant white light of that sky, pinched by the narrow alleys, occasionally illuminating their bare walls, but never cleansing them. I remember how they hung their clothing over corrugated-iron shutters, painted blue. Blue paint was what they had.
This bit is Yusef’s story. It isn’t really mine. Without Yusef, I wouldn’t be here now. The first time I knew Yusef was just six weeks – some forty days, as it happens – and I know now he was my salvation.
Yusef was, and very probably remains, and may he always be, a teacher originally from the West Bank. He was assigned to my beat in Syria, Lebanon and Jordan. He was from an exiled Palestinian Christian family, and I think that’s how he had picked up work with us. I was notionally coordinating the efforts of local educational associations for the Palestinian camps, with a brief for skills training for women. There were women heroically managing their communities across the camps and I’d developed an interest in their workshops on gender and family issues. The rank poverty of some of the camps had fomented grotesque domestic violence – who’d have guessed? No work, no hope of deliverance, a black hole of human deposit, against which some of these women were offering pay-groups, chiselling away at the rock face of illiteracy, organising collective projects among their alloy folding tables and stackable white plastic chairs. It was an impertinent little joke at oppression’s expense.
The conventional view of these women in Europe is of scarved heads hanging washing to dry on bicycle wheels. Bless. But then Europeans also think that these camps are like Bedouin tented communities, or the kind of medical and feeding station we parked our stolen truck beside in Sudan. Listen, people, how many decades do you think they’ve been there? This isn’t temporary displacement – nor are they shanty towns so much as ghettoes, where Palestinian families have been raised and have rotted since the ethnic cleansings of Israel in 1948 and 1967.
I worked across twelve such camps in Lebanon, out of a base in north Beirut. The nearest was Burj el-Barajneh and I spent most of my time there, quickly learning that the other camps had their specific characteristics: there was Beddawi, edgy with its youths tattooed with Arabic slogans. Al Jaleel in the Bekaa Valley was an old French barracks, where the mountains rose towards the Syrian border, as rooted in its history as the ancient ruins of Baalbek. Then there was the big Burj el-Shemali camp at Tyre, with its cordon of Lebanese security and ring of red oil drums, with sand-bagged bunkers to stop building materials from getting in. And Mar Elias, the smallest of the camps, populated with Christians expelled from Galilee in 1952.
And there was this well-built man in his early thirties, tall with a wavy burst of dark hair and a ready smile. Yusef would drive me between the camps, making connections, patiently explaining background. In the heat and the dust and the smell of diesel, with a hint of lavender, I came secretly to cherish our drives along the rudimentary dual-carriageways of the coast as we dodged ancient grey Mercedes, stunted palms marking our way in the central reservations. I wore sunglasses I’d found on an airport seat and put my feet on the dash of Yusef’s 4x4 and imagined we were in a low-budget road movie.
I liked him for his sense of silence between bouts of effortless chat. We’d chew gum or smoke for half an hour, then talk about the cleverness of a Roman viaduct which now ended abruptly by the road like some pointless ski-jump, or about how the woman we’d met that morning was the sole survivor of a Phalangist mortar attack. I sensed that Yusef had previous, as ex-pats in the region had come to call it, but then so had I, and neither of us felt compelled to delve.
I’d just been checking out educational resources for primary children in Barajneh and we were heading back towards Beirut when Yusef said, “You must come home for tea.”
I laughed. It sounded more Home Counties than Lebanon. “Is this how Arabs do a first date? Are you asking me home to meet your family, Yuse?” I said. I’d started to abbreviate his name and he seemed to like it, sometimes calling him Yuseless when I pretended to be cross with him. He smiled when I said it anyway.
“I suppose so. They’re there anyway. How much have you seen of how we live in the camps?”
I knew his challenge was right. I met women’s collectives in day centres and schools and UN officials in offices and at the consulate. I didn’t actually know much about everyday life in the camps.
“I’d like that,” I said, afraid that I may have offended him with a glib response.
“You’ll like my uncle’s cake,” he said.
So, the next afternoon, I walked up the little alleys that were cambered higher at the sides to run what was all too often raw sewage down the gully in the middle, around a couple of breeze-block doglegs, which I took to be stopping child cyclists getting up too much speed, and we were at Yusef’s stable door. His uncle leaned against it from the inside, smoking a filterless Gitane.
“You’re late for a goy girl,” he said, one side of his mouth breaking to show shiny teeth in a guileless smile.
“She’s out of your class,” said Yusef, in English for my benefit. “And don’t speak Yiddish in my house. Come inside, Natalie.”
A leathery old lady I took to be his mother sat by a cabinet in a rocking chair that looked absurdly out of place. French, probably. She was holding a cat in a shawl and was about no other business. I would learn that she sat like this endlessly, with a studied detachment from her surroundings, but not without contentment, her place a simple statement of presence. “Her name is May,” said Yusef. “Say hello to Natalie, May.” May held up a hand, nodding and smiling.
Yusef had a son, spare and skinny in a clean white vest and nylon tracksuit trousers, Western-branded. I could hear the relentless ricochet of a plastic football against concrete as Asi played with his friends out in the yard, shushing them if they shouted, as he had been told. He was ten.
A Dark Nativity Page 15