Final Stop, Algiers: A Thriller

by Mishka Ben-David

  On a wall, I found photos of the graduating classes. Despite the ten years that separated the photo of the long-haired twenty-five-year-old Ronald Friedlich in his passport and the kid in eighth grade, his face jumped straight out at me. Had it not been an impossibility, I would have thought that the chubby, nice-looking boy smiling at me from one of the frames was me. Perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised; if we were so similar now, it was logical that we were also similar when we were little. Nevertheless, it was a peculiar sensation.

  A bell rang and the kids scurried into their classrooms. Teachers who passed by looked at me, and eventually one of them asked if I needed help. I said I was moving with my family into the area, and looking into schools for my son, who would be going into first grade next year. This led to an invitation to the principal’s office, something I hadn’t wanted, but I did learn one important thing there for my cover story: the current name of the school dated back about a decade, and before that it had only been a number. The principal called in the teacher who would be taking first grade, and the two posed for a photo for me in the main corridor and again at the entrance, so I’d “have something to show my son”. I also took a picture of Ron’s class photograph, and I memorized the names of some of the teachers, the homeroom teacher, the then-principal, and a few of his classmates. I asked what high schools the graduates went to and I was given the names of two, which helped me focus my search.

  At the high school, it would have been difficult to deny the resemblance between me and the eighteen-year-old graduate, and I decided to cut my visit there to a minimum. Luckily, at the first one I went to I found two photographs of Ron. The first was of the graduating class, at the exact age at which I was inducted into the Israeli army. I was still umbilically linked to my feelings and memories about the induction, and in Ron’s picture I saw a more successful version of myself. The eighteen-year-old Ron was a lot skinnier than the pleasant kid of fourteen. His cheekbones were prominent, his face seemed longer, and his jaw more clean-cut. The look in his eyes was also different. No longer the nice friendly boy, but rather a predatory young male, with a look that I had never had.

  The second picture shed some light on the change. Hanging next to the class photo was one of the school football team, taken after it won the Toronto schools’ championship. In the centre, smiling proudly, holding the trophy, was my double: a robust young man, the puppy fat of childhood replaced by muscle.

  A special ops guy, I thought to myself. If he’d been an Israeli with that physique, with the strength and fitness needed to captain a football team, he would have got into the elite commando unit, Sayeret Matkal. When had the chubby kid decided he’d had enough of the softy image, and that he wanted to be captain of the school football team, perhaps the number one aspiration in the culture of North American youth? What had he done to morph from a puffy fourteen to a beefy eighteen?

  It reminded me of all the workouts I did in the eleventh and twelfth grades, in the hope of getting my combat fitness rating high enough to be able to join one of the elite units. Just as we, the students of Leo Baeck High in Haifa, saw ourselves as smarter than the kids at Reali High, we also tried to show that we were more militarily gung ho than they were, despite their affiliated military boarding school. But I gave up too quickly. By then I was already aware of my not particularly positive trait of not seeing anything as important enough to devote much effort to it. During night runs in the deep sand along the seashore, and then up the French Carmel to the state of the art gym facilities that Leo Baeck High had put at our disposal, I used to huff and puff like an antiquated steam engine, curse, spit, retch – and simply break down. Fuck the paratroops, fuck the Golani recon unit. So it’ll be artillery or engineers. As long as it wasn’t the tanks, for obvious reasons. And if I had tried a little harder? Would I have become a guy with a body like Ron’s?

  So why did he succeed, I asked myself, where I didn’t? Was there something in the Canadian air that led him to set the goals that were right for him and to act to achieve them in a more focused way than I had? Perhaps football was to him what art was to me: the things we were good at, where our talents showed through. But, in the meantime, my road had been blocked by my “surroundings”. By the messy nature of the part of the world where I grew up. And what had happened to him? What had he gone through before becoming a homeless wanderer, and then dead and buried in the sands of Sinai, without anyone knowing what had befallen him?

  I felt a need to get to know him better, and not only for cover purposes. There was something about Ron that was signalling to me, again and again, that he was a relevant alternative to myself, if I could only decipher those signals properly.

  I decided to take a look at his parents. It wouldn’t do any harm for me to know what they looked like, so that if necessary I could give an accurate description of them. I devoted three days to this, at first without results. The Friedlichs were now living in a neighbourhood of Toronto known as The Beach, on the shore of Lake Ontario, down the road from where they had lived before. I took the streetcar, and the trip along Queen Street took far longer than I’d expected. As it turned towards the lake and the houses began to look more cared-for, the road itself became the dividing line between a more expensive area, to the right of Queen Street, and the less well-off part, to the left. I alighted and walked along the road, which was like a street in a seaside village. The trees were covered in autumn foliage and the small buildings, one or two storeys high, housed shops selling souvenirs, beach equipment, clothing and all kinds of food.

  The Friedlich’s street ran from the main road towards the lake, ending at a large park along the shore. It was lined by small, wooden, two-family duplexes that could have all looked the same, but each was painted a different colour, green, yellow, orange, blue or brown, and each had a garage in the yard painted the same color. It was a cheerful sight, and my first thought was how much I would like to live in such a house, close to a park and a lake. When I remembered it was Ron’s parents who lived here, I thought how much I would like my parents to live in a house like this and in a place like this, free of the anxiety over national existence that casts such a dark shadow over everything that happens to them. But Ron’s parents had lost their son, I reminded myself. Nobody would want to change places with them. Nobody deserves such sorrow.

  I knew the house number, but I didn’t want to stake out their home from nearby. In fact, I couldn’t do so, for fear of arousing their suspicions or that of their neighbours. In the half-light of dawn or in the evening, observation from a distance is not effective, so I did mine during daylight hours. Some of the time I sat on a bench in the park looking up the street, with a freezing wind blowing on my back from over the lake, and the rest of the time I sat at a bus stop on Queen, with a view straight down the street. I couldn’t stay there too long without getting onto one of the buses, so I also spent hours in one of the restaurants on the corner, from which I couldn’t see the house but could see everyone emerging from the little street. I decided to rent a car, something that would make things easier, and would enable me to follow the Friedlichs if they left in a vehicle.

  With the motor running and the heat on, the discomfort of stakeout duty was relieved, but the difference in the temperature between inside and outside caused condensation on the windows, and the white fumes emitted through the exhaust pipe into the freezing air formed a pillar of cloud that signalled something irregular was afoot. I didn’t feel comfortable, although I moved the car around and changed it for another one on some pretext after a couple of days.

  On the fourth day I saw a couple aged around sixty coming out of the house. I had no doubt they were the Friedlichs. Ron’s father had a grey beard and his mother was an attractive woman. I had seen her before, when I was watching the end of the street and she had walked by to do some shopping. But then I’d had no way of knowing she was Ron’s mother. Arm in arm, they walked to the bus stop. I took several photographs of them, and got ready to follow their
bus. Obviously, I wasn’t about to show myself to them because they would immediately think I was their son.

  I asked myself, if they didn’t know their son was dead, what did they know? When had they last seen him? Not for the past four years, judging from the stamps in his passport, unless they had travelled to meet him somewhere. How often had he called them, and what were they thinking now? I pictured my parents in their situation, and tears came into my eyes. Did the Friedlichs have other children, who just maybe could be some kind of comfort? Did they have grandchildren, impish little sources of consolation? If Ron was their only child, their situation was too horrible to contemplate.

  Nature has designed us to separate from our parents, when the time comes. From the time they help us to come of age, they gradually wither and we become prepared for the moment of parting. But for parents to have to part from their son forever? It’s not only that he is supposed to carry on your genetic presence in the world. After you have brought a son into the world, raised him in joy and in pain, loved him unconditionally, watched his every stage of development, worshipped every clever thing he uttered, seen him grow older and smarter, become a teenager, the captain of the football team – and all at once it is all over?

  I recalled a conversation I had with Udi in the little house in Tel Aviv, when I raised the matter. Then, I’d put it out of my mind, but now the horror of it was clear. Growing old like that, without knowing. It was a terrible thing for me – for us – to know and not to tell them. I knew very well that if and when Ronald Friedlich was registered as deceased in the Canadian registry, the passport would become worthless. Any check carried out by the authorities would expose our bluff and put me in considerable danger. And as Udi said, we hadn’t killed him, we hadn’t concealed his body, and we were not even sure what had actually happened to him. We also couldn’t own up to having his passport – and a passport like this, in the hands of a trained operative, was invaluable.

  So why was I feeling so lousy about myself? I felt I couldn’t go on watching them. Let them go wherever they were going, in any case it was unlikely to provide much information.

  But then, something else occurred to me. The house was empty now, and in it might be the answers to all my questions, even to questions I hadn’t thought of. I knew I would have to get the Office’s approval for a break-in, to submit an operational plan, to think of escape routes, contingencies and responses. What if they were to come home suddenly, or if the cleaning lady turned up, or if I bumped into a neighbour? What cover did I have for any such occurrence, especially in light of my identical resemblance to Ron? For one moment I thought that if I was surprised by a neighbour I could pretend to be Ron, but ruled it out immediately. How would his parents be able to live with the news that Ron had appeared and then vanished again? I could say I had the wrong address, and if that didn’t work, I would have to stun the person, and clear out quickly in my car. And after that, of course, I would have to explain everything to Udi.

  There was no chance I’d get approval for such an operation, and even if I did, I’d probably lose days waiting until they left the house again. As the bus with Ron’s parents on it drove away I got out of the car and headed for the house. I’ll either get a medal or get busted.

  I didn’t see any sign of a burglar alarm, closed circuit TV or extra locks. It looked as if the door simply locked when you closed it. Anything more, and I would have needed special equipment. Looking both ways, and with my heart beating 180 times a minute, I went to the door, rang the bell – to ascertain there was no one inside – took two plastic cards out of my wallet, shoved them between the door and the jamb and pressed with a small pen knife. The latch slid in and the door swung silently open.

  I knew what to look for: any information at all on my Canadian double, his childhood, youth, parents and other family members. Pictures, documents, anything that would enable me to be him. That was on the operational level. But I felt I was here for another reason as well, and this was what had led me to violate the rules. I was here to check out the alternative to my own life. What I would have been, had I grown up under the conditions in which Ron had grown up. The closeness I felt for him, because of our great resemblance, aroused in me a strong urge to get to know him, inside and outside, not only as Ron Friedlich, but as another way that Mickey Simhoni could have lived his life. Just as a tree would grow differently if planted in different soil, I was curious to know how I would have turned out if I’d grown up here, and not in Haifa.

  I pushed the locking button on the latch with my knuckle, so as not to leave a fingerprint. Inside the house the curtains were drawn and I had to wait until my eyes grew accustomed to the dark. It smelled like a home: the breakfast toast, the flowers in the vase. On the wall facing me, in the hall, I made out some framed certificates and pictures. Leo Friedlich, doctor of dental medicine, was printed in large letters on one diploma, under the name of some Anglican university in elaborate lettering that was hard to read: its emblem had a large cross at its centre. It had been awarded to Leo on his graduation with distinction in 1980. The other certificates were in smaller letters; I rapidly photographed them to be examined later.

  On another wall there were family photos. Even in the faint light I could recognize myself, that is Ron, and his parents, at different ages and in different places. There was a girl in the pictures too, probably Ron’s sister. Leo always had an unkempt beard that grew greyer as the years went by. In contrast, his clothes were always impeccable. He was wearing suits and ties that I had never seen on my father or his friends in Israel, where informality in dress reigned. I even remember dad saying, “I don’t understand how all the geniuses in the field of men’s fashion have come up with nothing more than the same jacket in almost the same colours everywhere.” And I understood even less this idiocy, the tie, a piece of cloth, a colourful decoration, hard to knot, that chokes you and yet everyone feels that they have to wear one.

  In other photos, from more recent years, Ron was absent. Here were his father, his mother, his sister and a balding young man who was apparently her husband, and a baby who grew older in each picture.

  Despite my accelerated pulse, common sense told me I wasn’t in danger, for now. They had taken a bus in the direction of central Toronto and were likely to be away for some time. I was about to climb the stairs to the second floor when I saw a chest of drawers against the far wall, and on it a pair of tall candlesticks, a large seven-branched menorah and above them, a wooden plaque carved with the word “Shalom” in Hebrew and English.

  My insides quaked. They were Jewish. For a moment, I felt weak-kneed. Here I was, Mickey Simhoni, a Mossad operative, an agent of the Jewish state, posing as a dead Jew, and breaking into the home of his parents, Jews like me.

  Actually there was nothing about this situation that should have astonished me, certainly not to the extent that it did. No one had ever told me that the dead Canadian in Sinai was not a Jew. He could have been a Jew just as much as he could have been anything else. The only thing that interested the Mossad was that he was a Canadian. Was I adopting a Jewish name? But Friedlich was not necessarily a Jewish name. Perhaps only one of the parents was Jewish. This could also be the reason that there was no mezuzah on the doorpost. If only the mother was Jewish, the family name wasn’t, and if only the father was a Jew, then Ron wasn’t one. And anyway, why should I care about it?

  But care I did. I felt my betrayal all the more strongly, if the identity I was stealing was that of the son of a Jewish family, and I was leaving that family in the dark about their son’s death. I also felt my kinship all the more strongly. This too should not have happened to me, but it did. Just as I was a “patriot by default” I was also a “Jew by default”. I had never thought there was any special value in my being Jewish, I never thought Jews were better than any other people, but I knew where the concept of “Germans of the Mosaic faith” had led. Other nations weren’t willing to accept us as part of them – and I couldn’t even define mys
elf as being “of the Mosaic faith”. Ever since I could think for myself, as a teenager, I had never given even a shadow of a chance to there being any such thing as what believers of all kinds call “god”. But I also knew what the fate of unbelieving Jews had been, those who thought they could somehow tag along with the ostensibly supra-national, ideological, classless collective of Soviet Communism. And beyond all this, I was the grandchild of survivors of death camps and the son of people who had been conceived in a displaced persons camp and in besieged Jerusalem. I had imbibed with my mother’s milk the certainty that in order to survive the Jews had to have their own country.

  To the same extent, I too felt the estrangement my father felt from all those Jews living outside Israel “who don’t see the situation they’re in” and who “are ready to give up being a free nation in its own land” and “to live under the protection of the Gentiles” – all dad’s phrases, and he never spared those Jews his tongue lashings. I however, didn’t feel the same way about those whose fate had taken them elsewhere and offered them different possibilities, those who were able to live under the illusion of merging into other surroundings, as was apparently possible here, in Canada and the United States, each a place where immigrants from many lands were creating a new nation.

  My father was even more vituperative whenever the matter of Jews who left Israel came up. “Rabin was being gentle when he called them ‘a fallout of nobodies’,” I remember him saying. “They’re simply traitors.” When I challenged him about this, he replied, “If ever mum and I are in big trouble and you, instead of lending a hand, desert us, you would be, in my eyes, a traitor.” Sometimes he reminded me of the terrifying father in one of the stories I’d read as a child, who preferred his son to die in battle rather than come home without winning.