It was self-evident that I must avoid at all costs being handed over to the Mukhabarat. They would treat me very differently.
Na’im rubbed his chin as his mind worked. “I have only two ways of letting you go without giving you to the Mukhabarat. One would be to ask your consul to come here. The truth is that it would be embarrassing because we should have done so when you were arrested and I want to avoid a diplomatic incident. The other way, as I have said, would be for you to think of somebody else who could verify your identity over the phone. A brother or a sister, a neighbour, someone who knows you. Even the owner of that gallery, anyone, I don’t care who.”
It was just as important for me that the consul shouldn’t be called in. The chance that the gallery owner would recognize my voice was small, but I had to try it. There was no one else who knew me as Ron Friedlich.
“All right. I’ll call the gallery,” I said. “but bear in mind that the owner has seen me only once.”
I dialled the number. There was no reply.
“Of course. It’s the middle of the night there now.”
“I realize you haven’t been living in Toronto for the past few years, but isn’t there a single soul there who knows you?” Na’im asked sympathetically. “A friend? A girlfriend? Someone who would recognize you in their sleep? I can’t wait with this until it’s morning there.”
Niki.
She would, of course, recognize my voice immediately. She was also the only one who could link me with the name Ron Friedlich. Actually, all she knew was that I had asked for his university paperwork, but, if I identified myself straight away as Ron Friedlich, wasn’t it possible that she would connect that with my sudden disappearance and my asking for his documents, and realize that I had to pretend that I was he?
Of course she might not catch on straight away, and say something like, “What’s all this bullshit, Mickey?” Or that she’d been contacting all the Mickey Simhonis in Israel, thereby dooming me to years in prison. That was the most likely reaction. She was also liable to grasp the situation, but not to cooperate. I didn’t know what she felt about me after I walked out on her.
“OK, listen to me,” Na’im’s voice cut in. “If you fall into the hands of the Mukhabarat, I really pity you. You will stay with them until you see the consul which will take another week and which won’t be as pleasant as your time here. I’m going to call the consul. I’ll have to do some explaining about the departure from proper procedure, and I hope they won’t accuse me of false arrest, but I hope that in a few hours you’ll be a free man.”
“Wait. There is someone,” I said. I had to prevent an encounter with the Canadian consul. “Someone who may be able to confirm my identity.”
“So what have you been waiting for?”
“It’s a little sensitive. It’s a woman I met when I was back in Toronto recently. We had a little fling, and the problem is that I left without saying a word. She may be furious at me.”
“May be? If I did something like that to my woman, I’d lose my dick.” Na’im had decided to move onto more intimate ground with me.
“She may make things difficult for me. You’ve got to take that into account.”
“Worth your while to try, no? Perhaps she’ll be prepared to take you back, after we let you go.”
His words fell on the most fertile of grounds. All I wanted was to fly out of there straight into her arms.
“I’ll try.”
I was putting my fate into her hands. I knew I was wagering not only on her speed of comprehension and her good will, but also on my ability to manoeuvre the conversation correctly. While Na’im asked his exchange for an international line I was working out exactly what I would say.
“There’s something else,” I said. “It’s the middle of the night over there. She may be confused. And of course she may be with another man. So please take that into account as well.”
“Yalla, dial.” Nai’im turned the phone towards me.
My heartbeat must have been audible across the Atlantic.
I heard the ring-back tone from across the seas and the continents. And then a surprised and sleepy “Hello” that seared my heart and my guts.
“Hi Niki, it’s me, Ron,” I said, trying to suppress the eruption of emotion that overwhelmed me and to conduct the conversation exactly as I had planned it, with all the responses to all the possible contingencies.
I knew it would take her a moment to connect the familiar but unexpected voice with the totally unexpected name, and that her first reaction would be what it in fact was:
“Who is it again?”
“It’s me, Ron. Ron Friedlich. And I owe you a big apology for the way I left.”
I wanted her to hear a full sentence, so that she would have no doubt that it was me speaking, and that she would hear the name twice, so that she wouldn’t blurt out my real name.
“I’m sorry, who?”
“Ron. Ron Friedlich.”
Niki was really confused, and I heard some alarm in her voice.
“Ron? I never thought I’d hear your voice again.”
I wasn’t sure that she knew she was talking to me. I had to make things clearer.
“Niki, listen. Do you remember when you went with me to get my transcripts and BA diploma? And then we spent a few days together and I left without saying goodbye? I’m terribly sorry about the way I did that. There were good reasons.”
“Yes …” her voice sounded hesitant, waiting for me to say more. And then, “Do you know what time it is?”
That’s exactly what I’d expected.
“I know it’s the middle of the night, and I’m terribly sorry. But I’ve got a problem. I’ve been arrested in Jordan, and my interrogators here told me to call someone who could identify me. I hoped …”
Na’im grabbed the phone. He looked a little angry. I had apparently said a little too much for his liking. I could only pray that Niki would pull herself together and understand and be prepared to go along with me. I was no longer in control.
“This is Captain Na’im speaking.”
I heard the echo of Niki’s voice resonating from the handset, and a moment later Na’im’s face softened, and a smile spread across it and turned into an actual laugh.
“She’s asked me to give you a couple of slaps, not in the face but on your butt, for what you did to her,” he chuckled. “And I’m liable to do just that,” he told both of us.
I couldn’t share his mirth.
“I have some questions for you, if I may,” Na’im continued with his identification process, and when he got her permission he asked her what my occupation was and what I’d studied. She was able to say that I had majored in Anthropology and Earth Science – as she’d seen the transcripts – and then she must have added that I’d played football for the Varsity Blues, as he asked her what kind of a team that was. He asked her to describe me, and burst out laughing again.
“She says she hopes that our treatment will shrink your swollen chest, shave off your wavy forelock and pull out the curly little hairs on your chest and arms, one by one …” Na’im dissolved in sheer enjoyment. “Well, there’s no doubt you made quite an impression on her,” he said as he ordered me to open my shirt and roll my sleeves up.
Things seemed to be going in a positive direction, despite her weird humour. She hadn’t given me away, but there was no way of knowing how the phone call would end.
To complete her description, Niki apparently suggested they pluck out my two green eyes, make a hole in my other cheek as well, because I had only one dimple, and slice off my straight and rather longish nose. I deduced this by the way he looked at my eyes, signalled me to show my profile and smile, and expressed surprise at my single dimple. He couldn’t know that it was the result of an unlucky fall on a sharp object when I was a kid. Her description was perfect, and seemed to satisfy him, as did her performance as an injured party – if it was in fact a performance. I felt that the whole lump of tension that had been b
uilding up inside me was beginning to melt away and that an internal sea of love was welling up instead.
I hoped that he’d let me have another few words with Niki, but he thanked her, apologized for the intrusion, and hung up.
The sea of love overwhelmed me. My wise and good Niki. But was she actually mine? Although she had decided to save me and had gone along with my cover story, did she really mean it when she wished all those tortures on me? And Nai’m’s conniving, somewhat lecherous laughter evoked a dubiousness in me which straight away I understood was a kind of jealousy, and which was immediately replaced by desire. I felt pressure in my trousers. Just hearing Niki’s voice on the phone, even now, as had always happened when she called me from work, was enough to make me hard.
“Well, Mr Friedlich, you are a free man,” said Captain Na’im, and he shook my hand. “I’m sorry you were detained, but don’t do any more silly things now. Stick to the places where tourists usually go. Your car is parked in the station courtyard.” He walked with me to the duty officer, signed my release forms and made sure that my camera and car keys were returned to me.
I drove to the hotel and there I was greeted with considerable surprise, because of my unexplained absence. While I was waiting at the elevator, I caught sight of a tall, slender man get out of an armchair in the lobby, look at me, and then give me an almost imperceptible nod. It was Avi, our case officer. The blanket of isolation enveloping me was lifted. I was no longer alone.
I went to my room and straight to the shower. I took into account that I might be under surveillance, and decided not to make any calls or send any secret messages. Everything I did may be transmitted by cameras concealed in my room before my release. I hoped Avi wouldn’t come knocking at my door, and he didn’t. He’d apparently been sent to sniff around after I’d failed to communicate for three days.
I guessed that the report on my release would reach Jordanian intelligence soon and I didn’t want to be in Amman while there was an argument going on over whether I should have been let go or not, and why the Mukhabarat hadn’t been told about me. I phoned the airline, and was told that planes to Paris and Brussels were full, so I booked a flight to Amsterdam for that afternoon. No one would be amazed that a tourist who’d been jailed for three days without having done anything wrong would want to clear out as quickly as he could.
As I left the hotel and picked up a taxi, I couldn’t see any untoward activity around me. Neither did I see Avi. In the plane, a moment before takeoff, before we were asked to switch off our electronic devices, I thought I’d send a coded message to HQ. Held for three days, released, leaving now. But I decided not to take the risk. Avi must have reported. Only when we were in the air did I feel the tension easing.
The route surprised me. I hadn’t known that the peace agreement allowed planes leaving Amman to fly over Israel. All of a sudden, with a surge of joy, I saw Jerusalem and the Temple Mount, and then we veered to the north and flew over Mount Carmel and Haifa Bay, and when I looked back a little, I saw Haifa itself. I had to keep my happiness pent up but it felt as if it would burst through my chest.
And then, at that moment, I knew I wouldn’t be going home anytime soon. There was a far more important matter I had to settle first, and a new and different tension, a sweeter one, began gathering anew in my now relaxed limbs.
If I’d been able to, I wouldn’t have left Amsterdam airport at all, but simply bought a ticket to Toronto on the first flight out. But I could not enter Canada as Ron Friedlich. I had no idea what was listed under his name at Canadian border control, or whether the Jordanians had queried their Canadian counterparts about him, and I’d had enough of interrogations. I had to pick up the documents I’d left in a locker at the Gare du Nord. It was late, but I didn’t want to spend another night as Ron Friedlich: there was just time to buy a ticket for the last train from Schiphol airport to Paris.
I climbed into an empty compartment, and prepared to catch up on my sleep. Just after the train left the airport and began picking up speed, the door opened, a shadow fell over me and a large form was reflected in the window, through which I was watching the receding lights. I turned my head. Standing in the doorway was Udi. In his hands, there were two paper coffee cups, giving off steam.
Contradictory waves of emotion flooded over me at the sight. My first, instinctive, urge was to throw my arms around him – metaphorically, of course, because that’s not what they expect us to do, and straight after that the opposite urge kicked in – to gather up my stuff and move to another compartment, without exchanging a word with him. Clearly, his presence here was going to make it difficult, or even impossible, for me to fly off to Niki, as I had already set my heart on doing.
Udi sat down facing me and placed the cups on the shelf next to the window, pushing one in my direction.
“I saw you the minute you came out of customs. You didn’t even take a minute for a cup of coffee. I made it the way you like it.”
Again, the warm feeling welled up. Udi had been my home for the past year. But he was also what was keeping me from a real home.
“How did you know my whereabouts?”
“Avi accompanied you to the airport. I’m glad you never noticed. It’s also no big problem to scan the lists of passengers departing from Amman.”
“And how did you get here?”
“I was in the neighbourhood.”
We were silent for a while.
“I think you can start talking. There’s no one in the car with us.”
“I’ll start at the end,” I said. “I’m going to Toronto. To Niki. So let’s not waste our breath talking about it.”
“OK, so that’s the end. Now let’s go back to the beginning.”
For a number of hours, until we arrived in Paris, I told Udi what had happened. Here and there he asked a question, to help him grasp the situation better.
“You had more luck than sense,” he summed up after I’d told him about the call to Niki. “And she’s proved she’s worth returning to.”
I thought I hadn’t heard right.
“You know what that means.”
“No, I don’t know. And neither do you,” he replied with his characteristic serenity, which hadn’t left him since he entered the compartment. Actually, since I first met him.
“It means I’m choosing her and leaving you.”
“That’s what you are thinking now. But you don’t know where she’s at today, nor where you’ll be at tomorrow.”
“So that’s how easily you’re giving up on me? Was I so lousy?”
“You’ve been really bad. We can’t afford foul-ups like this one, but you got out of it, and I’m not giving up on you, yet. Problem is, you haven’t chosen us, yet.”
I remained silent.
“You deserve a chance, and so does she,” he said. “You owe her a lot.”
“I know.”
“You don’t know. An hour after you left, Captain Na’im Aziz called her again.”
“Na’im Aziz?”
“Right. That’s his name. His brother is in Toronto and he wanted to fix him up with her. You could say, she threw him down the stairs and told him that if he doesn’t let you go right away, and make sure you get to her the same day, she’d take the matter all the way up to the Canadian foreign minister.”
I gawked at him in amazement, both at the story and at the level of the intelligence he had at his disposal.
“I’ve just read a book of short stories by Savyon Liebrecht. It’s called A Love Story Needs an Ending,” Udi said. “Most of the stories in it actually don’t have an ending, and your story also doesn’t have one yet. It’s neither this way nor that. It has to be wrapped up, one way or another.”
Deep down somewhere, hidden in Udi’s bear-like body, inside his gruff apathy, there was a soul!
He rose, shook my hand warmly, and left the compartment.
I got out at Gare du Nord which was almost empty at this hour of the night, and caught a glimpse of him al
ighting from another car. I walked past a couple of cops who gave me a quick once-over, and went to the locker feeling enormously secure. Somewhere behind me, Udi had my back covered.
I took my Israeli documents out of the locker and left Ron Friedlich’s there. Was this goodbye forever?
11.
“A Love Story Needs an Ending”
BUT I HAVE an apartment in Toronto, I remembered when I was thinking about booking into a hotel on my way into town from the airport, although I’d rented it as Ron Friedlich, and living there as an Israeli would be contaminating if any situation arose in which I had to identify myself. Damn it, I shook myself, I’m behaving as if I’ve chosen to stay in the Mossad. And I had not. I’d had six hours on the plane to rearrange my order of priorities. My wonderful luck had given me a woman whom I loved with all my heart and who apparently also loved me with all her heart. All the rest came after that. “Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother and shall cleave unto his wife,” I recalled. The wisdom of the Bible had grasped it long before I did, even though cleaving to Niki meant not only leaving my parents, but also my country, my homeland, and obviously the Mossad as well. I didn’t want to think about it too much. I only wanted to be with her.
I adjusted my watch to Toronto time. It was twelve noon and Niki would be at work. I’ll surprise her there, I decided. But because I had a suitcase and hadn’t changed my clothes since leaving Paris and was in need of a shower and a shave, I decided to check into a hotel.
Just before four p.m., I arrived at the registrar’s office in Trinity College. I was refreshed and smelling of aftershave but too lightly dressed for late February in Toronto. The winter coat that I’d reckoned would do for Amman couldn’t keep out the freezing, dry cold here. There were two good thick coats in my, or Ron’s, apartment, but I decided it would be better to buy myself another one rather than collect them.
My teeth were chattering, and I had goose bumps, but didn’t know if it was the cold or the excitement. I soon discovered that I’d wasted energy on the excitement – Niki didn’t work at the College any more.
Final Stop, Algiers: A Thriller Page 22