I took the subway to her apartment, imagining the surprise in her beloved voice, as it had resonated on the phone in Captain Na’im’s office.
It was already dark when I emerged from the subway, the temperature had sunk way below zero and a piercing wind was blowing in from the iced-over Lake Ontario, only a few hundred yards away. Without a hat on my head, I felt my scalp and my ears freezing and an icicle forming at the tip of my nose. I didn’t come across any clothing stores on my way or I would have bought at least a thick sweater, a hat, a scarf and a pair of gloves. My trembling increased. I hurried towards her building, a few blocks away, holding my breath against the cold.
I rehearsed what I would say to her, but when I pressed the bell there was no reply. Niki wasn’t home.
I had no idea when she would return, since she’d changed her place of work. Perhaps she was running errands after work? Or she was on a date? But I remembered the entry code and I decided to wait for a while in the lobby where I was at least protected from the wind.
Sitting in the unheated space, endlessly waiting, I began to sweat. My body temperature was soaring. An ache in my throat, a shivering back, a first cough, a running nose all heralded what I already knew was happening inside me. The seed sown in the cold police detention room in Amman, had sprouted in the gusts of winds from Lake Ontario. If I didn’t leave right away and get to my hotel room, I would end up with pneumonia, I thought, and I got up to go. I headed back to the subway station, teetering a little and almost bumping into the few people coming towards me.
“Mickey?”
The soft, startled voice came from behind me. I stopped. A little figure that I had passed by seconds before, bundled up in a coat and hat turned around and stepped in front of me.
“Mickey. Is it you?” she yelped gleefully.
I felt like a polar bear buried in snow, unable to move. Niki immediately realized how sick I was, took my arm, turned me around and lugged me back to her house. All I felt was the trembling getting worse and, hardly able to move my legs, I let her drag me along.
This was not the way I had imagined our first few hours together. Niki put a thermometer in my mouth and was shocked when she saw my temperature was 104° Fahrenheit, which I couldn’t convert in my mind to Celsius, but I guessed it was about 40°. She didn’t know whether to give me a hot cup of tea or to put me in a cold bath. I mumbled that tea would be better and she added a couple of pills and led me to her bed.
When I woke up in the morning, she wasn’t there. The clothes I had slept in and the sheets were drenched in my sweat, but I felt a lot better. On the table in the kitchen was a list of instructions, ending with “Love, Niki.”
“Love” in American, and therefore probably in Canadian too, is a very general concept. I’d have to wait until she got back to find out what she meant by it. Meanwhile, I gladly did everything on the list: breakfast, which I had only to put in the microwave for a minute, so the bacon wouldn’t be cold (if my religion permitted it); a towel, soap and shampoo were in the bathroom, and I could use her robe (if it fitted); some clothes that I’d left last time, were washed, ironed and folded at the foot of the bed; the TV could be switched on with the green button on the red remote (she didn’t think we’d ever switched it on last time), and she’d call at noon, but anyway here’s what there is for lunch …
The heating was on and I felt nice and warm. As I was doing battle with the TV knobs, after showering and breakfasting, and dressed only in a pair of boxer shorts that I’d left last time, the door opened, and Niki came in. Despite the gust of wind that came with her from the hall, I felt a wave of warmth. My misgivings about how she would feel melted away as she charged at me and kissed me passionately.
“I couldn’t wait until the end of the day to see you,” she said, radiant, and she took a step back to check me over. “You’ve really recovered!” She jumped at me again.
At first I was surprised at the level of her confidence in me, in my feelings, that I was back with her, until it dawned on me that last night, of which I remembered nothing, had been a night of feverish talk and such deep confessions of love that I couldn’t imagine myself uttering them in my normal state. In her bedroom, she told me that I had made a clean breast of everything, of the little half-lies that I had told (“Ron Friedlich and London are only small details in a little puzzle …” she reminded me with a reproachful smile), of my unwillingness to live a lie with her, and on my choice of her over my other life.
“I hereby release you from all the commitments you made last night, and erase everything you said,” Niki told me when she saw I was alarmed. “Even the declarations of love, which I am sure were sincere, and all the secrets. And I’m open to hearing everything again.”
The impish smile that appeared at the corners of her mouth when she uttered the last sentence filled me with a lunatic happiness. I hurled her right onto the bed. “You’ve got too many clothes on”, I felt no need to say more about my love; what I’d whispered during the night was enough for Niki too and she gave me her all.
“So, what now?” Niki asked later in the evening, when we felt that our bouts of love-making had released the tension in both of us. We were still marvellous together.
“Well, I don’t feel a need to go to some restaurant right now,” I said.
“That’s not what I’m asking about, fool.”
I knew what she’d meant the second my clumsy response came out.
“OK, let me tell you in an orderly fashion what’s relevant, so we’ll have some common denominator. I really don’t know what I told you last night.”
“No, I’ll tell you what you told me last night, and then we’ll really have a common denominator.”
Then, in amazing detail, Niki recounted the entire story of my life that had led to the situation I was in now. She told the story of my parents, which from her lips sounded like a fairytale; the first time I had killed, in that ambush in Lebanon; my rather odd position in Bezalel; the bombing at the Dolphinarium, where I’d lost some precious students, and the bombing of the bus on Allenby Street, in which I’d lost Dolly, “Who you were going to marry,” she emphasized, on the day my exhibition opened. And then she told me about my decision to join the Mossad.
I had linked it all, even in a state of delirium and fever, to my theories about we humans being survivalist pack animals, about survival being the real history of the natural world, and I had not spared her my talk about my duty now to fight for my people, my pack, which were in danger. And about which Niki now said to me: “That’s what you look at, so that’s what you see. I see a completely different history of the world, a history of love: all the animals that have lasted this long, have the astonishing ability to love; that is, to multiply and to nurture their offspring. For this purpose, they decorate themselves, paint themselves, sing, dance, woo, suckle, caress, lick …”
Yes, that’s another aspect of nature, and being next to Niki it was no wonder that it was also possible to see things that way.
Shocked, I also heard the details of my course, about my cover as Ron Friedlich, “who the Bedouins buried in Sinai and you think it’s awful that his parents don’t know about it.” And then also about the missions I’d been on in Cyprus, Poland and Jordan. I had left nothing to her imagination.
“What’s clear is that your bosses shouldn’t send you on missions without a coat, a scarf, gloves and a hat,” Niki laughed. I didn’t think it was so funny. All right, I had a high fever, but something had unlocked my innermost secrets, and I’d told her everything, down to the smallest detail. What had been done could not be undone.
She recounted it all as she lay on top of me, her two sharp elbows sticking into my chest, her small beautiful face cupped in the palms of her delicate hands, her hair tumbling over her shoulders and the sides of her face, her eyes glued to mine, deadly serious. I sensed that yet another link had been forged between us, making us a single entity.
“And what did I say about us?” I asked.
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Niki slid off me, turned her back to me, and I turned onto my side and hugged her.
“You blabbered something about love being a biological ability, like defending the nation and like painting, and whoever has it must fulfil it, and all kinds of nonsense like that.”
“That’s it?”
“No,” she hesitated. “You said you don’t understand how you could have made the mistake of leaving me, and that you’d never do it again, ever.” She was speaking without looking at me. I held her closer. I knew she was avoiding facing me because she didn’t want to embarrass me nor watch as I retracted that statement.
“It appears I was telling the truth all night,” I said, and only then did she turn around and kiss me hotly, pushing her little body up against mine and holding me as tight as she could with her slender arms.
And then, she asked the same question again, “So, what now?”
“We’ll begin with what’s obvious,” I said. “I am staying with you. All the rest is details that we’ll deal with later on.”
A sigh emanated from somewhere deep down in Niki’s belly, and after it came some abrupt gulps that were her attempts to stop herself from crying, and when she saw that she couldn’t, she wanted me to make love to her again. Now that I had said what I said while in perfect control of my senses, and knowing that I was ready to stand by my word, whatever happened, I could also abandon myself to our loving. I think that this was our best time ever. It was a bond that did not spring from the joining of our sexual organs, but from the intertwining of our souls. Eye to eye, mouth to mouth, breast to breast, heart to beating heart, arms and legs tangled together, and yes, the organs of our pleasure were also there, and through them everything erupted from one body into the other.
What came into my mind later was a close combat lesson back when an instructor had tried to explain how a short punch to the body of the opponent begins a long time before, deep inside the belly and passes through our whole being, while the blow itself is only the external manifestation of the movement. I then understood that this was also the way that love passes through our sexual organs.
I was sweating, and Niki took my temperature again. It had gone up a bit so she brought me a pill and a glass of water. Then she told me about the anxious days she had gone through after my disappearance. At first she thought something bad had happened to me, but after checking with the police and the hospitals she realized that wasn’t the problem. She went to the Town Inn Suites where they told her that I’d checked out, “rather hastily” they said, accompanied by a man who “didn’t look very nice”. Later on she’d recalled the documents belonging to Ron Friedlich that I’d requested and received, and put two and two together.
“I remembered news items about how the Mossad uses Canadian passports. There was that business in Jordan six or seven years ago. It occurred to me that you were trying to pose as some Canadian whose passport had somehow fallen into Israeli hands. If you actually were a Mossad agent, then maybe you’d been killed, or kidnapped. I was terribly worried and I turned half the world upside down trying to find out what had happened to you. None of the Mickey Simhonis I called were you, at your consulate here they didn’t care, and when a Tel Aviv private detective, to whom I’d offered all my savings, informed me he had to drop the case, I realized it must be a government thing, and I’d better drop it too. That I could even get hurt. I came to the conclusion that actually, you looked like you could be in the Mossad.”
Just like the compliments I used to receive about my art, I also found it very flattering that Niki was saying I looked like a Mossad agent.
“Later on, you left me that weird little message on my machine, that you were very sorry but you couldn’t explain. I realized that my guesses were probably right, and that I didn’t have anything to wait for any more. But I couldn’t calm down and to try and solve another bit of the puzzle I called up Ron Friedlich’s parents. Don’t get alarmed, I already knew them, and later I’ll tell you how, and I did it without giving anything away. I heard from them that he’d been travelling around the world for years, that he’d been in India and got involved with drugs, that his father had gone there and been with him for a while and had placed him in some rehab centre because Ron wouldn’t come home. But after that he’d vanished, apparently in Sinai. They didn’t think he’d kicked the habit and they were quite sure he’d not enrolled on any course in Cambridge, which made it clear to me that there was another story behind the transcripts you asked for,” she said reproachfully.
Hearing that she’d spoken to Ron’s parents, with whom I felt a special connection, rattled me, more than it alarmed me. I asked her to tell me more about them. How each of them sounded, what she felt about them, what she thought they were feeling.
“I can see that it really bothers you,” she said, this time sympathetically.
“Of course. Both the idea that I know their son is dead and they don’t, and also my guilt, that part of the reason for their not knowing is that I’m pretending to be their son. And that pretence does something to me. For days and weeks I am Ron Friedlich in my mind. Their actual son. There under interrogation in Jordan, I felt it in a very tangible way.”
Niki stroked my arm, and said nothing. She wanted to get back to talking about us. She told me that as the days passed, and she didn’t hear anything, it became an actual process of mourning. To get over it, she felt she had to change some things about her life. She left the registrar’s office and devoted herself to what she really loved doing, editing books, which now involved her full-time. She’d also thought of moving to another apartment but didn’t because of the vague hope that I’d come back, and if I did I wouldn’t find her. She was clever, my Niki.
I sang her a Hebrew song about a sailor’s sweetheart who lit a candle in her window each night to signal that she was waiting for him but, the night his ship came in, the wind blew the candle out while she slept, and he sailed away again. I translated the words for her, and she said, “That almost happened to us. Tell me, what would have happened if that Captain Na’im, that flirt, hadn’t allowed you to call me?”
I didn’t have a good reply for her. I believed at some time or another my longing for her, or my loneliness, would have risen to the surface and overcome me, but I had no way of being certain.
“We’ve got to thank Na’im, or even the cop who arrested you,” she said.
This world is full of peculiar twists and turns.
We were besotted with each other. Over the following days, Niki brought home manuscripts that she read and commented on, and that meant we could be together every moment that she wasn’t working. She could enjoy this flexibility because she worked for her mother, who owned a literary agency, and her father owned the printing press that produced some of the books that Niki and her mother selected and edited.
“We prefer bringing our books out through big publishing houses, but when work we believe is good is rejected, we have the means to print and publish it ourselves. So we are also a small publishing house, and we work with a publicity agency and a distribution company that do the rest,” she explained.
I began to feel at home in the elegant apartment high in the sky. But every now and again, mostly when Niki was busy or when she had to go into the office to return or pick up new material, my thoughts drifted back to the Mossad, to the few things I had done for it so far, and which were only the prelude, in my mind, to the real thing. TV news broadcasts took me back to the gloomy reality of Israel, and phone conversations with my parents and my sisters, and even more with my little nieces, awoke a longing in me. From time to time I recalled lines from that slender volume, and my mood darkened:
How long, I wonder, can this American exile last?
A century and a half so far, they say, and thank God, all’s well.
A century and a half? That’s
How long our Golden Age –
The one in Spain – lasted
Before the expulsion.
But i
n New York alone there are three million Jews
I’m told. Three million? As in Poland, on the eve of WWII.
They’d been there for six hundred years
Until one day …
I kept reading, and there was a sentiment that gripped my heart so tightly that I thought it was about to seize up:
It’s so sad, saying goodbye to all that.
So sad it’s all over.
It was hard, but good to be together, and alone.
I loved my life, and living there.
Pride, and fear
The swell and the ebb.
Everything possible
All in one capsule.
How sad to say goodbye.
How sad it’s all over.
My heart, my broken heart.
Wasn’t what I was doing contributing to the realization of that terrible reality the anonymous poet was depicting? I bit my lips. I had, after all, decided on my life’s priorities: Niki, art, Israel, Mossad. In that order. Whatever didn’t fit in would be dropped, depending on its place in that order.
Niki had seen inside me and understood, and one day she told me, in preparation for a surprise she was going to spring on me later: “Do you know that you are actually a samurai?”
“Meaning?”
“You are a warrior. You have chosen to fight. For a country, a leader, a nation, whatever. You have chosen to devote your life to this. Any other Canadian woman would have thought you were a primitive, militant fanatic. But I am a descendant of samurais. I wanted to be a samurai myself. But here there isn’t a reason, a cause, so all I do is train. But I can understand you.”
That’s how I discovered that Niki was a student – at Toronto’s Japanese Canadian Cultural Centre – of what she called “the way of the warrior”, the old samurai arts of judo, jiu-jitsu, swordplay. Then she showed me the secret sign, which only a graduate of warrior training was entitled to bear. A small samurai sword had recently been tattooed beneath her navel. “Here, where you stick the knife in when the time comes to perform harakiri,” she said with a faint smile.
Final Stop, Algiers: A Thriller Page 23