“Currently number two on our ‘B’ list, after Ilich Ramirez Sanchez: eliminate on sight without reference to higher authority. Aman report that she’s planning to hijack an aircraft somewhere over the Gulf on behalf of Iran, in a bid to free nationals of that state now held in Baghdad.”
“Flight NQ oh-double-three.” Raful’s voice was dreamy. “From London to Manila, via Bahrain and Kuala Lumpur.”
Now the man called Yigal pushed the file across to Raful.
“I’ve seen it.” Raful waved away the proffered file. “I
drafted
it, yes, I did.”
“Okay, and here is something you didn’t draft.” Yigal resorted not to the file but to an inside pocket of his coat. Raful allowed his eyes to widen, affecting surprise, but he knew what this was, what it had to be, and he wouldn’t sign it, not even to please Avshalom Gazit’s (God bless him, keep him safe) son opposite.
“What is this, Yigal? Mm?”
“A receipt for the thing you asked for.”
“And what did I ask for?”
Yigal did not answer in so many words. Instead, he took an object from his pocket, held it cupped in his right palm for a moment while he squinted down at it, and finally pushed it across the table to his companion.
The cigarette lighter was gold and bore the logo of a well-known brand. While Raful was examining it Yigal said sharply, “Be careful.” And then immediately, as if to cover up his nervousness, “Why do you want this?”
Raful smiled, said nothing.
“Sometimes,” Yigal said, “a man gets funny ideas into his head. Desk men feel bored. ‘Oh, it’s sunny outside,’ they say, ‘I’ll take a turn around the block.’ Which is fine, in its way. Sign this, please, Raful. For me.”
But Sharett steadfastly ignored the paper.
“Raful…”
Sharett stood up. He went across to the bedside table and once more picked up the telephone, transporting it back to their makeshift desk while he prayed that the lead would be long enough not to spoil the effect by bringing him up with a jerk and making him look like one, too.
“In Jerusalem,” he said, as he resumed his seat, “it’s not so early, not really. Phone him. Phone your father.” He lifted the receiver and handed it to the other man. “Phone Avshalom.”
“Oh, Raful.” Yigal rolled his eyes ceilingward and heaved a sharp sigh.
“Call him.”
“I know how it was when you were all in the Shai—or was it the Haganah; I can’t remember—and you were running around blowing up the King David and getting hanged next day by the British—”
“Just one call. For my sake.”
They were talking across each other, not caring, indifferent to what each had to say.
“But in this world, you know, this is—I mean, Raful, this is 1984 for God’s—”
“For his sake. For your father’s sake, don’t destroy your career, Yigal. Just one sweet phone call.”
“These days we have rules: mavericks are out, I mean
out.”
“And you’ll be telling me next, I know what you’re telling me—”
They were standing now, their faces hissing and spitting across the inch or so of space that separated them, but making very little noise.
“Memuneh Hofi has you in his sights, Raful,
squarely
in his—”
“—telling me that since we’ll be talking to Yasser Arafat eventually we might as well talk to him
now!”
Raful’s fist came down on the desk, his face contorted in what he hoped his opponent would take as rage, though really it was pain, and there was silence. For a moment longer the two of them continued to gaze at each other. Slowly, slowly, the anger drained out of their faces.
Yigal said, “Nobody knows you’re here?” Raful shook his head.
“Which means nobody knows you’re leaving, either.” “That would seem to follow.”
Yigal nodded, a patient accepting the diagnosis of cancer. “And so nice,” he said, “if you never came back.”
Raful’s gaze dropped away. In saying that, the young man was demanding too high a price, aware that Sharett had no option but to pay it. The knowledge soured Raful. It flew contrary to his old-fashioned notion of how you bargained.
“Look,” he said. “Look. Stepmother’s taken out in midair, the plane lands in Malaysia, I disembark and disappear, and I’m back in Tel Aviv before anyone realizes I’m missing.”
“And if someone does realize?”
Raful half winked, jerked his right shoulder, but Yigal did not laugh. By “doing a Raful” Sharett meant to convey, Well, that’s tough, I’m getting on now, not much time left and no life plans worth the name; let them cut my pension if they want to be that petty. But Yigal, he knew, didn’t read it that way. Yigal merely thought him irresponsible.
“I’m going now,” Raful said at last. “Stay well, don’t worry.” And loosen up, he added mentally as he rose; they won’t be sending you to Tripoli for talks with the PLO just yet.
He collected his overnight bag, cast a final glance around the room, and then paused on the threshold.
He wanted to say, You’re one of the best of the best, Yigal. Educated. Aware. Tolerant and civilized, you are a better Jew, a better Israeli Jew, than I can ever hope to be. You believe absolutely in the things we hold dear, and your generation will do more to hold the line we drew than we ever could. I salute you, Yigal, and I love you.
But:
“Kacha, ma laasot?”
he murmured to the young man’s hunched shoulders. That’s the way things are, what can we do?
He did not take the obvious route to Heathrow. Partly that was out of a sense of caution inbred over the years, but mostly it was because he knew this would be his last visit to London and he wanted to make a little pilgrimage.
He turned down Charing Cross Road and parked opposite the churchlike facade of St. Martin’s School of Art, which he contemplated silently for a moment or two. There were no cars, no people. After a while he delved into an inside pocket of his houndstooth jacket and took out a leather wallet. From this in turn he extracted a photograph.
He’d had the snapshot heat-sealed in plastic, because he wanted this humble pictorial record to outlive him. He studied the photo briefly—a needless exercise for one who knew its lineaments by heart—before again raising his eyes to the college opposite. At this time of morning, no students milled around, no one sat on the steps Sara’d been sitting on when the photograph had been taken all those years ago: her right leg tucked up, the left fully outstretched, both hands raised to extend long black hair to either side of a narrow, smiling face. Sara, Raful’s only child.
He could still remember the day of her graduation, summa cum laude, in Hebrew studies. Raful had stood side by side with her mother, tears streaming down both their faces, while the strains of “Hatikva” floated beautifully, gravely, above the throng; dinner afterward; the stunning blow she had delivered over nightcaps in the Baka apartment: no government service, not one hour on a kibbutz, no boyfriends, no life in Israel … but to London! She would go to London, there to study fashion design and spend the rest of her life making clothes for rich goyim.
The war between them had been long, one of the few Raful ever lost.
He smoothed the plastic a couple of times before putting away the photo. These were mortal memories: the fight, while his wife, Esther, stood miserably on the sidelines; the reconciliation; the slow coming to terms with a grown-up daughter’s assertion of independence. All those things had led, like the long straight road linking Jerusalem and the West Bank, to death.
Sharett had been forced to accommodate death too often. In the old days, yes, as Yigal said: running around and blowing people up and getting hanged by the British … though that had been different because it was
other
people who were blown up,
other
people who got hanged. But then the cast had changed. Then family and friends started to vanish, permanently, from Raful’s landscape. A certain friend called Ehud Chafets—oh, yes, he was dead, his brains shot out of his skull on the road to Beirut airport. Esther—she had died of barbiturate poisoning, they said, but that was only because doctors shied away from certifying “broken heart” under
cause of death
; doctors tend to ignore what they cannot cure.
Sara’s certificate was even less informative. “Massive terminal trauma” had always struck him as an odd way to describe the effects of being blown apart by a bomb.
“Voilà!”
said Robbie.
“Le
breakfast
en lit, pour un.”
Colin pretended to struggle out of sleep, rubbing his eyes. “Whass’ time?”
“Deux heures. De bonne heure, encore.”
Colin sat up. His son stood beside the bed with a tray in his hands, grinning broadly.
“Le café de Nes,
from a jar purchased, in a single lot, from one of our most exclusive
supermarchés,
and opened, personally,
par moi. Les oeufs, frits. Et le. .
. I dunno what bacon is, Dad.”
He lowered the tray onto Colin’s lap. Toast, juice, eggs and bacon, coffee. “What’s all this, then?” Colin asked suspiciously. “What are you after?”
“As if I would ask the aged P for anything! Who,
moi?”
Robbie laid a hand across his breast, looking pained.
Colin sniffed. “Wallet’s on the dresser,” he growled. And then, “Thanks, son. You eaten?”
“Yes. Couldn’t sleep. You talking on the phone woke me up; who called?”
Colin stirred his coffee. “No one called. You must have been dreaming. You say you couldn’t sleep, but you were doing all right when I looked in on you. Anyway, what’s with the
français
all of a sudden?”
Robbie shook his head, that same cheeky grin, the grin of innocence, splitting his face in two. “Just excited, that’s all. Silly.”
He flushed crimson, embarrassed, and Colin, who knew better than to take his hand, which was what he wanted to do, said, “So am I. Butterflies.”
“Me too.” Robbie perched on the bed and took a fingerful of bacon.
“Hey!” Colin stabbed with his fork. “That’s mine!”
“I’m a growing boy.” Robbie’s tone was unctuous. “I need building up. Besides, it doesn’t go to fat on me, like on
someone,
I know.”
“Ouch! Leave off.” Colin sipped coffee. “Hey, this is good. Thanks.”
The boy flushed again and looked down. “What’s K.L. like?” he asked suddenly.
“Oh … noisy, a bit dirty. Hot and humid. But some lovely buildings, and lovelier people. You’ll like it. Anyway,
I
should be asking
you;
you’ve done nothing all month but read guidebooks.”
“Yes, but I’ve been looking at the Australian ones, mostly. I can’t wait for Melbourne, Dad.”
Robbie meant: for Celestine. For the mother of the mother of
my
mother, who went away and never came back. For my roots, my past, my self. As Colin formulated this to himself, he wondered what the boy would say about Leila to his great-grandmother, when they met again. He must have prepared something: a spell to exorcise the anger he felt toward his father, his mother, the unrighteous world that allowed such things to happen.
Colin did not know how his son had dealt with Leila’s desertion. He’d never found a way of asking.
“Wish we didn’t have to hang around in K.L.,” Robbie said.
Colin had been invited to lecture in Sydney. Oxford had granted his request for a sabbatical without demur. Academic friends in Malaysia, eager to repay some hospitality, had invited him to stop over with them. When the ticket arrived and he saw the university had treated him to business class, it seemed like an omen. Colin cashed the ticket in for two economy seats and decided to take his son on the holiday of a lifetime.
They needed a holiday. They had not taken one for over two years, not since Leila went out of their lives forever.
“I’ll get up now,” Colin said, his sharp tone causing Robbie to start. “Can you take the tray? Thanks.”
He watched his son carry the tray out of the bedroom. The boy’s hands and feet were too big for the rest of him, and he needed fleshing out a little; nature, having given him her all for so many years, had paused for breath just short of completion, leaving him out of sync and lanky. At fourteen, though, he showed no signs yet of reaching the moody phase that must come: emotional development proceeded like its physical counterpart, in fits and starts. Maturity came at its own pace; over the past two years, Colin had learned when not to push.
As he swung his legs off the bed his meticulous lawyer’s brain reminded him that he had not lied to his son about the phone. No one had called.
Robbie sat next to his father and map-read. “Exit Four. Two more to go. Then you leave the M-four, take the third exit, and you’re on a slip road.”
When Colin said nothing, Robbie realized he’d been superfluous. For a moment he knew that hard, angry feeling like the start of a tension headache, but it passed. Today was too great to spoil with shit like that.
He wanted to ask the questions he’d composed in his mind, but they spiked out like missile warheads. If he fired them, somewhere in the air between his tongue and Colin’s eardrums they would automatically become armed, possessed of unimaginable destructive force. This might be a good time, though. Dad seemed relaxed; he’d really appreciated the breakfast. And compared to most other fathers he was just so incredible. Like, human, you know? In touch, pretty well the whole time, really. Trouble was, they were flying today, and for some reason Dad hated that.
If Robbie wanted to ask about Leila he had to pick his moment very, very carefully.
“Dad.”
“What? Did you say two more exits, or—” “Two. Dad, I never really thanked you properly for this trip.”
Colin smiled. “No need. And you did thank me.” “I mean, you might just have shunted me off to Muriel.”
Muriel was Colin’s mother, and a right royal pain in the ass.
“Cruel and unnatural punishment, old boy, outlawed by the Constitution.”
Robbie laughed. “Mothers,” he said, “can be tough.” Pause. “Can’t they?”
Silence.
“Dad, I—”
“Exit five, great; next one’s ours. Still got plenty of time.” Colin was staring into his mirror with peculiar intensity, as if the lorry behind had suddenly transformed itself into a dinosaur.