The Deserter

Afterwards

Afterwards

‘I was going out for a walk in the sun, four or five days after the Nablus thing, and there he was in front of me, this guy. This small guy. Checked jacket, grey trousers, short mud-coloured hair, scuffed black shoes.’

Lev hadn’t been back long. London seemed dull and cold after Jerusalem. Jo had chosen neutral ground, a little café near the British Museum.

‘You seem to have a very clear picture of him.’

‘I do, don’t I?’

‘Even down to his shoes.’

‘Something about him must have alerted me. Alerted some sixth sense? Odd though that I should notice his shoes so clearly.’

‘Especially since you pay such scant regard to your own. Yours are hardly ever shiny, always scuffed and dusty. Wasn’t the state of your shoes an issue for your father?’

‘Always. Anyway, there the guy was, standing on the path outside the front door to the apartment block. Not the door to Sarah’s flat, you understand me? But the building’s door, the one onto the street.’

‘Is it so important?’

‘Yes it is, Jo. Because of what happened later. He just stood there, halfway between the door and the gate, blocking the path. He said to me, You’re Lev Dubnow, aren’t you? I replied, Yes, I’m Lev Dubnow. Why do you want to know? He came up the path towards me. I was still standing on the step in front of the open door. He was looking up at me, defiantly, and he began yelling into my face, straight into my face: But I don’t understand. You’re a Jew. You are, aren’t you? I was astonished. He repeated it again, You’re a Jew. You’re Levi Dubnow’s son. You’re a Jew; you even look like a Jew. You were born into a good Jewish family. One of the best families! Yet you hate Jews. I shook my head at him, I don’t hate anybody— He put his hand up, palm towards me, fingers parted like the spokes of a wheel. His hand was trembling so hard I could barely distinguish one finger from another. Yes you do. Yes you do. I know you do. You hate Jews. You support the Arabs, the terrorists. You want us all killed. I had pulled myself together by this time. Look, I don’t have to listen to this. I went to close the door in his face but he put his foot against it. He clenched his hand into a fist and shook a single finger at me. His face was twisted, Jo, ugly, his eyes slits. Yes you do, Lev Dubnow. I know all about you. You’ve betrayed your family, betrayed Israel – and betrayed your faith. You are a deserter. Deserter, do you hear? A deserter. You leave Israel, live for years outside. And now when you do finally crawl back, you don’t come just to bury your father, just to mourn him, as you should, but you come to fight us, to fight with the Arabs, to join with them against us, us your people. The whole world is talking about you. You, Lev Dubnow, the great Nablus hero. Yet you’re a Jew. I can see you’re a Jew. He was screaming into my face, so close I could feel his saliva on my cheeks. I tried to be calm. I wasn’t frightened exactly; he was so out of control and he still seemed to me such an insignificant little man. I told him to get his foot out of the door and when he didn’t, I said to him, Look, if you don’t go now, I’m going to call the police; it’s as simple as that. He laughed. Call them then. See what they’ll do. Nothing. I turned back into the hall and tried to slam the door. And it was then I felt a strange coldness in the middle of my back, and a pain so sharp it made me pitch forward. I fell against the door, hitting my forehead on something hard. Probably the door handle, I don’t know. I must have twisted with the impact because the back of my head crashed against the floor tiles in the hall and everything went dark. When I woke up – it could only have been seconds later – I was surrounded by people telling me to lie still. There was blood in my mouth, Jo, there was blood; I could taste it. I felt like I was drowning.’

1. Overland from Amman

Lev got in from Beirut at around ten in the morning and took a cab straight to the King Hussein Bridge. Two and a half hours after landing at Amman’s Queen Alia International Airport, he was walking under the huge circular twin portraits of the dead Hussein and his son Abdullah, the past and present kings of Jordan, into the Jordanian border post. As his cab had freewheeled out of gear down the steep curving road towards the parched white Jordan Valley, he had caught sight of a slate-grey stretch of lifeless water to his left. His map told him it was the Dead Sea. He tried to remember if he had ever been there as a child. He’d ask Sarah.

He was directed by a soldier at the border post gates across a dusty yard towards a freshly-painted single-storey terracotta-and-white building. It was one of a number dotted here and there around the fenced compound, built as the need arose rather than to any plan, it seemed to him. The light was very bright outside in the yard but not yet hot. The building he walked into though was dark and dismal and at first sight completely deserted. When his eyes grew accustomed to the sudden deep gloom, he saw that there was actually someone there, at the far end of a long hallway, looking at him through a glass screen. The man was in shirtsleeves, although the warmth outside had yet to reach as far as the booth where he sat.

He smiled a welcome as Lev approached.

‘Hi. Passport?’

‘Oh yes, right. Thanks. I mean, eh, shukran.’

Lev handed over his passport, pushing it through a little half-circle gap at the bottom of the booth’s glass screen.

‘Ufwan.’

‘Excuse me, do you speak English?’

‘Yes.’

‘Thank you. Thank you very much. That’s kind. I’ve been told to ask you not to stamp my passport. Is that alright?’ Everyone had told him that the last thing he needed was an Israeli stamp in his passport, and to avoid it at all costs.

The man grinned back at him.

‘Oh yes, that’s fine. We only stamp paper here.’

‘Great, thanks, that’s very kind.’

The light was so dim that he had difficulty finding the right note to pay the departure tax. It wasn’t because of a lack of electricity; the smiling official was already registering his details on a computer.

‘You don’t like Jordan?’

‘What?’

Lev was puzzled for a moment.

‘You’re leaving so soon.’

‘Oh I see. I have no time, I’m afraid. I am going to Jerusalem to see my family. My father has just died.’

The man very slightly and very elegantly inclined his head down and to one side, gently closing his eyes for a moment and putting his right hand flat on his chest, his fingers splayed.

‘I’ll have a trip round on the way home, if I have time.’

‘Petra is very beautiful.’

‘So I’ve heard.’

Together with his passport, Lev was handed a little piece of paper, serrated down the middle, decorated with a coloured photograph of some Roman ruins and with the words ‘Departure Tax Receipt’ printed underneath on each half. On the back were two diamond shaped stamps in Arabic and in English, reading ‘Departure from Jordan’ with the date.

‘Go down that corridor please. There is a bench. You will see. Have a good trip.’

‘I’m grateful. Thank you. That’s very kind.’

‘It’s my job.’

The official looked curiously at him before turning back to his screen. Lev was aware that he was being exaggeratedly polite. It was probably because he was so nervous about the next few days and what might happen.

He walked down the corridor, past an unattended bag-scanner and back out into the sun. It was much hotter now. There was a bench across the yard, against the wall of one of the other buildings. Two men were sitting on it already. One was old, very smartly dressed in a slightly tight and old-fashioned brown pinstripe suit, and very English brogues which shone brilliantly in the sun. Surrounded by bags, and packages wrapped in brown paper and tied up with string, he was clearly not European. His complexion was dark and his skin deeply lined, with unhealthy-looking puffy folds of flesh under his eyes. He was dozing, his drooping bottom lip revealing tobacco-stained teeth in bad repair. Beside him was a much younger man, dressed in black trousers, black open-necked shirt and white trainers. There was a small red holdall on the ground between his feet. He was smoking. As Lev sat down next to him he looked up and smiled.

‘Hi.’

‘Hello.’

They sat in silence for a few moments. The younger man was the first to speak.

‘We seem to be the only internationals around here today.’

‘Seems we are. Yes.’

‘Getting hot, isn’t it?’

‘Very.’

Again they sat in silence.

‘It’ll take some getting used to.’

‘What will?’

‘The heat.’

‘Certainly will.’

After another few moments of silence the younger man tried again, putting out his hand this time.

‘My name’s Jack.’

Lev would have been content to have continued sitting in silence, but shrugging his shoulders resignedly, he limply clasped the outstretched hand.

‘Oh right. I’m Lev.’

‘You’re a Jew, right?’

‘I am yes. Is it that obvious?’

‘Yep. Once a Jew and all that. Like the Catholics.’

‘Are Catholics so easy to recognise? It’s not been my experience.’

Lev lit a cigarette of his own and looked across the compound at a scruffy little building he hadn’t noticed before. Unlike the others, it was an earthy grey, and very badly neglected – almost derelict. ‘DUTY FREE SHOP’ was painted on a wooden board crookedly tacked up over its locked brown door.

Jack was short and stocky, very dark skinned. He had dark brown eyes, alert and quick. His black curly hair was worn longish to well below his collar.

‘Well, I’m American.’

‘I can tell by your accent.’

‘American-Palestinian.’

‘Palestinian?’

‘Yep.’

They sat for a further few moments in silence.

‘So what’s your story?’ Jack asked.

‘What?’

‘What’s your story? How do you come to be sitting here next to me waiting to go to Israel?’ He pointed at the deserted yard in front of them. ‘It’s pretty clear there aren’t many other people making the trip.’

Lev felt disagreeable, peevish even. He couldn’t help himself. He resented being found out so easily and so quickly, especially after his last few days of anonymity.

Lev had gone straight from the hospital to Heathrow after coming off-duty, without bothering to make a booking. He had taken the first available seat going vaguely towards the Middle East and had ended up in Istanbul. When he arrived he asked to be taken to the best hotel in town. After lapping up the overpriced luxury for two nights, he flew to Beirut. The next day he took a flight to Queen Alia.

It had been wonderfully exhilarating doing exactly what he wanted when he wanted, with no one around to remind him of how much everything was costing or arguing with him about what to do next. He lived – and had lived for most of his life – such a structured existence. As a hospital doctor for over twenty years he was invariably on call, living with the threat of his bleeper summoning him to some emergency. He had felt so liberated and carefree when he had locked the accursed thing away in his locker, walked out of the department and got on the tube to the airport.

‘I think I’d rather hear yours, actually,’ replied Lev.

‘Right. Okay then. My parents were from Nablus,’ said Jack. ‘Do you know where that is?’

‘Yes.’

‘Right, of course you do. I was forgetting.’

‘You’re assuming a lot. Not every Jew is from Israel.’

‘No, but you are, aren’t you – or were, at least?’

‘I was born in Jerusalem.’ Lev didn’t attempt to hide his irritability. ‘Why don’t you just get on with your story?’

Jack ignored the disagreeable tone.

‘Right. Well, my dad left Nablus when I was four. He went to the US, worked for a few years as a porter in a vegetable market in New York, built up some capital and then went into business for himself in Boston. He did very well. He never went back.’

‘Alone? Did he go alone?’

‘No he took me with him.’

‘What about your mother?’

‘He left her behind. After a couple of years he divorced her and married Kathy, an American woman from New Mexico. She brought me up. They opened a deli in downtown Boston, specialising in Middle Eastern food, and we all lived in an apartment above it. Still do. Except I’ve been away at college in Michigan for the last three years. Just graduated. Civil Engineering. After this little trip is over, I’m going back to do my Masters in New York.’

‘So you’ve come back to find your roots?’

‘Pretty much. Yes.’

‘It was a very unusual thing for your father to have done. How old are you now? Twenty-four, twenty-five?’

‘Twenty-seven.’

‘So he left your mother, your Palestinian mother I mean, something like twenty-three years ago. He certainly broke out of the mould, to have done a thing like that twenty-three years ago.’

‘More than you think. My mum found out she was expecting just after we left.’

‘And he still never went back?’

‘Nope.’

‘Bit of a rogue, your dad, then?’

‘Rogue? Are you trying to be polite?’

‘I expect he had his reasons at the time. There’re usually two sides.’

‘No two sides to it, Lev. He’s not a bad man, my dad, but he was very selfish to have up and left like he did, without so much as a backward glance. That he’s been a good father to me I can’t deny, and he has always sent money back here for my mother and my brother. But he just wanted out, and to him then that was all-important, so he just left. He wanted what he calls now a real life. Even in those days it was pretty wretched for Palestinians – although it seems it is much worse now. At least they could get work in Israel then. He finally made up his mind to leave just after the Camp David Accords. It had become a bit easier to emigrate. My mum didn’t want to go, so he just left her behind. I was only four. It was pretty cruel to us both. Don’t you think?’

‘A tough decision certainly. Why did he take you with him?’

‘For my education.’

‘So this is your first time back since you left?’

‘Yep.’

‘And you’ve got a twenty-two-year-old brother you’ve never met?’

‘I have.’

‘And your mother?’

‘She died a couple of years ago. Dad didn’t tell me until months after he’d heard. Otherwise I’d have been over before now. I’d have come over then, if he had told me.’

‘Why do you think he didn’t?’

‘Wanted nothing to do with his old life? Guilt? Would have felt obliged to come with me? We had a furious row when I found out. He said he didn’t think it would be so important to me, seeing as Kathy had been such a good mother and seeing as I had been so young when we left.’

‘And your brother, what’s happened to him?’

‘Waseem, that’s his name, looks after my uncle’s land north of Nablus, near Tulkarem. My uncle’s an old man and not very well. Olives, almonds and a few sheep and goats, from what I can gather. I’m about to find out, aren’t I? As long as the Israelis let me in, that is.’

‘Why shouldn’t they? You may have been a Palestinian once but you’re an American now, aren’t you?’

‘Once a Palestinian ...’

‘Surely it wouldn’t be in Israel’s interests to make it difficult for visiting Americans? A bit counterproductive, I’d have thought.’

‘I’m still a Palestinian in their eyes, despite my passport. They call us a ‘problem’, or haven’t you heard?’

‘Of course I have. My father spent most of his youth pushing you lot around. I’m not sure how things stand now though. I’ve been gone a long time, Jack. I’ve tried hard not to think much about ‘the situation’ these last few years. Sometimes Israel has seemed very far away. From the little I’ve bothered to read, both sides seem to me to be as bad as each other.’

Jack grunted disapprovingly and continued.

‘Perhaps I should have tried to get an entry visa before I left. Some people said I should. But I somehow thought I’d have a better chance with border guards than with the embassy in Washington. They’ll have less chance to think about it, won’t they? And I’m told this particular border is the easiest to pass through because of agreements with Jordan. I’ve come a very long way to be turned back.’

‘We’ll find out soon enough.’

‘That’s for sure.’

They sat silently again for a few minutes.

‘So what about you?’

‘You’re very persistent, Jack.’

‘Hell Lev, what else is there to do while we’re waiting for something to happen? People say you can sit here for hours just waiting. But if it’s private, if it’s too personal, that’s OK.’

‘No, it’s not particularly private, it’s just that I’ve done my best over the years to put all the Jewish stuff and the conflict on the backburner. Much like your father seems to have done. It was all part of an