Shake Off (6 page)

B
efore I’d left for Moscow from Schönefeld Airport in the GDR, Abu Leila had told me that on arrival at Sheremetyevo Airport I should look for a man carrying an English edition of
Crime and Punishment
. When I disembarked I was pleasantly surprised to see someone not much older than me, casually holding the book up to his chest under a folded arm as if he’d just been reading it. Close up, though, the spine looked unbroken. He was round-faced and smiled as if I was arriving for summer camp. His fair hair was cropped short and he wore a wedding ring.

“Ahlan wa sahlan,”
he said, surprising me with his Arabic. “Follow me.” He turned and I followed him through an unmarked door, on the other side of which he showed someone ID. I wasn’t searched and my passport wasn’t taken from me, although he filled out my details on a form, which he signed and gave to the official. We went through a network of corridors until we emerged in the foyer of the airport. Outside we found his unmemorable car and inside it he gripped my hand tightly.

“My name is Vasily,” he said. “Welcome to the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.” He drove carefully down the Leningradskoe highway towards a darkening Moscow. I looked for familiar landmarks but all I recognized were large pictures of Gorbachev. He noticed my gaze. “We are on the brink of a new era,” he said. “As long as the West does not push us too hard. To them we are just a virgin market waiting to be deflowered.” We drove around the outskirts of Moscow and parked in a residential area. Vasily took my bag and led me to an ancient block of flats where we took a creaking lift to the top floor. Vasily had the key to the only door on this floor. He opened it onto a little hall, from which double doors led into the living room, in which a coffee table was covered with a variety of dishes, some Russian beer and an iced bottle of vodka. A woman, in her fifties, I think, came through from the kitchen. She wore an apron, which she removed.

“This is Marina,” Vasily said. “She will come each morning and cook and clean. She speaks Georgian and a little Russian.”

“Spaseeba,”
I said, speaking the only Russian I knew and bowing my head to her because I didn’t know what else to do. Vasily told me that Marina would use a special knock on the door when she came in the morning. She demonstrated the knock on a sideboard, then put on a headscarf and left. I would be on my own in the evenings and at weekends, he told me. We sat down to eat but I had no appetite. Vasily looked disappointed that I didn’t drink.

“I was told you’re not a Muslim?” he said, sounding concerned that he may have insulted me by offering alcohol.

“I’m not,” I said. “I just don’t drink alcohol.”

“That is good.” He poured himself a chilled shot of
Stolichnaya
. “Many people in our business rely on it too much.” He didn’t say for what, but showed me around the flat, which took no more than sixty seconds. The living room looked north over the city and no other buildings were in the proximity because of a large tram and bus depot below. The bedroom at the back was overlooked, and Vasily suggested I keep the shutters closed. A small kitchen and bathroom completed the tour. Vasily shook my hand and said he had to leave.

“When you have finished your training the world will not look the same again,” he said.

Left alone, I tried the television in the living room but it was dead. I picked up the Dostoyevsky that Vasily had left and started to read.

Different people came to the Moscow apartment over the summer. One man came with a shoe box and a rolled-up plastic play mat. We moved the coffee table out of the way and he unfurled the mat, which had streets and buildings drawn on it. They were not like European streets though, they were more like American streets, straight and parallel and in blocks. He took a selection of toy cars from the box. He didn’t speak English, so Vasily had to translate.

“He says you are the red car.”

“But I want to be the blue car,” I said, and although Vasily laughed he did not translate my joke. The red car was the target and the other cars were following it. I moved the red car on the mat and the man moved the other cars, to show that wherever I went they would follow, although “follow” isn’t an accurate description. Despite what you see in films, some of the cars will be in front of the target car and some will be on other streets parallel to it.

Evenings were spent alone reading. I read Dostoyevsky until I was sick of him, so Vasily took me to a bookshop where they had a small selection of English books. We bought some Dashiell Hammett, which they stocked because he was a communist. Driving back to my apartment, Vasily said he had read John le Carré, although you couldn’t buy him in the USSR. He said that all KGB trainees read him for the tradecraft.

“He has been in the business,” he said. “You can tell.”

I contemplated all this as I lay in bed the morning after finding Helen’s unconscious lover. I contemplated it because I experienced the same disorientation upon waking that I had my first morning in Moscow. The bewilderment you might get, I imagined, from too much alcohol, or, in my case, too much opiate, or when you don’t know how you got to the place you have woken up in, or even who you are. Something about those first few minutes of the day can either make or break the rest of it. I usually overcame it by doing my push-ups and sit-ups until my arms and stomach ached.

I hid the
Le Monde
article under the bath and went to lessons at SOAS for a couple of hours. Then I checked my PO box in Westminster, taking surveillance countermeasures along the way, using the underground. Going underground forces any surveillance behind you (rather than parallel and in front) and they hate that. Carrying out that maneuver often exposed them, particularly when few passengers were about.

All this and more I learned in my summer in Moscow, practicing on Moscow streets against the KGB. The idea, said Vasily, was to do it without making it obvious that you were doing it, otherwise you were advertising your guilt. He would come with me, and we began by me trying to spot any surveillance in the first place, without trying to avoid it. He said that they were using KGB trainees for the exercise.

“They have to learn too,” he said. I found the trainees too easy to spot. Their clumsy efforts at trying to change their appearance by taking off jackets and coats and putting on hats did not help them. I could spot their individual gait and mannerisms, the way they muttered self-consciously into microphones hidden under their sleeves. I could spot their obvious mirroring of my actions: if I stopped, they stopped too; if I moved, they moved. They had no subtlety. Afterwards I would have to recount to Vasily how many people I had seen and where. He gave me no feedback on these efforts, but, smiling one morning, he said that an experienced team had replaced the trainees. “I do not even know if they will be there or not,” he said, “sometimes they will be busy following real spies.” I enjoyed these games and learned to be constantly alert, memorizing faces and looking for places that would force a team behind me or up close. Sometimes, though, you decide to do things that don’t require you to be constantly, if metaphorically, looking over your shoulder. So you take a few days off, go to the cinema, sit in the park, stay at home and read a book. In fact, it’s a good thing to do if you have any suspicion that you’re being followed.

“Make them bored,” said Vasily. “A bored surveillance team is a careless one,” he said. “After a few days they might even call it off. Do anything odd or different though, give them just one idea that you know what you are doing and they will stick to you like dog shit on the bottom of a shoe.”

So you have to be on continual alert: every public place is a potential meeting place; every alley or public toilet could be a dead-letter drop; every street, store and restaurant needs to be assessed for its countersurveillance potential. You need to be constantly on the look-out for places to cache money and documents. Everyday objects must be considered potential concealers of microphones or cameras. Every person you meet could either be an agent wanting to get close or a possible recruit to the cause. Every woman that talks to you wants to trap you with the promise of sex. Every postcard has a hidden meaning. Everybody behind you could be following you, and it is your job to shake them off.

W
hen I got back to Tufnell Park I lay down. I must have fallen asleep as I was woken by knocking, and the light in the room had changed. Helen was at the door.

“Hello.” She waved at me by holding up her hand and wiggling her fingers. “I want to repay you for what you did yesterday.” In my dopey state I thought she wanted to give me money; perhaps some English etiquette I was unsure of. I stood in my bare feet and ran my hand through my tangled hair. She looked different, like she had a little make-up on. Not much, but enough to make a difference. “I’d like to take you out to dinner,” she said. I’d never been asked out to dinner before.

“You don’t have to pay me back,” I said.

She shrugged and pushed back her hair.

“OK then. Let’s just go to dinner. We can go Dutch, if you like.”

I was trying to remember what going Dutch meant, and for some reason I looked behind me into my room, as if something there could rescue me from making a decision.

“Do you have a girl in there?” she asked, trying to look past me.

I smiled and shook my head.

“Then maybe you have better plans for tonight?”

My plans consisted of heating up a ready-made meal of meat and vegetables and gravy. I was going to eat it from the plastic container it came in so I’d only have a fork to wash up.

“I have no plans,” I said. “Give me fifteen minutes to get dressed.”

We went around the corner to a Chinese restaurant on the high street. She was telling me how good it was and asking if I had been before. She looked great, in simple linen trousers and a shirt. They were understated but looked expensive. Her hair was pinned back for a change, and she had little dangly earrings on, like silver peas. She still had the enormous stainless-steel man’s watch on, and for some reason I found it reassuring. I chose a table in the corner and sat down with my back to the wall, where I could see the door. I worried about being on a date initiated by a woman.

“So tell me how you learned to open doors like that,” she said.

I’d forgotten to concoct a story to explain the lock-picking, so I smiled stupidly in order to buy time to think. “It’s just something I picked up,” I said.

“Picked up where? Prison?”

I told myself that these were innocent questions.

“Relax,” she said. “You look like a deer caught in headlights.”

I sat back in my chair and tried to smile. My knee was springing up and down under the table in a rapid displacement of nervous energy. A waiter approached.

“Perhaps we need a drink,” she said.

“I don’t drink alcohol,” I told her, wishing I did.

“Then we’ll drink green tea,” she said. “It has the same effect.” We ordered, and while we waited for our food we sipped our pale tea.

“I’ve sent him back to his wife,” she said. I kept a blank face, even though I knew who she was referring to. “You know, my pretend boyfriend?”

“It’s none of my business,” I said, glad at least that the subject had been changed.

“Well, you have become involved in a way, and I feel I owe you an explanation.”

She didn’t owe me an explanation but I understand that sometimes women have to talk through their problems—they don’t want a solution necessarily, just someone to listen. She told me that she was a postgraduate anthropology student and that he was her supervisor and that they naturally spent a lot of time together because of her work on her PhD.

“We attended the same field trip and things got out of hand.” I didn’t want to hear this but I let her carry on. “He told me I made him feel complete,” she said, as if this explained everything. Our food arrived and we were quiet as they laid the dishes out.

“And how did he make you feel?” I asked, when the waiters were gone.

“Do you ever feel that you are only living half your life, like something is beyond you, just out of reach?” I nodded, although truthfully I didn’t know what she was talking about. She put rice on her plate. “I feel like that all the time, like there must be more to life, something more real than…” She waved her chopsticks around. “Anyway, I have something missing, a gap. A gap…I let other people fill.”

I supposed she meant men. We ate our food. She asked me what I was studying and I told her about the language course.

“It doesn’t sound like you need it,” she said.

“It’s a requirement,” I lied.

“And then what? What do you want to do?”

I was flummoxed by the question, it wasn’t something anyone had asked me before. I didn’t know what Abu Leila had in mind. Maybe he didn’t know, or maybe he hadn’t told me yet.

“English literature,” I said. It just popped into my head.

We ate: she used her chopsticks and savored her food, making noises of satisfaction when she liked something. Her big watch slid down her forearm when she raised her hand.

I used a fork and ate quickly without much noticing the food; I’d forgotten how hungry I was. Occasionally I looked around the room at the other diners, or at people coming through the door, checking for anyone who looked like they were in the business. We didn’t talk for a while but I didn’t feel uncomfortable, like you do sometimes when you struggle to make conversation. We looked at each other with our mouths full of food and she smiled at me with her eyes.

“You don’t say much, do you?” she said.

I shrugged. “Does that bother you?”

She shook her head. “No, I like it.” She removed sauce from her chin with her napkin. “I find that men can’t wait to talk about themselves. But not you.” I wondered how many men she’d based that generalization on. “I hate the fact that I talk too much,” she said.

“Then try shutting up.”

She laughed her natural, muscular laugh and made a zipping motion across her lips. They brought us more tea and we sat drinking it. She looked at me over her cup and I looked back. I winked at her to make her say something. She stuck her tongue out at me. I rolled my eyes. She batted her eyelashes. We kept up this silliness until the waiter came and put the bill on our table.

We walked back to the house more slowly than we had left it. I asked her to explain anthropology. She said it was a big subject but that in a nutshell it was the comparative study of humankind. I told her I was no wiser.

“Well,” she said, becoming animated, “different societies deal with the same universal events in different ways. My area of interest is death. More specifically, I’m interested in how different cultures cope with death. That’s what my thesis is on: I’m comparing the burial rites of ancient Turks with those of a Celtic tribe of the same period, looking at what they have in common and what they do differently.”

We walked a bit more, and when we were near our house she asked me where I was from. I told her I was from
Lebanon
—avoiding saying I was Lebanese.

“Is that why you don’t drink, for religious reasons?”

“As a matter of fact, I’m not a Muslim,” I said.

“No, of course you’re not.”

“Why wouldn’t I be?”

“I don’t know. I’m sorry, I haven’t quite got my anthropological stripes yet. As you can see, I have yet to hone my cultural awareness skills before I’m awarded them. Am I babbling again?”

“A little,” I said, smiling.

She zipped her mouth. Could she be as nervous as I felt? She seemed so self-assured. We both took our keys out to open the door but I got to the lock first. Upstairs we stood on our shared landing. We kissed each other on the cheek, my right hand resting gently on her hip with hers on my arm. I hoped that she wouldn’t ask me into her room; I certainly wouldn’t ask her into mine. Maybe because I could still see her naked tutor on her bed, or maybe I didn’t want yet another brief encounter. I was certainly still wary of her. Besides, we hadn’t had the usual pre–one-night-stand dance of easy compliments and accelerated physical contact.

“Shall we do that again?” she asked. I thought she meant the kiss, but when she turned to her door I understood she meant dinner.

“I would like that,” I said.

I lay on my bed in the dark and listened to her running a bath. I wondered if she was using her herbal bath oil. Later, I had to make myself get out of bed to take some codeine because I’d forgotten to take any and had nearly fallen asleep.