The Pigeon Tunnel: Stories From My Life Read online

  With Salah to guide me and Charlie as my familiar, I visit Palestinian outposts on the Israeli border and, to the putter of Israeli spotter planes and bursts of occasional gunfire, listen to fighters’ tales – real or imagined, I don’t know – of night raids by rubber boat across the Galilee. It isn’t their derring-do that they boast of. To be there is already enough, they insist: to live the dream, even for a few hours, at the risk of death or capture; to pause your stealth boat in mid-crossing, breathe the scent of the flowers and olive trees and farmlands of your own homeland, to listen to the bleating of the sheep on your own hillsides – that is the real victory.

  With Salah at my side, I walk the wards of the children’s hospital in Sidon. A seven-year-old boy with his legs blown off gives us the thumbs-up. Charlie has never been more present. Of the refugee camps, I remember Rashidieh and Nabatieh, townships in their own right. Rashidieh is famous for its football team. The pitch, which is of dust, has been bombed so often that matches can be arranged only at short notice. Several of its best footballers are martyrs to the cause. Their photographs are propped among the silver cups they won. In Nabatieh, an old Arab man in a white robe notices my brown English shoes, and something colonial about my walk.

  ‘You are British, sir?’

  ‘I am British.’

  ‘Read.’

  He has the document in his pocket. It is a certificate, printed in English and stamped and signed by a British officer of the Mandate, confirming that the bearer is the rightful owner of the following smallholding and olive grove outside Bethany. The date is 1938.

  ‘I am the bearer, sir. Now look at us, who we have become.’

  My useless rush of shame is Charlie’s outrage.

  Evening meals in Salah’s house in Sidon gave an illusion of magical calm after the travails of the day. The house might be bullet-pocked; an Israeli rocket fired from the sea had passed clean through one wall without exploding. But there were lazy dogs and flowers in the garden, and a log fire burning in the hearth and lamb cutlets on the table. Salah’s wife, Dina, is a Hashemite princess who was once married to King Hussein of Jordan. She was educated at a British private school and read English at Girton College, Cambridge.

  With literacy and tact and a lot of humour, Dina and Salah educate me in the Palestinian cause. Charlie is seated close beside me. The last time there was a pitched battle in Sidon, Salah tells me proudly, Dina, a slight woman of renowned beauty and force of character, drove their ancient Jaguar into town, picked up a stack of pizzas from the baker, drove to the front line and insisted on delivering them personally to the fighters.

  It is a November evening. Chairman Arafat and his entourage have descended on Sidon to celebrate the seventeenth anniversary of the Palestinian Revolution. The sky is blue-black, rain threatens. All but one of my bodyguards have vanished as we cram ourselves by the hundred into the narrow street where the procession will take place – all, that is, but the inscrutable Mahmoud, a member of my bodyguard, who carries no gun, shoots no cats from Salah’s window, speaks the best English and wears an air of mysterious apartness. For the last three nights Mahmoud has disappeared completely, not returning to Salah’s house till dawn. Now, in this palpitating, densely crowded street hung with banners and balloons, he stands possessively at my side, a diminutive, tubby eighteen-year-old boy in glasses.

  The parade begins. First the pipers and flag-bearers; after them a loudspeaker van bellowing slogans. Burly military men in uniform, official dignitaries in dark suits, assemble on a makeshift podium. Arafat’s white keffiyeh is spotted among them. The street explodes in celebration, green smoke belches over our heads and turns to red. A firework display, assisted by live ammunition, gets under way despite the falling rain, as our leader stands motionless at front of stage, acting his own effigy in the flickering light of the fireworks, fingers raised in a victory sign. Now it’s hospital nurses with green crescent badges, now it’s war-crippled kids in wheelchairs, now it’s girl guides and boy scouts of the Ashbal, swinging their arms and marching out of step, now a Jeep towing a float with fighters wrapped in the Palestinian flag, pointing their Kalashnikovs at the rain-black heavens. And Mahmoud, close beside me, waves wildly at them, and to my surprise they turn as one and wave back at him. The boys on the float are the rest of my bodyguard.

  ‘Mahmoud,’ I shout at him through cupped hands. ‘Why are you not with our friends, pointing your gun at the sky?’

  ‘I have no gun, Mr David!’

  ‘Why not, Mahmoud?’

  ‘I do night work!’

  ‘But what do you do at night, Mahmoud? Are you a spy?’ – lowering my voice as best I can amid the din.

  ‘Mr David, I am not spy.’

  Even in the clamour Mahmoud remains undecided whether to impart his great secret.

  ‘You have seen on the breasts of the uniform of the Ashbal the photograph of Abu Amar, our Chairman Arafat?’

  I have, Mahmoud.

  ‘I personally, all night, in a secret place, with a hot iron, have impressed upon the breasts of the Ashbal the photograph of Abu Amar, Chairman Arafat.’

  And Charlie will love you best of all of them, I think.

  Arafat has invited me to spend New Year’s Eve with him at a school for the orphans of Palestine’s martyrs. He will send a Jeep to pick me up from my hotel. The hotel was still the Commodore, and the Jeep was part of a convoy that drove bumper to bumper up a winding mountain road at breakneck speed through Lebanese, Syrian and Palestinian checkpoints in the same pouring rain that always seemed to bedevil my encounters with Arafat.

  The road was single-track, unmade and falling apart in the deluge. Loose stones kept flying at us from the Jeep in front. Valleys opened up inches from the kerbside, revealing small carpets of light thousands of feet below. Our lead vehicle was an armoured red Land Rover. Word was, it contained our Chairman. But when we drew up at the school the guards told us they had fooled us. The Land Rover was a decoy. Arafat was safe downstairs in the concert hall, greeting his New Year’s guests.

  From outside, the school looked like any modest two-storey house. Once inside, you realized you were on the top floor and the rest of the building went in steps down the hill. The usual armed men in keffiyehs and young women with ammunition belts across their chests watched over our descent. The concert hall was a huge, tightly packed amphitheatre with a raised wooden stage, and Arafat was standing in the front row beneath it, embracing his guests while the packed hall boomed to the rhythmic thunder of clapping hands. New Year’s streamers dangled from the ceiling. Slogans of the Revolution decked the walls. I was prodded towards him and he once more received me in a ritual embrace, while grizzle-haired men in khaki drills and gun-belts clasped my hand and bellowed New Year’s greetings over the handclapping. Some had names. Some, like Arafat’s deputy, Abu Jihad, had noms de guerre. Others had no names at all. The show began. First, the parentless girls of Palestine, dancing in a ring, singing. Then the parentless boys. Then all the children together dancing the dabke and trading wooden Kalashnikovs to the beat-beat of the crowd. To the right of me, Arafat was standing, holding out his arms. On a nod from the grim-faced warrior on his other side, I grabbed Arafat’s left elbow and between us we manhandled him bodily on to the stage and went scrambling after him.

  Pirouetting among his beloved orphans, Arafat seems to lose himself in their scent. He has taken hold of the tail end of his keffiyeh and is whirling it like Alec Guinness playing Fagin in the movie of Oliver Twist. His expression is of a man transported. Is he laughing or weeping? Either way, the emotion in him is so evident that it barely matters. Now he is signalling to me to grab hold of his waist. Somebody grabs hold of mine. Now the whole lot of us – high command, camp followers, ecstatic children – and no doubt an entire convocation of the world’s spies, since probably nobody in history has been more thoroughly spied on than Arafat – have formed a crocodile with our lead
er at its head.

  Down the concrete corridor, up a flight of steps, across a gallery, down another flight. The stamp-stamp of our feet replaces the handclapping. Behind or above us, thunderous voices strike up Palestine’s national anthem. Somehow we tramp and shuffle our way back to the stage. Arafat walks to the front, pauses. To the roars of the crowd, he does a swallow dive into the arms of his fighters.

  And in my imagination my ecstatic Charlie is cheering him to the rooftops.

  Eight months later, on 30 August 1982, following the Israeli invasion, Arafat and his high command were expelled from Lebanon. From the docks of Beirut, firing their guns defiantly into the air, Arafat and his fighters sailed to the docks of Tunis, where President Bourguiba and his cabinet were waiting to receive them. A luxury hotel outside the town had been hastily fitted out as Arafat’s new headquarters.

  A few weeks later, I went to see him there.

  A long drive led up to the elegant white house nestling among dunes. Two young fighters demanded to know my business. There were no dashing smiles, no customary gestures of Arab courtesy. Was I American? I showed them my British passport. With savage sarcasm, one asked me whether by any chance I had heard of the massacres of Sabra and Chatilla. I told him I had visited Chatilla only days before, and I was deeply grieved by all that I had seen and heard while I was there. I told him I had come to see Abu Amar, a term of familiarity, and offer him my condolences. I said we had met a few times in Beirut and again in Sidon, and I had spent New Year’s Eve with him at the school for the orphans of the martyrs. One of the boys picked up a telephone. I didn’t hear my name spoken, although he was holding my passport in his hand. He put down the phone, snapped ‘Come’, drew a pistol from his belt, jammed it into my temple and frogmarched me down a long passage to a green door. He unlocked it, gave me back my passport and shoved me through the doorway into the open air. In front of me lay an equestrian ring of beaten sand. Yasser Arafat, in white keffiyeh, was riding round it on a pretty Arab horse. I watched him complete a circuit, then another, then a third. But either he didn’t see me, or he didn’t want to.

  Meanwhile, Salah Tamari, my host and the commander of Palestinian militias in South Lebanon, was receiving the treatment due to the highest-ranking Palestinian combatant ever to fall into Israeli hands. He was in solitary confinement in Israel’s notorious Ansar jail, subjected to what these days we are pleased to call enhanced interrogation. Intermittently, he was also forming a close friendship with a distinguished visiting Israeli journalist named Aharon Barnea, which led to the publication of Barnea’s Mine Enemy, and affirmed, among other points of mutual agreement, Salah’s Israeli-Palestinian commitment to coexistence, rather than the everlasting, and hopeless, military struggle.

  14

  Theatre of the Real: the Villa Brigitte

  The prison was a discreet cluster of green military huts set in a fold of the Negev desert and surrounded by barbed wire. A watchtower stood at each corner. To insiders of the Israeli intelligence community it was known as the Villa Brigitte; to the rest of the world, not at all. Brigitte, as the young English-speaking colonel of Shin Bet, Israel’s security service, explained to me as he drove our Jeep over billows of sand, was a radicalized German activist who had thrown in her lot with a group of Palestinian terrorists. Their plan was to shoot down an El Al plane as it approached Nairobi’s Kenyatta airport, to which end they had provided themselves with a rocket launcher, a rooftop on the plane’s flight path, and Brigitte.

  All she had to do, with her Nordic looks and blonde hair, was stand in a phone booth inside the airport and, with a shortwave radio to one ear and a phone to the other, relay the control tower’s flight instructions to the boys on the roof. She was in the process of doing this when she was joined by a team of Israeli agents, at which point her contribution to the operation ended. The El Al plane, forewarned, had already arrived – empty save for her captors. It returned to Tel Aviv with Brigitte manacled to the floor. The fate of the boys on the roof remained vague. They had been taken care of, my Shin Bet colonel assured me, but did not specify how, and I did not feel it proper to ask. I had been given to understand I was being granted a rare privilege, thanks to the good offices of General Shlomo Gazit, until recently the head of Israeli military intelligence, and a valued acquaintance.

  Brigitte was now a prisoner in Israeli hands, but the secrecy of the operation remained essential, I had been warned. The Kenyan authorities had collaborated with the Israelis but had no wish to inflame domestic Muslim feeling. The Israelis had no wish to compromise their sources or embarrass a valued ally. I was being taken to visit her on the understanding that I wouldn’t write about her until I had the Israelis’ permission. And since they told me that they had so far not admitted either to her parents or to the German government that they knew of her whereabouts, I might have to wait a while. But that didn’t trouble me too much. I was about to introduce my fictional Charlie to the kind of company she would be keeping if she succeeded in penetrating the West German–Palestinian terrorist cell that she was being groomed for. At Brigitte’s hands, if I was lucky, Charlie would be taking her first lessons in the theory and practice of terror.

  ‘Does Brigitte talk?’ I ask the young colonel.

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘About her motives?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  Better I ask her myself. Fine. I feel I can do that. I have a notion that I’m going to strike up a relationship with Brigitte, however false and fleeting. Although I left Germany six years before the flowering of Ulrike Meinhof’s Red Army Faction, I have no problem understanding its origins, or even sympathizing with some of its arguments: just not its methods. In this, and this alone, I am no different from large sections of Germany’s middle classes, who are secretly providing the Baader–Meinhof Group with money and comfort. I too am disgusted by the presence of former high-ranking Nazis in politics, the judiciary, the police, industry, banking and the Churches; by the refusal of German parents to discuss the Nazi experience with their own children; and by the West German government’s subservience to America’s Cold War policy in its ugliest manifestations. And have I not, if Brigitte requires further proof of my credentials, visited Palestinian camps and hospitals, witnessed the misery and heard the cry? Surely all of this added together will buy me some sort of ticket of entry, however short lived, to the mind of a radical German woman in her twenties?

  Prisons have an unpleasant hold on me. It’s the abiding image of my incarcerated father that won’t let me go. In my imagination, I have seen him in more prisons than he ever inhabited, always the same burly, powerful, restlessly active man with his Einstein brow, prowling his cage and protesting his innocence. In an earlier life, whenever I was sent to interrogate men in prison, I had to take myself in hand for fear of earning the jeers of the inmates I had come to question when the iron door slammed behind me.

  There was no courtyard to the Villa Brigitte, or none I remember. We were stopped at the gates, scrutinized and allowed to pass. The young colonel led me up an outdoor staircase and called out a greeting in Hebrew. Major Kaufmann was the prison governor. I don’t know whether she was really called Kaufmann, or whether that was the name I have since awarded her. When I was an army intelligence officer in Austria, a Sergeant Kaufmann was the keeper of Graz’s town jail, where we locked up our suspects. What is certain to me is that she wore a white name-tag above the left breast pocket of her untypically immaculate uniform, that she was an army major aged fifty or so, sturdy but not plump, with bright brown eyes and a pained but kindly smile.

  And we speak English, Major Kaufmann and I. I have been speaking English with the colonel, and since I have no Hebrew it is only natural that we go on speaking English. So you’ve come to see Brigitte, she says, and I say, yes, it’s a privilege, I’m very sensible to it, very grateful, and is there anything I should be saying or not saying to her? I go on to explain what I haven’t ex
plained to the colonel: that I’m not a journalist but a novelist, here to collect deep background, and pledged not to write or speak about today’s encounter without the consent of my hosts. To all of which she smiles politely and says, of course, and would I prefer tea or coffee, and I say coffee.

  ‘Brigitte has not been very easy recently,’ she warns me in the considered tone of a doctor discussing her patient’s condition. ‘When she was first here, she accepted. Now, in these last weeks, she has been’ – a little sigh – ‘not accepting.’

  Since I cannot understand how anyone accepts imprisonment, I say nothing.

  ‘She will talk to you, maybe she won’t talk to you. I don’t know. First she said no, now she says yes. She is not decided. Shall I send for her?’

  She sends for her in Hebrew over a radio. We wait, and go on waiting. Major Kaufmann smiles at me, so I smile back at her. I’m beginning to wonder whether Brigitte has changed her mind again when I hear multiple footsteps approach an interior door, and have a momentary sickening expectation of a young demented woman in handcuffs with her hair torn, being delivered to me against her will. The door is unlocked from the other side, and a tall, beautiful woman in a prison tunic, enhanced by a tightly drawn belt, strides in with a diminutive wardress either side of her, each lightly holding an arm. Her long blonde hair is combed freely down her back. Even her prison tunic becomes her. As her wardresses withdraw, she steps forward, drops an ironic bob and, like a well-brought-up daughter of the house, extends her hand to me.

  ‘With whom do I have the honour?’ she enquires in courtly German, to which I hear myself repeating in German what I have already told Major Kaufmann in English: that I am this novelist, here to inform myself. To which she says nothing at all, but looks at me, until Major Kaufmann, from her chair in the corner of the room, says helpfully in her excellent English: