1001 Nights Cast

The last I saw of my agent, he was being handcuffed and frogmarched into the night. I lunged towards my laptop, but the officer holding it pulled it back, and suddenly turning obsequious, said ‘after you, sir’, and ushered me into the Danish Tea House with a grotesque little bow.

‘Two teas, if you please’, he said to the patron.

‘But we’re closing, sir’.

‘On the double!’, he hissed, and he sat me down amongst the cushions, opposite him. The other soldiers kept their distance, their hands relaxed around their weapons, stationed in a loose constellation around the table. A young man wearing a tee-shirt with the Google logo came in, sat down at an adjacent table. My host turned to him, and said ‘Good evening, Maestro’, and handed my laptop over to him. I stiffened and rose, a soldier bounced up and shoved me back down. ‘Maestro’ had opened my laptop, and with a flourish logged into the Greek Orthodox WiFi network down by the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. His fingers danced over the keyboard. Rows of figures raced wildly up the screen, as if the machine was spilling its guts.

‘So’, my host turned to me. ‘We’ve caught the terrorists’ bankroller.’ The tea had arrived, he poured me a cup. I shook my head wildly. Yes, I had donated money to the Palestinian Authority, but they are a legitimate government, the Israelis themselves have financial relations with them.

‘No matter’, he said. ‘It looks like Maestro has hit the jackpot.’ And indeed, Maestro had. My Clearstream passwords. My accounts. My clients’ accounts. Again I rose and jerked forward, and this time three soldiers shoved me back, spilling my tea and shattering the porcelain cup on the ground, they kicked it under the table as Maestro’s expert fingers transferred it all into the coffers of the Israeli Treasury.

They took me up the winding stairway to my rooftop house, unlocked my door. I had five minutes to throw stuff into a bag. This time, the soldiers were tensed with their guns and jostled about me, as if they expected me to pull an ambush. But there was nothing, not even Idi’s crocodile, to come to my rescue.

Then they were marching me out of the Old City of Jerusalem. They could have taken me to the Jaffa Gate, the most Israeli of the city’s entrances, but they chose the Damascus Gate, the most Palestinian, marched me up the steps under the archway. The moon had gone, the night dark. There were few people to witness my disappearing into a windowless truck.

I know every detail of the road from Jerusalem down to the airport outside Tel Aviv. One drives up Jaffa Road, past the Generali insurance building with its rooftop lion statue, the shops and the banks, the high-rise buildings which awkwardly punctuate the city’s skyline when viewed from the Palestinian side. The road continues to rise until its crest at the entrance to modern Jerusalem. From there, the highway leaves the city and descends to the bottom of the valley in four generous, loping ‘s’ bends, the sprawling Israeli military cemetery above the retaining wall to the left, the hilltops of occupied Palestine to the right.

I could see nothing, but could feel it all running past. At the bottom of the hill, the sharp right bend by the old brick factory, past the antique synagogue of Motza village. A long, steep climb, where the buses pain and groan in low gear, then over the summit with its arched bridge and memorial to the ‘Harel’ brigade at Mevaseret; and down an equally steep hill, a long swing to the left and then to the right, past the Israeli Arab village of Abu Ghosh whose inhabitants had been integrated into the Israeli state but whose children went to separate schools. Upwards again, through the deep, cream-coloured rock cutting, that rises up above the roadway in layers, like a wedding cake. Then the long straight stretch along the hill top, where Palestinian fighters once forced a bus and its passengers into the ravine. And down the long, twisting wadi with its burnt-out trucks, remembrance of the Israeli War of Independence. We were in the foothills, now. Past Latrun, the old British police station, and across the wide battlefield that had been no-man’s-land until the war in 1967, and are Israeli wheatfields now. I imagined the glow of orange light from the new settlement of Modi’in to the north, where the wall gouges into Palestine, cutting the farmers from their olive groves, where each Friday the anarchists come up from Tel Aviv to demonstrate with the village people, and I blessed them in my heart. Now the terrain is gently rolling, the highway goes gradually down a way, then up, down and up a second time, like a sleeping person breathing slowly, out then in. Past the big interchange where all the highways in Israel seem to meet, where the road veers leftwards, down onto the coastal plain. The airport is in sight.

They drove me directly out onto the tarmac. A gangway scuttled out to a 747, its engines roaring, manifestly it was taxiing to leave. I was hustled up and pushed into a first class seat. My escort leaned down and whispered in my ear, pointing out shapes in the darkness. Him and him and him and him. They were not armed, I was told, but one false move and I would spend the rest of the flight in cold storage. I was strapped in. The aircraft jerked into motion, lurched to the right, rolled forward, an abrupt turn to the left and it was hurtling down the runway. My eyes were shut. I could feel the coastline of Palestine sliding away underneath me. Jerusalem was slipping from my fingers like sand, like the notes of a funeral march.