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Sunday, Nov 22, 2009
And so it was that when I was followed by a tangerine-colored Mercedes one moonless midnight walking homeward past the city's rambling New Graveyard, I knew enough to reply to the two men who had cut me off on the sidewalk and then rolled down their windows to interrogate me that I did not understand them, and was Greek.
Despite these intrigues, Abu Moses and his circle remained a side story those years in Belgrade. Our daily lives consisted of far more mundane enterprises: the constant hunt to obtain food more palatable than the interminable pork and fermented cabbage ladled up at the collective dining halls (while a single gleaming orange, shipped in from Spain and then cruelly displayed in specialty-shop windows, cost a day's stipend). The capital's phantom phone directory listed only the most established residents, and in any case, none of us had access to a phone. Contacting anyone, therefore, meant half a day's journey across the city -- on foot, or via whiplashing tram car -- with better-than-average odds that the individual sought would be absent upon one's arrival. There were the daily battles with stingy landlords over the amount of coal required to keep the frigid winter at bay and our mind on studies. At school, a corrupt professor or two might make clear that a stereo, hard cash or something rather more personal would guarantee high marks. And finally, there were the near-peasants given State desk jobs, who so relished making the city-bred beg that securing official stamps for the right to study, or rent, or work might take months of groveling.
Life went on and, as anywhere, word circulated in student circles about our classmates, including the young Palestinian operatives. They ranged from spoiled rich boys who had grown up in luxurious Libyan exile (and whose parents sent a son to join the PLO as a matter of prestige, as families elsewhere do to the monastery or priesthood) to gaunt refugees from wretched Syrian camps, dressed always in threadbare suit coats, full of the quiet rage of the disinherited, with nowhere to go but up.
Abu Moses, I now realize, spoke little about his own origins. And though he was with us for two winters and the spring and summer in between, my knowledge of his past remained as skeletal as of others with whom I'd scarcely spoken: a few late-night references to the Expulsion, a casual mention of his ancestral village, a moist-eyed, soft-cheeked yearning for the Land -- as one longs for a grandparent left behind, whom one has grown up adoring but has never met.
Piecing these fragments together, it can be said that Abu Moses' story was not an uncommon one among the ranks. In or around 1948 (the year marked by the Israelis as Independence, and by Palestinians as al Naqba, the Catastrophe) his family fled their village in Palestine, somewhere near ancient hilltop city of Safad. The occupying British, through a system of unequal reward, had managed to divide -- but not conquer -- Palestine's local Arab majority and Jewish minority, then washed their hands of the region, leaving the two groups to peck each other to pieces, like some vicious Levantine cockfight. When combat subsided, Abu Moses' ancestral village lay within the borders of the nascent Israeli state.
There was the family's life in exile, as refugees in Lebanon. Abu Moses (baby Ibrahim), born a dozen years later, dragged from camp to city slum. Recruitment as a teen into the PLO, driven by the vision of one day retaking the family home from the Israelis. Training camp somewhere along the coast, a show of promise, some distinction. The Israeli invasion and war of '82, the evacuation of Palestinian fighters from Beirut; news of the massacres. Later, a PLO scholarship to Yugoslavia, where he would ostensibly study tourism (the least-pressured course of studies and one that could provide a young commando a visa, minimal cover, and a home base for European operations).
Even now, it is with effort that I assemble the outlines of Abu Moses' tale. In Belgrade, he was simply the affable friend-of-a-friend who dropped in unexpectedly every few months, a sometimes tiresome cutup with a penchant for practical jokes, uninterested in academics, an acquaintance who had once gone out of his way to do me a good turn.
Winters were a deadly bore in Belgrade, a capital city that supported little nightlife of any kind. An exciting Saturday evening might consist of, say, selling a used sheepskin coat for a pile of wilted deutsche marks or procuring black-market airplane tickets from some Polish shark.
Days were pure drudgery. One gray January afternoon I found myself beating back the snow flurries, running through the sooty, cobbled streets of Abu Moses' Dickensian neighborhood. To escape the weather, I decided to drop in on him at home. Though our conversations had never been particularly fluid or engrossing, I was certain that we could find something about which to complain (the acknowledged national pastime). Probably it would be Walid, at whom we were both miffed since New Year's Eve, after he hopped a night train to party in Sarajevo, leaving us to drink brandy at the Hotel Slavija with some boring mafia hack.
In any case, when Abu Moses opened his apartment door that afternoon and bade me enter, he was distracted, barely registering surprise at my appearance. Normally an unfailingly polite and attentive host, now he was unsettled, jumpy, on edge -- nearly rude -- mulling around the dim, red-and-black-carpeted flat. Perched everywhere, gift flasks of men's cologne and Scotch whisky, bought in airport duty-free stores, gold-foil seals yet unbroken.
"I'm going on vacation," Abu Moses piped up, as tight-lipped and agitated as a methamphetamine freak, searching my eyes intently for a moment, then lost again in his demons. "To Cyprus," he added then, as speaking to someone who wasn't there.
