Day of atonement by Roger Moss
10 Tishrei 5746/25 September 1985
Some stories linger for a long time without making sense.
I remember this one from the papers at the time.
It was 1983 when a 25 year-old carpenter from north-east England left home with only ten pounds in his pocket, saying he was fed up with his life and was going to hitchhike round the world.
I went off to Florence that June, a 32 year-old academic with a conference paper on comic eloquence to present, wanting to escape an unhappy marriage. Thatcher won a huge landslide the night before I left.
How did Ian Davison plan his journey? Where did he go to first? Was it just the idea of being somewhere different that shaped his route? Or had it always been part of his plan that he should end up in Lebanon?
I had already decided to include Siena in my journey before going to the conference. It was the season of the Palio. The city was full of excitement, with the drumbeat of opposing supporters’ groups sounding through the narrow streets at night.
The Lebanon in 1983 was in turmoil, a small country whose northern borders were under pressure from a Syrian expeditionary force. The southern part was a war zone between the Lebanese Christians and the displaced Palestinians, with the Israelis increasingly involved as well. The year before there had been brutal massacres at the refugee camps of Sabra and Chatila, with Israel standing by
.
I fancied that by travelling I could escape the turmoil of domestic life. But of course I couldn’t. There’d been too many awful things. On our wedding anniversary she’d told me she was pregnant, and then booked into a clinic to have it terminated. I said nothing, calmly accepting that it would be crazy for the pair of us to have a child.
It would have been exhilarating after England, to be a young man surrounded by all the dangers and the fierce debates, the feeling of living at the heart of something momentous. The long nights of discussion, the passionate faces, and the generous servings of spiced food -- all this would have had its excitement too.
I ignored her pleas for me to stay in England, writing a lengthy letter on the train to the airport to justify myself. The little we said to one another by this time was mainly said by letter or by phone. The days of almost enjoying the drama of our quarrels belonged in the past.
He would have listened to their reasons for the struggle with a growing conviction that what they said made sense, and a feeling of privilege to be among such dedicated friends. Or was it rather that the struggle itself, with all its atmosphere of conspiracy and comradeship and sacrifice, stirred him, and he came to accept the arguments because of this?
As well as my work there were other pressing reasons that made me determined to get away. In the anonymity of foreign cities it was so much easier to put aside the guilt and secrecy involved in seeking out the company, even just the proximity, of other men. This had become by then the deepest layer of conflict in my marriage.
Did he one day declare his admiration for the cause, his wish to be a volunteer? Or would he have been introduced by one of his new friends to someone senior in the movement in a conscious effort to recruit him? Leading in either case the following day to an invitation to the secret bureau on the edge of town to meet the leadership.
In my vanity I was flattered to have the admiration of my older colleagues at the conference. I was equally eager to be out at night as the admiring onlooker of the curly-haired and dark-eyed Tuscans hanging around in the streets and bars. Even wandering beyond the walls of the old city in search of a sex cinema to see who I could find.
For Davison, it was a proud moment when they admitted him to the ranks of the PLO. After which he was a soldier sent for training. It takes two years to turn someone into a killer. When the order came to evacuate to Yemen, he obeyed unquestioningly. By the time he was ready to return he’d been recruited to join the organisation’s elite commando unit.
In Florence my duplicity didn’t let up for a moment. I gave my paper on language that mocks its own inadequacy, and then over a glorious meal in Fiesole clumsily told a younger colleague I found attractive about my feelings towards men. We walked back down the hill into the city in near silence, and I could tell he thought our friendship had been tainted.
They sent orders for him to travel with two others to Cyprus on a special mission. The group would get their final instructions once they were in place. At this stage they didn’t know precisely what was planned, only that it would be something aimed to make a shattering impact.
I’d said to her that when I came to travel home I wanted her to be there, as if things could carry on as normal. But she’d gone to stay with friends in London. Phoning from the empty house I told her I’d decided we couldn’t carry on at all.
On the morning of the Jewish day of repentance, Yom Kippur, the three of them headed for Larnaca harbour, where they overran the yacht belonging to a middle-aged Israeli couple, Esther and Reuben Palzur, who were spending the holiday with Abraham Avery, a friend. Esther was the first to be killed when she tried to get away.
It was only on the evening of the third day that I changed my mind. On an impulse I took the train to London, without any idea of what I was hoping to achieve. When I arrived, her friends told me she’d begun drinking heavily after the phone-call.
They’d left her sleeping in the guest-room after that.
All morning it dangled, a lifeless body, over the guard-rail.
I quickly found the empty pill-bottle beside her unconscious body.
One of the group of gunmen stayed on deck, casually smoking a cigarette. The others went down into the cabin and shot the two men, tied up and half-naked, at point-blank range. They didn’t wait for a reply to their demands for the release of Palestinian prisoners, before the three of them surrendered to the Cypriot police.
That night in the hospital bed, beside which I stayed watching, she returned to life, moaning and staring at me like someone terrified. We went for a couple of nights to a Brighton hotel after this, to try to restore ourselves. Where I couldn’t resist a brief encounter on the seafront when I went out to smoke.
When the newspaper reports appeared in September 1985 it emerged that one of the men arrested was blond and spoke little Arabic. To begin with he said his name was George Hannah, but was later identified as Ian Davison, an Englishman. At the family home in South Shields his father told the press, “He was just a happy-go-lucky lad, with no interest in politics or world affairs.”
I was with her still in Paris that same September to see the Pont Neuf wrapped by Christo in golden canvas. Still married, still unhappy, still looking obsessively at men and escaping to the rue St.-Denis when I got the chance to be alone. Both of us by then had secret lovers but it would be more than a year before things finally came to an end.
“I was sick of my empty life,” was the way that Davison explained it. Declaring to the court, “I acted as an idealist and for my heart, on behalf of the Palestinian people.”
Given the indecisiveness and guilty secrecy of my own life at that time, it’s not surprising that I remember him with such appalling fascination. The cold ruthlessness in some ways I probably shared.
There were reprisals, naturally. A long-range attack on Arafat’s headquarters in Tunis, including the building used by Force 17. Followed a week later by the hi-jacking of the Achille Lauro. And so on, and so on, even now.
We both wanted it to stop, this cycle of attack and counter-attack. But it didn’t stop. There were fights over money and possessions and other stuff. Until finally, thankfully, there was nothing left for us to fight about.
After eight years’ imprisonment, Davison was free. He left the jail in Nicosia and flew into Heathrow where he was reunited with his sister.
But would either one of us ever be completely free from what still remained after all the nastiness inflicted by one person on another?
And twenty-five years after these things happened, their imprint stays.
I try to piece events together, not explain what happened.
Wave 3.5c
After Oulipo
November, 2010
Roger Moss
Roger Moss has taught at Essex University since 1977, where he currently teaches Theatre Studies and Creative Writing. He also teaches for the Open University and has taught at the Universities of Lyon-II and Mauritius.
He has published two novels, The Game of the Pink Pagoda and The Miraculous Birth, Secret Life and Lamentable Death of Mr. Chinn. Shorter pieces include Le Morne/Lemorn, published in Mauritius with a parallel Creole translation by Lindsey Collen, ‘The month the music died’ in an issue of Wasafiri dedicated to Mauritian writing, and ‘Hick, hack, hock’ in Ovid Metamorphosed, edited by Philip Terry.