Shake Off Read Online Free

never been asked to go to my room before and I didn’t move, not knowing what to do. “Go,” Abu Leila commanded softly, waving at me with his cigarette and winking through a grubby lens.
    Forty minutes or so after re-reading the same page of algebra at my desk I heard a knock at my door and Abu Leila came in, closing it softly behind him. He sat on the bed and lit one of his cigarettes, filling the small room with pungent blue smoke. I turned to face him and watched him run nicotine-yellowed fingers through his thick hair. He had his raincoat with him. I opened the small window above the desk and watched the smoke escape. No stranger had come into my room like this before.
    “Tell me what happened in Sabra—tell me everything,” Abu Leila said, pushing his heavy glasses up his nose and peering at me. The request was made in a tone that could have been used to ask how I was finding school, or whether I liked my new bedroom, but it was this lack of emotion in Abu Leila’s voice, the fact that he did not affect concern, that allowed me to consider telling him about the killings. It was also the first time that anyone had asked me what had happened, apart from the enemy soldier who had found me wandering around outside the camp in my bloodstained clothes. Not my own blood, it turned out, but the blood of my father. I recalled that the Israeli soldier, an Arab-​ looking Israeli (another revelation to me, as I had never seen one before), had hidden his M16 rifle—hidden it because I’d started to shake when I saw it—before crouching down to question me in a funny-sounding Arabic. The soldier had listened as an Israeli medic checked me for injuries, looking at the ground and holding his face in his hands as if it had happened to him. And so I told Abu Leila the story, starting with my family and me sitting down to dinner and ending with me escaping from the camp into the arms of the Israeli who handed me over to the Red Cross.
    It had felt good to tell it, like when you’ve been keeping something from your parents and come out with it at last. It feels good even if the consequences of telling it may not be good. And when Abu Leila heard it, he lit another cigarette and after a silence said, “Do you want to see justice done, Michel?” I looked up and blushed and nodded, because it was as if he had looked into my head and seen my secret wish: that I should somehow avenge what happened and make up for not doing anything to help Mama. He carried on, saying, “Then you need to know why this was done to you.” Did he not mean who had done this to me? “Do you play chess, Michel?” Yes, I told him, my father had taught me, and we’d played until I’d started to beat him. He smiled and dragged on his cigarette. “The pawn is often sacrificed, Michel, so the bishops and the knights can live on to achieve greater victory.” He looked at me intently. “Do you understand me?” I said yes, although I didn’t fully at the time. What I did intuit was that he was offering me a way out of my situation, a way to rebuild my shattered life—he was giving my experience a reason and purpose. He smiled and shook my hand, as if we had just signed a contract satisfactory to both parties.
    Now, according to an older Abu Leila in Berlin, my purpose was becoming clearer, but I always clung to that first conversation, even though we never talked of my family or of revenge again.

Five
    I t’s Roberto, can I speak to your father?” I said to the boy who answered the phone. I was calling from a phone box outside Finsbury Park underground station. It went quiet at the other end and I could hear raised voices in the background, women and children shouting in Turkish. Then a man’s voice shouted and it went quiet.
    “Roberto! My favorite customer,” a male Turkish voice boomed into my ear. “When are you coming to visit?”
    “Lemi, I’ll be there in an hour,” I told him. I sat in a café diagonally across from Lemi’s house,