‘I understand. Did Efraim know that?’
‘I answered your question. Now you answer mine.’
Efraim’s former boss gave a wry smile, then told Eden what she had already heard from Fred Banks in London. It was only when he reached the end of the story that she found out who Mona Samson was.
‘Mona Samson, or Nadia Tahir to give her her real name, was the Paper Boy,’ he said. ‘The source Efraim ran in the Palestinian village on the West Bank. And it was her son who died in the explosion.’
He spread his hands wide.
‘It’s a terrible story from start to finish. Gideon and Saul left Israel after that, which was a sign of weakness, if you ask me. But I suppose everyone makes their own judgement.’
Eden wasn’t interested in making a judgement. She was trying to feel something after what she had just learned, but she couldn’t. The fact that the woman who had murdered Eden’s daughter had lost her child herself was of no importance.
‘How come she was carrying Israeli passports?’ she asked.
‘That was down to Efraim. Her life would have been in danger if she had stayed on the West Bank after the deaths of her husband and son; she was at considerable risk of being exposed as a source. We offered her the chance to disappear in another country, but she wanted to stay in Israel, so she was granted Israeli citizenship. It was no big deal; her father was an Israeli, after all. A year ago she contacted us and asked for a new identity; she said she thought she was being followed. It was then that she became Mona Samson.’
‘Do you think Efraim was involved in the murders?’
The man’s expression hardened.
‘Of course not. Nadia was behind all this, and she persuaded Gideon to go along with her by exploiting the terrible experiences he had been through as a child. I can guarantee that he didn’t know what her real motive was: to avenge the death of her son. Efraim was the only one who had met her; Saul and Gideon had no idea who she was, what the Paper Boy looked like.’
‘So the fact that Efraim was in Stockholm when this all kicked off – that was pure coincidence?’
He nodded.
Eden thanked him for his help, and got to her feet. The man she had come to see also stood up.
‘We’d still really like you to join us, Eden,’ he said. ‘Any time.’
She didn’t answer; she just turned and left.
Mikael was still signed off so that he could recover from the bullet wound. Saba was the one who had healed the fastest, although she often asked about her sister Dani. Time and time again they explained that she was gone.
‘She’s not coming back. Ever,’ Eden said, feeling as if she was about to fall apart.
How many times could one heart break?
An infinite number of times.
Tears poured down her face without her even noticing. When she was driving the car. When she was out shopping. When she was watching TV. When she was cooking.
She exercised as frequently as she could, often twice a day. Physical exertion and pain became a balsam for her soul.
‘You have to forgive yourself,’ was the last thing GD had said to her. ‘You couldn’t possibly have foreseen this.’
But that was exactly what she had done, and still she had failed to act decisively enough. If only she had explained to Mikael why they had to get out of the apartment, why they weren’t safe there. She also hated herself for the misjudgement she had made when she first walked in; she had simply assumed that Mikael must be dead, since Efraim was lying on the bed with the children.
Mikael was haunted by the same demons. He blamed himself because he hadn’t done what Eden said. Their anguish grew into a monster that threatened to destroy everything they had left. It was as if they were caught in a raging torrent, and neither of them had the strength to stay afloat.
They were being carried away from all their routines, away from one another.
Until the day when Eden realised she was pregnant, and saw a light flicker in Mikael’s eyes. A faint light, but it was there.
And she knew that she couldn’t wait for him any longer. He had to know what she hadn’t been able to bring herself to tell him for five long years.
She told him one night when they were both lying awake. Her voice was no more than a whisper, and she couldn’t look at him as the words left her mouth.
‘You’re not Dani and Saba’s father.’
Her whole body was shaking.
She could feel the tears trickling down her cheeks, seeping into her hair.
Mikael lay there motionless.
On his back, his gaze fixed on the ceiling, he reached out and took her hand in his.
‘I’ve always known that,’ he said.
AFTERWORD AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
To begin with there was only the title. The very first time I visited my publisher, Piratförlaget, I said that the title of my fifth book would be The Chosen [Davidsstjärnor]. Looking back that seems completely incomprehensible. I never even thought that I would write five books. Or six, actually – I’ve started writing children’s books too.
I am sitting at my desk trying to remember what it felt like to write The Chosen. It isn’t particularly difficult, because I have never enjoyed writing something so much in my whole life. I have been fascinated by the history of the Jewish people and the creation of the state of Israel for such a long time; how could I resist the temptation to write a book with that title at some point? When I had finished, I wept; the sense of loss was so overwhelming. You can write a book only once. Everything that follows – the re-reading, the revision – is something else. Something that, for me, doesn’t have much to do with writing. So when The Chosen was finished, I felt bereft. There was only one cure: to start a new project as soon as possible, because it is when I am writing that I feel best of all.
I thought we could have a little chat about that, dear reader.
About the importance of feeling good. And about where I was in my life when I wrote this book.
A few years ago I wrote a piece that was published when Unwanted [Askungar] came out in paperback in Sweden. I said that we must get better at following our heart, at devoting ourselves to things that give, rather than take, energy. I differentiated between what we do because it is right and strategic (or ‘good for our career’), and what we do because we want to. And writing was – and is – exactly that: something that I want to spend time on because it is so much fun. Because it makes my life better on so many levels.
Yet for a long time I insisted on marginalising my writing, keeping it as a leisure activity. In spite of the fact that I was producing a book a year, and had been published in a dozen countries, I carried on working full time, often in locations in a constant state of re-organisation, with almost comically poor leadership which suppressed both creativity and productivity. I used to say that I would never be able to resign. This was based on the erroneous assumption that if I stopped working, I would also lose contact with the politics of international security, and to be honest I can’t imagine my life without that contact. As time went by, it became clear that I had been wrong. I could integrate what was going on in the world with my writing, as long as I had the courage to expand my authorship to include non-fiction texts and perhaps journalism. And if I missed having a job, I could always apply for a new one.
So since January 2012 I have been a full-time author, and at the moment there is very little from my old life that I miss. The transition between old and new was actually supposed to happen at the end of 2010 / beginning of 2011, but then I got another allegedly good job. In Vienna. As a counter-terrorism expert. That was something I couldn’t say no to, and so 2011 became yet another year when I worked and wrote at the same time.