Traitor

by Jonathan de Shalit

  Ya’ara asked if she had any of her father’s paintings, personal documents, journals he may have kept, letters, and the like. Gal showed her three oil paintings that were hanging in the apartment.

  “Actually, there are a few more of his paintings that I’ve simply rolled up and now keep in the storeroom, in the building’s bomb shelter. As for documents, papers, I really don’t know. I left my father’s apartment untouched for months after he died, and then I had to clear it out quickly, because I found a buyer, and I threw away a lot and packed the rest into some boxes. They’re downstairs. I haven’t looked at them in fifteen years, and thought maybe I’d just get rid of them and that’s it. I need the space. If I haven’t got to them by now, I’m sure I never will, so why keep things for nothing? People are like that, they like to hang on to things for no reason.”

  “And tell me, did you know Katrina Geifman? Vladislav mentioned her when we met, he said your father did a wonderful sketch of her, and he thinks it’s among his papers that still remain at the association. They have a box there of his stuff, you know? But he started to look for it and couldn’t find it, and got a little annoyed, and said he’d let me know if he does.”

  “I know who you’re talking about. I was almost seventeen when they first met, but I wasn’t spending much time at home. I preferred to study as much as possible with friends, at their homes. And then I enlisted in the army and only came home on weekends. I hardly saw her, maybe once or twice, and I certainly didn’t know her very well. Honestly, I was angry with her and my father to begin with, and I was angry in general. You know how it is, I had a mother, and then she died, and suddenly along comes this beautiful woman, so beautiful and impressive, dressed in clothes I’d never seen in Israel, and so inappropriate, for my father and for our tenement building in Bat Yam, and my father was absolutely besotted with her, like a teenager. It embarrassed me terribly.”

  “But maybe he really loved her?” Ya’ara asked softly, playing the part of the student looking for a theme for the perfect film. “It was actually quite a few years after your mother died, right? And I know that he loved your mother dearly, you can tell right away from the painting you showed me, in the study.”

  “I get it better today perhaps, now that I have teenagers of my own. We don’t really exist to them, you know? Just like our parents didn’t exist to us. And to actually think of them having a life, falling in love, having sex. Eww, it’s hard for me even now to imagine it.” Gal smiled. “But I think he really did have something unique with that woman, with Katrina. Even though, like I said, she was so special, or glamorous, it’s hard to find the right word for it. I thought back then, too, insofar as I could feel and think through my anger, that she really did care for my father, and loved him as he was. Not because he was rich or handsome or extremely talented, but because he was a good and gentle man, a likeable man with vision. You know something, Ya’ara, it makes me happy today to know that my father had a love story like that.”

  Ya’ara reached out to touch Gal’s hand for a brief moment, before clasping her fingers around her cup of coffee again. “I hope to have moments like that in my film, to be able to show the people whose stories I’m telling, your father, as they were. Without all those things that people dress themselves in to feel more protected. Clothes, layers, thick skin, rudeness. Just them, as they are.”

  24

  Ya’ara smiled shyly and wiped the sweat off her forehead with the back of her hand. She and Gal had finished loading the boxes from the bomb shelter into her car. And she had just caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror in the hallway: Strands of light hair had escaped her ponytail and her cheeks were flushed. Gal looked a little disheveled, too, her hair ruffled but a smile on her face. “Take good care of everything,” she said to Ya’ara. “I’m going to go through it all when you return them. What can you do, one has to move on, memories shouldn’t remain in boxes. But maybe there’ll be a movie now, and that’s something, too. I’m sure you’ll make a lovely one. You have that way, that special way, of seeing things,” she said, warmly touching Ya’ara’s hand.

  25

  Dearest Katrina, my love,

  It’s with a heavy heart that I write to you now. My darling, I’ve read your last letter over and over again. I read it and didn’t know what to do with myself. I know it’s hard, I know it isn’t easy to deal with, but why are you so adamant and determined? Why put an end just like that to such a special and rare love story, to our love, which has been nothing but beautiful?

  I’ve come to terms with the fact that our relationship is such a fragmented one. We see each other once a year, always at your initiative, always when it suits you, never for long enough and always too painful. And our letters have been my comfort—as if we’re living in a different century, way back when, the seventeenth century perhaps, maybe the eighteenth, with you the unattainable princess, and me the poor poet in a faraway land. And the words bind us, making their way across the sea, over mountains and wide open plains, bearing the fibers of our emotions, the passion of our bodies, the undying yearning, to be together, to sit facing one another, to look into your deep eyes, filled with sorrow and beauty, and to feel so close, so close.

  And now all of a sudden, without forewarning, you tell me it’s all over. No more! No more meetings and no more writing to each other. As if you’ve been summoned by the forbidden-love police and ordered to do so. And me, I’ve never asked for more than you could give, and each time I saw you filled me with the strength for another year, another ten years if need be, until I could see you again. But now you say: We’ll never meet again. I won’t write any longer, and don’t write to me either, my dear Igor.

  My beloved, my love, I don’t understand what happened, what’s happened specifically now. Your husband found out, you say. How he found out—you don’t say. I’m sorry about his discovery. It must have pained him. He—yes, even he—must know, as I do, how wonderful you are. But I can’t help feeling sorry for myself and for you, for the two of us, my Katrina, sorry that our love has thus been doomed suddenly to die.

  I’ve never pleaded with you, but I’ll ask just this one time: Can’t you leave him? After all, the hardest part is over. He knows. The secret is no longer a secret. Bring your beautiful daughter and come live with me, with us, here. I can just imagine the kind of life you lead, the comfort and luxury in which a spectacular woman such as yourself must live. Not that you ever showed off or looked down on me, God forbid, your soul is a gentle and good one, but I allowed my imagination to run free. And I, as you know, live a simple and modest life. But we’d have a warm and pleasant home, and the beach is nearby, and the hustle and bustle and chaos of our country also offers a joie de vivre and a sense of festivity and color. Come, my love, come live your life with me. And if you want, my darling, I will come live with you. We’ll find ourselves a small apartment, even just a room would suffice. I’ll paint and you’ll do your interpreting, and we’ll live together, a happy life. Whatever you choose.

  But if you don’t respond, this will be my final letter. And suddenly I think to myself: You’re such a selfish scoundrel, so focused only on yourself. You can’t seem to grasp the kind of hell in which your beloved is living, you only remember the handful of days spent together. And not all the other days through which she is forced to struggle with life’s hardships, with life itself, with all its demands and unfairness. And if your beloved says she can’t do it any longer, that all she wants is peace and quiet and tranquility, you have to respect that. If you love me, you wrote, let me go. I could see the tears in your eyes through your written words. And that’s what I am doing, my love, I’m letting you go, if that is what you want. You know where to find me, and I have no idea how to get to you. I love you and I will wait. I love you and won’t be a burden to you.

  Yours,

  Igor

  26

  Ya’ara came across Igor Abramovich’s last letter to his lover in one of the boxes. Well, a copy of the last l
etter actually, as the original had been mailed to Katrina’s post-office box in Moscow. Attached to the letter was a photocopy of the stamped envelope in which the original had been sent, and Ya’ara came to the conclusion that Igor was either a very meticulous and organized man or simply couldn’t let go of anything connected to the woman he loved. Igor’s precise and embellished script appeared on the envelope; Katrina’s name and address had been written with a loving hand, using a fountain pen. Along the edge of the photocopy, in red ink, Igor had written: “Sent on 4/22/92. My final letter perhaps?”

  Ya’ara translated the letter as best she could, recording the text on a white sheet of paper, and wondering all the while if her Hebrew version was capturing Igor’s emotions and archaic style that so touched her heart.

  She found Katrina’s letters in the same box, inside a small cardboard container. The last letter she sent was the one Igor referred to in his. It truly was a heart-rending letter. She sounded tired and defeated. Let me go, she wrote. I won’t write to you again. I can’t.

  One of the other boxes contained a small sketch pad. Katrina’s face adorned its pages, in charcoal, in brown ink, skillfully sketched with love. There were also sketches of a tranquil seascape, a grove of trees, a shaded bench in a public park.

  A distinct memory flashed through Ya’ara’s mind for a moment. It was so real she felt as if she could bite into it. She and her mother were walking hand in hand through their old neighborhood, the wind was whipping up leaves and plastic bags, the smell of exhaust fumes was drifting in from the main road that leads to Haifa, with its incessant traffic, the low-rise and shabby tenement buildings so like the one in which Igor and Galina used to live, in Bat Yam. She had sat for almost an hour in front of that tenement building, trying to make contact with the ghosts of Igor and his adolescent daughter, preparing for her meeting with Gal, who herself was already the mother of teenage children.

  Ya’ara’s parents also immigrated to Israel from the Soviet Union, from the far reaches of the empire, from Vladivostok. They arrived in the country in the 1970s, after having had their requests to emigrate rejected by the authorities on three occasions. After the first request, her father was transferred from his position in the laboratories of the large oil refinery to the facility’s warehouse. He lost his job entirely after the second request. Their lives went from hard to unbearable, but her father, the stubborn man he was, went on to submit a third request nevertheless. He managed to make a living by working in a local market, at a fish stall. He sold fresh produce when available, but spent most of the time dealing in smoked and salted fish, whose smell permeated his clothes. Ya’ara had no real recollection of it, yet she seemed to be able to feel the slippery and scaly texture of the fish. Her father spent long hours on his feet behind the counter, in the freezing cold, in the filth. Her mother survived the first two requests, but she, too, lost her job at the municipal library after the third. The winter that year was a particularly harsh one: icy winds blew in from the ocean, the heating system went down after the water pipes froze and burst, the snowplows worked around the clock, spewing diesel fumes, the skin on people’s hands cracked and bled, the radio crackled and broadcast reports about large ships trapped in the frozen seas. The sun, even during the few hours of light, was gloomy and gray. A gray sun, her mother said, can you even imagine that? Ya’ara was just a little girl when she heard her mother speak of such things, and her mother’s stories came from a different world, a world that existed somewhere but certainly didn’t exist there, in Kiryat Haim, where the sun shone warm most days of the year, casting a bright glow, painful to the eyes, over the endless rows of tenement buildings and the sparse trees. She listened eagerly to her parents’ stories, which to her sounded like myths from a cruel and frozen land. And she, free spirit that she was, raced to follow the alluring voice of her heart, which pulled her to the sea and the sun and the greenish pool of water in the dark and fragrant orchard that still survived on the edges of their modest neighborhood, on the other side of the dirt road. There, in the shade of the orange trees, she would immerse herself for magical hours on end in books borrowed from the municipal library, thrilling and chilling books, tales of adventure and tales of love, books about unruly orphans (whose hair miraculously turned from red to auburn over the years), books about tough men and books about smart and courageous women. And to go with her perfect Hebrew, her mother taught her to read and write in Russian, too. “There’s no need to be ashamed of the language, maminka,” she said to her. “It’s not just a language. It’s an empire.” And that word, empire, echoed in her head. As a child she would imagine the immensity of the Russian language, the vast expanse it covered between the giant oceans, the millions of people who spoke it, dreamed their dreams in it, and she wandered back and forth between the ancient language that was hers and that other huge language, which was her mother’s, and she also read Russian books that her mother would present to her with a touch of celebration. Those books she’d read in bed, enveloped in her soft blanket, her heart filled with an inexplicable sense of longing.

  Her name as a young child wasn’t Ya’ara. That’s the name she chose shortly before enlisting in the army. She had walked out of the Interior Ministry shaking with pride, her new ID document clasped in her hand. Ya’ara Anna Stein. The name her parents gave her was still there, but from now on, she said to herself, she would be Ya’ara. A Hebrew name, literally meaning honeycomb. A symbol of her new autonomy. Her independence. She felt reborn. She was on her own. Ya’ara, Ya’ara, the name filled her with joy, intoxicated her, and she reveled in its fragrance and whispered to herself, so lovely, so lovely.

  27

  TEL AVIV, JANUARY 2013

  The team convened at two. Aharon joined them a few minutes late, concluding a call as he walked in, taking off his raincoat, sinking into the old leather armchair left vacant for him.

  “Okay,” Michael said, “let’s see what we have so far.” He looked at Adi and asked her to kick things off.

  Adi fidgeted with her gold necklace and blushed. “So here’s the story,” she began. “Shortly before her death, a retired Stasi archivist tells her priest in Dresden that the Stasi once had a high-ranking source in Israel. The source’s code name: Cobra. According to her, about two years prior to the collapse of East Germany, the KGB stepped in to take charge of the source, deeming the operation important enough to warrant its commandeering from the Stasi and also the assassination of the officer in charge on behalf of the East German intelligence service, probably to ensure the secret remained unexposed. The priest relayed this information to his contacts in the West German intelligence service, which by then had become the intelligence service of the united Germany. The information eventually reached the former German intelligence chief, the head of the BND, who then passed it on to the former Israeli Mossad chief, Aharon Levin, who sits here now with us dozing in an armchair.”

  Aharon, whose eyes were actually closed, muttered: “True, sleeping, but not missing a single word. Go on, Adi, go on.”

  “Hagar Beit-Hallahmi, the Shin Bet’s leading expert on Soviet intelligence matters in general and the KGB in particular, managed to dredge up from memory an unresolved affair, one that centers on the character of a woman, presumably a Soviet intelligence operative, who visited Israel several times under different names, and then disappeared. I need to stress that there’s no proof, no proof at all, that this affair is tied to the one we’re investigating.”

  Sunk in his armchair, Aharon interjected again. “That’s true,” he said, “we have no proven connection, or even a circumstantial one, between this woman and Cobra, but let me remind you that this matter in particular, out of all the numerous unresolved incidents related to KGB activity in Israel, was the one that popped into Hagar’s mind, and specifically in the context of our affair. Hagar Beit-Hallahmi is a very serious woman. Very experienced. Her intuition is beyond me, but as far as I’m concerned this is something we have to consider seriously and try to fi
gure out as best we can. Besides, we have no other leads. All we have is the hint of an old and faint scent that an aging bloodhound has got wind of and is now telling us to follow.”

  “No offense—as my kids would say,” Amir remarked, and then went silent again, his cheeks turning red.

  Adi continued: “Okay, so this woman, who appeared under several names and then disappeared, is our lead. What do we know about her? Almost nothing. She had a relationship with an Israeli man, an immigrant from the Soviet Union by the name of Igor Abramovich, who’s no longer alive. And the nature of the relationship? Hagar Beit-Hallahmi says the Shin Bet was sure that Igor wasn’t a spy. Ya’ara will elaborate shortly on what she came up with and her thoughts on him. He, Igor, knew the woman as Katrina Geifman. Her real name? Who knows? In any event, she entered Israel in 1992 using a passport with a different name. On her previous visits to Israel—Igor mentioned three others during his questioning—she came into the country under a different name or different names. We’re assuming they were different names because the Shin Bet at the time wasn’t able to find the ones they knew of in the border control records.”

  “Katrina Geifman, Katrina Geifman,” Aharon said. “What do we know about her? Ya’ara?”

  Ya’ara told them about making contact with the Association of Russian Artists in Bat Yam and her meeting with Galina, Gal Ya’ari today, Igor’s daughter. She had gone through, in a cursory manner at least, the boxes from Galina’s home that contained papers and sketches and small items belonging to her father, who died in 1998, almost fifteen years ago. And she had read the letters sent by Katrina to Igor and the last letter Igor sent to her, a letter he took the trouble to copy and save, several times.

  “I think Katrina Geifman is her real name. It may have been a little reckless on her part to write as she did, but her letters rang true to me. They come from the heart. They’re touching. Yes, letters like that can also be fabricated. They can be prepared as part of an overall operation. But I don’t see any operation here, any reason for the KGB to want something from Igor Abramovich, and even if they were interested in him for whatever reason, why did they invest so much effort in him? I therefore think, like Hagar Beit-Hallahmi said, that Igor wasn’t a KGB spy. So what do we have here then? I think we’ve stumbled upon a love story. Real, intense, naïve, like in the movies. Katrina probably did work for the KGB. We have no knowledge of what she did for them, what her assignments were, but we know she came to Israel quite regularly over a period of several years, using different passports. As I see it, the fact that she managed to give the Shin Bet surveillance team the slip means she was a highly skilled field operative. Don’t forget, she was probably on a mission the first time they followed her. The following day, when they came across her again by chance, she may no longer have been doing something she needed to hide. She was busy instead with the private part of her life, her affair with Igor, and not a KGB operation. And that’s why she didn’t look for a surveillance team and didn’t find one either, and as far as she was concerned the Israeli Shin Bet could keep watch on whatever she was doing. If she was hiding her relationship with Igor, she was hiding it from the KGB. And that’s the reason—and this is total guesswork on my part—her relationship with Igor ended so abruptly. Igor was her secret. We don’t know if Katrina Geifman was married to someone or not, but she was certainly hitched to the KGB. If she was involved in a love affair with Igor, if she did indeed make the mistake that we sometimes make, too”—she paused for a moment and smiled—“and against all the rules she fell in love, it was clearly in violation of KGB regulations. And when they found out, one way or another, she was ordered to put an end to it. Immediately. If not something worse. And that’s why she wrote her final letter.”