Traitor

by Jonathan de Shalit

  “So you don’t know Cobra’s name then?”

  “I don’t know anything about him. I saw him, of course, but never from up close. Slim, average height, smooth, dark hair. He may have been thirty or perhaps even forty. Brian once pointed him out from afar. ‘There, you see, that’s him, that’s him,’ he said. That was enough for me. And I also know he has a birthday in late January or early February.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “On one of the occasions when we met with him in Israel, Brian said something about it being his, Cobra’s, birthday. He made a point of celebrating it with him. He brought him a gift, a token of his love and attention, pulled it out of his pocket like a magician, and the next thing I saw was an ivory statuette from the Middle Ages balancing in the palm of his hand. It was winter. Cold even in your part of the world. I’m almost certain it was in late January. And I remember Brian telling me they hadn’t had such a snowy and cold Christmas in ages. It didn’t really mean much to me, we didn’t celebrate Christmas, as you know. He was talking about the United States, of course.

  “And then, my lovely girl, during one of my visits to Israel with Brian, who was there to meet with Cobra, I met your father. He was so different from all the people I used to work with, so different from any man I had ever known. His entire world was different. Clean and bright. And our eyes met. And I knew, I knew, of course, that developing close ties with strangers was strictly forbidden. A violation of all our rules and regulations. But I said to myself: I deserve something, too. I deserve something unsoiled, something that is mine alone. I hadn’t loved anyone in years. Constant vigilance and a sense of self-preservation always overpowered any desire for romance or even a flirtation. I was a mother, I couldn’t run around like a fool, and when I had free time, I devoted myself to Natalya. I didn’t want her to be only her grandmother’s child. And all of a sudden I was forty, and my beauty was starting to fade, and I had no one other than Natalya in my life, and all the rules and regulations and procedures were so hard to live with sometimes. So didn’t I deserve a chance at love? How often in life do you run into someone you’ve been searching and searching for without even knowing, and suddenly your eyes meet?”

  “I think I know what you mean,” Ya’ara said. “Even though I don’t work in an organization with so many regulations and restrictions. In high-tech anything goes, but there’s so little time for anything . . . Yet I still managed to meet Eran, my husband.” She smiled warmly, and their eyes met. “But what you said about the rarity of love, about everyone deserving true love, about the right to act on an opportunity if one happens to come your way . . . that, I think I get.”

  “In any event,” Katrina continued, “that marked the beginning of those sweet and wonderful years during which your father and I were in contact. And although we saw each other only once a year, for just a few days, we exchanged letters in the interim, and the bond we formed, through the written word, was magical. We sustained and nurtured our love affair at the pace of the eighteenth century. And then we’d meet again. I always told myself that things would work out well in the end. That the impossible situation in which we found ourselves would resolve itself somehow. That one day we’d be able to be a real couple, that we’d be able to live a real life, together.”

  “Did you meet only in Israel, you and my father?”

  “Almost every time. Except for once. Brian had arranged to meet with Cobra in Geneva. I traveled to Switzerland via Germany, and I was due to return to Moscow via Germany, too. I wrote to Igor to tell him we could meet in Germany, if it suited him. And he came, of course. After the meetings with Cobra, my task was to further establish my cover as a simultaneous translator, and to do so I attended a conference at the University of Heidelberg. Brian went on his way, and I returned to Frankfurt and took a train from there to Heidelberg, where Igor was waiting for me in the small lobby of the hotel by the time I arrived. My heart melted when I saw him there.”

  “Did someone find out about you in the end?” Ya’ara asked. “Is that why you ended the relationship with my father? I mean, did the KGB learn somehow that you were involved romantically contrary to regulations?”

  “They’re very strict when it comes to such things, relationships like that. It’s not viewed merely as a bureaucratic transgression. I can even understand it from their perspective. But I didn’t want to see the world only through the eyes of the organization. I had eyes of my own, and I wanted my view to prevail just once.”

  “What happened? How did it happen?”

  “I went ahead and opened a private post-office box in Moscow, so I could receive letters from your father without having him send them directly to my residential address. I told Igor it was because of my husband. So that a letter from him, from Igor, didn’t mistakenly end up in his hands.

  “The thing I forgot, even though I shouldn’t have as a KGB operative myself, was that they carried out random checks on the post-office boxes. The KGB, not my directorate, but the one that dealt with internal security, systematically checked the post-office boxes throughout the empire. Checked who opened a post-office box, how frequently letters arrived to the box, whether they came from inside Russia or from abroad, and so on. The post-office branch managers were working in the service of the KGB, of course, and it was routine work, in fact. Systematic, gray, and carried out by all security services, I’m sure. And they stumbled upon my post-office box one day. I don’t know if they simply ran my name through the computer and revealed that Katrina Geifman was one of their own, a member of the KGB, or if the branch manager told them that the box served only mail from abroad. And I don’t know if they opened Igor’s letters, or if they contacted me immediately on learning I had a private post-office box at the branch. I was told, of course, after being summoned to the Internal Affairs Division, that they were approaching me as colleagues, and that they wanted to hear the explanation from me directly. But I believe they waited things out for a while for operational purposes, and read several of my letters from Igor before they called me in for questioning. Why wouldn’t they have? Why forgo such obvious leverage over a subject under investigation? I would have done the same. But that invasion of my privacy still causes me to blush with shame. Can you imagine it? Foreign hands opened the letters that were meant only for me, foreign eyes read the private words written on the pages. And I can just imagine the comments they must have made to one another, their coarse remarks. Getting hard simply from reading other people’s letters. Miserable bastards.”

  Katrina paused for a moment. The light in the small kitchen suddenly faded. The two women sat there facing each other, in silence.

  “And how did it all end?” Ya’ara asked.

  “When they asked me about the post-office box, I told them everything right away. There wasn’t much to hide, and there was certainly no point in trying. Either they knew already, or they’d get it out of me without much effort. I told them I had met a man and had fallen in love. I swore to them that I hadn’t told him anything, nothing about the organization and nothing about the real reason I was in Israel. I told them everything I knew, yet they continued to badger me for days on end. I wasn’t arrested, however, and I was released to spend the night at home every evening, but I underwent questioning all day long for days. Initially by one pair of interrogators, and then by others. They brought a woman in, too, at some stage of the questioning, someone of my age, more or less. They must have thought I’d tell her things I wasn’t willing to tell the others. She certainly did take a different approach with me, one woman conversing with another. The sessions with her didn’t even take place at the offices of the Internal Affairs Division. I could breathe with her. We walked through parks, sat at cafés, strolled along the riverbank. And we chatted. Some girls’ talk, some moaning about life, a lot about men, all men, their nonsense, their childishness. I was questioned later by a more senior officer. We went through the same things all over again. They didn’t have much to question me about, so the
y went through the same things time and again. Primarily to verify that my and Igor’s story was the entire story, and that Igor wasn’t a Shin Bet agent who was on to me, and that I hadn’t revealed KGB secrets and definitely hadn’t breathed a word about Cobra to him or anyone else. I was summoned a few weeks later to a disciplinary hearing. To this very day I can still close my eyes and feel myself standing there, in that large and magnificent room in the old section of the Lubyanka, which served as a palace in the days of the czar. I walked in and was told to sit down. I sat on the lone chair that had been placed in the very center of the room. Sitting some five or six meters from me were the three members of the disciplinary committee. And hanging on the wall behind them was a large Soviet Union flag alongside the insignia of the KGB. The shield and the sword. The chairman of the committee, a senior officer from the Manpower and Resources Administration, addressed me and said: First of all, Katrina Geifman, you have to promise to sever all ties with Igor Abramovich immediately. And what if I decide—I asked on the verge of breaking down emotionally—what if I decide to leave the organization and continue my relationship with him, with the man I love? Look, said the committee chairman, the heart does what the heart wants to do. But if that’s the case, we will throw the book at you, Katrina Geifman. As you know, you’ve not only violated the regulations of the organization, but you’ve also broken the laws of the state. Moreover, you’ve committed a series of explicit criminal offenses, namely maintaining unlawful contact with a foreign national, conspiring to undermine state security, breach of trust, and the illegal use of state property. We won’t be the ones to try you for your offenses, the courts will do that. But we, Katrina, we want to make it easier on you, we want to avoid handing your case over for criminal prosecution. You never know how that could turn out for you. And there’s another thing.” He paused for a moment and cleared his throat. “The matter of Natalya, your daughter. If you are convicted and sent to prison, a very real possibility, who will take care of her? My mother’s already looking after her today, I argued. Come now, your mother isn’t a young woman anymore, and if you’re convicted, the blemish on your record will undermine Natalya’s chances of graduating from school honorably and going on to academic studies that suit her talents. Guardianship of Natalya will have to be passed on to the state. With you in prison and Natalya being raised by a foster family or in an institution for young girls, there’ll be no justification for leaving your mother in her apartment. Three rooms for a woman on her own? That doesn’t sit well with our concept of social justice. But all of that, dear comrade, will be out of our hands and in those of the other authorities, the criminal prosecution, the courts, the social services, and the municipal housing committee. You’ll be able, of course, to argue your case. Every citizen, even a criminal, even someone in breach of his duties, has the right to have his say and to be afforded a fair chance to argue the charges against him. You can always try your luck. But due to your long years of service, and because you are fundamentally patriotic and loyal, and because we, the members of the disciplinary committee, are also people, after all, with hearts and feelings, who understand the loneliness you’ve been forced to live with due to your fieldwork, due to all of that, we want to offer you the easy and considerate way out. Without prison, and without having your daughter, Natalya, taken from you. So what we’re expecting is for you to sit down now, under our supervision, and write your farewell letter to Igor Abramovich. Tell him that you will never be in touch again. Of course, you won’t be able to remain in your post at the First Directorate. We believe you’ve gone beyond the point of no return and have nothing more to offer there. You’ll be assigned to Border Police Headquarters, here in Moscow. Naturally you can forget about any promotions, and you’ll be stripped of your operational bonuses, but you’ll have a job, and you’ll keep Natalya, and you won’t be evicted from the apartment, and you can go on. And perhaps, when the dust settles, you’ll find yourself a life partner.

  “Give me a pen and paper, please,” I said.

  “Yes, Galinka, what choice did I have? How could I risk blackening Natalya’s name forever? How could I risk losing her?

  “They didn’t make me the offer out of kindness. They wanted me to remain under their watchful eyes. That’s why I wasn’t expelled immediately from the organization. They wanted me to remain completely under their control. Oh, my, what a boring job they gave me! The days dragged on endlessly. Day after day after day. Such tedious work. And my longing for Igor. So heart-wrenching to begin with. But the feeling slowly dulled. My emotions became buried under the mountains of paperwork I handled every day and my feelings of guilt. I said to myself: That’s it, Katrina, keep your head down, shut off your heart, and take care of what you have, your daughter, your mother, your small apartment—it’s more than enough.

  “My mother died a few years later, and Natalya left home to go study at the Academy of Sciences. I was then informed by the manpower department that I was being transferred to district headquarters in Dimitrovgrad. I went. What else could I have done? And two years ago, I took early retirement. I decided to remain here. Perhaps out of habit. Natalya had started a family and had built a life for herself far from here. I didn’t want my bitterness to have any influence on her and her sweet daughters, my granddaughters. I see them once a year, I spent some time with them just a few weeks ago, over New Year’s and Novy God, our festive season. And I live my life here, peacefully, without bothering anyone.”

  “You said earlier that Cobra’s handler looked and sounded like an American in every way—except for once. What did you mean by that?” Ya’ara asked.

  “Well, okay. I told you already that I have a talent for languages. And I have a particularly sensitive ear when it comes to accents. On one of the occasions when I met up with Brian, ahead of a series of meetings with Cobra, we were held up for a while. Cobra failed to arrive on the scheduled day, and in keeping with procedures we were supposed to wait twenty-four hours to give him a chance to show up. Agents aren’t always able to report in on the precise date scheduled for them in advance. Last-minute disruptions can always come into play. In any event, we had to wait. We were in Munich, I think. Yes, without a doubt. I remember the spectacular stained-glass ceiling of the Vier Jahreszeiten, the Four Seasons Hotel. We had to pass the time. It was wintry and horrible outside, so we drank at the bar. Quite a lot. Brian and I always spoke English in public. We lived our covers. We only spoke Russian behind closed doors. And even then, never anywhere where someone might be listening in. Anyway, we drank quite a lot and chatted. We spoke English to the barman, too. And suddenly my ear caught the sound of another accent under Brian’s perfect American one. A hint of another accent. I told you I’m sensitive to such things.”

  “What accent?”

  “It was just a hint, like a current of warm water that flows through a cold river all of sudden. It sounded like an Australian accent, possibly South African. I didn’t catch it again, and didn’t give much thought to it anyway. But it was there. I’m sure of it.”

  Ya’ara remained silent for a short while. And then, with a warm look squarely in Katrina’s eyes, she quietly asked, “If you ran away from it all, if you remained silent for all these years, how come you were willing to meet with me? What made you tell me all that you have?”

  “I can’t really say, Galinka. Maybe to prove to myself that there’s still a little life left in me. That I’m not completely dried out just yet. Perhaps to rebel, maybe for the last time. To tell someone finally about those awful officials. Thank you for Igor’s letter, and for the sketch. And his tie pin. It was nice of you all to think of me. And anyone who is wise enough to select a woman as attentive and pleasant and lovely as you deserves to be told the things he wanted to know.”

  Both women went silent and Ya’ara waited, because Katrina appeared to have something more to say.

  “Nevertheless, perhaps you shouldn’t have underestimated the strength of an old woman’s memory. After all, Gali
na’s eyes were green and yours are blue, almost gray. Rarely seen eyes. You probably assumed I’d simply think I was mistaken. That I’d blame myself for not remembering very well. But as you’ve seen, my memory hasn’t faded over the years, certainly not when it comes to matters of significance. Galina had the exact same eyes as Igor. What can I say? You really are very sweet and attentive. And what do I know? Maybe your name really is Galina. Or Natasha perhaps, or Anna? And now, I need to rest a little and you need to leave.”

  Ya’ara rose from her chair, a sudden dull pain in her stomach. She walked into the adjacent room, and Katrina made her way toward the front door, looking at her in silence. Ya’ara put on her fur coat and tightened the scarf around her neck. Laying her bag on the floor, she walked over to Katrina and embraced her, holding her close for quite some time. Katrina kissed her cheeks, and Ya’ara could feel the moistness of her tears. Their saltiness. Ya’ara then opened her bag, rummaged through it, and retrieved a bottle of her perfume. “It’s almost full,” she said. “Take it. Something for you to remember me by,” and she closed Katrina’s hand around the bottle. She stepped out into the icy darkness, and Katrina gently closed the door behind her. The headlights of the taxi Katrina had ordered for her glimmered in the blackness and it chugged toward her. Aslan, still in hiding on the other side of the street, watched Ya’ara get into the taxi and head off toward the city. Minutes later, he saw a large black car approaching, its headlights going black as it drove on in total darkness for a few dozen meters more, before taking up a lookout position nearby the house. Two large and cumbersome figures remained seated in the front of the car, their eyes on Katrina’s residence. Aslan watched them for a full hour. When the lights in Katrina’s house went out, he began making his way through the thick vegetation and away from the road, reaching the bank of the river a few minutes later. An icy mist hovered over the water, and the current hissed like a giant snake. Aslan picked up his pace and began making his own way toward the city.