The English Teacher

by Yiftach Reicher Atir

  He opened one of the files and riffled through it, and a picture fell from an open envelope. Rachel bent over and stroking the back of a pigeon in St. Mark’s Square. He remembered that trip to Venice. He remembered other trips too. It seemed he remembered everything. Meetings, journeys, hired cars, wayside cafés, shops, briefings, and above all the partings, the “good night” before turning to their separate rooms, the lingering look following her tall figure as she disappeared behind her door.

  “WHAT DO YOU THINK HAPPENED TO her?” he asked Yaniv as they entered the modern war room and sat on the chairs marked with their names. A young clerk offered them coffee, and a technician leaned toward Ehud and offered to help him work the computer. “Don’t be afraid to ask,” Yaniv said when Ehud looked nervously at all the new technology and then back at the clerk, who smiled at him. “I’ve heard a lot about you,” she said, and went on to explain that her mother used to work in the Unit. She mentioned the name, which Ehud didn’t remember, but this didn’t mean anything. His memory these days was letting him down often, too often.

  “And what do you think happened to her?” he repeated, and let Yaniv talk about Rachel, about meetings with her, about her little apartment in Rehovot, the school, and about the private lessons she used to give here and there. “Do you think it’s possible that after the funeral she went off with one of the students? A fling with someone?” Ehud asked.

  “I don’t think so,” said Yaniv, a serious expression on his young face. “I’ve been monitoring her for the past five years. She’s okayed every trip with us. This is something else.”

  “I also think there’s something more dangerous here,” said someone who had entered the war room by a side door, and Ehud wondered how long he had been standing behind them. Yaniv introduced Ehud to the chief security officer, and the two of them disliked each other at first sight. He was short, years younger than Ehud, but also the veteran head of a department who didn’t like being contradicted. “Security trumps everything,” he tended to say, and he didn’t want to hear any other opinion. They all knew he did his job conscientiously, and when the day came and promotion was discussed, he would be promoted ahead of the others, ahead of those who think that a coin has two sides.

  “Have you been to her flat?” Ehud asked.

  The chief security officer smiled scornfully and surveyed with pleasure the group of people sitting there in the room, engrossed in the assignment they had been given only this morning. What does he know, this old man? thought the chief to himself. He had a search warrant an hour after Ehud called in. “We didn’t find anything. A simple apartment, a little too orderly. One toothbrush. The place of a person who lives alone. We didn’t find a safe, apparently there wasn’t one. We didn’t find drugs, apparently there weren’t any. We found the life-signs of a normal woman who needs to work on her standards of cleanliness.” He leaned back in the chair in which he sat like the lord of the manor and patted his paunch with a self-satisfied air. He didn’t like outside teams being brought in, didn’t like being bypassed or forced to work with people he didn’t know, people who questioned his authority, who didn’t rely on him and defer to him. But he had no choice. He had never met Rachel and didn’t know her file, although his job description required that he meet all operatives who had spent long periods of time in Arab countries, even those who had retired. “It’s essential to know the operatives of the past,” was the emphatic statement. “There aren’t so many of them.” He himself used to say there is no substitute for personal acquaintance, but he had no time. Meetings gobbled up his time. Excursions abroad kept him busy, and his second wife was demanding her rights as well.

  Ehud had no intention of trying to convince the chief security officer that there was some point in an additional visit to the apartment. He didn’t want to use the authority he had been granted and the black plastic card that Yaniv gave him when they left the commander’s office, but now he enjoyed pulling the card from his wallet and flaunting it before the staring eyes of the security officer. “I’m licensed for everything except killing.”

  “You know,” said the chief security officer before they went their separate ways, “maybe her move to Rehovot is somehow connected with the Weizmann Institute. Don’t forget that after she returned Rachel was assigned to the biological weapons department, and she sometimes visited the laboratories at Weizmann. Don’t forget everything she learned from us, what a talented operative can get from the observation of routine actions. Who knows what she’s still capable of doing?”

  EHUD CLIMBED INTO JOE’S NEW MERCEDES. The soft leather seats invited him to relax, but he was too tense to give in to the small fripperies that Joe’s wealth enabled him to offer. He waited patiently while his friend slowly set the car in motion and said, as if continuing a conversation that began many years before: “And perhaps she’s just gone out of her mind. Perhaps everything was too much for her. The years that go by, the mirror that doesn’t lie, and the glory left behind. I met her after she left and she told me she didn’t want any more contact with the Unit. We sat in a café and I told her about my children and she didn’t have anything to say. ‘Work, work, work,’ was her answer when I asked her about her life, and I saw she already wanted to go. We had nothing to talk about, because our friendship and whatever else was between us was only about her operations. Sometimes I think that’s the way it should be, maybe it’s wrong to develop any other kinds of relationships and there’s no point taking an interest in what your operative is doing after you part company. I think of the years we were together and search my memory and I can’t remember what we talked about. Maybe I don’t want to remember. Memory is so selective. It chooses on its own what to ignore and what to retain.”

  Ehud took from his briefcase the two photographs that Yaniv supplied and studied them with Joe, who pulled up at the roadside. The Shabak, the Israeli Security Agency, required a photograph of Rachel before her visit to the Prime Minister’s house sixteen years ago.

  “There’s no choice,” the man on the phone had told him, “we need an up-to-date photograph for identification and confirmation. We too have rules that we need to comply with.”

  Ehud was adamant that he didn’t want a photograph of his operative going to another organization. Even the Shabak could make mistakes. “I trust you,” he said in a final attempt at persuasion, “and I know you’re incomparable when it comes to keeping your secrets.” He stressed the word your. “But even you don’t know where this picture might end up.” Ehud went on without waiting for the expected promise that everything would be kept in a secure file: “Think of the people in the archive. They travel abroad too sometimes, don’t they? Imagine that one of them sees her somewhere; who can promise me that he won’t point her out or approach her just for a moment, to say job well done?”

  “You don’t trust us?” He heard the rising resentment. But she was his responsibility and he had no intention of backing down, and the secure line enabled him to say what he wanted: “She’s working undercover. She has a foreign passport.”

  “Without a picture there’s no entry,” said the voice, and the line went dead. Ehud knew he was being overprotective. The Shabak had rules of its own, and the head of the Mossad wouldn’t want to become embroiled in another petty dispute with his colleague.

  Rachel, sixteen years younger, looks at the camera. Her eyes were brown from the contact lenses she wears when she has to get her picture taken, and the wig flatters her face, lending it an enigmatic beauty.

  Ehud started to tell Joe about her meeting with the Prime Minister, but Joe cut him off, said there would be time for that, and asked to see the other picture. The chief security officer brought it from her apartment, and Ehud wondered why she had kept it, and whether her operational skills were forgotten. Rachel stares with narrowed eyes in a mug shot inserted into a ski pass. A tag attached to the plastic card gave the name of the resort, and Ehud realized that he didn’t know
she had learned to ski. In training they taught her how to avoid the camera and how to leave behind her as few pictures as possible, and yet here, many years later, apparently this no longer mattered to her. Or apparently so she thought, and she was wrong. This picture would help them to track her down, would be useful to the search and surveillance teams in the field.

  And there were also other pictures that had been filed in the department. There were only a few, since Rachel knew how not to appear in the center of the picture. And when photographs arrived showing her on tourist beaches or against the background of some ancient site, with a clear view of the military installation behind her, the security officer blotted out her figure with black ink. Only a very few are allowed to know the identity of the one gathering the information that will give renown to others while she remains in obscurity, in the shadows.

  “We all change,” said Joe, and he pointed to the differences between the pictures. Ehud nodded. He had never thought he was handsome, he battled weight gain with both determination and frequent frustration. But he too was young once. His hair, already thinning, was combed back in those days, and Rina told him that his face reflected an intriguing inner strength. And now? Now he’s sixty-five, with little hair remaining on his head. He peered at Joe, who was back on the road and driving slowly and cautiously. Ehud had heard about the onset of Parkinson’s, but he didn’t offer to take over the driving. They had been together on more dangerous assignments than this one, and he was not about to insult the man who recruited him into the Unit.

  “Give me the basic details again,” Joe requested, and Ehud, who knew the importance of setting out every problem simply, explained that Rachel didn’t inform the Unit she was going to her father’s funeral. This was contrary to protocol and contrary to the document she had signed the day she left, normal procedure incumbent on anyone who had been party to secret information while on the staff. The chief security officer showed him the paper and said that just because of this she could cause punitive losses to her retirement pension. The phone conversation was the first and only contact with her, and it was only because he called the Office that the alarm was raised and the war room became operational. Joe asked about money and Ehud apologized for forgetting and told him about the withdrawal she had made in London. “What passport is she using?” Joe asked. “All by the book,” said Ehud. “She left using her Israeli passport, entered and left England with her British passport. More than this, we don’t know.” He wanted to tell him that the Unit commander had already sent a team to look for her in India, but Joe was busy parking the car behind a commercial van at the end of the street, and Ehud wasn’t sure that at seventy-five Joe could handle two things at once.

  THE TEAM COMMANDER, BRIEFED ABOUT THEIR arrival, approached them when they finally got out of the car. He pointed out for them the white van of the cleaning company and the young men in blue overalls. They were trained, orderly, and didn’t skip any detail, not even the apparently careless driver and the two middle-aged women, ideal camouflage for the job they needed to do. The team commander signaled to his men and they unpacked their cleaning equipment and prepared to set to work. Ehud watched them. They were professionals. You could sense this, but he wondered what else they were capable of beyond breaking into any place quietly and doing the job and leaving without a trace. They know how to search too, no doubt about that. They could find the needle in a haystack. You just need to tell them what to look for. He saw the commander checking his watch as he gave final instructions to the security team. “There’s no need for all this,” he said to the commander. “The probability that Rachel will suddenly return from a shopping trip or from a morning run is so remote, you can tell the couple sitting on the bench to go, and the moving van at the corner might as well leave too. Think of the budget.”

  “No one will suspect people your age,” said the team commander snidely, signaling Ehud not to interfere. He gave them the number of the apartment, and one of the young men opened the door of the building. As they walked slowly up the stairs Ehud imagined the moment that Rachel answered the phone and wondered what she did afterward. What does a woman feel, hearing the ring of the phone and answering politely in English, without any trace of an accent, confirming that she is Rachel, and being told that her father is dead? We all know, he thought as he panted from climbing the steps, that at any moment someone is liable to knock on the door of our house and turn our world inside out. Few people live in constant readiness. And Rachel? She lived in the very heart of the enemy, she knew that the life she was constructing there and the links she was forging with her surroundings were for a limited time only, but you still have to live that life as if it’s going to last forever. That’s the secret of perfect cover, you can’t overlook any detail. But this time something else has happened to her. Something that touched her deep down inside, that penetrated the shell that she created around herself.

  He stood at the door and waited for Joe to join him. There are two things I need to find in the apartment, he told himself. The first relates to her life before the announcement, what she was doing and what she was hiding. The second needs to be some indication of her intentions. What she left and what she took with her once it was clear to her he wasn’t around, and never would be again.

  Ehud sat down at the desk, glanced at the landline phone, which already had a thin coating of dust, and tried to imagine Rachel sitting like him on a small chair or at the edge of the bed, staring at the phone before dialing his number. He didn’t know why she decided to call him, and reckoned she would have no answer either. He remembered what she said to him and thought she had delayed the conversation until the shivah was behind her. Ehud counted the days on his fingers and made a note on the small pad that he kept in his pocket, a reminder to discuss with Joe the gap of two days.

  And there was something else. She spoke to him in English. She, who loved to revert to Hebrew whenever possible. “That way I feel like an Israeli,” she used to explain, and she wasn’t ashamed of her accent, which she was unable to shake off.

  He raised the receiver, listened for the dial tone, and wondered what she meant to say when she fell silent. He wanted to ask her why her last sentence sounded decisive and determined, a metallic tone with the seal of finality, what compelled her to announce that her father was dead for the second time and what accounted for the defiance in her voice, the thin shading that said to him: You’re to blame.

  He knew he needed to link this conversation with that time when he phoned her with the news that her father was on his deathbed and she should return at once. That was only a code phrase, Rachel, he wanted to say to her now. Your father was waiting for you. You could go to him, be with him, tell him as much as you were allowed to tell, and rebuild the connection.

  Suddenly he remembered their conversation. “I’m not telling him anything,” she said, and tried to convince him it was better that way. “He’ll understand,” he said to her in a final attempt to persuade her that every father loves his daughter, but she was silent, and it was obvious she had nothing to add.

  “WHEN I DON’T KNOW WHAT TO look for I just wait,” he said to the team commander, who stood by the door, arms folded, and looked at him with a question mark. “Okay,” the commander confirmed, “you have all the time in the world. Our instructions are clear; we’re here to help and not to hinder. If you need anything, just ask. We can also find documents, even drugs, if you want to incriminate her. Everything is possible, and the photo lab will process the proofs. That’s the way it is in the twenty-first century. There is no longer any meaning to the past or the future. Reality is imaginary. But why am I talking so much instead of letting you think in peace?” He told Ehud to let him know if he needed anything, and left the bedroom.

  Ehud opened one of the drawers, looked at the folded bras and underwear, and remembered the first time he was confronted with Rachel’s clothing, touching one item after another. He slid his hand under the pil
e and felt the delicacy of silk. There were no letters at the bottom of the drawer, just the soft underwear, smaller than Rina’s, which he had packed up with all his wife’s clothes once it was clear to him she wasn’t coming back. Many months passed before he dared to stand and face her closets and her drawers and take her belongings out. It was like killing her memory, taking her out of his world and making space for someone else. He tried to rid himself of the feeling that this was what he wanted now, that the underwear and the other clothes and personal items laid out before him in a kind of order that was hard to fathom would move over to his house and fill the empty spaces left behind. And suddenly he had an intuition that this place was waiting for someone to gather up the objects, sort them, pack them in cardboard cartons, and take them somewhere else. That although this apartment belonged to Rachel, it would now be the property of the chief security officer, at the disposal of those who had the power to break into it, handle her personal possessions, and do with them as they pleased. That Rachel had no further interest in what was left here, in fact she never had. That like the apartment in the Arab country, this apartment was always just a place to lay one’s head. That Rachel Ravid lived here on borrowed time, knowing that one day she would suddenly leave, and so she imprinted no personal stamp on the place.