The English Teacher

by Yiftach Reicher Atir

  Rachel returned to the small hotel; from its window the port was visible. She took a few pictures and made a point of including the Bahai Temple in the frame. From this room a lookout could make contact with an assault team out at sea, she thought, and wondered why this hadn’t been included in the critical information she was meant to bring from this exercise. Then she checked again that the door was locked and the chain in place and sat down to write the coded telegram summarizing the fifth day of the operation. And then there was a knock at the door. Through the peephole she saw a workman in hotel uniform, and it was only when she opened the door that she noticed two men standing in the corridor, a policeman in uniform and beside him a muscular young man who showed her a document and asked in Hebrew if he could come in. Rachel put a hand to the collar of her blouse with an instinctive movement and asked in English what they wanted. In halting English the policeman asked her name. For a moment a list of names flashed through her head, the names she had used in various exercises and also her real name, but she gave the name on her passport. Again, the young man asked politely, in English this time, if they could come in. She made space for them and saw they were looking at the table, which was laden with the tourist brochures and publicity she had gathered in the course of the days spent in Haifa. There was nothing about the exercise that could incriminate her, no hidden gun or secret cache of explosives. Her papers were perfectly in order, and she was prepared to explain to anyone who asked what flight she had arrived on and how she had been careless and lost her ticket. “We want you to come with us to the police station. We have some questions to ask you,” said the young man, who was obviously the one running the show. “Ask your questions here,” she said to them, and wondered if the women in the Port Authority had suspected her. The crumpled bed and scattered clothes testified to what she was, a young student staying in a two-star hotel on the Carmel. “It’s for your own good,” he insisted, and at her request he took from his pocket a short document written in English. She read slowly, recognized the stamps of the police department and the high court, and knew she had no choice. “Bring your things with you,” he told her. “If we let you go, we’ll send you to a better hotel.” They stood beside her, and while she packed her things they checked every item. They seemed to be looking for something in particular. When she said she needed to go to the bathroom, they told her to leave the door open and promised not to peek. As far as she remembers, she wasn’t afraid. She had a number abroad she could contact and leave a message, and also a local one, which was ostensibly of a friend who lived in Israel. They didn’t suggest she call someone and she didn’t ask. As they were about to leave, the police officer surprised her—he took handcuffs from his belt and signaled to her to hold out her hands. She refused and said she had rights, but the young man told her not to cause problems and not to make them use force. When they got into the vehicle they sat her between them, and their thighs pressed against hers. The long minutes of the car ride she spent reviewing her actions since she allegedly arrived in the country, and preparing for the questions she’d be asked. The car stopped outside a dark and menacing gate, and when it opened with a loud creak, the taciturn driver drove on and stopped by another door. Pale floodlights illuminated the police station, adjacent to an old British building, and Rachel couldn’t rid herself of the feeling that this was a genuine arrest, although at any moment she could tell her jailers to phone her course instructor. The two of them helped her out of the car and walked beside her along a dark and desolate corridor. Only the sounds of their footsteps and the wheels of her suitcase, which the policeman was dragging, broke the hostile silence that pervaded the building.

  A fat policewoman handed her a gray blouse and trousers and a pair of shabby plastic flip-flops and told her to change her clothes. Rachel thought perhaps it was worth arguing, and telling the female cop that detainees don’t wear prison clothing, but at once she realized there was no way a Canadian tourist would know what was and what wasn’t correct procedure in Israel. She held the clothes in her fingers as if they were unclean and it seemed her face expressed the outrage that the policewoman expected to see. The woman pointed silently to a dirty curtain. She went with Rachel to the other side of the curtain and turned away while Rachel quickly undressed and put on the clothes she’d been given. The clothes were too big for her and were smelly, and she tried to fight against the feeling of powerlessness that the tattered jail uniform was imposing on her. “How long will I be here?” she asked in a high and indignant voice, and tried to express all the anger of someone sure she is in the right. The policewoman held her silence and the young man who arrested her said it all depended on her. “You know I have a flight tomorrow?” Rachel said to him, and tried to look angry. He shrugged his shoulders and said this wasn’t his concern.

  When she was put into the cell and the heavy door closed behind her, her stress level rose. The bare walls, the hole in the floor that was the toilet, and the stained tap and basin above the concrete slab with a thin mattress on it all induced the dejection they were designed to create. The thought of having to spend the night in this cell, more than one day, perhaps, was extremely unappealing, and the idea of hammering on the door and speaking Hebrew and explaining to the astounded cops that she was just a Mossad trainee suddenly seemed reasonable to her. All the same, she knew that if she broke and blew her cover, she could say goodbye to the career that awaited her.

  Rachel folded the blanket that was spread over the mattress, made it into a kind of pillow, lay on the bed, and linked her hands behind her head. Just wait it out and see what happens, she told herself, and tried to locate the camera watching her. There was no window in the cell and since her watch had been taken from her she could only guess how much time passed between her arrest and when she was taken to the interrogation room.

  The first slap took her by surprise and she cried out in anger more than in pain. “You can’t do that!” she barked at the interrogator, a woman, who looked at her with indifference and told her to tell the truth. “Why did you come here? And what were you looking for in the Port of Haifa?” she kept repeating, like a mantra. Rachel told the cover story she had prepared, but they didn’t believe her and threatened that she’d be left rotting in her cell. From an envelope on the table the interrogator took all the photographs that Rachel had taken and claimed that the picture of the radar installation on Stella Maris would be enough to keep her in jail. Rachel said she didn’t believe her, and Mount Carmel is famous throughout the Christian world and anyone can take a picture of it. The interrogator was unimpressed; she left the room and returned with another colleague. They spread out all the papers on the table and asked for the meaning of every scrap. She was afraid they might decide to contact one of the fictitious addresses in Canada. Then they focused on the passport. They asked about the stamps in it, and especially about her visit to Sudan the previous summer. Before setting out on the exercise, Rachel went through the passport with the instructor and told him she had never been to Sudan. “Neither have I,” the instructor said with a smile. “We don’t have the resources to adapt our training passports according to the requirements of every novice. Open an atlas, buy a tourist guide book to Khartoum, and hope they don’t ask you too many questions about it.”

  “Where were you in Sudan?” asked the interrogator, and whispered something in Hebrew to the young man sitting beside her. “In Khartoum,” said Rachel, and then she got the second slap. Her teeth clashed together and she felt blood in her mouth, and again she resisted the temptation to speak Hebrew and tell them this was all a mistake. The interrogator spread out a map of the city and asked her to show them where she went and where she walked, and Rachel began to cry and said she couldn’t remember. She was in Khartoum with a friend who knew the city well and she followed around after her. Most of the time they were working as volunteers in an orphanage on the outskirts of the city and they slept in the house of one of the staff members. “It isn’t my fault if sta
ff members have no phones,” she said when they wanted phone numbers and names, and she explained that it’s hard to remember Sudanese names. She cried more and tried to stanch the bleeding with a handkerchief, and demanded they release her. She knew she could ask for permission to call the Canadian consul, but of course if he came and looked at her passport, he could easily tell that it was bogus.

  Rachel realized that as long as she was sobbing and whimpering, they would leave her alone and wait for her to calm down. A new feeling was aroused in her, like the sensation she felt during the exams for entry to the course. She wanted to prove she was capable of withstanding pressure. That it was impossible to break her, not with tough questions, not with slaps. She licked at a tooth that had been loosened and no longer wiped away the tears and the blood. Playing the pitiful card might persuade them she’s on the level.

  “We have no choice,” the interrogator told her. “We’re sending you back to the cell. Tomorrow or the next day we’ll talk to you again, and in the meantime we suggest you think about it and get ready to tell us everything, not just the crap you’ve been feeding us so far.” Rachel started to object, mentioning the law of detention and the right of appeal to a judge, but she was silenced with a crude gesture and led away.

  The concrete floor of the cell was now covered in water, the mattress and the blanket had been taken away, the cell stank. Rachel tried to tell the guard that this was no way to treat a Canadian citizen, wait and see how the press will handle a story like this. But the jailer pushed her into the cell, closed the door, and locked it.

  Again she was alone. She tried to organize her thoughts. I should have been better prepared for this exercise, I shouldn’t have agreed to go out with a passport showing the stamps of places I’ve never been, she scolded herself.

  “Do you want to talk to me?” The pleasant-sounding voice emerged from a concealed speaker, and she retreated to a corner of the cell. She almost answered but held her tongue. He spoke Hebrew. She waited until the voice addressed her again, and when he asked in English if she wanted to talk, she said she had told them everything and she wanted to leave. “I’m giving you another chance,” said the voice. “The clerk at the Port Authority said you know nothing about zoology and she doesn’t believe you. Nor do I. Tell me why you came and I’ll get you out of here.” A stream of water gushed from a crack in the corner and flooded the floor again. She said nothing and was disappointed by her failure to hold back the tears. This was the time to show that she was hurt and angry, not to give them the idea she was liable to break anytime soon. The voice promised her a long stay in detention until she told the truth. Then there was silence.

  She dozed; suddenly she felt a gentle hand shaking her. The policewoman escorted her to a dry and warm room. She was given a towel, handed back her clothes, and asked to sign a document written in faulty English. Rachel signed, declaring everything had been done according to the rules and she was waiving any future claim. They left the police station and walked to a nearby building. The officer knocked on an unmarked door, and when someone said, “Come in,” she opened the door and almost pushed Rachel inside. Then Rachel heard the sound of applause.

  She tried to smile, focused her gaze on her instructor, and it took her a moment to recognize the young man who arrested her at the hotel and the woman who interrogated her. They were all there, happy and smiling and holding glasses of wine. The instructor approached her, apologized on behalf of the team for the injury to her lip, and put a glass in her hand. “Congratulations, Rachel, you passed the final test. From now on, you’re a fully fledged combatant.” “But . . .” she began, and felt the anger bubbling in her. She remembered the blows, the filthy, stinking cell, the threats, and wanted to ask him if all this was necessary. The smiling faces told her that the question would spoil the party, they all looked so overjoyed, so when they wanted to tell her how they felt watching her through the two-way mirror, she gave in.

  EHUD TOLD JOE WHAT HE KNEW about her entry into the enemy country and about the exercise. The things that Rachel told him mingled in his mind with other memories. Again he wasn’t sure he was giving Joe an accurate report of the results of debriefings and the things they said in their long conversations. Joe encouraged him to continue and told him he didn’t need to be precise: “Facts and figures are for balance sheets, and I’m telling you there are more important things to know to understand the real state of a company.”

  “Our operatives,” Ehud continued, “pass on to us the intelligence reports that we ask for and report on the operations they have carried out. The rest we don’t know. We don’t ask for, and it would be impossible to get, a detailed daily report, something like a ship’s log. Come to think of it, we don’t know everything about our own children and what they’re doing, even when they’re living with us they can spring all kinds of surprises, and you can multiply the problem many times over when it’s our man or woman in the field. So what is left for us? To imagine, to think what we would have done in his or her place, to try to get our heads around the sensation that they were feeling, the reality they experienced. That way maybe we could understand what motivated her, how she overcame the fears, and what she did in all the days and weeks when she was just hanging around, living there like a normal person.

  “I wondered too why she told me about that interrogation, why did it even occur to her, with all the operational issues and the important things we had to talk about, to hark back to an exercise that belonged to another period. I think she couldn’t let go of this memory because she experienced it as a breach of trust. She trusted us. She could not believe that we would lie to her, and collude with the police, and that Shabak would arrest her and physically abuse her and ask her questions that we had planted. Something deep inside her was broken. She told me that after the exercise was over she thought of the passport she had been given and the paperwork she had printed out for herself, and she couldn’t get rid of the idea that all this time the instructor knew the cops were going to arrest her, and that he stood behind the two-way mirror and watched his protégée dirty, wet, and weeping, and that he allowed the interrogators to go on applying their pressure to test just how much she could take.

  “But being there, alone, she knew she could rely only on herself. Just as she was alone in the detention cell and couldn’t consult with anyone or depend on HQ to send someone to extricate her, so it would be in the field. She’s on her own and she has to function as if she’s the only one in the world who knows what she’s doing. Although this is strange and sometimes incomprehensible, exercises and operations get mixed up together, and memory has its own ways of processing them. It isn’t chronological order that decides but something else, which is usually out of our control and beyond our understanding. That was the way she associated events, and I myself see the similarity between the experience of the detention cell in the interrogation exercise and sitting in a hotel room, knowing that the world outside is an unfamiliar and hostile place.

  “I tried to prepare her for this feeling. For the first night in enemy territory, for the anxiety that they’re watching her and listening to her. That at any moment there could be a knock on the door and a man will be standing there, someone who will take her away just like in the exercise in Haifa. I told her that with time people get used to it—the seaman cannot sail thinking about the depth of water underneath him. You learn to live with the danger as if it’s a given that can’t be changed. But all the explanations and the preparations and the training, even the interrogation exercise, bear no resemblance to reality, because the danger is real and definite and because you are absolutely alone. I remember this. The entry into the room, the silence that falls after the door closes, and the sudden feeling that overwhelms you that someone is watching you. I told her you must get through this the first time and understand that this is it, that’s the way you operate, as if they can see you and as if you don’t care. I told her the days will come when she will hav
e to hide the things she does, and we’ll worry about it when the time comes.

  “Then she told me what happened, as if this verbal disrobing would fortify her against fear. Of course nothing happened. Rachel was a young tourist who arrived in the capital city intending to find work. The prospect of counterintelligence anticipating her arrival and taking the trouble to put her in a room fitted with cameras and two-way mirrors was remote. It was unlikely that they would follow her from the moment she arrived in the city or put listening devices in her room. But logic doesn’t dissolve fear.

  “RACHEL FINISHED PUTTING AWAY HER FEW possessions in the battered wall closet and looked around her. It was the time to report her arrival and give a coded version of the room number. She knew I was waiting by the phone but decided to wait awhile, take a shower, and try to calm down. ‘Relaxation is important,’ I told her. ‘Problems will come soon enough and you don’t need to reproach yourself in advance. Eat well, get as much sleep as you need, and behave like any other young woman like you. The assignments you carry out and the information you collect have to be integrated into your normal life. That’s the way you have to work, without standing out.’ Even the series of reports that we demanded of her on arrival at her destination were prepared with this in mind. Everything had an appropriate cover, and no phone conversation or postcard that she sent deviated from what would be considered reasonable.