The red light of the answering machine was flashing, and when she played the message she was disappointed to hear the voice of Ehud, pretending to be the director of the course she had attended at the Open University in Florence, congratulating her on her success on the examination. She wanted to hear Rashid’s voice. This is because of me, she concluded, I sold him the story about needing a break and he took it seriously, and now he’s wondering about the connection between us.
Rachel gave Mango a saucer of milk and let Gracie off the lead, and the bitch sniffed her way around the apartment. She needed to write and encode an operation report and send it at the stipulated time, but her thoughts were somewhere else. She showered quickly, sat beside the phone, and called his office. Again the driver answered, and again he said in basic English that his boss was busy. She had to struggle to explain to him why she needed to talk to Rashid urgently, shouted at him in the loudest voice she could muster, and he, not used to hearing such high-pitched and insistent tones from her, said, “One moment,” and left the receiver on the desk. She could hear the babble of voices, a door opening, someone talking loudly, and someone she assumed was Rashid answering him curtly. Then there was silence, and she heard the sound of footsteps approaching, also the sound of her heartbeat, which had speeded up and was now beyond her control.
The “Yes” with which he opened told her everything and her stomach turned over. “Rashid,” she said, and inserted in his name all the pathos she was capable of expressing. “Yes”—he repeated the word as if he didn’t understand. “I’m back,” she said, and knew this sounded stupid. “Yes,” he said for the third time, like a switchboard operator taking a report. “I want to see you,” she said, and felt she was mustering her last strength: the poisoning at the hotel, the slow walk to Strauss’s hotel, the tense wait, the moment of action, and the return to the city—all paled in comparison to what her lover was going to say to her.
After he’d finished the short sermon that he probably rehearsed during the two days of her absence, she told him she understood and put the telephone down. She didn’t understand anything. She wanted to take a sheet of paper and record from memory everything he said to her just now and everything she said to him before the mission. She was the one who told him she wanted to think. He was the one who said he would wait for her. And now she hears the hesitation in his voice, leading her to the unequivocal conclusion that he too wants a break. It’s important for him too to examine their relationship from a distance. Because of his English and the quality of the line, it all sounded to her so dismal and unreal, and when he told her he would make it easy for her and from now on take only private lessons in his office, she knew it was over.
Not a word of all this appeared in the cable she sent that evening, and even Ehud, who thought he knew how to read her between the lines, didn’t notice the storm that was brewing. And why should he notice? This belonged to another world, a world the sophisticated operational apparatus wanted to ignore. The Unit commander said that male operatives should keep their pricks in their pants, and more than that he didn’t want to know, and as for female operatives, no one dared say anything; they were just warned of the dangers.
In the coming weeks too she didn’t write about Rashid, nor was there any need, because the reports dealt only with operational and intelligence issues, and her moods she could keep to herself. Rashid didn’t call and didn’t turn up at school. She heard from the secretary that one of the veteran teachers was going to his office to give him lessons once a week, and she didn’t dare go to the teacher and ask after the student.
Rachel arrived at the school on time and taught her assigned classes. She drove past the government offices at the times prescribed, took walks with Gracie on the familiar paths, and transmitted reports on schedule. She heard and didn’t hear what they said to her, she saw and didn’t see who was coming toward her. It seemed to her that she needed to chart a course through this murky environment and make an effort to breathe. After a few weeks she invited Barbara for a heart-to-heart and told her best friend it was over, she had ruined everything. Barbara wasn’t letting her give up that easily. She asked Rachel what happened, how could it be that after all she told her, Rashid had left her just like that. Rachel didn’t tell Barbara about the trip that started it all, and she was prepared to explain that lie, if it should come up, on the basis of her need not to tell everything that happened between her and Rashid. Barbara didn’t ask. She was busy with her new temporary steady boyfriend, when she wasn’t delving into Rachel’s psyche.
“Why don’t you force yourself on him?” she asked. “That’s what I’d do. I wouldn’t give up. Okay, you told him you wanted to think, and he took offense and he’s not coming back to you anymore. So what? This is one of those exercises that boys know how to do too. Phone him. Go to his office. Ask him what’s going on. Don’t let him wriggle away from standing up and facing you and talking it through. Look him in the eyes. Tell him what you think, tell him you love him, you’ll marry him—he suggested that once, didn’t he? Tell him you’ll become a Muslim if that’s what he wants, you’ll stay and live here, you’ll wear long dresses and listen to your mother-in-law’s lectures.” She wasn’t laughing.
Rachel listened to her patiently as she poured sweet tea and folded her laundry and waited for Barbara to finish her homily and leave. She thought about what Barbara said, and wondered if she really wanted this, and knew it was impossible.
So she didn’t do anything. She continued her routine, which was interrupted one day by an urgent summons from Ehud, telling her to meet him in Europe. She sighed with relief. Action would lift her out of the grime, help her to forget Rashid and get some flavor back into her life. She asked in her cable if this could wait till her next furlough and was glad when Ehud insisted it was urgent and offered to write the school principal a letter from the director of the Open University in Florence, explaining that her final exam had to be done viva voce. It felt strange to Rachel that she was going without telling Rashid; she found substitute teachers to stand in for her and flew to Europe, ready to take on the next assignment and immerse herself in work.
PREPARATIONS FOR THE BIG OPERATION WERE at hand. She returned from another trial run, driving a hundred kilometers to the provincial capital and back. The school secretary fell ill and Rachel surprised her with a visit that ensured Rachel support of her cover story for the trip and the chance to hear some news about Rashid. Rachel gave her a bouquet of wildflowers that she plucked on the hill overlooking the garage, the object of her surveillance, wished her a quick recovery, and went on her way, with no updates of Rashid.
She noted on a sheet of paper the driving schedule that would take her to the garage precisely on time, memorized it, and dropped it in the trash compactor she had installed in her kitchen. The radio was tuned to an Israeli music station and she was listening to a concert to mark Israel’s Memorial Day. “I don’t like this,” Ehud said to her once when she told him about a concert she had heard, and she said everyone here listened to foreign stations, and she wasn’t living in North Korea. Only there is it considered a crime.
Evening came, infusing her with restrained sadness; Rachel Ravid from Israel would have worn a white blouse at this time and gone with Oren on the long walk from Ramat Gan to the municipal square. Oren knew that Boaz had been killed on the first day of the Lebanon war, and in the two years they were together he respected her need to light a candle in the middle of a wreath of flowers that she arranged with great care. She told him how she arrived in Israel in the summer of 1982 as a volunteer, and how Boaz, who was king of the banana groves on the Golan Heights, told her in his crude fashion that a fortified Syrian strongpoint was a tougher proposition than she was, and he seduced her with ease. Oren said the past was the past, and he didn’t ask her if she had other boyfriends after Boaz and what had happened in England before she came to this country, and she didn’t ask him questions either, and made an e
ffort to be content with what she had. Rachel Brooks from Canada didn’t know any Boaz or Oren. According to her cover story she had her first sexual experience in a summer camp near Montreal. Their climbing instructor was called Bobby, and he was killed a few months later while scaling a cliff in the Rockies. After this Rachel Brooks from Canada had a few casual relationships with boys whose names she barely remembered. She then decided to travel alone in the world.
It’s just as well I know one fallen soldier, she reflected, a laughing face I can think of when they play the sad songs. Her heart lurched when she remembered how once she wanted to go to the Golan Heights and stand by Boaz’s grave when the memorial siren sounded, but she was nervous about meeting his family and afraid seeing his earlier girlfriends there would hurt and embarrass her, and she let it go.
“COMMEMORATION IS VERY IMPORTANT TO US, and we remember all our combatants,” one of the instructors told her during training, and insisted on taking her to visit the monument in the memorial garden dedicated to intelligence personnel. They circled the great blocks of stone and she studied the names and wondered which of them, besides the famous ones like Eli Cohen, had been combatants. The instructor followed her, allowing her to be impressed by the sequence of the years and the fact that there were casualties between the wars too. She couldn’t resist asking if her name would be inscribed here as well if she fell too. He told her it would be some years before her name could be displayed, because the garden was open to the public and military attachés and other spies were always coming here and taking photographs and looking for connections with episodes that Israel was at pains to deny. “We’ll keep a space for you,” he said, and the smile on his face turned to a look of contrition and apology when she started to cry.
AT EIGHT IN THE EVENING THE siren will sound, and she’ll be careful to turn the radio off a minute before that and light a candle, to glow in the middle of a bowl of flowers that she prepared at midday. If someone comes, she’ll have an explanation. Romance is always easy to explain, especially for a young woman living alone, who’s prepared to admit she’s waiting for someone who probably won’t come. Then the radio programs will start. She won’t listen to them, there’s a limit to the risks she will take. Someone is bound to talk about soldiers on the frontiers, the security forces, working night and day to defend the state, and not a word about her and the other nameless combatants, whose existence is only acknowledged, if at all, when they die.
The phone rang, and Barbara, who had just finished another futile diet, said she’d come around at eight to tell her how it went. Rachel thought of asking her to come a bit later, but no excuse occurred to her and Barbara had already hung up. Better if she came later, so I could at least be alone for a moment and remember this is one of the reasons I’m here. That I too have a part to play in Israel’s struggles for existence. I don’t need the department’s rabbi to tell me I’m allowed not to fast on Yom Kippur. But if you were to come now, Rashid, I could endure it all. She wondered why this Memorial Day was so hard for her, and if the dull pain she felt in her stomach was emotional. It’s because of him, she said to herself, it’s Rashid who isn’t here. He’s the love of my life, who can console me without even knowing the truth. She glanced at her watch and tried to imagine what he had been doing since they parted.
Barbara knocked on the door and she let her in, not before looking to check that the apartment was ready, although this apartment was always ready for all visitors. The housekeeper had a key and came in as and when she wanted, and the agents of counterintelligence didn’t need keys to get in and search. I have nothing to hide—this was her mantra.
“Wow, how nice,” said Barbara, pointing to the candle burning in the basin strewn with leaves. “Are you waiting for a mystery lover? Have you found a substitute for our Rashid?” Rachel put on one of her best smiles, and said she was in training and getting ready for the next in line, but she still wanted Rashid. They sat on the balcony and she suppressed her impulse to tell her about the death of Boaz in the war, or about Bobby. She didn’t want to lie to Barbara more than was necessary. And all the same, why is it impossible, just this once, to sit down with her and talk about Boaz, we’ll call him Bobby, whom she slept with just once? Why not tell her about the last embrace, his promise to return and teach her everything a girl of seventeen can learn from a kibbutznik, twenty-three years old and an officer in the paratroopers? “Two pairs of socks, and the underwear I’m wearing now, that’s all I need,” he said when she stared in disbelief at the tiny pack he was taking with him. “We’ll teach them a lesson and come back. That’s what they’re like. Now and then they need reminding.” She figured she could tell her about Bobby, who went out on that climb although he knew the season was dangerous and the cliff face not dry enough. And about herself, how she stood beside his vehicle and watched him as he got in, and at the last moment she picked two flowers and put one in his hand and kept the other in a jam-jar vase, and urged it not to wilt before Bobby came back. But there was no point telling. The effort would be too great, and when she comes to the moment when someone knocked on the door of the room she shared with other volunteers and asked where was Rachel, she’ll burst into tears that will reveal all.
Barbara stroked the dog, said proudly that Gracie loved her most of all, and agreed to take her in while Rachel was away from home. “Isn’t it a shame about the money?” she said about the forthcoming trip. “You’ll be using up all your savings.” “My aunt is paying,” she replied, “she wants me there beside her, and bad girl that I am, I’m thinking of the inheritance she’s going to leave me.” Then she confessed about her chronic stomach pain.
Barbara chattered nonstop. A new teacher had arrived at the school. The air-conditioning in her classroom had been repaired at last. One of her pupils invited her to go out with him. In the papers they were warning again that the situation on the border was volatile, and Rachel, politely refusing a pill that Barbara was offering, struggled to keep up. The stomach pain was constant and growing more intense, as if pincers had been inserted in her body to torment her. Barbara was insistent but she refused again with all the courtesy she could muster. She won’t take anything from her, since nobody can be relied on and she needs to sort herself out by herself. Her medicine chest was well stocked, with everything a young and responsible girl could need for life in a third world country. The Mossad doctor told her how and what to buy, and from the first aid course she remembered some rules that had helped her in the past when she felt ill, but this time it was something else, much worse, and she waited for Barbara to go so she could listen to the daily bulletin and go to bed.
SHE THREW UP IN THE TOILET bowl, on her knees, and felt her strength ebbing away with the retching and the bitter fluids. She could contact Barbara and ask her to come back, but the signal from headquarters was waiting for her and she hadn’t yet sent the cable with the results of the week’s information-gathering. “This target won’t wait for us forever,” the ops officer said at the first briefing, and although Ehud told him not to put pressure on her, she understood the urgency. Rachel lay down on the sofa and probed with her fingers in search of the pain, moving down as if heading for the exit. Sensing something was wrong, Gracie licked her hand and then withdrew to her corner, curled up, and went to sleep. Rachel closed her eyes too and tried not to move, and remembered how her mother used to put a wet towel on her forehead and how her father refused to make any concessions to ill health, boasting that he never in his life had a day’s sickness. A stomachache was just stomachache, not an excuse for not doing homework.
The hands on the clock beside her bed showed it was time, but she wasn’t going to send the cable. They would have to wait for the next one. Her night surveillance was going to be missed as well. She couldn’t even stand up. When she could bear the pain no longer and heard herself crying out for help, she called an ambulance and then phoned Barbara and asked her to come over and look after the dog. She knew Rashid�
�s home number. He had given it to her and told her to contact him if ever she was in trouble. But that was in other times, and despite the pain and the dizziness she decided against it.
In the ambulance she was sure she was going to pass out, and she had the strange feeling that in fact she wanted to be ill, she wanted the release from responsibility that sickness allows, the dependence on others, the incomparable moments when someone else takes charge, lifting you onto the stretcher, cooling your brow with a wet towel, giving you his full attention, entirely at your service. The paramedic had a peculiar smell and his mustache frightened her, but his hands were good and warm, and when he told her everything would be all right she believed him and nodded. This is what I need to do, she thought as the last of her strength drained away, speak as little as possible, not lose consciousness, and deny, deny everything.
A MURKY LIGHT LIT THE ROOM and the beds around her. A middle-aged nurse approached her, and Rachel hardly resisted the impulse to cry and tell her she was tired and her whole body was in pain, and she wanted them to diagnose her with a genuine illness, a condition even her father would admit existed. This is no fault of hers, Ehud will repatriate her and no one will be angry with her, as illness is illness and it’s not only weaklings who are sick, as her father says.
The nurse plumped the pillows under her head and smoothed the sheet that covered her, and Rachel noticed she was naked under the hospital pajamas. The contact with the starched pajamas was pleasant and the touch of the nurse’s hands as she checked the intravenous drips had a calming effect. Like the paramedic, the nurse assured her that everything would be all right. This must be something they learn in the course for dealing with foreign patients, she reflected. “Okay, okay,” said the nurse, and she continued her night rounds. Rachel tried to reach out for the bedside cabinet to look at her watch and was shocked by the sudden pain. She moved her hand over the area of the pain and felt the big bandage bound tightly around her stomach. An operation, she thought in panic. General anesthetic. Recuperation. What have they done to me? What did I say? She was glad she insisted on not changing her first name. “I’ll get it wrong if they wake me in the middle of the night and ask me what my name is,” she explained to Ehud, and he conceded the point.
The English Teacher Page 16