The English Teacher

by Yiftach Reicher Atir

  “‘Papers.’ She held out her passport and the car documents. He examined them, lifted the barrier up with one hand, and waved her on. There was a demilitarized zone between the borders, the result of agreements that couldn’t be agreed on. The road was fenced and there were signs warning, in languages including English, that the sector was mined. She moved along the corridor, and if for a moment the association between barbed-wire fences and concentration camps occurred to her, she didn’t tell me. ‘Take her to one of the camps,’ the Unit commander told me before we sent her to liquidate Strauss. It was hard to explain to him just how absurd and worthless this idea was. ‘Rachel knows exactly what a concentration camp is,’ I dared to tell him. ‘If you read her file, you’d know her whole family was wiped out in the camps. For her, Grunewald railway station isn’t just some place.’

  “‘No-man’s-land,’ she told me later, ‘gave me the chance to think.’ She knew that joint patrols were active in the area and she had no reason to stop the car by the roadside, not even for a pee. But the temptation was overwhelming. To take a break, breathe some fresh air, get out of the car for a moment, review the details she has to remember, look at the documents again, and only then move forward. Rachel continued her slow progress. Around the bend she saw a wooden gate covered in barbed wire, blocking the roadway, and an enemy soldier standing and waiting for her.” Ehud broke off and took a sip of his whiskey. Joe looked at him, perhaps thinking of his own career, the times he had been caught up in situations like this, and trying to remember what he did and how he reacted. Ehud’s glance strayed to the garden, stretching away beyond the glass door, to the life going on beyond the dense vegetation, and he thought of how little he knew of what was happening in the lives of the other people in Rachel’s life.

  “And Rachel was alone. None of our soldiers stood beside her, none of our officers walked ahead of her. She had no one to talk to and no one to contact. She could still turn the Audi around and retrace her route. Say she changed her mind, she left something behind at the hotel, she’ll come back tomorrow. And then she’ll contact me and tell me whatever she tells me, and I’ll have to believe her, because if I don’t believe it I’ll be saying goodbye to her. Terminating her contract, in other words. We believe our operatives. We have to trust them even when we know they aren’t telling us the whole truth. Even when we hear from them that everything is okay, between ourselves we know everything isn’t okay. They’re frightened, they’re tired, they want to come home. They want to lie down on the sofa and get a big hug.

  “In our business everything depends on what the operative says. He creates the reality for us. There’s no one else who can submit a different report. No soldier who has seen something different. It’s not like Rashomon. There’s only what he saw, what he felt, what he did. I don’t know what she was thinking at that moment, what she thought was likely to happen to her sometime soon. I asked her and she told me that she slowed when she saw the fence and the barbed wire, and then she took a deep breath and moved on.

  “The sentry looked at her papers and let her pass. ‘Welcome, welcome,’ he said, and smiled, exposing nicotine-stained teeth. She smiled back at him as if her whole life depended on this smile. He dragged the barricade aside, took a cigarette from his coat pocket, offered her one, and lit his own. It seemed he’d prefer her to linger and talk for a while, but since the only English words he knew were hello and welcome, that was it.

  “Perhaps you’re wondering: Why is he yapping on like this? What’s the big deal? Even drug smugglers go through this process, and she isn’t the first operative who’s done it. But for me she was and always will be the only one. I sat in the hotel and waited for her call. I was the uncle who was left behind. The one who will wander around all alone for a few days before going back to France. The one who gets a migraine and waits until she calls to ask him how he is and confirm that she’s reached her hotel.

  “I picked up the book I brought with me but I couldn’t read it. The words passed me by. I thought of Rachel, who at about that time, at midday, when most people are thinking of the meal that awaits them, would be arriving at the crossing, hoping to exploit their fatigue and their inattentiveness.”

  TENSION WAS IN THE AIR. A heavily built man, big mustache, and a thick gold ring on his finger, sat behind an old wooden desk and played with a full ashtray. He moved it from side to side and studied the butts that had piled up in it. The other man, young, thin, and unshaven, sat beside the desk on the backseat of a car, evidently ripped from a confiscated vehicle, and smoked assiduously, filling his lungs and exhaling perfect smoke rings toward the solitary lightbulb, the only illumination in the semidarkness of the room.

  The door was open, or perhaps there was no door. She stood in the entrance and wasn’t sure if she’d come to the right place. Both men looked up at her and she asked in basic English if they could give her local number plates. “Yes, yes, maybe,” said the young man, still exuding smoke rings. She moved closer to the table and her dress brushed against the knees of the young man. The fat man moved the ashtray and held out his hand without saying a word. She handed him the documents and stood close to the table in the long dress that she wore out of respect for the local culture, topped by a thin sweater and sandals that exposed her red-painted toenails. Rachel tightened the sweater around her shoulders and listened to a muffled racket coming from the corridor. She reckoned this was the generator and inscribed this too in her memory. The ops officer will definitely want to know this. “What’s so hard about remembering everything you’ve seen there?” they always ask.

  She waited. The fat man ran a finger over his fleshy lips. He flicked through her passport and the Carnet de Passages and checked the certificate of ownership. He opened and closed the Carnet as if it were the shutter of a camera, and as she moved closer to the desk the young soldier, sitting on the low seat beside her, was out of her field of vision.

  “There’s a problem,” the fat man said in slow, clear English. “There’s a problem,” the fat man repeated, and then she felt the hand touching her dress.

  A faint rustle. That was all. A touch that pressed the material against her thigh. She wasn’t even sure. Perhaps a breath of wind stirred her dress. She didn’t move and went on looking at the fat man, who said, “Big problem,” like a veteran teacher confronting her in the staff room and calling her to order. The hand that touched her dress touched it again, this time lingering on the back of her thigh, and she had no doubt it was there, the full palm of the hand with all the fingers, working its way up. She could of course have turned around and pushed the young man’s hand away; he sat leaning forward with one hand still holding the cigarette and the other groping her. She could also have yelled at him, Stop! or That’s enough!, and she knew he would understand, but she also knew the fat man was about to point out the mistake that flashed up now before her eyes, the discrepancy between the car numbers, and exploit the opportunity to tell her again there was a problem, and show her the way out and force her to call Ehud, to explain the mistake that she didn’t make. She won’t be blamed for anything, but her operation will be killed, stone-dead.

  The hand reached the inner thigh. She noticed the narrowing of the fat man’s eyes, who saw what was happening behind her, and saw his tongue moistening his thick lips. The hand continued its upward journey, and she froze where she stood and told the fat man that all he needed to do was correct the number manually. This was the mistake of the clerk at the last checkpoint. She felt the hand fumbling between her legs and heard the heavy breathing behind her. The smoke from the cigarette stung her eyes and the fat clerk watched her and waited until he heard his colleague gasp and saw him slump back on the grubby car seat and take a long drag on the cigarette. It was only then he picked up the stamp and stamped her papers, and gave her the crumpled number plates that were on his desk, and said to her, “Welcome home.”

  Rachel walked down the narrow hallway, keeping a tight
grip on the plates, for the sake of which she had stood with legs parted and allowed the young man who had sat behind her to insert his hand in her panties and his finger inside of her. She knew it was by her own choice that she stood and waited until she heard his breathing change. Only then she turned and noticed the stain in the crotch of his pants, still feeling his probing, invasive finger. For the sake of the numbers on the plates, she was thinking, for the sake of the mission, she put up with it, didn’t cry out to the officer who sat in the lobby on a rocking chair, looking at her as if he knew what had happened in there. Ahead of her there’s another long drive to the hotel, and only then can she strip off her underwear and throw it out, the dress too, and try to forget. But she can’t throw out the feeling, or the image of his smile and the dreamy look in his eyes when he leaned back, still holding the burning cigarette.

  Rachel said something to the officer and he found some metal wire and helped her put the new license plates over the number plates on her car. The officer waved farewell as she set out on her way, legs shut together tightly. One more checkpoint to pass. The sentry at the gate examined her papers carefully. The passport was stamped, vehicle documentation in order. No one looked under the hood and checked the battery. The barrier was raised and she was finally through.

  “‘I WANT YOU TO ASK ME how I’m feeling,’ she said to me when she sat down with me two months later, after peering at the press clippings I had saved for her, looking at the ruins of the wrecked garage and reading the report in Haaretz: ‘A leading terrorist has been killed in a mysterious blast, and a secret office of the PLO has been completely destroyed. The office, masquerading as a garage on the outskirts of a harbor town, served as a center for the planning of terrorist attacks, and a senior source in Jerusalem, who spoke on condition of anonymity and denied any connection with the incident, would only say that the death of this man had thwarted a major attack which had been in the planning stages for some time. Local police investigators suspect that explosives stored in the garage detonated accidentally, while according to one British newspaper this was apparently the result of a turf-war between rival organizations.’

  “And there was also the report we prepared for the Minister of Defense, who wanted to know how we had done it. Of course we omitted Rachel’s name and certain other details that even the minister didn’t need to know, and only described in brief how she arrived at the garage, having ‘found’ a fault that had been prearranged, got a new battery installed, and went on her way. No need to explain to the minister that she was acquainted with the garage and the way it worked, having reconnoitered it in advance, and she knew what they did with batteries that had been replaced and where they stored them. Also no need to tell him where she set out from and what she did afterward.

  “‘I want to know what you think about the operation,’ she added, ‘the significance of it, the difference it might make.’ Her voice trembled and her face was flushed. I could see she was keeping something inside, she was holding herself back from telling me more, and I decided to wait. This was my method—let her choose her moment to speak. And if she doesn’t? It’s her choice.

  “‘Have you any idea what happened at the border checkpoint?’ she said. ‘I know what you wrote in your report. Some clerk mixed up the car number and you had to smile at the fat man and persuade him to turn ignore it. That’s what you wrote, isn’t it?’ And at that moment I didn’t suspect anything. I certainly wanted to know more details, but she reported the procedure she had followed in typically laconic style, and I took notes. And anyway, everything was dwarfed by the scale of the operation itself, by the reports in the press and the congratulations we received from the Prime Minister, who wanted to meet her and thank her personally. She told me she felt exploited, and she asked if I was prepared to hear her out, or if I would have a problem with that. Her face hardened and I heard a critical and resentful tone in her voice. What could I do after she gave me the full story, tell her she see should see a doctor? I couldn’t do that. The next morning she was due to fly back to her adopted country. God knows why she postponed the conversation to this moment. Perhaps to test me, to see what I would do. I glanced at my watch. I had no choice. In an hour and a half from now I was supposed to be meeting my wife and leaving for a vacation that had been planned long ago. How could I tell Rachel that life goes on, people go to work and come home, they have children, they have their little ways, they have their pleasures?

  “‘When he put his hand under my dress,’ she said, ‘I thought of you. I thought of what you would tell me to do, of what you would have done. You would tell me to do nothing. I hated you and I went on smiling at the fat man as if nothing were happening. When his hand was in my panties I wanted to scream, but I didn’t. The cigarette smoke was choking me. I didn’t move even when his finger went inside me. I remembered you saying something about the terrorist I was going to blow up. I remembered you saying such a thing has never been done before. It took all of two minutes maybe, until I heard his little gasp. I did what you asked of me and I hated you.’

  “She began to weep, and I sat there paralyzed and waited. I wasn’t the right person to be sitting with her when she is talking about me. The awful story of what I made her do should be told to somebody else, without holding back and without the complications of the relationship between us. I know she felt my devotion to her, she knew I loved her, and that made it harder for me. I tried to be professional, to do my job, but inside it felt like I had been there, in that room, and I had done nothing to help her. Since then we haven’t talked about it, and I keep thinking about her visit to the garage with the explosive battery, the mission that she went ahead with despite what she had to endure, despite the trauma to her body and her soul, and all of this was supposed to stay secret.

  “And I didn’t know, then, if she had told him. If after scrubbing her body and putting on her nightgown, and after hiding her passport and wallet and car keys, and after going over the whole episode minute by minute as she lay on the hotel bed, wondering if anything could have been otherwise, if she was somehow to blame—she contacted him.

  “I assume she thought of him and was ashamed. She told me about the guard who raised the barrier and said goodbye to her as if he knew what had happened, as if anyone seeing her would know what had happened. She thought she made it possible. This wouldn’t have happened to anyone else.

  “She arrived at her apartment in the evening and listened to the news in English. There was no mention of the explosion and the fire, and she had to wait for our clandestine broadcast to hear the plaudits showered on her.

  “And today I know that afterwards she called him.

  “And she told him, and he listened. And perhaps he had questions, and perhaps he thought of scolding her for traveling alone, but he didn’t say anything. I hope he rushed over to see her and took her in his arms and brought her to bed, to prove that he loved her and to earn her everlasting love.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Exit

  “AND WHAT DID YOU DO THEN?” Joe yawned, and Ehud tried to hide his disappointment. The stack of files on the small cart beside them hadn’t shrunk at all, and the security personnel assigned by the department to guard the classified documents were working around the clock. Joe reflected sadly that he was too old for all this, and in his day things were done differently. True, he knew how to use a computer and a cell phone, and like all of them he too admired the work of the surveillance teams, and the satellites that the Intelligence Corps had launched into orbit, but he still believed there was no substitute for dialogue and for the human factor when dealing with people and their innermost thoughts. He didn’t think Ehud was lying, or deliberately withholding vital information. Ehud was searching for something deep inside him, and he had no way of getting to it without talking and talking and unraveling whatever was in his heart in the simple and familiar way—word by word, date by date, event by event.

  When Ehud took a s
hort break for a nap, Joe had a talk with the Unit commander. The red phone allowed him to speak freely and he asked the commander to be patient: “Ehud is the key to this lock. He was her case officer, and he was the one she contacted. She told him her father was dead as if this is a password that he’d forgotten.”

  The commander had learned a thing or two about Joe, and he let him continue.

  “Ehud too wants to know where she is. It’s been fifteen years since they parted company. In the meantime his wife has died and his children have grown up, and I think he’s still in love with her.”

  “Are you sure he’s telling you the truth?” The commander reminded Joe that all they had was what Ehud was telling them, including the call he received.

  “Even if he is lying and even if he’s hiding things, he’s not the type who would be helped to confess by the interrogation room and the cold water treatment. He’s too experienced to be intimidated by that.”

  The commander mumbled something, and Joe had no doubt that the idea of a third-degree interrogation had occurred to him.

  “The problem is that Ehud doesn’t know what to do either. He doesn’t know her anymore, and now he’s afraid that even then he didn’t know what she was thinking and where her loyalties lay. She had a lover out there, did you know that?”

  The commander didn’t know, and he sent Yaniv, their liaison man, to go and scour the files. Joe waited on the line and listened to the commander giving Yaniv his instructions, and he knew this was pointless. All that Yaniv would find, if he found anything, would be a handful of dry, laconic reports, nothing that would be helpful.

  There was one more important point to be raised, and he wanted the commander to grasp precisely what he meant. “Ehud is not one of us,” he said, and he heard the sharp intake of breath at the other end of the line. “Ehud is on her side. He wants to protect and rescue her. If we back him into a corner, he’ll choose to defend her interests rather than ours.”