The English Teacher

by Yiftach Reicher Atir

  “I’m not sure I understand,” said the commander.

  “We are looking for her to make sure that she doesn’t divulge the secrets she knows. He is looking for her because he loves her. These are two completely different things, and we have a classic conflict of interests.” He paused to let this sink in and continued: “We need to treat him like a target, the same as Rachel. We need his help and his knowledge and we have to exploit the fact that she turned to him and not to her regular contact. This shows there is something between them. She could have been missing for weeks and months without anyone noticing her absence, and that’s why I need him here in my house, and not in the war room or the archive.”

  “Okay, so what are you doing?” The commander wasn’t the impatient type and he was a good listener. This was part of the reason that put him in the big leather chair.

  “I’m talking to him, that’s what I’m doing, I’m listening and letting him tell the whole story in his own way, until he himself leads us somewhere. It’s obviously connected with her past, and obviously connected with what they shared. Otherwise she would have contacted someone else, or no one at all.”

  The commander murmured his agreement.

  “But where is she now? In Canada, where her cover story is based? In Europe, in one of the places she stayed for months before she went out to the operational zone? Or none of these places? I don’t know, but I think we’re making progress. Don’t bother us, that’s all I’m asking for.”

  The commander agreed. He added that they were working on all the leads they had—the phone card that she bought, the brochures they found in her father’s house, her British and Israeli passports. “We sent teams to all the possible places, spoke to all the intelligence agencies that we cooperate with, and right now we’re waiting.”

  Joe asked the Unit commander to check a few things for him, and after speaking again to young Yaniv and telling him which of the old files to go through, he woke Ehud and asked him to continue.

  “AFTER SHE TOLD ME ALL THE details of what happened at the border crossing, I told HQ I was postponing her return to active service and sending her to Israel for a break. Deep silence prevailed over the preparations for what should have been a vacation and most of the time she spent in her room. Before the journey I gave her a makeup set and a wig that we had prepared for her at home, and she took them from me as if she really did want to change her identity. I could barely recognize her when we set out, and her whole demeanor had changed too. The restrained young woman I knew had turned into a noisy flapper, in keeping with the blond wig and the heavy makeup. At first I thought she was being the consummate professional, going deep into the image assigned to her and making it unlikely that anyone flying with us would recognize her as Rachel Brooks. But when I watched her then from a distance of three rows away on the plane it seemed to me she was allowing herself the relief that only a change of identity could give her.

  “We went to the Prime Minister’s residence as soon as we landed. She went into the bathroom and got rid of the wig, removed the makeup, took out the contact lenses, and was once again the woman we knew. The Prime Minister welcomed her to his inner sanctum, and although all of this had been laid on in her honor, I thought she felt uncomfortable being the center of attention of four men. When he asked her how she succeeded in smuggling the explosives across the border, I was afraid she was going to tell him. It was a bit strange. On one side there were the four of us—the head of the Mossad, the Unit commander, Rachel, and me—who knew what had happened, and on the other side the Prime Minister, who was asking her how she did what she did. She answered briefly and politely, and when he stood to award her the certificate of meritorious conduct I saw she was on the verge of tears. After this I took her to a hotel in Tel Aviv, left her some cash, and I took the certificate back to the Office. To this day she hasn’t been allowed to keep it at home. Security comes first, doesn’t it? Actually, she probably felt more isolated in Tel Aviv than in her apartment out there. She had nowhere to go, no home, no partner, and a father she had no intention of contacting. Before we parted in the hotel she stood with her back to me and stared at the dark horizon, and if there had been a single ray of light out there, I doubt she would have seen it.

  “We had to decide what to do with her. Opinions were divided. The chief security officer wanted to bring her home. The trauma she had suffered could undermine her judgment and there was the risk that she would put too much emotion into her work. I wanted her to carry on and I relied on what she had told me, that she would get over it and she had no complaints about the way we had treated her.

  “‘You should understand,’ I told them, ‘besides us she has nothing. Now she’s a highly esteemed operative making an honorable contribution to the success of our early-warning systems. At least, that is what she feels. If we bring her back, all she will have left is a sense of failure. She’ll pack her bags, tell the school she’s leaving, and be off. And what will she do here? Go back to teaching? Join the department as a junior bureaucrat? I agree we need to plan for the termination of her service there, but we should do this calmly and construct a routine for her. That’s the only way she’ll recover and be ready for more operations.’ The Unit commander suspended the discussion and called in the operations officer. I hadn’t agreed he should be told what happened to Rachel at the border crossing. I didn’t want the story to go any further than it already had, especially if there was a prospect that a few weeks from now she might be applying to our department for a more conventional job.

  “‘What do you say?’ the Unit commander asked. The ops officer was unequivocal. He insisted she be kept in place until we could find a replacement. ‘We can’t afford to give up such a valuable asset. The intelligence branch would kill us.’ ‘Don’t exaggerate,’ said the Unit commander. ‘If anything happens that puts her in danger, I’ll have her out of there at a moment’s notice.’ But even he couldn’t foresee what was going to happen. Even he underestimated the power of chance.”

  “THE CALL CAME THROUGH AT TWO in the morning. The Unit commander was on the line. ‘Congratulations are in order. We got the big project.’ I thanked him and didn’t ask any questions. We didn’t know if anyone was listening in on our conversation, and we always worked on that assumption. We agreed to talk again in the morning and I put the receiver down. I confess, my hand was shaking. It had come. I didn’t need to consult any list of projects to know what he was talking about. Rina asked me what had happened and when she saw my face in the light of the bedside lamp she said she would take the children to school in the morning and then wait for me at home.

  “It took me ten minutes to get to the Rome railway station. I made sure no one was following me. I knew how to do that, and at two in the morning it’s easy. When I decided I was clean, I used one of the twenty vacant phone booths and called HQ. The Unit commander was in the Office and in the background I heard other familiar voices. It was clear there was a state of emergency. ‘Take the first available flight. Everything will be explained when you are here. But before anything else, call Rachel and tell her to start moving at once. We’ve made all the arrangements we can here.’ I repeated his words so we would both be sure we were referring to the same thing, and hung up.

  “I moved to another booth and phoned her. The conversation was short and polite. I introduced myself as a good friend of her father’s, and the news was that the old man was dying. There was no risk of misunderstanding on her part. I was her regular contact and she recognized my voice. I gave the code word we had agreed on. That was all. In the original briefing she asked me what would happen if her father really did die suddenly. I said we would find someone else to contact her. And then she asked what would happen if on the day we needed to tell her to leave everything and get out at once I was ill, or couldn’t be contacted, and we agreed on code words that my stand-in would need to use, so she would get a clear and unmistakable message and know she was
leaving.

  “I returned to the apartment to pack before leaving for the airport. I knew the flight schedules by heart and I had time to say goodbye to Rina and kiss the children, who were still asleep. I didn’t know what had happened, and I didn’t indulge in any speculations. There were so many things to do, the most important being to think about Rachel. At this moment she was supposed to be following the instructions she had been given. She needed to be sure this was it, there would be no going back. I knew what was going to happen. We had practiced this scores of times. The phone conversation. The knowledge that someone might be listing in, that the Mukhabarat had already put her under tight surveillance. She knew what she had to do.

  “But an exercise bears no resemblance to the real thing. To the churning of the stomach, the irresistible urge to go to the bathroom, the dry mouth, the thought that won’t go away—what will happen now, will she have time to get out before they come for her? How do you cope with pressure and danger and maintain an unruffled exterior? With the feeling that an entire life is about to be left behind? Like refugees, like soldiers fleeing from the battlefield. I remember this. I saw Egyptian soldiers in headlong flight in the Yom Kippur War, and we were chasing them. And Rachel? For her it must be different. She has to act calmly, discreetly. Do everything slowly, in an orderly way, not arousing any suspicion at the last moment, not giving them a reason to lay a hand on her shoulder.”

  RACHEL NEVER TOLD EHUD WHAT HE so much wanted to know. She didn’t think he was worthy of it. She won’t be going back there, and there’s no reason why he should know more than he needs to know and what she wants to tell him about her life there. She confined herself to dry information and only tried to include every technical detail that would enable the security section to assess the damage done to the Mossad and be better prepared when the next operative was sent out into the field. Ehud hoped in vain that she would settle in the small and depressing apartment that they gave her in Tel Aviv and tell him what she felt as she was leaving behind everything that she had been.

  She didn’t tell him because something in her was broken. Because from the moment she boarded the plane and left the airspace of her adopted country she knew there would be no more dreams, no more dwelling in two worlds, no more Rachel Brooks living in a pleasant apartment in a foreign and exotic capital city, and loving Rashid. There’s just Rachel Ravid, Israeli citizen returning home after a long stint in Europe and needing to rebuild her life.

  IMMEDIATELY AFTER PUTTING THE PHONE DOWN, Ehud’s urgent voice still reverberating in her head, she thinks of Rashid and she’s glad he isn’t there beside her, forcing her to lie to his face. In her imagination she sees him in his bed in his parents’ apartment, covered by the blanket she bought him for his birthday. “It’s sad needing to buy two blankets,” she told him, and cajoled him into promising her this was temporary, and now she’s folding the blanket they won’t be using again. There’s no room in the small suitcase she’s taking, and no room for a blanket in the cover story she intends to sell to anyone who asks her where she’s rushing off to. She’s shocked when she realizes she’s already thinking about him in the past tense, and remembers how she used to lie beside him, her hand on his body, waiting till he’s asleep before she allows herself to drift off until he wakes up and tells her in a sleepy voice that he loves her. I didn’t have time to tell him, she thinks as she scours the flat and checks that everything is in place, I didn’t have the chance to tell him again and again how much I love him, I want to live with him but I can only die with him. Rachel puts into her purse the cuff link that Rashid left on the shelf in the shower, and knows she hasn’t the time to look for its twin, which was lost in their frantic haste of undressing a few hours ago. She won’t give him back what he has lost, and he can’t ask her what happened. She’s leaving him and everything that was between them. She’s burning her bridges. Whatever happens she will not be . . . She’s not coming back here, never, never, never.

  She doesn’t remember the instructions by heart, and there’s no need. “It’s just the essentials you need to know,” the chief security officer said, and he explained that if she gets the evacuation order, “which would never happen,” she has to leave everything and think only of herself. Not think of anything else. She’s not to worry about the communications equipment, not worry about the connections she’s formed, not worry about her past. “Rachel Brooks will no longer exist, and the reason why isn’t important.”

  She looks around her. The cat that she took into her home to be a companion for the dog is curled up asleep on the sofa. She didn’t tell Ehud about him. There were other things she didn’t tell him about, and afterward, when he asked her why, she said she wasn’t a little girl and he didn’t need to know everything about her. She was coming up with the goods, and that should be enough. The cat didn’t seem perturbed by the unusual activity at three in the morning. Mango will be all right, she knows how to fend for herself. And the plants? They’re going to die, obviously. And Rashid? He will be history too. He’ll look for her for a while, he’ll want to know where his lover has disappeared to, and then things will return to normal.

  Rachel waters the plants and imagines Rashid when the interrogators come calling, answering their questions and thinking about the woman who has abandoned him. How long have you known her? they’ll ask, and he’ll tell them about the first time he visited the school office with his driver, and saw her coming in. He’ll tell them about the school, her frequent leaves, the supper he suggested, the trip they took together, her eagerness to see more and more, their trip to the coastal town—and suddenly he’ll understand.

  And she imagines him falling silent, the way he does when they’re together and there’s something he doesn’t like, something he needs to think about. He glances attentively at the man who sits facing him with the open file on his lap and thinks of the ways she has deceived him. Pieces of the puzzle start fitting together and he remembers her answers, the nights she lay awake beside him, the tension in her muscles when they discussed politics, the look in her eyes when they passed a military base. And if he’s angry, he manages to hide it. And if he’s offended, he’ll let no one see it.

  There’s no haste in her actions, because she’s in a hurry, and when you’re in a hurry you need to work slowly and methodically. She finishes packing, drinks a glass of water, and makes a last circuit of the apartment. The music room is in a mess, as it should be, and the equipment looks tired and out-of-date. She will take from here only what she can, and that’s very little. The fridge is full of yesterday’s shopping, and the roasting tray, with the relics of the last supper she ate with him, cuts her to the heart. The wardrobe is arranged the way she likes it, and she tries not to think of the hands that will be rummaging through her drawers sometime soon. She wonders what to do with the sack of laundry that she prepared for tomorrow and finally kicks it into the corner of the bathroom, and decides not to throw anything in the bin. The next person in here needs to think she has just gone out for a while. What goes through the mind of someone checking her home for the last time, her fortress, her apartment, before leaving it forever? This wasn’t her apartment. She leased it, by arrangement with her superiors, who agreed to the exorbitant rent. But it was her home. These were her flowers, the carpets she bought, the souvenirs she collected, her bedding, and the memory of Rashid’s body, a precious and tangible memory, the toothbrush she kept for him, his favorite coffee, the semen stains on a sheet not yet laundered.

  And then she does something that is strictly forbidden, a contravention of the most basic rules. She takes a piece of paper.

  “MY LOVE,” SHE WRITES, AND THE pen scratches the surface of the wooden table that he bought her as a present; she placed it by the window, as far as possible from the music room, just in case the table had some kind of listening device. Do not accept gifts—that’s another rule she’s broken.

  “When you read this letter I will be far away
from you, as far as the living are from the dead. We will never meet again. I will never again see you watching me, feel your hand caressing my body, and you won’t feel the thrill that passes through me. I will never hear your voice again. I will never again smell your beloved fragrance, as a mother inhales the scent of her baby in her arms.

  “I’m leaving you. I will always remember the look in your eyes when you stood in the doorway, after you had already said goodbye, after you kissed me again and again, after you said you wished you could stay. A long look that infused and sustained me.

  “The secret won. A transparent yet impenetrable secret. Since the first day it has been a barrier between us. I thought it would disappear, I was wrong, and I’m to blame. I’m to blame for making you love me, for falling in love with you, for keeping the secret inside me and letting it poison me. I fought it until it defeated me.”

  SHE WANTS TO CARRY ON. SHE wants to tell him everything, explain it to him, as if that were possible. She knows there is no chance, but deep down she is still hoping. She crumples the letter, drops it in the garbage disposal, and turns it on.

  GRACIE HAS FOUND A COMFORTABLE PLACE to rest on the carpet, and now she raises her head and looks at Rachel, who goes over to the dog, kneels beside her, and then stretches out alongside her and hugs her. She caresses the warm and hairy belly and remembers the vet who told her to have the bitch spayed. “She’s a stray,” he said with his guttural local accent, and Rachel felt he was criticizing her, Rachel, personally. “Why cause more problems? She’s been vaccinated, let’s stop the bloodline here.” He was right, and she brought her in on the appointed day, and stood beside her and cried while the dog was sedated. “You can leave now,” said the vet, and he laid out the surgical instruments on the table beside him. Rachel felt that she was the one who was about to be cut and she stiffened her stomach muscles to resist the knife. She went, and the feeling that she had betrayed the dog, the dog who had trusted her, would never leave her.