Mishka Ben-David - Forbidden Love in St. Petersburg

The answers she was giving me began to dissolve that huge lump inside me.

That was something I couldn’t believe, she continued, and I imagined that they had kidnapped you. After all, from their point of view, the moment you didn’t go along with them, you became a deserter. And if you’d deserted and were living with an FSB woman you were definitely a traitor. All I knew were the details given to me by the counter-espionage division after they’d arrested me. They said you’d left accompanied by two escorts, that you’d used a fictitious name, that you’d flown to Copenhagen and from there to Tel Aviv. But was a gun pointed at your head? Did they threaten you? Did you resist? Perhaps what I was told was true and you really had cooperated with them and left of your own free will? These thoughts killed me. What especially hurt was the possibility that you’d used me in your spying activities. That was also something they said. Was it conceivable, I asked myself, that you got involved with me as part of your assignment, and not because you found me attractive?

Anna told me about Alexei Nikolayevich’s horror show on the day she was arrested. The image projected by the look of torment on her face was an exact reflection of my own interrogation, of the suspicions that were hurled at me, the doubts, and the pain. It was as if it was me speaking in whispers through her chapped lips.

I tried to recollect what had happened between us, she said. I knew it was me that had approached you and yet, even knowing that, what went on in my head was simply terrible. I knew that you never asked and that I never said a thing about the counter-espionage division. But I couldn’t avoid the thought that perhaps, just as I’d been given a task, which I hadn’t carried out, you too had an assignment. I could only hope that just as my love for you stopped me from executing my task, the same was true of you…

My heart, cleansed of its doubts, was overflowing with love. As she spoke I held her hand, stroked her head, and swore to her that I had had absolutely no idea of who she was and that my love for her was the most complete love I’d ever felt.

But I saw it coming, you know? she said, once she was able, like me, to put that part of the riddle to rest. During those last few days you weren’t yourself. You were frightened and desperate, like an animal hunters had closed in on from every side. I tried to radiate an air of ‘business as usual’ but you couldn’t conceal the despair in your eyes.

I had to remove the dark cloud hanging over my hasty departure, a retreat that had led to Anna spending three years of torment in prison. Tearfully, I told her about the appeals I’d rejected, the pressures and threats, and then about the pictures and the cassette.

But you know that they lied to you, don’t you? she asked. What they showed you were photomontages and a tampered-with cassette. Once they got my reports that you were a bona fide businessman, they just about stopped using me, even though, because of that ex-KGB guy, the suspicions didn’t altogether disappear. There was just one phone conversation, towards the end, when they suspected that some CIA agents were milling around our neighbourhood, and I denied it.

She paused for a while, reflecting, while I held her hand and stroked her. When she resumed, her voice was so low that I had to read her chapped lips which, from time to time, she continued to moisten with her tongue.

After you’d disappeared, I realized that what they’d claimed wasn’t just hot air, that there really had been some people wandering around our neck of the woods–your people. But when I think about how stubborn you were in not responding to their demands, I cannot really be angry with them. Our guys would certainly have poisoned you for such behaviour.

I was poisoned, my beautiful Annushka, I said, clasping her anguished face, its Asian features now more pronounced, its colouring paler than I remembered. Words can also poison, so can voices and pictures. You, perhaps, are not angry with them, but my fury knows no bounds. First of all I’m angry with myself, that I believed what they’d said. But I’m mad at them as well.

A while later we sat on the balcony of my apartment. In the spring sunlight more wrinkles showed up on Anna’s skin but the beginnings of a sense of relief and feeling of warmth permeated her body and seemed to soften the creases and to loosen her taut muscles somewhat. Her hand was held in mine, and she allowed herself to close her eyes, getting hooked on the sun. The hint of a smile began to appear in the corner of her mouth. My love for her was so great that I wanted to cry.

Her head tilted slightly to one side and she fell asleep. I opened the sun shade over her and went inside to make us something to eat. The continuation of Anna’s story and what she knew about me came bit by bit in the course of the day.

You knew all the time? I asked when she woke up and slowly drank some of the fruit juice I’d brought her.

I knew, Anna replied. We knew about you before you arrived. An informant of ours in the CIA–they apparently know everything that goes on in your camp–informed us that an agent using a Canadian cover, by the name of Paul Gupta, was about to set himself up in St Petersburg. Somehow our people didn’t understand that our informant was reporting the arrival of a Mossad agent, someone hadn’t read the small print, and we thought that you were from the CIA.

Perhaps we should go in, I suggested. The neighbours’ balconies were too close. As I held her arm, she continued to talk as we walked inside.

The first time we met I suspected that you were Jewish. You said you were half Indian and that origin possibly matched your appearance. But to check it I threw all sorts of comments at you about Jews, Judaism and Israel. Over time I became familiar with your expressions and was able to detect even the slightest hint of anxiety. My suspicion grew when I saw that you were circumcised but then I looked into it and discovered that in Canada circumcision was very common.

That’s also what I’d have told you if you’d asked, I said. And when did you know for sure?

I came to the conclusion that they were right on the day you hit Sergei, she answered, and I didn’t understand.

I hit somebody?

Sergei, the man who snatched my bag.

He… I didn’t need to continue.

I’m so sorry, my love, but that wasn’t planned. He was in the team following us, and couldn’t restrain himself when he saw us kissing. Apparently he was in love with me, and decided to attack you. The snatching of the bag was an attempt to make it look like a robbery. In the past Sergei was a professional wrestler, and when you ran after him and insisted on tackling him I trembled at the thought of what lay in store for you. If he could, he’d have beaten the living daylights out of you. When I saw you thrashing him I understood that there were things you were hiding from me… no one, unless there’re very highly trained, can get the better of Sergei. And no lonely, sad, Canadian businessman who reads Dostoyevsky is that highly trained. I might have come to the conclusion that you were a Jewish CIA agent, but during the night, she added, I realized you were an Israeli.

Before I could ask, Anna supplied me with the explanation. When you slept at my place that night you murmured ‘ lo Orit, lo ’ and ‘ lama Orit, lama ’, and the words became etched in my memory. I connected this to what you’d already told me about your wife during the previous night we’d spent together. The following morning I checked and discovered that this was Hebrew, and the whole picture became clear. Then I had to make one of the most difficult decisions of my life, she smiled, and with that smile the Anna I had known returned and had momentarily settled herself down in my apartment.