Mishka Ben-David - Forbidden Love in St. Petersburg

His wailing when they tore him away from me and my crying–I went wild–he was petrified and screamed. I hugged him and curled up with him in a corner, completely crazed. They fired an electric shock gun at me and he was only taken out of the cell after I passed out.

I felt weak at the knees. Had my child, our child, been taken away and was now lost?

From her pocket Anna took out a photograph which, until then, she had kept hidden, and handed it to me.

I managed to remove this from the wall when they dragged me out and took me to the airport, she said.

I held it up to what little light there was emanating from the orange lantern beside us. I could make out a small child, who appeared to be of a darkish complexion, and was dressed in a sailor suit. He had a dummy in his mouth.

Paul, she said, looks a lot like you. He’s just over two years old and is in a state-run orphanage in Moscow.

I insisted on him coming with me when they suddenly took me out of jail to fly me here. I screamed, wouldn’t let go of the car doors, refused to get on the plane without him. Their explanations didn’t interest me–that the deal was being done simultaneously in a number of places around the world and that there was no way of delaying my departure. They put me on the plane by force. Handcuffed.

The representatives of the Red Cross promised me that they would take care of whatever procedure was involved and that the minute I wanted to I could take him. The minute we want to, my darling, and that’s now, isn’t it?

Paul, I wept, kissing the photograph, and Anna held my head and rested it on her slender shoulder.

THE ILLUMINATED SIGN above the terminal welcomed Gadi to Beirut International Airport. He had opted not to bring the passport he had used the last time – the one with the valid visa – because he had no way of knowing how seriously the authorities had investigated the events of the previous year, and whether his name appeared on some blacklist. He figured he wouldn’t have any real trouble passing through as long as the visa clerk, the border officer or the customs officer didn’t have an especially good memory.

He moved forwards with the other passengers from the Alitalia flight from Rome, mostly Lebanese, with some Italians and a smattering of businessmen from other countries. As usual, the businessmen hurried to the front, but Gadi hung back with the tourists. Wearing a jacket with no tie – he had taken it off in the plane after observing the other passengers – and carrying only hand-luggage, he looked like something between a well-to-do tourist and an informal businessman, an image that suited him.

The renovated terminal was sparkling clean and nearly empty; the duty-free shopkeepers stood in the doorways of their shops watching the thin column of travellers pass by. Gadi rode an escalator up to the second floor, to the visa window. Peering over the heads of two Finnish backpackers he could see the very clerk who had checked his visa on his last trip to Beirut.

While it is true that the level of fear decreases with the number of trips an operative makes, it is also true that the fear never entirely disappears. Gadi’s subordinates were surprised to learn, when he spoke to them about justifiable fears and how to deal with them, that even he got butterflies in his stomach. It would be inhuman not to feel fear as you disembark on enemy territory, knowing, as you approach say, the border officer, that if something goes wrong you’re in huge trouble.

What helped Gadi lower his level of fear was the knowledge that he was lying, smuggling, and using false documents all for the good of his country. It wasn’t that he was a liar: he was lying for a cause. He was an emissary. But now he couldn’t hide behind that logic; he was lying to his own country, too, entering an enemy state without permission and about to carry out a mission that no one had approved.

Suddenly he felt anxious about what he’d taken on. What if his calculations were wrong? What if he’d been mistaken in thinking the right way to act was to reach Ronen and convince him to come home? How had he dared to take on such responsibility, to play with the destiny of an entire nation? So much was in the balance here. Who did he think he was anyway, Superman? He wasn’t even James Bond.

The tourist in front of him had finished. The clerk motioned him forwards.

“Good evening,” Gadi said as he handed him his passport and the fee.

The clerk looked him over, flipped through the pages of his passport, then looked up at Gadi again.

“First time in Lebanon?” he asked in a low voice.

Gadi answered that it was, and smiled. The expression on the clerk’s face – a mixture of disbelief and an attempt at remembering – disappeared as quickly as it had appeared. His eyebrows arched momentarily into an expression that said, so be it, and he took the dollars and stuck the visa into the passport. Gadi thanked him and moved along to passport control.

One of the officers looked completely unfamiliar to him, so Gadi stood in his line. The two Finnish women were ahead of him again, poring over a small map of Beirut.

“Do you need help?” Gadi asked, smiling.

“We’re only staying in the city for one night,” answered one.

“Need a hotel recommendation?”

“We booked a room over the Internet, at the Intercontinental.”

The officer motioned the Finns forward. They were stamped through immediately. Gadi approached the counter.

“I’ll meet you downstairs,” he called after them, smiling at them and at the officer all at once as he handed over his passport.

The officer compared the photo on the passport to Gadi, located the visa and stamped it.

“Have a pleasant stay, Mr…” he glanced at the passport, “…Ford.”

Gadi moved on, traces of a smile still on his face. He didn’t have a clue how he managed the transformation. Not that he found it particularly difficult to smile, but it still surprised him that it was easy for him to do so in the line of duty. He’d been weak at manipulations, acting and pretending in the training course; let him fight, man a stakeout, tail a target any day, just don’t make him lie. But time had had its effect on him.

Gadi descended to the bottom floor of the terminal, to the Hertz counter, and rented a Ford Mondeo with only a few hundred miles on the milometer. The car-hire agent walked him to the car.

“Here in Beirut I need to explain to you exactly how to travel, since there are some very dangerous neighbourhoods,” he said.

“That’s okay, I’ll manage,” Gadi told him as he slid his suitcase onto the passenger’s seat and sat down behind the wheel.

“Are you familiar with Beirut?” the Hertz agent asked.

Gadi started the engine. “A city’s a city. I know lots of cities.” He smiled and drove off.

The agent mumbled to himself with genuine concern, “But there are… it’s dangerous…”

Gadi had a strange feeling cruising the main street of Beirut on the way to Abu-Khaled’s office. He noticed the new buildings that had sprung up, but still it seemed as though nothing much had changed in the year that had passed since he last patrolled these streets. He recalled his very first time in Beirut, more than ten years earlier, when everything had seemed unfamiliar to him. Operatives loved working out the puzzle that was a city; it was true, a city’s a city. Or to be more specific, the cities of each region resemble one another: European cities almost always have a ring road, pedestrian zones in the centre, and a cathedral, court and town hall near an old castle. Arab cities have a central souk, wide boulevards that bisect the city and are dotted with government buildings and hotels, and a refugee camp on the outskirts.