Mishka Ben-David - Forbidden Love in St. Petersburg

I believed that things would happen when they were meant to happen. But Orit didn’t want to wait for the natural outcome. In addition to ultrasound tests, she also had a hyperoscopy of her womb, which turned out to be especially painful, and again nothing untoward was found. There was no blockage of the fallopian tubes nor was there any problem with the thickness of the lining of the womb.

We have to pay more attention to finding out when I am fertile, Orit said, and began using ovulation test kits. A positive meant that we had twenty-four hours to fertilize the egg before it died. I would get a phone call in the office and, to the extent possible, cancel scheduled meetings or training sessions for the rest of the day. I would then hurry home for sex that was purposeful, at times even fiery, depending on what it was that I had cancelled. If I happened to be abroad on such days I would get angry with the work I’d chosen, with the geographical area I’d picked–too far to dash back home for a day–and angry with HQ for defining practically every mission as ‘vital’.

And sometimes, when the mission really was imperative and linked to preventing Iran, Lebanon, or Syria from being armed with non–conventional weapons, or preventing a terrorist attack–I would get angry with her frustration, then with her, then with myself and finally angry again with the work I was doing.

I explained the situation to my CO and got permission to fly home when the chances of her becoming pregnant were high. But from the Far East it took me at least twenty-four hours to book a flight, get to the nearest international airport and fly home, by which time it was already too late.

In order to give me adequate notice, Orit had extra ultrasound tests every month that projected the development of her ovarian cells so we knew the timing of the next ovulation. This way, I managed on a number of occasions over the next year to arrive in Israel on time. But still there was no pregnancy.

Come in, I’m ready and waiting, was Orit’s standard greeting at the entrance to our house. The loving glint of blue was not visible in her eyes, nor could I see that guarded smile on her lips. We didn’t kiss or play with each other’s tongues. Orit undressed and expected me to undress myself. Then she lay on her back in a provocative position but dispensed with pleasuring ‘Magic’ or me.

She groaned, yet that deep ‘Oi’ of hers was no longer really audible and I suspected that her moans were intended only to speed up my coming into her. When I rose slightly and left her the space to pleasure ‘Magic’ by herself, she dispensed with that too, wrapped her long legs around me and after I’d come wouldn’t let me move as she fought for every drop of sperm that might otherwise seep out. The quivering and contractions that could have helped take it all in simply didn’t happen.

Only then, when she was sure that her ‘work’ was done, did she let go and allow her body to unwind. And only then, as long as she wasn’t too angry or too tensed up, did she agree to stay in my arms, and let me stroke her back as she nestled her head between my shoulders. I no longer asked her to open her eyes just a little to see that extraordinary blue, nor did I expect her to show an interest in the place I’d been to. I knew she was busy planning the next act of procreation. That’s what it was all about, love wasn’t really any longer part of the picture.

There was one occasion when I couldn’t get back, and that was to be my second kill, this time in Seoul. The target was a Hezbollah activist planning a suicide bombing against the Israeli embassy in South Korea. I was angry with myself and the situation. According to Levanon the target was also the object of my fury. At my request, Levanon was, once more, my number two.

This time I had fewer personal qualms about the target. The man, Rashid Nuri, had already planned a series of terror attacks against the IDF in Lebanon and against Jewish institutions all over the world. Some of them materialized and resulted in quite a few victims. In Thailand, the truck bomb he’d organized didn’t reach the embassy only because, miraculously, it got involved in a traffic accident.

Through an agent in the West Bank, intelligence was able to identify Nuri’s phone number, but we needed Micha’s skills to locate it. The Koreans are a friendly people and wanted to help. The baby-faced Micha went into the first post office he saw and was told that all numbers beginning with 925 were in one area in the southern part of the city. At the second post office he entered in that area of town, he told them he had arranged to meet a friend on the corner of the street he lived in but had forgotten its name and that the friend had already left the house. The post office gave him the name of the street matching the phone number. Immediately afterwards when ‘the friend was obviously already on his way home’, Micha also got the house number ‘even though strictly speaking we are not allowed to pass on such information’.

It was an old, dilapidated neighbourhood, very different from Seoul’s glitteringly modern downtown area. Nuri wasn’t the only Arab at the address. From a parked car, we photographed everyone leaving the building and sent the photos to Israel; our agents who had infiltrated Hezbollah were then activated and we got a positive identification on one of the individuals, a bearded balding man in his forties. After twenty-four hours of trailing him, it transpired that Nuri spent all his days in a Mosque except for lunch. To eat, he left the Mosque accompanied by a group of friends who looked very much like him. In the evening, as darkness fell, he slipped out of the Mosque and, alone, made his way to the red light district of Seoul, an area of dingy alleyways in the old part of the city where the only illumination came from the lanterns above the entrances to the brothels. Getting away from there was easy; within just a few minutes you could disappear into the town’s centre or get onto the highway leading to the airport.

At this stage, the plan of action was clear. It so happened that this was also the day on which Orit got in touch to tell me that she would apparently be ovulating within a day or two. Even without getting in touch with HQ it was obvious to me that I couldn’t possibly leave before the mission was completed. According to the intelligence we’d received, the job of getting the truck bomb ready was almost done and it could be on its way any day now.

I knew that if I was to consult Udi, the calm and fatherly head of the planning division was likely to release me. Levanon could carry out the mission without me and in a place as isolated as this, any member of the team could be the number two. In fact, this option, which I rejected, filled me with a huge sense of frustration. You don’t leave an operation at this stage, that’s clear. But neither do you leave your wife at a time like this. More than feeling like Nuri’s executioner, I felt I was my own judge and jury.

Cursing, I booked a flight for the following morning in the hope that by then we would have completed the mission. But Nuri didn’t leave the Mosque that evening.

I postponed the flight for a day. Orit told me she was ovulating and that as far as she was concerned if I didn’t get there in the next twenty-four hours I could stay where I was for another month. I swore at whoever I could, mainly at myself, and, of course, stayed put. In my eyes, this decision was no different from the decision to shift the ambush on that last night of reserve duty in Lebanon. And there was as much pain attached to it as there was lying for forty-eight hours on top of thorny shrubs on a rocky ledge. There are pains that you have to grin and bear.