Mishka Ben-David - Forbidden Love in St. Petersburg

My father was the last to employ Thai workers in his fields and he only agreed to do it when my mother–a country girl with no illusions–proved to him with the aid of dry numbers that without their help there was no chance of us keeping the farm. By then the caravans that were home to the Thai workers outnumbered the residences of the villagers themselves. During daylight hours the Thais were the only people to be seen in the village streets and in its fields.

In my mind I could link my father’s physical decline to his childhood experiences. But I couldn’t explain my mother’s sudden deterioration. She was the daughter of Galilee farmers who gave up the green of her childhood landscape when she too joined the army group in the Arava where she met my father. To me she was a deeply-rooted tree whose leaves never withered. I associated her with this verse from Jeremiah as soon as I first read it, recalling the great love with which she nurtured the fruit trees in our garden which she planted immediately after we moved from the encampment to the village proper. In family albums of that period I appear first as a child of about three helping her to water the trees and then, when I was a bit older, helping to prune and pick their fruit. The trees still yielded their sweet crops at a time when, as if contrary to nature itself, she herself began to wither away before my very eyes.

In the midst of all this I received the second phone call from Rafi. A group linked to Al-Qaida which had already been organizing itself for a year in a region where the borders of China, Laos and Vietnam converge, was planning a terror attack on Israeli tourists. Approaches by the Americans had failed to spur the local governments to act and I was given the task of making that happen.

We toured the various villages we’d been directed to go to by our intelligence services, getting looks of surprise from farmers up to their knees in their rice fields. As we passed by, female farmers dressed in colourful traditional costumes abandoned the potato fields and hurriedly took their children indoors. In the narrow pathways of the village, vegetable vendors stood up after hours of squatting and offered us their produce, while farmers on their way to market lowered the long pole on which two heavily laden baskets were suspended to make room for us to get through.

While travelling through the region inhabited by various minorities in northern Vietnam, we made an overnight stop in Sapa–a major centre for backpackers. At the entrance to the village, in a stone-built two-storey hotel, we located a vehicle with a number plate that had come up during a briefing from our intelligence people about the group linked to Al-Qaida. In the middle of the night we placed a small quantity of explosives in a suitcase in the boot of the car, and connected the fuse mechanism to the ignition with an electrical wire that would burn itself up. By morning we were in Hanoi where we mingled with the thousands of sweating tourists in the city’s old quarter around the lake.

The explosion triggered when the car’s engine was turned on injured the vehicle’s occupants and brought out the police. From their initial check, they believed that devices in the suitcase had accidentally exploded. The group’s members were arrested, and at long last the desired investigation got underway.

Perhaps you’ll leave the service and that will be that? Orit said when I returned. After such a long period at home I had to tell her the details of this trip and hoped that she would appreciate the fact that in line with my decision, the members of the cell had only been lightly injured. But she didn’t think that was OK and wasn’t at all interested in ‘such games of cops and robbers that could end badly’.

I have an agreement with them, Or, I said. I don’t violate agreements. I can’t leave.

Buy back what they’ve paid you, tuition fees and salary over the past two years. Enough’s enough. You have a farm to run, I have an office, we are both busy from morning till night and in between we have the child project.

I won’t do it, Or, I said again. We have another four years to go before the contract ends. Let’s try and get through that time as best we can.

But Orit refused to yield and barricaded herself behind a wall of silence.

MY PERIOD OF study had ended and with a heavy heart I returned to the service. Rafi understood my need to be with Orit for a certain number of days every month and even agreed to the office funding the cost of a nurse to replace me and administer her daily dose of injections. So far as your father’s farm is concerned, that’s a problem you’ll have to solve yourself, Rafi told me; we can’t help you with that.

This I did with the assistance of Yehiel, a farmer from the centre of the country who’d gone bust. Yehiel ran the farm well. We also got the go-ahead to employ a foreign carer for my father whose condition continued to deteriorate.

Our home was less well maintained. Orit invested all her energy in her successful architectural office, greeted me with indifference whenever I got back from Tel-Aviv–a journey of almost three hours–and with a frown whenever I returned from abroad.

These trips became increasingly frequent. As time went by I was put in command of more and more complex missions and an ever larger number of men. This growing burden of responsibility provided me with a good excuse to escape from what was happening at home. The passion and love that we had once known had given way to momentary expressions of kindness. What little sex was purely mechanical, engaged in merely to avoid reaching ovulation with stale sperm.

I won’t be able to go on like this for four more years, Orit said to me once when the topic came up. And if you don’t care about me, at least think about your parents. They’re reaching the end of their days and when they are gone you’ll be full of remorse.

On three occasions during the year after my return to the service I was about to raise the issue of my job with Rafi and each time missions important enough to postpone the discussion cropped up. The first involved an operation to prevent an anti-aircraft missile being fired at a plane belonging to the Israel charter company Sun D’Or, which had started to operate a weekly flight from Tel Aviv to the Seychelles. The combination of virgin forests, sandy white beaches, and the clear turquoise waters of the Indian Ocean, attracted a mass of Israeli tourists–deep-sea divers, lovers of nature, or simply people who enjoyed idling their time away. The islands had also become a highly suitable location for terrorist activity. We had no intelligence infrastructure set up there, and no clue as to how and when the terrorist group was planning to attack, or the identity of its members. All we knew was that it existed.

To me this appeared to be mission impossible. The international airport was located on the big island of Mahé. The lengthy landing strip was just off the shore at the foot of a high wooded mountainside. In the crystal clear waters on the other side of the airport were a number of smaller islands with hotels right on the beach. How could one possibly prevent a group of determined terrorists firing a missile from the woods on the mountainside or from one of the cabins on the waterfront?

In the recent past, the Seychelles had been a British colony. The current administration, however, was unstable and could be of no help to us. A yacht, hired in Zanzibar, sailed the thousand nautical miles eastwards and smuggled in the weaponry we needed. The local language, Seychellois Creole, sounded like broken French to us, a remnant of an earlier period when the islands were ruled by France, but even the French speakers among us realized that it was more effective to talk to the locals in English.