Mishka Ben-David - Forbidden Love in St. Petersburg

And it’s only now, they’d be bound to ask, that you’ve remembered to report it? Did you really consider it so trivial that it didn’t warrant even a mention in your weekly briefings?

Being reprimanded didn’t bother me. But what if they say no?

THIS WAS MY first experience of waking up in Anna’s apartment and I was surprised by the sense of tranquillity that enveloped me. It seemed as if I’d always been there, as if this was my natural habitat. This was also the first time I’d seen her bedroom in daylight. On the few occasions we’d been there together at night, Anna had turned off the lights and asked me to leave before dawn.

Like the kitchen, the modest living room, and the cramped toilet and shower areas, Anna’s bedroom was typical of such small apartments in an old high-rise residential block. There was no trace in these buildings–erected during the 1950s and 60s–of the city’s beauty, the magnificence of its bridges, palaces and squares, or even of the imposing neo-classical residential structures of Stalin’s era. Khrushchevist buildings, Anna called them, making me acutely aware of the differences between my apartment and hers. In the pale light filtering through the heavy curtains, I could see plaster peeling off the corners of the ceiling and blackening wallpaper beneath the window sill, evidence of seeping rain. The beautiful woman at my side and the wretched apartment she lived in were no match for each other.

Our clothes were strewn across the well-worn, wooden floor in the narrow area between the bed, the wardrobe, and the front door. A few landscapes, the figure of Jesus on the cross, and the empty space where the picture of her husband had been hanging, all looked down on me from the wall. Though I hadn’t stirred, Anna opened her eyes just moments after I had woken. I let the feelings of closeness and domesticity gently caress my temples. Anna turned towards me, her black hair with its sprinkling of grey slid over her brow, almost masking her face.

For a moment I held my breath. I knew that the first response to seeing me, a stranger in the bed she had shared for years with her husband, would be the most genuine reaction I could hope for. Anna brushed aside the strands of hair over her eyes. For a moment they were still bleary but then from deep inside her came a new light that made them sparkle once again.

My love, she said, using a phrase that could only sound so alluring in the Russian she spoke. Lyubimy moi , my love, the words resonated as if from an old song. Her eyes filled with tears as she quickly snuggled up and hugged me.

There were tears in my eyes too. I hadn’t cried when saying goodbye to my parents on the morning I enlisted as a paratrooper, or when I lost friends in battle and later when I lost men serving under me. Nor were there tears after my first ‘kill’ serving in the ranks of the Mossad, nor after those that followed. I’d hardly cried at all during the last few difficult years that Orit and I lived through. Instead of each tear that should have been shed, another droplet of calcified rock was added to the stalagmite growing inside me.

Now I could feel the rock crumbling and giving way to something else, an upsurge of quiet love, reassuring and yet at the same time new and exciting.

Instead of ‘my Annushka’ what came out of my mouth was a sigh. Despite not knowing or being able to know anything about it, Anna appeared to understand exactly what the sigh was meant to express and perhaps even the pain that preceded it. For her, at least I thought so at the time, I was Paul, a Canadian businessman of Indian extraction who was separated from his wife and had chosen a new life in a place where the prospect of making money seemed promising.

You’re going to stay with me, right? she asked, lifting her head from my shoulder and fixing her almond eyes on me–eyes that in the soft morning light and through a film of tears shone like emeralds. And you’ll never ever, ever, leave, right?

I kept silent. What could I say? That my life didn’t belong to me but to an intelligence service that she’d probably never heard of? That I was tied to a faraway, hot country that was the complete opposite of everything here in this cold, magnificent city? That the man she was falling in love with wasn’t, in fact, a quiet, amiable Canadian businessman of average height who had even managed to develop a smallish paunch since he’d stopped working out? That instead, her lover was a retired Mossad hitman, who along the way had also wiped out his own life? That beneath the already noticeable pot belly there is–was–a six-pack of abs, and that his seemingly gentle fingers had pulled the trigger more than once? And that the brown eyes she said were so kind became unmerciful at the sight of the terrified faces of the enemy?

What could I tell her? That everything I’d said till now was a lie? A legend, as we euphemistically called it at the Agency, but which for her was nothing but a lie?

Then an even more painful thought flashed through my mind. I was the one living a lie. For Annushka it’s the truth and it’s me who’s having to live with a constantly churning gut. It’s me who’s been forced–for the second time in my life–to lie to the woman I love. And if Orit–a down-to-earth woman from the Arava desert in southern Israel–hadn’t been able to take it, what chance had I with Anna?

She looked into my eyes with a mixture of curiosity, suspicion and apprehension. I still hadn’t answered her. It seemed to me that she was closely reading every movement of my pupils and through them looking into the very depths of my soul. Her gaze hardened and suddenly seemed remote.

At a loss for words, I hugged her and once more rested her face on my shoulder. I couldn’t bear her stare, that questioning look in her expectant eyes. Nor could I bring myself to lie–not to the first woman who’d restored the hope, long since abandoned, of love returning to my life.

But Anna broke free from my embrace and looked at me with that piercing glare of hers. She had meant every word. Perhaps, like me, she’d finally met someone who could fill her days and nights and be the love of the rest of her life.

Suddenly I heard myself saying, I am here to stay, Annushka.

But the look in her eyes gave no sign of rekindled hope.

I am staying with you, and no, I will never leave, never, ever, I said.

From beyond the mists of time, a distant memory from another life flashed through my mind. I remembered a similar promise made to Orit and not kept. And now, even more than then, powerful forces that I wasn’t sure I could handle stood between me and the keeping of that promise. But this time I was prepared at least to face up to them.

Anna showered me with kisses. We made love again and again. At first it was as if each of us was implanting our oath of allegiance deeply inside the other. Again I was surprised that this lovely face belonged to such a wild body whose softness and whiteness turned out to be so misleading; astonished once more by the full buttocks, the firm thighs, the ample, pendulous breasts, and the nipples which hardened and produced such waves of inexhaustible energy in me. She rose above me, moving up and down, forwards and backwards, asking, demanding more and more, her face a mixture of effort, desire, pain, and, at the same time, sublime pleasure. Again and again, together with her rapid breathing, came fragmented words and groans. And when it seemed that it was over, she rested for a moment and then began once more until suddenly she stopped. Enough, the spasms are going all the way to my head, I can’t anymore, she said, embracing me with a joyful smile.

Having let go of the reserve we had maintained till then, we now made love again, gently and pleasurably, reminiscent, in a way, of the caution of our first encounters. But this time it wasn’t bashfulness and uncertainty that was controlling us, but rather a sense of serenity, confidence and love, a love that was destined to endure. What a long way we’d come since that first, hesitant, and unsuccessful time, after which I was sure that Anna wouldn’t ever want to see me again.