Mishka Ben-David - Forbidden Love in St. Petersburg

He looked at me for a moment and saw no reaction because I didn’t feel anything.

The direction in which Russia is moving is not helpful to us. The Russian government is beginning to position itself as the polar opposite of the US and in a fairly consistent way supports whoever the US opposes and vice versa. This can be seen in Russia’s backing of Iran’s nuclear reactor in Bushehr and the building of small nuclear plants in other Muslim states. This trend is likely to continue. In some of the Republics of the former Soviet Union there is an evidence of strong Iranian influence, so much so that they have become its satellites and can serve as terror bases. I’m not talking about the ones that already have nuclear missiles. You know about those from personal experience–a reference to my operation in Kazakhstan.

Again, he looked at me and I was still waiting for the bottom line. He certainly wasn’t intending that I respond to his strategic analysis, particularly given that his forecasts on Syria and Lebanon had materialized in the past few years and had been widely praised.

In your previous work you went on numerous brief trips. The attempt to station you in China also proved to be short-lived. Now we want you to go to Russia for a number of years. Settle in, establish a trading company, begin to make import and export deals and in that way move around and get to know the country and its satellite states.

The FSB–the KGB’s successor–inherited its predecessor’s suspicion of foreigners. So the plan is that for the first year or two you’ll busy yourself with entirely innocent commercial activities. We won’t bounce you to any other country, and you won’t be given any operational missions. We would also want you to leave the place as little as possible.

That, from my point of view, won’t be a problem, I said.

After the week of mourning for my father, my mother rapidly went totally downhill and stopped communicating with those around her. She didn’t respond to me at all. Apart from her, there was no one else in the world I cared about. I also didn’t have a home I wanted to be in or could be in. Yehiel suggested buying my parents’ farm and when I agreed to sell, my last tie to the village was severed.

Russia–for me a complete mystery, but a country whose poetry I loved–suddenly seemed to be a possible refuge. I remembered Orit’s saying ‘a change of place a change of luck’.

You’ll also be able to rest there, the head of the Mossad said. You won’t have to earn a living from your dealings, of course. And it seems to me that you really are in need of a long rest.

So perhaps a set up in Barbados or Jamaica?

Again, he laughed, though once more I wasn’t joking. Then he stood up signalling that the meeting was over. As he accompanied me to the door, his hand tapping me on the shoulder in encouragement, he asked, so am I to understand that we’ve agreed?

Agreed, I heard myself saying.

ATHIN DAWN coloured the clouds beneath the aircraft’s wings during the long flight from Montreal to Saint Petersburg–the way the city’s name was assiduously pronounced by the employees of the Canadian airline company. From my window seat I gazed as if hypnotized at the narrow strip of colour that began to emerge out of the blackness. The evening meal had already been served, the cabin lights switched off, and the passengers, their flat bed seats fully extended, covered themselves up and got into their sleeping positions for the flight. Here and there the light of a laptop computer flickered in the dark.

As befits a Canadian businessman, I travelled business class with its luxurious seat-cum-bed making the tedium of the long journey so much more bearable. The break of day was also helpful. At first I didn’t realize that what I was seeing was the dawn. Across the width of my window a dark blue streak emerged from the dusk, a ribbon visible enough against the blackness above it but too dark to colour the layer of clouds below–a mass I only noticed when the blue streak turned to purple and an hour later to orange. Then it widened a little. Above it the skies remained pitch black, while beneath, a layer of clouds resembling flocks of sheep that stretched from the plane’s underbelly to the horizon, was being dragged slowly backwards.

I could feel a slight quiver of excitement in my stomach. Perhaps excitement isn’t exactly the right word. I felt a sense of expectancy, an anticipation of something that remained undefined but carried with it the certainty that what lay ahead would be different from the past I had left behind.

I once read that live multi-cellular organisms were discovered in the depths of icebergs; right there, in the kingdom of ice, the conditions enabling these organisms to form and develop were found to exist. So it may also be that at the bottom of the iceberg that was my soul the conditions existed for a creature of expectation, even of hope, to be spawned. It too was undefined, but powerful, twisting and turning in my stomach.

The sea of cotton-like clouds below was being painted in shades of orange, pink, and yellow. Threads of blue also sneaked their way into the dark azure of the sky which became increasingly bright as the moment of the sun’s appearance drew nearer and nearer. Like a dreamer, I gazed at this celestial beauty, a beauty not visible to earth dwellers below the layer of clouds.

My mind was a blank. For the first time I was on a mission with operational orders limited to just one page, no mention of forces, tasks or stages. Land in Petersburg, settle in to a hotel, locate an apartment, find an office. Your budget for settling in is such and such. Start making business contacts in Russia and beyond, with a focus on the former Republics of the Soviet Union. Within that area concentrate on the Muslim countries. As to your security: Don’t form close social or intimate relationships…

I was alone, no one was waiting for me at the airport and no one expected a briefing from me in the coming days.

Ariel, HQ’s man who from now on was to be my controller, had arrived at my hotel in Montreal to bid me farewell. I gave an explanation of the company I’d opened and of the service office from which a secretary would answer the phone in the firm’s name and take messages which she would forward to my email address. As per our standard procedure I’d added Ariel as a signatory to the company bank account, for any set of circumstances that might arise.

He asked how I was feeling ahead of the new mission and I asked, what mission? It took a moment or so for him to let out a quick and forced laugh.

Well, after Zaif, Rashid Nuri, Mustafa Quader, Schultz, and Fayyad, for you, perhaps, this is not a real mission. And there were also, of course, the Kazakhstani drivers and the cell in the Seychelles, he added.

Ariel wasn’t an historian of the Mossad and the organization’s agents don’t, as a rule, memorize the legacy of its liquidations. His reminiscences about all the operations in which I had killed someone–a handful out of hundreds of missions, mostly intelligence-related, in which I had taken part during my fifteen years in the organization–was not unplanned. It was clear to me that he’d been armed with this information in case I showed signs of trying to dodge the mission. With the steely subtlety by which the office holds on to its personnel–something I would have much experience of in the future–he suggested that we were blood brothers, that we were linked by the sort of powerful bonds that must not be broken.

At that time I had no intention of severing these ties or of settling down in Canada. Having sold my parents’ farm and received my half of the value of the house in which Orit remained, I already had sufficient funds to buy myself out of my contract if that’s what I’d wanted to do. The beautiful cities of Montreal and Toronto were, indeed, part of my past. In those distant times of innocence and happiness these were the places in which I set up my cover story as an Indo-Canadian. But now these cities belonged to bygone days I so wanted to forget.