Mishka Ben-David - Forbidden Love in St. Petersburg

But I was in turmoil. I had given two contradictory commitments, one to my employers and one to my lover. I could live with only one of them. And I knew which one that would be.

Anna got up to take a shower, leant towards me again, and kissed my forehead.

Don’t be so serious, you look almost gloomy, she smiled somewhat sadly and disappeared into the small cubicle.

It was as clear to me as was the daylight streaming through the window that I’d be unable to admit to her that I’d lied. Acknowledging the truth was something I couldn’t bring myself to do. She wouldn’t be able to cope with it, our relationship wouldn’t be able to cope with it. If I chose her, the only way open to me was to make my cover story the real story of my life. To make the lie a truth. The only truth Annushka was aware of.

My body was already shivering from the cold. Then a blast of freezing air blew in from a duct above the double windows Anna had flung open, and an even more powerful shudder rose from deep inside me.

IN MEASURED STEPS I made my way from the metro station to my office on Liteyny Prospekt, leaving behind me heavy footprints on the soft sheet of snow. As I walked, I drafted in my mind a number of possible letters to HQ. So preoccupied was I with this task that I even forgot to take my usual precautions along the route to ensure that I wasn’t being tailed.

Dear friends, my moment of truth has arrived, I wrote in my head. What I thought would never happen to me after the experience with Orit which you know about, has happened: I have fallen in love again. This is a love between two forty-year-old adults, a profound love. I don’t think I will have another such chance and I don’t intend to give this one up. I understand the implications and I understand that I have to choose. It’s a difficult choice but, in the end, not an impossible one, and I’m making it.

And I began another letter by saying–intending to soften them up–you have been my home for a decade and a half; you gave me direction and purpose, trust and training, help and support. Just as your ad promised, you were not merely a workplace but a home and a way of life. For this way of life I paid, as you well know, a high price, and living alone, as I am, in this inhospitable, distant land, it is a price I am still paying. And what can happen in such situations of extreme loneliness, and has probably happened to many others, has also happened to me. I have met a woman.

As these thoughts raced through my mind, I began to realize how genuine they were. I became conscious of how much I loved–and still love–this organization that turned me into a professional almost against my will; that enabled me to make a unique contribution to my country, the like of which only a few can make; that demonstrated concern for me from my first day of training as an operative; was at my side, supportive and considerate, throughout my difficult times with Orit, and lifted me off the floor after the separation. So was my choice really so clear-cut?

I tossed these thoughts around in my head as I walked down the street. I paid no attention to the old houses renovated in a variety of pleasing colours, or to the Lutheran church and its green domes, or the Japanese garden in the middle of the street. I didn’t even glance at the menacing building that was once the district court–marked as such in the map that I’d had when I rented the office–and which I only later discovered was home to the Federal Security Bureau, the FSB, the successor to the KGB…

I’d set up the offices of my trading company in an old building at the quieter end of Liteyny Prospekt, close to the river. An unpretentious building that didn’t attract any particular attention and that housed about a dozen other offices. The only traces of its grand past were large columns at the front, the marble slabs covering its outer walls, and the smell of old wood that lingered inside. I climbed the old staircase to the third floor and entered my office. Although the building’s old and constant heating system worked, the little heat that came from it was lost to its high ceilings. I was burning inside so I didn’t feel the cold and didn’t turn on the electric heater.

Once a week I sent a message to a certain electronic address. The message was disguised as a business email and the receiver was invited to participate in a forthcoming tender. In reality, the message was to inform the Mossad’s Tel Aviv HQ that at my end everything was OK. On only a few occasions since settling into my office had I used the special software program that scrambled the text and enabled me to send secret communications. The first time I’d used it was to send a detailed report on how my relocation was proceeding, my address, a description of the apartment I had rented on Moskovsky Prospekt, and of the office on Liteyny Prospekt. Later on I’d received special instructions via this channel and also used it to send reports at the end of my various missions. Now I set up the program again, perhaps for the last time.

The program signalled that I could begin writing. First I had to write the cover letter that would appear if someone tried to retrieve what I had written. Then I keyed in my password and started typing the letter to HQ–which even I wouldn’t see as the cover letter remained on the screen. Given my mood, this included a squabble with a firm whose tender I had once failed to win. Each character I now keyed in appeared in a bold font in the cover letter so that I was able to see the exact point up to which I could write.

Sitting facing the computer, the words I composed as I was walking disappeared from my mind.

Re: An Acquaintance, I wrote finally. The restaurant where I usually eat in the evening is also frequented by a single woman. We got to talk. She is a widow and owns a bookshop. The relationship became closer and last night I slept in her apartment. We are both interested in continuing the relationship and it’s my intention to do so. I shall, of course, maintain my cover. For your information.

And that was it. Not for ‘your approval’ but also not ‘this is the last communication between us’. The remainder of the words in the cover letter remained un-bolded. And in my heart I could also feel a big void. I was shivering again. I touched my brow. I was burning up with a fever. How on earth had I allowed such a dilemma into my life?

ISET UP the ambush on a rocky stretch of terraced scrubland about thirty metres above a winding road along which a Hezbollah convoy was expected to travel on its way from Tyre to villages further south.

On the second day of our reserve duty we were briefed by an intelligence officer while still in the assembly zone. Every night small convoys, sometimes no more than two vehicles loaded with weapons and explosives, manage to sneak in and resupply Hezbollah fighters in the south. Our objective, added the battalion commander, is to stop them from feeling secure and being able to move at night. Currently the situation is the opposite of what we want it to be: we are holed up in our outposts, and the night belongs to them. So, during this stint of reserve duty you’ll barely be seeing the inside of an outpost. You’ll spend three nights in ambush, then to Metulla to rest a bit and regroup, and back again for another three-night spell of lying in wait. That much I’m sure you can cope with.

My men looked at me, clearly astonished. Someone must have lost his mind. Three whole days in ambush? Who on earth do they think we are, an elite reconnaissance unit? Even as young paratroop conscripts we didn’t have to do anything like that and certainly not now when we are in the reserves for only a month every year. But in reading their expressions I knew they were also thinking something else; that I was new to being a company commander and wouldn’t be going to war with my superiors over this issue.