Mishka Ben-David - Forbidden Love in St. Petersburg

Yes, there is something magical about Montreal, I said. During my childhood I went there with my parents and also visited Quebec city, the capital, with its citadel and impressive ramparts, and many other cities as well. But when I got to Montreal as an eighteen year old, a young student, I fell in love with it.

Tell me more, I want to know with whom and how you fall in love, she smiled at me.

For some reason I felt that I had to go into detail, that I had to set Anna’s mind at rest. The earlier brushing up of my cover story enabled me to do this.

I remember my first tour of the city exactly, I said, gazing to one side as if recollecting the visit, avoiding her piercing look and the need to lie directly to her face. I was a young man who’d just left the family home. I rented a room in Cumberland Street in Notre Dame, a lower-middle-class neighbourhood. It wasn’t particularly close to the university but it was an area where I could afford to pay the rent. I lived in the attic of a family whose children had already left home. The houses in the street were two-storeyed and small, red bricked–all in the same style and yet different from each other–with well-kept lawns and rows of colourful flowers at the front. I walked the length of the road with mixed feelings; sadness at having left my parents’ home, tinged with excitement about the move and the euphoria of a tourist on a trip abroad.

And since then being a tourist abroad is something that you love to do, Anna added, words of empathy that regained my direct attention.

My description to Anna of my first encounter with Montreal wasn’t that far off the truth. It was based on the legend I’d formulated in that city immediately after its inception in India fifteen years earlier, and since then I had indeed travelled a great deal.

I took the metro to the city centre, and got off at Côte-Sainte-Catherine station. These were the last days of summer twenty odd years ago, I told her, adjusting the dating to make it consistent with the age a student who hadn’t served in the army would be. On one side of the street was a young man playing the violin, a pouch at the ready for the dollars he was given by passers-by. A bit further ahead was a thin young girl playing the guitar, singing and tapping her foot, ringing small copper bells attached to her ankle. Crowds of people passed by the street’s huge shop windows and on every corner there were street painters drawing young women sitting in front of them. I stopped at Place Ville Marie crammed with youngsters sitting around the fountain in the middle of the piazza. Many others stood listening to a childrens’ orchestra, each child dressed in the red uniform of cadets from the fire fighting service. In line, waiting their turn, were a group of young naval recruits in blue uniforms, white berets, and gilded swords. When the reds left, the blues marched in and performed a number of amusing foot drills which were loudly clapped by the onlookers. To my great surprise almost all the navy cadets were black.

There too, Anna commented, only those who have nothing enlist in the army. It’s the same here. But go on, please, you’re a wonderful storyteller.

I remember continuing on to the old city, to Place Jacques-Cartier, a narrow elongated piazza between the two sides of an ancient paved roadway leading from the port to the hills behind the city. Horse-drawn carriages carrying tourists trundled along the paved upper area of the square which was also an assembly point for dozens of bikers. Further down there were loads of youngsters sunning themselves on a lawn, some bare chested, some with guitars, many feeding the pigeons walking at their feet. I felt as if I was in a film. And then, suddenly, the bells of the church pealed and I was shaken. I knew at that very moment that there was no way back for me to my parents’ farm.

Anna unexpectedly leant over and kissed me on the lips. With these last few words I’d described to her exactly how I felt when I reviewed my cover story before leaving for St Petersburg in the knowledge that there was no way back.

And you stayed there, in Montreal?

No, I replied. I felt like a stranger there. After my studies I moved to Toronto and throughout my marriage that is where I lived. It was only after the divorce that the urge to leave surfaced and I returned to Montreal. But it’s not a place for someone alone, I said, transposing my isolation in Tel Aviv to that of an English speaker in Montreal.

You went back to the love of your youth, Anna said. I can really imagine you, just eighteen, in the solitariness and magic of a foreign city. And now, twenty years later, you’re doing it again.

Twenty plus, I corrected her. Then I was a teenager with his entire life in front of him, Annushka.

Did you notice how, when we talk, we’re echoing the titles of a couple of books? O Henry and Émile Ajar, she smiled and squeezed my hand more firmly.

G’enry, she’d said, O G’enry and it took me a moment to understand the Russian pronunciation of O Henry’s name.

And now what? She looked at me encouragingly. Perhaps not all our life, but a big slice of it is still in front of us, isn’t it?

I liked the fact that she was talking about ‘us’. We sat facing each other, she on a sort of velvety sofa pushed up against a wall and I on a wooden chair. I moved to sit by her side on the sofa. We embraced and kissed each other for what seemed like an eternity. This time at your place? she asked, and I trembled. That’s it, Anna’s made up her mind. At least about one more night of love.

This time at my place, I said, concealing my excitement. And you’ll have to excuse the mess.

The life of a bachelor, Anna forgave me in advance.

With the money from the Mossad and the need to be seen as a relatively successful businessman, my apartment was a few notches better than Anna’s. The building itself, though crude and dreary, was nonetheless soundly built. In addition to its good location, the apartment was big, renovated, and well furnished. For a short while I felt uneasy about being ‘better off’ than her, and nervous about the untidiness. When Anna went to shower, I quickly tidied up the bedroom, straightening the bedcover despite knowing that it would, in any case, be thrown aside again pretty soon. I managed to stuff my scattered clothes into the wardrobe and arrange in one pile the American newspapers in the living room–my main source of information for what was happening in Israel. I placed the Toronto Star , which I got daily, at the top of the stack. Anna came out of the shower, wrapped in my bathrobe, her hair wet. Strange how a male dressing-gown makes the naked, wet body of the woman concealed inside so desirable. I reached for the robe’s belt as Anna asked, aren’t you going to have a shower?

I didn’t plan to but if you think I need to…

Leaving someone unsupervised in my home was against the most basic rules of caution. But with Anna my cover story somehow became an integral part of me. I turned into the young half-Indian who’d left Sainte-Agathe in Quebec for Montreal, who had nothing to hide, and was now doing business in St Petersburg. Besides, there wasn’t anything in my apartment that could incriminate me. What’s more, I trusted Anna. When I came out of the shower she was waiting for me in bed, under the cover. The bathrobe was draped over the back of the chair.

Do you mind putting out the light? she asked as she had done when we were in her apartment.

I slipped into bed beside her, into my bed, and this time was greeted by the smell of my shampoo from her hair and the scent of my soap from her body. The warm water had been good for both of us and we slowly enjoyed every inch of the other’s body. Her skin after the shower was soft and smooth, her breasts heavy and pleasing. This time Anna allowed me to go down to her thighs and pleasure her, the salty taste captivating me, as did the sound of her light sighs that could be heard as if coming from a distance. She also stroked my cock until she pleaded with me to come in to her. My excitement wasn’t what it had been the last time round but I was nonetheless still very aroused and when, after a short while Anna wanted us to change position I had to tell her that it was a bit late for that.