Mishka Ben-David - Forbidden Love in St. Petersburg

I felt that the time for this had come. Her silence about Mikhail was no doubt connected to his death, and she had, after all, said that it was a subject that would make her cry. Divorce is different.

I transposed the story of our lives from the Arava and Jerusalem to Toronto, and in carefully measured words I came close to telling the truth. All I did was to turn my travels into business trips. When I got to the bit about the fertility treatments, Anna tensed up. I told her first about the loss of spontaneity, when my wife’s temperature indicated an imminent ovulation and I would ‘hurry home from wherever I happened to be in Canada or the United States’, and about the monthly disappointments. I told her about the decision to try insemination and, further down the line, IVF. I talked about the hormone injection, the dashes to the hospital at the time of ovulation, the painful suction of the ova and the production of sperm, the days of tension when we barely spoke to each other, and then the disappointments. I gave her every detail but one: the occasion when a viable embryo had formed and when, by a cruel twist of fate, my wife had chosen that moment to separate from me and give up our possible parenthood. But I knew I was incapable of explaining this. I could not come up with any justification for such a decision. I didn’t think that after so many attempts at bringing a child into the world a woman would forgo a sound embryo–even if she was by then sick and tired of her husband. At the time, Orit’s reason didn’t make sense to me and my inventiveness was unable to come up with a similar argument. I was incapable of fabricating the sort of crime and its punishment that life had thrust upon me. The taking of life by me, the punishment for which was the taking of the life of my embryo.

But there was no need for that. Anna cried. At first soundlessly, just tears trickling down her face, then she pressed her head into my shoulders and sobbed. It was clear to me that this wasn’t a response to my story. She wasn’t crying for me. I hugged her in silence and only after a while did she tell me, her voice breaking, about abortions she’d had as an adolescent and then as a young woman, including one performed by an unqualified doctor which was particularly bloody. After that, she said, she didn’t think she’d ever be able to give birth.

Though we made love again that night it was the lovemaking of two utterly defeated people. Despite lasting for a long time it barely helped us to comfort ourselves. There was no joy in it. Even if our love was to overcome all the obstacles that my nefarious work placed in its path, I thought sadly, we would be doomed to live together as a childless couple.

Once again Anna asked me to leave before dawn, so that her neighbours wouldn’t see me.

To me this was a sign of her unwillingness to link her fate to mine. And what if she was willing to do so? What possible chance did I have of getting HQ’s permission to bring an unapproved local woman into my life? What would happen in three or four years’ time when my stay here came to an end and I would be told to return to Israel? What chance did I have of concealing my real work from her? And if she did know, would she stay with me? I didn’t want to, nor was I prepared to, conceal the truth from her. Not if we were to develop true bonds of love. I had already paid a high price for that.

So what do we do now? I was already dressed and the cab now on its way.

I think that perhaps it would be preferable if we didn’t meet again today, Anna said to me. The last couple of days have been too dizzying, too emotional and exciting. I feel as if I’m on a roller coaster. And please, don’t ring and don’t come here or to the shop. After I’ve had time to think, I’ll get in touch with you. OK, my love?

A blast of cold froze my limbs and not only because of the door I’d opened to the chilly night air. She hugged me and held me tightly with tears flowing down her face.

Enough, my Annushka. It’s difficult enough anyway, I said. I turned round and made my way down the stairs.

ANNA’S TIME AWAY from me lasted much longer than I expected it to. At first I felt as if was in mourning. The thought that she would, in the end, decide she didn’t want me was like a knife twisting and turning inside me, making it hard for me to breathe, turning my limbs into deadweights. I couldn’t live without her. After two, three and then four days, the idea that perhaps it was better this way came between me and my grieving. We’d both be saved a great deal of trouble and distress. I then began asking myself how I’d stumbled into this relationship that so didn’t suit my situation. And why was I allowing myself and Annushka to harbour these groundless hopes? After a week of not hearing from her I began to get used to the bleak idea that this had been a brief and beautiful episode in my life, pleasurable and enchanting, which had come at a time when I needed it more than anything else, and so it had to remain.

And yet, I hoped with all my heart that she would ring, a call, which were she to make, would, I knew, rock my entire life.

In the meantime, without much enthusiasm, I continued with the task of establishing the cover for trips to the former Republics of the Soviet Union in the Caucasus and on the shores of the Caspian Sea. I gained exclusivity for the sale of a combine harvester, and was also successful in obtaining a motorized sprayer, as well as other, smaller, items of equipment.

During one of those evenings, as I was sitting in my apartment tired and lifeless, somewhat like my father in his last years but twenty-five years younger than he then was, a short news item appeared on the TV about a failed assassination attempt by the Mossad in Singapore. According to the commander of the Singaporean police, whose announcement in English could just about be heard through the Russian dubbing, the accidental discharge of a bullet had injured one of a group of Mossad agents who fled from the area with their wounded colleague. Who were they after, and who was it that had failed? Udi? Levanon? They were undoubtedly at the planning and command level. And who’d participated in the operation itself? Was it the younger bunch of operatives, Josh and his mates? I was filled with a mixture of emotions; sadness, anger, sympathy. I could clearly imagine the sense of frustration felt by the commanding officers–Udi and Levanon were both close to my heart–and the pressure they were under from above. Even more than that, I could feel the disappointment of the operatives with their own performance. An accidentally discharged bullet, for heaven’s sake. These are professionals! But professionals also have stupid accidents. And who knows more than me that the ‘professional’ does what he does because he has to. His job, when all is said and done, is to serve his homeland, not to kill.

At least I’ll be doing what I’ve been ordered to do, I thought. The next morning I arranged a tour of the Caucasus taking the route leading from Russia to Iran. Two days in Turkmenistan, a couple of days in Uzbekistan, one day in Tajikistan on the way to Kirgizstan, and from there a flight back to St Petersburg. All in all, a journey of three thousand five hundred kilometres, including a stopover in Moscow. When a week had passed since my parting from Anna, I took off on this seven-day trip. I recorded a message on my answering machines. If Anna called she would know that I was gone.

I left St Petersburg on a cold, grey day at autumn’s end. When I returned the city was covered in white. The snow filled me with a childlike feeling of delight which vied with my keen urge to get to my answer phone as quickly as possible and find out if there was a message from Anna.