Mishka Ben-David - Forbidden Love in St. Petersburg

Perhaps they’ll buy this pretence in Israel, I thought. Perhaps they’ll agree that Yogev Ben-Ari has been expunged together with everything he knew and poses no danger. Even if they don’t buy it, it will clarify for the Mossad just how adamant I am. I’m staying here. What can they do, turn me over to the authorities? Certainly not. They won’t kill me. That’s well beyond the red line. As for kidnapping me, if they truly believe that this is a rescue from the jaws of the FSB, that will be really difficult for them to do.

Look, mister, you seem to be a nice guy, but you obviously have mistaken me for somebody else. Now you must leave. If not I will have to call the police.

Levanon concealed a brief smile. He too understood the boundaries of the game and knew that I certainly wouldn’t call the police. He slipped his hand into the inside pocket of his coat, momentarily startling me. Instinctively I got ready to grab his hand and punch him in the face.

Levanon froze, appeared serious for a moment, then smiled again: your instincts are still good. But I just wanted to give you something. He slowly pulled out a small bundle of pictures from his pocket and placed them on my desk. Take them, refresh your memory a little.

The first was a picture of Levanon and me on Victoria Peak, high up on the mountainside above Hong Kong. Udi had taken the photo on the observation deck overlooking the city’s skyscrapers and the bay. You remember Zaif? he asked. Two bullets of yours and the third that I had to fire to complete the job? That’s the only reason why, today, the Syrians don’t have another chemical weapons plant.

I didn’t touch the pictures and Levanon picked them up.

You must realize what an effort was made to send me the pictures from Israel so that they would arrive at the same time as me, and yet you ignore them? Have some manners, man. He laid them down on my desk again, one after another. The next shot was also of the two of us together, this time in a local restaurant in Seoul. Here it was Rashid Nuri with the prostitutes, remember? You fired three into his back and I two into his head.

When he put a photo on my desk taken by the pool in a hotel in the Emirates he asked, remember Mustafa Quader?

Next were pictures from Kazakhstan. Remember the missile transporters? If it wasn’t for us being there the Iranians would long ago have had intercontinental rockets with nuclear warheads.

In another picture, I saw myself on a golden sandy beach surrounded by palm and coconut trees with my back to a turquoise sea and a speedboat. The Seychelles, in case you’ve forgotten, Levanon said. You brought down two Arabs, one carrying a shoulder missile and the other the launcher. You fired and hit the target from a distance of a few hundred metres and saved a plane carrying hundreds of passengers. Then you saved me in the committee of enquiry because I shot at the rest of the group without any real justification.

I breathed in deeply. I felt how these images, rolling out fifteen years of operations were, picture after picture, delivering powerful hammer blows at the suit of armour I had wrapped around myself. And for some reason one recent picture in particular hit home; a Hanukkah party at the Division. Led by Udi, all my acquaintances were there, smiling on the other side of a lit candelabra, some of them holding a doughnut. Apart from Anna, I thought, this is, after all, my only family. A family to which I am connected by blood, though it was a different kind of blood connection.

From the expression on his face it was clear that Levanon understood what I was thinking.

Yogev, the country owes you a great deal. You did so much for it. Why are you destroying everything? Come home.

I don’t know where this conversation might have led to had a customer not entered the shop at that very moment. As the cliché goes, a picture is worth a thousand words, and these had shown me the extent to which my new façade had failed to cut me off from my past.

Get up, I said to Levanon, my lips pursed. He slowly rose from Anna’s chair, gathered the pictures, returned them to his coat pocket, and moved to the other side of the desk.

I am still here, he said as the customer came towards me. At that very moment Anna entered the shop almost running.

Bozhe moi , my God, it’s cold outside, she said, laughing and rubbing her hands together.

I was too bewildered to deal with the Russian-speaking customer. Before even taking off her coat Anna leapt to my rescue by signalling the customer to come to her. Levanon, meanwhile, wandered between the bookshelves and when Anna was free, went up to her and asked in French whether we stocked modern Russian writers in French translation. Anna answered him in a French that wasn’t at all bad. Levanon was surprised, even confused for a moment–he hadn’t really intended to put his cover to the test.

I, too, was surprised. At the beginning of our acquaintance I’d spoken to her about my complex relations with the language of Quebec and she hadn’t said a thing and had continued to talk to me in English quite naturally. My cover story would also have been undermined a bit if she’d insisted on switching to French–the Mossad was content with the four years I’d spent studying the language in high school and invested time and effort only in improving my English.

Though translated Russian literature was on the borderline between Anna’s section and mine, I decided to leave the rest of the dealings with Levanon to her. They remained for a while at the counter, laughing and chattering to each other. Eventually Levanon left with two books by Platonov and Kurkov. He paid Anna and before leaving the shop, tall and erect, managed to sneak a slight smile at me–the meaning of which I didn’t even want to attempt to interpret.

I didn’t like him, Anna said to me after he’d gone. Rather than wanting to buy, I felt he was trying to find out how much I knew about the translation of Russian books into other languages. Who gets translated, which subjects are more popular, and what are the languages they are most often translated into–and all of it in a sort of artificial lightheartedness. Even his accent was strange. Not Parisian nor from the south, perhaps French Canadian, what do you think? You should know.

I don’t think so, I answered, he’s suntanned, perhaps from the colonies. I decided not to relate to the question of his accent and not to encourage a conversation about my French.

A few days ago someone else, rather like him, came into the shop, Anna said.

What do you mean ‘like him’? I asked, slightly apprehensively.

He was, in fact, Russian, but he too asked questions that you would normally expect to be answered by your professor at university, not a salesperson in a bookshop. Fortunately, I love the existentialists so I could help him. But out of all the books I suggested he bought only Sartre. What a pathetic choice, the simplest and most pompous of the existentialists. At least he bought the whole trilogy. I think he was a Jew by the way, she said, and I held my breath. And this last one as well, she added.

You know how to spot Jews? I asked in a strained tone.

Sometimes. You for example, if you hadn’t told me that you are half Indian I would have thought that you were Jewish, she said, briefly glancing at me. But that’s OK. She answered the questions that had welled up inside me within a second. I value Jews very much. A wise nation, stubborn, unfortunate, and heroic. I had some good friends at university who emigrated to Israel in the 1990s and I miss their friendship very much.

The raging suspicions that had sprouted quickly wilted like a field of wild plants.

You keep surprising me. This time with your French, I said to bring the discussion about Jews to an end.