Mishka Ben-David - Forbidden Love in St. Petersburg

I instantly understood the logic. A team often gives an object some sort of associative codename. Here the first four letters of Anna’s family name, Starzava, had given somebody the idea of assigning her the codename Shining Star.

The second picture, taken from the same position, was of a tall, silver-haired man walking up the stairs. At the bottom of the arrow drawn in the margin and pointing at his image, were the Hebrew words for ‘The Controller’.

Come on now, really, I said to myself. They write Controller and expect me to swallow it? I thought of chucking the pictures away but had a premonition of something bad and I continued to scan them. In the third photograph Anna was seen leaving the restaurant and in the fourth The Controller was also pictured on his way out of there. In this shot his face was turned towards the camera. I could see his features, but didn’t recognize him. Just some man in his fifties or sixties.

The fifth shot was again of Anna, this time in different clothes, walking in the direction of the restaurant. From the strips of heating elements visible across the picture I could tell she’d been photographed from the car’s rear window.

The Controller’s image was captured through the front windscreen. He was quite close to the car and the picture, which was apparently shot from the back seat, also included the vehicle’s interior mirror reflecting the photographer’s own silhouette. I was able to see the controller’s features more clearly. They remained unfamiliar.

The next one was snapped from inside the restaurant. The conditions for taking pictures were not good, the shot itself came out a bit dark and indistinct. The caption in the margins ‘meeting of Shining Star and Controller’ led me to the tip of the arrow. In the middle of the picture, encompassing four or five tables, two images were visible that could well have been Anna and the man they’d dubbed The Controller.

But in the next picture, apparently taken as the photographer was passing Anna’s table, the two could be seen clearly. Anna sipping her soup, and the Controller, sitting with nothing in front of him, looking at her.

My hands shook as I went on to view the rest of the batch. Again Anna and the Controller, on another day and wearing different clothes, at a table in some other restaurant. By the Controller’s side a cup, Anna’s place at the table unlaid. And another picture. The Controller sitting on a bench in a public garden–a place I was unable to recognize–and Anna, snapped from behind, approaching him.

And then again at the entrance to our house. Anna emerging and the figure of the Controller clearly visible behind her.

He’d been in our apartment? I shuddered. When? It was, after all, rare for Anna to be at home alone. Did she go there during her lunch break, and if so perhaps he’s actually a lover and not a Controller?

I was beside myself with pain and didn’t know which possibility hurt less. But the final shots supplied me with the answer. The team followed the Controller and photographed him travelling along Liteyny Prospekt, the very street in which my office was located. The picture showed him entering a guarded car park next to the former courthouse which became the KGB’s HQ and now housed the FSB. There could be no doubt about the identity of the square brown building, so different from any other in the street, with its beige façade, its shocking functionality, and its utter lack of any form of décor.

In the last picture the man was seen walking towards the side entrance of the building.

A terrible void opened up inside me. The story the pictures told was so incomprehensible, so impossible to assimilate, that I couldn’t think at all. I was sucked into the void, utterly shattered. On this occasion Anna was out for longer than usual, which gave me time to pull myself together. I looked at the pictures once more, refusing to believe, searching for evidence that would enable me not to believe, evidence I found it hard to come up with. Their story was conclusive. And it had also been organized in a clear-cut way with an ending that was watertight and clear.

And yet that is not how pictures taken by a team look, I heard another voice inside me saying. Someone took care to organize them in a way that would lead me from my initial doubts to the unavoidable conclusion at the end. Someone knew that I wouldn’t believe the first photos and would only finally be persuaded when I saw them together in the restaurant. That I wouldn’t know if the man was a lover or a controller–and that I would get the irrefutable answer at the gates of the FSB building. And that same somebody also knew that I would recognize the building. I tried to climb out of the pit, looking over the pictures for a third time, lingering over every single one of them, trying to find flaws, indications that these were nothing but a set of photomontages. But the walls of the pit I was in were too smooth to scale and there was nothing for me to hold on to.

Anna was always Anna. In every picture wearing clothes I was familiar with. The coat, the boots, the hat, and the glasses I knew so well. On the two occasions she was photographed in the restaurant she even had on blouses I remembered her wearing in the past few days.

And the unrecognizable Controller, what could I say about him? In the photographs he wore two different coats. Most government officials had just one such winter garment. He wore neither a hat nor glasses, nor did he wrap himself up in a scarf, unlike all other living creatures who did everything possible to cover every exposed inch of their bodies during these bitterly cold days. The photo in the public garden seemed a bit odd to me. Who sits on a bench in a garden in temperatures of minus twenty degrees? And then it also seemed to me that there was some slight difference–too slight for me to be sure of it as evidence–between the sharpness and colouring of the images of The Controller and that of Anna or the backgrounds that appeared in the various pictures. They could have photographed Anna and then afterwards planted The Controller. But in the picture taken at the entrance to our house the image of Anna was brighter and in the one in the garden with The Controller on the bench, his was the clearer image.

The pictures were developed here. The probability of such a plant was low. Nonetheless, I managed to kindle slight doubts in my mind. Like the little boy in the Dutch legend I succeeded in thrusting my finger into the hole in the dyke. But I still felt utterly defeated.

I tore the pictures into little pieces, packed the shreds into two separate bags and left the shop for a moment to dump them in the nearby public bin. I didn’t even put on a coat, and sharp arrows of icy cold wind lodged inside me, burning my body wherever they reached.

I hadn’t been willing to hear what first Yoav and then Levanon wanted to tell me, and hadn’t wanted to see what Udi had brought me. Like a breakwater, I protected the safe harbour I’d found for myself, stubborn waves of new information constantly crashing into me. But like salty, bitter, sea water the pictures penetrated the cracks and overran me.

I can only compare my emotions at the moment when Anna entered the shop to what I felt when Orit discovered I’d shot Schultz, the Austrian arms dealer, and instructed the lab to destroy our embryo. The time we spent in the shop that afternoon, and in the evening at home, reminded me of the hours when I wandered the Arava in my ATV. And perhaps this was an even more difficult time because I had to put up a front and because of Anna’s ability to clearly see through it.

She was silent and so was I. For the first time ever we spent an evening in avoidance, alienation and suspicion. Only deep into the night, as we lay awake in our bed in the dark, each enduring their own nightmare, did Anna touch me, caressing me gently. I turned towards her, and when we made love all the despair and hopelessness we both felt accompanied our every act of passion. Afterwards, I heard her cry and stroked her head. She pressed her face into my shoulder, and I put my arms around her. But we didn’t exchange a word.