The English Teacher (4 page)

And there were also other pictures that had been filed in the department. There were only a few, since Rachel knew how not to appear in the center of the picture. And when photographs arrived showing her on tourist beaches or against the background of some ancient site, with a clear view of the military installation behind her, the security officer blotted out her figure with black ink. Only a very few are allowed to know the identity of the one gathering the information that will give renown to others while she remains in obscurity, in the shadows.

“We all change,” said Joe, and he pointed to the differences between the pictures. Ehud nodded. He had never thought he was handsome, he battled weight gain with both determination and frequent frustration. But he too was young once. His hair, already thinning, was combed back in those days, and Rina told him that his face reflected an intriguing inner strength. And now? Now he's sixty-five, with little hair remaining on his head. He peered at Joe, who was back on the road and driving slowly and cautiously. Ehud had heard about the onset of Parkinson's, but he didn't offer to take over the driving. They had been together on more dangerous assignments than this one, and he was not about to insult the man who recruited him into the Unit.

“Give me the basic details again,” Joe requested, and Ehud, who knew the importance of setting out every problem simply, explained that Rachel didn't inform the Unit she was going to her father's
funeral. This was contrary to protocol and contrary to the document she had signed the day she left, normal procedure incumbent on anyone who had been party to secret information while on the staff. The chief security officer showed him the paper and said that just because of this she could cause punitive losses to her retirement pension. The phone conversation was the first and only contact with her, and it was only because he called the Office that the alarm was raised and the war room became operational. Joe asked about money and Ehud apologized for forgetting and told him about the withdrawal she had made in London. “What passport is she using?” Joe asked. “All by the book,” said Ehud. “She left using her Israeli passport, entered and left England with her British passport. More than this, we don't know.” He wanted to tell him that the Unit commander had already sent a team to look for her in India, but Joe was busy parking the car behind a commercial van at the end of the street, and Ehud wasn't sure that at seventy-five Joe could handle two things at once.

T
HE TEAM COMMANDER, B
RIEFED ABOUT THEIR
arrival, approached them when they finally got out of the car. He pointed out for them the white van of the cleaning company and the young men in blue overalls. They were trained, orderly, and didn't skip any detail, not even the apparently careless driver and the two middle-aged women, ideal camouflage for the job they needed to do. The team commander signaled to his men and they unpacked their cleaning equipment and prepared to set to work. Ehud watched them. They were professionals. You could sense this, but he wondered what else they were capable of beyond breaking into any place quietly and doing the job and leaving without a trace. They know how to search too, no doubt about that. They could find the needle in a haystack. You just need to
tell them what to look for. He saw the commander checking his watch as he gave final instructions to the security team. “There's no need for all this,” he said to the commander. “The probability that Rachel will suddenly return from a shopping trip or from a morning run is so remote, you can tell the couple sitting on the bench to go, and the moving van at the corner might as well leave too. Think of the budget.”

“No one will suspect people your age,” said the team commander snidely, signaling Ehud not to interfere. He gave them the number of the apartment, and one of the young men opened the door of the building. As they walked slowly up the stairs Ehud imagined the moment that Rachel answered the phone and wondered what she did afterward. What does a woman feel, hearing the ring of the phone and answering politely in English, without any trace of an accent, confirming that she is Rachel, and being told that her father is dead? We all know, he thought as he panted from climbing the steps, that at any moment someone is liable to knock on the door of our house and turn our world inside out. Few people live in constant readiness. And Rachel? She lived in the very heart of the enemy, she knew that the life she was constructing there and the links she was forging with her surroundings were for a limited time only, but you still have to live that life as if it's going to last forever. That's the secret of perfect cover, you can't overlook any detail. But this time something else has happened to her. Something that touched her deep down inside, that penetrated the shell that she created around herself.

He stood at the door and waited for Joe to join him. There are two things I need to find in the apartment, he told himself. The first relates to her life before the announcement, what she was doing and what she was hiding. The second needs to be some indication of her
intentions. What she left and what she took with her once it was clear to her he wasn't around, and never would be again.

Ehud sat down at the desk, glanced at the landline phone, which already had a thin coating of dust, and tried to imagine Rachel sitting like him on a small chair or at the edge of the bed, staring at the phone before dialing his number. He didn't know why she decided to call him, and reckoned she would have no answer either. He remembered what she said to him and thought she had delayed the conversation until the
shivah
was behind her. Ehud counted the days on his fingers and made a note on the small pad that he kept in his pocket, a reminder to discuss with Joe the gap of two days.

And there was something else. She spoke to him in English. She, who loved to revert to Hebrew whenever possible. “That way I feel like an Israeli,” she used to explain, and she wasn't ashamed of her accent, which she was unable to shake off.

He raised the receiver, listened for the dial tone, and wondered what she meant to say when she fell silent. He wanted to ask her why her last sentence sounded decisive and determined, a metallic tone with the seal of finality, what compelled her to announce that her father was dead for the second time and what accounted for the defiance in her voice, the thin shading that said to him: You're to blame.

He knew he needed to link this conversation with that time when he phoned her with the news that her father was on his deathbed and she should return at once. That was only a code phrase, Rachel, he wanted to say to her now. Your father was waiting for you. You could go to him, be with him, tell him as much as you were allowed to tell, and rebuild the connection.

Suddenly he remembered their conversation. “I'm not telling him anything,” she said, and tried to convince him it was better that way.
“He'll understand,” he said to her in a final attempt to persuade her that every father loves his daughter, but she was silent, and it was obvious she had nothing to add.

“W
HEN
I
DON'T KNOW
WHAT TO
look for I just wait,” he said to the team commander, who stood by the door, arms folded, and looked at him with a question mark. “Okay,” the commander confirmed, “you have all the time in the world. Our instructions are clear; we're here to help and not to hinder. If you need anything, just ask. We can also find documents, even drugs, if you want to incriminate her. Everything is possible, and the photo lab will process the proofs. That's the way it is in the twenty-first century. There is no longer any meaning to the past or the future. Reality is imaginary. But why am I talking so much instead of letting you think in peace?” He told Ehud to let him know if he needed anything, and left the bedroom.

Ehud opened one of the drawers, looked at the folded bras and underwear, and remembered the first time he was confronted with Rachel's clothing, touching one item after another. He slid his hand under the pile and felt the delicacy of silk. There were no letters at the bottom of the drawer, just the soft underwear, smaller than Rina's, which he had packed up with all his wife's clothes once it was clear to him she wasn't coming back. Many months passed before he dared to stand and face her closets and her drawers and take her belongings out. It was like killing her memory, taking her out of his world and making space for someone else. He tried to rid himself of the feeling that this was what he wanted now, that the underwear and the other clothes and personal items laid out before him in a kind of order that was hard to fathom would move over to his house and fill the empty spaces left behind. And suddenly he had an intuition that this place
was waiting for someone to gather up the objects, sort them, pack them in cardboard cartons, and take them somewhere else. That although this apartment belonged to Rachel, it would now be the property of the chief security officer, at the disposal of those who had the power to break into it, handle her personal possessions, and do with them as they pleased. That Rachel had no further interest in what was left here, in fact she never had. That like the apartment in the Arab country, this apartment was always just a place to lay one's head. That Rachel Ravid lived here on borrowed time, knowing that one day she would suddenly leave, and so she imprinted no personal stamp on the place.

He tried to remember who she was when she was the real Rachel, the one sitting in her apartment in the evening, turning off the television set, looking out through the little window, and thinking about herself, not about being an operative on a mission and not about the image that she needed to project. Ehud realized that in fact he didn't know, he'd never taken an interest, never asked her what she was reading, what she was doing, what she liked, what she was interested in. Everything relating to Rachel the operative he was well acquainted with, but about the real woman he knew nothing. A troublesome thought nagged at him—perhaps this Rachel no longer existed. Maybe he and his colleagues had destroyed her, and the one who once lived here was no more. She was stuck in an in-between state, in the limbo that he himself created for her, waiting for an assignment, waiting for time to pass, waiting for some savior like the one who came to her in the end. He remembered this wasn't the first time she left, but he was overwhelmed by the painful feeling that this was evidently the last time.

Ehud continued searching. What did she want to bring on her journey? What was missing here of all the things normally found in a
house? He shifted his attention to the bookshelves. They were in order. He opened the drawer. Old pens and pencil sharpeners, all kinds of things that no one bothers to sort out. He took the drawer out from its place and bent down to see if there was anything underneath it, something that had been stuck, or some little cache that she improvised. Nothing. He emptied the drawer on the table and sorted through the few objects, until he saw a strange kind of button. “From a jacket sleeve,” said Joe, suddenly standing beside him. Ehud picked up the silver object and examined it intently. There was no insignia on it, and it seemed it was there arbitrarily. But that wasn't the way it was, because she had kept it. Ehud put it in his wallet, in the compartment reserved for small change. When they meet, he'll ask her.

“Anything else?” The voice of the team commander roused him from his reverie. “The smell,” said Ehud. “The smell is different.” He sniffed, and the team commander did the same. “There is no smell,” said the commander, disappointed. “Exactly,” said Ehud. “Every place has a smell. There should be something here too, and there isn't.” He moved again around the little apartment until he was sure he'd found what he was looking for: nothing. Rachel didn't take anything. She walked out of here as if she were leaving a hotel room, although the apartment of course was full of personal items. All these items belonged to a world that Rachel didn't need anymore. Rachel didn't want to come back.