The English Teacher (19 page)

“Why don't you force yourself on him?” she asked. “That's what
I'd do. I wouldn't give up. Okay, you told him you wanted to think, and he took offense and he's not coming back to you anymore. So what? This is one of those exercises that boys know how to do too. Phone him. Go to his office. Ask him what's going on. Don't let him wriggle away from standing up and facing you and talking it through. Look him in the eyes. Tell him what you think, tell him you love him, you'll marry him—he suggested that once, didn't he? Tell him you'll become a Muslim if that's what he wants, you'll stay and live here, you'll wear long dresses and listen to your mother-in-law's lectures.” She wasn't laughing.

Rachel listened to her patiently as she poured sweet tea and folded her laundry and waited for Barbara to finish her homily and leave. She thought about what Barbara said, and wondered if she really wanted this, and knew it was impossible.

So she didn't do anything. She continued her routine, which was interrupted one day by an urgent summons from Ehud, telling her to meet him in Europe. She sighed with relief. Action would lift her out of the grime, help her to forget Rashid and get some flavor back into her life. She asked in her cable if this could wait till her next furlough and was glad when Ehud insisted it was urgent and offered to write the school principal a letter from the director of the Open University in Florence, explaining that her final exam had to be done
viva voce
. It felt strange to Rachel that she was going without telling Rashid; she found substitute teachers to stand in for her and flew to Europe, ready to take on the next assignment and immerse herself in work.

P
REPARATIONS FOR THE
BIG OPERATION WERE
at hand. She returned from another trial run, driving a hundred kilometers to the provincial capital and back. The school secretary fell ill and Rachel surprised her
with a visit that ensured Rachel support of her cover story for the trip and the chance to hear some news about Rashid. Rachel gave her a bouquet of wildflowers that she plucked on the hill overlooking the garage, the object of her surveillance, wished her a quick recovery, and went on her way, with no updates of Rashid.

She noted on a sheet of paper the driving schedule that would take her to the garage precisely on time, memorized it, and dropped it in the trash compactor she had installed in her kitchen. The radio was tuned to an Israeli music station and she was listening to a concert to mark Israel's Memorial Day. “I don't like this,” Ehud said to her once when she told him about a concert she had heard, and she said everyone here listened to foreign stations, and she wasn't living in North Korea. Only there is it considered a crime.

Evening came, infusing her with restrained sadness; Rachel Ravid from Israel would have worn a white blouse at this time and gone with Oren on the long walk from Ramat Gan to the municipal square. Oren knew that Boaz had been killed on the first day of the Lebanon war, and in the two years they were together he respected her need to light a candle in the middle of a wreath of flowers that she arranged with great care. She told him how she arrived in Israel in the summer of 1982 as a volunteer, and how Boaz, who was king of the banana groves on the Golan Heights, told her in his crude fashion that a fortified Syrian strongpoint was a tougher proposition than she was, and he seduced her with ease. Oren said the past was the past, and he didn't ask her if she had other boyfriends after Boaz and what had happened in England before she came to this country, and she didn't ask him questions either, and made an effort to be content with what she had. Rachel Brooks from Canada didn't know any Boaz or Oren. According to her cover story she had her first sexual experience in a summer camp near Montreal. Their climbing instructor was called
Bobby, and he was killed a few months later while scaling a cliff in the Rockies. After this Rachel Brooks from Canada had a few casual relationships with boys whose names she barely remembered. She then decided to travel alone in the world.

It's just as well I know one fallen soldier, she reflected, a laughing face I can think of when they play the sad songs. Her heart lurched when she remembered how once she wanted to go to the Golan Heights and stand by Boaz's grave when the memorial siren sounded, but she was nervous about meeting his family and afraid seeing his earlier girlfriends there would hurt and embarrass her, and she let it go.

“C
OMMEMORATION IS VE
RY IMPORTANT TO US,
and we remember all our combatants,” one of the instructors told her during training, and insisted on taking her to visit the monument in the memorial garden dedicated to intelligence personnel. They circled the great blocks of stone and she studied the names and wondered which of them, besides the famous ones like Eli Cohen, had been combatants. The instructor followed her, allowing her to be impressed by the sequence of the years and the fact that there were casualties between the wars too. She couldn't resist asking if her name would be inscribed here as well if she fell too. He told her it would be some years before her name could be displayed, because the garden was open to the public and military attachés and other spies were always coming here and taking photographs and looking for connections with episodes that Israel was at pains to deny. “We'll keep a space for you,” he said, and the smile on his face turned to a look of contrition and apology when she started to cry.

A
T EIGHT IN THE EVENING THE
siren will sound, and she'll be careful to turn the radio off a minute before that and light a candle, to glow in the middle of a bowl of flowers that she prepared at midday. If someone comes, she'll have an explanation. Romance is always easy to explain, especially for a young woman living alone, who's prepared to admit she's waiting for someone who probably won't come. Then the radio programs will start. She won't listen to them, there's a limit to the risks she will take. Someone is bound to talk about soldiers on the frontiers, the security forces, working night and day to defend the state, and not a word about her and the other nameless combatants, whose existence is only acknowledged, if at all, when they die.

The phone rang, and Barbara, who had just finished another futile diet, said she'd come around at eight to tell her how it went. Rachel thought of asking her to come a bit later, but no excuse occurred to her and Barbara had already hung up. Better if she came later, so I could at least be alone for a moment and remember this is one of the reasons I'm here. That I too have a part to play in Israel's struggles for existence. I don't need the department's rabbi to tell me I'm allowed not to fast on Yom Kippur. But if you were to come now, Rashid, I could endure it all. She wondered why this Memorial Day was so hard for her, and if the dull pain she felt in her stomach was emotional. It's because of him, she said to herself, it's Rashid who isn't here. He's the love of my life, who can console me without even knowing the truth. She glanced at her watch and tried to imagine what he had been doing since they parted.

Barbara knocked on the door and she let her in, not before looking to check that the apartment was ready, although this apartment was always ready for all visitors. The housekeeper had a key and came in as and when she wanted, and the agents of counterintelligence
didn't need keys to get in and search. I have nothing to hide—this was her mantra.

“Wow, how nice,” said Barbara, pointing to the candle burning in the basin strewn with leaves. “Are you waiting for a mystery lover? Have you found a substitute for our Rashid?” Rachel put on one of her best smiles, and said she was in training and getting ready for the next in line, but she still wanted Rashid. They sat on the balcony and she suppressed her impulse to tell her about the death of Boaz in the war, or about Bobby. She didn't want to lie to Barbara more than was necessary. And all the same, why is it impossible, just this once, to sit down with her and talk about Boaz, we'll call him Bobby, whom she slept with just once? Why not tell her about the last embrace, his promise to return and teach her everything a girl of seventeen can learn from a kibbutznik, twenty-three years old and an officer in the paratroopers? “Two pairs of socks, and the underwear I'm wearing now, that's all I need,” he said when she stared in disbelief at the tiny pack he was taking with him. “We'll teach them a lesson and come back. That's what they're like. Now and then they need reminding.” She figured she could tell her about Bobby, who went out on that climb although he knew the season was dangerous and the cliff face not dry enough. And about herself, how she stood beside his vehicle and watched him as he got in, and at the last moment she picked two flowers and put one in his hand and kept the other in a jam-jar vase, and urged it not to wilt before Bobby came back. But there was no point telling. The effort would be too great, and when she comes to the moment when someone knocked on the door of the room she shared with other volunteers and asked where was Rachel, she'll burst into tears that will reveal all.

Barbara stroked the dog, said proudly that Gracie loved her most
of all, and agreed to take her in while Rachel was away from home. “Isn't it a shame about the money?” she said about the forthcoming trip. “You'll be using up all your savings.” “My aunt is paying,” she replied, “she wants me there beside her, and bad girl that I am, I'm thinking of the inheritance she's going to leave me.” Then she confessed about her chronic stomach pain.

Barbara chattered nonstop. A new teacher had arrived at the school. The air-conditioning in her classroom had been repaired at last. One of her pupils invited her to go out with him. In the papers they were warning again that the situation on the border was volatile, and Rachel, politely refusing a pill that Barbara was offering, struggled to keep up. The stomach pain was constant and growing more intense, as if pincers had been inserted in her body to torment her. Barbara was insistent but she refused again with all the courtesy she could muster. She won't take anything from her, since nobody can be relied on and she needs to sort herself out by herself. Her medicine chest was well stocked, with everything a young and responsible girl could need for life in a third world country. The Mossad doctor told her how and what to buy, and from the first aid course she remembered some rules that had helped her in the past when she felt ill, but this time it was something else, much worse, and she waited for Barbara to go so she could listen to the daily bulletin and go to bed.