The English Teacher (20 page)

S
HE THREW UP IN THE TOILET
bowl, on her knees, and felt her strength ebbing away with the retching and the bitter fluids. She could contact Barbara and ask her to come back, but the signal from headquarters was waiting for her and she hadn't yet sent the cable with the results
of the week's information-gathering. “This target won't wait for us forever,” the ops officer said at the first briefing, and although Ehud told him not to put pressure on her, she understood the urgency. Rachel lay down on the sofa and probed with her fingers in search of the pain, moving down as if heading for the exit. Sensing something was wrong, Gracie licked her hand and then withdrew to her corner, curled up, and went to sleep. Rachel closed her eyes too and tried not to move, and remembered how her mother used to put a wet towel on her forehead and how her father refused to make any concessions to ill health, boasting that he never in his life had a day's sickness. A stomachache was just stomachache, not an excuse for not doing homework.

The hands on the clock beside her bed showed it was time, but she wasn't going to send the cable. They would have to wait for the next one. Her night surveillance was going to be missed as well. She couldn't even stand up. When she could bear the pain no longer and heard herself crying out for help, she called an ambulance and then phoned Barbara and asked her to come over and look after the dog. She knew Rashid's home number. He had given it to her and told her to contact him if ever she was in trouble. But that was in other times, and despite the pain and the dizziness she decided against it.

In the ambulance she was sure she was going to pass out, and she had the strange feeling that in fact she wanted to be ill, she wanted the release from responsibility that sickness allows, the dependence on others, the incomparable moments when someone else takes charge, lifting you onto the stretcher, cooling your brow with a wet towel, giving you his full attention, entirely at your service. The paramedic had a peculiar smell and his mustache frightened her, but his hands were good and warm, and when he told her everything would be all
right she believed him and nodded. This is what I need to do, she thought as the last of her strength drained away, speak as little as possible, not lose consciousness, and deny, deny everything.

A
MURKY LIGHT LIT
THE ROOM
and the beds around her. A middle-aged nurse approached her, and Rachel hardly resisted the impulse to cry and tell her she was tired and her whole body was in pain, and she wanted them to diagnose her with a genuine illness, a condition even her father would admit existed. This is no fault of hers, Ehud will repatriate her and no one will be angry with her, as illness is illness and it's not only weaklings who are sick, as her father says.

The nurse plumped the pillows under her head and smoothed the sheet that covered her, and Rachel noticed she was naked under the hospital pajamas. The contact with the starched pajamas was pleasant and the touch of the nurse's hands as she checked the intravenous drips had a calming effect. Like the paramedic, the nurse assured her that everything would be all right. This must be something they learn in the course for dealing with foreign patients, she reflected. “Okay, okay,” said the nurse, and she continued her night rounds. Rachel tried to reach out for the bedside cabinet to look at her watch and was shocked by the sudden pain. She moved her hand over the area of the pain and felt the big bandage bound tightly around her stomach. An operation, she thought in panic. General anesthetic. Recuperation. What have they done to me? What did I say? She was glad she insisted on not changing her first name. “I'll get it wrong if they wake me in the middle of the night and ask me what my name is,” she explained to Ehud, and he conceded the point.

“How are you feeling?” asked the nurse, returning. Rachel was gratified to note that she was devoting more time to her than to the others.

“All right,” said Rachel, even though the opposite was the true.

“Who is your regular doctor?”

Rachel didn't answer. Here, in this city, she had never registered at a clinic, and in Europe it was the Mossad doctor who came to her.

“They took out your appendix, they got to it just in time.”

“Really?” Rachel whispered, and asked her how soon she could leave.

“You'll need to spend a few days here. You want us to contact anyone?” She went on talking as she looked through the patient's notes attached to the bed. “Rachel. That's a nice name. I had a friend called Rachel when I was studying in London.” The nurse stood over her and gave her a quizzical look while adjusting the tubes and checking the infusions. “This is your bell. Ring it if you want me to bring you a bedpan. You know that's the important thing now, we need to be sure all your systems are working. In the morning the doctors will come and then I'll try to get you a phone.”

Rachel thanked her and said this could wait, that she didn't want to worry her father.

“Perhaps in the meantime you'd like to give me a local number, if there's anyone you want me to call. You know, you were saying things before I didn't understand. But that doesn't matter now. Get some rest, and I'll see you in the morning.”

She was sure she wouldn't be going back to sleep. This has nothing to do with Hebrew. To her, Hebrew is a foreign language. She thought of the target she was supposed to be watching, her surveillance of his house, his schedule, which she was trying to memorize, the names of the people he socialized with, she thought of Strauss too, Strauss who picked up a paper for her when she dropped it on purpose, whose blue eyes met her eyes when he kissed her gloved hand, his lips in contact with the poison prepared especially for him.
His eyes. His kindly expression. The perfect manners of someone who spent his last days in a hospital bed, hooked up to machines just like her.

So the inevitable will happen. The nurse will bring them to her, and she'll be full of good intentions, she can't be blamed for telling what she heard. The genial interrogator will ask her how she is and then he'll want to clarify a few things. And when he goes they'll transfer her to a private room of her own, which will even have a window, also an iron door and a grille, and a guard who won't let anyone enter or leave until she's well enough to be moved somewhere else.

Near sunrise she woke from fitful sleep and saw the darkness outside giving way to a pale dawn and the new day taking shape. She thought of her father and cried when she realized that once again she couldn't contact him and tell him she was sick.

H
ER BED WA
S IN THE CORNER
of the room, close to the window and somewhat away from the rest of the patients. It was clear she was the only foreigner in the ward, perhaps in the entire hospital. She looked at the door at the end of the big room. That is the way they will come, she thought as the pains started. First little stabs, and then a regular and steady pain that forced her to grit her teeth and clench her fists. She knew this would pass. She knew these were the pains of recovery and she had to wait, and in the meantime she needed to pee in the bedpan and she wondered how she would lift herself off the strange device and who would wipe her. The torn and dirty curtain gave her a little privacy, but not much. She wanted to call the nurse, but she had suddenly disappeared, perhaps to talk to the security officer. Only women were around her. Women like her. Older and younger, moaning or silent, all of them speaking a language she didn't understand.

She heard footsteps. Not the nurse in her rubber sandals, not the cleaner in her flip-flops. Vigorous steps that pounded the floor as if it belonged to them, as if it owed them something. Heavy leather boots; steps raising a sound to be reckoned with. This is it, they're coming, she thought, and the idea of pulling out the tubes and trying to escape paralyzed her, she just didn't have the strength. Someone else would have done this, and not waited for them to come and pick him up like an egg laid in the night. A man would have got out through the window, found his way home, picked up his passport, and bolted. And instead of this, there was the option of closing the eyes, to postpone the end, lapsing into helplessness. Despite the pains and the tubes attached to her she tried to sit up and thought of her disheveled hair and lack of makeup and the pajamas, from which repeated washing had failed to remove the ancient stains. And before she had time to pass a hand through her hair he was standing beside her and holding her hand, ignoring the other patients, and the nurse who was pursuing him and intent on ejecting him, because this was the women's ward and there were visiting hours, and all the myriad regulations that every hospital imposes on itself. He leaned over her and touched her lips with his, then moved on to her forehead, and all this time he held her hand in both his strong and warm hands, and she felt cured and ready to fly out of there.

“I came the first moment I could.” Not a sentence a screenwriter would have used, and not something he picked up from his counterespionage buddies. “You came when you could,” she repeated, and she didn't want anything more. Rashid turned and spoke in a tone of unmistakable severity to the nurse who was standing behind him and still trying to eject him, and then he nonchalantly pulled up a chair and sat down beside her. She had to struggle to move her head and look at him, but he held her hand and that was enough for her. She
didn't need anything else, and for one brief moment she was glad she was ill, glad he was sitting beside her, and saying nothing. “I'm a lucky guy,” he said after a pause, and explained that he contacted the school to cancel a lesson and Barbara happened to be around and she told him. “I'm lucky too,” she whispered, and asked him to close the curtain and bring her a bedpan.

The wound radiated waves of pain and she groaned. Rashid spoke with the nurse again in Arabic. “Soon they'll bring you a phone, you can tell your parents I'll meet them at the airport.” And what's she supposed to do now? Tell him about Ehud? Tell him about the mother she invented? Or the father she left so far behind? This isn't the time to tell him her father is ignoring her, he never calls, and he probably wouldn't believe her. Now, after he had come back to her, she didn't want to tell Rashid all the lies that had become second nature to her, and the truth was unbearable. Rachel kept silent and held his hand.

B
Y
THE TIME
E
HUD REACHE
D THIS
section of his report, the stay in hospital was already history, another anecdote from the tortuous process of monitoring his operative. He told Joe about the hard times he had back then, and the effort to locate her. The possibility of accident or ill health had of course been raised—among the potential pitfalls discussed in training—but when things really happen and contact is broken, it all looks different.

“Rina saw the way I was mooning around the apartment and bumping into things and she asked me what was happening. I admit I lost my temper with her and with the children too, for no logical reason, and our apartment in Rome was like a prison for them all. My cover story obliged me to go and work for a small company that
employed me as a salesman, and because I had nothing to do besides wait for Rachel to make contact, or hope for some intelligence update that would explain her absence, I had no excuse for not turning up at the Office.