The English Teacher (23 page)

“F
ROM A DISTANC
E EVERYTHING LOOKED
CALM.
No one overtook her on the way, and as far as she could tell she wasn't being followed. The rain had stopped and the sun was shining. She got out of the car and checked that nothing had come loose. There had been no problem before, driving between borders with a battery similar to the one that was now installed in her vehicle. The exercise was important, and the checks at the border crossing between European states were sometimes more rigorous and the technical equipment more sophisticated. Or so we told her, in the hope of boosting her confidence. But I was there waiting for her behind every border crossing, waiting to shake her hand and tell her she was doing great, and the battery was just a battery. And here no one is waiting for her, and in the battery there are five kilos of explosives. She knew what lay ahead, wiped away the droplets of sweat on her upper lip, and moved on to the next stage.

“Getting out of a country is always easy. The cop who stood at the entrance waved goodbye, the customs officer didn't even look at her, and at the border police post they stamped her passport and let her drive on. Rachel stepped on the clutch. The technical team insisted on a car with gears. They said it was easier to repair, and if it wouldn't start, she could always find someone to give her a push. She drove the Audi to the barrier, with its blue and white horizontal bar. A casual-looking soldier was amusing himself raising and lowering the bar. A cigarette dangled from his lips and he reminded her of a prison camp guard in a World War II movie, at the membrane between freedom and captivity, but she was on her way in, not out. She looked at the sentry and smiled.

“‘Papers.' She held out her passport and the car documents. He examined them, lifted the barrier up with one hand, and waved her on. There was a demilitarized zone between the borders, the result of agreements that couldn't be agreed on. The road was fenced and there were signs warning, in languages including English, that the sector was mined. She moved along the corridor, and if for a moment the association between barbed-wire fences and concentration camps occurred to her, she didn't tell me. ‘Take her to one of the camps,' the Unit commander told me before we sent her to liquidate Strauss. It was hard to explain to him just how absurd and worthless this idea was. ‘Rachel knows exactly what a concentration camp is,' I dared to tell him. ‘If you read her file, you'd know her whole family was wiped out in the camps. For her, Grunewald railway station isn't just some place.'

“‘No-man's-land,' she told me later, ‘gave me the chance to think.' She knew that joint patrols were active in the area and she had no reason to stop the car by the roadside, not even for a pee. But the temptation was overwhelming. To take a break, breathe some fresh air, get out of the car for a moment, review the details she has to remember, look at the documents again, and only then move forward. Rachel continued her slow progress. Around the bend she saw a wooden gate covered in barbed wire, blocking the roadway, and an enemy soldier standing and waiting for her.” Ehud broke off and took a sip of his whiskey. Joe looked at him, perhaps thinking of his own career, the times he had been caught up in situations like this, and trying to remember what he did and how he reacted. Ehud's glance strayed to the garden, stretching away beyond the glass door, to the life going on beyond the dense vegetation, and he thought of how little he knew of what was happening in the lives of the other people in Rachel's life.

“And Rachel was alone. None of our soldiers stood beside her, none of our officers walked ahead of her. She had no one to talk to and no one to contact. She could still turn the Audi around and retrace her route. Say she changed her mind, she left something behind at the hotel, she'll come back tomorrow. And then she'll contact me and tell me whatever she tells me, and I'll have to believe her, because if I don't believe it I'll be saying goodbye to her. Terminating her contract, in other words. We believe our operatives. We have to trust them even when we know they aren't telling us the whole truth. Even when we hear from them that everything is okay, between ourselves we know everything isn't okay. They're frightened, they're tired, they want to come home. They want to lie down on the sofa and get a big hug.

“In our business everything depends on what the operative says. He creates the reality for us. There's no one else who can submit a different report. No soldier who has seen something different. It's not like Rashomon. There's only what he saw, what he felt, what he did. I don't know what she was thinking at that moment, what she thought was likely to happen to her sometime soon. I asked her and she told me that she slowed when she saw the fence and the barbed wire, and then she took a deep breath and moved on.

“The sentry looked at her papers and let her pass. ‘Welcome, welcome,' he said, and smiled, exposing nicotine-stained teeth. She smiled back at him as if her whole life depended on this smile. He dragged the barricade aside, took a cigarette from his coat pocket, offered her one, and lit his own. It seemed he'd prefer her to linger and talk for a while, but since the only English words he knew were hello and welcome, that was it.

“Perhaps you're wondering: Why is he yapping on like this? What's the big deal? Even drug smugglers go through this process, and she isn't the first operative who's done it. But for me she was and
always will be the only one. I sat in the hotel and waited for her call. I was the uncle who was left behind. The one who will wander around all alone for a few days before going back to France. The one who gets a migraine and waits until she calls to ask him how he is and confirm that she's reached her hotel.

“I picked up the book I brought with me but I couldn't read it. The words passed me by. I thought of Rachel, who at about that time, at midday, when most people are thinking of the meal that awaits them, would be arriving at the crossing, hoping to exploit their fatigue and their inattentiveness.”

T
ENSION
WAS IN THE AIR.
A heavily built man, big mustache, and a thick gold ring on his finger, sat behind an old wooden desk and played with a full ashtray. He moved it from side to side and studied the butts that had piled up in it. The other man, young, thin, and unshaven, sat beside the desk on the backseat of a car, evidently ripped from a confiscated vehicle, and smoked assiduously, filling his lungs and exhaling perfect smoke rings toward the solitary lightbulb, the only illumination in the semidarkness of the room.

The door was open, or perhaps there was no door. She stood in the entrance and wasn't sure if she'd come to the right place. Both men looked up at her and she asked in basic English if they could give her local number plates. “Yes, yes, maybe,” said the young man, still exuding smoke rings. She moved closer to the table and her dress brushed against the knees of the young man. The fat man moved the ashtray and held out his hand without saying a word. She handed him the documents and stood close to the table in the long dress that she wore out of respect for the local culture, topped by a thin sweater and sandals that exposed her red-painted toenails. Rachel tightened the
sweater around her shoulders and listened to a muffled racket coming from the corridor. She reckoned this was the generator and inscribed this too in her memory. The ops officer will definitely want to know this. “What's so hard about remembering everything you've seen there?” they always ask.

She waited. The fat man ran a finger over his fleshy lips. He flicked through her passport and the
Carnet de Passages
and checked the certificate of ownership. He opened and closed the
Carnet
as if it were the shutter of a camera, and as she moved closer to the desk the young soldier, sitting on the low seat beside her, was out of her field of vision.

“There's a problem,” the fat man said in slow, clear English. “There's a problem,” the fat man repeated, and then she felt the hand touching her dress.

A faint rustle. That was all. A touch that pressed the material against her thigh. She wasn't even sure. Perhaps a breath of wind stirred her dress. She didn't move and went on looking at the fat man, who said, “Big problem,” like a veteran teacher confronting her in the staff room and calling her to order. The hand that touched her dress touched it again, this time lingering on the back of her thigh, and she had no doubt it was there, the full palm of the hand with all the fingers, working its way up. She could of course have turned around and pushed the young man's hand away; he sat leaning forward with one hand still holding the cigarette and the other groping her. She could also have yelled at him, Stop! or That's enough!, and she knew he would understand, but she also knew the fat man was about to point out the mistake that flashed up now before her eyes, the discrepancy between the car numbers, and exploit the opportunity to tell her again there was a problem, and show her the way out and force her to call Ehud, to explain the mistake that she didn't make. She won't be blamed for anything, but her operation will be killed, stone-dead.

The hand reached the inner thigh. She noticed the narrowing of the fat man's eyes, who saw what was happening behind her, and saw his tongue moistening his thick lips. The hand continued its upward journey, and she froze where she stood and told the fat man that all he needed to do was correct the number manually. This was the mistake of the clerk at the last checkpoint. She felt the hand fumbling between her legs and heard the heavy breathing behind her. The smoke from the cigarette stung her eyes and the fat clerk watched her and waited until he heard his colleague gasp and saw him slump back on the grubby car seat and take a long drag on the cigarette. It was only then he picked up the stamp and stamped her papers, and gave her the crumpled number plates that were on his desk, and said to her, “Welcome home.”

Rachel walked down the narrow hallway, keeping a tight grip on the plates, for the sake of which she had stood with legs parted and allowed the young man who had sat behind her to insert his hand in her panties and his finger inside of her. She knew it was by her own choice that she stood and waited until she heard his breathing change. Only then she turned and noticed the stain in the crotch of his pants, still feeling his probing, invasive finger. For the sake of the numbers on the plates, she was thinking, for the sake of the mission, she put up with it, didn't cry out to the officer who sat in the lobby on a rocking chair, looking at her as if he knew what had happened in there. Ahead of her there's another long drive to the hotel, and only then can she strip off her underwear and throw it out, the dress too, and try to forget. But she can't throw out the feeling, or the image of his smile and the dreamy look in his eyes when he leaned back, still holding the burning cigarette.

Rachel said something to the officer and he found some metal wire and helped her put the new license plates over the number plates on her
car. The officer waved farewell as she set out on her way, legs shut together tightly. One more checkpoint to pass. The sentry at the gate examined her papers carefully. The passport was stamped, vehicle documentation in order. No one looked under the hood and checked the battery. The barrier was raised and she was finally through.