The English Teacher

by Yiftach Reicher Atir

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  The English Teacher

  YIFTACH REICHER ATIR was born in 1949 on a kibbutz in the south of Israel. As a young military officer, he participated in Operation Entebbe—the hostage-rescue operation carried out by commandos of the Israel Defense Forces at Entebbe airport, Uganda, on July 4, 1976—and in other still-classified military and intelligence operations. He retired from the military in 1995, with the rank of Brigadier General. Reicher Atir is the author of four novels; his third, The English Teacher—based on his firsthand experience as an intelligence officer—was a bestseller in Israel, widely acclaimed by readers and critics alike.

  PENGUIN BOOKS

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  Copyright © 2013 by Yiftach Reicher Atir

  Translation copyright © 2016 by Yiftach Reicher Atir

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  Originally published in Hebrew by Keter Books, Israel.

  “The Remains of Life” from The Remains of Life by Lea Goldberg, translated by Rachel Tzvia Back. Used by permission of the publisher, Sifriat Poalim and Rachel Tzvia Back.

  eBook ISBN 9780143129196

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Names: Reicher Atir, Yiftach, author.

  Title: The English teacher : a novel / Yiftach R. Atir ; translated by Philip Simpson.

  Other titles: Morah le-Anglit. English

  Description: New York : Penguin Books, 2016.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2015049266 | ISBN 9780143129189 (paperback)

  Subjects: LCSH: Women spies—Israel—Fiction. | Intelligence

  officers—Israel—Fiction. | Israel. Mosad le-modi°in òve-tafòkidim

  meyuòhadim—Fiction. | BISAC: FICTION / Espionage. | FICTION / Mystery &

  Detective / General. | GSAFD: Spy stories | Suspense fiction

  Classification: LCC PJ5055.39.E42 M6713 2016 | DDC 892.43/7—dc23

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Cover design: Tal Gorestsky

  Cover images: (man) Efenzi/Getty Images; (cityscape) Plainpicture/Manuel Krug; (woman’s face) MaxMaximov/Shutterstock; (woman’s body) Stephen Mulcahey/Arcangel

  Version_1

  Contents

  About the Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  A Note on the Text

  CHAPTER ONE: London

  CHAPTER TWO: Israel, Two Days Later

  CHAPTER THREE: Milan

  CHAPTER FOUR: Entry

  CHAPTER FIVE: The Operation

  CHAPTER SIX: Out There

  CHAPTER SEVEN: Rashid

  CHAPTER EIGHT: Strauss

  CHAPTER NINE: The Capital City

  CHAPTER TEN: In the Field

  CHAPTER ELEVEN: Exit

  CHAPTER TWELVE: Tel Aviv

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN: The Capital City, Two Days Earlier

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN: Rashid

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN: Out There

  Already the silences are easier.

  The light is bright.

  When there’s no road to travel

  there’s no fear of borders.

  And there’s nothing to reveal

  when there’s nothing to hide.

  —Lea Goldberg, The Remains of Life Translated by Rachel Tzvia Back

  A Note on the Text

  THE BOOK YOU ARE HOLDING IN your hands is the true story of what never happened.

  This is the story of a Mossad operative. She and others like her operate alone for extended periods of time, deep in enemy countries. Unlike their front-line soldier counterparts, these secret soldiers are armed with nothing but a foreign passport, a fake identity, extensive training, and inexplicable courage.

  Being an IDF intelligence officer for many years, I came to know these operatives intimately. I assigned them missions; I followed their progress as they lived their strange and dangerous undercover lives; I marveled at the missions they completed; and, anxiously, I awaited their eventual safe return home.

  And I wondered, What is it like to live a secret life among one’s enemies for months and years? I knew what it was like to be in battle and to cross borders in the night to execute military operations; I had no idea what it would be like to live across those borders. How does one deal with the ever-present fear, and the great loneliness? And what happens to the heart?

  This story is the result of those wonderings.

  This book spent many months with the Israeli civilian and military censorship committees; numerous changes and omissions were imposed, until the book was approved for publication.

  And so, this is a true story, of real-life operatives that are wholly made-up, and actual missions that never happened.

  There is one woman, an undercover soldier in the past and a scholar in the present, to whom I owe a special thanks. I take this opportunity to thank her and all the operatives I have known, and those I don’t know; The English Teacher is dedicated to them all.

  BG (RET) YIFTACH REICHER ATIR

  CHAPTER ONE

  London

  IN A DREAM THAT SHE LOVED to remember she’s standing in the kitchen of her house and preparing supper. The window faces the little garden and she watches her son, who sits on the swing and waves to her. There’s no one in the house, and she doesn’t mind waiting. She knows who she’s waiting for. She hears the creaking of the hinges of the old swing, the roar of the cars racing down the road, and the tapping of the knife on the chopping board. The din of a world carrying on as usual.

  Sitting now for the first time in her father’s chair, Rachel closed her eyes to get a clearer view of the child. She wanted to know who he resembled. Every child has a father, hers included. Suddenly this became urgent, as if this was the last time.

  She remembers the dream. Sometimes she wakes up with it in the morning and sometimes she returns to it in the course of the day, and her son, whom she sees clearly amid the darkness that she imposes on herself, looks like her alone, and now he’s standing by the door that opens on the garden, isolated in his orphanhood. Rachel opened her eyes and wanted to get up and lead him to the swing, which was still waiting, rusty and unclaimed, in the neglected garden. But the dream disappears, and with it her son.

  She leaned back, pressed against the thick wooden support, gripped the arms of the chair with both hands, ready to stand up and tackle the business that awaited her, but in the end she nestled in the chair, which was now hers, facing the photograph that the principal of the school had brought in from the faculty room and placed on the mantelpiece. The black ribbon crossed it diagonally, like a mark of distinction that someone had added to it in haste, and her father looked out at her with a severe expression, as he was and as he liked to be seen, with brows and lips tensed. Even the color photograph added no light
to him. And suddenly he seemed to be smiling as he looked at her, something in his eyes telling her she was now indeed free, but a different obligation, new and more dangerous than the ones he had imposed, was unfolding for her.

  The house was quiet. The shivah, the seven days of mourning, had passed, and the rabbi explained that his children couldn’t do without their bedtime story, apologized, and left. She closed the door behind him and listened to his footsteps that pounded the pavement like tom-tom drums. There was no need for a codebook or for psychological insights to tell her that this time she was really alone. There was no one left in the world whose criticism might upset her, whose angry silence would make her obsess about what she was doing, or not doing, whose smile could light up her day, from whom a compliment was the thing that she longed for in vain.

  She stood up and approached the artificial hearth. Her father thought it was a waste of time and money to fetch logs and light fires in the house, and he made do with an electric heater with coils disguised as flames. Rachel didn’t switch on the heater despite the cold permeating the room, because it still seemed to her that she was in his sanctuary, in a place where she didn’t belong, and from which at any moment she might be expelled. On the mantelpiece there was also a picture of her, standing between her parents on her eighteenth birthday; it was the last photograph of the three of them together. Beside it someone—her father, perhaps—had placed a portrait of her mother, in a black frame. Half a year later the cancer defeated her, and Rachel remembered, as if it were yesterday, how just a few days after Mother was gone she told him that she too was leaving, and going to Israel.

  She studied the forced smiles, hers and her mother’s, and the look in her father’s eyes, ranging far beyond the photographer. He seemed to be scanning the skies, as if he were making sure that they too were in good order, they had done their homework. In the picture there was a little shadow on the wall, the fruit of a London sun that probably had put in a special appearance only for him, and Rachel thought that now that he was no more, his shadow would disappear too and she would have light and shade of her own.

  RACHEL RETURNED TO THE CHAIR AND ran her hands across the smooth wooden arms. She traced with a fingertip the marks left behind by his fingernails. She had the nagging feeling that she was peeping at him, like in the days when he told her not to open drawers. “Nothing here is locked,” he said, “you have to believe me and I have to trust you.” You know, Dad, she answers him silently now, even an open drawer can remain closed. Even something that is clear to everyone can still hide everything.

  The old phone rang. As she picked up the Bakelite receiver she pictured her father sitting in the armchair glancing at an obsolete TV set. He had refused to get a cell phone. “No one ever calls me,” he said, and she knew he meant her, “and I have no one to call,” his words scratching her heart just as he scratched the arms of the chair. The rabbi was calling. He asked if he could do anything for her, and would she be coming to the synagogue on the Sabbath. “I knew your mother too, what a wonderful woman she was,” and he regretted that her parents couldn’t be buried side by side, making no reference to her father’s refusal to pay for a joint cemetery plot. After the phone call, she huddled in the chair as if trying to hide there. “My father died,” she said aloud. The words sounded to her sad and strange, as if someone else were saying them, and at the same time they were so familiar.

  Just three words. Three words that were a wall between her and everything that had been hers. She said them for the first time fifteen years ago. Ehud was sitting beside her then, going through all the possibilities with her, and he guided her when it came to choosing the tone and the words themselves. He insisted on carrying out the exercise, and she contacted him on the internal line and said in a soft voice suffused with tears, “My father is dead.” Ehud played the role of principal of the language school and he spoke English with an Arab accent that at any other time would have made her laugh. He expressed his sympathy and asked when she would be coming back. She ignored the question. Then she said she didn’t know where she would be spending the next few days. He asked for a phone number, and she promised to get in touch again once she had located herself somewhere and would give him the details. She didn’t give him an address either, with the excuse that she planned to travel soon and anyway she would be staying in hotels.

  A few minutes later, when she was ready, it was time for the real phone call. She looked out through the window at the Milan Cathedral, took a deep breath, and dialed a number in the Arab capital. The conversation flowed. The principal wanted to know where she was and expressed his concern at her sudden disappearance. She interrupted him: “Something terrible happened. My father died.” “I’m so sorry, Rachel,” said the principal, and he asked if he could help. No detail was divulged beyond what had been rehearsed from the start. “There are so many things I need to do. Send them all my love, and give my last salary check to the library at the refugee camp.” “Rachel, where are you speaking from?” She didn’t answer him; she knew how to evade an unwanted question, and she turned to look at Ehud, who was listening to them on another extension. “My father didn’t suffer at all,” she said to steer the conversation back on course. She wanted to say more. To ask the principal to pass on her message to him, that she had no alternative, that if it had been up to her she would have chosen something else, that she promises to contact him soon. But Ehud’s expression, and the code she was bound to, made it clear to her that this bridge too had been burnt.

  RACHEL PUT HER ELBOWS ON THE table and tried to come to terms with the sense of déjà vu that enwrapped her like a fishing net. Once again she needs to contact the school and announce that her father is deceased, again they will express condolences that they don’t really mean, and again she’ll realize that no one expects her to return. There, in the large and yet so homey Arab capital, he was hers, and she abandoned him because she had no choice. And in Israel? In the school where she’s teaching now, and in the nondescript apartment in which she’s chosen to live? Who is waiting for her? Who really knows who she is and what her father was to her? She can’t explain to any of them, not to any of her acquaintances, how profound grief is blending with the feeling of liberation.

  And again there is only one person left with whom she can speak. She looked for Ehud’s number on her cell phone and picked up the old receiver to listen to the dial tone. Once, alert to whether the phone was bugged, she used to listen for other sounds. Once, long ago, ancient history, she would walk into the apartment and immediately think of where the eavesdropping equipment could be hidden. She held on to the receiver until the sound changed from a pleasant and enticing purr to a truncated and irritating buzz, and she wondered what she would actually say to Ehud after so many years and across the sea of disappointment that separates them. Ehud will make an effort to understand her, this she knows for sure. He will also listen to her with the attentiveness that she loved so much, and he’ll suggest solutions that she could have found for herself if she had only taken the trouble to think the way he did. This was another world, a world in which there were people like Ehud. For some of them in the Unit she was just a sophisticated implement nicknamed Fairy. For those who met her in the Arab countries she was Rachel Brooks or any other name that served her purposes at the time.

  She replaced the receiver back in its cradle. Ehud could wait. He’s used to this. “Our job,” he used to tell her when she asked him how he manages to sit in a hotel room day after day, “comprises ten percent activity and ninety percent waiting.” He promised her he would wait, and that she could rely on him, always.

  The clock chimed. Her father wound it every evening before going to bed, and she kept it up through the days of the shivah. She isn’t taking it with her. She isn’t taking anything from here. In the city that once was hers and also in Tel Aviv it’s already midnight. In London only ten o’clock. All that remains is to get through the night, and then . . . then what?
Arrangements. Things to be done, things to be forgotten. When she sells her father’s apartment nothing will be left from her past. “You’ll be set up for life,” she was assured by the energetic real estate agent, who mentioned her father’s death only in passing and then talked a lot about how much the house would sell for. And her mother’s grave awaits her at the other end of the cemetery. She hasn’t been to her mother’s grave since her funeral, and she shivered when she thought of the neglect that surrounds death and its aftermath.

  She climbed the narrow staircase, went into the room that was once hers, and turned on the light. The posters were still hanging on the wall, and Jim Morrison and the Doors remained as young as ever. They were the only ones. On the tidy bed was the dust of years, and she realized that her father had never been in here. Rachel went out of the room, closed the door, and approached his bedroom on tiptoe as if afraid of waking him. “Even though he was working as a volunteer, I knew Michael would never miss a day’s work,” the school principal told her, and described in exhaustive detail, which embarrassed her, how he telephoned her father again and again and then took a taxi at his own expense and knocked on the door, in vain, and called the police department, and they found him peacefully in bed, a young seventy-three-year-old and generally in good health. “I’d like to go the same way—a cerebral hemorrhage and passing on to a world that’s all good,” said the principal, and he forced a smile. The cleaning service that she called in and the neighbor from across the way had tidied the apartment, but the bed remained as it was, the depression in the pillow seeming to call out for a hand to plump it up.

  She opened the drawers only with her fingertips. She glanced at the matching socks and underwear that she knew she would never find the strength to put into bags, and inspected the few suits and the bright white shirts still hanging in the wardrobe. Nothing to indicate that he wouldn’t need them anymore. She opened the drawer of personal items and closed it right away, afraid she might find something that would confuse her, that would change what she thought of her father. She told herself there would yet be time for this, that eventually she must sit down and confront the memories and sort them one by one. She moved to the bathroom, but didn’t open the medicine cabinet. On the sink, his toothbrush was in a cup with head uppermost. Like in her apartment, only one toothbrush.