Teaching Tania - Love is all you need???

by James Gault

  “Have a nice day!

  “Tan.”

  You can see from this that Tania has big problems. It’ll take at least two months to get her English back to acceptable standards. And I don’t know how she got out of the country without her mother knowing. Her Mum must have had some idea about it or she would have phoned me by now. And how did Tania get a visa? I’m not sure what Ruthie’s parents do, but they sure must be able to pull some strings with the top brass in US officialdom. (My God, I’m beginning to write in American idioms myself!)

  I also think she may be in some danger over there. Can you phone me and tell me if Honza and Big George are in class? I’m hoping they followed her to America and are protecting her, but it doesn’t seem likely. But if not, and they are still in school, get them to phone or e-mail me right away,

  Best wishes

  Tania’s other teacher

  J.

  Chapter 20 The Big Plan

  AIRPORT MESSAGE

  To be handed to Miss Tania Mozrova, passenger from New York, USA

  Dear Tania,

  Phone me immediately! You can’t go home, your Mum is in hospital, the same one as your Dad. You are coming to stay with us for a few days. You are not under any circumstances to go to Ruthie’s house.

  While you were away, your mum found the air tickets for Tel Aviv, in your name. She called Ruthie’s parents in Prague right away, because that is where you told her you were. I know I told you that telling the truth is an overrated virtue but in my opinion this was an unjustifiable lie. I hope you are not sinking to the low level of normal adult morality. Anyway, when Ruthie’s parents didn’t answer, she phoned my house. By the time she got to me, she was already agitated, and in a fleeting moment of inattention I let it slip that you were in the U.S.A. I heard a loud thump over the phone and the line immediately went dead.

  I immediately phoned for an ambulance, then I got in touch with Honza and Big George and we hurried round to your flat. Big George broke down the door, and we rushed into the living room to find your mother out cold on the floor, with your air tickets locked tightly into her closed fist. The ambulance men came and they recognised your Mum right away. After a quick check they were able to confirm that she was only suffering from the usual nervous shock, and that she would be fine after a few days rest in hospital. As they were carrying her out on the stretcher, I reminded them to keep her well away from your father when she came round.

  Honza, Big George and I tidied up, fixed the door, and sat down in your kitchen for a council of war. We were looking at the crumpled air tickets that Big George had managed to prise from your mother’s determined grip, and we decided we were very annoyed. Honza and I were angry that you had sneaked off to America without telling us, and Big George was embarrassed because one of his operators had lost your trail. Apparently you and Ruthie had used some simple trick which is published in the CIA manual (readily available on the World Wide Web) and he doesn’t understand how someone he had trained could have been fooled so easily.

  We have all decided that this secrecy of yours has to stop. Honza opened up your computer and rummaged through your word processing files and your old e-mails, and now we know everything about your plan.

  Personally I think that it’s a mad hair-brained scheme but the boys are quite impressed. You have their support on the committee, so you are assured of a majority and the plan will be going ahead. But there are conditions, none of which are negotiable, so you will have to accept them. The attempts on your life haven’t stopped, even in America, and we have to think of your safety.

  First of all, we are all going to Jerusalem with you, Honza, myself, Big George and the whole security team. Don’t try to pretend it will be too expensive, we know about the sponsorship from the major TV companies and the airline industry. Besides, we are a team, a multi-gender team, and we male members are demanding our rights of full participation in decision making. I know you girls like to be in charge, but you cannot run a political society like a marriage.

  Next, you have to keep to the 6 rules I gave you, especially rule 5. You must not go anywhere unless Big George and the boys (and girls) are there to look after you. When we get to Israel, we will find a secret location where no-one can find you. Big George’s team will be keeping a watch on it. You will stay there with Ruthie, working on your speech, while Honza and I take care of greeting all the international delegations and the preparations for the demonstration. We can keep in contact by mobile phone.

  Before we leave for Israel, you will have to go and visit your Mum and Dad in hospital. You may also want to visit Vladimir the Red, but Honza doesn’t think that this is entirely necessary. In any case, don’t even begin to think of making your own arrangements for this visit. Big George has arranged for an armour- plated limousine and six heavily armed motor cycle outriders to take you there and back. We aren’t playing games with your safety any longer. I apologise if this seems a bit draconian, but it’s for your own good.

  Call me as soon as you get this! It could be dangerous to hang around the airport too long, even though Big George has deployed some of his team to protect your return.

 

  See you soon,

  Your teacher,

  J.

  Chapter 21 The penny drops

 

  To : honza@tempisrael.com

  From : jteach@tempisrael.com

  Subject: Urgent

  Honza, drop what you’re doing and get round to the secret hiding place right away. We have a problem!

  I’ve just worked out who the traitor in the camp is. How can I have been stupid? It is Ruthie. It’s so obvious, how could we have missed it?

  Let my experience be a warning to you. We are all subject to the temptations to stereotype races, nationalities and genders, and this is how I failed to notice the crystal clear signs of Ruthie’s guilt. Because she was an American, I totally underestimated her intelligence, and because she was female, I totally underestimated her ruthlessness. I keep reminding myself that people are people, and that we must discard our prejudices and judge those we meet on their own merits, but once you get an idea in your head, it is difficult to shift it. As a result, the clues were staring me in the face and I couldn’t see them.

 

  Who knew every movement Tania made, even those little excursions she didn’t even tell us about? Ruthie! Who was magically able to get a twelve-year-old Russian visas for the USA and Israel? Ruthie! Who has contacts in the highest places of the US administration? Ruthie! Who knows all the secrets of the CIA operations manual, apart from Big George, of course? Ruthie! Whose father, I have just discovered, is the senior representative of the American Secret Service in the Czech Republic? Ruthie’s! And finally, who has disappeared from our secret hiding place here in Israel with our mutual friend and leader Tania, whom we are trying to protect? Ruthie, again!

  We have to find them, and quickly. We have only one lead. In her rush to leave, Ruthie left her mobile phone. That’s how I found out about her father. When I connected to the Internet through this phone, the home page was a highly secure site on the CIA server, in the name of Ruthie’s Dad. I connected the phone to my notebook, and I’ve been able to find a lot of interesting information already. But you’re much better at this than me. Get over here right away and help me!

 

  J.

  Chapter 22 The demonstration

  Dear Alena,

  I know you have no one to teach and I hope you’re enjoying your rest. I’m sorry I took all of your class away to the Middle East without telling you, but something very urgent and important came up. No doubt you saw it on T.V. Your pupils and I have decided to stop off in Cyprus on the way home for a few days rest and recreation at the seaside, but we’ll be back on Friday, and your lessons will almost be back to normal. I say almost because Ta
nia isn’t with us, and I will explain why later.

  By the way, Ruthie won’t be coming back to school either. You wouldn’t know this, but her father was an American secret agent based in Prague. Unfortunately, he’s no longer very secret so the US authorities have decided to send him back home. Ruthie was a secret agent too, in her own small way. When we got to Jerusalem, she set the cat among the pigeons right away by kidnapping Tania. Luckily for us, in her hurry to get Tania out of the house, she left behind her mobile phone. It was a big mistake, because it was a CIA mobile phone and it proved to be extremely helpful.

  First of all, we used it so send an SMS to Ruthie telling her to come back to the safe house where we had been hiding Tania and from where Ruthie had kidnapped her. Ruthie of course thought it was an official CIA message, so she fell for it and returned to the scene of the crime. Honza and I were waiting and we caught her. We had been hoping she would bring Tania with her, but unfortunately she came alone, so we had to proceed to the interrogation stage.

  Honza connected the mobile phone to the computer and begin to interrogate it, while I took on the low-tech job of the head to head interview with our suspect. It was hard going. Ruthie completely refused to listen to any of my questions. She had obviously had some quick crash course in anti-interrogation techniques, and she was applying the rules to the letter. I asked her how she could think of betraying her friend, who had helped and protected her from the very first moment she arrived, lonely and frightened, in a strange foreign city where they spoke an unintelligible sounding language totally devoid of vowels. She responded by closing her eyes tightly, shaking her head, standing to attention, putting her right hand on her heart, and singing the ‘Star Spangled Banner’. My every question was met with the same identical response, except that for variety she would change the song from time to time. I was regaled with ‘God Bless America’, ‘This Land is My Land’, and a few old and only slightly less patriotic numbers from Simon and Garfunkel albums. But I was getting nowhere with finding out where Tania had been hidden.

  I was beginning to get very desperate when Honza came into the room and handed me a piece of paper on which he had written

  “Her mobile phone is the most sophisticated I have ever seen. She keeps a personal diary on it. I have discovered that she has a crush - a serious crush – on Big George!!”

  It was the break we needed.

  “Get him here, right now!” I told Honza.

  When Big George arrived, we explained the situation to him – Ruthie the traitor, Ruthie the CIA agent, Ruthie the kidnapper, and Ruthie the amorously besotted with himself. Then we told him what he had to do. Big George was a bit embarrassed, it wasn’t what he had expected. Although tall, broad and strong, he was still young – thirteen next Tuesday – and he hadn’t really given much thought to the opposite sex. Kalashnikovs and Thomson machine guns held no fears for him, but girls were a different matter entirely. Honza, although younger, had more experience in this field than him, couldn’t he do it? We explained that while Honza might be more charming and suave than the affable BG, Ruthie just wasn’t madly in love with him. He, Big George, Velký Jirí in his own language, was the man, and the only man, for the job.

  Faced with this unavoidable challenge, Big George was magnificent.

  “Leave it to me, then, boys! ” he told us, and swaggered into the room where Ruthie was waiting, carefully bound and gagged in case she was harbouring evil thoughts of escape. He emerged some five minutes later, hand in hand with an untied and ungagged Ruthie, whose face was resplendent with a smile of undying adoration which would have made an overprotective mother faint on the spot. George handed us a slip of paper with an address, and informed us that he and ‘sweet little Ruthie’ were going back to HQ to work together on the planning of the demonstration. As they walked arm in arm out the door, we realized that the CIA’s loss was Big George’s gain.

  Honza and I sped over to the address George had given us and recovered the waiting Tania. She was a little surprised to see us, as she had been expecting Ruthie to return with a hot pizza. We told her the whole story and her main reaction was of rapturous delight at the formation of a new romantic couple in the world. She was so pleased that she took Honza’s hand and kissed him on the cheek right in front of me, much to the poor boy’s embarrassment. As we walked back to the safe house, Tania’s arm tightly tucked in Honza’s, I noticed a re-emergence of the doe-eyed devotion which she had been tending to forget while preoccupied with her political career.

  The demonstration went off rather well. Thanks to Ruthie’s mobile we were able to access all the computers of every clandestine organisation in the world. It appears that if you are cleared for access to one you are cleared for them all. All of them, of course, had been instructed to take out Tania, as she was seen as a serious threat to all their various but equally unsavoury objectives. But they had also been given instructions that no assassination attempts were to be made in presence of TV cameras, and, in fact, she was to be protected assiduously whenever she was on camera. Our TV sponsors were only too ready to agree to round the clock filming of our leader, and so the security problem was solved in a rather elegant and perfect manner.

  The effect of the demonstration was considerably enhanced by the attempted Israeli tank invasion of the old holy city which took place at the same time. This may just have been coincidence, but I suspect it was orchestrated by the TV companies in the interests of making a better show. This kind of proactive journalism seems to be prevalent these days. Spontaneous or planned, the result was spectacular.

  There they were, in a long line, thousands and thousands of children from all over the world, black, white and in between, wearing their national costumes and waving their little flags, holding hands, hugging, kissing and having fun, when suddenly the line of tanks appeared. The children formed a long thin barrier in front of the advancing army. The tanks rolled on; the children, unafraid, waved and shouted . The tanks stopped only about twenty feet from the line, which hadn’t given an inch. The guns were turned directly on the demonstrating children. Tania held up her hand, and everyone was silent. She walked right up to the front of the middle tank. Someone gave her a small stepladder. She placed it on the ground, right in front of the tank turret, and she climbed up until her face was directly opposite the muzzle of the gun. She looked right down the barrel, and waited. She waited and waited. Three or four minutes passed, no one spoke, no one moved. Then the turret of the tank rotated until the gun was pointing in the other direction. A great cheer went up from the line behind her. At the same time the guns of all the other tanks were turned away from the crowd.

  Only then did Tania turn around to face the children and begin to make her speech. It was a great speech, in English, and she had written the whole thing by herself. The grammar was perfect, the register just right, and the style could not have been improved. She made liberal and judicious use of antithesis, analogies and alliteration, and she employed the ‘rule of three’ to excellent effect. I would say her speech was realistic, righteous, and rousing.

  When she had finished, the Secretary General of the United Nations – another coincidence? – walked forward from between the line of tanks. He came right up to Tania and he shook her hand. Tania came down from her step ladder. The Secretary General put his arm round her shoulder, and led her off in the direction of a waiting white official car with the blue UN flag flying from the front of the bonnet. The crowd cheered and waved goodbye, then tucked into the lemonade and cookies that Ruthie and Big George had prepared the night before.

  Honza and I watched Tania walk to the car from the front of the line. As she passed by us, we both gave her a discrete, barely perceptible wave from the waist. She saw us, and smiled, acknowledging us only with a raising of the eyebrows, in the manner of a great and famous lady. The gesture was captured by the
TV cameras. Tania’s Mum and Dad phoned me that night. They had seen it on TV, they had felt as if the gesture had been for them and them alone. They had both cried a little. Honza and I had been scarcely less emotional, as we had used up three packets of Kleenex between us.

  The next day Tania phoned to say that she and the Secretary General would be tied up in meetings with all the senior Middle East politicians for the next week or so, so could we go home without her? The American Ambassador came for Ruthie to tell her she had to go back to the USA. There was a tearful farewell between her and Big George, and they parted promising to write each other postcards every day, in English, so you can expect a big improvement in George’s performance in the English lessons.

  So, Alena, that’s what your class have been doing while they’ve been away. I hope you feel that it’s been worthwhile, and that the time away from lessons hasn’t been entirely wasted. We’ll see you in a few days and we will answer all your questions then.

  Best wishes,

  Tania’s teacher,

  J.

  Chapter 23 Epilogue Part 1

  ENGLISH LESSONS AVAILABLE

  Outstanding teacher of English has a vacancy to teach one, and only one, enthusiastic and capable student. Individual lessons twice a week.

  Due to my complete and hectic schedule, I am only able to teach a limited number of students. Therefore I am only interested in dedicated hard-working people with a real desire to learn the language.