“They took me,” Katrina responded. “I thought I was going to die there, during the interrogation, in custody.” She paused, and her eyes filled with tears. “I wanted to die. That’s the truth.”
Ya’ara took her hand. They were both looking straight ahead, at the sea. White seagulls glided through the air close to the beach.
“But there was someone there who saved me. He smuggled me out. They must have thought he was going to finish the job. To put a bullet in the back of my head. But he took me to his mother’s home. I have no idea why he did it, why someone would tempt fate like that. His mother was a partisan fighter during the Great Patriotic War. An old woman who fears nothing. The heart of an angel. And soft hands. They cared for me as you would care for a baby, and I eventually got back onto my feet. He told me I couldn’t remain in Russia. That they’d find me and kill us both. He gave me a Czech passport he had made for me and money, too. He accompanied me all the way to the border with Ukraine. He drove through the night, and then the following night, too, and sent me over the border. I can still picture him there, just standing there and not moving, the sun rising over the hills, and him just standing there and watching me. And I went. I think he was the bravest man I’ve ever met.”
“And how did you get here?” And why did you come? Ya’ara didn’t voice her second question out loud.
“I wanted to see Galina,” Katrina said, answering the question she wasn’t asked. “I had to. I wanted to get in touch with the one person who forms a part of the sweetest moments in my life. I didn’t know how to find her, but the Bat Yam Artists Association was able to track her down. Someone by the name of Vladislav is still in contact with her. He used to be a friend of Igor. And I wanted to see you, too. To find out where you live I had to remember things I’d already forgotten, and it took a fair deal of patience to learn that you come here at least once a week, to the Bat Yam Promenade.”
Ya’ara felt a cold shiver down her spine. She suppressed the fear that momentarily froze her.
“How was your encounter? Yours and Galina’s?”
“You know how it goes. Such reunions always come with an element of disappointment. But it did me good. It took me back to those times. And she was a lot nicer than she had been back then. Oh, well, she was a seventeen-year-old girl then, at odds with herself, and full of hate for me for taking her father away from her, and worse even, for taking the place of her mother. That’s how children see it. She’s a lot more amiable these days, of course. And you must know that she doesn’t look like you at all.”
“My name’s Ya’ara.”
“I know. They slammed me with it during my interrogation, time and again, between punching me in the face and forcing my head into a bucket of ice water.”
“I’m sorry,” Ya’ara said softly. “If you prefer, you can call me Anna. That was once my name.”
“It’s okay, sweetheart. You helped me to get my revenge on them. It was so easy for them to break me back then. And there are some breaks from which there’s no coming back. So I still need to forgive myself. You have no need to ask for forgiveness.”
“There was nothing else you could have done. They threatened to take your daughter.”
“I don’t know…”
They sat there together in silence for a short while and the sun warmed their bodies. Ya’ara closed her eyes and allowed the sea breeze to caress her. After what had happened, she knew that even if she wanted to, she would never work for the organization again. Aharon would have made sure she’d been marked as an unstable element. Someone who despite her talents couldn’t be trusted. She didn’t want to go back to film school. Even the script she had written for her final graduation project had lost its appeal. The future looked remarkably empty to her.
“What are your plans now?” she asked Katrina Geifman. “Do you have enough money? I can help you.”
“I don’t know yet. I want to stay here for a few months. To wait for the winter. And then I’ll see.”
“Do you have a phone?” Ya’ara asked. “I want you to have my number. This doesn’t end here, on a bench overlooking the sea.”
“I know already that Cobra is dead,” Katrina said after they had exchanged phone numbers. “I saw a picture of him on an Internet news site while I was still in Ukraine. I wanted to know what was happening in Israel and I searched every day. Killed in a car accident. That’s what the report said. He looked just like he did when I used to provide security for the meetings with him. A little older, but exactly the same. I didn’t know back then who he was, only that he was someone important. Now I know just how important. I don’t know who had a hand in the accident. God, perhaps. I’ve seen more than enough through the years to learn not to believe in Him, but I don’t see any other way of explaining it.” She looked at Ya’ara, allowing the silence to ask what she hadn’t dared to voice out loud.
Ya’ara didn’t say a word. Katrina’s question remained unanswered. They sat there on the bench, gazing at the sea. The sun had climbed to a higher point in the sky, its heat more concentrated now, radiating orange. Anyone observing them from the side would have assumed perhaps that they were mother and daughter. But there was no one there to look at them. The promenade was deserted. Strange, Ya’ara thought to herself, as if someone had evacuated the area for the purpose of shooting a movie scene. “I’ll call,” she said to Katrina as she stood and regathered her hair, which shone in the glare of the sun. She picked up the black helmet that had been resting on the bench next to her and started walking. She could still feel the soft touch of Katrina’s hand as she got onto the large motorcycle and headed south with a low growl, which gradually intensified. The wind swept over her face, the blue sea appeared to flash by on her right, and the urban landscape gave way to sand dunes. The sky opened wider, her heart did the same, and she rode on, sucking clean air deep into her lungs. She was on the move.
69
MOSCOW, SVR HEADQUARTERS, JUNE 2013
By nine in the evening most of the workers had already left the facility. The warm light of the long summer day streamed diagonally through the wooden shutters of the SVR chief’s expansive bureau. Dust danced on the rays of sunlight, broken up by the straight lines of shade. Sitting as comfortably as their chairs would allow them in the conference area at the far end of the room were the commander of the SVR and the head of the Tenth Directorate. The commander’s bureau chief, who had just carefully placed a frosted bottle of vodka and two chilled glasses on the table in front of them, exited quietly to leave the two men on their own. The SVR commander’s fine gray jacket was hanging over the backrest of the chair across from his desk, where he had placed it earlier. His severe back pain, the result of a gunshot wound sustained during a shootout in a coastal city in southern England, back at some point during the Cold War, dictated that his bureau be furnished with simple, stiff wooden chairs. Sometimes he’d suggest to a guest in the office that those were the kind of chairs that had stood in his childhood home, in a small and meager village in the heart of the wilderness that lay hundreds of kilometers east of Moscow. But that was simply one of the proletarian cloaks in which he liked to drape his image. He had grown up in fact as the only child of educated and well-to-do parents in Leningrad, his father a professor of Semitic languages and his mother an electrical engineer, both loyal party members, both fierce fighters, albeit painfully young, during the Great Patriotic War. They were the ones who had instilled in him his values and his dedication to the greater cause, which from his perspective had never waned. His steely character wasn’t the product of financial hardship and an arduous life in the wilderness, but of a zealous love for the motherland and a constant desire to excel and earn the attention of his parents, and their praise, too, on rare occasions. He opened the top button of his impeccably clean white shirt and loosened the tie knot around his neck. Sitting across from him, on a rudimentary chair, was the head of the directorate, who stretched his legs out in front of him and emitted a sigh of weariness and contentment to mark the passing of a long day.