She went into the kitchen, still talking, and he followed her. “I speak it well enough, but I still need to practice reading,” she said.
He leaned in the doorway and watched her prepare coffee. “Tell me something,” he said. “How did a girl like you get mixed up in this sort of game?”
She smiled briefly over her shoulder and then continued with her work. “It’s not much of a story, I’m afraid. I left school at sixteen and studied economics at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. After that, I went into the Israeli Army.”
“Did you see any fighting?”
“Enough to make me realize I had to do more,” she said briefly.
She placed cups and the coffeepot on a tray, and then she moved over to a cupboard and took down a tin of cream. Chavasse watched her as she moved about the small kitchen. As she leaned over the table to pick up the tray, her kimono tightened, outlining the sweet curves of her body, and then she turned, the tray in her hands, and smiled at him.
No woman had ever smiled at him quite like that. It was the sort of smile that went with the surroundings, drawing him in, enveloping him with a tenderness he had never experienced before.
As if she sensed what he was thinking, the smile disappeared from her face. He took the tray from her hands and said gently, “The coffee smells good.”
She led the way into the other room, and they sat down by the empty fireplace and he put the tray on a small table. As he poured, he said, “Nothing you’ve told me fully explains why a girl like you should be doing this sort of work.”
She held her cup in both hands and sipped coffee slowly. “My parents were German refugees who went to Palestine during the Nazi persecution, but I’m a sabra – Israeli born and bred. It makes me different in a way which would be difficult to explain. People like me have been given so much – I’ve never known what it is to suffer as my parents did. Because of that, I have a special responsibility.”
“It sounds more like a king-size guilt complex to me.”
She shook her head. “No, that isn’t true. I volunteered for this work because I felt I had to do something for my people.”
“Surely there are other things you could have done back home,” he said. “There’s a new country to be built.”
“But for me it isn’t enough. This way, I feel I can do something for all men – not just for my own race.”
Chavasse frowned and drank some of his coffee and she sighed. “I’m sorry, it’s difficult to put into words, but then feelings always are.” She shrugged and produced a packet of cigarettes from the pocket of her kimono and offered him one. “If it comes to that, how does anyone get into this kind of work? What about you, for instance?”
He smiled and gave her a light. “I started as an amateur. I was a university lecturer – Ph.D. in modern languages. A friend of mine had an elder sister who’d married a Czechoslovakian. After the war, her husband died. She wanted to return to England with her two children, but the Communists wouldn’t let her.”
“And you decided to get her out?”
He nodded. “The government couldn’t help, and as I speak the language, I decided to do something unofficially.”
“It must have been difficult,” Anna said.
He smiled. “How we managed it I’ll never know, but we did. I was in hospital in Vienna recuperating from a slight injury, when the man I work for now came to see me. He offered me a job.”
“But that still doesn’t explain why you took it.”
He shrugged. “I didn’t – not straightaway. I went back to my university for the following term.”
“And what happened?”
He got to his feet and walked across to the window. It was still raining, and he stared out into the night and tried to get it straight in his own mind. Finally, he said, “I found that I was spending my life teaching languages to people who in their turn would spend their lives teaching languages to other people. It suddenly seemed rather pointless.”
“But that isn’t a reason,” she said. “That’s the whole human story.”
“But don’t you see?” he said. “I’d discovered things about myself that I never knew before. That I liked taking a calculated risk and pitting my wits against the opposition. On looking back on the Czechoslovakian business, I realize that in some twisted kind of way I’d enjoyed it. Can you understand that?”
“I’m not really sure,” she said slowly. “Can anyone honestly say they enjoy staring death in the face each day?”
“I don’t think of that side of it,” he said, “any more than a Grand Prix racing driver does.”
“But you’re a scholar,” she said. “How can you waste all that?”
“It takes intelligence to stay alive in this game.”
There was a slight silence and then she sighed. “Don’t you ever feel like giving it up?”
He shrugged and said lightly, “Only when it’s four o’clock in the morning and I can’t sleep. Sometimes I lie in the dark with a cigarette and listen to the wind rattling the window frames and I feel alone and completely cut off from the rest of humanity.”
There was a dead, somber quality in his voice, and she reached across quickly and took one of his hands. “And can you find no one to share that loneliness?”
“A woman, you mean?” He laughed. “Now, what could I ever offer a woman? Long unexplained absences without even a letter to comfort her?” There was a sudden pity in her eyes, and he leaned across and gently covered her hand with his. “Don’t feel sorry for me, Anna,” he said. “Don’t ever feel sorry for me.”
Her eyes closed and tears beaded the dark eyelashes. He got to his feet, suddenly angry, and said brutally, “Keep your sorrow for yourself, you’ll need it. I’m a professional and work against professionals. Men like me obey one law only – the job must come first.”
She opened her eyes and looked up at him. “And don’t you think that I live by that law just as fully?”
He pulled her up from the chair. “Don’t make me laugh,” he said. “You and Hardt are dedicated souls, amateurs playing with fire.” She tried to look away, and he forced her chin up with one hand. “Could you be ruthless – really ruthless, I mean? Could you leave Hardt to lie with a bullet in his leg and run on to save yourself?”
Something very like horror appeared in her eyes, and he said gently, “I’ve had to do that on several occasions, Anna.”
She turned her face into his shoulder, and he held her close. “Why didn’t you stay back in Israel where you belong?”
She raised her head and looked up into his face and she was no longer crying. “It’s because I wanted to stay that I had to come.” She pulled him over to the couch and they sat down. “As a small girl, I lived on a kibbutz near Migdal. There was a hill I used to climb. From the top, I could look out over the Sea of Galilee. It was very beautiful, but beauty, like everything else in life, must be paid for. Can you understand that?”
She was very close to him, and he looked down into her eyes and they moved together, naturally and easily, and kissed. They stayed that way for quite some time, and after a while she said with a sigh, “This shouldn’t have happened, should it?”
He shook his head. “No, very definitely not.”
“But I knew it would happen,” she said. “From the moment you spoke to me at the club, I knew it would happen. And why not? We are human beings after all.”
“Are we?” he said, and got to his feet. He walked over to the window and lit a cigarette, taking his time. “Perhaps you are, but I don’t think I could change now if I wanted to.”
She walked near and faced him, eyes searching his face. “Then what just happened changes nothing for you?”
He nodded somberly. “Except to make me feel even lonelier at four o’clock in the morning.”
A sudden determination showed in her face, and she was about to reply when there was a knock on the door. When she moved across the room and opened it, Mark Hardt came in.