Free The English Teacher by Yiftach Reicher Atir

qualities. She had a lovely face with fine features but she was somehow hard to remember, to inscribe in the memory and say: This is a woman I want to see again. She wasn’t pleased when the instructors in the course told her they considered her looks an asset. ‘Please don’t be offended,’ the Unit commander said in the final briefing. ‘We see you as a weapon, and it’s better for us and better for you that it’s a concealed weapon. Under your facade of normality, and behind the pretty face, one among thousands like it, an operative is hiding, an operative who has completedher course with distinction and is capable of fulfilling whatever assignment is entrusted to her.’ She also thought we were happy she had broken up with Oren, and didn’t say he was the one who initiated the separation. To console her I told her that most operatives abandon their girlfriends after training, and she at once, in her typical way, told me it pained her to find herself in a group she didn’t want to be a part of.
    â€œâ€˜That’s what you need,’ she told me, ‘someone like me, who doesn’t have a boyfriend, who takes the world seriously.’
    â€œâ€˜Actually, not just that . . .’ I responded, and was trying to say something that would balance the picture, but she continued: ‘I know I’m not funny and not charming, and perhaps that’s what makes me suitable, because men don’t start up with me.’
    â€œShe was right, of course. And there was something else, something I said to the Unit commander before I fell in love with her, and after he said goodbye to her and wished her success. I said to him, ‘Rachel will be a good operative, but she can’t be coddled. She needs to be like a wrestler climbing into the ring—lean and hungry.’ And that is exactly what she was.”

    E HUD DIDN’T SIT IN THE ROW behind her on the plane, nor did he peer at her through the mostly opaque window of one of the vehicles waiting on the tarmac. The Unit’s war room was unmanned the day she went deep into enemy territory, bearing a new identity, the image of a carefree young English teacher starting out on her way. There was no point holding a squadron of helicopters on alert for a rescue mission, because Rachel’s commanders knew that if something went wrong, not even a military intervention would help. They had told Rachel this, and it was clear to her that now everything depended onher. It was her decision, when she could go ahead with the operation and when it was better to stop and say: This is too dangerous.
    There was no turning back. The plane landed and she needed to get up from her seat and move toward her destination. Around her there was a strange and menacing silence. Her neighbor in the next seat said something that sounded like goodbye, and someone standing in front of her in the queue for the exit chattered with his friend in Arabic. The flight attendant said something to her, and outside was the din of jet engines, but it all sounded far away, and she was alone in the world, in her own almost-silent movie. “Enough,” she said to herself aloud, and walked to the door of the plane.
    Rachel shielded her eyes with her free hand and held her handbag firmly, as if someone might snatch it. The sun beat down fiercely despite the early hour of the morning, and the heat outside wrapped around her like an extra layer of clothing. She walked slowly down the steps and inadvertently exposed her thigh. “Everything has to be planned,” Ehud told her in one of the briefings. “Just as you don’t go out on a date in clothes you’ve yanked out of the closet, that’s the way it has to be over the border, at the first encounter with your adversary, the one who’s looking for a reason to take you aside and ask a few more questions.” They chose a simple blouse with a high collar, to emphasize her