A Spy in Exile

BERLIN, DECEMBER 2014

They met at Café Einstein on Unter den Linden. The wide thoroughfare was already filled with decorations ahead of the approaching Christmas holiday. The thousands of tiny lights flickered to life on the bare trees, people hurried along the sidewalk, their heads tucked into their coats in an effort to find relief from the bitter, biting cold. Hanging in the air was a hint of the smell of hot wine, spiced with cloves and cinnamon, and Ya’ara remembered just how much she loved that time of the year in Europe, the cold and colorful weeks of December. She was shocked to see how tired Matthias looked when she spotted him. His hunched figure seemed to stand out in direct contrast to the festive holiday mood, the large, tough man now appearing tired and vulnerable. He smiled when he caught sight of her, wrapped in her white coat, and embraced her warmly, crushing her against the coarse sweater he was wearing.

“You look wonderful,” he said, sizing her up.

“And you look like someone who needs a rest. You look like a wreck, Matthias.”

“Why, thank you, young lady, you’ve always been generous with your compliments.”

“You don’t want empty words from me, do you?”

“It wouldn’t hurt sometimes, to hear false flattery. But you’re right. I haven’t heard a thing from Martina yet. Sometimes I tell myself that I’m just feeling hurt, that she got up and left without any explanation, turned her back on me as if I meant nothing to her. An aging man with a bruised ego. But then in creeps this sense that something sinister is going on, and I can’t seem to figure it out.”

“Are you sleeping?” Ya’ara asked with genuine concern. “It looks like you haven’t slept a wink since our meeting in Haifa.”

“I’m sleeping too little. Time is moving too slowly. Perhaps the holiday season will give me a chance to relax a little, to put things into perspective.”

“Where are you for Christmas?”

“I may go to Alexandra. She suspects there’s something up with me; I wasn’t my usual self when we last spoke on the phone. I blamed it on stress at work, but she said, ‘I’ve known you since you were born, Matthias, you can tell tales to others, but not to me.’ ”

Ya’ara knew that Alexandra had raised Matthias after the death of their parents, serving not only as a big sister but as a solid and stable home base. From the little he had revealed to her about himself, up until this last episode with Martina at least, she knew that Alexandra was the closest person to him in the entire world.

“You’re lucky to have a sister like Alexandra. You’re not a big talker, but from the stories you’ve told me I can tell that she’s a lovely woman. Perhaps it’s time we finally met, and then I can get to know you a little better, too?”

Matthias chose to ignore Ya’ara’s remark. “Anyway,” he said, “I spoke to my friend at the BfV, our domestic intelligence service. I gave him all the phone numbers for Martina that I’m aware of. He’ll see what he can do. He’ll have to violate about a hundred regulations and fifty laws along the way. He’ll be in big trouble if he’s caught. I told him he could blame it all on me, say that I was the one to initiate an unofficial investigation, based solely on a general hunch, and that’s why I didn’t want to trouble the entire system and run everything through the formal channels. But you’re pretty familiar with us by now, and that’s something the Germans are not willing to accept. Order must rule. And the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution certainly cannot track phones and print call records without cause and without due process of law.”

“But he’ll do it, right?”

“Yes, he’ll do it. For me.”

Matthias sensed that Ya’ara’s attention had drifted momentarily. Her eyes had fixed on a woman walking along the sidewalk in front of the café. She was wrapped in a long, dark gray woolen coat. Her light-colored hair was uncovered. She moved off into the distance, her hand sliding over her hair, a gold earring glinting in her left ear.

“Do you know her?”

“No, no,” Ya’ara responded with an element of nonchalance designed to hide the elevated pulse in her neck. “I thought for a moment that she looked familiar, but it was only my imagination playing tricks on me.” That’s what she must look like now, twenty years later. Like that woman. Ya’ara almost got up to follow her, even though a second look told her that the eyes were different. Not the same sparkling catlike eyes of her sister, Tatiana. She shook her head, forcing herself to focus on Matthias and return to the business of Martina, who had disappeared on him now and not twenty years ago.

She steadied her voice and asked, “Have you checked the records from border crossings?”

“Yes. Nothing. But that doesn’t mean anything. She could have left Germany in a thousand different ways without ever having used a passport. She could fly to any country that’s party to the Schengen Agreement, she could board a ferry to Scandinavia or the Baltic states, she could travel by car or train to Austria, the Netherlands, Belgium, Poland, anywhere, without being checked, and aside from flights on airlines that insist on seeing some kind of identification nevertheless, she could leave Germany without ever having to present an ID document at all.”

“You said a car picked her up when she left.”

“Yes, but I didn’t catch its license plate number.”

“But you saw something, right? Make? Color? The number of people inside?”

“There was only one person in the car. The driver. A young man, I think. Well, that’s what he looked like from the back at least. It may have been an old Land Rover. But Toyota also makes cars like that. Very similar to the Land Rovers. Sand-colored. It looked like a military vehicle was taking her away from me. Only the color, a light brown, almost yellow, remains imprinted in my memory. It really could have been a military vehicle, were we in the desert. Our army’s military vehicles are camouflaged in dark shades of brown and green. The car that came to collect Martina looked somewhat like one of those off-road vehicles you see in ads for cigarettes or alcohol from the 1970s. Know what I mean?”

“How old am I, Matthias?”

“Okay, never mind. I keep forgetting that you’re such a youngster.”

“Are you going back to Hamburg this evening already?”

“Yes. I need to get back to the station. I’ll head to my sister in Basel only on the eve of the holiday. Lined up for me until then are more discussions on the work plan for 2015. We need to prepare a detailed proposal for the bosses in Berlin. They’re killing me, those discussions. Our planning procedures are so cumbersome and bureaucratic. The world’s changing all the time anyway. What’s the point of making such detailed plans?”

“Are you sure you’re a German, darling?”

“I’m not so sure any longer.”

“I hope that your friend at the BfV comes up with something. Another option, of course, would be to stake out her office at the university and her previous apartment, from before she moved in with you. Perhaps I could make contact with her colleagues from the faculty, or with her dissertation advisor. But those would be shots in the dark, and I don’t have enough people to do so. I need a sign of life from her. A single point on the radar screen.”

“Ya’ara,” Matthias said, staring at her in earnest, the flesh under his eyes dark and puffy, “I don’t know what to say . . . Having you see me like this, so helpless, is hard for me. I don’t know myself like this either, yet here we are . . . But having you here cheers me up. You don’t beat around the bush. And you’re optimistic. It’s a little pathetic to draw courage from someone twenty years younger, but . . .”

Ya’ara was clearly embarrassed by his candor. She almost scolded him. “Matthias,” she said, “the roles have been reversed before. Friends don’t busy themselves with such considerations. They come when you need them. And the age difference between us is getting smaller all the time.”

Matthias wanted to say that the laws of mathematics made that impossible, that the age difference between them couldn’t change. But he remained silent. Maybe there is something to what she’s saying, he thought. There’s more than one way to reduce such differences.

“Call when you hear something,” Ya’ara said, before standing up, kissing him on the cheek, and disappearing into the night that had fallen on the city like a dark carpet.