A Spy in Exile

LONDON, MARCH 2015

Had anyone asked her, Ya’ara wouldn’t have been able to say how and under what circumstances she had made it to her hotel room in Paddington. It was a small, old-fashioned hotel, one out of a row of shabby guesthouses adjacent to one another in a long trainlike structure. When she got there, the reception desk was unmanned, and she struggled her way up the steep stairs to the third floor. She flopped onto the narrow bed still in her clothes, managing to position her head over the trash bin squeezed between the edge of the bed and the rickety writing desk, and threw up a bitter yellowish liquid. Her body was bathed in sticky perspiration. She sank into a fitful sleep, tossing in her bed, covering herself with the thick blanket.

When the chambermaid knocked on her door in the morning, Ya’ara shouted from the other side of the door that she wasn’t to come in, and the chambermaid relented. Ya’ara knew in her stupor that her clothes were damp and her hair wet and sticky.

It wasn’t until evening, when darkness had fallen, that she managed to get up and drink some water from the plastic cup in the small bathroom. She undressed and left her clothes in a dirty pile in the middle of the room, her bare feet recoiling from the cold feel of the white ceramic flooring. She rinsed her mouth out with the ice-cold water she collected in the palm of her hand, remains of toothpaste she had applied with her finger still smeared on her face, and collapsed naked onto the bed, onto the sour-smelling sheets, her eyes closed and burning.

She asked the chambermaid not to enter the following day, too, fending off her anxious questions from behind the closed door and declaring that everything was okay. She was just a little tired.

• • •

Only on the third day did she sit up straight on her bed, wrapped in a thin, worn-out towel that had been washed far too many times, her body smelling of the cheap liquid soap she had found in the bathroom. She felt better. At least that awful, bitter, metallic taste in her mouth was gone. She checked her email again. A blue dot suddenly appeared. Mail from the production company in Israel. Attorney Ben-Atar had renewed the contact that had been inexplicably broken.