8/9/00

Spies Like Flies

If everyone's been acting kinda strange lately, it's only because the Mossad started advertising for help wanted.

    When I found Mahmud, the Arab kid who works in Yoram's makolet, hiding behind the bread bin, it didn't surprise me at all. Everyone's been acting kinda strange lately.
    "You too?" I asked him.
    "Your fat aunt," he responded, rather predictably, "is visiting from Haifa. You will be working overtime all week. Your cat has gastritis."
    "There are sesame seeds in your mustache," I said.
    This was not a password, but the truth. He struggled out from under the breads, brushed his lip hair, and it was only then I saw it was really Eliyahu the mailman in disguise.
    "Not you as well!" I exclaimed. Eliyahu shrugged as if to say, what, I should be the only fool left out? "So where's Mahmud?" I asked despite myself.
    "Tashkent, with Kirschenblatt, doing laundry for the diplomats."
    Driving home, I waved at Yerachmiel Fish peering out from under the drain grating. "Regards to your fat aunt," he called out.
    I had known this was going to happen, and it did, starting the very day the Mossad ran advertisements in the employment columns of several newspapers. "SPIES WANTED" it said, or something like that; I never actually saw the ad, because my kid, who's nine, tore it out, and later, nonchalantly asked if I could buy her a silencer.
    (I asked my editor why the ad didn't run in our newspaper. But indeed it did, he replied. We used invisible ink.)
    I came through the front door, arms loaded with groceries. Aunt Blanche was there to greet me. Well, not exactly "greet" in the sense that she said "hello": she frisked me. These days, she pointed out, you can't be too careful. "The whole damn country is crawling with spies, spies-in-training, assassins, student assassins, you name it," she sputtered. I asked if she suspected me, her favorite nephew. She didn't answer.
    She pounced on my purchases, inspecting everything thoroughly. "Did you check the eggs for bugs?"
    Noodles I always check, and rice, ever since the time we dined on caterpillar pilaf, but what could possibly crawl into an egg?
    But she knew what she was talking about, even if I didn't, and methodically smashed each ovum.
    "You're mad!" I shrieked.
    "Aha!" she crowed. Two of the eggs had tiny microphones in them.
    "Birnbaum!" Aunt Blanche snarled furiously. She ran to her room, and ran right back with a stick of dynamite. She stuffed it inside the #2 frozen chicken I thought would be tonight's supper. "Take this back to the store, tell Yoram to deliver it to Birnbaum. Yoram will understand."
    There was a time when the Mossad was so secretive that its workers didn't even know they were with the Mossad. It did not have a name. But rumors persisted (especially among people whose cellphones were blowing up in their ears) that there was such an organization, so it became known as The Organization, which is what mossad means, which would be like calling Ben-Gurion Airport "The It."
    Israelis spent their entire careers working for enterprises with such names as "The International Institute for Cooperation and Friendship," or "Paperwork Federation Inc.," or "The Government of Israel," but they were, in fact, Mossadniks.
    This is not a unique concept. Similarly, everyone who works at the nuclear-weapons plant is convinced they are working in a bank, because, as is well known, we do not make atom bombs, and to prove it, the place where they're not made is commonly called "There."
    Another good example is the entire country, which, in many parts of the world, is not considered to exist. It is an "entity" not unlike the area beyond Pluto. (In strictly metaphysical terms that is not without logic, because where we are is subject to blind trust, whereas in fact it is essentially unprovable that the view outside your window is irrefutably not elsewhere on the planet. What doesn't make sense is, if they deny Israel's existence, how can they affirm that there is an Israeli atom bomb, or Israeli spies?)
    Anyway, unless the advertisements are a prank, now we know the Mossad exists, though we still don't know if we work for it.
    But that too is changing.
    I work in a newspaper, but I got to wondering. The other day, I had just finished editing the "Dear Ruthie" column, when it occurred to me this might be undercover work. So I called the Mossad, said it's Orbaum, can I have an advance on my salary?
    They wanted to know which Orbaum.
    That's how I found out I was a secret agent, and my entire family too.
    I called my mother, because I thought she might like to know.
    I got the answering machine. "You have reached the home of Rabbi Zerubavel and Gabriella Tschernichovsky-Katzenellenbogen. Please leave a coded message at the beep."
    I didn't think much of their aliases: the couple next door, and the babysitter's parents, and the mayor's two children, were all named Rabbi Zerubavel and Gabriella Tschernichovsky-Katzenellenbogen as well. I suppose with everyone in the country now working for the Mossad it was getting more difficult to come up with fake names. There are only so many.
    I left a message, mostly to let her know I hadn't been captured or something. "Hi Ma, it's me -- uh, Wolfgang. Listen, I know you're in it deep. Aunt Blanche told me you're knocking off world leaders or something. Please call when you have a minute."
    I then called the vet, who said he already knew about the cat's gastritis, from Mahmud. Uh-uh, I told him, Mahmud's in Tashkent, that's really Eliyahu. The vet scoffed at my ignorance. "What, you think one spy doesn't talk to the other spy? Nobody in Uzbekistan doesn't know about this." Why anyone should care was obvious when the vet pronounced his diagnosis: the cat had swallowed too much microfilm. "The Russians would kill for what that cat craps," he warned.
    It occurred to me that I'd better keep an eye on the lady across the street, because she's always staring out the window and, well, because she's Russian. In a moment, she was at my front door, hands on hips. "I know what you're thinking," she growled.
    I didn't have to worry about her for long, because she apparently completed her training, and suddenly one morning two Nesher taxis pulled up in front of her house. Grasping her tik jemsbond she jumped into the second one. "Follow that cab!" she commanded. "Take me to the airport!" I heard her shout, as the driver fell in with a high-speed chase. "Nu! Step on it!"
    She was leaving for a vacation, in North Korea.
    This didn't surprise me, because at any given moment there are always 20 million Israelis on vacation somewhere in the world, and no place anywhere with no Israelis, ever. (And yet the queues at your average Israeli bank never get shorter. Go figure.) 
    It's comforting to know that here and abroad, whatever happens, we Israelis will know about it, instantaneously.
    If only our government had any idea what's going on.