The Betrayers (14 page)

—What conditions? Kotler asked.

At this Svetlana hesitated and glanced at Tankilevich. He had opened his eyes and now looked at her scornfully, as at a simple-minded, bumbling child.

—He had to go once a week to Simferopol, Svetlana said tersely.

Kotler paused for a moment and smiled.

—The weekly trip to the synagogue, he said. To make the minyan.

In his pronunciation of the Hebrew word was a subtle mimicry of the way Svetlana had flourished it the previous day. She detected it.

—He would have gone willingly! Svetlana protested. When he was well, he went with pleasure. She’d only needed to ask.
But to force someone to perform a religious duty is an insult. An insult twice over. To the person and to God.

—I see, Kotler said. So this must be why God sent us to you.

—I don’t presume to know God’s reasoning. But just when our life here was made impossible, He sent the only person who could save us.

—I still don’t understand how you believe I can save you.

—By letting us finally leave this place.

—For Israel.

—For Israel.

—Flights depart regularly from Kiev for Tel Aviv. I hope to catch one myself today. If your husband is well enough to travel, you could be on a plane tomorrow.

—Your girlfriend said the same thing. But both of you know it isn’t so. We cannot go as we are. Not with my husband’s past. He must first be absolved before the Jewish people.

—I see. And I’m to absolve him?

—Who else? Not me. If it were me, I would have done it long ago.

Tankilevich wouldn’t accept Kotler’s money—what of Kotler’s absolution, to which he had an even fainter claim? Kotler looked to see if he was rousing himself in protest. He was not; instead, he had composed himself in a yet more stately guise, the image not merely of a man deserving of absolution, but of a man to whom it had been too long and cruelly denied. And thus—
tragically, tragically
—he might meet his Maker! It was clear that Kotler was expected to grant this absolution even though Tankilevich offered no repentance. But why should he? Since Tankilevich was in need, since he was in the subordinate position, he must be the injured party. And since Kotler was in
the dominant position, since the power now rested in his hands, it was mean and petty of him to demand repentance, an admission of guilt. After all, guilt and innocence were not fixed marks. There were extenuating circumstances. Wasn’t this the governing logic of the times? That cause and effect could not be easily disambiguated? That all was up for revision and nobody durst speak of an absolute truth? By this logic, in granting absolution, Kotler would be remediating a wrong. A wrong he had perpetuated by virtue of holding power. Saying
I forgive you,
he would actually be saying
Please forgive me.
Or, at least,
Please forgive me for not forgiving you sooner.

There lay Tankilevich, presumably with one foot in the next world. Svetlana had asked Kotler to absolve her husband before the Jewish people. What would it cost him to say he would do it? A small lie. Just enough to calm her down and enable her to call the private ambulance. For Kotler wanted no hand in Tankilevich’s death. Especially since, once, he had truly wished him dead. And yet, being himself, he still could not form the words.

—So, will you do it? Svetlana asked.

—Call the ambulance, Svetlana. First he needs to live, then worry about absolution.

From Tankilevich came another objection but it lacked force, and this time Svetlana did not heed him. She went into the kitchen and returned paging through a phone book. She looked from Kotler to Leora and then dialed the number. Unlike the call to the public ambulance, this one was brief.

—Shall we wait with you until they come? Kotler asked.

—What for? Svetlana said. So you can feel magnanimous? You gave the money for the ambulance. Very well. The paramedics
will come. They will help us. Today. But what about tomorrow? If this is all you intend to do, then go, and the devil take you.

Now Svetlana went and sat again at her husband’s side in a demonstration of fidelity. She placed a hand on his forehead, which caused Tankilevich to turn his face toward the back of the sofa.

The image of the two of them struck Kotler as pitiable and ludicrous. Upon these people he was to exercise his lofty principles? Still, Svetlana peered at him and awaited a reply.

—Svetlana, you may not believe it, but I harbor no ill will toward your husband. So it is not even a matter of forgiveness. I hold him blameless. I accept that he couldn’t have acted differently any more than I could have acted differently. This is the primary insight I have gleaned from life: The moral component is no different from the physical component—a man’s soul, a man’s conscience, is like his height or the shape of his nose. We are all born with inherent propensities and limits. You can no more be reviled for your character than for your height. No more reviled than revered.

—You say, came Svetlana’s answer. When you have been revered and my husband reviled.

—It’s true. But that doesn’t change the fact that it is so. You spoke before of fate, that you believe in a Divine Providence. You asked my opinion, and I said that I believed we walk hand in hand with fate. We choose to follow it or pull against it, depending on our characters. But it is character that decides, and the trouble is, we don’t decide our characters. We are born as we are. Last night I told Leora about my father, who, in his youth, was a gifted sportsman, a very fast runner. I was his only child. In many respects I resemble him, yet I didn’t inherit his athletic
prowess. When I was a boy, he trained me, attempting to coax from me something that wasn’t there. I tried with all my strength, but I simply lacked the ability. This was my first encounter with this unpleasant reality. The first but hardly the last. For instance, I was a good pianist. But if I didn’t achieve greatness it was because, again, I lacked a certain quality that more gifted students possessed. I also had these small hands. I understood that both these things inhibited me equally and were equally beyond my control. It is the same with morality, as I was forced to discover. Just as there are people in this world who are imparted with physical or intellectual gifts, there are those who are imparted with moral gifts. People who are inherently moral. People who have a clear sense of justice and cannot, under any circumstances, subvert it.

—I see, so you were born a saint and my husband a villain?

—No, I do not consider your husband a villain. There
are
villains, but he is not one. This is why I said I don’t blame him. He is an ordinary man who was ensnared in a villainous system. As for what I am, I don’t have a word for it. A
saint
or a
hero
might be someone else’s word, but not mine. I behaved the only way I could. When I was in prison and I knew that it would take only a single word from me to put an end to my suffering, I still could not bring myself to speak the word. It was like I had a plug in my throat. A moral plug. Impossible to dislodge. As for where it came from, that is as much a question for physicians as metaphysicians. This is what I discovered during my imprisonment. I saw the human character in its naked form. I saw at one end a narrow rank of villainy, and at the other a narrow rank of virtue. In the middle was everyone else. And I understood that the state of the world is the result of the struggle between these two extremes.

—A very strange idea you have, Svetlana said. There is no fault; there is no blame and no praise either. Nobody is accountable for his actions.

—I agree it is strange. There is no fault, no blame or praise, but we are all held accountable.

—I don’t understand, Svetlana said. You say you do not fault my husband. You hold him blameless. You forgive him. But still you intend to punish him, even after all these years and him in his condition?

—I do not intend to punish him. But I cannot absolve him the way you ask. I cannot go in front of the news cameras and the journalists and declare to all the world that I forgive him and hold him blameless. That he was a victim of forces he could not resist. Even if this is what I sincerely feel in my heart.

—No? And why not?

—The reason I can’t do it, the reason I’m forced to hold Volodya to account, no longer has anything to do with him. Even if I still believed that he deserved punishment for what he did, I agree that he has served his term, such as it is. If it were simply between him and me, I would say it: Volodya, I forgive you. But I can’t go before the world and say that he was not culpable for his actions. Because the world would misunderstand.

A groan emanated from Tankilevich, and, as if with his last strength, he gripped the sofa and tried to lift himself up. Svetlana’s hands fluttered about him, as though trying to dissuade and assist him at once. And he responded in kind, repelling and requiring her until he achieved a sitting position. He propped himself, somewhat precariously, against the arm of the sofa. But he was burning to speak.

—It’s all very clear, Tankilevich said. You are the Shield of David protecting Israel from my toxic influence.

—That isn’t what I am saying, Volodya.

—What you are saying is that I was not born a man but some sort of worm. And that most men who roam the earth are also worms. But as one such worm, I can tell you that if I had it to do over again, I would choose just as I did. If I hadn’t agreed to work for the KGB, they would have killed my brother. And for all the trouble I caused you, you survived and prospered. So now you tell me how you, a man, would have acted differently.

Kotler looked unwaveringly at Tankilevich.

—Haven’t I already answered that question? Kotler said. I couldn’t have done what you did. Sooner than betray any of my brothers, I was prepared to die, to lose my wife, and to abandon my parents to a lonesome old age.

Kotler looked to Leora, who had observed all this coolly and silently. It was a coolness extended even to himself, he felt. As if he’d been weighed in the balance and found wanting. He’d never sensed it from her before.

He turned back to Tankilevich and addressed him as gently as he could.

—Here is what I will say to you, Volodya. And I say it without malice. Israel doesn’t need you. It has thousands like you. Thousands of old generals on park benches plotting the next war with the Arabs. It can do without another. So why go to a place where you are not needed? Why not ask instead: Where am I needed? Where do my people need me? And choose that place. Choose that place, for the first time in your life, of your own free will.

—Choose to wither away, the last Jew in Crimea.

—If so, a noble end.

—If it’s so noble, then why me and not you?

—Because I am still needed elsewhere, Volodya. Though I’m not sure for how much longer. I may yet join you here. We can both be the last Jews of Crimea or, God knows, part of another exile, another return.

Kotler checked his watch and looked out the window. There was no sign of the ambulance.

—We should pack, Kotler said. We should go.

He took a step in the direction of their room and glanced at Leora to see if she would follow. She did, though her face retained the same cool, inscrutable cast.

Kotler had taken several more steps when he recalled one last thing. He turned back to see Tankilevich now lying on his back again, his eyes open as Svetlana peered anxiously at him.

—Volodya, Kotler spoke.

Tankilevich inclined his head toward him.

—The night before your letter appeared in
Izvestia,
you broke all those plates in our apartment. Do you remember?

He waited for Tankilevich to respond, to evince the least animate gesture.

—Do you remember? Kotler repeated.

—I remember everything, Tankilevich said slowly.

—I never understood it. What happened there? All those broken plates. And then sitting in the kitchen to glue them together.

—What happened? Tankilevich said. Very simple. I needed to do something with my hands. It was either that or I kill you. And spare us both.

O
nce more, as on the previous day, Kotler and Leora, trailing suitcases, made their way among the sunburned vacationers on the esplanade. It was still before nine, but the day’s procession had already begun. Was there another people who approached the phenomenon of leisure as systematically as the Russians? Was there a people who took the sun and the waters with more conviction and diligence? Natural remedies, holistic treatments, folk cures, mineral therapies—and the doctors and professors and experts who promoted them. The rival flows of mysticism and science that irrigated the Russian heart, a manifestation of the failed Soviet project. Backwardness yoked to forwardness. This was one of its more harmless manifestations. His father had embraced it. At dawn, he would already be walking along the shore, vigorously swinging and rotating his arms. By seven, he would have claimed a strategic spot on the beach. Soon after, Kotler and his mother would join him. Throughout the day they would follow a salubrious regimen of walks and swims because it was not acceptable to simply laze
about. The sunlight contained vitamins. Walking at a prescribed pace improved the circulation. Immersion in salt water restored the skin. And the quality of the air for the respiratory system! And the aromatic wildflowers for teas and infusions! And the pleasure his father derived from the word
nutrient!

Kotler and Leora picked their way through the vacationers toward the Internet café. Like the last Jewish stragglers, Kotler thought, with their suitcases and cheerless expressions in the holiday sunlight. Though, technically, that sad distinction belonged to Tankilevich. Capricious fate had cast him as the final link in the long chain of Crimean Jewry. A chain that stretched back more than a thousand years to the Khazars, the last Jewish warriors and emperors, if legend was to be believed. The Khazars, the Krymchaks, the Karaites. And, in the past century, the doomed farming colonists and Yiddish poets who had imagined a homeland in Crimea, a New Jerusalem to supplant the Old. Now it was coming to a close, like all Jewish stories came to a close, with suitcases.

There were only two other people in the Internet café when they arrived. Two young women typing quietly at opposite ends of the room. Between them were half a dozen vacant machines. The raucous boys waging war were gone. It was too early for them. Or perhaps the dark room with the strobing screens could not compete with the offerings of a summer morning. This could be construed as proof that the world was not yet beyond repair.

As before, Kotler and Leora took two neighboring machines. They propped their suitcases behind their chairs and started to seek their way home. In no time, they had it. At midnight, a flight departed Kiev for Tel Aviv. At eight in the evening,
a flight departed Simferopol for Kiev. Seats were available on both flights. They could purchase them in a matter of minutes through the computer. Kotler reached for his wallet and his credit card. Leora stopped him.

—It is the same airline, Leora said. I will call to see what they charge to change the tickets.

—Unfailingly prudent, Baruch said.

—I see no reason for you to throw any more of your money away.

—Any more? Do you mean what I gave to Tankilevich?

—I mean this entire trip, Baruch. It was a mistake.

She spoke the words with a cold stoicism, the lingering effect, it seemed, of whatever had disturbed her at Tankilevich’s house.

—The fault is mine, Kotler said. Forgive me.

—You don’t need to apologize. Nor do you need to absolve me before the whole of the Jewish people.

Leora reached into her purse, took out her phone, and dialed the number for the airline. Kotler watched her as she waited for the system to connect and then as she submitted to the gauntlet of recorded prompts. Sensing her mood, he left her to the task and turned to his computer screen to key in the address for
Haaretz.
Unlike the previous day, he was not greeted by an unflattering image of his own face. His story had already dropped several rungs down the news ladder. Besides, his story had only ever been preliminary to the main story. And that story, after its interminable lead-up, was now in the offing. On the screen appeared the opening stages of the drama: Stricken, grieving, furious settlers facing columns of distressed and stone-faced Israeli soldiers and police. A young Orthodox mother, hardly older than a girl, in head scarf and long skirt, thrusting her
squalling infant into the face of a young female soldier. A group of young men, with the long, flowing
payos
and the disheveled dress of the hilltop youth, who had chained themselves to the ark in a synagogue. A different group of men, older, who had each donned the striped costume of the concentration camp inmate, with the crude yellow Star of David sewn over the breast. The full shameful, histrionic, heartrending pageant was on display. He motioned for Leora to look. She gave a cursory glance, no more.

Kotler entered the address of
Yedioth Ahronoth
and found essentially the same images. He scanned the photographs for Benzion’s face. In their uniforms and helmets, a number of boys resembled Benzion, more scholars than warriors, but none was Benzion himself.

Kotler felt a redoubled urgency to get home, if only, during such a turbulent moment, to breathe the same air as his countrymen. It was disgraceful to be away.

—Is there anyone there to speak with? Kotler asked Leora.

She nodded her head but said nothing. She was no longer pressing buttons, simply listening and waiting.

—I’d sooner pay the money than wait. To have the tickets would put my mind at rest.

—Another minute, Leora said. If they don’t answer.

Kotler could see it was now a matter of principle. There was life: a quick leap from practical to principle. But he did not press her on it. If it had become a matter of principle, grounds for her to assert herself, it was because of him. She’d conceded one thing after another on this trip.

—Very well, Leoraleh, another minute, he said.

He used his minute to navigate from the news site to his
e-mail account. He’d last consulted it in Kiev more than a day ago. Then, there had been a block of messages forwarded from his office. Media requests. Now he saw more of the same. As well as a few notes from disparate friends, expressing, he assumed, some manner of concern or support or, perhaps, censure. He didn’t open them. He scrolled quickly through the list, looking for anything that might require his immediate attention. His eye stopped on a message whose sender was identified as Amnon. Its subject line was a single Hebrew word:
Chaval
—“Too bad.” Kotler clicked on it. The message contained no other text, only a picture of himself sitting on the park bench behind the Israel Museum. In his lap lay the sealed envelope with the photographs. Behind him rose the carob tree and the plum-colored, twilit sky. But beside him, where Amnon had been sitting, the bench was vacant. Any trace of Amnon had been meticulously erased, as though he had never been there. The only indication that there was something amiss about the photo was that a little lark had been placed atop Kotler’s bald head. The bird perched there, making him look ridiculous. Like some dotty old fool or comic Saint Francis.

Kotler deleted the message.

He continued to scroll through the list and saw, one followed by the other, a message from Benzion and one from Miriam. Benzion’s had been sent a little more than an hour before. And Miriam’s only a few short minutes ago. Which meant that she would have pressed the button to speed it through the circuitry while Kotler was sitting in the Internet café. Thus he could envision her in their apartment, facing the computer screen, in the room they had designated as the office, the window at her back with a view of Mount Scopus, and on the wall above the computer
screen the framed black-and-white portraits of his parents and her parents, taken around the same time though thousands of Soviet kilometers apart, both couples young and unsmiling, humbly dressed, embarking on new lives in the jagged aftermath of the war, daring to look with their dark eyes to the future. How would he fare under their scrutiny and judgments if they were here today? No, that was too simplistic, too self-critical. After all, their parents, like most people, had seen and sampled life’s full panoply. So, the truer question was, how would he and Miriam both fare under their scrutiny and judgments?

The subject line of Miriam’s message was blank. Benzion’s read:
Psalm 137:5.
Kotler opened it first and discovered that the message consisted solely of the subject line. As if Benzion had composed it either very hastily or very cryptically. Kotler knew the Psalms reasonably well. He’d had occasion to read them in Moscow in his refusenik days, and in prison camp—from the Russian Bible kept by the Jehovah’s Witness—he’d read them even more closely. With their calls for God’s strength and protection in the face of wicked and ruthless foes, they’d seemed especially pertinent. He found in the Psalms, if not quite religious conviction, then something more vital to him, a sense of continuity with his people from deepest antiquity, with King David himself, who was made palpable through his verse as a man of flesh and blood racked by the same fears as Kotler was.
They encourage one another in an evil matter; They converse of laying snares secretly; They ask, who would see them?
And from King David he felt linked to the cumulous generations of his forebears, bowed under the harsh decree, who had also sought comfort in these words. From this history of Jewish resistance he had drawn his strength. The title of his memoir,
Song of
Ascent,
Kotler had taken from the Psalms, and its epigraph from Psalm 126:
They that sow in tears shall reap in joy.

Off the top of his head, Kotler could not recall Psalm 137, and certainly not its fifth verse, but it was a problem that was easily solved. It no longer required a Bible. He typed the query into the computer and was met by the well-known opening:

Its fifth verse read:

So he had Benzion’s answer. The son had gone against the wishes of the father. It was nothing new. It accounted for the greater part of human history. Still, it didn’t make it less of a mistake in Kotler’s eyes, only a mistake for which he shared the blame. After the disgrace the father had visited upon the family, could the son have chosen differently? After such a thing, could he have been expected to quell his conscience and abide by his father? Even without the scandal, Kotler did not know what Benzion might have done. He actively believed in the things Kotler regarded as only ornamental, contextual. For Benzion, the God of Israel was the giver of the law. For Kotler, God and His law merely provided the inflection for the Jewish people. To be a Jew, one did not need to worship, only to be suitably
inflected. To resonate at the Jewish semitone. Kotler knew many such people. Not only godless but God-averse. It was such people, after all, who had founded the country. It was from them that Kotler had drawn inspiration when he was his son’s age, a dissident in Moscow. Weizmann, Ben-Gurion, Jabotinsky, Trumpeldor. For them the Bible was more a source of poetry and ancestral lore and less a guidebook for keeping house. But their example was waning. For Miriam and Benzion, the poetry and the lore were inextricable from the housekeeping. It was divine, which meant all or nothing. It was holy scripture, not a document to prove hereditary land claims. Which was very well. This line of thinking had always existed and there was space for it. But, increasingly, it left less and less space for anything else. Less space, as loath as Kotler was to admit it, for him and those like him. But wasn’t that the dissident’s lot? He should have been inured to it by now. Too much logic and so always the misfit.

Kotler looked to Leora, who was still holding her phone to her ear in silence.

—Benzion refused orders, he said.

Leora turned her face away from the phone.

—How do you know? The news?

—I don’t know if it has made the news yet. He sent me a message. A verse from the Psalms. Its implication seems clear enough. We should order the tickets.

Leora nodded reluctantly, prepared to concede, but then a voice sounded through the handset.

—Hello, yes, hello, Leora said.

She was drawn into the conversation, which left Kotler to return to the computer screen and Miriam’s waiting message.
He saw her name,
Miriam Kotler,
composed in Hebrew letters, as though she were asserting in the most unmitigated sense—before God and man—her connection to him. In those two words—her name—was enfolded their entire history together, a history of nearly four decades. From the time they had met in Moscow as fledgling Zionists, as Boris Kotler and Milena Ravikovich, to her becoming Milena Kotler on their wedding day. It was
Milena Kotler,
in Russian, that she had written on the first envelopes she mailed to him from Israel. Later, after his detention and the start of her campaign on his behalf, she became Miriam. For the duration of his sentence, that was the name he saw, again in Russian, on the post he was fitfully granted. Only after his release did he encounter this Hebrew version, spelled out on the directory of the apartment building where she had insisted on listing them both,
Baruch and Miriam Kotler,
years before there had been any tangible hope of a reunion.

Ah! It was wholly unpredictable where life’s emotional jolts would come from, thought Kotler. He would never have supposed that the sight of Miriam’s name, typed in Hebrew—a thing he had seen a thousand times on the ephemera of household bills—could so stir him.

He clicked on her message.