The Betrayers (16 page)

—What did he say to you, Papa? Dafna asked.

—What did he say? He wanted my blessing, Dafna. To refuse orders.

—And what did you tell him?

—I told him I couldn’t do that.

—Why?

—Because I disapproved, Dafna. I told him to find another way.

—Ha! Dafna derided him. Well, he found another way!

And what other way
had
Kotler imagined Benzion would find? Once the words were out of his mouth, did he follow the line of thought to the very end? He had. And had he been willing to accept that end? The graveside with the heaped earth? The sackcloth and ashes? No. But then why hadn’t he said so unequivocally to Benzion?
My son, my dear one, anything but that!

—You, Mama, Benzion: all of you with your sacred principles, Dafna said. And look at us. Look at all the good they have done us. Benzion wanted one word from you, Papa. Would it have killed you to give it to him? He is your son, not some enemy. Not the KGB or the prime minister. Well, now he gets to follow in your footsteps and go to jail, which should make you both happy.

A voice reverberated over the hospital intercom again and there was the sound of some commotion.

—This is pointless, she said. I have to go.

—How is your mother? Kotler interjected before she could hang up.

—In her element, Dafna said and ended the call.

A
t the next roadside stand, Kotler asked the driver to pull over.

Several folding tables were arrayed on the gravel turnout. On the tables dozens of clear glass jars glowed with different shades of honey, from palest yellow to deepest amber. On the ground, in wicker baskets, sprawled mounds of apricots and melons. And from metal racks flanking the tables, long strings of purple Yalta onions hung like curtains. Shaded under a large blue beach umbrella, a Russian woman and a Tatar boy in his teens sat on folding chairs. The boy was hunched over, doing something on his mobile phone, his thumbs moving in rapid patterns, while the woman gazed languidly at the highway and her approaching customers.

Kotler and Leora drew up to the table, though Kotler hardly looked at the offerings. He came to rest near the boy, who continued the compulsive thing he was doing with his phone. The woman fanned herself with her hand, though Kotler and Leora were the ones under the sun.

—Good day, the woman said.

—Good day, Kotler answered abstractedly, his thoughts elsewhere.

—Visiting Crimea?

—Visiting.

—Where from? she asked.

—Israel, Kotler answered plainly, since there was no longer any reason to dissemble.

—Ah, Israel, the woman said, investing the word with a completely arbitrary meaning.

A simple mercantile woman, without politics, Kotler thought. But that was all the consideration he was willing to give her. He asked Leora to borrow her phone—What for? she asked—Penance, he said—and took several steps away from the table. Only tangentially did he hear Leora’s exchange with the woman.

—Yalta onions. Sweet as sugar. Taste.

—I believe you.

—Tell me, what do you know about honey?

—What everyone knows.

Kotler stood by the roadside. A truck plunged through the amplitude of dense air, and a wave of it washed over and staggered him. He had tried to do right, he thought, but had caused a great deal of hurt, even more than he’d expected. In some future of books and historians, he might yet be exonerated, but in the present he could not point to a single positive outcome. From the entire mess he would have liked to salvage at least one. There still remained a possibility, and in three or four phone calls he would know if it was feasible. He placed the first call to his office, for the number of a man he trusted at the JDC in
Jerusalem. From this man he received the address of the Simferopol Hesed, a phone number, and the name of its director, Nina Semonovna Shreibman. He made his last call to her.

By noon they arrived at the Hesed. The driver, though he claimed to know the city, had trouble locating the building.

—What kind of place is it? he asked.

—A Jewish center.

—They don’t make it easy to find.

—Not by accident, Kotler said.

In the parking lot the driver took a space under the branches of a juniper tree. The sun was high overhead and the air smelled thickly of the surroundings, of the tar in the asphalt, the metal and rubber of automobiles, the molten pitch of the trees.

—Keep track of your time, Kotler said to the driver. I don’t know how long we’ll be. I hope not long.

—So long as you pay, it’s all the same to me, the driver said, lowered his window and reached for his newspaper. Reconciled to waiting by vocation and heredity. A stern relentless life, Kotler thought. Thus they’d sat in the trenches as the Panzers advanced.

At the door to the Hesed, Kotler pressed the buzzer, and the door clicked open to admit them. A man was seated behind a desk in the vestibule. He looked to be in his fifties, with a long melancholic face and graying hair. He regarded Kotler and Leora with no special interest.

—We’re here to see Nina Semonovna.

—And you are?

—Baruch Kotler.

—One minute, the man said, Kotler’s name evoking no more recognition than had his face.

There was a telephone on his desk. The man lifted the receiver and dialed a number.

Kotler and Leora stood by. Kotler looked wryly at Leora as if to say:
And we feared I’d be recognized …

A short exchange, and the guard hung up the phone.

—Go through, he said.

They went past the desk and into the narrow corridor, built along the Soviet administrative plan. In such corridors he had queued up for every piece of paper in his Soviet life, including, once upon a time, his exit visa. But here, instead, he saw a large wall map of Israel adorned with crayon drawings of camels, pomegranates, and menorahs. Beside it were the photographs of decorated Russian Jewish war veterans. This arrangement was also familiar. There had been a time when, in his capacity as an Israeli minister and an emancipated prisoner of conscience, he had visited many Jewish centers across the former Soviet Union. He’d done more of it in the years immediately after the Soviet Union’s collapse, when he still possessed considerable stature and mystique. Back then it would have been unfathomable for a guard, for even a
charwoman,
to have failed to recognize him in the most far-flung Hesed. He had made those trips, his triumphant return, accompanied by reporters and photographers, and he’d posed and reminisced and delivered the same message to all of the Jews who’d come to lay eyes on him and clasp his hand:
Brothers and sisters, come home! Come to Israel!
And they had come. He didn’t flatter himself that it was because of his personal invitation. The main credit went to Yeltsin and Kuchma and Lukashenko for providing such excellent reasons to leave. But it wasn’t grandiosity for him to think he’d played a part. Even his worst enemies wouldn’t quibble with that. He’d
played a part and seen the results. Now here he was, doing what? Escaping those results? And what’s more, taking the opposite line: telling a Jew to stay rather than go.

Not knowing which office was Nina Semonovna’s, they walked the length of the corridor looking into the rooms. They saw the library—several shelves partially covered with books watched over by a woman who smiled meekly at them from behind a counter. Next, a nursery from which they could hear voices. Kotler saw three small children not yet able to walk and two others who were older. Various toys and games were scattered about the room. A young woman minded the littlest ones while a young man helped the older ones make cardboard shields emblazoned with drawings of intricate and colorful birds.

As they made their way along the corridor, Kotler noticed that they were being watched. A man, older than Kotler, stood at the double doors of one of the rooms and marked their progress. From a distance Kotler couldn’t read the man’s disposition. Nobody would have described him as menacing. He was a bald, slightly stooped, elderly Jew. Bifocals hung from a lanyard around his neck. But his expression, when they neared, was cagey.

—Good day, he said to Kotler, still inspecting him.

—Good day, Kotler replied.

—Have I seen you here before? the man asked.

—I’ve never been here before, Kotler said.

—You looked to me familiar, the man said.

—I have that kind of face.

—But you’re Jewish?

—A popular question in Crimea.

This evasion the man disregarded, since his interest was in establishing the fact.

—But are you?

—I am, Kotler confirmed.

—
Redstu
Yiddish? the man inquired.

—A
bissel,
Kotler replied, to the man’s great delight.

—Ah,
zeyer gut! Vos macht a yid?

—A
yid dreitzikh,
Kotler said.
A Jew gets by,
his father’s favored phrase.

—Come, the man said and indicated the room to his right. You must join us.

Kotler glanced inside. There was a proscenium at one end, an upright piano, and much empty floor space. In the middle of the room, a card table held a chessboard over which two men were bent. Three others sat near them but paid scant attention to the game. One gazed out at Kotler while the other two commiserated together in the language of commiseration.

—It is our Yiddish circle, the man announced. We meet every Sunday to talk in Yiddish.

—What you heard, I’m afraid, is the extent of my Yiddish. I’d be of no use to you.

—What about chess? We also play chess.

—My chess is worse than my Yiddish, Kotler said.

—No Yiddish and no chess? the man chided. What kind of Jew are you?

—The subject of much debate.

—And what about you? the man asked Leora. Maybe you have Yiddish? Young people are learning it now. Last year American students came with their professor to make a video interview with us.

—My Yiddish is worse than his, Leora said.

—And your chess?

—My chess is better.

—So join us. For old
kockers
like us, it will be nice to have such a lovely girl for company.

—I’m sorry, but not today, Leora said.

—If not today, then not tomorrow either, the man said without animus. But maybe with the coming of the
moshiach!

—Then we will all play chess and talk Yiddish! Kotler said.

—May He come speedily and soon! the old man said.

He ducked back into the room to rejoin his circle, and Kotler and Leora were presented with one last door. Kotler knocked and a woman said, Come in.

The door opened onto an outer office containing two vacant desks with telephones and computers on them. A radio played at low volume, tuned to a Russian call-in program. The topic seemed to be the possibility of life on other planets. A scientific expert was speaking in favor.

Centered between the two desks was the door to the inner office. It was open. A woman sat behind a large desk and looked at Kotler. A cigarette smoked in an ashtray at her elbow. She picked up the cigarette and motioned for Kotler and Leora to enter.

—Have a seat, she said. And you may want to shut that door.

Kotler and Leora assumed two chairs in front of the desk.

—Do you object if I smoke? Nina Semonovna asked, holding her cigarette away from her face.

—No, Kotler said.

She rose and went to the window and pulled it partway open.

—It’s hot outside and we have the air-conditioning, so I keep it closed. But this will release a little of the smoke.

She resumed her seat, deftly tapped the ash from her cigarette, and gave the indication that she was now ready to proceed. She was like other women Kotler had met who held similar offices. Disciplined, beleaguered, economical women with too many claims on their attentions. Unemotional but not unkind. Mothers of poor households, making due with not enough.

—So, Mr. Kotler, to what do I owe this honor? Nina Semonovna said with only the slightest trace of disingenuousness. You said very little on the telephone.

—Thank you for agreeing to see us on such short notice.

—It’s not every day I get a call from Baruch Kotler. As I said, I consider it an honor. I hope I don’t embarrass you by saying you were a hero to me.

—You embarrass me just enough. It’s always nice to be remembered. Especially as one slips into obscurity.

—I doubt you are slipping into obscurity.

—It’s not so terrible. The times change. Before, I could not have walked anonymously through a Hesed.

—You walked anonymously?

—Your guard didn’t recognize me and a man in the corridor wanted to know if I was Jewish. It grounds the ego. Not a bad thing.

—The people are caught up in their problems.

—They have every right, Kotler said.

Nina Semonovna paused to bring the cigarette to her lips and looked from Kotler to Leora.

—My apologies, Kotler said. I failed to introduce you. This is Leora Rosenberg.

—I know, Nina Semonovna said. I read the papers.

—I see, Kotler said.

—So to the big mystery
Where did they go?,
the answer is
To Crimea.

—Yes, Yalta. For reasons of childhood nostalgia. Ill placed.

—Why ill placed? Yalta, Crimea, are still beautiful. I see nothing wrong with this sort of nostalgia. I wish more Jews had it. We’re not Odessa. We could do with the visitors.

—I agree. Crimea is beautiful. But it was not the right time for us to come. And things did not go as planned. A very strange coincidence befell us.

That was all he needed to say, Kotler saw, all the fragments he needed to provide for Nina Semonovna to assemble the picture. The mention of Yalta. Of a very strange coincidence. And now their appearance in her office. He watched her face go stony. Now he also understood: the queerness of her welcome had to do only with the scandal, what she had read in the papers. The connection to Tankilevich hadn’t occurred to her yet.

T
ankilevich stood over the zinc tub in the yard. He had placed inside it the carbons of his letter to Chava Margolis. In his hand he held a box of matches. He would burn this letter. He had kept it this long because of a stupid self-deception. He’d imagined it would be discovered by his daughters after he died and that it would provide them with the truth about their enigmatic father. This had given him comfort. That which he could not bring himself to reveal to them in life, they could read in his own words after his death. But after his return from the pointless trip to the hospital, Tankilevich had been seized by the need to reread this letter, and he’d gone to the cabinet to get it. He hadn’t looked at it in many years. He’d sent it ten years earlier, and it had been nearly that long since he had read it, though he believed he remembered with considerable accuracy what it contained.

After he reread it he went to find a matchbox.

Svetlana, meanwhile, had collapsed on the sofa. She lay there
with a hand over her eyes. From this position she called after him—first imploring him not to go rummaging in the other room and then, when she saw him going back out to the yard, imploring him to stay in the house.

Reading the letter had brought back something that Tankilevich had managed to suppress. He had been right in that he remembered with a high degree of fidelity
what
he had written, but he had somehow forgotten
why
he had written it. And the reason for the letter, the purpose behind its composition, was shamefully manifest in its every line. He had written it soon after his brother’s death. How could he have forgotten that? He had written it in a fit of financial desperation. This accounted for its pathetic, clamoring tone. Now he remembered. First he had begged Chava Margolis
—Forgive me, spare me, release me
—and, when she did not reply, he’d gone to beg Nina Semonovna. The letter was in the voice of a weakling, a man he despised. Not the man he wanted his daughters to discover. Instead, a man whose traces needed to be obliterated.

As he struck the match, he heard the telephone ring inside the house. For some reason, some intuition, he stood with the lit match in his fingers. The phone rang a second time before Svetlana answered it. Tankilevich continued to wait. He dropped the match onto the parched earth and stamped it out. Moments later, Svetlana came rushing out, holding the cordless telephone.

—For you, she said breathlessly.

Tankilevich took the phone and heard Nina Semonovna’s voice. He heard her speak his name.

—Mr. Tankilevich, I have thought about our conversation.

—Yes, Tankilevich said.

—I have had a change of heart, Nina Semonovna said, though her voice gave no sign of it.

—Why? Tankilevich asked.

—Instead of asking questions, Mr. Tankilevich, I’d encourage you to say
Thank you.

—I would like to know why, Tankilevich repeated.

—Why? Because the sun is in the sky, Nina Semonovna said. Tell me, would you prefer I reconsider?

Svetlana stood very close to Tankilevich and looked at him with horror.

Do as you please,
Tankilevich thought.
Reconsider! Go to hell!

—No, he said.

—I’ll not wait for
Thank you,
Nina Semonovna said, adding, Your stipend will be mailed to you.

Tankilevich handed the receiver back to Svetlana.

—Well? she asked.

—Go and thank God, Tankilevich said.

He struck a match and put it to the letter.