The Betrayers

SIX

At dawn, Chaim Tankilevich gripped the metal handrail and pulled himself into the trolleybus, which, with its wobbly antennae, resembled an old, dun grasshopper. He handed the driver his fare, fifteen hryvnia, and lumbered to take one of the vacant seats in the rear of the vehicle. This was not hard to do. All of the seats were vacant and would remain so for much of the trip. He was going against the current. At the other end, in Simferopol, a crowd was boarding a trolleybus to come to the sea, but in Yalta he was among a dismal handful who, for their own insular reasons, were going in the wrong direction. And of these, only he appeared every Saturday, summer or winter, rain or shine, year after year, now for ten years. Occasionally, over this time, some misfortune had led one or another person to undertake this journey for a period of weeks or months — a man who required a course of chemotherapy at a specialized clinic; a woman who succored her ailing mother and then her ailing aunt. Their appearance on the trolleybus was temporal, tragically temporal, as his appearance was tragically permanent. But this wasn’t something he disclosed to his co-sufferers. He presented them instead with a similar tale of woe. He was going to visit his brother, once a successful businessman, now destitute and homebound, crippled by gangsters. This was something that ordinary people could understand. To tell them the truth, that he was going to Simferopol because it was Shabbat, because there weren’t enough Jewish men in Simferopol willing or able to come to synagogue — this seemed a bizarre and inadvisable thing to disclose. He had no desire to engage in ethnography or explain himself. Besides, to fully explain himself would have been impossible. Better and easier to tell a total than a partial falsehood.

The trip to Simferopol took three hours — trundling across the flats, creeping up the rises, passed by every other vehicle. It was particularly so in these, the oldest of the trolleybuses, relics still from the Khrushchev era. But it was true even in the newer ones — every model a different color, lest someone confuse decades and regimes — all of them lugubrious grasshoppers. Back and forth they went along this triumph of Soviet engineering, the longest trolleybus line in the world. A typical Soviet triumph: scale over substance.

So many times had Tankilevich made this trip that he believed he had memorized every square meter of the terrain. Now it was summer. He could anticipate every roadside stand with its jars of honey and strings of purple Yalta onions. He could anticipate the sloping vineyards and the pastures with their cows and horses like indolent fixtures of the landscape. And he could anticipate the cement bus shelters and the blank-eyed men who sat on their haunches beside them. This pitiless monotony, this drone of a life, to this he had been condemned. Especially in this land, to this they had all been condemned. The fortunate among them were able to shirk the knowledge, to keep it in abeyance. But this was denied him. Deliberately and vengefully denied him. He was forced to look, to contend with the unremitting dreariness of existence. He was a seventy-year-old man afflicted with cataracts, arrhythmia, and sciatica, captive of the trolleybus, tormented body and soul.

Tankilevich didn’t think he could go on this way much longer. He had told Svetlana that he was at the end of his rope.

— And after you dangle from your rope, what then? Then it’s my turn?

— I can’t do it anymore, Tankilevich said. Simply, I am going crazy.

— Then go before Nina Semonovna and fall on your knees.

And that was what he intended to do. He had telephoned Nina Semonovna and requested an audience. A busy, taciturn woman, she had of course asked if they couldn’t transact their business over the telephone, but Tankilevich had held firm. The matter was too delicate, too weighty for the telephone. It could be done only in person. Grudgingly, she agreed — as though she surmised what he wanted but consented, against her better judgment, to see him anyway.

From the trolleybus terminal Tankilevich caught a small local bus that brought him within a kilometer of the synagogue. Fifteen hryvnia for the trolleybus and three hryvnia for the local bus, a total of thirty-six hryvnia for the round-trip. Four times a month, it totaled nearly a hundred and fifty hryvnia, equivalent to twenty American dollars. The entire monthly subsidy he and Svetlana received from the Hesed was one hundred dollars. So one-fifth of their subsidy was squandered just to transport his carcass to and from the synagogue. The pain of this also never abated.

It was now just past nine in the morning. Services were technically scheduled to begin around this time. When Tankilevich had first started coming to synagogue, they had still sometimes managed to draw the quorum required by Jewish law. But even then they had engaged in a pantomime. By rights, with ten men, they were entitled to read from the Torah, but they never did. They had a Torah — the scrolls donated by Jews in Evanston, Illinois — but none of them had the training to read from it. Out of a sense of piety and obligation, they would unlatch the ark to reveal the scrolls. Once a year, on Simchas Torah, they would remove them from the ark. They would open a bottle of vodka, shoulder the scrolls, and dance with them to the accompaniment of whatever Hebrew and Yiddish songs they could improvise. But Tankilevich couldn’t remember when they’d last assembled ten men. If they unlatched the ark now, it was from a habit transmuted into tradition. They didn’t know if it was strictly permissible to look upon the scrolls in the absence of a quorum, let alone to touch them. But they were operating under hard constraints and believed that the Almighty would tolerate and forgive.

To walk the kilometer was never pleasant. In summer, even at nine in the morning, the heat could already be burdensome. By the time Tankilevich arrived at the synagogue, his handkerchief would be wet. In the winter, if it snowed, the way was slick and treacherous. In the spring and fall, there were cold, spiteful rains. But in any season, even in the mildest weather, there was still nothing to enjoy about the trek. The neighborhood where the synagogue stood was one of the worst in Simferopol. Even by the deplorable standards of the time, the roads and sidewalks were in terrible disrepair. So too the houses — huddled, dark, flaking and eroding. Trees and weeds grew wild. Refuse littered the streets. Cadaverous old women and dogs picked through it. Beginning in the afternoon, local toughs emerged, drinking and cursing. Into this midst many Jews were reluctant to come. Of those who did, their numbers were shrinking. It was a matter of attrition. When one of them departed — now almost exclusively in the eternal sense — nobody replaced him. They had counted seven men. Then six. And now, with the death of Isidor Feldman, five. Not including Manya Grinblatt and Shura Feyn, the two women.

Past a parked van and a broken chair, Tankilevich reached the synagogue. Its exterior was crumbling, the paint on its wooden window frames blistered. To gain entry, one went around to the side and through an iron gate wide enough to admit a car. On Saturday mornings, this was left unlocked. Then the narrow lane that separated the synagogue from the neighboring house — an ordinary residence like all the other residences on the street. The synagogue was tucked away, secreted here as in meaner times. Unless someone knew different, there was nothing to identify the house. Only the Jewish faces that doddered in on Saturday mornings.

Like the gate, the side door was also unlocked. Beyond, there was a dim cool hallway that offered Tankilevich his first instance of relief. The house may have been in a sorry state, but it had been properly built, close to a century ago, with walls thick enough to contend with the extremes of the climate. A few steps and he could hear more clearly the voices in the prayer room. Voices raised not in prayer but in routine, familiar disputation. Tankilevich pulled open the door and saw them. He thought, Here they are, my companions of ten years. God grant I not see them again until I choose.

He went to his customary place, at the rearmost of two dark mahogany tables. Each table had three chairs. Normally Isidor Feldman and Hilka Berezov, Nina Semonovna’s brother, occupied the two other seats at his table. But Isidor had died of a stroke that past Tuesday, and Hilka, at fifty-four the youngest and most affluent among them, had closed the electronics shop he owned near the train station and taken his wife and children for a week to Kerch. So Tankilevich had the table to himself. Moshe Podolsky, the elderly Nahum Ziskin, and Nahum’s son Pinya were at the other table, nearest to the bimah, from which the Torah was intended to be read. To their right, on chairs positioned against the wall, in an approximation of a separate section, were Manya Grinblatt and Shura Feyn.

Golden light poured into the room through four tall arched windows on the opposite wall. In this light — and in the light of his imminent leave-taking — the prayer room and its occupants were nobly cast. The shabbiness that marked the rest of the building and the neighborhood was not to be found here. The mahogany tables and chairs were sturdy, built for epochs. The bimah and the ark beyond it had already withstood the darkest times. Somehow they had been rescued from the conflagration. The bimah — a raised platform and table — was lacquered black wood with flashes of gold. The ark was the same, gilded and carved, its doors concealed behind a burgundy velvet curtain trimmed, tasseled, and embroidered in gold. Above hung two crystal chandeliers. The walls were whitewashed, the room clean. And of his companions, awash in this light? History had laid its heavy hand on them, but they had burrowed, eluded, resisted, and remained. One needed only to look at their faces — expressive Jewish faces — to see that they had known the depths of life. Let no one say that he lacked feelings for these people and this place, Tankilevich thought. Neither was he deserting them. Deserting them for what? He would be the one with the void in his life.

Moshe Podolsky was jabbing the air with his finger as Tankilevich lowered himself into his seat.

— This, this is precisely why I left that country! Podolsky declared.

Tankilevich immediately grasped the substance of the conversation. Israel. His blood quickened.

Podolsky, in his olive army cap, had risen from his chair to more emphatically make his point to the two Ziskins and the women who followed the discussion from their places along the wall. A minute turn of his head, and Podolsky now included Tankilevich as well.

— What do the Arabs do? They throw rocks. They attack innocent women and children. They shoot rockets. If they pay a few shekels in tax, where does the money go? To their crooked Palestinian officials, who, if such a thing is possible, are more corrupt than our Ukrainian ones. Meanwhile, the Jews pay money to the state. In Israel, they pay taxes, and from America they send how many millions. And what does the state do with this money? It commands Jewish soldiers to evict Jews from their homes.

— Of course, Nahum Ziskin said, it’s only in Israel if a Jew builds a house it’s a crime.

Even more than the prayers, Tankilevich would miss such conversations. With whom else could he speak this way? In Yalta, surrounded by goyim, he could talk like this only to himself. To speak like this even with Svetlana was to stir up turbulent feelings.

Podolsky, born Mihail but reconsecrated as Moshe, had lived in Israel for three years in the late 1990s before returning to Simferopol. His reasons for returning, Tankilevich still found murky. Podolsky ascribed his departure to his frustration with the state, its pandering to the Americans and the Arabs at the expense of the Jews. Was this reason enough for a person to leave a country like Israel and return to one like Ukraine? But Tankilevich, given his own biographical infelicities, did not pry. In this country, at this point in time, a man was entitled to his secrets, his fabrications. If Podolsky gave as his reason for leaving the ideological incongruities between himself and the state of Israel, then it was best not to scrutinize too closely. If it seemed odd that Podolsky, still ardent in his Zionism, when restrained from living in Judaea or Samaria, had opted for Simferopol over Jerusalem or Haifa, it was best to regard this as no more than a personal quirk. The man had been in his middle forties when he’d returned. He had a wife and son. The economic situation in Crimea in the 1990s had been even worse than it was now. Would a man hazard such a move based purely on political discontent? Since then, Podolsky’s son had, of his own accord, re-immigrated to Israel. But Podolsky had stayed. Tankilevich knew it wasn’t because he was prospering. He was a heating technician; his wife was a bank teller. What held them? It wasn’t love for Crimea, Ukraine, Russians, or Tatars. Podolsky’s life revolved around Judaism and Israel. He oversaw the synagogue, unlocking the doors every Saturday morning. He wore his olive army cap in solidarity with the Jewish settlers. He kept abreast of the latest developments in Israel, even reading the Hebrew newspapers on his computer. Tankilevich was not alone in wondering what precisely had happened to Podolsky in Israel. What act had he committed that kept him from returning to the place where his heart so clearly resided?

The question of Israel, of why they had not relocated there, pertained to them all. Why did they persist here? Nahum Ziskin was eighty-five years old. Too old to leave, too old to make a new start. Pinya, his son, had never married and, with a mental deficiency, had never lived apart. What would become of him when Nahum died? They were sustained now mostly by Nahum’s German reparations. When Nahum was gone, that money would cease. Manya Grinblatt’s husband was Ukrainian and had no desire to live in Israel. Shura Feyn, a widow, was as old as Nahum Ziskin and frail. Her daughter had married a Russian and moved to Siberia. Hilka Berezov had been deliberating for years whether to stay or go, his inclinations fluctuating with the fortunes of his electronics business. And Isidor Feldman, a man with a sense of humor, always maintained that he would have left long ago if he hadn’t already bought a plot next to his wife at the Jewish cemetery and didn’t want some stranger taking his place. Now this was no longer an issue.

— The Israeli government is nothing but a Judenrat! Podolsky declaimed. If anyone doubted it before, it should be clear now. The Americans and the Arabs issue the order, and their Jewish servants carry it out. They deceive themselves with the same rotten Judenrat logic. “If only we do this, our masters will be satisfied. If only we sacrifice these few, they will spare the rest.” Have not enough books been written on this subject? Is this some obscure wrinkle of history? What is the point of this Yad Vashem? So the Polish pope and the Nazi pope can have a nice place to go make a speech? And when the Arabs take over? When the Judenrat gives them Jerusalem? Then what will happen to this Yad Vashem?

— It will become the Zionist Occupation Museum, Tankilevich said, braced with tribal feeling.

— If not a mosque, said Nahum Ziskin.

This was what it was like to be on firm spiritual footing. To enjoy the prerogative of every human being: the society of like-minded fellows. In whose midst a man understood things preternaturally, in his bones. Yes, as if, after a fashion, the neural threads led to a common brain, the vessels to a common heart. Where even disagreement was disagreement within yourself. Once connected, always connected. Nothing and no one, exerting even the greatest power, could refute this.

For another fifteen minutes they remonstrated about this newest Israeli crisis, as though it were part of the liturgy they had come to recite. Then again, what were their prayers for? What was the point of Jewish prayer? What was the point of it from the very beginning? One point: Zion. A return to Zion. The ingathering of the scattered people at Zion. The arrival of the messianic age and the rebuilding of the temple in Zion. When there were millions under the tsar, it was for Zion. Now that there was but this puny remnant, it could only be for Zion. Even in London, New York, and Dnepropetrovsk, where they were not living under the shadow of extinction, it was still for Zion. Only in Zion was it not for Zion.

SEVEN

After services, Tankilevich didn’t linger as he often did but hurried out on the pretext of seeing his daughter. Often on these Saturdays, he visited her and her husband in the apartment they rented in a different, marginally less squalid, part of the city. For these visits Svetlana outfitted him with a parcel of food — even if only a jar of preserves and a few eggs from their chicken coop. Depending on how things sat, Tankilevich might also slip in fifty hryvnia. In return, his daughter did him the service of going once a month to pick up his Hesed subsidy. But today, because of his fearsome meeting with Nina Semonovna, he had avoided making other plans. He reasoned that if the meeting went well, he could still call his daughter and arrange to see her. But if the meeting went badly, he was certain that he would be in no condition to see her or anyone else. He dreaded to think about the condition he would be in if the meeting went badly.

Nina Semonovna had set their meeting at her office at the Hesed. She did not normally come in on Saturdays, the Hesed being closed on Shabbat, but she was making this accommodation for him. Tankilevich knew he was inconveniencing her and that this would not incline her favorably toward him, but what other choice did he have? Ten years earlier, when he had first contacted her, he had insisted on meeting after business hours, when he could be assured that nobody would overhear them. He supposed he could have done the same again, but it seemed to him that making his petition at the end of a long workday was no better than making it in the middle of a quiet Saturday. Besides, on another day he would have had to make an additional trip to Simferopol, six more hours on the hard plastic seats of the trolleybus; the prospect was too dispiriting, too daunting.

It was nearly forty-five minutes from the synagogue to the Hesed. There was the walk to the bus stop, a series of two minibuses to wait for, and another ten-minute walk to the apartment building where, on the ground floor, the Hesed had its offices. A wealthy American Jew with roots in Simferopol had bought the building and lent them the space. They were lucky to have it. Other communities — the Tatars, the Ukrainians — had nothing at all, even though there were plenty of rich Arabs in the Gulf and rich Ukrainians in Canada. Still, the location was problematic. Aside from the synagogue that Tankilevich attended, there were two others in the city, a Reformist and a Chabad — both struggling, both far from the Hesed. Nina Semonovna’s big ambition, known to all, was to reclaim the old Talmud Torah building, erected in 1913 to educate Jewish boys. It was large and well situated, perfect for a center. With such a building, the community might stand a chance. But for many years, it had served as the Institute of Sport. In the 1990s, the government had returned some buildings to local communities, but there was little chance it would return this one. The state was poor and the Jews were poor. What did moral and historical claims matter in such an equation? So the Gestapo had used it as their headquarters. So they had collected Jews there before sending them to their macabre deaths. But the innocent students of the Institute of Sport hadn’t done this. Why should they be dispossessed?

A crime demanded rectification! That was why. But it would never happen.

The situation was not bound to improve. They had just said the kaddish for Isidor Feldman. A sad business in and of itself, made sadder by the fact that without Feldman they were further depleted. Their trajectory was ineluctable. During the prayer, the perverse thought had occurred to Tankilevich that they could have used Feldman’s voice to help say the kaddish for Feldman.

Tankilevich rang the bell to be admitted into the Hesed and waited for some time for a response. He rang again and then felt, through the door, the reverberations of someone’s steps striding toward him. A turn of the bolt and Nina Semonovna was there. A handsome Jewish woman in her fifties, of the Portuguese type, olive-skinned, full-featured, and without a shred of credulity, habituated to a deceitful, grasping world where everyone is suspect. Tankilevich was no exception.

Dispensing with Hello she said, Come in.

He followed her through the empty reception area where the guard usually sat. Then through the narrow corridor, dim because she had not bothered to turn on the lights. Along the walls were posted the displays. There was always something. Tankilevich remembered one that featured Jewish Nobel laureates — Einstein, Bohr, Pasternak, and so on — complete with their likenesses and short biographies. Now it was local Jewish war heroes: soldiers, sailors, and partisans. Affixed to the walls were dozens of photographs; some depicted the fighters in their youth, some in their later years. They passed the doors to the lecture room, the doors to the library, the doors to the game room. At the end of the corridor, Nina Semonovna indicated a padded vinyl chair situated in front of the door to the administrative offices.

— Wait here, please, she said morosely, I have another client.

Tankilevich did as he was told. He sat in the dim corridor and, almost in spite of himself, caught strains of the dispute that resounded behind the closed door: Nina Semonovna’s firm, even tone and another, shriller female voice. Nina Semonovna’s words were difficult to distinguish but, Tankilevich could make out some of the other woman’s phrases at the highest pitch: On whose authority? … How dare you? … Who said so? … I am entitled!

After this appetizer, Tankilevich thought, what stomach for the main course?

There followed a considerable period of silence broken by one final proclamation and the harsh scraping of chair legs. Then the door flew open and a woman barged furiously out. She was about the same age as Nina Semonovna, stout and heavy-bosomed. She passed him with hardly a glance, only a flash of gold earrings and a swirl of her long skirt. She stamped her heels on the linoleum and Tankilevich felt shudders through the base of his chair. There was also the echo, like cannonade. Meanwhile, Nina Semonovna filled the doorway and observed laconically the woman’s departure.

— If you would be so kind as to close the door behind you, she called after her.

She waited calmly for the sound of the slamming door and then turned her attention to Tankilevich.

— Now, Nina Semonovna said, what can I do for you?

Tankilevich followed her into the office and took the seat she indicated. He watched her round her desk.

— If once, only once, someone would ask for a meeting to express their gratitude, Nina Semonovna said as she sat down across from Tankilevich. Yes? If someone was so overcome with gratitude for what we do here that he simply had to come in and say so. That would be something.

Tankilevich could think of no satisfactory response. Nor did he believe that one was expected of him.

Nina Semonovna gazed at him with bemusement.

— Of course, if one wishes to hear Thank you, one should seek another line of work.

Once more, Tankilevich could think of no response short of nodding his head.

— You don’t happen to know that woman? Nina Semonovna asked.

— I don’t, Tankilevich replied honestly. He was certain he’d never seen her before.

— She owns two shops, she and her husband. Also a small apartment building. Everyone knows this. But she comes here outraged that I have denied her claim for support. What is my explanation? My explanation, naturally, is that I am not going to be taken for a fool. She insists she is destitute. She owns nothing. Preposterous to accuse her of owning shops and a building. Her daughter owns these. All the documents are in the daughter’s name. In case I doubt it, she waves the documents. So on what grounds and by what authority am I denying her claim? On what grounds and by what authority? On the grounds of conscience and by the authority of common decency. And you saw the result.

Nina Semonovna felt around the tabletop for her pack of cigarettes. Nimbly, she pulled one from the pack and lit it. She held the cigarette in her hand and allowed a tendril of smoke to curl past her eyes.

— Now I can look forward to a complaint from this person to the Odessa Hesed. And, I assure you, I do look forward to it. The shame of it is that for a person like her, there are no consequences. She will make her outrageous demands, and I — and other people who have far more important things to do — will have no choice but to suffer them. And in the end she will get what she wants. Because even though everyone knows she’s a liar, on paper she has covered her fat arse. It’s because of behavior like this that people detest Jews. Because of this miserable shrewdness and greed. I won’t say it doesn’t exist. In my position, I see my share. But for every one like her, there are twenty others who honestly don’t have two kopeks to rub together. And when this woman takes money to which she has absolutely no right, when she cheats and steals, it’s not from me that she steals, but from them. So even if there’s nothing I can do to stop her, I can at least take some pleasure in blackening her days. I don’t fool myself into thinking that this will cause her to reconsider or repent — with such people, one learns not to expect moral transformations — but it will send the message that when you come into this office with the intention to deceive, you will not be able to simply waltz in and out, but you will take it on the head!

Nina Semonovna put her cigarette to her lips and inhaled. If the point of her monologue had been to discourage him, Tankilevich thought, she had succeeded. Nevertheless, he didn’t have a choice. He’d come with a realistic appraisal of his prospects. Nina Semonovna had done nothing but confirm what he had already suspected. But so? His part was to ask. And her part, then, was to deny. If nothing else, at least he, unlike the woman, was not engaged in fraud. He wasn’t concealing anything. Between him and Nina Semonovna, everything was out in the open. At once out in the open and closely guarded. That was what he believed — though this display of hers, the zeal with which she revealed to him the details of another client’s case, raised apprehensions. Here he was, proposing to go back on his word, but could it be that she had long since gone back on hers? Then again, in all these years he had seen nothing to suggest that she had misled him. He would have sensed it if people knew the truth about his past. It was not the kind of information someone could possess and dismiss. Certainly not Jews. Certainly not Jews like her brother and the others at the synagogue. Which led him to believe that Nina Semonovna had, at least in his case, remained discreet.

As Tankilevich girded himself to speak, Nina Semonovna took another pull on her cigarette and said, But you didn’t come to hear me complain.

— I appreciate your difficulties, Tankilevich said, and do not wish to add to them. But I have come to talk about the synagogue.

— Yes, the synagogue, Nina Semonovna said grimly.

— You probably know that Isidor Feldman died.

— A good person, Nina Semonovna said. One of the last with roots in the farming colonies. I meant to go to the funeral, but it was one thing after another.

— Yes, a good person, Tankilevich said. A loss to the community, and also to the synagogue. He came regularly. Without him there are only five men left.

— This is our predicament. Our people go and we can’t replace them. But I don’t suppose you have come here with a solution?

— I regret — I regret sincerely — that I have not, Tankilevich said and felt the heat of desperation rise on his skin. He imagined Nina Semonovna could detect it from where she sat.

— If you regret, then you are sitting in the right place. The place of regret. This is where everyone comes with their regrets. Regrets, of course, that are really requests. Or am I mistaken?

Tankilevich held a chastened silence.

— So let’s get to it, then, Nina Semonovna said. What do you want?

— It isn’t a matter of what I want, Tankilevich said. What I want and what, unfortunately, I am able to do are two different things.

Nina Semonovna crossed her hands on the desktop and gazed bitterly at Tankilevich.

— It is a Saturday, Mr. Tankilevich. I have just been yelled at by a hideous woman. My patience for games and intrigues is thin.

— Ten years ago, I came to see you for the first time. I wonder if you remember.

— I remember very well. Even with my long and varied experience, it is hard to forget a case like yours.

— So you remember our agreement?

— To the letter.

— I have honored this agreement for ten years. I have not missed so much as a single Saturday.

— Very good. Are you here for my congratulations?

— Nina Semonovna, I think you will agree that ten years is a long time. I was sixty then; I am seventy now.

— And I trust you will soon get to the point.

— Ten years ago, when we made our agreement, there were still enough men for the minyan. But for a long time that hasn’t been so. With me or without me, the number will not reach ten.

The ash had grown at the tip of Nina Semonovna’s cigarette. Without taking her eyes from Tankilevich, she tapped it into a crude ceramic ashtray, a children’s craft project with a purple Star of David painted at its center. Then, implacably and unhurriedly, she brought the remainder of the cigarette to her lips. She released the smoke and continued to regard Tankilevich as if from a predatory height.

— Despite what you might think, Nina Semonovna, it was not easy for me to come here. I have endured for a long time the hardship that our agreement has imposed on me. I have endured it and accepted it as my obligation and my lot. But I am an old man now. My health is not what it once was. My vision is bad. My heart troubles me. I have sciatica that makes sitting for hours on the trolleybus a kind of torture. These trips to and from Yalta are taking their toll on me, Nina Semonovna. A toll both physical and psychological. A toll that, I believe, no longer has a justification.

Nina Semonovna ground her cigarette into the ashtray.

— So we have finally reached the point? You would like to be released from your obligations? On account of the terrible hardships imposed, yes?

— I would.

— And what about my part of our agreement? Am I then to be released from that?

Tankilevich eyed Nina Semonovna cautiously.

— You speak of the hardship our agreement imposed on you, but why not ask about the hardship it imposed on me? Do you think it was easy for me to engage in this subterfuge all these years? And to engage in it for the sake of a person like you?

Nina Semonovna leaned forward, her eyes lit with malice. But also with something else. A kind of gladness. He had been mistaken. The appetizer hadn’t robbed her of a stomach for the main course. Quite the contrary. It had whetted her appetite. The appetizer had made her ravenous, eager to devour something. It was likely that, even without the episode with the horrible woman, Nina Semonovna would have denied his request. But after the horrible woman, his fate was sealed. Such was his misfortune.

— You ask if I remember when you first came to this office. When I say I remember, not only do I mean that I remember it now because you have asked me to. When I say I remember, I mean that I have never forgotten. I mean that, from time to time, I still think about you, Mr. Tankilevich. I still think about you and whether I was right or wrong to enter into this arrangement with you. Because I did not like you from the first. I did not like you and I did not trust you. I thought you were an opportunist. That is still my opinion. Because of what you did for the KGB, because of how you conducted yourself in the decades after, because of the circumstances under which you came to my office, I thought you deserved nothing but scorn. Not my indulgence, not my protection, and not a kopek of the Hesed’s money.

— I see, Nina Semonovna, Tankilevich said. And ten years of my faithful attendance at the synagogue has not changed your opinion?

— Why should it? You attended only for the Hesed subsidy. What is there to admire, Mr. Tankilevich? It is batlanus, and you are a batlan. I am not happy that I had to resort to batlanus to help the synagogue, but that is our reality. Hilka complained to me that they did not have enough men and by chance you happened on my doorstep. So I extended my offer. More out of sentiment than sense. Always a mistake. As you have now proved.

— I’m sorry, but how exactly have I proved this? By making a difficult trip from Yalta to Simferopol for ten years, until my health no longer permits it? You think I did all that as part of some fraud? The fraud, Nina Semonovna, was my life until I came to you.

Nina Semonovna leaned back and emitted a throaty, contemptuous laugh. She laughed this way, deliberately, overlong, until the laugh drained to a dark smile.

— Quite a declaration, Mr. Tankilevich. You’ll forgive me if I don’t applaud. But since you put it like this, allow me to say you could have put an end to the so-called fraud of your life at any time simply by walking through this door and declaring: My name is Vladimir Tankilevich. I have reached my pensionable age. I am a Jew, descended from Jews. I was born on such and such a date, in such and such a place. Here are my supporting documents. This is what everybody else does. But this was not what you did. You came here under a shroud of secrecy and asked me to help you conceal your true identity. And in the moment I agreed to that, I became a party to this deception. I compromised myself for you. I could say for the synagogue, but this fine distinction would not count for much in the heat of a scandal. You have thought only about yourself and your situation, but allow me to enlighten you about mine. From the performance you witnessed a few minutes ago, you might have gathered that I am a person who is not without enemies. Can you imagine what that wonderful woman would do if she learned that for ten years I have been secretly helping a person like you? A notorious traitor to the Jewish people? You think she would keep quiet? You think she wouldn’t be writing to Odessa and Moscow and New York to denounce me? Here I am, denying her humble claim, while I am giving money to Vladimir Tankilevich, KGB informant, the man responsible for sending the great Baruch Kotler to the Gulag. How do you think this would be received by my superiors? And by their superiors? By the American Jews in New York whose job it is to raise the money for our sustenance? Do you know how they do this? By appealing to their wealthy brethren who still harbor quiverings for their shtetl roots. By telling them sad tales about our existence. By printing brochures with photographs and touching descriptions of poor, neglected Russian Jews. By staging lavish events for millionaires where famous Jews, like your Baruch Kotler, make speeches to get them to open their wallets. Now, can you imagine what happens if it is revealed that some Nina Semonovna Shreibman, director of the Simferopol Hesed, has, with full and deliberate knowledge, been aiding and abetting the traitor Tankilevich, this disgrace to the Jewish people? That for ten years she has been giving him money — and not only him but also his shiksa wife? That to this end, she has manipulated documents? Are you getting the picture, Mr. Tankilevich? Can you imagine what would happen if this information was to be publicized? Not only what would happen to me. That should be quite clear. But the harm it could do to the larger structure upon which we all rely? Can you imagine how such an embarrassment would look printed in the newspapers? You have no idea how sensitive these American Jewish organizations are. Or how territorial. I have seen them go into fits over far lesser things. There are many organizations and they are all competing for the same dollars. If one group stumbles, believe me, the others are quick to take advantage. And just like that, money that has been painstakingly solicited for the Jews of Ukraine is now diverted to some other, less controversial, cause, like teaching Ethiopian Jews to eat with forks or sending young American Jews to pick tomatoes in the Negev. And all this because I stuck my neck out for you. So while you have been riding the trolleybus, Mr. Tankilevich, this is what has been hanging over my head.

Tankilevich received the speech as if it were a clobbering, and he slumped down accordingly. And yet, he thought: Clobbered, yes, but not beaten! In his life he had known real terrors, real bloodlettings. So this was nothing new. Unpleasant, yes, but it would take more to make him fold. He found his voice.

— Nina Semonovna, I don’t dispute anything you say. But the fact remains: What choice did I have? As Vladimir Tarasov — with this false identity bestowed upon me by the KGB — I could rejoin the community of my people. As this aberration, Vladimir Tarasov, I could attend the synagogue. And as Vladimir Tankilevich, I could not.

— As Vladimir Tarasov, this aberration — as you call it — you could have rejoined your community and attended the synagogue a long time ago. Nothing was stopping you. But you came only when there was money for the taking. And now you wish to have everything: to retain the disguise of Vladimir Tarasov, keep the subsidy, and retreat from your obligations to the community and the synagogue. But, Mr. Tankilevich, hear me well: So long as I sit behind this desk, I will not allow this to happen. If you do not fulfill the terms of our agreement, I will cut you off. Doing so, as you should by now understand, would be a great relief for me. A great relief and no small satisfaction.

With this statement of finality, Nina Semonovna reached again for her pack of cigarettes and, in a flare of punctuation, struck a match.

Tankilevich regarded her across the desk. She looked contented, the cigarette smoking between her fingers.

He remembered Svetlana’s words. Now, then, he thought. So the time had come to go to the farthest extreme.

Stiffly — not without difficulty — he rose from his chair and pushed it from him. Its legs scraped, and the sound shot like a current along his calves and up his back. Gripping the edge of the desk, he lowered himself until the points of his knees met the hard ground. When he felt steady enough, he removed his hands from the desk and let them dangle at his sides. He lifted his eyes to Nina Semonovna, his inquisitor. This was the posture, but it was not enough. More was required. There were also the words.

— I beg of you, Tankilevich said.

Nina Semonovna gazed down at him from her bastion.

— Stand up, Mr. Tankilevich. If you are fit enough to do this, you are fit enough to go to the synagogue.

EIGHT

On Mayakovsky Street, in the center of the city, was a Furshet grocery market where, each week, Tankilevich bought provisions to take back to Yalta. The Hesed had an arrangement with the market’s owners. It had a similar arrangement with a Furshet in Yalta, but Nina Semonovna deliberately hadn’t put him on its roll. To utilize the subsidy, Tankilevich was obliged to do it in Simferopol. For this reason, the shopping also fell to him on these Saturdays. But after his encounter with Nina Semonovna, he felt leaden, nearly killed. How could he force himself to go to the market, to put one plodding foot in front of the other, to contemplate the bins and the shelves and be surrounded by the gaudy, mindless, mocking display of excess? His hands felt as if they were filled with sand. It would take a superhuman effort to lift them, to coax his fingers to grasp the cartons and boxes. His every fiber revolted against this. It was too much to ask of him on such a day. He pictured Svetlana’s dour, disapproving expression. But what right could she invoke? She was not shackled to the trolleybus; she had not thrown herself before Nina Semonovna. The depredations were all on his head. Svetlana could stuff her disapproval. He would not go, that’s all, Tankilevich thought. He would not go! But by then he was already there.

Mechanically, Tankilevich moved through the aisles, depositing their staples into a red plastic basket: bread, farmer’s cheese, sour cream, cereals, buckwheat kasha, carrot juice, smoked mackerel, tomatoes, cucumbers, potatoes, green onions. A few yellow plums, because they were in season and inexpensive. He finished at the meat counter, where the woman reflexively asked, Three hundred grams roast turkey? Tankilevich had long assumed that they stocked the turkey solely for the Jews. Everything else at the counter, the appetizing salamis and sausages, contained pork and was thus forbidden under the Hesed subsidy. For pork and shellfish, as for cigarettes and alcohol, one had to lay out one’s own money.

From the meat counter Tankilevich carried his basket — the plastic handle biting into his fingers, the sinews straining in his shoulder — to the cash register at the front of the market. Since it was a Saturday afternoon, the market was not short of customers. Three women stood in line ahead of him. And immediately after Tankilevich assumed his place, people formed up behind. He glanced back to take their measure. Directly behind him was a young mother with a small daughter, three or four years old, in a bright cotton dress with a white cotton cap. Behind them was an older man, Tankilevich’s age, with short bristly white hair, ethnically Russian. And behind him was another man, younger than the Russian, swarthy, Tatar or Azeri, a laborer, wearing a sleeveless shirt, the taut muscles of his arms exposed. Paying for his purchases, this final element of the task, always put Tankilevich’s nerves on edge, made him exceedingly conscious of the people around him, of attracting their attention, judgment, and disdain. It was the moment when he was forced to shed the bleary status of ordinary citizen and declare himself conspicuously, in blazing letters, a Jew.

Tankilevich’s turn came. He presented the contents of his basket to the cashier, a blond woman in her thirties. Like the woman at the meat counter, she was offhandedly familiar with him. With quick, practiced movements she unloaded his basket and punched the prices into her register. When the sum appeared on the computerized display, the woman looked at Tankilevich and said, Coupons? It was at this point that Tankilevich became supremely attuned to any change in the atmosphere, like a dog sniffing for storm ions. And as he withdrew the bright, multicolored Hesed bills from his pocket, he picked up rumblings behind him. The air grew dense. Its sullen weight pressed on his shoulders. He turned around to confirm his suspicions. The woman behind him was gazing off, her little girl waiting docilely at her hip. Neither of them was the source of the disturbance and neither seemed to have noticed anything awry. Why should they? Tankilevich thought. Such storms did not affect them. But after a lifetime of such storms, he rarely mistook them. One look at the Russian man’s face and Tankilevich knew that he wasn’t mistaken now either. He saw the sneer — the bitter, arrogant, Jew-hating sneer. Locking eyes with Tankilevich, the man allowed his sneer to ripen into a smirk.

— Is there a problem? Tankilevich asked him.

The question seemed to fill the man with glee, as if Tankilevich had uttered a tremendous joke. The man swiveled his head from side to side, seeking to include others in this hilarity. If not his goggling about, then Tankilevich’s question had already drawn people’s attention. The young mother pulled her daughter closer and eyed both Tankilevich and the Russian warily. The cashier shifted a hip, tilted her head. And the laborer looked up with the coolness of a lizard.

— Is there a problem? the Russian mimicked. Not for the likes of you. Never.

— What are you implying, Citizen?

— Implying? I’m not implying anything. I’m stating what is clear as day. You people always know how to get ahead.

— You people. What people do you mean? Tankilevich demanded. If you’re going to sow slander, at least have the courage to speak plainly.

— To say what I’m saying requires no courage, the Russian said. Only eyes in your head. Anyone with eyes in his head sees how you Jews always get special treatment. Isn’t that so?

The Russian turned for confirmation to the people around him. But they remained silent. Tankilevich thought he even detected a hint of disapproval on the cashier’s face. Still, he expected no support. How many times had he encountered such anti-Semites, and how many times had anyone said even a single word in his defense? He felt his heart pounding as if to fly apart. He gripped tightly the bills in his hand and held them up.

— What special treatment? Tankilevich said. Do you mean these?

The Russian was unintimidated.

— Who but Jews have such things? I too would like such privileges. But it’s only the Jews that get them.

— You would like such privileges? Tankilevich boomed. Then you should have lined up in ’41, when the Germans were taking the Jews to the forest!

— Oh ho! the Russian said. So it’s back to the Germans, is it? To listen to you people, you’d think it was only the Jews who suffered. Everyone suffered. Who shed more blood than the Russian people? But nobody gives us special favors, do they?

At this, he turned again to the others for reinforcement. First to the young mother, whose expression remained wary and reticent. And then to the laborer.

— Isn’t that so, pal? the Russian asked.

The laborer took his time and then answered in Tatar-accented Russian, the consonants rolling like stones in his mouth.

— Yes, everyone suffered, he said. But not only from the Germans.

— Oh, I see, the Russian announced grandly. I’m surrounded by persecuted minorities. That’s the way it is now in this country. The Russian nation built up this land — what didn’t we do? — but now we’re everyone’s bastard. We’re supposed to go around with our heads bowed and beg forgiveness from this one and the other.

The Russian had worked himself up now and gazed about defiantly, no longer expecting solidarity. He glared at Tankilevich.

— The hell I’ll beg forgiveness from the likes of you! While you get special money and I have a hole in my pocket. The Germans could have lined up a few more of you in ’41!

There it was, Tankilevich thought. The fuse had been lit and now the charge had detonated. His heart surged. He waved his Hesed banknotes in the Russian’s face.

— I should beat you, you filth! Tankilevich shouted.

— Well, well, I’d like to see you try.

But the young mother and her little girl were between them. And the laborer put a restraining hand on the Russian. And the cashier spoke up.

— Be civilized or I will call the police!

And that, more or less, was the end of the spectacle.

His heart still thudding, his groceries sagging in their net bag, Tankilevich left the market and followed the dolorous path to the trolleybus station.

NINE

Normally, Tankilevich called Svetlana from the highway to arrange for her to collect him at the depot. This time he did not call. And when she called, he did not answer. Still, when he descended from the trolleybus and did not immediately see her, he was incensed. With his net bag slapping against his thigh, its weight like razors in his forearm, he staggered from the depot to the road where the cars and taxis were parked. It was evening, but the sun had still to set and he could see clear down the line. He had taken only a few steps before he saw Svetlana striding over to intercept him. Her face, her posture, declared that she had already intuited all.

— She refused you?

— I don’t want to discuss it, Tankilevich snapped.

Svetlana reached for the shopping bag and Tankilevich made a play of refusing to yield it.

— Don’t be a hero, you look half dead, Svetlana said and took hold of the bag.

They walked in silence back to the car, Svetlana stealing glances at him as they went.

Had there been a single redeeming moment in the entire day? In this one day of a man’s life? From dawn to dusk? A single moment? Yes, there had been one. A short distance from the grocery store, when he had stopped to rest his burden, the young mother and her little girl had come alongside him. He expected nothing, averted eyes. But the woman said, My mother used to work with a Jewish woman, an ophthalmologist. Her husband was a chemist. They were honest, respectable people. Now they live in Israel. How many such valuable people did we lose? Intellectual people. Specialists. Thousands. I don’t blame them. Because this country is still primitive, full of primitive people. In front of my daughter, I’m embarrassed for this country.

There was silence between Svetlana and Tankilevich as she put the groceries in the trunk and he lowered his bulk into the passenger seat. Silence as she veered the car onto the road and began the drive home. Embedded in the silence was his silent command that they remain silent. But he could feel Svetlana straining against the silence and knew that no exercise of his will would keep her quiet long. Abruptly, he turned to face her.

— What do you want me to say? She spat in my face! Tankilevich shouted. That is all.

— I shouldn’t have let you go by yourself, Svetlana said, rehashing an old antagonistic line.

— Yes, you should have come with me. This way the trip would have cost double, and, with you along, Nina Semonovna would have simply turned us away at the door.

— Why turned us away? Because I am not Jewish?

— Of course because you are not Jewish! Tankilevich thundered. Don’t talk foolishness. It is a Jewish organization. One that believes it owes me nothing and you even less.

A large white tour bus had stopped ahead of them. Red letters stenciled on its hull identified it as Polish. Svetlana craned her neck to see what the matter was. Behind them, cars sounded their horns.

— Is he stalled?

Svetlana continued to look and didn’t reply.

— Well? Tankilevich persisted.

The bus moved.

— What was it? Tankilevich asked.

They crept along behind the bus but saw no sign of anything amiss. Nothing broken, no one injured on the road. Just indifferent trees and houses on the periphery and the slope of a hill to the east. Nothing out of the ordinary. Nothing to cause a distraction. Nothing at all.

— A day of frustrations. Tankilevich sighed.

It was then that Svetlana told him about the new lodgers. More to crow than to console, Tankilevich felt. As though the lodgers were a flag she was waving in his face. Witness: While he was frittering away his chance in Simferopol, she was securing them lodgers for the week. Lodgers who had paid up front in full. Lodgers who also happened to be Jews. This last, Svetlana delivered with sly significance. Tankilevich didn’t miss her implication. That precisely at this moment, these people, being Jews, represented much more than a week’s rent. They represented a second chance! Salvation itself!

It was utter childish nonsense, its logic so comprehensively flawed that it pained Tankilevich to think that he was married to a person whose mind wallowed in such inanities.

— Who are these people? he asked bleakly.

— A man and a younger woman, Svetlana replied, bristling at his tone.

— What sort of couple is this?

— Is this our business? They’re a couple. They wouldn’t be the first such couple.

— Did they say where they were from?

— America.

— But they’re Russians?

— Yes. They spoke Russian like you or me.

— And where in Russia are they from?

— That, I didn’t ask. If I had to guess, I would say Moscow or St. Petersburg. They didn’t strike me as provincial people. Rather, sophisticated people. The man particularly. I would think he would need to be, to get himself such an attractive young companion. Because himself, he is not much to look at. A little nub of a man in a big hat and dark sunglasses. A little Jewish midget, like from a cartoon. Clever, wily. Still, no girl would give herself to such a physically unappealing type if he wasn’t wealthy or important.

Tankilevich felt his throat, his entire being, constrict. A tensing against an old pernicious ill. Svetlana, oblivious, looked ready to prattle on, but he cut her off.

— How old would you say is this man?

— How old? I don’t know. But I’d give him sixty. Not less.

Gloom, gloom descended on him. That Svetlana had no inkling of it — that she behaved as though enraptured by her own perspicacity and brilliance — astounded him. Tankilevich saw the approach to their house. Svetlana turned the car into the driveway. Night had begun to fall. The house was dark. Dark too were the windows of their Jewish lodgers.

Svetlana opened her door and put a leg out but Tankilevich didn’t stir.

— What is it with you? Svetlana asked.

— How is it you have no sense? he said.

— I have no sense? she retorted. What sense is it that I lack?

But when he told her, she waved her hand.

— This is only your paranoia, she said and went to fetch the groceries from the trunk of the car.

Tankilevich made a point of remaining in the car as Svetlana marched to the door with the groceries. She turned once to glance at him over her shoulder, but he stayed obdurately, broodingly in place. She entered the house, and the white rectangles of their rooms flicked consecutively on. In the quiet sanctum of the car, he listened for some soothing intimation.

Svetlana had said paranoia, but that was not the right word. It was not paranoid for him to believe that a man such as the one she had described, a Jew of that generation, native to Moscow or Leningrad, part of the intelligentsia, might be able to recognize him. That was no paranoia. That was a fact. A fact that had dictated the course of his life for the past four decades. It had dictated where he could live and whom he could associate with. For those four decades he had taken every precaution to avoid meeting people like the man Svetlana had now recklessly brought into their midst. This was something she knew as well as he. It was the very reason they had met: she had lived in a part of the Soviet Union, the sort of provincial hinterland, where no Jew from Moscow or Leningrad had set foot since collectivization. This was where he had been deposited by the KGB and where he had remained, a Jewish needle in the Soviet haystack, until everything changed and it seemed possible and permissible to venture out. But he and Svetlana had still been guided by the same fact. By then, Yalta seemed as safe as their little Ukrainian hamlet, which was dying a sclerotic death. By then, in Yalta, after the flood of emigration, one was as likely to encounter a Jew from Moscow or Leningrad — now St. Petersburg — as in any rotting kolkhoz. So how was it that something they had registered as a fact, a reality, a peril, something that had accounted for nearly forty years of their lives — how could Svetlana now deride this as paranoia? But after nearly forty years, was the peril the same? Time made specters of perils. But was this true of every peril? And how much time? And who could claim the authority to decide? Who could say to another that his fears were unsubstantiated? That the wolf was not at the door? That the wolf was not even a wolf? And who knew this better than a Jew? Still, he was willing to concede that time had done its work, that time, like water, had eroded the sharpest edges from the peril. What he had feared before — confrontation, outcry, retribution — he did not fear in the same way. Not from a random Russian Jew, even, say, a former activist who might be able to recognize him. Nina Semonovna had spoken of attacks in the press, of newspaper articles, of public excoriation, but he didn’t believe that a chance encounter would have the same consequences. And if not those, then what consequences? What was it that he still desperately wished to avoid? Curses? Epithets? Or just that penetrating look of contempt? The tangible evidence that there remained people in the world for whom he was unredeemed, unredeemable.

But had he even this much to fear from the man Svetlana described? This midget with a mistress? What feelings to attribute to this sort of man? No, it was not a case of paranoia that was at issue but a case of overreaction. He and Svetlana both. They were equally at fault. They had each attributed too much to this man. Svetlana had been too hopeful; he too fearful. Hers the exaggerated hope that this man could save them; his the exaggerated fear that this man could harm them.

Back in the house, he sequestered himself in his armchair and watched the insipid programming from Channel One in Moscow. A game show hosted by a facetious impresario. A benevolent vozhd who behaved toward the contestants — bumpkins and workers — as if they’d come to touch the hem of his Italian suit. This was what they had raised from the scraps of communism. This was what the struggle for freedom and democracy had delivered. Bread and circuses. Mostly circuses. From one grand deception to another was their lot. First the Soviet sham, then the capitalist. For the ordinary citizen, these were just two different varieties of poison. The current variety served in a nicer bottle.

As Tankilevich allowed the vulgarity to wash over him, Svetlana sat on the sofa with one of the free weekly newspapers on her lap. Occasionally he would hear her rustle a page or sense that she had raised her eyes to glance at the television. Finally she folded her newspaper and stood up. She was almost through the door before she stopped and let out what she had pent up.

— It’s not you alone who prays. I also pray. And it may be that God has sent these people to us.

Tankilevich did not even grumble a response but waited for her to leave the room. The game show came to an end and the nightly newscast began. The game show was offensive, but there were no words for the newscast. Every lie starched and ironed. The pomp of a new agreement between Russia and Western corporations to drill for oil in the North Pole. Which everyone knew meant billions of dollars to the same crooks. Condemnation of America for interfering in the affairs of sovereign states. Which meant defending the rights of Arab dictators to shoot their citizens with Russian guns. A clash between authorities and violent demonstrators in Moscow. Which meant the criminal regime stifling dissent. This was Moscow, Russia, and he was in Yalta, Ukraine. But it mattered little. Moscow, Kiev, or Minsk. The same methods prevailed.

Tankilevich turned off the television and rose heavily to his feet. He was overcome by fatigue. The fatigue of living in this country. The fatigue of enduring a day of such indignities — after a life of such indignities. He took a few steps and then caught his haggard reflection in the window. There had been a time when women considered him handsome and he had prided himself on his looks. Now he was like an old elephant, a big gray beast sagging to the earth. He ran his hand through his hair and cleared his throat. More quaveringly than he intended, he called to Svetlana.

— Mother, if you’re not praying, make some tea.