The Betrayers

TEN

At dawn Kotler opened his eyes. He had been lying in bed for what seemed like hours with his eyes shut, thinking, thinking. For part of this time, he had heard Leora shifting beside him. Then she had grown still, her breathing become that of a sleeping person. He wished to sleep too, but his mind was too active. For a man of his vocation — civic life, politics — sleepless nights should not have been uncommon. Indeed, for months now he had been embroiled in a political struggle and a love affair, but he could not say that he had lost an entire night’s sleep. An hour here or there, certainly, but not a full night watching the chromatic spool in his head. In fact, part of what kept him awake were recollections of sleepless nights past. The sleepless nights after Tankilevich’s article ran in Izvestia. That article had marked the beginning of his third life. First life: rank-and-file Soviet citizen. Second life: rank-and-file dissident. Third life: the chosen among the chosen. Many sleepless nights followed: sleepless nights waiting for the knock on the door; sleepless nights in his cell in Lefortovo, parsing his interrogator’s every word and gesture, trying to squirm his way out of the psychological maze; sleepless nights during his trial, chiseling away at the lies of his accusers; sleepless nights in solitary confinement, in conditions too brutish for sleep; and sleepless nights in the camps before a hunger strike, steeling himself for the ordeal, incanting a Hebrew phrase he had memorized, the words ringing like hammer blows: Justice, justice, shall you pursue.

And now what was he pursuing? Kotler asked himself. Justice, justice, he playfully replied.

He swung his legs around and rose from the bed. He pulled on his trousers and his shirt. Barefoot, he padded to the window. The chickens were out, pecking. Ma nishma, chickens? he greeted them. Joviality in the face of adversity, that was the secret of his success. And of my undoing! he appended to himself jovially.

Behind him, Leora stirred. He turned from the window. This was how they had spent their first, and possibly last, night alone together. Lying silently in the same bed, thinking their separate, divergent thoughts. Very like a married couple. Another of life’s scintillating ironies.

Leora slowly opened her eyes. How lovely she looked, even when she awoke cross. He smiled at her and told her so.

— What time is it, Baruch?

Kotler consulted his wristwatch.

— Early. Just past six.

— Did you sleep?

— I thought about it.

Leora sat up and brushed the sheets aside. She wore her brassiere and panties. He had worn his underpants. The stuff of bourgeoisie comedy.

— You haven’t changed your mind? Leora asked.

— Many times, Kotler said. But it always changed back.

She stood up and surveyed the room. Her dress lay on the floor beside the chair. She moved to pick it up. Kotler watched with admiration and longing — the longing for a thing that is slipping from one’s grasp — as she raised her arms and the dress slid down the length of her body. The closing curtain on a fine spectacle.

— All right, then, what do you intend to do?

Kotler looked at his watch again, as if he hadn’t looked at it a minute before.

— If I knew where we could get one, I would like to see a newspaper. A cup of coffee would be nice too.

— Very well, Leora said and took a determined step toward the door.

— There’s no need for that, Leora, Kotler said.

— No need for what? If you wish to do this, why delay? I’ll wake the lady of the house. I’ll ask her for a newspaper and a cup of coffee. And then we can get to the business at hand. The sooner we start, the sooner we’ll finish. Or isn’t that the point?

— That probably is the point. As usual, you’re more astute than I. I had visions of something grand and involved, but likely it will be nothing of the kind. As is often the case in life, one imagines an opera and gets an operetta. If that. Still, I’d prefer to do this in a civilized manner. No banging on doors. No rousing from sleep. The time for that is past.

— From what I have seen, Baruch, the time for that is not past.

— Even so. Let’s behave as if it is and wait for the world to follow our noble example.

— None of this is even remotely funny to me.

— No, I know it isn’t, Kotler said.

Leora looked at him from where she had stalled, partway to the door.

— Would you like to hear about the last time I shared a roof with this man? Kotler asked. You’ve said more than once that you were interested in the stories of the glorious past. So here is one I’ve never told you. It’s one I’ve hardly spoken of at all, as far as I can remember. Perhaps to a few cellmates and to Miriam. Because it isn’t much of a story. It’s the opposite. A nonstory. Even in my memoir, my editor chose to edit it out. But it is the story of the last night I spent under the same roof with Vladimir Tankilevich.

Leora sighed and walked slowly back to the bed. She sat on its edge and looked at Kotler like someone submitting reluctantly to the sway of a hypnotist. Kotler, who remained near the window, would have liked to sit beside her as in times past, but refrained. Times past now included the previous day, the previous hour. He was responsible for it. He still had the power to change it. But he knew he would not. A man could not live two lives. A man was condemned to choose and he had chosen.

— Fine, Baruch, tell me. Tell me so that we can get on with things.

There was his gospel, the substance of which Leora knew, as, once, did millions of others. A young man, a lapsed musician turned computer scientist, embraces his Jewish identity and resolves to quit the Soviet Union for Israel, his ancestral homeland. His application for an exit visa is routinely, arbitrarily denied by the Interior Ministry for unsubstantiated “security reasons”—even though he possesses no technical knowledge that isn’t already old news in the West. He is branded a traitor, fired from his job, designated a criminal — since it is a crime to be without work in the workers’ state. He falls in love with a young woman, also a Zionist; they marry quickly in the hope that this will bind their fates but are nonetheless separated when she, just as arbitrarily, is permitted to leave and he, again, is not. While he waits to join her, he throws himself into activist work and is framed by a fellow Jew, a KGB plant. Charged with treason, subjected to a show trial, he is sentenced to death, but then, after an international outcry, he is locked up for thirteen years instead of being shot in the head. All the while, he resists, resists, resists! Until finally, triumphantly, he is released.

But there was more, of course. The minor notes and episodes, less spectacular but, for him, more consuming. His final night in the apartment he shared with Tankilevich represented one. For until Tankilevich took him in, he had been homeless. Miriam had left for Israel. Their small apartment had been registered in her name, and once she departed — for it was virtually a rule among refuseniks that nobody should forfeit the chance to go — he had to move out. With no job and no apartment, he slept, a week here and a week there, in the homes of other refuseniks and of sympathizers. Everything he owned he carried in a small suitcase. The man who would soon become the world’s most illustrious refusenik was a pauper whose belongings would have been declined by a junk shop. And then, at no small personal risk, Tankilevich offered to take him in. A marginal character in Kotler’s life before then, Tankilevich had appeared in their midst a year earlier. He presented himself as a Zionist and declared he had been refused an exit visa — nobody bothered to verify. If KGB spies had infiltrated their ranks, there wasn’t much they could do about it. In any case, everything they did — the Hebrew classes, the Passover seders, their small public demonstrations — was technically legal.

They made an odd pairing, the two of them. Tankilevich was almost a decade older, a bachelor, impressive-looking, while Kotler was a balding, feisty little schmendrik. By trade, Tankilevich was a dental technician, and he volunteered his services to other refuseniks, making dentures, caps, and crowns. Since he was ostensibly under refusal, he could not work officially. Everyone understood the implications: How could a refusenik handle gold and silver? He was susceptible to a charge of commercialism or speculation. This was grounds for suspicion. People discussed this, and Chava Margolis, as usual, staked out the most skeptical position — even though she too had one of Tankilevich’s bridges in her mouth.

But Kotler never found any reason to distrust him and came to consider him a friend, a confidant. He was nursing the pain of Miriam’s departure. Sometimes the two men sat together and listened to classical music: Scriabin, Prokofiev, Shostakovich. They studied Jewish subjects and practiced their clumsy Hebrew. There was nothing out of the ordinary until the night before Tankilevich’s denunciation ran in Izvestia.

And what of that night? Kotler was in the apartment, writing a press release for Western outlets about the conditions inside the psychiatric hospitals. They’d received sworn affidavits from a dissident who had emerged from one and, remarkably, from a psychiatric nurse who was appalled by what she had seen — taking sane, healthy people, confining them with lunatics, and injecting them with drugs until they became like lunatics themselves. Kotler was composing his text at a table in the front room when Tankilevich came home. They exchanged the usual greetings. Shalom. Shalom. Everything as always. Tankilevich asked what he was doing. Kotler told him. Tankilevich considered attentively and then excused himself, going into the kitchen. Kotler continued his work. Then, suddenly, there was a crash, a sound of breaking plates. Not just one or two; it was as though every plate in the kitchen had been dashed. Kotler sprang up from the table and found Tankilevich standing amid the shards of an entire stack of dinner plates. With a very peculiar expression on his face. Not startled or agitated or regretful. Rather, detached. As if he was mildly, distantly intrigued by the mess around him. Volodya, what happened? Kotler said. Nothing, a trifle came the answer. Kotler offered to get a broom, to sweep up. But Tankilevich said, No need, I’ll do it. Because he was behaving so strangely, Kotler didn’t insist. He let him be. They were all under a great deal of stress and nobody knew all that weighed on another man’s heart. Kotler went back to work. He heard Tankilevich sweeping. Then some fumbling and shuffling that he couldn’t identify. He expected Tankilevich to go to the corridor and toss the broken things into the dustbin, but when he looked in on him, he found him at the kitchen table gluing the pieces back together. How many plates had been broken? Ten? Twelve? There was a considerable jumble. The plates themselves were nothing special, neither heirlooms nor imports. They were the most ordinary Soviet plates and could be purchased in any store for fifty kopeks apiece. To replace them would have been easy. There were deficits and shortages of practically everything then, but not of those sorts of things. So why go to the trouble? Volodya, what are you doing that for? he asked. To which Tankilevich replied, It calms the soul.

Those were the last civil words they exchanged. Period. The end.

Leora listened to all this dully, with neither expression nor reaction.

— And the mystery? she asked.

— You see, I told you it wasn’t much of a story.

— I just don’t see the mystery.

— The mystery? The entire thing. Did he dash the plates deliberately or did they fall by accident? And what was going through his head?

— Of course he dashed them, Baruch.

— Yes? And what was going through his head?

— He was conflicted. Stricken by conscience. He didn’t want to face you.

— There’s that.

— What else could there be?

— I don’t know. But life has taught me that there is always something else. Some surprise beyond the scope of my limited imagination.

Through the door they heard movement, the sounds of the day’s first activities, a kettle set on a burner.

— Well, Leora said, here is your chance to find out.

She rose from the bed and walked briskly to the door. This time Kotler did not inhibit her. She opened the door and passed into the hall. The sounds of a morning’s preparations came more distinctly now. He heard Leora greeting their landlady and the woman returning the greeting and inquiring if Leora would be having breakfast. There was also the sound of a man’s grumbled Good morning. Kotler felt a jolt in his heart. And yet, if he hadn’t already known that this voice belonged to Tankilevich, would he have recognized it?

Here it was. The moment he had fantasized about had finally arrived. Naturally, it was not how he’d envisioned it. In his vanity, he had always imagined meeting Tankilevich and his other former tormentors at the height of his powers, when he could gaze down upon them like a Zeus upon mortals. But this wasn’t how things stood now. It could be said that he was now as low as he had ever been and that he could not have chosen a less auspicious time for this grand reunion. But now was when it had happened. Only a fool believed that the world was built to stoke his vanity. Not from the heights but from the depths was life truly lived! And other such hokhmes.

Forward! Kotler commanded himself.

Ten strides and he was in the kitchen, facing his audience. He found the women on their feet and Tankilevich at the kitchen table, a teacup between his hands. That Leora eyed him expectantly was no surprise. But he saw similar expressions on the faces of Svetlana and Tankilevich. As if they too had been intent upon his appearance. What had they been expecting? Clearly not him. Tankilevich flinched and knocked his teacup against its saucer. He looked down to see if the liquid had spilled but when he looked up, his face had hardened and set. There was no doubt. No doubt for either of them.

— Boker tov, Volodya, Kotler said.

Like quicksilver, a look flashed between Tankilevich and his wife. Kotler saw the woman’s face blanch. Instinctively, she crossed herself.

— My God, she said.

— Your God, Tankilevich snapped. See how He’s answered your prayers.

He turned from his wife and glared at Kotler with the loathing of a cornered animal.

— A merry game, eh? An important man like you, you’ve got nothing better to do? Well, have a good look around, then. Here’s your old enemy. The despicable beast. The disgrace of the Jewish people. See how fate has settled its accounts with him. Give your girl a good laugh at his expense.

— What do you think, Volodya, Kotler said, that I had the Mossad hunt you down? That we chased you fifteen years, like Eichmann?

— You’ve come to insult me? Insult me. Rejoice. I’m a defenseless man. Say what you want and leave us be.

— Volodya, it’s pure coincidence, not the Mossad, that has brought me here. I’ve no more sought you than you’ve sought me.

— Chaim, Tankilevich said.

— What’s that? Kotler asked.

— I go by Chaim, Tankilevich said resolutely.

— Ah, you see, Leora, Kotler said with a grin, the first surprise.

— What’s the surprise? Tankilevich demanded. You alone reserve the right to change your name? I’m no less a Jew than you. No less a Zionist either.

— I’m glad to hear it, Kotler said. Though, if you’ll forgive my saying so, this also comes as a surprise. The last time I saw you, you denounced me before a Soviet tribunal as a Zionist imperialist spy working for the American intelligence services.

Splaying his hands on the tabletop, Tankilevich pushed back his chair and rose stiffly. He cast another baleful look at his wife and then turned to face Kotler.

— What do you want? You have come to collect? Well, I have paid and paid for my sins. I have paid in excess. I am paying still. And I have nothing for you.

On his way out of the kitchen, Tankilevich glanced one last time at his wife.

— Return their money.

The three of them watched his broad back fill the doorway and listened to his ponderous steps in the corridor. There was the sound of the front door opening and closing, and of footfalls on the gravel outside.

After an instant, recovering from her shocked state, Svetlana sprang from the table and went in pursuit of her husband, leaving Kotler and Leora to each other. The door opened and slammed shut again, and Svetlana’s footfalls joined her husband’s on the gravel path. From Leora came the unspoken question: Satisfied? To which what could Kotler reply? In a way.

Through the kitchen window it was possible to see what was unfolding in the driveway. Svetlana caught up to Tankilevich as he unlocked the car door and was preparing to lower himself into the driver’s seat. She gripped the door and would not release it. Kotler and Leora watched the struggle between them and heard the more heated parts of their argument.

From Svetlana: With your eyes! Have you forgotten what the doctor said? Suicide!

And from Tankilevich: I want those people out of my house!

The standoff continued for a little longer. Tankilevich resisted and did not easily relinquish the wheel, but Svetlana held fast and wouldn’t allow him to close the door. Eventually, in supreme frustration, Tankilevich wrenched himself from the car and stalked off toward the road. In parting he declared: One hour!

Svetlana watched him go, and when he had disappeared from view, she eased shut the car door. She then looked back to the house, where she found Kotler and Leora at the kitchen window. She eyed them grimly, then started inside. Before long, she was back in the kitchen. Nobody spoke and the room felt hollowed out, vacuous. The three of them regarded one another as through spans of chilled space. Svetlana, looking sorely perplexed, broke the silence.

— Is what my husband said true?

— What part? Kotler replied.

— That you came here deliberately.

— You were at the bus station. Do you believe we staged that encounter? Does that seem plausible to you?

— I don’t care about plausible. I am asking you if it is true.

— Svetlana, ask yourself: If we knew where to find you, why would we even bother with such contortions? Why would we not come straight to your door?

— So you deny it?

— I’ve already denied it. I denied it to your husband. I can deny it a thousand more times. But to what end? In my experience, denial is pointless. It is just words. What matters is logic and proof. I see you are not a simple woman. Ask yourself a different question: Why would I deny this? If indeed I sought your husband out, why wouldn’t I say so? Why would I engage in this pretense? Especially since, as anyone will tell you, I am a terrible actor. My strength, such as it is, lies in the opposite direction.

Svetlana stopped to consider this, to consider him. Kotler felt as though he could discern, behind her eyes, the minutest cogitations of her mind. He saw her reach a decision, the thought clicking into place. She turned to the stove and lifted the kettle, which had just started to whistle. Kettle in hand, she faced Kotler and Leora.

— You will have some tea? she inquired. Or coffee?

— It’s very hospitable of you, Kotler said, but perhaps unwise. Your husband doesn’t want us here and we’ve no interest in imposing ourselves.

Svetlana strode to the table and dismissed Kotler’s reservations with a wave of her hand. She put the kettle down.

— My husband does not alone decide. Please sit. There will be plenty of time to leave. Besides, where would you go now? It is not even seven o’clock. Where would you find a room at this hour? And without even so much as a bite to eat? I would not allow it.

— We are perfectly capable of fending for ourselves, Leora said.

— Who says you are not? But you are in our house. You are our guests. By Divine Providence, if what you say is true. Never mind my husband. I have my own convictions, Christian convictions, if I can say such a thing in front of you.

— Why not? Kotler said. We are not offended by Christian convictions. Particularly if they lead to nothing worse than a cup of coffee.

— Good, then, Svetlana said. You’ll sit.

She went to a cupboard, opened its door, and retrieved a jar of instant coffee. As she did so, Kotler lowered himself into one of the kitchen chairs. He looked to Leora to follow suit, but she held her ground with a tired obstinacy. Passive resistance. Fine, but for what sake? Kotler wordlessly inquired. Just so. For no sake, came Leora’s wordless reply.

Holding the jar of coffee in her hand, Svetlana observed the two of them.

— You won’t sit? she asked Leora, in a tone both anxious and reproachful.

— She is registering her disapproval, Kotler said.

— Of what does she disapprove?

— Of remaining here.

— Of coming here in the first place, Leora calmly corrected.

— But if fate brought you here, how can you disapprove? Svetlana said.

— It turns out, very easily.

— But what is the point of disapproving? If it is fate, your disapproval will not change it. Standing instead of sitting in my kitchen will not change it. Even walking out the door will not change it. A tree will fall across your path. Because if fate has ordained to bring you here, it will conspire to keep you here. I am older than you. I have lived a life. What I say I say from experience. One needs time on this earth to understand fate.

Svetlana turned to Kotler and asked: Is it not so?

— I would say that one walks hand in hand with fate. Fate pulls in one direction, you pull in the other. You follow fate; fate follows you. And it is not always possible to say who is leading whom.

— But you say fate led you here.

— Fate led; I followed. I chose to follow. At first innocently, obliviously. But once I recognized where fate was leading me, no longer obliviously. Then I chose with full and deliberate knowledge. Leora would have preferred if I had chosen differently.

Svetlana went to the table and placed the coffee jar beside the kettle. She looked again at Leora.

— Will you also take coffee? Because if you will, I would ask that you sit. Even if you won’t take coffee, I would ask that you sit. I find your standing very disconcerting. It grates on my nerves. It is like having a policeman or an undertaker in the house.

Leora inhaled dramatically and, with slow leisurely strides, crossed the room and took a seat opposite Kotler. She looked up at Svetlana and made a little theatrical gesture with her hands. A gesture of There, I have complied.

— Will you take coffee? Svetlana asked her.

— After all that, how could I not?

Svetlana poured the hot water into three teacups. Then came the ceremony with the teaspoons and the stirring and mixing. She passed Kotler and Leora each a cup and took her seat between them. They all observed a brief, tactical lull while they sipped their drinks.

— If I may, Kotler offered, you mentioned your Christian convictions. I’m interested to know what you meant.

— I believe in God’s grace. I believe that He hears our prayers.

— Which would make us the answer to those prayers?

— How would you explain your arrival here?

— May I ask what you prayed for?

— Like everyone else, Svetlana said, I prayed for His mercy. I prayed for Him to ease the burden of our suffering.

— If that’s the case, it would seem He sent you the most unlikely emissaries.

— Isn’t that how we recognize His hand?

— And how do you know it is your prayer He is answering?

— Who else’s? Yours? Hers?

— Certainly not mine, Leora said.

— Yours, then? Svetlana inquired. Are you a believer?

— Not like that, Kotler said. It’s many years since I prayed. But who knows how long it takes a prayer to reach God’s ears? And how long for Him to respond? When I was in prison, I asked Him to grant me the satisfaction of facing my tormentors as a free man. That was a long time ago. But perhaps a prayer is like a radio signal, flying through space until it finds its mark. And the answer arrives not when you want it but when it suits God, when you have long since stopped waiting for it.

— Well, what is to say He hasn’t answered both our prayers?

— I think that would be quite a feat, even for God.

The trill of Kotler’s cell phone sounded. He fished the device out of his pocket and inspected the name on the screen.

— It’s my son, Kotler said. Excuse me.

He rose from the table and took two steps before he brought the phone to his ear. He spoke his son’s name and heard his voice in reply. In the background, he heard also the grinding sounds of heavy machinery, the rumble of diesel engines, and the clatter of a half-track.

— One moment, Benzka, Kotler said. Let me just—

He went into his and Leora’s room and closed the door. He gravitated to the window and looked out at the familiarly uneventful yard. So unlike the scene he pictured surrounding his young son. The word young interposed itself. They had tasked young men — somber children with long limbs and smooth cheeks — to undertake this ugly job. To smash the work of their brothers and expel the brothers too. To do it and continue to believe that, afterward, they could still be brothers. And to trust that this served the greater good. A good for all: the enforcer and the resister, and the nation of onlookers who sat wringing their hands in front of their televisions. Vey iz mir, as his father would have said. Where were they headed?

— I was going to call you, Kotler said. I was waiting until seven.

— They are moving us now. A few of the guys are still davening shacharit. But they can only drag it out for so long before the commanders say, Enough.

— A busy day for God. So many prayers to answer.

— Not so many, Benzion said. Not enough.

— How are you, Benzka? Kotler asked with fatherly inflection.

— Don’t say it like that, Benzion said. That isn’t why I called. I don’t want to talk about that.

Benzion’s voice faltered and Kotler felt the same impulse he had had when his son was small and someone had caused him pain. The innate desire to console. But his son was no longer small and didn’t want to be consoled. Besides, this time Kotler was the one who had caused him pain. So what use was his sympathy?

— I talked with Rabbi Gedalia and I talked with some of the guys, Benzion proceeded. We don’t want to do it.

— I understand, Benzion. It’s a terrible thing that is being asked of you boys. I wish with all my heart that it hadn’t come to this. But are you calling to inform me of your decision or to ask my opinion?

— Tell me why I should do it.

— I have no inspired answer to this. You’re a soldier in our nation’s army. The answer I’ll give will be the same as the one you get from your commanders and the minister of defense. However much I disagree with him about this operation, I don’t disagree that a soldier’s job is to obey orders.

— Even immoral orders?

— No, not immoral orders. But it says nothing in the Geneva Conventions about dismantling your own settlements.

— It says it in the Torah.

— I’m not so sure it says it in the Torah either. But you know I’m no Torah scholar. Anyway, that’s neither here nor there. Like it or not, our country is a democracy. The Torah is very nice, but we don’t run the country by it. If we ever did.

— Rabbi Gedalia says different.

— I’m sure he does.

— So do many other people.

— Well, if you have a majority, you can form the next government.

— So that’s it? You’re saying I should go along with this even if it makes me sick? Even if I believe with perfect faith that it is wrong, a sin against God to give up our land? You can tell me honestly that this is what you would do?

— Benzka, if you have called for my blessing, I can’t give it. I would like to give it. After what has happened and after what I have done, I want nothing more than to give you what you want. But as much as I love you, and as much as I want to please you, I can’t lie to you, my son. Because I love you, I can’t lie to you.

— You lied already.

— There are lies and there are lies.

— You say.

— This is your father, imperfect.

— So that’s all?

— You ask what I would do in your place. Let me ask you. What would happen to our army and our country if soldiers started to choose what orders they would follow? One believes evicting settlers is wrong, another believes the occupation is illegal.

— So instead we should all go against our consciences and wait until the next election? Is this what you did in the Soviet Union?

— Despite what some people say, the time has not yet come to compare Israel to the Soviet Union.

— I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about a person’s soul. When it screams, No. What are you supposed to do? Ignore it? If you see that your country is on the road to ruin, do you not do something about it? Before it’s too late.

— This is what you believe?

— It’s what you yourself said.

— As a politician, not a soldier. And not exactly for the same reasons.

— I don’t see a big difference.

— So then what can I say, Benzka? You’ll do as you see fit.

— And you won’t support me?

— If you disobey orders, no. I’m sorry.

— But I’m telling you I have no choice.

— That’s not true. If you think there’s no choice, look harder. There is always a choice. A third way, if not a fourth. Whether we have the strength to make those choices is another matter. Of which I am no less guilty than anyone else.

ELEVEN

Leora and Svetlana looked down the corridor to where Kotler had disappeared. They kept their eyes fixed on the spot past the point of all discomfort. They were now trapped together without a word to say. Leora laced her fingers around her teacup and looked anywhere but at Svetlana. If necessary, she could sit like this for hours, for as long as it took. How many times had she sat in some government office or waiting room waging a silent war with a receptionist or rival aide? How many times during the last round of negotiations had she been sequestered with the junior members of the Palestinian delegation staring at the closed door behind which the fruitless talks were being conducted?

She had grown up waiting. She had watched her parents wait. Righteous, implacable, and unheralded. They were modest heroes, nothing like Kotler and Miriam and the others whose names had made it into the newspapers. But they had waited no less honorably. And from their example Leora had learned her first and most instructive lesson. The iron lesson: We will out-wait them. The lesson that had sustained and defined the Jews for thousands of years. It now also sustained and defined their enemies. Both parties, masters of waiting. Across the table and across the fence, waiting each other into oblivion.

Svetlana shifted in her seat and pushed back her chair. Out of the corner of her eye, Leora watched the woman until she left the room. Unwilling to turn her head, she continued to gaze at nothing and to strain her ears. She tried to decipher even a single word of Kotler’s telephone conversation but heard only Svetlana’s steps moving across the floor and receding up the hall. Then a door creaking on its hinges followed by more of Svetlana’s heavy, muffled steps. After that came finer sounds: the sliding of a wooden drawer; the snapping of a clasp; some papery rustling. Finally, the repetition of all these sounds in reverse, until Svetlana was again in the kitchen, standing before Leora with her arm extended, a fold of bills in her palm.

— It’s all here, Svetlana said. I didn’t deduct for last night.

— That’s your prerogative, Leora said. But the money is Baruch’s, not mine. You can give it to him.

— But you see the money is already in my hand. I give it to you or I give it to him, what’s the difference?

— I told you the difference. The money is his. Give it to him. It’s not for me to accept.

Svetlana looked at the money as if it were now the crux of a thorny dilemma. She resolved it by turning her palm over and laying the money on the tabletop. She resumed her seat and silence reigned between them again. Though this time Svetlana looked directly at Leora, studied her plainly and knowingly.

— I understand, I understand, Svetlana said. You dislike me. You hold an opinion of me. In your eyes, I am a certain kind of woman. A disreputable woman. Because what other kind of woman would marry a man like my husband?

— To be honest, Leora said, I haven’t given much thought to you or your character. You and your character matter very little to me. At the risk of insulting you, you and your character are at the very bottom of the list of my concerns. If that.

— Yes, and what are your concerns? Svetlana inquired, undeterred.

— Please, let’s just sit here quietly until Baruch returns. Or if you absolutely must speak, let’s talk about the weather or your recipe for borscht.

— You believe you are very different from me, but you are mistaken. I was also a young girl who fell for an older, worldly man. A man who seemed unlike other men. The others drank, strutted, talked foolishness. You knew what your life would be like if you bound yourself to them. But then a man appears who seems to be lit from within. Yes? How else to describe it? When you look at him, you see the glow. And you think that only he can rescue you from the bleak life that is inundating you like a flood.

Svetlana leaned toward Leora. Isn’t that so? she asked, to which Leora didn’t reply. What could she say to her? She detested such talk. This psychoanalyzing. The sort of idiotic conversation that passed for revelation over white wine in Tel Aviv.

— I don’t know what you think you know about our lives, Svetlana pressed on. Let me ask you, where were you born?

Leora had no wish to swap biographical data, but Svetlana waited for her answer nonetheless.

— Moscow, Leora finally said.

— And how long did you live there?

— When I was six, we left.

— Consider yourself a lucky person.

— I have no regrets. But I’ve seen places worse than Russia and Ukraine. There are even people who’ve left Israel and moved back here. I can tell you, the Ethiopians who come to Israel don’t do that.

— What do they move back here for?

— For an easier life. Why else do people move?

— Really? I’d very much like to see this easier life. I have two daughters, both educated, with no prospects. I have a son-in-law sitting idle in Simferopol. For three months he was a policeman in Yalta. In a narcotics unit. Would you like to know what that means?

— Very much, Leora said.

— Good, I’ll tell you, Svetlana said, parrying Leora’s sarcasm. His salary was one hundred and fifty dollars a month. They also gave him a police car and ten dollars a month for gas. Ten dollars for gas was good for one day. The rest had to come from his pocket. The cost of notebooks and pens to write the reports — his pocket. Money to buy drugs from the criminals so as to catch them — his pocket. Now, how did they expect a person to survive like this? Could a policeman do his job faithfully? Either a person becomes corrupt or he abandons this job. Most of them become corrupt. Ours said he didn’t have the constitution for it. It didn’t agree with him to work in such an environment. So he resigned. Is it better for his constitution to live without regular work in Simferopol?

Svetlana looked pointedly at Leora, as if she expected her rebuttal.

— I don’t know what you want me to say.

— There’s nothing to say, Svetlana declared. Only one time in my life did I allow myself to feel hopeful in this country, and that was when I met Chaim. I was twenty years old and I lived in a village that could fit inside Yalta fifty times over. He appeared at the regional dental clinic. I couldn’t imagine what would have brought him to such a provincial place, but it was Soviet times and a person was like a pebble in the hand of the regime, tossed here or there. Or if someone wanted to shed his old life, there were a million villages from Kamchatka to Baku. All I knew of my husband was that he had been born in Chernovets, spent the war in Kazakhstan, and later lived in Moscow. The man I married was named Vladimir Tarasov. His passport said his nationality was Russian. We were married in 1979. It was only ten years later, when the Soviet Union was on its last legs, that I learned the truth. By this time we had our two daughters, and life in the village was becoming intolerable. People were being paid their salaries in vodka. A truck would pull up and they would hand out bottles. Can you imagine? Not just to the laborers but also to the schoolteachers. And it was only when I insisted that we leave the village that he told me his secret. He wept.

— Not from contrition, I suppose.

— It is easy to judge, Svetlana said. But he was a man who had hidden his true self for over a decade. From the people closest to him. From his very children. Do you think it is easy?

— It depends what you are hiding. All husbands hide things from their wives, and all parents hide things from their children. I’m surprised he chose to confess such a thing at all.

— Such a thing? It was his essence.

— That he was a KGB informant?

— That he was a Jew.

— He wouldn’t have been the first to conceal that inconvenient fact either. Unless it was no longer inconvenient. A lot of people discovered their Jewish ancestry at this time. You can see them on Sundays at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.

— Have you seen him at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre? Have you seen either of us? Though, I won’t lie, I would dearly love to go. I would like to go to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre almost as much as he would like to go to the Wailing Wall.

— Very well. Go. Who’s stopping you? It’s a free country. Jerusalem is full of pilgrims. Not a few of them Russians. At the Jaffa Gate they are disgorged by the busload. Every third word in the souk is Russian. Even the Arab storekeepers speak it now.

— Very nice, but it isn’t about being a pilgrim.

— No? Then what is it about?

— You heard him. He’s a Zionist. He wants to live in Israel.

— Fine. So go. B’hatzlacha. I’m not going to stop you. Neither is Baruch, I suspect.

— But you know we cannot do that. After what my husband did, he will never be accepted. Nor will our daughters.

— I don’t know anything of the sort. You should see some of the people we’ve accepted. The Law of Return doesn’t discriminate. Or not enough. Even against gangsters and traitors.

— I am not talking about legally.

— No? Then how?

— Spiritually. How can a person live in a country where his name is despised?

— Your husband should have asked himself that question forty years ago.

— Believe me, my dear, he asked it.

— And apparently answered it.

Leora watched Svetlana run a hand across her forehead, as in frustration and sorrow.

— Oh, girl, how easy it is to sit in judgment when one doesn’t hold all the facts.

And just when Leora had thought she couldn’t feel more distaste for this woman, with her unctuous, melodramatic, wheedling tone. Leora stole another glance down the hallway in hopes that Baruch would emerge. How much more could she possibly say to this woman? Were they to have an esoteric conversation about justice? Who is the real victim? Who is the real perpetrator? Who gets to sit in judgment? Who? Everyone. And only a child or a simpleton bemoans it. To sit in judgment without all the facts? Who ever sat in judgment with all the facts? Facts were imposed by those who had the power to impose them. Today, it suited the newspapers to depict her as a wide-eyed, impressionable fawn. Tomorrow, different facts would paint her as a sly, self-seeking tart. And later still, depending on the way the winds were blowing, she could find herself on a soundstage in intimate conversation with a television host, with the furniture, the coffee mugs, and the pretensions of compassion and sincerity. But neither in that setting nor in this kitchen could Leora imagine speaking candidly about herself and Baruch. None of them deserved to hear it. The world was full of jackals; they ravaged your life, and there was little you could keep from them except a few small tokens of introspection:

Her earliest girlhood in the Moscow apartment. Returning in tears from kindergarten and the playground to the firm inculcations of her father. Never be ashamed. Hold your head high. You are the daughter of a proud and ancient people.

Her parents’ gallery of heroes, some of whom passed through their doors, others imprisoned, their photographs cut from newspapers and kept in a scrapbook. Baruch’s photograph among them, given pride of place. Though by the time she was old enough to comprehend, he had gained his release. Different photos depicted this triumph. The small rumpled man with the mischievous grin saluting the honor guard at Ben Gurion Airport. Listening as the prime minister bent close to speak into his ear. Carried aloft on the shoulders of an exultant crowd. Facing a bank of lights and microphones, holding the hand of the pretty, patient wife.

The scrapbook and the walnut armoire in which it was kept went with them to Petah Tikva. But in Israel there was no longer a need for the pictures. The Soviet foe had been vanquished, that battle had been won. Replaced by the new battle — to carve out a life in the Promised Land. After school, alone in the apartment, awaiting her parents’ return, she sometimes paged through the book, whose radiance was slowest to dim for a child.

The anniversary of Jerusalem Day, attending with her parents a gathering of former refuseniks in Ben Shemen Forest. The picnic tables under the pines. The flags strung between the tree trunks. The old activists, gone gray, but their energy undiminished. Like her parents, they came with children, grandchildren. For most, the anniversary was coincident with the anniversary of their national revival. In a manner of speaking, the Israeli paratroopers who had liberated Jerusalem had also liberated them. Here she had met Baruch for the first time. A microphone, an electric keyboard, and an amplifier were plugged into the battery of a Volkswagen. Baruch stood at the keyboard and, with an accordionist and her own father on guitar, provided accompaniment for a rendition of “Kachol Velavan.” Afterward, her father introduced her. She was twenty-two, in her final year of university. A serious girl. A serious student, her father said proudly. I can see, Baruch teased and then asked about her plans. I’m interested in politics, she found the courage to say. You’ve raised an activist, Yitzhak, Baruch said. There are worse things, her father replied. Not according to my daughter! countered Baruch with a grin.

And the winter trade mission to Helsinki. The tours of the mobile-phone factories and paper mills. Baruch outfitted against the cold in a fashionable coat that she and Dafna had bought for him at the Mamilla shopping mall. People will mistake me for an Austrian ski racer, he’d protested. His existing winter coat dated from 1992, bought at a Kiev market on the occasion of his symbolic return to the former Soviet Union. Maybe acceptable for a Ukrainian transport worker but unfit, Dafna and Leora had pronounced, for the Israeli minister of trade. Seeing him in the coat was a constant reminder to Leora of her afternoon with Dafna, wandering the shops, drinking cappuccinos at the Aroma Café. Like two girlfriends. And in the hotel room, though the coat was stowed in the closet, discreetly out of sight, she nevertheless felt its reproving presence, as though it bore silent witness to what she and Baruch were doing in the bed. Neither of them was rich in experience, but he made her feel the more practiced, the more assured. He wrapped his arms around her chest, pressed his face against her back, and sat still as a statue, as though drawing sustenance. And in the moment of climax, he called out as if in gratitude, as if she had alleviated some ache.

To whom could she confide such things?

To Svetlana, she said, So you think God sent us here for your redemption. To shepherd you into the Holy Land. With Baruch the shepherd and your husband the lamb.

— Do you believe in God? Svetlana asked.

— What does it matter?

— If we are going to speak of God, it matters. I need to know what kind of person I am speaking with. One who believes or one who doesn’t. It isn’t the same conversation. And if you believe, you will know this.

— Then say I believe.

— Then I will repeat myself. I believe in the grace of our Lord. I believe in His justice and mercy. If you say you believe, then I take it you agree. Or what sort of God is there to believe in? A sadist who only metes out suffering?

— He does that too.

— He punishes the sinner according to his sin. But He also forgives. And He rewards the true penitent. Don’t we also believe this? That when we transgress we can seek His forgiveness?

— So your husband has repented and is deserving of forgiveness.

— My husband has repented a hundred times over. For decades he has borne his punishment. But he is not the worst of men. Far from it. Whether you believe it or not. What he did forty years ago, he did with a heavy heart. What he did, he did against his conscience. And he has suffered for it in more ways than I can say.

— Is it still God’s mercy we’re talking about?

— For me, God’s mercy is no longer the question. I know He is merciful. Not just on faith. I know it because I see the evidence of His mercy.

At this, Svetlana fixed her eyes on Leora with a fervent, meaningful conviction. The gaze of a holy communicant.

— That He brought you to us now is a sign of His mercy. That is how I see it, Svetlana said. So it is no longer about His mercy.

— It isn’t? Then whose? Leora asked, incorrectly anticipating the answer.

— Yours, of course.

— Mine? Leora asked. You don’t mean mine specifically?

— Yours. To start.

— How is that? I haven’t been wronged. I have nothing to forgive.

— It is still yours. I see that you hold my husband in contempt. As many people hold him in contempt, though he wronged none of them personally. Of course your forgiveness won’t change those people’s minds. Only one person’s forgiveness can do that. But you are in a position to influence that person.

— There you are mistaken. Nobody is in a position to influence that person. Which is why he is that person.

— However he is, Svetlana said, her expression unbeguiled, he is a man.

At this Leora could not help but smirk.

— According to the latest news, Leora said, and she enjoyed the vexed, befuddled look on Svetlana’s face.

— You don’t have any idea what I’m talking about, Leora added.

Uncertain, cautious, fearful, Svetlana didn’t answer.

— What happened between Baruch and me is all over the papers. Do you understand?

Before her, Svetlana leaned away, drew her teacup to her bosom, and straightened her spine to sit fully, rigidly upright, as though tensed against a cruel onslaught.

— So if you believe God sent us to you, you might want to question His timing. We have our own troubles. We came here to escape them. Only, as it turns out, we found new ones. In any case, Baruch’s forgiveness will be of no benefit to your husband now. Right now, Baruch could use this sort of forgiveness himself. Not that he seeks it.

Rather than stiffen further, Svetlana appeared to relax. Her eyes lit with a sly, fervent, self-satisfied gleam.

— Then I wouldn’t be so quick to question God or His timing. What you say gives me no reason to question Him. On the contrary, only to further admire His wisdom. Only He could contrive to bring us together at such a time. When we are all in such need. It is clear as day that everything is according to His will. I am surprised you don’t see it. He brought you here not only for our sake but also for yours. You say that Baruch’s forgiveness will be of no benefit to my husband, but how can you be so sure? If he is fulfilling God’s plan, then it will be to everyone’s benefit. And if it seems improbable, that is further proof that it is ordained. I see by your face that you still don’t believe. You think I am a lunatic. But half the miracle has already happened. You are here. If half the miracle has already happened, it is lunacy to deny the other half.

Almost against her will, Leora’s mind, as if of its own accord, step by step, advanced this hypothetical. Was there truly some advantage to be gained from this scenario?

Baruch Kotler, on the run with his young mistress, stumbles upon the man who betrayed him to the KGB. And forgives him! And then what? A photo of the two of them clasping hands. Followed by the grand redemptive statement. But what was it? This unexpected meeting has reminded me of my priorities: my family and my people. My commitment to my people has never wavered, but I have hurt my family and I will do whatever I can to make amends.

This was the standard script. If she could distance herself from her feelings, she would advise Baruch to deliver these lines. As for if he would do it, that was another matter. In any case, what good would this confession do? Leora tried to continue thinking this way, pragmatically, minding Baruch’s interests, but her pragmatic thoughts pragmatically branched off. Baruch’s interests were one thing, but she had interests of her own. And if their interests diverged, what would happen to her? What place did the world reserve for the discarded mistresses of powerful men? When the unwelcome attention waned and people turned to the next disturbance, where did these women go? Were they allowed to slip into a quiet anonymity — marrying a gentle and understanding man, living in an unremarkable town, doing the grocery shopping with a child riding in the cart? But what if they wanted something more, to wield some of the power that had attracted them? How stubbornly did the world conspire against them?

— Look into your heart, Svetlana said. That’s all I ask. You have the ability to save lives. And what does a person gain from withholding mercy?

At that moment the front door opened and there came the sound of Tankilevich’s heavy steps. They both looked up to see him enter the kitchen, his face dark with disapproval at the sight of Leora.

TWELVE

Kotler stared for long minutes out the window and into the chicken yard. What had once seemed like the right decision, compulsory even, now seemed like utter foolishness. What had made him think that he could go on some romantic holiday when the situation at home was dire and his own son was caught up in it? He’d failed to understand his duty clearly. His duty was to see things through to their conclusion. When the army and the police came to evacuate the settlement, his duty was to be present, holding a placard: Peace Settlement Before Settlement Withdrawal! But he had convinced himself that he needed to leave. That the scandal would overshadow everything. That his presence would prove too distracting. That the helpful, reasonable thing to do was to absent himself. And he’d somehow thought that far away, in Crimea, he would be able to occupy his mind with other thoughts. Now, after speaking to Benzion, he saw his mistake. He had engaged in games. Coming to Yalta had been a game. And staying to confront Tankilevich, to satisfy his curiosity? Also a game. Well, he had played games for one day, and one day was enough. He’d caught a glimpse of Yalta and seen the changes fifty years had wrought. He’d had a day and a night together with Leora, the most he could ask for under the circumstances. If he was to have no more, he would have to accept it. That was the bargain he had struck on the park bench. And as for Tankilevich, what else did Kotler want? He’d seen as much as he needed to see. Enough, in any event, to resolve the central mystery. Was Tankilevich living or dead? Living. How did he live? Like this. Had justice been served? In its way.

It was still early in the morning. If they took a taxi to Simferopol, Kotler thought, they could be at the airport in two hours. If they were lucky, in another two hours they could be in Kiev. By the end of the day, they could be back home. Almost certainly too late for the evacuation, but not for the aftermath. The aftermath was also important — in its way, more important. The evacuation itself was by now a foregone conclusion. People could protest and resist, but the decision had been made and wouldn’t be reversed. The aftermath, on the other hand, was an open question. And the aftermath accounted for the larger portion of life. The drab aftermath, when the vanquished must fend for themselves. He remembered it after Gaza — the dazed, disbelieving, resigned numbers sitting on the steps of their mobile homes. They had been deceived, misled. In a golden hour they had been promised one thing, and that promise had been rescinded. And what did they get in return? They got what Kotler had predicted. From the Arabs they got rockets — some people had apparently expected bouquets. Not that he blamed them for their optimism. They hadn’t had his education. Even if a lesson was elementary, one rarely learned it in the abstract. The instruction had to be applied directly onto one’s hide. Holding the territory had become increasingly painful, but as Kotler knew, one had to have a tolerance for pain. Because there is no life without pain. To deny this was only to invite more pain. This is what they had done when they withdrew from the Gaza settlements in 2005, and they were doing it again, as if a mistake stubbornly repeated could yield different results. To uproot thousands of your own people. To make casualties of them for no discernible purpose. It was gross incompetence. If you were not willing to protect your people, you should not have encouraged them to live in that place, and if you were not going to encourage them to live in that place, you should never have held the territory. There was no middle ground. Once you had committed to one, you had committed to all. The time for simply walking away had long passed. Now you stayed at any cost or exchanged a pound of flesh for a pound of flesh. That was all. Nothing else.

Well, what rigidity! Kotler observed with bemusement. Sometimes, after a run of such thoughts, he stood as if at his own shoulder, looking at a curious twin self. Who was the man who thought these thoughts? It came as something of a surprise. Not because of the thoughts — he didn’t dispute the thoughts — but their pitch. The pitch of a public man who expected his thoughts to have injunctive force in the world. In spite of his true nature, he’d become this man. Forty years earlier, he’d been thrust, unwittingly, into this role by Tankilevich. Neither of them could have anticipated where it would lead. When he’d first seen the article in Izvestia, his head swam. Then, two weeks later, on the street outside his apartment, half a dozen agents swooped, surrounding him, their many hands clutching his coat and tossing him, limp as a rag, into the waiting car. From such pathetic beginnings he rose. Simply, he was forced to discover hidden reserves of strength. And once he rose, it was hard to return to the man he’d been before — a fairly ordinary man, with no grand designs. A former musical prodigy with small hands, a degree in computer engineering, and a desire to live in Israel. This described nearly every Zionist in Moscow. But then, after his ordeal, he was exposed to people in positions of power and saw how many of them were inadequate, even mentally and morally deficient. Little more than noise and plumage. And then it seemed impossible to leave serious matters — matters for which he had sacrificed everything — in the hands of such people. Still, he wasn’t one of them and it was a wonder that he had lasted in their midst for as long as he had. Now, almost certainly, his time was up. How many politicians survived such a scandal? So why couldn’t he now return to his original humble ambitions: to lead the life of an ordinary citizen in his ancestral homeland? How many other immigrants were there, even former refuseniks, who’d attained just that sort of life? They gloried in the country, found pleasure in every mundane detail. It all still seemed miraculous for a people so long displaced. Street signs bearing names from Jewish history. Hebrew singing issuing from the radio. The sight of young Jewish soldiers in uniform. All the peerless works of Jewish industry. Even the trees and birds, their beautiful essences nourished on Jewish soil. It sufficed for them. Only an egomaniac thought in terms any more exalted — to be a leader of the people, a second Moses or Ben-Gurion. But the question was, after he had been exposed to the upper machinations, to the sordid leveragings of power, and knowing what he knew, could it still suffice for him?

In the chicken yard, Tankilevich came into view. His legs moved stiffly, arthritically, as if they had lost the greater part of their utility. He still had the presence of a large man, but he was sapped of strength, his arms depleted of muscle, the elbows bulbous in their sheath of skin. He carried weight in the stomach and chest, but it was slack and unwholesome. The only sign of vitality was his full, almost overfull, head of white hair, below which his face was drawn, his skin loose at the mouth and the throat. He gave the impression of dissatisfaction and ill health. Bent wincingly at the knees, he ducked his head and shoulders inside the chicken coop and then held this inelegant pose, his legs splayed for balance and the wide seat of his pants framed by the gray wood of the chicken coop. Kotler couldn’t help but compare him to others from the movement, most of whom had passed through the frozen jaws of the Gulag to reach Israel. They’d emerged from captivity emaciated, jaundiced, and toothless, thinking that they would never fully recover. But to see them now, one would never guess. Kotler had recently visited Yehuda and Rachel Sobel at their home on the grounds of the Weizmann Institute. They had themselves a little villa. Pomegranate and citrus trees surrounded the backyard patio where they’d taken their dinner. Rachel had plucked herbs for their meal from ten different ceramic pots. Yehuda was tanned, stout, and percolating with good health. And yet the man had spent two years in a hole near the Mongolian border, much of that time with an abscess in his mouth. Or there was Eliezer Shvartz, who did his morning calisthenics on a balcony that overlooked the Jaffa Gate, and Abrasha Mirsky, who held several patents in desalinization and had retired to Ma’ale Adumim, and Moshe Gendelman, who had grown a long beard, fathered eight children, and ran a yeshiva in Kiryat Shmona. Compared to Tankilevich, they were all thriving, each after his own fashion. From a certain standpoint, Kotler thought, Tankilevich had no right to look as terrible as he did. Nobody had tried to destroy his health. So it was disgraceful for him to be in such poor shape. Nobody had done it to him. He had done it to himself. Perversely, Kotler thought, though it served him right, he hadn’t earned the right.

Tankilevich took two short shuffling steps back from the chicken coop and then extracted his shoulders and head from the enclosure. He straightened himself to his full height. In his hands he cradled several white eggs. Kotler couldn’t tell how many. Perhaps half a dozen, perhaps fewer.

Eggs in hand, Tankilevich stood contemplative, gazing off to one side. Kotler remained at the window watching him. To watch another person think was absorbing, more absorbing than watching a person do anything else. Nothing was quite so personal or mysterious or telling. And all the more absorbing when it was someone you knew. To see him in an unguarded moment when he was trying to be known to himself. And more, to watch him when you believed he was thinking about you. Tankilevich peered down at his eggs and then again at a point over his left shoulder. Every fluctuation of thought had its corresponding expression, which could be read as though set in type: self-pity, reproach, accusation, defeat, forbearance.

Tankilevich turned his head and looked at the window behind which Kotler stood. There was no confusion. It wasn’t nighttime, and the glass played no optical tricks. Kotler didn’t flinch from Tankilevich’s gaze, nor did Tankilevich avert his eyes. They looked at each other through the glass. And now what did he detect on Tankilevich’s face? A flare of recalcitrance that quickly guttered. And what of his own face? What did Kotler present? The same expression he had presented to the KGB and all the subsequent adversaries. Unyielding calm. An expression of come-what-may. No — more than that. An expression that invited come-what-may.

Though it seemed to pain him body and soul, Tankilevich put one foot in front of the other and trudged toward Kotler. If this is the way it is to be, Kotler thought, then this is the way it is to be. He moved from the window and went to meet Tankilevich. If they were to have this encounter he preferred not to have it in this small room, contained and constricted, but outdoors, with the sun and the air and the expansiveness of the sky, as befit a free man.

THIRTEEN

Tankilevich stood in the yard, waiting for Kotler to appear.

Along the wall of the house was a wooden bench — seven slats nailed together — and an upended zinc tub. Tankilevich thought to sit on the bench or to lay the eggs on the base of the tub. It had a lip that would keep them from rolling off. He bent and carefully placed the eggs down on the tub, his nerves and the need for concentration amplifying the geriatric tremor in his hands.

In the hallway, Kotler spied Leora and Svetlana in the kitchen. Both women eyed him expectantly. He acknowledged them with a quick cheery nod and continued to the side door. Stepping out into the yard, he saw Tankilevich stooped and intent over the metal tub, where the eggs rested in a line along the edge of the slightly convex surface. A hollow metal tapping sounded as Tankilevich put the last egg down with its fellows.

— I see you have your own little kibbutz.

— Oh yes, it’s some kibbutz, Tankilevich said. We’re four chickens from the grave.

— That’s a lot of kibbutzes today.

— Too bad.

— I agree, Kotler said.

— How nice. Is that all? Or is there more you came to say?

Tankilevich had his first good look at Kotler in the flesh. Over the years, he had of course seen his picture in the papers and marked his progress. But to see a man in the flesh was a different matter. How had the years treated him? Forty years ago, he had been a skinny, quick-witted, balding, shabbily dressed young man. Shabbily dressed even for Russia in the 1970s. Tankilevich, who cared to dress better, had allowed himself to feel superior. Now Kotler was still shabbily dressed. His shirtsleeves were too long; the cuffs dangled. His trousers were baggy, even though he had gained weight. Only his shoes were worth envying. They were clearly from abroad, not something you could find at the bazaar. The shoes declared him a foreigner. The shoes and his expression. The easy, confident look of a person who lives his life in a better country. Kotler had prevailed and he had come to lord this over Tankilevich.

— Volodya—

— Chaim.

— Chaim, Chaim. For the last time, I didn’t come here to say anything to you. I had no idea you lived here. Not in Ukraine. Not in Crimea. Not in Yalta. In fact, I had no idea whether you were living at all. Nor did I spend much time on this question.

— I wrote a letter.

— What’s that?

— I wrote a letter. To Chava Margolis.

— And?

— Ten years ago.

— All right.

— She didn’t tell you?

— Chaim, despite your fervent Zionism, it’s clear you’re not keeping up with the news from Israel.

— I keep up perfectly well. I watch the Russian television. I read the Russian press. And a friend informs me of the Hebrew. He gets it on the computer.

— Then perhaps this bit of news eluded you. Or perhaps it didn’t rate over here.

— What news is that?

— The news of my Jerusalem trial. Chava Margolis was one of the witnesses for the prosecution. She and Sasha Portnoy. A few others too. The plaintiff was another activist. He made some outrageous claims against me in print. I defended myself and he brought a suit against me for libel. Shapira. From Gomel. Is the name familiar?

— No.

— Well, he had a very intricate thesis worked out, in which I had not been an agent of the American intelligence services, as you accused me of being, but rather an agent of the KGB. And that my Moscow show trial had been doubly fabricated. A show trial in which I, the defendant, had been in league with the authorities who were prosecuting me. In other words, I merely gave the very convincing impression of passionately defending myself and the Zionist movement, whereas, in fact, I was opposed to the movement and used the trial process as a way to expose other activists. Genuine activists like Chava and Sasha and, presumably, Shapira. And that it was because of me that they were imprisoned and exiled. You see? That I, who pretended to be the great hero, and who was celebrated above all the others, was in fact a traitor and a party to a deception of unprecedented complexity and mendacity. That I was heartless enough to put those closest to me, my parents and my young bride, through terrible anguish for more than a decade. And that while my family believed I was being kept in deplorable conditions in Soviet jails and camps, and while they moved heaven and earth to win my freedom, I was actually luxuriating in some undisclosed location, a client of the KGB. That, in essence, I was the worst traitor of all. Worse even than you.

— They mentioned me in the trial?

— Of course. You were my accomplice. Naturally. We plotted together.

One of the chickens had skittered over to them and now cocked its pert, imbecilic head at Tankilevich. With an angry swipe of his foot, he sent it flapping.

— When was this trial? he asked.

— Ten years ago.

— The same time I wrote to Chava.

— Evidently. Had I known you were alive, I could have called you as my witness.

— How so?

— To recount how we plotted together.

— No, we didn’t plot together. But if, over my head, you plotted with the KGB, how would I have known about it?

— Over your head?

— Yes. It was in my letter to Chava. I explained everything to her. How I did not write that statement in Izvestia. How they merely appended my name.

— I see. And was it a look-alike who testified against me at the trial and confirmed the substance of the letter?

— It was I but under duress. They also had me on medication. It was all in the letter to Chava. Which I expected she would share with others.

— She might have shared it with others, but not with me. I haven’t spoken to her since the Jerusalem trial. And I’ve seen her only once, unavoidably, at a gathering of refuseniks in the Ben Shemen Forest. What valuable information did she fail to impart to me?

— A great deal. But I can see that you’re not interested in it.

— That’s not true. But if by not interested you mean that I don’t believe anything you say will change the material facts, that’s right.

— The material facts?

— Facts that most sensible people — not conspiracy theorists — consider to be established. You gave false witness against me to the KGB.

— I gave, but I was forced.

— It was the Soviet Union; who wasn’t forced? A few degenerates. But most people aren’t degenerates. Everyone was forced. Some nevertheless managed to resist.

That second trial. Kotler avoided speaking or thinking about it. It had been a disgrace to them all. Even though he’d been acquitted, he’d come away wounded — in stark contrast to his Soviet trial, where, though convicted, he had come away invigorated. To sit in an Israeli courtroom and see Chava and Sasha looking at him with the same cold rectitude they had once reserved for the KGB. Terrible.

One afternoon in the courthouse cafeteria, he had seen Chava alone.

— Why are you doing this thing, Chava?

— Because I looked objectively at the evidence, that’s why. And it confirmed my suspicions.

— What suspicions were those?

— That you were always a self-seeker. Here as there.

They had always been a fractious group. That wasn’t news. There had been plenty of rifts and conflicts in Moscow. There were nearly as many deviations in their ranks as there had been among the Marxists at the time of the revolution. Not to mention the purely personal rivalries and antagonisms. But one had to expect some strife. Dissidents were by nature contrary. They would find fault with Paradise and send God a petition.

And how had they been to one another afterward, in Israel? Decent, for the most part. Ideological differences, irrelevant in Israel, were shelved. But there was even more. People who had buckled under KGB detention were pardoned. If they appeared at gatherings, they were not shunned. Outsiders were surprised by this. But if you had been through that life, you found it easier, not harder, to forgive. You remembered your own bouts of despair. Who among them was made of steel? Very few. Sobel had had it very hard. He’d held out remarkably. And Kotler would grant that both Chava Margolis and Sasha Portnoy were tough. He’d spoken with people in a position to know and had read their books. He didn’t call their accounts into question as they did his. But others did the best they could. None of them was trained to undergo interrogations. At most, they had read Esenin-Volpin’s “Memo for Those Who Expect to Be Interrogated.” It counseled silence. But you could keep silent a week, two weeks, a month. Eventually you found yourself obliged to speak. Especially when the interrogator paraded facts before you, some of which were accurate. You knew that others were talking and you asked yourself what you would gain by keeping silent. Why, by your principled silence, should you incur the harshest sentence? Those were the rationalizations. Everyone entertained them. But this was the sad irony: Those who had succumbed were forgiven, and he who had endured was attacked. Attacked precisely because he had endured and was then celebrated for it. As if that too had been his doing. As if he’d been in a position to promote his own cause. As if he hadn’t been locked up like all the others. So what explained his fame, then? It certainly wasn’t his good looks. If he had attracted a disproportionate amount of the world’s attention, it was because of Miriam. Unlike Chava or Sasha or Shapira, he’d had a soulful, determined, striking young wife who went from embassy to embassy, from Hadassah to Hadassah, campaigning for his freedom. It wasn’t his fault that the world liked a love story.

Now he had betrayed Miriam and there was another scandal. How had he managed it? In one small life, to have so many scandals. But it was as though the first scandal had predisposed him to the others. If you have drawn the world’s attention once, it is easy to draw it twice. And easier still for some tawdry business. If you give the world a love story, it is like a first installment. Where the next installment is a hate story. Of which the world will accept an infinite number. He had Tankilevich to thank for his first scandal, his introduction to the world. He had Shapira’s spitefulness to thank for his second. For this one, he could thank himself.

Kotler looked at the man before him. Tankilevich smoldered. He who had every right to be angry wasn’t, and he who had no right was.

— Well, here we are, Chaim. However you believe we have been brought together, we have been brought together. What shall we make of this brief encounter?

— What is there to make of it?

— I don’t know. There was a time when I knew very well. In jail, especially in solitary confinement, I composed long speeches to you. Detailed, biting, and incontrovertible statements that would have reduced you to ash. If I’d preserved them all, they would have filled a library. I paced in my cell and recited them with the passion of Hamlet. What else did I have to do?

Kotler had composed speeches and letters and dialogues? Tankilevich thought. Well, he was not the only one. He thought he could have filled a library? Tankilevich didn’t doubt he could have matched him volume for volume. But he wasn’t going to bleat about it.

— I had a brother, Tankilevich said. What I did, I did only for his sake. To save his life. That is all. I had a younger brother who was a thief and a fool and I destroyed my life to save his.

— Destroyed whose life?

— Ah, Tankilevich said and brushed this off with a wave of his hand. You got thirteen years. All right, I am sorry for your thirteen years. But the way you were going, you must have expected it. And if they hadn’t used me to hang those years on you, they would have used someone else. But I got the same thirteen years and however many more.

Tankilevich could practically see the years, heaped one atop the other in a moldering pile. His brother had been arrested in 1964. So it was now forty-nine years since he had handed over the reins of his life. He had just turned twenty-one. His brother was two years younger. With his parents, he went to the KGB office in Alma-Ata to beg for clemency. And in the end, his parents offered him on the altar to save his brother. His mother wept and his father demanded. Somehow he found himself with his brother’s life in his hands.

— My brother smuggled eight molars’ worth of gold and they sentenced him to death. He was reckless and arrogant, but he was only eighteen, hardly more than a child. What was I to do, let them shoot him?

— So instead of him, me?

— They were never going to shoot you.

— The charge was treason, a capital crime, which came with a daub of iodine and a bullet to the head.

— What daub of iodine?

— To guard against infection, Kotler said with a grin.

— Before you, Portnoy and Baskin were convicted of treason, and their sentences were commuted. The Soviets weren’t killing dissidents anymore. It wasn’t like under Stalin. Or under Khrushchev. Under Khrushchev they were killing people like my brother. Everyone knew it. They were shooting them or, worse, sending them to perish in the uranium mines.

— So what was the deal you made?

— I agreed to work for them. In exchange, they reduced my brother’s sentence to ten years. He served eight and then went to bestride the world. While I sat in my Ukrainian village, he had Israel and America and Europe and even the New Russia. He traded, he did business, he had four wives, six children, and God knows what else. He lived like a king until some Moscow gangster put a bullet through his heart.

For that Tankilevich had forfeited his life. Though it would have been ludicrous to expect that his brother would recast himself as a scholar or a healer. His brother was a swindler, and Tankilevich had merely granted him the chance to live long enough to see the USSR remade in his image. In recompense, Tankilevich had received souvenirs and postcards, a few phone calls, fewer visits. But when they moved from the village to Yalta, when the KGB assistance dried up and he and Svetlana were reduced to living off their meager pensions, his brother had sent money. He hadn’t stinted. What he sent was enough for them to buy the house and the car. And for as long as his brother lived, he had continued to send. A small fraction of his many millions, to be sure, but Tankilevich didn’t fault him. Though when he was killed, the millions mysteriously evaporated. There wasn’t even enough for Tankilevich to fly to Moscow and attend the funeral. Strangers buried his brother.

— You worked for them from 1964? How many others did you denounce? Kotler asked, and for the first time he felt a flash of the anger he had known in those years.

— Nobody else.

— All those years for me alone?

— That’s all they ever asked of me.

— Did you know from the beginning that you would be required to denounce Jews?

— I didn’t know anything. The colonel said I would have a chance to restore my family’s honor by protecting the motherland from spies and saboteurs. I thought he had in mind catching others who were doing what my brother had done. Those who were doing it on a larger scale. But I heard almost nothing from them for several years. I guess they had no shortage of informants. They didn’t contact me until 1972, when they made plans to move me to Moscow. Only then did they explain what they wanted from me.

— So you never applied to go to Israel.

— How could I? They had me by the neck.

— Well, you certainly played the Zionist.

— Before 1972, I knew as much about Israel as you did. I followed the Six-Day War. I watched the Munich Olympics. I never denied who I was. But what kind of Zionist could I have been in Alma-Ata before 1972? What did we have in Kazakhstan? I learned about Israel and Judaism along with you, in Moscow.

— As a KGB spy.

— It so happened I discovered Zionism through the KGB. But the things I learned, the people I met — those were the best days of my life. You say I pretended to care about Israel, but I cared as much as anyone else. I too dreamed of living there even though I knew that for me it was a futile dream.

— So if you were such a sympathizer, why did you continue to collaborate?

— In ’72, they still held my brother. And after they released him, they threatened to take my father. He suffered from heart problems. I told them to arrest me instead, but they refused. They said if I stopped cooperating they would put my father under a rock and me right beside him. Even after your trial I tried to recant, but they wouldn’t let me. I offered to go to prison, but they wouldn’t allow it since it would compromise the result of your trial. I was the primary witness and so I couldn’t be a criminal.

— We all had families, Kotler countered. We were all prey to the same intimidation. And we all had to make the same calculations. Everyone understood what it meant to shelter one’s brother at the expense of someone else’s. None of us had that right. You say you believed that they wouldn’t shoot me, but how could you know? What if they had shot me? Or what if some accident had befallen me in jail that cost me my life or left me a cripple? Or even if none of this happened, what led you to think that I could be shorn of thirteen years of my life? That I should be separated from my wife? That my parents should not live to see me liberated? That they should have to meet death without their son at their side? There is no compensation for such losses. Not in this life. And no explanation but weakness. Which I can excuse. But not self-deception.

Kotler knew he was allowing himself to become overly emotional. It hadn’t been his intent, but the mention of his father’s death had loosed the stream of memories. Where had Tankilevich been when Kotler received the letter informing him of his father’s death? What affront was he decrying while Kotler was at the Perm camp sewing hundreds of flour sacks? The letter arrived in February, four months after his mother had sent it. My dearest son, How it pains me to give you this sad news. The camp authorities would not explain why it had been so cruelly and illegally withheld. From there the conflict escalated so much that he himself came close to meeting his end. He announced a work strike. He would not sew the flour sacks. He wrote a protest to the post office, to the procurator’s office, and to the Interior Ministry. Even though he was four months late, he decided to sit shivah. He stayed in the barracks and recited what mismatched scraps of Hebrew liturgy he could remember in the absence of a prayer book. Hear, O Israel, the Lord is God, the Lord is One. Holy, holy, holy. He Who makes peace in the heights, may He make peace upon us, and upon all Israel, amen. He wore the single phylactery upon his head like a horn, its companion missing, the subject of a previous battle. When he ignored the commands of the guards, the warden came to reason with him. He ignored him too. He was not deceived. After all, who had withheld his letter? Out of respect for his father, he declared that he would sit the full seven days and observe all the customs, neither working nor shaving. Then the battle started in earnest. They cut his food ration in half. But his bunkmates — a Crimean Tatar, a Jehovah’s Witness, an Estonian nationalist — gave him from theirs. Before the week of mourning was up, the guards threw him into a punishment cell. When he still refused to concede, they confiscated his phylactery. Two guards pinned him to the stone floor while a third tore it from his head. He then had no choice but to declare a hunger strike until his property was restored to him. Ninety-eight days later, when his heart was no longer beating properly, the warden put the velvet pouch with the phylactery on the metal table beside his cot. For those three months, they had fed him with a tube down his throat.

But this was in the past and he had put it to rest. It didn’t pay to dredge it up. Kotler looked at Tankilevich standing rigid before him.

— Never mind, Kotler said. It’s all gone and done with.

— For who? Tankilevich asked.

— For everyone.

— Easy for you to say. You’re a big personage. You have yourself a young mistress.

— You’re right, I have a mistress. She’s a remarkable young woman. Attractive, passionate, intelligent. Everything a man could want. But it’s not a thing to gloat about. On the one hand, I am very happy with her; on the other, I regret the whole mess. I have hurt and embarrassed my children and my wife. I have damaged my reputation, but Shakespeare had a good line about that. Still, if you wish to insist on the past, then you can take credit for my mistress. If I hadn’t been separated from my wife for thirteen years, it would never have happened. I would have gone to Israel shortly after Miriam. Maybe a year or two, but not thirteen. When we reunited, my Miriam would have been much as I remembered her. She would not have gravitated toward religion or the settlers. Neither of us was much inclined that way. We would have had a normal life. Instead, we had thirteen years of separation and thirteen years of struggle. She was alone fighting this battle. The state of Israel rebuffed her. Because I’d involved myself in the larger human rights movement, I wasn’t Zionist enough for them. My case trailed unwanted complexities. So who embraced her and who helped her? The religious. The settlers. And naturally she was drawn into their midst. Because of their help, she had the strength to fight. For that I’m grateful. But the woman I found wasn’t quite the woman I’d married. And as for Leora, my mistress, what reason would a girl like her have to be interested in a round little man like me? Only because I was dropped down the coal chute of the Gulag and came out the other end.

— There. That’s it. Say what you will, but you benefited from this Gulag. You had thirteen dark years followed by how many bright ones? Without those thirteen years, where would you be? You say living a normal life. Am I living a normal life? Very well, in Israel a normal life doesn’t look like this, but people still struggle. Maybe you would have had forty years like that? In stead you had money and position. Those thirteen years were your lottery ticket.

— I see. And you gave me this ticket.

— Look at it how you wish.

— All right. If I credit you with my mistress, I suppose I should credit you with the rest too. But what did it take to issue me this ticket? You did it, but anyone could have. With that legal process, anyone could have put his name to the indictment. And as you said, I was destined for trouble anyway.

— But it was I who signed. I explained to you why. And it is I who have borne the consequences all these years. To this day!

Tankilevich spoke the last with great vehemence, as though trying to breach the impenetrable divide between them. He had been too long maligned. It wasn’t so simple as Kotler liked to believe. The force of his desire rose up in him like the sea. His head was filled with the deafening tidal rush. The white surf flooded his vision. His knees gave and he sank into it.

Kotler watched Tankilevich’s eyes go blank, then quizzical. Tankilevich teetered and pitched to his side. Kotler was slow to react and reached for him only when it was too late. On the way down, Tankilevich’s shoulder struck the tub, and with the blow the eggs juddered around the base. Three fell to the ground, surprisingly unbroken.

FOURTEEN

Kotler and Svetlana, each under one of his arms, helped Tankilevich into the house. He offered little assistance, shuffling his feet and mumbling unintelligibly. Leora followed behind.

They lugged Tankilevich through the kitchen and lowered him onto the sofa in the living room. His face was ashen. He continued to mumble. Now Kotler was able to distinguish a few phrases. To strike a peaceful citizen, you scum! I have witnesses. I will report you to the police.

Svetlana bent close to Tankilevich’s face and pressed a hand to his forehead.

— Chaim, do you hear me? Chaim?

Leora entered from the kitchen, bearing a glass of water. She offered it to Svetlana, who accepted it without a word. She held it under Tankilevich’s lips, urging him to drink. When he didn’t respond, she set the glass on the magazine table nearby.

— We must call the ambulance, Svetlana declared.

There was a handset for a cordless phone on the table. Svetlana snatched it up and dialed.

— Has this happened before? Kotler asked.

Svetlana shook her head brusquely and, tight-lipped, held the phone to her ear.

Tankilevich had quieted. He was no longer mumbling but lying down with his eyes closed, breathing shallowly.

— Curse them, a person could wait all day, Svetlana seethed at the phone.

As she continued to wait for a response, Leora picked up the glass of water and moistened her fingers with it. She sat on the edge of the sofa and ran her fingers across Tankilevich’s brow, temples, and the line of his jaw. She kept her fingers at his neck and felt for his pulse. All this she performed with precision and unexpected tenderness. In her care, Tankilevich began to breathe more regularly. Kotler watched and was gripped by a strong feeling of adoration. If this was how she cared for a stranger, an enemy, how indeed would she care for him? How could he contemplate losing such a woman?

— Is there a cloth or a handkerchief? Leora asked.

Svetlana, still loath to oblige, glanced around the room. She seemed on the verge of saying something to Leora when her call was connected.

— Yes, hello, Svetlana said, I need an ambulance.

As she spoke, Kotler dug into his pants pocket for his handkerchief and presented it to Leora. She doused it with water, and they both listened to Svetlana’s conversation.

— It’s for my husband, Svetlana said. He has lost consciousness.

Leora applied the compress to Tankilevich’s brow and he stirred a little. Reacting, it seemed to Kotler, either to the compress or his wife’s agitated voice.

— He is seventy, Svetlana said. He suffers from arrhythmia, yes.

She listened, with growing consternation, to the voice on the other end and considered her husband.

— He is breathing, yes. No, I haven’t taken his pulse or his blood pressure. When do you think I would have had time to do this? He is in distress. I am not a doctor. I called you.

His head cradled in Leora’s lap, Tankilevich weakly blinked his eyes open. Kotler saw him inspect the room, looking first, dimly, at Leora and then, darkly, at Kotler and at his wife.

— I don’t understand what you mean by busy, Svetlana said. You are the ambulance service. A person requires aid.

Tankilevich tried to lift his head to speak. His lips moved but his voice caught in his throat, producing no more than a croak.

— Maybe an hour, maybe two? What sort of answer is this? The devil take you!

She jabbed her thumb into the phone’s keypad to disconnect and then glared at Kotler and Leora.

— This is the sort of country we live in! Where the average person counts for nothing. Less than nothing. You could drop in the street and nobody would bat an eye.

She bustled over to the sofa and edged Leora from her place. She cupped Tankilevich’s head in her hands. He gazed at her with irritation. Again he tried to speak but his voice still failed him.

— Give him water, Leora said.

Petulant, resentful of another’s instruction, Svetlana grabbed the water glass from the table and held it to her husband’s lips. Tankilevich took a few feeble sips.

— No ambulance, he managed.

Svetlana studied him with overwrought concern. She felt his forehead with the back of her hand.

— Look at how pale you are. And cold.

Tankilevich stared at her silently, derisively, and then closed his eyes.

— I don’t like the look of you, Svetlana said.

With this she turned and hurried out of the room and then noisily upended things in another. She returned carrying a blood pressure cuff.

— That one on the phone asks if I took his blood pressure. And what if I had? Would they come any quicker?

Tankilevich submitted as she fastened the cuff around his arm and inflated it with the rubber bulb.

— If you are old, they have no use for you. For a younger person, they might still come. But for an older person? Everyone knows. They don’t come. Even if a person has a critical reading, they still don’t care. An elderly person is having an infarction, better he should have it at home. If they send an ambulance, and he is still alive, they will have to take him to the hospital. And what then? He will occupy a bed. On an old person, they will be reluctant to operate. Why expend scarce resources? He might die on the table, or if he survives, what are the chances he’ll last more than a week? Because this is a person with no money. If he had money, he would never have called the public ambulance. He would have called the private. And if he has no money it means he won’t be able to afford the medications to recuperate properly. So, of course, why go to all the trouble to begin with?

Svetlana craned her neck to scrutinize the cuff’s dial. She shook her head grimly.

— What does it say? Kotler asked.

— Eighty over fifty. Dangerous.

Svetlana removed the cuff from Tankilevich’s arm and looked at her husband with a strange, rising fanaticism. She brought her face close to his and said in a loud, importunate voice, Chaim, can you hear me?

Tankilevich responded by squeezing his eyes shut and saying, almost soundlessly, Let me be.

— Let you be? Svetlana said, affronted. Not in your condition!

Tankilevich’s response was silent disregard.

Svetlana continued to gaze at her husband as if to impress upon him her concern, but Tankilevich did not stir. He appeared to suffer both his wife and his debility. Svetlana persisted a moment longer before her expression changed, grew pensive.

— You can curse the system all you want, but what good is it? And what should we expect of the public services? The people who work these jobs are as bad off as everyone else. About the police, I already told you, Svetlana said, glancing at Leora. And this woman on the phone, what can her salary be? One hundred dollars a month? One hundred and twenty? How is she to live on it? The same for the paramedics. And if the hospitals don’t have enough medicines and equipment, why would the ambulances? Consider yourself lucky if you get a blanket. If there was ever money to pay for such things, it was stolen long ago by the bureaucrats.

— You say there is a private service, Kotler said. If they will come, call them.

— And with what money? Svetlana inquired.

— If he needs help, call, Kotler said. I’ll pay.

At this, Tankilevich stirred. He opened his eyes and tried, unsuccessfully, to lift his head. Failing, he looked acidly at Svetlana.

— I could call the Hesed, she said wanly. They have a service.

Tankilevich continued to glare Svetlana into submission.

She looked down at her husband miserably and wrung her hands.

— No. You cannot be left like this. I won’t have it. It would be like I killed you myself.

But having spoken, Svetlana made no move. For some seconds, the only sound was Tankilevich’s breathing. Then Leora plucked the phone from the table.

— What is the number? she asked.

— To what? Svetlana said.

— The private ambulance.

— I don’t know it. I’ve never called.

— Find it, Leora said.

From the sofa came Tankilevich’s strangled No. Leora ignored him and went with the phone into the kitchen. She returned holding the phone and some banknotes. She offered them back to Svetlana.

— This is the money Baruch gave you in advance for the week. You keep it. It’s not charity. It’s rightfully yours. If we choose to leave early, we’re the ones breaking the agreement.

Svetlana vacillated, glancing at Tankilevich.

— Is it enough for the ambulance?

Svetlana nodded but still didn’t reach for the money, as if she were in the grip of some paralysis. Leora pressed the bills into her hand.

— Find the number and I will call.

Svetlana looked down at Tankilevich, whose eyes burned in his pale face. She kneeled before him and took his hand.

— Have mercy on me, she said.

Tankilevich mutely shook his head.

Svetlana rose to her feet, gripped her hair by the roots, and startled Kotler with a piercing cry.

— There is nowhere to turn! Who can tolerate such a life?

Tankilevich closed his eyes and lay on the sofa impassively, deaf to the drama.

Svetlana directed herself at Kotler and Leora.

— Life here for us now is impossible!

Kotler looked at her and, incidentally, at the room, which was part of a house, on a patch of land, with a car parked in front, but he didn’t contradict her.

— This country suffocates its people. Slowly, slowly, until it finally chokes you to death. That’s where we are now. It’s been suffocating us for years but somehow we managed to sneak a mouthful of air, but no longer. Now the time has come for us to choke, like everyone else who cannot leave this place.

— For Israel?

— For America. For Canada. For Australia. For Germany. Anywhere a mouse can find a hole. And, yes, for Israel. For Jews like my husband and half Jews like our daughters, and goy appendages like me. I understand very well how it is. We didn’t treat the Jews fondly here. The Russians and the Ukrainians. We were terrible anti-Semites. With repressions and pogroms, our fathers and grandfathers drove the Jews from this country. Because we didn’t want them here, the Jews had to make their own land. They shed their blood for it. A hundred years later and the Jews are nearly gone. So this is a great triumph! But how do we celebrate? By bending over backward to invent a Jewish grandfather so that we can follow the Jews to Israel! Ha! There is history’s joke. But tell me who is laughing.

— Everybody and nobody, Kotler said. A Jewish joke.

— Nobody is laughing here. They are leaving or expiring.

— A sad end to the Crimean Jewish dream. And yet, if Stalin had only signed his name, it would have been a Jewish homeland.

— Yes, I heard of this dream. Stalin destroyed a lot of those people. But the Russians aren’t the Germans and they don’t pay reparations. So why speak of it? There is plenty of other history that also doesn’t pay.

Tankilevich’s chest rose and fell with a slow regularity. He lay on the sofa without stirring, reposed, as if calmly, pharaonically welcoming the void. Kotler recognized this condition, this state of being. A man proudly relinquishing his mortal coil. Where your death became your badge and a stab at your oppressors. This was how he had felt during the transcendent, soul-heightened stretches of his hunger strike. As though his hands were firmly gripped around the hilt of death, pointing its shining blade at iniquity. But what iniquity was Tankilevich combating? He would not accept Kotler’s help on principle. For this he was willing to deprive himself of his life and bereave his wife and children. It seemed an act of pridefulness and spite.

— We should go, Kotler said.

He watched Tankilevich for a reaction, but the man offered none. Leora, who had resisted coming here from the first and had been agitating to leave, reacted hardly more. At this point, there was little in leaving to gladden the heart.

The only animated response came from Svetlana.

— That’s it, then? she asked. This is how you’ll leave us?

With that she cast her eyes at the dreary scene behind her. The room, even in the morning light, had a watery murk.

— I think we’ve done enough, Kotler said. We’ll go before we inflict more harm.

— Never mind harm. The way we are, there’s no more harm you can inflict on us.

— Your husband needs an ambulance. Because of me he won’t accept one. We will go. And not just for your sake. We need to go. What Leora said is true. That money is rightfully yours. Use it to get him help.

Without saying another word, Kotler and Leora moved to leave the room.

— Go then, Svetlana cried. And turn your backs on God!

At this, despite his better judgment, Kotler failed to bite his tongue. A flicker of temper leaped in his chest.

— Excuse me, Kotler said, but let’s leave God out of this for a moment. There is something I don’t understand. You say you are to be suffocated and devoured. But how did you live, how did you feed yourselves all these years?

— How? We managed is how. We were younger, healthier. For as long as we could, we managed. We didn’t ask anyone for a kopek. Even when we were eligible, Chaim didn’t want to apply. He said, I cannot go to them for money. But we had no other choice. It was that or we become like the other pensioners in this country — insects scrabbling in the dirt. So I made him go to the Hesed. Not he, I. And how did the Hesed treat him? With compassion? With a shred of human decency? How? They humiliated a person. Here was a man who came to them in need, his heart full of love for the Jewish people, and they treated him like a dog.

Tankilevich lay, as before, with his eyes shut, but now he had shed the otherworldly affect. He was listening.

— Don’t think to walk away with any rosy illusions, Svetlana spat. I understand, a respectable woman does not spill all her troubles. But I am not ashamed. Shame is a luxury, and we cannot afford it. My husband went to the Hesed as a Jew looking for help, and the director greeted him with a cold heart. She agreed to give, but imposed conditions. Conditions that my husband met for many years but that are now crippling for him. You see the state he’s in. Who in good conscience would impose harsh conditions on a person like this? And now that he can no longer meet her conditions, she will revoke the subsidy. In other words, she’s told us to dig our graves.

— 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.