The Betrayers

FIFTEEN

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

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

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

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

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

— Unfailingly prudent, Baruch said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kotler deleted the message.

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

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

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

By the rivers of Babylon,

There we sat down, yea,

We wept,

When we remembered Zion.

Its fifth verse read:

If I forget thee, O Jerusalem,

Let my right hand forget her cunning.

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

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

— Benzion refused orders, he said.

Leora turned her face away from the phone.

— How do you know? The news?

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

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

— Hello, yes, hello, Leora said.

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

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

He clicked on her message.

My Dear Baruch,

I don’t know where my letter will find you, but I believe it will find you. This is the opposite of how it was all those years ago when I knew where you were but couldn’t trust that my letters would be delivered. Much has changed since then, most of it, praise G-d, for the better. I have been reminding myself of this during these last two trying days.

Baruch, I never thought the time would come when I would be writing you such a letter. I never thought there would come a time when I would not know where to find you in this world. That has been the greatest shock of all. That, if you can believe it, is what seems most painful to me. That you have vanished on us. On me and on the children. That you have treated those dearest to you like informers, like strangers. Somehow I feel that if I knew where you were, I could better withstand my pain.

Baruch, I am not naïve. I understand that the promises people make to each other when they are young cannot be enforced when they grow old. I understand about men and the temptations of the flesh. I understand it from life and from our Torah, which does not shy away from this subject. I am a sixty-year-old woman and I know that, as pertains to the sexual appetite, this is not the same as being a sixty-year-old man. I do not desire and do not need to be desired the way I did when I was a younger woman. G-d, in His wisdom, made men and women differently, and made men to harbor these desires until their dying days. When King David was old, it was a young girl, Abishag the Shunammite, who was sent to warm his bed and not Bathsheba, his wife, whose beauty had once caused him to commit a terrible sin. The Torah never says how Bathsheba felt about this girl in her husband’s bed. Did she not wish to care for him herself? Or did she accept that she could not provide for him the way a young girl could? Of course, those were different times and a king had many wives and none could make an exclusive claim on him. Still, I have been thinking about Bathsheba and Abishag these past days. There is only one passage in the Bible where Bathsheba and Abishag appear together. It is when Bathsheba goes to King David to ask him to honor his promise to her and to appoint Solomon the rightful heir to the throne of Israel. “And Bathsheba went in unto the king in the chamber. — Now the king was very old; and Abishag the Shunammite ministered unto the king. — And Bathsheba bowed, and prostrated herself unto the king.” Why does the Bible mention again that Abishag was with the king? It must be only to further humble Bathsheba at this moment. Not only must she beg her husband to keep his promise, she must do it before the young woman who now warms his bed. But in the end, she is rewarded. Her husband keeps his promise and her son ascends to the throne and builds the first temple, praise G-d.

I have been thinking about this and about what lesson I am to draw from it. Is it to accept that there is something in the natures of men and women that must be accommodated? I know that our intimate life is no longer what it was. I am not Abishag. I am Bathsheba. I am your wife, a woman of sixty, the mother of your children. But after all these years of marriage, what can Bathsheba ask of her husband? Can she ask only on behalf of the children, or also on her own behalf? If I no longer possess all the same desires, it does not mean I am without desires. I still desire those other things that we have always had together — comfort, familiarity, respect, affection, and love. For all the years we have spent together and the hardships we have endured, what is the value of the bond between us? What is owed to Bathsheba?

I am not writing to plead with you or make demands. I also will not pretend that you have not hurt me or that I am not angry with you. But I see that our life together has reached a crossroads and I ask myself which path I would prefer we take. It is true, we have both reached a very mature age and our children are nearly grown. We are no longer in that stage of life where we must worry about remaining together for the sake of the children. And I am past the stage of my life where I would be lost without a man. My mother was widowed when she was not much older than I am now and she lived until the end by herself. She claimed she was content. She would have preferred to have my father beside her, but without him she had the company of her friends and she also had me. Not only me, but all of us, as you well remember. We all cared for her, you no less than me. You were as much a son to her as if you were hers by blood. I too have friends and I have our children. And in time — soon, if G-d grants — there will be grandchildren. I imagine myself living the life my mother lived in her final years and I cannot say it terrifies me. But just as my mother would have wished to have my father by her side, I would still, even after all this, prefer to have you by my side. We have built this family together. It was the dream we shared almost from the first moment we met in Moscow. It seemed such a distant dream, and for so long it seemed nearly unattainable. But we have done it. We have made our lives in the land of Israel, the land of our forefathers, and we have raised two beautiful children here, proud Jews and Israelis who now dream their dreams in Hebrew.

Baruch, I don’t know what your intentions are. I don’t know what is in your mind or in your heart. I don’t know what promises you have made to Leora, the Abishag in our story. Of course, I always recognized her as Abishag. A younger woman in your house is always Abishag. No matter how doting or polite she may be, you know she poses a threat. It is not even her fault. It is in nature. Our part is to struggle against nature. Our part is to resist our bad inclinations with our good. I do not know how much Leora resisted her bad inclinations and I don’t know how much you resisted yours. But Dafna said you were blackmailed and that, if you had compromised, those dreadful photographs would have been suppressed. (On this, I took your side. One cannot make such compromises and I know you never would.) But if you were blackmailed it means that you did not intend for those photographs to be seen and you didn’t want to make public this affair. And perhaps this affair had already run its course or you were planning on ending it. Perhaps it was never your intention to leave our marriage. Perhaps you had simply strayed, submitted to an isolated temptation, and were now prepared to continue with our life as we have always lived it. That is for you to say. But if you wish to return to our marriage, I am willing to forgive. Our friends, our community, the people who have rallied around me as they rallied around me in the years of our earlier struggle, feel as I do. Everyone is willing to forgive. No one of us is perfect. Just this morning, Gedalia brought me this verse from Ecclesiastes: “For there is not a righteous man upon earth, that doeth good, and sinneth not.” Our greatest sages and prophets were also not without sin. So what right do I have to expect of you, even you, to be more righteous than our sages?

Baruch, whatever you decide, I ask only that you don’t delay. Even if you decide not to return to me, return speedily to the country and to your children. They are in desperate need of your presence and your guidance.

Your wife,

Miriam

How thoroughly he had fouled the best of what they had once been, Kotler thought. And of the many offenses he had committed, the worst seemed to be against the girl he had met in Moscow forty years earlier to whom he had pledged his love. The quiet, contemplative beauty, like a young Ingrid Bergman, who appeared one evening at the Hebrew class that the Sobels ran secretly out of their apartment. Rak Ivrit—“only Hebrew”—was the rule. In the course of a conversational exercise, he had said to her: Would you like to see a movie and go drink coffee and get married and move to Israel and raise a large family? To which she had replied with the single Hebrew word: Zehu? “That’s it?”

Somewhere within Miriam this girl was cradled, and also the other Miriams who, through selflessness and loyalty, had enriched and solaced his life. He had wronged them individually and collectively, but they were now out of reach and he could not return to them even if he wished. And to the Miriam who had written the letter? Likely he could not return to her either.

Leora’s telephone conversation had ended before Kotler finished reading Miriam’s letter. Perceptive to the last, she didn’t disturb him but waited patiently for him to conclude.

— Something important? she asked.

— A letter from Miriam.

— Anything I should know?

— Nothing new, Kotler said as kindly as the words could be spoken. Other than some wisdom from Gedalia.

— And what is that?

—“For there is not a righteous man upon earth, that doeth good, and sinneth not.”

— He would know.

They did not pursue it further. They were of the same mind about Gedalia, though Kotler had reasons beyond those Leora could know. It was a young Gedalia, barely out of yeshiva, who had been Miriam’s chief advocate and protector. Her chaperone on her global crusade to free Kotler. There had been salacious murmurings, which had reached Kotler even in prison. In her letters, Miriam denied them, but not long after Kotler landed in Israel, Gedalia came to him, beating his breast, begging forgiveness, tearfully confessing to his impure thoughts and desires.

— I got our tickets changed, Leora said.

— Yes, I overheard. Thank you.

— No need to thank me, Baruch. It felt good to finally manage something. Even something so trivial.

Kotler looked at his watch. Half past nine. They had more than ten hours before their flight to Kiev. If they left now, they would be facing an inordinate wait at the Simferopol airport. It would be an inordinate wait in any airport, let alone Simferopol, which was not among the world’s coziest way stations.

— I suggest we go to Simferopol, Leora said. At the airport or the bus station we could stow our luggage and see the city. There must be something to see there.

— There must, Kotler said.

— What else would you propose? Leora asked.

— We’ll be the only tourists to leave Yalta without seeing the Livadia Palace, Chekhov’s house, or Massandra Beach.

— So you have a reason to come back, Leora said.

— No, Leoraleh, Kotler said. I have no reason to come back.

To reach the taxi stand they crossed Lenin Square for the last time. An accordionist, older than Kotler, a roostery fellow in a white baseball cap, had set himself up at the base of the statue. On the ground, lashed to a wheeled dolly, a stereo system piped an underscore of music. Next to the stereo sat an accordion case, open to receive contributions, a few bills and coins already scattered on its incompatibly lush blue velvet lining. The accordionist stood by the case and fingered the melody of a Russian folk song. A small audience formed a perimeter to listen to the music and watch the bolder among them dance. Kotler also slowed to watch, and Leora fell austerely in line beside him. On the impromptu dance floor, some dozen people spun. Kotler counted only one man among them, a youth with a shaved head who led his slim girlfriend by the hand. The rest of the dancers were older women. Some danced in pairs a short distance apart, stepping to the music. The others danced by themselves. They looked like ordinary embattled Russian women of Svetlana’s type briefly forgetting their arduous lives. Nearest to Kotler danced a woman in a flowered blouse and a long white skirt, her figure matronly, her hair auburn but gray at the roots, the skin of her face finely wrinkled. She held her head upturned, her shoulders level, her hands delicately twirling. She revolved in a small circle, her feet moving under the sweep of her skirt. On her feet, Kotler saw, she wore flesh-colored nylon socks and white leather, low-heeled shoes. With a blade she had cut the leather to make room for her bunions, which bulged almost monstrously through the rents.

Everywhere you look, heartbreak, Kotler thought.

At the taxi stand, cars were waiting. Kotler approached the first. Its driver sat inside, his window rolled down, reading a newspaper on the steering wheel.

— Will you take us to Simferopol? Kotler asked.

— And why not? the man replied. I’d take you to Kherson. The farther the better.

He named a fee and took charge of their bags while Kotler and Leora deposited themselves in the backseat, Leora turning to face the window, withdrawn into herself.

They drove along the same road they had taken before, this time heading out of Yalta. Morning traffic was heavy through the tourist center. Cars and buses lurched forward. Kotler gazed out the window at the view of sparkling, modernized Yalta. A resort town in a corrupt country, as it had always been, there to propagate the illusion. But he had loved it as a boy and believed his parents had loved it too. Now he would leave it for the last time and consign more of his life to the impervious past.

They picked up the main highway and drove through the Crimean countryside. They saw again the scenery they’d seen through the bus windows the previous day: the small towns and villages, visible from the road, little changed from fifty years earlier. They were ramshackle then; they were ramshackle still — though topped, here and there, by a satellite dish. Twice on the way to Yalta their bus had stopped to allow a herd of goats to cross the highway, their minder blithely leading them as though privileged by the antiquity of his trade. Sometimes they saw workers in the fields; sometimes men in the bones of a house engaged in some ongoing construction project. The pace of everything seemed governed by a bucolic torpor. It resembled, Kotler thought, Israel not so very long ago and, even to this day, the Arab parts of the country in the north and the south. The main difference was a peculiarity of the landscape, crude structures strewn haphazardly everywhere. Often they were just four walls without a roof. Or if with a roof, then with gaping holes for the windows and doors. All were of the same yellow limestone and could just as easily have been new and unfinished as old and decaying. But if they were old, Kotler didn’t remember them from before. The previous day, on the bus to Yalta, he’d turned to a young Russian man in the neighboring seat. Drily, the man informed him that these were the instruments of a Tatar land grab. After the fall of the Soviet Union, the Tatars had returned to Crimea in their thousands. The Ukrainian government, bowing to their historical grievances, had ceded them land wherever they built dwellings. These were supposed to be their dwellings.

Land! The land! What, Kotler had wondered, would his old Tatar prison mate have made of this? The repatriation and autonomy of the Crimean Tatars had been his struggle. He had given his life over to it. Were he still living, he and Kotler could have had an interesting conversation. What dreams they had nurtured and what distortions now obtained. And it was all to do with land. A measure of earth under your feet that you could call your own. Was there a more primitive concept? But nobody lives in the ether. Man is a physical being who requires physical space. And his nature is a prejudicial nature of alike and unalike. That was the history of the world. How much earth can you claim with another’s consent? How long can you hold it if you haven’t consent? And is it possible to foster consent where none exists? Kotler didn’t know the answers to the first two questions, but the essential question was the last, and the answer to that was not favorable.

— Imagine, Kotler said to Leora, this could have been the Jewish homeland. Then the Tatars and the Russians could have demanded we go back to where we belong, as the Palestinians do now.

Leora sat on her side of the backseat as she had from the start, looking silently out her window. Kotler had spoken in an attempt to break the silence, make a conciliatory gesture, though he still didn’t know exactly what he’d said or done to alienate her.

— If you have something to say, Leora, you should say it. Mindful of the driver, Kotler spoke the words in Hebrew. We have two hours in this car.

Peevishly, Leora turned from her window.

— What are you doing with me, Baruch?

— I don’t understand.

— Why did you get involved with me?

— I thought that much was clear. I fell in love with you.

— So you said. But how could someone like you fall in love with someone like me?

— Someone like me? Someone like you?

— An exceptionally moral person like you and an ordinary person like me. I don’t understand how that is possible.

— It is possible. It happens all the time. The trouble with us exceptionally moral people is that there are exceedingly few of us. We must partner up somehow, Kotler said, trying to lighten the mood.

— I don’t believe it. If I were like you, I don’t see how I could be with someone like me.

— But you aren’t me. And I clearly haven’t minded.

— I have always had my doubts about that. I have always wondered how you could be sincere. That compared to you, compared to Miriam, I was insufficient. And this has nothing to do with what they wrote about me in the newspapers. Believe me, they didn’t write a single word that I couldn’t have written myself.

— I think you have too dim a view of your own character.

— Do I? Not according to what I heard between you and Tankilevich. I heard what you said and I heard what he said. I’m not sure I would have behaved any differently in his place. So maybe I’m not who you thought I was.

— I see, Kotler said.

— He is a sick foolish old wreck of a man.

— And so should be absolved.

— Oh, I don’t know, Baruch. Does it matter what I think, anyway? I’m in no position to say.

They looked at each other in silence and before Leora could turn away or Kotler offer something in reply, there came a cascade of notes that Kotler recognized as Leora’s phone’s ringtone. The notes, sampled from a vibraphone, bounced around the chamber of the cab. Leora let the phone ring a second time before she reached into her handbag. She let it ring a third and a fourth as she held it in her hand and read the display. And she gave Kotler a dubious glance before she touched the screen to accept the call.

— Hello, she said crisply.

Kotler tried to infer who might be on the other end. At present, a great many people could conceivably elicit from Leora such a response.

Yes, Kotler heard her say. Then, in the same tone, Yes, I know. And after a pause, looking directly at him, she said once more, Yes. She then took the phone from her ear and mutely extended it to him.

Kotler accepted it.

— Hello, he said and heard his daughter’s voice in reply.

— I called first on your phone, Dafna said tightly. It didn’t work.

Kotler felt for his own phone in his trouser pocket and tilted it away from the sun’s glare. The screen was black. He pressed the button for the power but saw no change.

— The battery died, Kotler said.

— I was forced to call her.

— Then it must be important.

Through the handset Kotler heard a woman’s voice over an intercom, resonating through the corridors of a public space. He couldn’t decipher the words but he immediately assumed the worst. His heart and mind hurtled to the graveside, with the raw heaped earth, the shrieks and lamentations.

— You need to come home, Dafna said.

— I am coming home. I have a flight tonight. What happened?

— You talked to Benzion?

— Dafna, what is this? Are we playing some sort of game? Have you taken it into your head to discipline me? Tell me what happened.

— Benzion shot himself, she replied.

Kotler felt the impact as though the gun had just been fired and the bullet had struck him as well, its force concussing his chest.

— Did you hear me, Papa?

— Is he alive?

Leora had been following his conversation, and at this Kotler saw her body tense and her eyes grow wide and sharp with concern.

— Yes, Dafna said. He shot himself, but it was in the hand.

Kotler felt immediate, slavish relief, but also a rising sadness.

— He and two other soldiers. They all put their hands in front of Benzion’s rifle and he fired. They called themselves the Brotherhood of the Right Hand. Benzion posted their declaration on his Facebook. A few lines from the Psalms. Now none of them will say a word.

— Where are you, Dafna?

— Hadassah Ein Kerem.

It was where Miriam had given birth to Benzion. The doctor had announced, Mazal tov, Mr. Kotler, you have a son. Kotler was invited to look at the child, the embodiment of so many of his dreams. He saw, almost to the exclusion of everything else, the infant’s long, slender, finely wrought hands. On the little body, the hands seemed almost freakishly long, as if to mock Kotler’s unspoken desire. For he’d secretly hoped that a child of his not be encumbered as he’d been. That the randomness of genes would, against probability, be kind to it. The sight of his son’s beautiful hands filled him with pleasure and relief. He never ceased to admire them. He admired them too much, too effusively — his admiration, to his shame, carrying with it a taint of envy. How different his own life would have been if only he’d been granted such hands! In Benzion’s act, Kotler discerned the deeper message intended for him: it was not by coincidence that his son had ruined the part of himself that his father loved best.

Now, in a hospital room, under military guard, his son was lying, while outside, before they were dispersed, the demonstrators would have assembled. Bearded and bedraggled supporters with their songs and banners. Through his window Benzion would hear their voices. David, King of Israel, lives, lives and endures!

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

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

— And what did you tell him?

— I told him I couldn’t do that.

— Why?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SIXTEEN

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

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

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

— Good day, the woman said.

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

— Visiting Crimea?

— Visiting.

— Where from? she asked.

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

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

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

— Yalta onions. Sweet as sugar. Taste.

— I believe you.

— Tell me, what do you know about honey?

— What everyone knows.

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

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

— What kind of place is it? he asked.

— A Jewish center.

— They don’t make it easy to find.

— Not by accident, Kotler said.

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

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

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

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

— We’re here to see Nina Semonovna.

— And you are?

— Baruch Kotler.

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

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

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

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

— Go through, he said.

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

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

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

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

— Good day, Kotler replied.

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

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

— You looked to me familiar, the man said.

— I have that kind of face.

— But you’re Jewish?

— A popular question in Crimea.

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

— But are you?

— I am, Kotler confirmed.

— Redstu Yiddish? the man inquired.

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

— Ah, zeyer gut! Vos macht a yid?

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

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

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

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

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

— What about chess? We also play chess.

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

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

— The subject of much debate.

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

— My Yiddish is worse than his, Leora said.

— And your chess?

— My chess is better.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

— No, Kotler said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

— I doubt you are slipping into obscurity.

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

— You walked anonymously?

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

— The people are caught up in their problems.

— They have every right, Kotler said.

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

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

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

— I see, Kotler said.

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

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

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

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

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

SEVENTEEN

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

After he reread it he went to find a matchbox.

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

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

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

— For you, she said breathlessly.

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

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

— Yes, Tankilevich said.

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

— Why? Tankilevich asked.

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

— I would like to know why, Tankilevich repeated.

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

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

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

— No, he said.

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

Tankilevich handed the receiver back to Svetlana.

— Well? she asked.

— Go and thank God, Tankilevich said.

He struck a match and put it to the letter.

EIGHTEEN

Between the domestic terminal of Kiev’s Boryspil airport and the parking lot, there was a stand of mature chestnut trees, the bases of their trunks painted white. A few benches had been installed beneath them to create a little refuge. Leora told Kotler she wished to sit there before they went into the international terminal for the flight to Tel Aviv. It was past ten in the evening and the canopies of the trees corralled the darkness. A soft breeze blew. Leora and Kotler were not alone in the little refuge; others appeared to have gravitated there for the same reason: to skim a restful moment from a long journey. On one bench huddled a young family — the parents and two small children. One child was asleep in the father’s arms, the other chewed sleepily on a bun given it by its mother. Sitting quietly by himself on another bench was a man, much obscured by the darkness, who sipped from a bottle of beer and smoked a cigarette. The silence was broken intermittently by the motor of a car starting in the parking lot and, every few minutes, by a plane lifting into the sky in a graceful line, soon visible only as a configuration of lights, pulsing and shining, white at the nose, the wings tipped green and red.

Leora and Kotler sat without speaking a small distance apart. After a time, Leora took her hand and placed it in Kotler’s. Holding hands, they continued to sit without speaking. This was farewell with nothing to be said. Had they not come to Yalta, had they not met Tankilevich, had Benzion not shot himself, Leora wondered if the outcome for them would have been the same. If the train of events would have been any way unchanged. She thought of Benzion in the hospital with his mutilated hand. In her mind he was still very much a shy, serious, openhearted boy. She still felt a great deal of affection for him, and for Dafna and Miriam too. She had always felt privileged to be taken into their midst. But now she could not even think of paying Benzion a visit, sending him a card for his convalescence. She didn’t doubt that his act had as much to do with the havoc in his family as the havoc in the land. Soon enough they would be returning to both, and she also to the ambiguity of what life held next. For this reason, she was glad to sit in the darkness and prolong their farewell, the purest, most intimate moment they would share on this trip. The rest of it was now clouded by a vague unpleasantness. She understood now what she should have understood all along. When Kotler refused the compromise on the park bench, it had sounded the death knell not for his marriage but for their affair. This trip, which they had entertained as a beginning, was always an ending. And, at root, her relationship with Kotler had been built upon a flawed premise. A girlish infatuation she had failed to banish. She had wanted her saint to also be a man. Which was like wanting day to also be night. A saint loved the world more than any single person, while a man loved one person more than the whole world. And so only a saint could live with a saint. She was no saint, though she had once aspired to be.

The thought of being not good enough for another person carried within it a condemnation of that person, and yet Leora felt it was a condemnation to which she alone was entitled. The rest of the world hadn’t earned the right. And the rest of the world would resume for them as soon as they joined the line of people for the flight to Tel Aviv and lost their anonymity. They had already received a foretaste from Nina Semonovna. There had been the look on her face when she greeted them, but also the way she had treated Baruch when he asked for her help. This was what they could expect, and more.

— If it gets out, if there is trouble, Nina Semonovna had said, who will protect me? Are you any longer in a position to give assurances?

— Never mind assurances, Kotler said. Even at the best of times, there are no assurances. You do it not because of assurances but because it is right.

— Then I must not think it is right.

— You are punishing him needlessly. If I can forgive him, so can you.

Nina Semonovna then turned flintily to Leora.

— You have not said a word. Maybe we should also have your opinion?

Kotler turned to her as well.

— Let him live, she said.