The Betrayers

by David Bezmozgis

  Kotler listened to the beseeching sound of the ringtone. He knew how the technology worked. At the other end, his name would appear, and Dafna would know who was calling. It was past eleven thirty at night in Yalta, the same time as Jerusalem. Dafna often spoke on the phone with her friends at this hour or later. He and Miriam had occasionally scolded her for it, though not with any conviction. She was a good girl, a conscientious student. By the standards of a modern eighteen-year-old, she could not even be called rebellious. Miriam would have liked her to be more devout, but given that Kotler’s own level of religious devotion left a lot to be desired, there was only so much Miriam could legitimately expect. Within a family there were any number of possible configurations, alliances, and affinities—none set in stone, all open for renegotiation unto the grave—but for them, things had assumed a fairly standard alignment: the son took after the mother, the daughter after the father. What enabled Miriam to wholeheartedly embrace God and His strictures, she had passed on to Benzion. And whatever independence, whatever unruliness of spirit Kotler possessed, had been imbibed or inherited by his daughter. Even if angry with him, her way, like his, would be to confront, not to evade.

  —Where are you? he heard his daughter say in a parental tone.

  —A quiet place, Kotler replied.

  —Another secret? Dafna said acerbically. I’ve been calling you.

  —I know, Dafnaleh, Kotler said. I would have liked to call you sooner, but it wasn’t possible.

  He heard the rustling that implied his daughter was in motion.

  —Where are you? he asked.

  —Home.

  More rustling. Then it stopped.

  —Is your mother there?

  —You didn’t call to speak to her, did you?

  —No, I called to speak to you.

  —Rabbi Gedalia is here. He’s with her in the other room. They know I’m talking to you.

  —How is she?

  —How do you think? You hurt her, Papa. She didn’t deserve it.

  —You’re right. She didn’t.

  —But you did it anyway.

  —Dafna, those are two separate things. The first is not something for a father and daughter to discuss. As for the second, you will have to believe me that I had no choice.

  —I don’t want to talk with you about sex either, but I’m not a child and I’m not naïve. And don’t forget, we live in Jerusalem, the most sex-crazed place in the world, where half the people wear wool sacks to keep from having sex with everyone else. So you didn’t wear a wool sack and you surrendered to your desires.

  Your desires. The words spoken boldly and neutrally, as if to rise above her disgust at the squalidness of her father’s passions.

  —I won’t even say her name. It makes me sick to think of all the times she was in our house pretending to be loyal and respectful. Pretending to be my friend. She should have had some shame. But it doesn’t matter now, does it?

  —What do you want me to say, Dafna?

  —Are you planning to marry her?

  —I don’t know my plans. Not about that, not about other things.

  —I don’t understand. If you don’t even know your plans, why did you allow this entire mess to happen?

  —As I said, Dafnaleh, I had no choice.

  On the other end of the line, his daughter fell silent. A simmering, frustrated silence. Kotler imagined her in her room sitting cross-legged on her bed, glaring at the wall with her dark, intelligent eyes. What could be said about a father’s love for his children? You loved them entire. You loved even their anger at you. For what was this anger if not a frustration maddeningly entangled with love?

  Kotler waited for Dafna to speak again. She was in her room, in the familiar space. He could imagine her, but she couldn’t have imagined him. At that moment he could hardly have imagined himself. In the distance was the bold black silhouette of the Crimean Mountains set against the moonlit sky. There was the quiet road, raked occasionally by the headlights of a passing car. There were the low-slung houses, even in the darkness, haphazard and needy, making their emotional appeal. And in front of him was the bright windowpane, offering a view of the conventional tedium of his landlords’ lives. He saw Svetlana rise from her seat and cross the room, carrying a folded newspaper in her hand. She stopped and said something over her shoulder to someone who wasn’t visible to Kotler. The Jewish husband, Kotler assumed, returned from his communal duties.

  —When you say you had no choice, Dafna finally said, what are you talking about? I don’t understand. What exactly didn’t you have a choice about?

  —Blackmail, Dafnaleh, Kotler said.

  —Blackmail?

  —I still believe in the policy that one doesn’t negotiate with terrorists.

  —What did these terrorists want?

  —It shouldn’t matter what they want. Whatever they want is what you cannot allow them to have.

  —But what did they want?

  —My silence.

  —And what did they promise you for your silence?

  —Their silence.

  —Their silence? About you and her.

  —I didn’t bother to ask.

  —But that’s what it was.

  —That’s what it turned out to be.

  —And you didn’t understand that’s what they were threatening you with?

  —I understood well enough.

  —You understood and still you let them do it? Dafna nearly shouted. Didn’t you know what it would do to us?

  —Yes, Dafna, I knew, but one thing has nothing to do with the other. There are matters of principle where you cannot compromise. Under any circumstances. If I’d compromised, it would have been worse. Far worse for all of us. For our country and for our family, which is part of our country.

  —But who cares about the country if it destroys our family? The country doesn’t care. All you need to do is read the newspapers to see how the people in this country care about us. To hear the disgusting things they’re saying on television. Have you seen the television where you are?

  —No.

  —Have you called Benzion?

  —Not yet.

  —He won’t say a word about it, but imagine what it’s like for him now. Did you think about that? He has to face it all. The army offered him a leave. He should have taken it. I told him to take it. But he wouldn’t.

  —Dafnaleh, this will pass. You have to believe me. I speak, unfortunately, from great experience.

  —I know about your experience, Papa. Everybody knows. You’ve sacrificed and sacrificed for this country, but they still ridicule you. They ridicule you because of your sacrifices. So what good is it? Let somebody else sacrifice for a change. And if nobody else wants to, then who are you sacrificing for?

  One sacrificed for one’s people as one sacrificed for one’s children. One did it because one felt that one knew better than they did. That one saw in them what they failed to see in themselves. One kept faith as God kept faith with the Israelites, the stubborn stiff-necked people, complaining even at the moment of their redemption, turning their backs, endlessly squabbling, quick to forget signs and wonders. One identified with them, even at their lowest, because otherwise one would be lost. He would be lost, desolate. A man needed to belong to something greater than himself.

  But the call ended with Kotler having conveyed none of this.

  It was late now, approaching midnight, too late, Kotler thought, to call Benzion. Besides, he still wasn’t fully accustomed to the idea that a soldier on active duty could be telephoned. On this subject, despite his having lived more than two decades in Israel, his frame of reference was seventy years out of date, rooted in childhood and his father’s stories of the eastern front. These stories, supported by a few photographs and a packet of yellowed field post—folded into triangles and bearing the censor’s seals—were deeply encoded in Kotler’s psyche.

  A movement in the window drew his eye and Kotler turned from the black absorption of the mo
untains. Faster than a thought, his knees buckled, responding to an overwhelming impulse to drop to the ground, to get out of sight. Kotler caught himself, and stood rigidly, his knees still slightly and comically bent. Blood battered his heart as if to dislodge it. The fear was one he’d not known in untold years. Framed in the window was a man, Svetlana’s husband, arrested by some worry or introspection, his profile presented to Kotler. Kotler’s thoughts swirled, sense convoluted with nonsense. He knew that the man could not see him, but he feared the man could see him. He knew the year was 2013 and that the Soviet Union no longer existed, but he felt the cold menace of the KGB, sensed the nearness of his old tormentors. He knew he was an Israeli citizen, a husband and father, a dissident champion, but he felt isolated and vulnerable, helpless to stave off the horror. In the window the man blinked his eyes and wearily ran his hand through his white hair. He cleared his throat, opened his mouth to call out to his wife, squinted as he listened for her reply, and then shuffled from the room.

  FIVE

  Leora was watching the television when Kotler entered the room. He caught a glimpse of the screen and recognized the movie, White Sun of the Desert, a Soviet film, once a personal favorite. It had come out in 1970, when he was twenty years old and taking his first tentative steps down the dissident path. He’d read a samizdat translation of Leon Uris’s Exodus. He’d given vent in mixed company to some mildly provocative ideas. Little things. The movie’s tone—dry, laconic, gently mocking of the Soviet revolutionary myths—had struck him as simpatico. And the music as well, with the famous ballad by Okudzhava, back when Kotler still considered himself a student and follower of music. Now, before Leora turned the television off, he saw the burka-clad women scurrying down the lane of the dusty Oriental town. The women in their burkas, the somnolent bearded elders, the crusading Western liberators, the primitive Muslim insurgents, the flaming oil wells; who could have predicted the immutability of this unhappy subject?

  Kotler joined Leora on the bed atop the blue coverlet. The atmosphere between them at that moment was unerringly chaste. Leora held herself slightly aloof, as if in anticipation of a blow. This trip they had embarked on, already fraught with many complications, seemed to accrue new ones by the minute. Mostly, Kotler thought, because he was inept at selfishness. After a life of self-denial, he had finally pursued a selfish want, but he kept undermining himself. How long had he dreamed of sleeping with Leora in a large white room overlooking the sea? If not from the first moment he saw her, then soon after he brought her onto his staff and, increasingly, into his home. A smart and efficient girl who quickly proved her worth. She was frequently at their table for Friday-night dinners. She became like an older sister to Dafna and went shopping with her for clothes that Miriam, in her piousness, abjured. All the while, a current passed between him and Leora, like the invisible data that streamed between all the new machines. It went like this for years. Then one night a year ago, the two of them working late in his office, she had glanced up from her note-taking and caught him looking at her in an explicit way, and, for the first time, he did not draw the cloak of self-restraint. How I have denied myself, he said to her. Should I continue to deny myself? She had considered him steadily and said, I can’t answer that for you. To which he’d replied, Yes, you can. And they had done in his office what so many other political men had done in theirs. For shame, Kotler thought, and yet they continued to follow in this disreputable tradition.

  —What did Dafna say? Leora asked. Other than that she hates me?

  —In so many words, she called her father a fool. A popular position at the moment, and difficult to dispute. Though I disputed it.

  —That’s all?

  —She’s a grown girl. A young woman. No longer a child, as she is quick to remind me. A father doesn’t fully realize this until it stares him in the face. It isn’t all bad. Sooner or later, the realization arrives: the child discovers the immaturity of the parent, and the parent the maturity of his child.

  —It’s all wonderfully philosophical, Baruch.

  —Yes, well, at times like these, we turn to our vices. The bottle for some, philosophy for others. Most of us are not blessed with your unwavering levelheadedness.

  —My unwavering levelheadedness. Do you know what it’s like to be a levelheaded girl? It’s like having a disfigurement. I’m still embarrassed by the stupid things I did to try to overcome it.

  —To me it isn’t a disfigurement. Quite the contrary, I like it very much.

  —That puts you in the minority. A small minority.

  —Not for the first time, Kotler said and took Leora’s hand.

  —So that’s it, then? Leora asked. Nothing has changed? We go on as before?

  —Nothing has changed between us, Kotler said.

  —And not between us? If there is something you want to say, Baruch, you should say it.

  Kotler tried to draw Leora closer to him, but she held her ground, such as it was, refusing to be mollified.

  —What does the name Vladimir Tankilevich mean to you? Kotler asked.

  From her expression, he saw that it meant nothing. It was no surprise. The name had long ago ceased to mean anything to all but a handful of people. A dwindling handful. A few of the central players from the defining drama of Kotler’s life.

  —He’s my red-haired Motele, Kotler said with a weary smile.

  —I don’t know what that means, Baruch.

  —It’s a line from Eugenia Ginzburg. Her first offhand impression of the man who will eventually destroy her life. “Who’s the red-haired Motele?” she asks her husband at a picnic. The analogy isn’t perfect. Ginzburg was a Jewish Communist and her red-haired Motele was a Jewish Chekist, but the line nevertheless stuck in my head.

  —Perhaps I’m dense, Baruch, or on edge, or just tired, but I’m not in the mood for puzzles.

  —Tankilevich was the man who denounced me. My old roommate in Moscow who also happened to be a KGB informant. He published the open letter in Izvestia that said I was working for the CIA.

  —All right. What of him?

  —I saw him.

  —When did you see him? I’ve been with you all day.

  —I saw him when I was standing in the yard making the phone call to Dafna. I saw him through the window of the house. Shall I go on?

  There was no need for him to go on. Leora rose from the bed and looked at him soberly.

  —You saw him, but did he see you?

  —No.

  —Fine, Leora said.

  She turned from Kotler and pulled open a dresser drawer. She scooped up an armful of their clothes and dropped it in a pile at the foot of the bed. Kotler understood that she meant to rouse him to action, to counter what had already taken root in him—what she sensed had taken root in him—but it did no good. He sat serene and motionless on the bed. Leora looked at him with ebbing defiance. He could see it ebbing, flagging. Beginning at her eyes, her shoulders, her spine, and so on. Against such motionless serenity, nothing could be done. They both knew this. As for the source of the serenity that had possessed him so swiftly, Kotler was almost embarrassed to say. It was unlike the serenity with which he had confronted Amnon and the prime minister and the various foes of his past. That serenity had been the product of reason and principle, easy to articulate and, at least in his own mind, defend. This serenity descended upon him from another dimension. For want of a better word, a mystical one. Though, no doubt, this was how all irrational people justified their intransigences.

  —We should never have come here, Leora said. We should never have gone with that woman. I said so.

  —But we did. And, as strange as this will sound coming from my mouth, I can’t help but feel that it was for a reason.

  —Yes? And what reason?

  —That’s what I’d like to find out.

  —I still don’t understand. What’s there to find out? You’ve stumbled upon the man who betrayed you forty years ago. The odds of this, of ending up a boarder in his house,
are almost nil. But so? Now what? Is it that you want to exact vengeance? What is it? Do you want to hit him?

  —No, those fantasies ended long ago.

  —So what, then? Do you want to prove something to him? Confront him with your achievements?

  —No. And it hardly feels like the moment for it.

  —Doesn’t it? You’re on the front pages of newspapers. Yes, there’s a scandal, but that’s incidental. The real point is about the fate of our country, a fate that means a great deal to a great many people. And you are at the center of it. Who is he, this Tankilevich, compared to that?

  —I also have a beautiful young mistress. You forgot to mention that.

  —And he is married to a sly embittered hag. And he lives in this decrepit little house. And he’s barely scraping by. And he’s probably nursing some chronic ailment of the liver or the prostate. And, and, and … In the end, there has been some kind of justice. What more do you want?

  —I’m curious, Leora. That’s my only explanation. Curiosity. A curiosity deep in my bones. I’m as curious as I have ever been in my life.

  —That’s your entire reason?

  —I want to know, Leora. First and foremost. It is a need like hunger. You satisfy the need, and the rationale, the why, comes after, once you are sated.

  —And to satisfy this need you’re willing to risk revealing yourself to these people? Not only that, but also us, the time we have together here. The only time like this we’ve ever had or may ever have. Because what do you think will happen when you confront this man and his wife? That we’ll continue on as if nothing happened? That we’ll go to the beach and take excursions to the Livadia Palace and the Chekhov Museum? If you confront this man, you don’t know what will happen, except that we will lose our chance to be alone together as we dreamed. If that isn’t important to you, if that is a subordinate need, then you will have answered a question for me.