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?
The Betrayers Page 10
