The Betrayers

by David Bezmozgis

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

  —Why are you doing this thing, Chava?

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

  —What suspicions were those?

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

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

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

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

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

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

  —What is there to make of it?

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

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

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

  —Destroyed whose life?

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

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

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

  —So instead of him, me?

  —They were never going to shoot you.

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

  —What daub of iodine?

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

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

  —So what was the deal you made?

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

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

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

  —Nobody else.

  —All those years for me alone?

  —That’s all they ever asked of me.

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

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

  —So you never applied to go to Israel.

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

  —Well, you certainly played the Zionist.

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

  —As a KGB spy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  —For who? Tankilevich asked.

  —For everyone.

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

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

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

  —I see. And you gave me this ticket.

  —Look at it how you wish.

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

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

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

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

  FOURTEEN

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

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

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

  —Chaim, do you hear me? Chaim?

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

  —We must call the ambulance, Svetlana declared.

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

  —Has this happened before? Kotler asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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