The Betrayers (12 page)

T
ankilevich stood in the yard, waiting for Kotler to appear.

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

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

—I see you have your own little kibbutz.

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

—That’s a lot of kibbutzes today.

—Too bad.

—I agree, Kotler said.

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

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

—Volodya—

—Chaim.

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

—I wrote a letter.

—What’s that?

—I wrote a letter. To Chava Margolis.

—And?

—Ten years ago.

—All right.

—She didn’t tell you?

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

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

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

—What news is that?

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

—No.

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

—They mentioned me in the trial?

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

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

—When was this trial? he asked.

—Ten years ago.

—The same time I wrote to Chava.

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

—How so?

—To recount how we plotted together.

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

—Over your head?

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

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

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

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

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

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

—The material facts?

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

—I gave, but I was forced.

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

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

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

—Why are you doing this thing, Chava?

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

—What suspicions were those?

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

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

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

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

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

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

—What is there to make of it?

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

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

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

—Destroyed
whose
life?

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

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

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

—So instead of him, me?

—They were never going to shoot you.

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

—What daub of iodine?

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

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

—So what was the deal you made?

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

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