The Betrayers (2 page)

T
o get to the house, they rode in Svetlana’s boxy little Lada, not so old and yet seemingly unchanged from Soviet times, its interior smelling cloyingly of rose water. The drive, snaking up into the hills away from the coast, took only a few minutes, long enough for them to formally introduce themselves. Svetlana gave her full name, complete with patronymic, and Kotler and Leora provided their former Russian names, omitting their last names; thus, for the first time since his release from prison, Kotler presented himself as Boris Solomonovich, and for the first time since she was a Moscow kindergarten student, Leora introduced herself as Lena Isaacovna. If only for the purposes of reaching back in time, the use of his old name seemed appropriate. Not until he said it did he realize the extent to which simply identifying himself as Boris evoked a former self. A self very distinct from the man he had resolutely chosen to become. Boris. He might as well have said Borinka, the pet name his parents had used for him. His heart swelled at the ghostly sound of it in his head. And though he
recognized that he was in a delicate frame of mind, still he was surprised by how vulnerable, how sentimental he had become. How easily and intensely he could be moved by his own thoughts and recollections.

The house Svetlana brought them to was a single story and, like the neighboring houses, showed signs of deterioration and slapdash repairs. She veered her car sharply onto a pitted driveway and came to a stop in front of flaking, pale green stucco walls. Kotler noted that the roof was of terra-cotta tiles, but a newer addition, affixed to the main body of the house like a crude prosthesis, was covered with slanted corrugated metal. Beside this addition was a small patch of dry grass, the domain of some idle brown hens and a white goose. A stunted peach tree clung to life at the edge of the patch. It was an ordinary village house. A plot of land and its modest yield. A life of shtetl dimensions.

Kotler and Leora followed Svetlana to the house but left their bags in the trunk of the car so as not to give the impression of a fait accompli. At the entrance, they conspired to notice the white plastic mezuzah that had been fastened to the doorjamb. Svetlana, not oblivious, and with a glint of self-satisfaction, brushed the object with her fingertips and then pressed her fingers to her lips.

—Normally, my husband would be here, but Saturdays he takes the trolleybus early to Simferopol to go to synagogue. They don’t always have ten men for services, the minyan. Svetlana said, savoring the last word.

Inside the house, she whisked them through the rooms that she occupied with her husband. The front door opened out to a sitting room with a sofa, coffee table, and television. Beyond
this stretched a corridor. On the right side of the corridor lay the kitchen, with a wooden table and four matching chairs, a modern refrigerator and stove, and a deep, old-fashioned enamel sink. On the left side of the corridor were three doors, all shut, behind which, Svetlana explained, were the bedroom she shared with her husband, the bedroom their two daughters had shared, and a bathroom. With the exception of the kitchen, which boarders were permitted to use, the rest of the rooms were exclusive to her and her husband. The walls of the corridor were adorned by a number of decorative plates, some of a folkart variety—presumably local—and others porcelain, featuring historical renderings of foreign cities: Krakow, Prague, Zurich. There was a small wooden plaque with a bronze relief of the Wailing Wall—the kind sold on every street corner in Jerusalem. At the end of the corridor hung a framed portrait of a bride and groom.

—My oldest, Svetlana said, indicating the photo. Now in Simferopol. Her husband prefers to be unemployed there.

—He also attends the synagogue? Kotler asked playfully.

—It’s not for him, Svetlana curtly replied.

—And your other daughter?

—She is at the university in Kharkov. She studies economics. A brilliant girl, but this summer she is working in a hairdresser’s, Svetlana said and shrugged ruefully.

The corridor came to an end and they faced a door. A small window along the right side of the corridor admitted light. The left side of the corridor opened out to a vestibule. Three steps down was another door, which led to the scraggly yard.

—A private entrance, Svetlana said. You would have a key.

She then unlocked the door to the guest quarters and ushered
them into a room of some twenty square meters, hardly extravagant, but tidy and bright. It had everything one expected from such a room: a desk, two chairs, a dresser with a small television upon it, and a double bed with the pillows and blue coverlet precisely arranged. The floor was composed of square white tiles; the walls were also painted white. Above the desk hung a rectangular gilt-framed mirror, and above the bed an amateur watercolor of a seascape, with wheeling gulls and little sailboat. Between the desk and the dresser was the door to the celebrated toilet. Svetlana stood behind them as Kotler and Leora peered inside. They saw a light blue commode with its water tank, a sink of the same color, and the raised platform of the shower protected by a translucent plastic curtain. Like the rest of the quarters, the space was cramped but everything looked clean and in good repair.

—Towels are here, Svetlana said.

Folded over a rod that was screwed to the back of the door were two thin, stiff cotton waffle-print towels, not large enough to wrap around a grown person’s waist—masterworks of Soviet fabrication.

With the tour concluded, they returned to the bedroom and inhabited a brief silence. Svetlana looked from Kotler to Leora and then said, So.

—We’ll need a few minutes to discuss, Kotler said.

—Very well, Svetlana said.

Her eyes then ranged about the room and momentarily came to rest on the bed. She turned and regarded them both as though trying to communicate something wordlessly. A thing too embarrassing to say out loud.

—And if there are other things you need for the room …

Kotler took this as an allusion to the ambiguity of his and Leora’s relations. In other words, the discreet offer of a foiding cot.

—Thank you, he said.

Svetlana withdrew to the main house, doing a poor job of concealing her resentments: a resentment that they had not immediately agreed to take the room and a resentment that anticipated their inevitable refusal.

Once she had gone, Kotler sat on the bed, bouncing gently to test the firmness of the mattress.

—This is not a good idea, Baruch. It’s not worth it.

—What about your sympathies?

—I don’t need to prove my sympathies, and neither do you.

—But that’s the problem with sympathies, Kotler said with a smile. One keeps needing to prove them.

—Baruch, to stay here is to ask for trouble. And the whole point of coming here was to evade trouble.

—The point. But not the whole point.

—You know what I mean.

—From that woman, we have nothing to fear.

—And from her husband?

—A Kazakh Jew in a Crimean town?

—A Russian Jew. If there is a Russian Jew in the world who doesn’t know who you are, I haven’t met him.

—Come, sit by me, Leora.

Kotler patted the spot beside him on the bed. Reluctantly, she did as he asked. Kotler reached for her hands and laid them on his thigh. The gesture was paternal and reassuring, but also undeniably more. Through the fabric of his trousers, Kotler felt the warm, birdlike weight of her hands. They sat quietly together
and allowed the moment to take its effect. Slowly, as if submitting to fatigue, Leora rested her head on Kotler’s shoulder.

—There, my bunny, Kotler said.

What a picture they made, he thought. This voluptuous, serious, dark-haired girl with her head on the shoulder of a potbellied little man still wearing his sunglasses and Borsalino hat. Fodder for comedy. And yet, the girl’s fingers slipping between the man’s thighs dispelled comedy. In its place, the leap of animal desire.

—Leora, I agree this isn’t the rational thing. The rational thing would be to stay with the other woman.

—The peasant.

—The hardy, noble peasant. Who doesn’t care for Jews and doesn’t read the international press.

—It isn’t too late.

—Call it curiosity. Call it instinct. And I am a man who has followed his instincts.

—I thought it was principles.

—In my experience, they’re one and the same.

Leora straightened up and looked at him.

—You know my position. What more can I say?

—If you trust me in large matters, trust me in small.

—Baruch, it isn’t trust, it’s agreement. Usually, I agree with you. I agree with you like with no one else.

—Well, then this time will be an exception. Or more precisely, an evolution. Between two people, trust is more important than agreement. I am asking for your trust. Do you trust me on this?

—I disagree with you, Baruch, but I will not fight with you about it.

—Good. That is the definition of trust.

They found Svetlana in the kitchen, rinsing beet greens in the sink.

—So you have decided? Svetlana asked, not bothering to extract her hands from the sink.

—We will take the room, Kotler said.

—Is that so? Svetlana said, warming not at all.

—We will pay in cash for the week in advance. If that suits you.

—Yes, Svetlana said evenly, that suits me.

A
s the sun started its slow midsummer descent, they settled into their room. Svetlana had provided them with keys to the front and back doors and then done them the favor of graciously disappearing. For a moment—after they had finished arranging their belongings in the drawers and cabinets, and after they had stowed their empty suitcases in a corner—Kotler and Leora regarded each other with a mixture of wryness, giddiness, and apprehension. They had stolen away to hotel rooms before, but, except for one instance, never for more than an afternoon or an evening. Six months earlier, on a diplomatic visit to Helsinki, Leora had prevailed upon Kotler to let her stay the night in his bed. But there, she had had her own room a few doors away. Here, for the first time, they had created the semblance of a shared home. Their clothes resided in the same dresser, the same drawers. In the bathroom, huddled together in the shallow cabinet, were their vitamins, pills, creams, and toothbrushes. They were now publicly what they had been privately—which meant they were now altogether something
else. Leora still had her apartment in Jerusalem, but as for himself, Kotler thought, this room arguably represented his only home. As matters stood, he had no other.

Liberated from past constraints, free to indulge themselves as they wished—as they had declared they would if only given the chance—neither of them could quell the feelings of restlessness and anxiety. Kotler had been on the run for nearly two days. He’d packed his little suitcase and slipped out of his house before dawn on Friday, hiding out first in his office and later in Leora’s apartment. And for much of the day now he and Leora had been traveling, beginning with the surreptitious early-morning flight from Tel Aviv to Kiev, another from Kiev to Simferopol, the bus from there to Yalta, and then the imbroglio with the hotel. All this time they’d barely had a chance to catch their breath and apprise themselves of what was happening in the world. In Kiev, during their layover, they had briefly been able to access the Internet, but it had still been too soon for there to have been any reaction or commentary. Leora had also phoned her father and had the pained, unpleasant conversation. Kotler stood beside her, close enough to overhear part of what her father said and to feel the blot of disapproval. She was her parents’ only child, very much her father’s daughter, and had lived her life to merit his good opinion. A decade younger than Kotler, Leora’s parents had also been Zionists and refuseniks. When their application to emigrate was denied, they’d been trapped in Russia for the final eight years of Soviet rule, though, unlike Kotler, they had been spared the adventure of the Gulag. Yitzhak and Adina Rosenberg—good, intellectual, fair-minded people. Kotler came to know them in Israel at the periodic gatherings of former refuseniks. It was at
one of these gatherings that Yitzhak introduced Kotler to his young daughter, a top student at Hebrew University with an interest in politics. When Kotler later hired Leora for his staff, her parents were exceedingly grateful. That was four years ago. Each of those years, they sent a fruit basket to Kotler’s house for Rosh Hashanah. Rosh Hashanah was again approaching, but Kotler supposed there would be no fruit basket this year.

To get to the heart of Yalta, he and Leora didn’t bother to ask Svetlana for directions but left through the back door, scattering fowl. Kotler led them toward the coast. He flattered himself by thinking that he was navigating from childhood memory, that his sense of the place inhered in him from all those years ago. Closer to the truth was that the town was not very large and sloped downward toward the sea. A few stops on a minibus soon returned them to the tourist center, depositing them near Lenin Square, where, framed heroically by the Crimean Mountains, the bronze Bolshevik still stood on his pedestal looking intently out to sea—and peripherally at a McDonald’s. In time, Kotler thought, the good citizens of Yalta might resolve, if not to add a pile of bones at his feet, then at least to replace him.

Without too much trouble, Kotler and Leora located an Internet café, dark as a grotto and occupied mostly by teenage boys wearing headphones and hollering to one another as they shot at Chechens or the Taliban on their computer screens. Kotler had once caught Benzion playing a similar game. A sensitive, studious boy, he was then a student at the yeshiva. Seeing his father’s reaction, he’d said shamefacedly,
The guys were playing it.
Now, stationed near Hebron, he was no longer playing.

They found two available terminals next to each other at the back of the café and began with the Israeli press. It didn’t take
them long to find what they were looking for. The lead stories in both
Haaretz
and the
Jerusalem Post
featured the same photograph of the two of them in the Tel Aviv airport. The photograph captured them as they presented their documents at the ticket counter. It had been taken from a distance, furtively, by another traveler, Kotler presumed, as the professionals never suffered from such scruples. Still, there could be no mistaking their identities, particularly his—though he supposed Leora had now attained a level of notoriety to match his own.
Haaretz
also provided a companion photo of his wife shopping for Shabbat at a market near their Jerusalem home. In the photo, Miriam looked every bit the aggrieved, steadfast spouse, the victim of her husband’s treachery. For the article, she said only that she refused to discuss “a private family matter.” Kotler could imagine the scene at the market, the pestering, beseeching journalists. But with Miriam they stood no chance. At this thought Kotler permitted himself a fond smile. Miriam was a rock. In her time she had undergone a harsh apprenticeship and was as canny about the press as any image consultant. The reporters could flatter themselves that they had caught her in an unguarded moment, but Kotler would have been surprised—and, frankly, disappointed—if Miriam hadn’t orchestrated the whole thing, down to the potato in her hand when they took her picture.

In both newspapers, “the
scandale
Kotler” shared the front page with news of the Knesset’s vote in favor of the withdrawal from the settlement bloc. It had gone as predicted, with the prime minister’s coalition eking out a narrow majority. Kotler, not wanting to be on record as merely abstaining, had cast his vote the previous day, shortly before his ignominious escape. The
Haaretz
article listed his name among the notable
opponents, prominent among the defectors from the prime minister’s cabinet. Then there were the obligatory quotes from the various factions. The same choir singing the same song. The prime minister cited defensible borders and the welfare of the Israeli state. The chief of staff spoke of the army’s inviolable discipline. The Left rejoiced. The Right seethed. The Americans applauded. The settlers pledged bloody insurrection. And the Palestinians complained.

The din would continue until the operation was executed. What happened then, nobody knew.
Nothing good,
was Kotler’s opinion. The only question was just how bad.

He felt Leora’s hand on his arm. On her computer screen was displayed a column from an Israeli Russian newspaper. There again was the same grainy photograph from the airport.

—At least here someone bothered to add one plus one, Leora said.

That someone was Chava Margolis, his old friend turned foe, once the mother superior of the Moscow Zionists, the strict, ascetic Krupskaya of their movement. As one of the witnesses against him in his Jerusalem trial, she had later wished to undo him, but here she was saying what any reasonable person should have said: That it was cynical and vindictive of the prime minister to destroy a man’s family simply because that man wouldn’t bend to his political will. That such an act tarnished the prime minister far more than it did Kotler, particularly as, in the end, it achieved no political goal. And that even people like herself, who had long since grown disenchanted with Kotler, should, instead of gloating over his humiliation, take a moment to reflect upon the reptilian soul of the man who was leading their country. She then added, as professional journalistic practice demanded,
that her accusations against the prime minister were speculative, given that no evidence had yet been found to connect him to the incriminating photographs that had been leaked, anonymously, to the press. But she felt that only a child of extraordinary naïveté would believe that the prime minister wasn’t involved. And she hadn’t met any such children in the entire state of Israel.

Kotler knew that no evidence would ever be found. The prime minister was many things, but he was no amateur. Kotler doubted the press would ever even trace the man who had contacted him. Kotler had known more than his share of security agents and spies, and, as in any walk of life, there were the addle and the adept. But the man he had met, who had introduced himself as Amnon, was a seasoned operator.

Two days earlier, this Amnon had called Kotler on his private cell phone, thus bypassing his staff. How he got the number, Amnon didn’t bother to explain. He asked that Kotler meet him that evening in the park behind the Israel Museum to discuss a matter of great consequence not only to the state but also to Kotler’s personal life. He instructed Kotler to come alone.

—You should not fear, the man said. There is no threat to your physical safety.

The threat, Kotler was made to understand, was of a different nature.

He rather suspected what the matter was about. For weeks he had criticized the prime minister’s decision to unilaterally withdraw from the settlement bloc. At first Kotler had done so strictly
in camera.
They were mostly allies of political expediency, he and the prime minister. Kotler had pledged the eight
mandates his Russian immigrant party had won in the previous election to allow the prime minister to patch together his ruling coalition. For this, he had received his ministerial portfolio and, presumably, the stature and influence that went with it. He also had the residual respect afforded to an old Zionist hero, although politics, that indiscriminate blade, eventually cut everyone down to size. So when the prime minister ignored his objections, Kotler voiced his opposition first in the Knesset and then on the op-ed page of the
New York Times,
where he vowed to resign from the cabinet if the prime minister pursued his plan. After that, the usual pressures were brought to bear. His office was inundated with angry phone calls and letters. The prime minister sent his lackeys, first with carrots, then with sticks. All of this was in keeping with what passed for normal political discourse in Israel—at the best of times, no place for gentle souls. But involving a man like Amnon exceeded all bounds.

Still, Kotler agreed, unflinchingly, to the meeting. Not out of curiosity or apprehension, but because he had learned that there was only one way to deal with people like Amnon. You had to stand before them and look them in the eye. Otherwise they started thinking that they could exert power over you.

Kotler went to meet Amnon at eight in the evening, at the very onset of dusk. The trees cast long crisp shadows. A smattering of people filtered through the park—ordinary Jerusalemites glad for a respite from the summer heat, as well as the day’s last visitors to the museum. Kotler walked along the footpath, drawing only the occasional glance. His manner betrayed no distress. He, in fact, felt none. He felt, if anything, a familiar sense of contentment. A purposefulness. Fifteen minutes earlier, he had
gotten up from his dinner table, kissed his wife and daughter, and calmly walked out the door.

At the appointed place, Kotler saw a burly man in his late forties. His hair was shaved down to dark stubble, sunglasses perched atop his head. He wore a yellow short-sleeved polo shirt whose fabric was stretched by his broad shoulders and thick arms. To complete the image, with his blue jeans he sported a pair of modern athletic sandals, a kind meant for hiking. He looked like certain other sabras of his generation who cultivated the air of retired colonels and regarded the world with the relaxed leer of the habituated military man. In his left hand, held leisurely against his thigh, he had a letter-size manila envelope. As Kotler approached, the man smiled exuberantly and extended his right hand like an old schoolmate or favored cousin. Kotler played along and allowed the man to shepherd him to a vacant bench under a gnarled carob tree.

There they sat in relative privacy, engaging in a conversation that, to a casual observer, would have seemed perfectly congenial. There were no raised voices, no scowls. Not the least sign of agitation. Thus was such business conducted.

Amnon said, I’m here on behalf of an interested party.

—What party might that be? Kotler asked.

—It’s of no consequence.

—Is that so?

—Mr. Kotler, you’re a politician. You’ve taken an unpopular position. You must know that many people are unhappy with you. Some of them contacted me. Who specifically? Avi, Yossi, Moshe, Dudi. What does it matter? If I told you who, it would only be a distraction.
Who
isn’t important.

—So then.

—So then these people wanted to give you one last chance to change your mind.

—You see? You say
who
isn’t important, but it is important. Clearly, if these people knew me at all, they would know that this here is a waste of time. With me, this road leads nowhere. I am a famously stubborn person, Mr. Amnon. Famous for being stubborn. I assume you’re aware of this.

—I am, Mr. Kotler. I am a great admirer of your stubbornness. But I assume you are aware that, even without your cooperation, the vote will still go in favor of the withdrawal. In this instance, your stubbornness won’t change the outcome.

—So then why bother with me?

—Because the people I represent would like to see everything go as smoothly as possible. They are concerned about the safety of the soldiers and the settlers both. It is an emotional issue. And you are an influential person. People respect you. They listen to what you have to say. If you continue to speak out against the operation, you could incite a bad reaction. You yourself may not be aware of the consequences.