David Bezmozgis - The Betrayers

The outburst brought a flush to Leora’s throat and cheeks, a sensuality, as if ardor of any kind were related to sexual ardor. Kotler looked at her breathing above him and was filled with the animal instinct to pounce on her so they could claw and tear at each other. The lushness of her body still inflamed him, the fullness and smoothness of her breasts, her buttocks, her thighs. Her flesh that he stuffed his mouth with, that he clutched by the handful like a bandit. Her body, where she invited, encouraged, him to enact his every wildness, his every brackish want. Between them there was no hesitation, no apology. With Leora he had been able to be himself, the paragon of virtue, but also a man who felt the weight of his testicles under the point of his prick. A man he had only half been for forty years of prison and vindication and glory and indebtedness and fidelity and timidity. He had been locked up at twenty-five and released at thirty-eight. He had gone into prison a young man, newly wed, and he had come out a gaunt, desiccated saint. What a groom he was for the bride who had waited for him all those years. And what a bride awaited him, after her own years of dogged, confounding struggle. Two people who had long occupied cold solitary beds were brought together. Two old acquaintances, nearly strangers, were expected — by the world, by themselves — to leap into passionate embrace or slip into delicate intimacy. They had done their best. They were persistent, devoted people, and they persisted also in the matter of their hearts. In many ways, they did what everyone did to stoke the embers of the original fire. But their fire hadn’t simply abated; it was practically extinguished for want of fuel, the ordinary fuel of shared days and casual contact. Apart, they had pretended that the embers still glowed, that the fire still burned, but reunited, they knew the truth. Still, they had rekindled a fire. It was no small thing. It was a real fire. But the fire you rekindle is not the same fire, doesn’t burn as hot. With Leora, he burned as before, with consuming heat.

— Are you not also curious, Leora? Kotler asked. Don’t you want to see what will happen? This coincidence is not mine alone. It is ours together. If we stay, what happens will include you. You will be part of it. As I believe you are meant to be. As I would like you to be. Because if greater forces have conspired, they have seen fit to include you. After all, what brought you to me started forty years ago between me and this man.

At dawn, Chaim Tankilevich gripped the metal handrail and pulled himself into the trolleybus, which, with its wobbly antennae, resembled an old, dun grasshopper. He handed the driver his fare, fifteen hryvnia, and lumbered to take one of the vacant seats in the rear of the vehicle. This was not hard to do. All of the seats were vacant and would remain so for much of the trip. He was going against the current. At the other end, in Simferopol, a crowd was boarding a trolleybus to come to the sea, but in Yalta he was among a dismal handful who, for their own insular reasons, were going in the wrong direction. And of these, only he appeared every Saturday, summer or winter, rain or shine, year after year, now for ten years. Occasionally, over this time, some misfortune had led one or another person to undertake this journey for a period of weeks or months — a man who required a course of chemotherapy at a specialized clinic; a woman who succored her ailing mother and then her ailing aunt. Their appearance on the trolleybus was temporal, tragically temporal, as his appearance was tragically permanent. But this wasn’t something he disclosed to his co-sufferers. He presented them instead with a similar tale of woe. He was going to visit his brother, once a successful businessman, now destitute and homebound, crippled by gangsters. This was something that ordinary people could understand. To tell them the truth, that he was going to Simferopol because it was Shabbat, because there weren’t enough Jewish men in Simferopol willing or able to come to synagogue — this seemed a bizarre and inadvisable thing to disclose. He had no desire to engage in ethnography or explain himself. Besides, to fully explain himself would have been impossible. Better and easier to tell a total than a partial falsehood.

The trip to Simferopol took three hours — trundling across the flats, creeping up the rises, passed by every other vehicle. It was particularly so in these, the oldest of the trolleybuses, relics still from the Khrushchev era. But it was true even in the newer ones — every model a different color, lest someone confuse decades and regimes — all of them lugubrious grasshoppers. Back and forth they went along this triumph of Soviet engineering, the longest trolleybus line in the world. A typical Soviet triumph: scale over substance.

So many times had Tankilevich made this trip that he believed he had memorized every square meter of the terrain. Now it was summer. He could anticipate every roadside stand with its jars of honey and strings of purple Yalta onions. He could anticipate the sloping vineyards and the pastures with their cows and horses like indolent fixtures of the landscape. And he could anticipate the cement bus shelters and the blank-eyed men who sat on their haunches beside them. This pitiless monotony, this drone of a life, to this he had been condemned. Especially in this land, to this they had all been condemned. The fortunate among them were able to shirk the knowledge, to keep it in abeyance. But this was denied him. Deliberately and vengefully denied him. He was forced to look, to contend with the unremitting dreariness of existence. He was a seventy-year-old man afflicted with cataracts, arrhythmia, and sciatica, captive of the trolleybus, tormented body and soul.

Tankilevich didn’t think he could go on this way much longer. He had told Svetlana that he was at the end of his rope.

— And after you dangle from your rope, what then? Then it’s my turn?

— I can’t do it anymore, Tankilevich said. Simply, I am going crazy.

— Then go before Nina Semonovna and fall on your knees.

And that was what he intended to do. He had telephoned Nina Semonovna and requested an audience. A busy, taciturn woman, she had of course asked if they couldn’t transact their business over the telephone, but Tankilevich had held firm. The matter was too delicate, too weighty for the telephone. It could be done only in person. Grudgingly, she agreed — as though she surmised what he wanted but consented, against her better judgment, to see him anyway.

From the trolleybus terminal Tankilevich caught a small local bus that brought him within a kilometer of the synagogue. Fifteen hryvnia for the trolleybus and three hryvnia for the local bus, a total of thirty-six hryvnia for the round-trip. Four times a month, it totaled nearly a hundred and fifty hryvnia, equivalent to twenty American dollars. The entire monthly subsidy he and Svetlana received from the Hesed was one hundred dollars. So one-fifth of their subsidy was squandered just to transport his carcass to and from the synagogue. The pain of this also never abated.

It was now just past nine in the morning. Services were technically scheduled to begin around this time. When Tankilevich had first started coming to synagogue, they had still sometimes managed to draw the quorum required by Jewish law. But even then they had engaged in a pantomime. By rights, with ten men, they were entitled to read from the Torah, but they never did. They had a Torah — the scrolls donated by Jews in Evanston, Illinois — but none of them had the training to read from it. Out of a sense of piety and obligation, they would unlatch the ark to reveal the scrolls. Once a year, on Simchas Torah, they would remove them from the ark. They would open a bottle of vodka, shoulder the scrolls, and dance with them to the accompaniment of whatever Hebrew and Yiddish songs they could improvise. But Tankilevich couldn’t remember when they’d last assembled ten men. If they unlatched the ark now, it was from a habit transmuted into tradition. They didn’t know if it was strictly permissible to look upon the scrolls in the absence of a quorum, let alone to touch them. But they were operating under hard constraints and believed that the Almighty would tolerate and forgive.