David Bezmozgis - The Betrayers

It was still early in the morning. If they took a taxi to Simferopol, Kotler thought, they could be at the airport in two hours. If they were lucky, in another two hours they could be in Kiev. By the end of the day, they could be back home. Almost certainly too late for the evacuation, but not for the aftermath. The aftermath was also important — in its way, more important. The evacuation itself was by now a foregone conclusion. People could protest and resist, but the decision had been made and wouldn’t be reversed. The aftermath, on the other hand, was an open question. And the aftermath accounted for the larger portion of life. The drab aftermath, when the vanquished must fend for themselves. He remembered it after Gaza — the dazed, disbelieving, resigned numbers sitting on the steps of their mobile homes. They had been deceived, misled. In a golden hour they had been promised one thing, and that promise had been rescinded. And what did they get in return? They got what Kotler had predicted. From the Arabs they got rockets — some people had apparently expected bouquets. Not that he blamed them for their optimism. They hadn’t had his education. Even if a lesson was elementary, one rarely learned it in the abstract. The instruction had to be applied directly onto one’s hide. Holding the territory had become increasingly painful, but as Kotler knew, one had to have a tolerance for pain. Because there is no life without pain. To deny this was only to invite more pain. This is what they had done when they withdrew from the Gaza settlements in 2005, and they were doing it again, as if a mistake stubbornly repeated could yield different results. To uproot thousands of your own people. To make casualties of them for no discernible purpose. It was gross incompetence. If you were not willing to protect your people, you should not have encouraged them to live in that place, and if you were not going to encourage them to live in that place, you should never have held the territory. There was no middle ground. Once you had committed to one, you had committed to all. The time for simply walking away had long passed. Now you stayed at any cost or exchanged a pound of flesh for a pound of flesh. That was all. Nothing else.

Well, what rigidity! Kotler observed with bemusement. Sometimes, after a run of such thoughts, he stood as if at his own shoulder, looking at a curious twin self. Who was the man who thought these thoughts? It came as something of a surprise. Not because of the thoughts — he didn’t dispute the thoughts — but their pitch. The pitch of a public man who expected his thoughts to have injunctive force in the world. In spite of his true nature, he’d become this man. Forty years earlier, he’d been thrust, unwittingly, into this role by Tankilevich. Neither of them could have anticipated where it would lead. When he’d first seen the article in Izvestia, his head swam. Then, two weeks later, on the street outside his apartment, half a dozen agents swooped, surrounding him, their many hands clutching his coat and tossing him, limp as a rag, into the waiting car. From such pathetic beginnings he rose. Simply, he was forced to discover hidden reserves of strength. And once he rose, it was hard to return to the man he’d been before — a fairly ordinary man, with no grand designs. A former musical prodigy with small hands, a degree in computer engineering, and a desire to live in Israel. This described nearly every Zionist in Moscow. But then, after his ordeal, he was exposed to people in positions of power and saw how many of them were inadequate, even mentally and morally deficient. Little more than noise and plumage. And then it seemed impossible to leave serious matters — matters for which he had sacrificed everything — in the hands of such people. Still, he wasn’t one of them and it was a wonder that he had lasted in their midst for as long as he had. Now, almost certainly, his time was up. How many politicians survived such a scandal? So why couldn’t he now return to his original humble ambitions: to lead the life of an ordinary citizen in his ancestral homeland? How many other immigrants were there, even former refuseniks, who’d attained just that sort of life? They gloried in the country, found pleasure in every mundane detail. It all still seemed miraculous for a people so long displaced. Street signs bearing names from Jewish history. Hebrew singing issuing from the radio. The sight of young Jewish soldiers in uniform. All the peerless works of Jewish industry. Even the trees and birds, their beautiful essences nourished on Jewish soil. It sufficed for them. Only an egomaniac thought in terms any more exalted — to be a leader of the people, a second Moses or Ben-Gurion. But the question was, after he had been exposed to the upper machinations, to the sordid leveragings of power, and knowing what he knew, could it still suffice for him?

In the chicken yard, Tankilevich came into view. His legs moved stiffly, arthritically, as if they had lost the greater part of their utility. He still had the presence of a large man, but he was sapped of strength, his arms depleted of muscle, the elbows bulbous in their sheath of skin. He carried weight in the stomach and chest, but it was slack and unwholesome. The only sign of vitality was his full, almost overfull, head of white hair, below which his face was drawn, his skin loose at the mouth and the throat. He gave the impression of dissatisfaction and ill health. Bent wincingly at the knees, he ducked his head and shoulders inside the chicken coop and then held this inelegant pose, his legs splayed for balance and the wide seat of his pants framed by the gray wood of the chicken coop. Kotler couldn’t help but compare him to others from the movement, most of whom had passed through the frozen jaws of the Gulag to reach Israel. They’d emerged from captivity emaciated, jaundiced, and toothless, thinking that they would never fully recover. But to see them now, one would never guess. Kotler had recently visited Yehuda and Rachel Sobel at their home on the grounds of the Weizmann Institute. They had themselves a little villa. Pomegranate and citrus trees surrounded the backyard patio where they’d taken their dinner. Rachel had plucked herbs for their meal from ten different ceramic pots. Yehuda was tanned, stout, and percolating with good health. And yet the man had spent two years in a hole near the Mongolian border, much of that time with an abscess in his mouth. Or there was Eliezer Shvartz, who did his morning calisthenics on a balcony that overlooked the Jaffa Gate, and Abrasha Mirsky, who held several patents in desalinization and had retired to Ma’ale Adumim, and Moshe Gendelman, who had grown a long beard, fathered eight children, and ran a yeshiva in Kiryat Shmona. Compared to Tankilevich, they were all thriving, each after his own fashion. From a certain standpoint, Kotler thought, Tankilevich had no right to look as terrible as he did. Nobody had tried to destroy his health. So it was disgraceful for him to be in such poor shape. Nobody had done it to him. He had done it to himself. Perversely, Kotler thought, though it served him right, he hadn’t earned the right.

Tankilevich took two short shuffling steps back from the chicken coop and then extracted his shoulders and head from the enclosure. He straightened himself to his full height. In his hands he cradled several white eggs. Kotler couldn’t tell how many. Perhaps half a dozen, perhaps fewer.

Eggs in hand, Tankilevich stood contemplative, gazing off to one side. Kotler remained at the window watching him. To watch another person think was absorbing, more absorbing than watching a person do anything else. Nothing was quite so personal or mysterious or telling. And all the more absorbing when it was someone you knew. To see him in an unguarded moment when he was trying to be known to himself. And more, to watch him when you believed he was thinking about you. Tankilevich peered down at his eggs and then again at a point over his left shoulder. Every fluctuation of thought had its corresponding expression, which could be read as though set in type: self-pity, reproach, accusation, defeat, forbearance.