The Betrayers by David Bezmozgis

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 inthis 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 hiscarcass to and from the synagogue. The pain of this also never abated.
    It was now just past nine in the