The Betrayers by David Bezmozgis Page A

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.
    To walk the kilometer was never pleasant. In summer, even at nine in the morning, the heat could already be burdensome. By the time Tankilevich arrived at the synagogue, his handkerchief would be wet. In the winter, if it snowed, the way was slick and treacherous. In the spring and fall, there were cold, spiteful rains. But in any season, even in the mildest weather, there was still nothing to enjoy about the trek. The neighborhood where the synagogue stood was one of the worst in Simferopol. Evenby the deplorable standards of the time, the roads and sidewalks were in terrible disrepair. So too the houses—huddled, dark, flaking and eroding. Trees and weeds grew wild. Refuse littered the streets. Cadaverous old women and dogs picked through it. Beginning in the afternoon, local toughs emerged, drinking and cursing. Into this midst many Jews were reluctant to come. Of those who did, their numbers were shrinking. It was a matter of attrition. When one of them departed—now almost exclusively in the eternal sense—nobody replaced him. They had counted seven men. Then six. And now, with the death of Isidor Feldman, five. Not including Manya Grinblatt and Shura Feyn, the two women.
    Past a parked van and a broken chair, Tankilevich reached the synagogue. Its exterior was crumbling, the paint on its wooden window frames blistered. To gain entry, one went around to the side and through an iron gate wide enough to admit a car. On Saturday mornings, this was left unlocked. Then the narrow lane that separated the synagogue from the neighboring house—an ordinary residence like all the other residences on the street. The synagogue was tucked away, secreted here as in meaner times. Unless someone knew different, there was nothing to identify the house. Only the Jewish faces that doddered in on Saturday mornings.
    Like the gate, the side door was also unlocked. Beyond, there was a dim cool hallway that offered Tankilevich his first instance of relief. The house may have been in a sorry state, but it had been properly built, close to a century ago, with walls thick enough to contend with the extremes of the climate. A few steps and he could hear more clearly the voices in the prayer room. Voices raised not in prayer but in routine, familiar disputation.Tankilevich pulled open the door and saw them. He thought,
Here they are, my companions of ten years. God grant I not see them again until I choose.
    He went to his customary place, at the rearmost of two dark mahogany tables. Each table had three chairs. Normally Isidor Feldman and Hilka Berezov, Nina Semonovna’s brother, occupied the two other seats at his table. But Isidor had died of a stroke that past Tuesday, and Hilka, at fifty-four the youngest and most affluent among them, had closed the electronics shop he owned near the train station