The Betrayers Read Online Free PDF Page A

appreciation of my own vulnerabilities. However, if, God forbid, those photos depict some indiscretion committed by my children or my wife, I am sure your people would have, if not the moral, then the political sense not to publicize them. In either case, I have absolutely no desire to look at your garbage.
    That was the end of their conversation. Amnon walked off with his garbage and the next morning it was plastered on the front page of every newspaper in Israel.

FOUR
    S mall round halogen lights had been set into the flagstones of the promenade, evidently part of some recent beautification project. From Lenin Square, the lights formed an illuminated path that extended about a kilometer, as far as the Hotel Oreanda. After a dinner at a restaurant that overlooked the square and the harbor, Kotler and Leora followed the path, leisurely now, feeling, for the first time since the news had broken, not like two culprits harried and pursued. The day’s heat had subsided, and the nighttime air felt gentle, consoling, as if bestowed upon them by a sympathetic spirit. The day’s throngs had also thinned, and most of the people on the promenade proceeded as they did, without urgency, seemingly without destination. At a certain point, a column of shops and nightclubs split the promenade into two branches. The lower branch bordered the sea; the upper branch ran between two rows of storefronts. For no particular reason, Kotler and Leora followed the upper branch and saw themselves reflected in the darkened storefronts on either side. Out in the open, with their imagesduplicated again and again, it was as though they had unwittingly made a bold statement of exhibitionism. Not only could they now be seen but, in this hall of mirrors, they could not be missed.
    They walked for some time without speaking. With their arms linked, they gave the impression of a couple complete unto themselves, unburdened by the sorts of complications that could lead a person with a constitution weaker than Kotler’s—weaker than Leora’s, he believed—to commit some desperate, rash, irredeemable act. In the matter of taking one’s self in hand, Kotler had world-class credentials. He had mastered his emotions in circumstances far more dire than these. To prove the point to himself, he summoned up an anodyne image from childhood, from this very place, fifty-three summers ago.
    —Did I tell you my father was something of a sportsman? Kotler said to Leora.
    She shook her head.
    —In Lvov, as a boy, before the Soviets took over, he played soccer and ran track and field for the Maccabi sports club. He claimed to have been their best sprinter.
    —That’s something else you never told me. Your father was Zionist?
    —He didn’t tell me himself until I informed him that I wanted to immigrate to Israel. I knew growing up that he took a dim view of the Soviet Union, but only in the way most children knew such things about their parents. He’d make a veiled remark. He’d listen covertly to the BBC. But not until I announced myself did he reveal that he had once been the fleetest little Zionist in Lvov!
    —No, you never told me, Leora said.
    By the time Kotler was a boy, his father was no longer in shape to run. At the front he’d been wounded in the knee, and the wound had never properly healed. Nevertheless, he retained his love for sport and tried to cultivate this interest in Kotler. Physically, they looked very much alike—there were a few childhood photos of his father preserved from before the war, and Kotler could see that the resemblance between him and his father was striking. Even now, when Kotler looked in the mirror, he saw his father’s face. Increasingly, he sought his father’s face—but that was another story. Yet somehow, in spite of this resemblance, Kotler had failed to inherit his father’s knack for running. His father did not easily accept this. When Kotler was little, his father tried to train him. They’d be walking on the