The Betrayers by David Bezmozgis Page A

were filled with sand. It would take a superhuman effort to lift them, to coax his fingers to grasp the cartons and boxes. His every fiber revolted against this. It was too much to ask of him on such a day. He pictured Svetlana’s dour, disapproving expression. But what right could she invoke? She was not shackled to the trolleybus; shehad not thrown herself before Nina Semonovna. The depredations were all on his head. Svetlana could stuff her disapproval. He would not go, that’s all, Tankilevich thought. He would not go! But by then he was already there.
    Mechanically, Tankilevich moved through the aisles, depositing their staples into a red plastic basket: bread, farmer’s cheese, sour cream, cereals, buckwheat kasha, carrot juice, smoked mackerel, tomatoes, cucumbers, potatoes, green onions. A few yellow plums, because they were in season and inexpensive. He finished at the meat counter, where the woman reflexively asked, Three hundred grams roast turkey? Tankilevich had long assumed that they stocked the turkey solely for the Jews. Everything else at the counter, the appetizing salamis and sausages, contained pork and was thus forbidden under the Hesed subsidy. For pork and shellfish, as for cigarettes and alcohol, one had to lay out one’s own money.
    From the meat counter Tankilevich carried his basket—the plastic handle biting into his fingers, the sinews straining in his shoulder—to the cash register at the front of the market. Since it was a Saturday afternoon, the market was not short of customers. Three women stood in line ahead of him. And immediately after Tankilevich assumed his place, people formed up behind. He glanced back to take their measure. Directly behind him was a young mother with a small daughter, three or four years old, in a bright cotton dress with a white cotton cap. Behind them was an older man, Tankilevich’s age, with short bristly white hair, ethnically Russian. And behind him was another man, younger than the Russian, swarthy, Tatar or Azeri, a laborer, wearing a sleeveless shirt, the taut muscles of his arms exposed. Paying for his purchases, this final element of the task,always put Tankilevich’s nerves on edge, made him exceedingly conscious of the people around him, of attracting their attention, judgment, and disdain. It was the moment when he was forced to shed the bleary status of ordinary citizen and declare himself conspicuously, in blazing letters, a Jew.
    Tankilevich’s turn came. He presented the contents of his basket to the cashier, a blond woman in her thirties. Like the woman at the meat counter, she was offhandedly familiar with him. With quick, practiced movements she unloaded his basket and punched the prices into her register. When the sum appeared on the computerized display, the woman looked at Tankilevich and said, Coupons? It was at this point that Tankilevich became supremely attuned to any change in the atmosphere, like a dog sniffing for storm ions. And as he withdrew the bright, multicolored Hesed bills from his pocket, he picked up rumblings behind him. The air grew dense. Its sullen weight pressed on his shoulders. He turned around to confirm his suspicions. The woman behind him was gazing off, her little girl waiting docilely at her hip. Neither of them was the source of the disturbance and neither seemed to have noticed anything awry. Why should they? Tankilevich thought. Such storms did not affect them. But after a lifetime of such storms, he rarely mistook them. One look at the Russian man’s face and Tankilevich knew that he wasn’t mistaken now either. He saw the sneer—the bitter, arrogant, Jew-hating sneer. Locking eyes with Tankilevich, the man allowed his sneer to ripen into a smirk.
    —Is there a problem? Tankilevich asked him.
    The question seemed to fill the man with glee, as if Tankilevich had uttered a tremendous joke. The man swiveled his head from side to side, seeking to include others in this hilarity. Ifnot his goggling about,