Michael Chabon

by The Yiddish Policemen's Union

  When Buchbinder sees Landsman, his eyes narrow with suspicion or myopia. Returning from the men’s room to his plate of corned beef and his cherry soda, working over the buttons of his fly with the absent air of a man in the grip of a startling but useless inference about the world. Buchbinder is a stout man, a German, enveloped in a cardigan with raglan sleeves and a knit sash. Between the arc of the man’s belly and the knotted sash are hints of past strife, but an understanding appears to have been reached. Tweed trousers, on his feet a pair of hiking sneakers. His hair and beard, dark blond with flecks of gray and silver. A metal clasp grips a crewel work yarmulke to the back of his head. He tosses a smile in Landsman’s direction like a man dropping a quarter in a cripple’s cup, fishes some closely printed tome from his hip pocket, and resumes his meal. He rocks back and forth while he reads and chews.

  “Still running that museum of yours, Doctor?” Landsman says.

  Buchbinder looks up, puzzled, trying to place this irritating stranger with the blintzes.

  “It’s Landsman. Sitka Central. Maybe you remember, I used to—”

  “Oh, yes,” he says with a tight smile. “How are you? We are an institute, not a museum, but that is all right.”

  “Sorry.”

  “No harm has been done,” he says, his supple Yiddish fitted with a stiffening wire of the German accent to which he and his fellow yekkes, even after sixty years, stubbornly cling. “It is a common mistake.”

  It can’t be all that common, Landsman thinks, but he says, “Still up there on Ibn Ezra?”

  “No,” says Dr. Buchbinder. He wipes a streak of brown mustard from his lips with his napkin. “No, sir, I have closed it down. Officially and permanently.”

  His manner is grandiloquent, even celebratory, which strikes Landsman as odd, given the content of his declaration.

  “Tough neighborhood,” Landsman suggests.

  “Oh, they were animals,” Buchbinder says with the same cheeriness. “I can’t tell you how many times they broke my heart.” He stuffs a last forkful of corned beef into his mouth and subjects it to proper handling by his teeth. “But I doubt they’ll trouble me in my new location.”

  “And where is that?”

  Buchbinder smiles, dabs at his beard, then pushes back from the table. He raises an eyebrow, keeping the big surprise to himself a moment longer.

  “Where else?” he says at last. “Jerusalem.”

  “Wow,” Landsman says, keeping the straightest face he’s got. He has never seen the regulations for admission of Jews to Jerusalem, but he’s fairly certain that not being an obsessed religious lunatic is at the top of the list. “Jerusalem, eh? That’s a long way.”

  “Yes, it is.”

  “Lock, stock, and barrel?”

  “The whole operation.”

  “Know anyone there?”

  There are still Jews living in Jerusalem, as there always have been. A few. They were there long before the Zionists started showing up, their trunks packed with Hebrew dictionaries, agricultural manuals, and plenty of trouble for everyone.

  “Not really,” Buchbinder says. “Apart from—well.” He pauses and lowers his voice. “Messiah.”

  “Well, that’s a good start,” Landsman says. “I hear he’s in with the best people there.”

  Buchbinder nods, untouchable in the sugar-cube sanctuary of his dream. “Lock, stock, and barrel,” he says. He returns his book to his jacket pocket and stuffs himself and the sweater into an old blue anorak. “Good night, Landsman.”

  “Good night, Dr. Buchbinder. Put in a good word for me with Messiah.”

  “Oh,” he says, “there’s no need of that.”

  “No need or no point?”

  Abruptly, the merry eyes turn as steely as the disc of a dentist’s mirror. They assay Landsman’s condition with the insight of twenty-five years spent searching tirelessly for points of weakness and rot. Just for a moment Landsman doubts the man’s insanity.

  “That’s up to you,” Buchbinder says. “Isn’t it?”

  18

  As Buchbinder pushes out of the Polar-Shtern, he stops to hold the door for a blazing orange parka carried on a gust of slanting snow. Bina is dragging that old overstuffed cowhide tote of hers slung over one shoulder. From it a clutch of documents protrudes, highlighted in yellow, stapled and paper-clipped and flagged with strips of colored tape. She throws back the hood of her parka. She has pushed up her hair, and pinned it up, and left it to fend for itself at the back of her head. Its color is a wistful shade that Landsman remembers observing in only one other place in his life, and that was deep in the grooves of the first pumpkin he ever beheld, a big dark red-orange brute. She lugs her tote over to the ticket lady. When she comes through the turnstile on her way to the stacks of cafeteria trays, Landsman will come directly into her line of sight.

  At once Landsman makes the mature decision to pretend that he has not seen Bina. He looks out the plate windows at Khalyastre Street. The depth of snowfall he estimates at close to six inches. Three separate trails of footprints snake in and out of one another, the edges of each print blurring as it fills with fallen snow. Across the street, handbills pasted to the boarded windows of Krasny’s Tobacco and Stationery advertise the performance, last night at the Vorsht, of the guitarist who got rolled in the toilet for his finger rings and cash. From the phone pole at the corner, a craze of wires runs out in all directions, mapping the walls and doorways of this great imaginary ghetto of the Jews. The involuntary processes of Landsman’s shammes mind record the details of the scene. But his conscious thoughts are focused on the moment when Bina will see him sitting there, alone at his table, chewing on a blintz, and call his name.

  This moment takes its sweet time showing up. Landsman risks a second look. Bina already has her dinner on a tray and is waiting for her change with her back to Landsman. She saw him; she must have seen him. That is when the great fissure oozes open, the hillside gives way, and the wall of black mud comes rolling down. Landsman and Bina were married to each other for twelve years and together for five before that. Each was the other’s first lover, first betrayer, first refuge, first roommate, first audience, first person to turn to when something—even the marriage itself—went wrong. For half their lives, they tangled their histories, bodies, phobias, theories, recipes, libraries, record collections. They mounted spectacular arguments, nose-to-nose, hands flying, spittle flying, throwing things, kicking things, breaking things, rolling around on the ground grabbing up fistfuls of each other’s hair. The next day he would bear the red moons of Bina’s nails in his cheeks and on the meat of his chest, and she wore his purple fingerprints like an armlet. For something like seven years of their lives together they fucked almost every day. Angry, loving, sick, well, cold, hot, half asleep. They went at it on every manner of bed, couch, and cushion. On futons and towels and old shower curtains, in the back of a pickup truck, behind a Dumpster, on top of a water tower, inside a rack of coats at a Hands of Esau dinner. They even fucked each other—once—on the giant fungus in the break room.

  After Bina came over from Narcotics, they worked the same shift in Homicide for four solid years. Landsman partnered with Zelly Boybriker, and then Berko, and Bina had poor old Morris Handler. But one day the same sly angel who had brought them together in the first place arranged a confluence of leaves taken and injuries to Morris Handler that left Landsman and Bina partners, for the one and only time, on the Grinshteyn case. Together they endured that visitation of failure, failing every day for hours, failing in their bed at night, failing in the streets of Sitka. The murdered girl, Ariela, and the broken Grinshteyns, mother and father, ugly and ruined and hating each other and the hole they were left holding on to: He and Bina had shared that, too. And then there was Django, who took form and impetus from the failure of the Grinshteyn case, from that hole shaped like a plump little girl. Bina and Landsman were twisted together, a braided pair of chromosomes with a mystery flaw. And now? Now each of them pretends not to
see the other and looks away.

  Landsman looks away.

  The footprints in the snow have become shallow as an angel’s. Across the street a small, bent man leans into the wind, dragging a heavy suitcase past the boarded windows of Krasny’s. The wide white brim of his hat flaps like the wings of a bird. Landsman watches the progress of Elijah the Prophet through the snowstorm and plans his own death. This is a fourth strategy he has evolved to cheer himself when he’s going down the drain. But of course he has to be careful not to overdo it.

  Landsman, the son and paternal grandson of suicides, has seen human beings dispatch themselves in every possible way, from the inept to the efficient. He knows how it should and should not be performed. Bridge leaps and dives from hotel windows: picturesque but iffy. Stairwell leaps: unreliable, an impulse decision, too much like an accidental death. Slashing wrists, with or without the popular but unnecessary bathtub variation: harder than it seems, tinged with a girlish love of theater. Ritual disembowelment with a samurai sword: hard work, requires a second, and would smack, in a yid, of affectation. Landsman has never seen it done that way, but he knew a noz once who claimed that he had. Landsman’s grandfather threw himself under the wheels of a streetcar in Lodz, which showed a degree of determination that Landsman has always admired. His father employed thirty 100 mg tablets of Nembutal, washed down with a glass of caraway vodka, a method that has much to recommend it. Add a plastic bag over the head, capacious and free of holes, and you have yourself something neat, quiet, and reliable.

  But when he envisions taking his own life, Landsman likes to do it with a handgun, like Melekh Gaystik, the champion of the world. His own chopped Model 39 is more than enough sholem for the job. If you know where to put the muzzle (just inside the angle of the mentum) and how to steer your shot (20 degrees off the vertical, toward the lizard core of the brain), it’s fast and reliable. Messy, but Landsman doesn’t have any qualms, for some reason, about leaving behind a mess.

  “Since when do you like blintzes?”

  He jumps at the sound of her voice. His knee bangs the table leg, and coffee splashes the plate glass in an exit-wound spatter.

  “Hey, Skipper,” he says in American. He scrabbles for a napkin, but he took only one from the dispenser by the trays. The coffee is running everywhere. He grabs random scraps of paper from his jacket pocket and blots at the spreading spill.

  “Anybody sitting here?” She balances the tray in one hand and fights off her swollen briefcase with the other. She’s wearing a particular expression that he knows well. Eyebrows arched, slight foretaste of a smile. It’s the face she puts on before she walks into a hotel ballroom to mingle with a bunch of male law enforcement, or enters a grocery store in the Harkavy wearing a skirt that doesn’t cover her knees. It’s a face that says, I’m not looking for trouble here. I just came in for a pack of gum. She drops the bag and sits before he has a chance to reply.

  “Please,” he says, pulling his own plate back to make room. Bina hands him some more napkins, and he takes care of the mess. He dumps the clump of soggy paper on a neighboring table. “I don’t know why I ordered them. You’re right, cheese blintzes, feh.”

  Bina lays down a napkin with a knife, fork, and spoon. She takes two plates from the tray and sets them side by side: a scoop of tuna salad on one of Mrs. Nemintziner’s lettuce leaves, and a glinting golden square of noodle pudding. She reaches down into her bulging tote bag and pulls out a small plastic box with a hinged lid. It contains a round pill box with a threaded lid from which she tips out a vitamin pill, a fish-oil pill, and the enzyme tablet that lets her stomach digest milk. Inside the hinged plastic box she also carries packets of salt, pepper, horseradish, and hand-wipes, a doll size bottle of Tabasco sauce, chlorine pills for treating drinking water, Pepto-Bismol chews, and God knows what else. If you go to a concert, Bina has opera glasses. If you need to sit on the grass, she whips out a towel. Ant traps, a corkscrew, candles and matches, a dog muzzle, a penknife, a tiny aerosol can of freon, a magnifying glass—Landsman has seen everything come out of that overstuffed cowhide at one time or another.

  You have to look to Jews like Bina Gelbfish, Landsman thinks, to explain the wide range and persistence of the race. Jews who carry their homes in an old cowhide bag, on the back of a camel, in the bubble of air at the center of their brains. Jews who land on their feet, hit the ground running, ride out the vicissitudes, and make the best of what falls to hand, from Egypt to Babylon, from Minsk Gubernya to the District of Sitka. Methodical, organized, persistent, resourceful, prepared. Berko is right: Bina would flourish in any precinct house in the world. A mere redrawing of borders, a change in governments, those things can never faze a Jewess with a good supply of hand wipes in her bag.

  “Tuna salad,” Landsman observes, thinking of how she stopped eating tuna when she found out she was pregnant with Django.

  “Yeah, I try to ingest as much mercury as I can,” Bina says, reading the memory on his face. She swallows the enzyme tablet. “Mercury’s kind of my thing nowadays.”

  Landsman jerks a thumb toward Mrs. Nemintziner, standing ready with her spoon.

  “You ought to order the baked thermometer.”

  “I would,” she says, “but they only had rectal.”

  “See Penguin?”

  “Penguin Simkowitz? Where?” She looks around, turning from the waist, and Landsman seizes the opportunity to peer into her shirt. He can see the freckled top of her left breast, the lace edge of her bra cup, the dark indication of her nipple against the cup. The desire floods him to run his hand inside her shirt, to hold her breast, to climb into the soft hollow there and curl up and fall asleep. When she turns back, she catches him in his dream of cleavage. Landsman feels a burn in his cheeks. “Huh,” she says.

  “How was your day?” Landsman says, as if it’s the most natural question he could ask.

  “Let’s make a deal,” she says, and her tone ices over. She buttons the top button of her blouse. “How about we sit here, you and I, and eat our dinners together, and we don’t say one damned word about my day. How does that sound to you, Meyer?”

  “I think that sounds all right,” he says.

  “Good.”

  She spoons up a mouthful of tuna salad. He catches the glint of her gold-rimmed bicuspid and thinks of the day she came home with it, looped on nitrous oxide and inviting him to put his tongue into her mouth and see how it felt. After the first bite of tuna salad, Bina gets serious. She shovels in ten or eleven more spoonfuls, chewing and swallowing with abandon. Her breath comes through her nostrils in avid jets. Her eyes are fixed on the intercourse of her plate and spoon. A girl with a healthy appetite, that was his mother’s first recorded statement on the subject of Bina Gelbfish twenty years ago. Like most of his mother’s compliments, it was convertible to an insult when needed. But Landsman trusts only a woman who eats like a man. When there is nothing left but a mayonnaise slick on the lettuce leaf, Bina wipes her mouth on her napkin and lets out a deep sigh of satiety.

  “Nu, what should we talk about, then? Not your day, either.”

  “Definitely not.”

  “What does that leave us?”

  “In my case,” Landsman says, “not very much.”

  “Some things never change.” She pushes away the empty plate and calls forward the noodle pudding to meet its fate. It makes him happier than he has been in years just to see her giving that kugel the eye.

  “I still like to talk about my car,” he says.

  “You know I don’t care for love poetry.”

  “Definitely let’s not talk about Reversion.”

  “Agreed. And I do not want to hear about the talking chicken, or the kreplach shaped like the head of Maimonides, or any of that other miraculous shit.”

  He wonders what Bina would make of the story that Zimbalist told them today about the man lying in a drawer in the basement of Sitka General.

  “Nothing about Jews at all, let’s stipulate,” Landsman s
ays.

  “Stipulated, Meyer, I am heartily sick of Jews.”

  “And not Alaska.”

  “God, no.”

  “No politics. Nothing about Russia, or Manchuria, or Germany, or the Arabs.”

  “I am heartily sick of the Arabs, too.”

  “How about the noodle pudding, then?” Landsman says.

  “Good,” she says. “Only, please, Meyer, eat a little, it makes my heart ache to look at you, my God, you’re so thin. Here, you have to have a bite of this. I don’t know what they do to it, somebody told me they put a little ginger. Let me tell you, up in Yakovy, a good kugel is something you dream about.”

  She cuts him a piece of noodle pudding and starts to poke it right into his mouth with her fork. Something like a cold hand grabs hold of his guts at the sight of the kugel coming his way. He averts his face. The fork stops in mid-trajectory. Bina dumps the wedge of egg custard and noodle, jeweled with sultanas, onto his plate beside the unmolested blintzes.

  “Anyway, you should try it,” she says. She takes a couple of bites herself, then lays down her fork. “I guess that’s all there is to say about noodle pudding.”

  Landsman sips his coffee, and Bina swallows her remaining pills with a glass of water.

  “Nu,” she says.

  “Okay, then,” says Landsman.

  If he lets her go, he will never lie in the hollow of her breast, asleep. He will never sleep again without the help of a handful of Nembutal or the good offices of his chopped M-39.

  Bina pushes back from the table and pulls on her parka. She returns the plastic box to the leather case, then shoulders it with a groan. “Good night, Meyer.”