Michael Chabon

by The Yiddish Policemen's Union

  “No good moves,” Bina says.

  “They call that Zugzwang,” Landsman says. “‘Forced to move.’ It means Black would be better off if he could just pass.”

  “But you aren’t allowed to pass, are you? You have to do something, don’t you?”

  “Yes, you do,” Landsman says. “Even when you know it’s only going to lead to you getting checkmated.”

  Landsman can see it starting to mean something to her, not as evidence or proof or a chess problem, but as part of the story of a crime. A crime committed against a man who found himself left with no good moves at all.

  “How’d you do that?” she says, unable to suppress completely a mild astonishment at this evidence of mental fitness on his part. “How’d you get the solution?”

  “I saw it, actually,” Landsman says. “But at the time I didn’t know I was seeing it. It was an ‘after’ picture—the wrong picture, actually—to the ‘before’ picture in Shpilman’s room. A board where White had three knights. Only chess sets don’t come with three White knights. So sometimes you have to use something else to stand in for the piece you don’t have.”

  “Like a penny? Or a bullet?”

  “Any kind of thing a man might have in his pocket,” Landsman says. “Say a Vicks inhaler.”

  46

  The reason you never developed at chess, Meyerle, is because you don’t hate to lose badly enough.”

  Hertz Shemets, sprung from the hospital with a nasty flesh wound and that Sitka General smell on him of onion broth and wintergreen soap, is lying on the couch in his son’s living room, his thin shanks sticking out of his pajamas like two uncooked noodles. Ester-Malke has a ticket for Berko’s big leather armchair, with Bina and Landsman in the cheap seats, a folding stool and the armchair’s leather ottoman. Ester-Malke looks sleepy and confused, hunkered down in her bathrobe, her left hand fiddling with something in the pocket that Landsman figures for last week’s pregnancy test. Bina’s shirt is untucked, and her hair is a mess; the effect partakes of shrubbery, some kind of ornamental hedge. Landsman’s face in the pier glass on the wall is an impasto of shadows and scurf. Only Berko Shemets could look sharp at this little hour of the morning, perched on the coffee table by the couch, clad in a pair of rhinoceros-gray pajamas, neatly creased and cuffed, his initials worked over the pocket in mouse-gray crewel. Hair combed, cheeks eternally innocent of whisker or blade.

  “I actually prefer losing,” Landsman says. “To be honest. I start winning, I get suspicious.”

  “I hate it. Most of all I hated losing to your father.” Uncle Hertz’s voice is a bitter croak, the voice of his own great-aunt calling out from beyond the grave or the Vistula. He’s thirsty, tired, rueful, and in pain, having refused any medication stronger than aspirin. The inside of his head has got to be ringing like the slammed hood of a car. “But losing to Alter Litvak. That was almost as bad.”

  Uncle Hertz’s eyelids flutter, then settle over his eyes. Bina claps her hands, one-two, and the eyes snap open.

  “Talk, Hertz,” Bina says. “Before you get tired or go into a coma or something. You knew Shpilman.”

  “Yes,” Hertz says. His bruised eyelids have the veined luster of purple quartz or the wing of a butterfly. “I knew him.”

  “You met him how? At the Einstein?”

  He starts to nod, then tilts his head to one side, changing his mind. “I met him when he was a boy. But I didn’t recognize him. When I saw him again. He had changed too much. He was a fat little boy. Not a fat man. Thin. A junkie. He started coming around the Einstein, hustling chess for drug money. I would see him there. Frank. He wasn’t the usual patzer. From time to time, I don’t know, I would lose five, ten dollars to him.”

  “Did you hate that?” Ester-Malke says, and though she knows nothing about Shpilman at all, she seems to have anticipated or guessed at his answer.

  “No,” her father-in-law says. “Strangely, I didn’t mind.”

  “You liked him.”

  “I don’t like anybody, Ester-Malke.”

  Hertz licks his lips, looking pained, sticking out his tongue. Berko gets out of the chair and takes a plastic tumbler from the coffee table. He holds it to his father’s lips, and the ice jingles in the tumbler. He helps Hertz to drain half of it without spilling. Hertz doesn’t thank him. He lies there for a long time. You can hear the water sluicing through him.

  “Last Thursday,” Bina says. She snaps her fingers. “Come on. You went to his room. At the Zamenhof.”

  “I went to his room. He invited me. He asked me to bring Melekh Gaystik’s gun. He wanted to see it. I don’t know how he knew I had it, I never told him. He seemed to know a lot about me that I never told him. And he told me the story. How Litvak was pressing him to play the Tzaddik again, to rope in the black hats. How he’d been hiding from Litvak, but he tired of hiding. He had been hiding his whole life. So he let Litvak find him again, but he regretted it right away. He didn’t know what to do. He didn’t want to keep using. He didn’t want to stop. He didn’t want to be what he wasn’t, he didn’t know how to be what he was. So he asked me if I would help him.”

  “Help him how?” Bina says.

  Hertz purses his lips, gives a shrug, and his gaze sidles toward a dark corner of the room. He is nearly eighty years old, and before this he has never confessed to anything.

  “He showed me that damned problem of his, the mate in two,” Hertz says. “He said he got it off some Russian. He said if I solved it, then I would understand how he felt.”

  “Zugzwang,” Bina says.

  “What’s that?” Ester-Malke says.

  “It’s when you have no good moves,” Bina says. “But you still have to move.”

  “Oh,” says Ester-Malke, rolling her eyes. “Chess.”

  “It’s been driving me crazy for days,” Hertz says. “I still can’t get a mate in fewer than three moves.”

  “Bishop to c2,” Landsman says. “Exclamation point.”

  It takes Hertz what feels to Landsman like a long time, with his eyes closed, to work it out, but at last the old man nods.

  “Zugzwang,” he says.

  “Why, old man? Why would he think you would do that for him?” Berko says. “You barely knew each other.”

  “He knew me. He knew me very well, I don’t really know how. He knew how badly I hate losing. That I couldn’t let Litvak bring about this foolishness. I couldn’t. Everything I worked for all my life.” There must be a bitter taste in his mouth; he makes a face. “And now look what happened. They did it.”

  “You got in through the tunnel?” Meyer says. “Into the hotel?”

  “What tunnel? I walked in the front door. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, Meyerle, but it’s not exactly a high-security building you live in.”

  Two or three long minutes unwind from their spool. Out on their closed-in balcony, Goldy and Pinky mutter and curse and hammer at their beds like gnomes at their forges deep beneath the earth.

  “I helped him fix himself up,” Hertz says finally. “I waited till he was under. Way, deep down under. Then I took out Gaystik’s gun. I wrapped it in the pillow. Gaystik’s .38 Detective Special. Rolled the boy over onto his belly. Back of the head. It was quick. There was no pain.”

  He licks his lips again, and Berko is there with another cool swallow.

  “Too bad you couldn’t do as good a job on yourself,” Berko says.

  “I thought I was doing the right thing, that it would put a stop to Litvak.” The old man sounds plaintive, childish. “But then the bastards went ahead and decided to try it without him.”

  Ester-Malke takes the lid from a glass jar of mixed nuts on the table beside the couch and stuffs a handful into her mouth. “Don’t think I’m not totally disturbed and horrified by all of this, friends,” she says, hoisting herself to her feet. “But I’m a tired lady in her first trimester, and I’m going to bed.”

  “I want to sit with him, sweetness,” Berko says. He adds, “In case he�
�s faking and he tries to steal the television once we’re asleep.”

  “Don’t worry,” Bina says. “He’s already under arrest.”

  Landsman stands by the couch, watching the old man’s chest rise and fall. Hertz’s face has the hollows and facets of a flaked arrowhead.

  “He’s a bad man,” Landsman says. “And he always was.”

  “Yes, but he made up for it by being a terrible father.” Berko stares at Hertz for a long time with tenderness and contempt. The old man looks like some kind of demented swami in that bandage. “What are you going to do?”

  “Nothing, what do you mean what am I going to do?”

  “I don’t know, you have that twitchy thing happening. You look like you’re going to do something.”

  “What?”

  “That’s what I’m asking you.”

  “I’m not going to do anything,” Landsman says. “What can I do?”

  Ester-Malke walks Bina and Landsman down the hall to the front door of the apartment. Landsman puts on his porkpie hat.

  “So,” Ester-Malke says.

  “So,” say Bina and Landsman.

  “I note that the two of you are leaving together.”

  “You want us to leave separately?” Landsman says. “I can take the stairs and Bina can ride down in the elevator.”

  “Landsman, let me tell you something,” Ester-Malke says. “All these people rioting on the television in Syria, Baghdad, Egypt? In London? Burning cars. Setting fire to embassies. Up in Yakovy, did you see what happened, they were dancing, those fucking maniacs, they were so happy about all this craziness, the whole floor collapsed right onto the apartment underneath. A couple of little girls sleeping in their beds, they got crushed to death. That’s the kind of shit we have to look forward to now. Burning cars and homicidal dancing. I have no idea where this baby is going to be born. My murdering, suicidal father-in-law is sleeping in my living room. Meanwhile, I’m getting this very strange vibration from the two of you. So let me just say that if you and Bina are planning to get back together, excuse me, but that’s all I need.”

  Landsman considers this. Any kind of wonder seems likely. That the Jews will pick up and set sail for the promised land to feast on giant grapes and toss their beards in the desert wind. That the Temple will be rebuilt, speedily and in our day. War will cease, ease and plenty and righteousness will be universal, and humankind will be treated to the regular spectacle of lions and lambs cohabiting. Every man will be a rabbi, every woman a holy book, and every suit will come with two pairs of pants. Meyer’s seed, even now, may be wandering through darkness toward redemption, striking at the membrane that separates the legacy of the yids who made him from that of the yids whose errors, griefs, hopes, and calamities went into the production of Bina Gelbfish.

  “Maybe it would be better if I took the stairs,” Landsman says.

  “You go right ahead and do that, Meyer,” says Bina.

  But then when he finally makes it all the way down, he finds her at the bottom, waiting for him.

  “What took you so long?” she says.

  “I had to stop a time or two on the way.”

  “You need to quit smoking. Quit again.”

  “I do. I will.” He fishes out his package of Broadways, fifteen left to burn, and arcs it into the lobby trash can like a dime carrying a wish into a fountain. He’s feeling a little giddy, a little tragic. He is ripe for the grand gesture, the operatic mistake. Manic is probably the word. “But that’s not what held me up.”

  “You’re really hurt. Tell me you’re not really hurt, walking around so tough and macho when you need to be in the goddamn hospital.” She reaches for his windpipe with the fingers of both hands, ready, as ever, to choke the life from Landsman to show how much she cares. “Are you hurt badly, you idiot?”

  “Only in my soul, sweetness,” Meyer says. Though he supposes it’s possible that Rafi Zilberblat’s bullet creased more than his skull. “I just had to stop a couple of times. To think. Or not to think, I don’t know. Every time I let myself try to, you know, breathe, just for ten seconds, with the air full of this thing we’re letting them get away with, I don’t know, I feel like I’m suffocating a little bit.”

  Landsman sinks onto a sofa whose bruise-colored cushions give off a strong Sitka odor of mildew, cigarettes, a complicated saltiness that is part stormy sea, part sweat on the lining of a wool fedora. The lobby of the Dnyeper is all blood-purple velvet and gilded crust, blown-up hand-tinted postcards of the great Black Sea resorts in Tsarist times. Ladies with their lapdogs on sun struck promenades. Grand hotels that never housed a Jew.

  “It’s like a stone in my belly, this deal we made,” Landsman says. “Just lying there.”

  Bina rolls her eyes, hands on her hips, glances at the door. Then she comes over and drops her bag and plops down beside him. How many times, he wonders, can she have enough of him, already, and still have not quite enough?

  “I can’t really believe you agreed to it,” she says.

  “I know.”

  “I’m supposed to be the brownnose around here.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “The ass licker.”

  “It’s killing me.”

  “If I can’t rely on you to tell the big shots to fuck off, Meyer, why do I keep you around?”

  He tries to explain to her, then, the considerations that led him to make his own personal version of the deal. He names some of the small things—the canneries, the violinists, the marquee of the Baranof Theatre—that it pleased him to cherish about Sitka when he was coming to terms with Cashdollar.

  “You and your goddamned Heart of Darkness,” Bina says. “I’m not sitting through that movie ever again.” She shrinks her mouth down to a hard mark. “You forgot something, asshole. On your sweet little list. You were one item short, I’d say.”

  “Bina.”

  “You have no place for me on that list of yours? Because I hope you know you’re at the fucking top of mine.”

  “How is that possible?” Landsman says. “I just don’t see how that could be.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because, you know. I failed you. I let you down. I feel like I just let you down so badly.”

  “In what way?”

  “Because of what I made you do. To Django. I don’t know how you can even stand to look at me.”

  “Made me? You think you made me kill our baby?”

  “No, Bina, I—”

  “Let me tell you something, Meyer.” She grabs his hand, digging her nails into his skin. “The day you ever have that much control over my behavior, it will be because somebody’s asking you, should she get the pine box or a plain white shroud?” She discards his hand, then retrieves it and strokes at the fiery little moons she carved into his flesh. “Oh my God, your hand, I’m sorry. Meyer, I’m sorry.”

  Landsman, of course, is sorry, too. He has already apologized to her several times, alone and in the presence of others, orally and in writing, formally in measured phrases and in untrammeled spasms: Sorry I’m sorry I’m so, so sorry. He has apologized for his craziness, his erratic behavior, his glooms and jags, for the years of round-robin exaltation and despair. He has apologized for leaving her, and for begging her to take him back again, and for breaking down the door to their old apartment when she declined to do so. He has abased himself, and rent his garments, and groveled at her shoes. Most of the time Bina has, good and caring woman that she is, offered Landsman the words he wanted to hear. He has prayed to her for rain, and she has sent cool showers. But what he really requires is a flood to wash his wickedness from the face of the earth. That or the blessing of a yid who will never bless anyone again.

  “It’s all right,” Landsman says.

  She gets up and goes over to the lobby trash can and fishes out Landsman’s package of Broadways. From her coat pocket she pulls a dented Zippo, bearing the insignia of the 75th Ranger regiment, and lights a papiros for each of them.

 
“We did what seemed right at the time, Meyer. We had a few facts. We knew our limitations. And we called that a choice. But we didn’t have any choice. All we had was, I don’t know, three lousy facts and a boundary map of our own limitations. The things we knew we couldn’t handle.” She takes her Shoyfer out of her bag and hands it to Landsman. “And right now, if you’re asking me, and I kind of got the idea you were, you also don’t really have any choice.”

  When he just sits there, holding the phone, she flips it open and dials a number and puts it into his hand. He raises it to his ear.

  “Dennis Brennan,” says the chief and sole occupant of the Sitka bureau of that major American daily.

  “Brennan. It’s Meyer Landsman.”

  Landsman hesitates again. He covers the mouth hole of the phone with a thumb.

  “Tell him to get his big head down here and watch us arrest your uncle for murder,” Bina says. “Tell him he has twenty minutes.”

  Landsman tries to weigh the fates of Berko, of his uncle Hertz, of Bina, of the Jews, of the Arabs, of the whole unblessed and homeless planet, against the promise he made to Mrs. Shpilman, and to himself, even though he had lost his belief in fate and promises.

  “I didn’t have to wait for you to drag your lamentable hide down those lousy stairs,” Bina says. “You know that. I could just have walked out the goddamned door.”

  “Yeah, so why didn’t you?”

  “Because I know you, Meyer. I could see what was going through your mind, sitting up there, listening to Hertz. I could see you had something you needed to say.” She pushes the phone back to his lips and brushes them with hers. “So just go ahead and say it already. I’m tired of waiting.”