“They said… they used to say…” Berko begins. He screws up his face, as if he knows what he’ll say next is going to irk Landsman or give him cause for scorn. He unscrews his brown eyes, lets it pass. He can’t bring himself to repeat it. “Mendel Shpilman. Dear God. I heard some stories.”
“A lot of stories,” Zimbalist says. “Nothing but stories till he was twenty years old.”
“What kind of stories?” Landsman says, duly irked. “Stories about what? Tell me already, damn you.”
14
So Zimbalist tells them a Mendel story.
A certain woman, he says, was dying of cancer at Sitka General Hospital. A woman of his acquaintance, call her. This was back in 1973. The woman was twice a widow, her first husband a gambler shot by shtarkers in Germany before the war, her second a string monkey in Zimbalist’s employ who got tangled in a live power line. It was through supporting the widow of his dead worker with cash and favors that Zimbalist got to know her. It’s not impossible that they fell in love. They were both past the age of foolish passion, so they were passionate without being fools. She was a dark, lean woman already in the habit of controlling her appetites. They kept their affair a secret from everyone, not least Mrs. Zimbalist.
To visit his lady friend in the hospital when she took ill, Zimbalist resorted to subterfuge, stealth, and the bribing of orderlies. He slept on a towel on the floor of the ward, curled between her bed and the wall. In the half- dark, when his mistress called out from the distances of morphine, he would spill water between her cracked lips and cool her forehead with a damp cloth. The clock on the hospital wall hummed to itself, got antsy, kept snapping off pieces of the night with its minute hand. In the morning Zimbalist would creep back to his shop on Ringelblum Avenue-he told his wife he was sleeping there because his snoring was so bad-and wait for the boy.
Almost every morning after worship and study, Mendel Shpilman would come and play chess. Chess was permitted, even though the Verbover rabbinate and the larger community of the pious viewed it as a waste of the boy’s time. The older Mendel got-the more dazzling his feats of scholarship, the brighter his reputation for acumen beyond his years-the more painful this waste appeared. It was not just Mendel’s memory, the agile reasoning, the grasp of precedent, history, law. No, even as a kid, Mendel Shpilman seemed to intuit the messy human flow that both powered the Law and required its elaborate system of drains and sluices. Fear, doubt, lust, dishonesty, broken vows, murder and love, uncertainty about the intentions of God and men, little Mendel saw all of that not only in the Aramaic abstract but when it appeared in his father’s study, clothed in the dark serge and juicy mother tongue of everyday life. If conflicts ever arose in the boy’s mind, doubts about the relevance of the Law that he was learning in the Verbover court at the feet of a bunch of king-size ganefs and crooks, they never showed. Not when he was a kid who believed, and not when the day came that he turned his back on it all. He had the kind of mind that could hold and consider contradictory propositions without losing its balance.
It was because the Shpilmans were so proud of his excellence as a Jewish son and scholar that they tolerated the side of Mendel’s character that loved only to play. Mendel was always getting up elaborate pranks and hoaxes, staging plays that featured his sisters, his aunts, the duck. Some people thought the greatest miracle Mendel ever performed was to persuade his formidable father, year after year, to take the part of Queen Vashti in the Purimshpiel. The sight of that somber emperor, that mountain of dignity, that fearsome bulk mincing around in high-heeled shoes! A blond wig! Lipstick and rouge, bangles and spangles! It might have been the most horrible feat of female impersonation Jewry ever produced. People loved it. And they loved Mendel for making it happen each year. But it was just another proof of the love that Heskel Shpilman had for his boy. And it was the same loving indulgence that permitted Mendel to waste an hour every day at chess, with the proviso that his opponent be chosen from the community of Verbov.
Mendel chose the boundary maven, the lone outsider in their midst. It was a small display of rebellion or perversity that some, in later years, would have occasion to revisit. But in the Verbov orbit, only Zimbalist had even a prayer of beating Mendel.
“How is she?” Mendel said to Zimbalist one morning after the lady friend had been dying at Sitka General for two months and was nearly gone.
Zimbalist experienced a shock at the question-nothing to compare to the fate of the widow’s second husband, of course, but enough to stop his heart for a beat or two. He remembers every game that he and Mendel Shpilman ever played against each other, he says, except for this one; of this game he can manage to recall a solitary move. Zimbalist’s wife was a Shpilman, a cousin to this boy. Zimbalist’s livelihood, his honor, perhaps even his life, demanded that the secret of his adultery be kept. He was absolutely certain that so far it had been. Through his wires and strings, the boundary maven felt every whisper and rumor the way a spider hears in its feet the thrashings of a fly. There was no way word of it could have reached Mendel Shpilman without Zimbalist hearing about it first.
He said, “How is who?”
The boy stared at him. Mendel was not a handsome kid. He had a perpetual flush, close-set eyes, a second and hints of a third chin without clear benefit of a first. But the eyes, though too small and too near the bridge of his nose, were dense and fitful with color, like the spots on a butterfly wing, blue, green, gold. Pity, mockery, forgiveness. No judgment. No reproach.
“Never mind,” Mendel said gently. Then he moved his queen’s bishop, returning it to its original position on the board.
The move had no purpose that Zimbalist, pondering it, could see. At one moment fantastic schools of chess seemed to be contained or implied by it. The next it appeared to be only what, in all likelihood, it was: a kind of retraction.
Zimbalist struggled for the next hour to understand that move, and for the strength to resist confiding to a ten-year-old whose universe was bounded by the study house, the shul, and the door to his mother’s kitchen, the sorrow and dark rapture of Zimbalist’s love for the dying widow, how some secret thirst of his own was quenched every time he dribbled cool water through her peeling lips.
They played through the remainder of their hour without further conversation. But when it was time for the boy to go, he turned in the doorway of the shop on Ringelblum Avenue and took hold of Zimbalist’s sleeve. He hesitated as if reluctant or embarrassed. Or maybe he was feeling afraid. Then he got a hard pinched expression on his face that Zimbalist recognized as the internalized voice of the rebbe, reminding his son of his duty to serve the community.
“When you see her tonight,” Mendel said, “tell her that I send her my blessing. Tell her I say hello.”
“I will,” Zimbalist said, or remembers saying.
“Tell her from me that all will be well.”
The little monkey face, the sad mouth, the eyes saying that for as much as he knew you and loved you, he might still be pulling your leg.
“Oh, I will,” Zimbalist said, and then he broke down in hiccuping sobs. The boy took a clean handkerchief from his pocket and gave it to Zimbalist. Patiently, he held the boundary maven’s hand. His fingers were soft, a bit sticky. On the inside of his wrist, his younger sister Reyzl had scrawled her name in red ink. When Zimbalist regained his composure, Mendel let go of his hand and stuffed the damp handkerchief into his pocket.
“See you tomorrow,” he said.
That night, when Zimbalist crept onto the ward, just before he spread his towel on the floor, he spooned the boy’s blessing into the ear of his unconscious mistress. He did it without hope and with very little in the way of faith. In the dark of five A.M., Zimbalist’s lady friend woke him and told him to go home and eat breakfast with his wife. It was the first coherent thing she had said in weeks.
“Did you give her my blessing?” Mendel asked him when they sat down to play later that morning.
“I did.”
“Where is she?”
“At Sitka General.”
“With other people? On a ward?”
Zimbalist nodded.
“And you gave my blessing to the other people, too?”
