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
