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 says.
“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.
