After an hour of this kind of treatment, around four-thirty, the baby starts to scream, way out on his balcony. Landsman can hear Ester-Malke trying to comfort him. Ordinarily, she would bring him into her bed, but that’s not an option tonight, and it takes her a long time to settle the little grandfather down. By the time Ester-Malke wanders into the bedroom with the baby in her arms, he’s snuffling and quieter and almost asleep. Ester-Malke dumps Pinky between his brother and Landsman and walks out.
Reunited in their parents’ bed, the Shemets boys set up a whistling and rumbling and a blatting of inner valves that would shame the grand pipe organ of Temple Emanu-El. The boys execute a series of maneuvers, a kung fu of slumber, that drives Landsman to the very limit of the bed. They chop at Landsman, stab him with their toes, grunt and mutter. They masticate the fiber of their dreams. Around dawn, something very bad happens in the baby’s diaper. It’s the worst night that Landsman has ever spent on a mattress, and that is saying a good deal.
The coffeemaker begins its expectorations around seven. A few thousand molecules of coffee vapor tumble into the bedroom and worry the hairs inside Landsman’s beak. He hears the shuffle of slippers against the carpet in the hall. He fights long and hard against the impulse to acknowledge that Ester-Malke is standing there, in the doorway of her bedroom, ruing him and every fit of charity toward him that’s ever seized her. He doesn’t care. Why should he care? At last Landsman realizes that in his struggle not to care about anything lie the paradoxical seeds of defeat: So, all right, he cares. He opens one eye. Ester-Malke leans against the doorjamb, hugging herself, surveying the scene of destruction in a place that once was her bed. Whatever the name of the emotion inspired in a mother by the sight of filial cuteness, it competes in her expression with horror and dismay at the spectacle of Landsman in his underpants.
“I need you out of my bed,” she whispers. “Soon and in a way that’s lasting.”
“All right,” says Landsman. Taking stock of his wounds, his aches, the prevailing direction of his moods, he sits up. For all the torment of the night, he feels oddly settled. More present, somehow, in his limbs and skin and senses. Somehow, maybe, a little more real. He has not shared a bed with another human being in over two years. He wonders if that is a practice he ought not to have foregone. He takes his clothes from the door and puts them on. Carrying his socks and belt, he follows Ester-Malke back down the hall.
“Though the couch has its points,” Ester-Malke continues. “For example, it features no babies or four-year- olds.”
“You have a serious toenail problem among your youth,” Landsman says. “Also something, I think it might be a sea otter, died and is rotting in the little one’s diaper.”
In the kitchen she pours them each a cup of coffee. Then she goes to the door and retrieves the Tog from the mat that says GET LOST. Landsman sits on his stool at the counter and stares into the murk of the living room where the bulk of his partner rears up from the floor like an island. The couch is a wreck of blankets.
Landsman is about to tell Ester-Malke I don’t deserve friends like you when she comes back into the kitchen, reading the paper, and says, “No wonder you needed so much sleep.” She bumps into the doorway. Something good or terrible or unbelievable is described on the front page.
Landsman reaches for his reading glasses in the pocket of his jacket. They are cracked at the nosepiece, each lens severed from its mate. It’s truly a pair of glasses, two monocles on their stems. Ester-Malke gets the electrician’s tape, yellow as a hazard warning, from the drawer under the phone. She binds up the glasses and passes them back to Landsman. The gob of tape is as thick as a filbert. It draws the gaze even of the wearer, leaving him cross-eyed.
“I’ll bet that looks really good,” he says, taking up the newspaper.
Two big stories lead off the news in this morning’s Tog. One is an account of an apparent shoot-out, leaving two dead, in the deserted parking lot of a Big Macher outlet store. The principals were a lone homicide detective,
Meyer Landsman, forty-two, and two suspects long sought by Sitka law enforcement in connection with a pair of apparently unrelated murders. The other story is headlined: “ BOY TZADDIK ” FOUND DEAD IN SITKA HOTEL
The accompanying text whips up a tissue of miracles, evasions, and outright lies about the life and death of Menachem-Mendel Shpilman, late Thursday night, at the Hotel Zamenhof on Max Nordau Street. According to the medical examiner’s office-the examining doctor himself having moved to Canada-the preliminary finding on cause of death is something known in fairy tales as “drug-related misadventure.” “Though little known to the world outside,” the Tog ’s man writes, in the closed world of the pious, Mr. Shpilman was viewed, for the better part of his early life, as a prodigy, a wonder, and a holy teacher, indeed, as possibly the long-promised Redeemer. The old Shpilman home on S. Ansky Street in the Harkavy was often thronged with visitors and supplicants during Mr. Shpilman’s childhood, with the devout and the curious traveling from as far as Buenos Aires and Beirut to meet the talented boy who was born on the fateful ninth day of the month of Av. Many hoped and even arranged to be present on one of a number of occasions when rumors flew that he was about to “declare his kingdom.” But Mr. Shpilman never made any declarations. Twenty-three years ago, on the day projected for his marriage to a daughter of the Shtrakenzer rebbe, he all but disappeared, and during the long ignominy of Mr. Shpilman’s recent life, the early promise had largely been forgotten.
The chaff from the ME’s office is the only item in the story resembling an explanation of the death. Hotel management and the Central Division are said to have declined comment. At the end of the article, Landsman learns that there will be no synagogue service, just the burial itself, at the old Montefiore cemetery, to be presided over by the father of the deceased.
“Berko said he disowned him,” Ester-Malke says, reading over Landsman’s shoulder. “He said the old man wanted nothing to do with the kid. I guess he changed his mind.”
Reading the article, Landsman suffers a cramp of envy toward Mendel Shpilman, tempered by pity. Landsman struggled for many years under the weight of fatherly expectations, but he has no idea how it might feel to fulfill or exceed them. Isidor Landsman, he knows, would have loved to father a son as gifted as Mendel. Landsman can’t help thinking that if he had been able to play chess like Mendel Shpilman, maybe his father would have felt he had something to live for, a small messiah to redeem him. Landsman thinks of the letter that he sent his father, hoping to gain his freedom from the burden of that life and those expectations. He considers the years he spent believing that he caused Isidor Landsman a fatal grief. How much guilt did Mendel Shpilman feel? Had he believed what was said of him, in his gift or wild calling? In the attempt to free himself from that burden, did Mendel feel that he must turn his back not only on his father but on all the Jews in the world?
“I don’t think Rabbi Shpilman ever changes his mind,” Landsman says. “I think somebody would have to change it for him.”
“Who would that be?”
“If I had to guess? I’m thinking that maybe it was the mother.”
“Good for her. Trust a mother not to let them toss her son out like an empty bottle.”
“Trust a mother,” Landsman says. He studies the photograph in the Tog of Mendel Shpilman at fifteen, beard patchy, sidelocks flying, coolly presiding over a conference of young Talmudists who seethed and sulked around him. “The T addik Ha-Dor, in Better Days,” reads the caption.
“What are you thinking about, Meyer?” Ester-Malke says, striking a note of doubt.
“The future,” Landsman says.
23
A mob of black-hat Jews chugs its way, a freight train of grief, from the gates of the cemetery-the house of life, they call it-up a hillside toward a hole cut into the mud. A pine box slick with rain pitches and tosses on the surf of weeping men. Satmars hold umbrellas over the heads of Verbovers. Gerers and Shtrakenzers and Viznitzers link arms with the boldness of schoolgirls on a lark. Rivalries, grudges, sectarian disputes, mutual excommunications, they’ve been laid aside for a day so that everyone can mourn with due passion a yid who was forgotten by them until last Friday night. Not even a yid-the shell of a yid, thinned to transparency around the hard void of a twenty- year junk habit. Every generation loses the messiah it has failed to deserve. Now the pious of the Sitka District have
