newborn red heifer, he saw the product of $1 million in taxpayer dollars spent secretly on bull semen and in vitro fertilization. In the eventual burning of this little red cow, they saw the purification of all Israel and the fulfillment of a millennia-old promise; Litvak saw, at most, a necessary move in an ancient game-the survival of the Jews.
Oh I wouldn’t go that far
There was a knock at the door, and Micky Vayner put in his head.
“I came to remind you, sir,” he said in his good American Hebrew.
Litvak stared blankly at the pink face with its peeling eyelids and baby-fat chin.
“Five minutes before twilight. You said to remind you.”
Litvak went to the window. The sky was striped in the pink, green, and luminous gray of a salmon’s hide. Sure enough, he saw a star or planet overhead. He nodded his thanks to Micky Vayner. Then he closed the box of chessmen and hooked the clasp.
“What’s at twilight?” Roboy said. He turned to Micky Vayner. “What’s today?”
Micky Vayner shrugged; as far as he knew, it was, by the lunar calendar, an ordinary day in the month of Nisan. Though, like his young comrades, he had been trained to believe in the foreordained reestablishment of the biblical kingdom of Judaea and in the destiny of Jerusalem to be the eternal capital of the Jews, he was no more strict or nice in his observance than any of the others. The young American Jews at Peril Strait observed the principal holidays, and for the most part, they kept the dietary laws. They wore the skullcap and the four-corners but kept their beards in military trim. They avoided work and training on the Sabbath, though not without exception. After forty years as a secular warrior, Litvak could stomach that much. Even in the wake of the accident, with his Sora gone, with the wind whistling through the hole she had left in Litvak’s life, with a thirst for meaning and a hunger for sense and an empty cup and a barren dish, Alter Litvak could not have taken a place among truly religious men. He never could have fallen happily, for example, among the black hats. In fact, he could not abide black hats, and since the meeting at the baths, he had kept to a minimum his contacts with the Verbovers, as they prepared in secret to be airlifted en masse to Palestine.
Today is nothing, he wrote before he pocketed the notepad and walked out of the room. Call me when they arrive
In his room Litvak took out his dental plates and dropped them with a chime of dice into a drinking glass. He unlaced his boots and sat down heavily on a folding cot. Whenever he came out to Peril Strait, he slept in this tiny room-on the blueprints, it had been shown as a utility closet-down the hall from Roboy’s office. His clothes he hung on a hook behind the door, his kit he stashed under the cot.
He leaned back against the cold wall of painted cinder block and looked at the wall, over the steel shelf that held the glass with his teeth. There was no window, so Litvak imagined an early star. A wheeling duck. The photograph moon. The sky slowly turning to the color of a gun. And an airplane, coming in low from the southeast, bearing the man who was, in Litvak’s plan, both prisoner and dynamite, tower and trapdoor, bull’s-eye and dart.
Litvak stood up slowly, with a grunt of pain. There were screws in his hips, which ached; his knees thudded and gonged like the pedals of an old piano. There was a constant thrum of wire in the hinges of his jaw. He ran his tongue across the empty zones of his mouth with their feel of slick putty. He was accustomed to pain and breakage, but since the accident, his body no longer seemed to belong to him. It was something sawed and nailed together out of borrowed parts. A birdhouse built of scrap wood and propped on a pole, in which his soul flapped like a fugitive bat. He had been born, like every Jew, into the wrong world, the wrong country, at the wrong time, and now he was living in the wrong body, too. In the end maybe it was that sense of wrongness, that fist in the Jewish belly, binding Alter Litvak to the cause of the yids who had made him their general.
He went over to the steel shelf that was bolted to the wall under his notional window. Alongside the drinking glass that held the proof of Buchbinder’s genius, there stood a second glass. That one contained a few ounces of paraffin hardened around a piece of white string. Litvak had bought this candle in a grocery store not quite a year after his wife died, with the intention of burning it on the anniversary of her death. Now a number of such anniversaries had come and gone, and Litvak had evolved his own quaint tradition. Every year he brought the yahrzeit candle out, and looked at it, and thought about lighting it. He imagined the shy flutter of a flame. He envisioned himself lying in the darkness with the memorial candle’s light dancing over his head, scattering an alefbeys of shadows across the ceiling of the tiny room. He pictured the glass empty at the close of twenty-four hours, the wick consumed, the paraffin combusted, the metal tab drowned at the bottom in waxy dregs. And after that-but here his imagination tended to fail him.
Litvak rummaged in the pockets of his suit pants for his lighter, just to give himself the option, the chance of finding out, if he could bring himself to do it, what it might mean to set fire to the memory of his wife. The lighter was a steel Zippo etched with the Rangers insignia in worn black lines on one side, and on the other dented deeply where it had deflected some oncoming bit of the car, or the road, or the chokecherry tree, from piercing Litvak’s heart. For the sake of his throat, Litvak no longer smoked; the lighter was only a habit, a token of his survivorship, an ironical charm that never left his bedside or his pants. But now it was in neither place. He patted himself down with the sheepish method of old man. He stepped backward through his day, working his way to that morning, when, as every morning, he had slid the lighter into his hip pocket. Hadn’t he? All at once he could not remember having pocketed his Zippo that morning, or laying it on the steel shelf last night when he went to sleep. Perhaps he had been forgetting it for days. It might be in Sitka, in the back room at the Blackpool Hotel. It might be anywhere. Litvak lowered himself to the ground, dragged his kit from under the cot, and ransacked it, his heart pounding. No lighter. No matches, either. Only a candle in a juice glass, and a man who did not know how to light it even when he had a source of fire. Litvak turned to the door just as he heard someone approach. A soft knock. He slipped the yahrzeit candle into the hip pocket of his jacket.
“Reb Litvak,” said Micky Vayner. “They’re here, sir.”
Litvak put in his teeth and tucked in his shirt.
I want everyone in quarters I don’t want anybody to see him now
“He isn’t ready,” Micky Vayner said, a little doubtfully, wanting to be reassured. He didn’t know, had never seen Mendel Shpilman. He had only heard stories of long-ago boyish miracles and perhaps caught an acrid whiff of spoiled goods that sometimes curled in the air over the mention of Shpilman’s name.
He is unwell but we will heal him
It was neither part of their doctrine nor necessary to the success of Litvak’s plan for Micky Vayner or any of the Peril Strait Jews to believe that Mendel Shpilman was the Tzaddik Ha-Dor. A Messiah who actually arrives is no good to anybody. A hope fulfilled is already half a disappointment.
“We know he’s just a man,” said Micky Vayner dutifully. “We all know that, Reb Litvak. Only a man and nothing more, and this is bigger than any man, what we’re doing.”
It isn’t the man I’m worried about, Litvak wrote. Everyone in quarters
As he stood on the floatplane dock and watched Naomi Landsman help Mendel Shpilman down from the cockpit of her Super Cub, Litvak considered that if he did not know better, he would have taken them for old lovers. There was a brusque familiarity in the way she gripped his upper arm, fished his shirt collar from the lapels of his rumpled pin-striped jacket, picked a string of cellophane from his hair. She watched his face, only his face, as Shpilman eyed Roboy and Litvak; she was tender as an engineer looking for cracks, fatigue in the material. It seemed inconceivable that they had known each other, as far as Litvak was aware, for slightly under three hours. Three hours. That was all it had taken for her to seal up her fate with his.
“Welcome,” Dr. Roboy said, posed beside a wheelchair with his necktie flapping in the breeze. Gold and Turteltoyb, a Sitka boy, jumped down from the plane to the dock, Turteltoyb heavy enough to make it ring like a slammed telephone. The water smacked the pilings. The air smelled of rotten netting and brackish puddles in the bottoms of old boats. It was almost dark, and they all looked vaguely green in the light of the floods on the standards, except for Shpilman, who looked white as a feather and as hollow. “You are genuinely welcome.”
“You didn’t need to send an airplane,” Shpilman said. He had a wry, actorish voice, his diction studied, excellent, with a low, soft underthrob of the sorrowful Ukraine. “I’m perfectly capable of flying on my own.”
“Yes, well-”
“X-ray vision. Bulletproof. The whole bit. Who is the wheelchair for, me?”
He outspread his arms, laid his feet primly side by side, and gave himself a slow once-over, looking prepared to be shocked at what he found. Ill-fitting pin-striped suit, hatless, tie loosely knotted, one shirttail hanging out, something teenage in his unruly ginger curls. Impossible to see in that slender fragile frame, that sleepy face, any
