balance, stumbled, and hit his head on the metal shelf. The force of the blow jarred loose the candle and sent it crashing to the tile floor. The glass cracked into three large pieces. The cylinder of wax split in two.
“I don’t want it,” Litvak croaked. “I’m not ready.”
But when he looked down at Shpilman, sprawled on the floor, dazed, bleeding from a cut on his right temple, he knew that it was already too late.
40
Just as Litvak lays down his pen, you can hear a tumult outside: half a curse, glass breaking, the wind huffing out of somebody’s lungs. Then Berko Shemets comes promenading into the bedroom. He has Gold’s head nestled under one arm like a nice roast and the rest of Gold draggling along behind. The ganef’s heels plow deep furrows in the carpet. Berko slams the door behind them. He has his sholem out, and it hungers like a compass needle for the magnetic north of Alter Litvak. Hertz’s blood is mapped across Berko’s hunting shirt and jeans. Berko’s hat is pushed back in a way that makes his face look all brow and eye whites. The head of Gold glares oracular from the crook of Berko’s arm.
“You should shit blood and pus,” Gold intones. “You should get scabies like Job.”
Berko’s gun swings around to get a look at the young yid’s brain in its breakable container. Gold stops struggling, and the gun resumes its one-eyed inspection of Alter Litvak’s chest.
“Berko,” Landsman says. “What’s this craziness?”
Berko heaves his gaze toward Landsman like a great burden. He opens his lips, closes them, draws a breath. He seems to have something important that he wants to express, a name, a spell, an equation that can bend time or unknit the strings of the world. Or maybe he’s trying to keep from coming unknit himself.
“That yid,” he says, and then softer, his voice a little husky, “My mother.”
Landsman has maybe seen a photograph of Laurie Jo Bear. He manages to scare up a vague memory of teased black bangs, pinkish glasses, a wiseass smile. But the woman is not even a ghost to him. Berko used to tell stories about life in the Indianer-Lands. Basketball, seal hunts, drunks and uncles, Willie Dick stories, the story of the human ear on the table. Landsman doesn’t remember any stories about the mother. He supposes that he always knew there had to be some kind of cost to Berko in turning himself inside out the way he did, some kind of heroic feat of forgetting. He just never bothered to think of it as a loss. A failure of imagination, a worse sin in a shammes than going into a hot place with no backup. Or maybe it was the same sin in a different form.
“No doubt,” Landsman says, taking a step toward his partner. “Bad guy. Worth a bullet.”
“You have two little boys, Berko,” Bina says in her flattest tone. “You have Ester-Malke. You have a future not to throw away.”
“He does not,” Gold says, or tries to say. Berko puts a deeper squeeze on him, and Gold gags, trying to turn over, to gain purchase with his feet.
Litvak scrawls something in the back of the pad without taking his eyes off of Berko.
“What is it?” Berko says. “What did he say?”
No future here for any Jew
“Yeah, yeah,” says Landsman. “We get it already.”
He grabs the pen and the pad away from Litvak. He flips over the last page and writes, in American, DON’T BE AN IDIOT! YOUR ACTING LIKE ME! He tears out the sheet of paper, then tosses the pad and pen back to Litvak. He holds the sheet up in front of Berko’s face so that his partner can read it. It’s a fairly persuasive argument. Berko lets go of Gold right as the yid is turning a bruised color all over. Gold drops to the floor, gasping for breath. The gun in Berko’s fist wavers.
“He killed your sister, Meyer.”
“I don’t know if he did or not,” Landsman says. He turns to Litvak. “Did you?”
Litvak shakes his head and starts to write something out on the pad, but before he finishes, a cheer goes up in the outer room. The heartfelt but self-conscious whoop of young men watching something great on television. A goal has been scored. A girl playing beach volleyball has fallen out of her bikini top. A moment later, Landsman hears the cheer echoing, the sound of it carried through the open window of the penthouse as if on a wind from far away, the Harkavy, the Nachtasyl. Litvak smiles and puts down the pad and pen with a strange finality, as if he has nothing left to say. As if his whole confession was leading to-was made possible by-only this moment. Gold crawls to the door, drags it open, and then staggers to his feet and into the outer room. Bina goes over to Berko and holds out her hand, and after a moment Berko lays the gun across her palm.
In the outer room of the penthouse, the young believers hug one another and jump up and down in their suits. Their yarmulkes tumble from their heads. Their faces shine with tears.
On the big television screen, Landsman gets his first look at an image that will soon be splashed across the front page of every newspaper in the world. All over town, pious hands will clip it and tape it to their front doors and windows. They will frame it and hang it behind the counters of their shops. Some hustler, inevitably, will work the thing up as a full-size poster, two feet by three. The hilltop in Jerusalem, crowded with alleys and houses. The broad empty mesa of paving stone. The jagged jawbone of burnt teeth. The magnificent plume of black smoke. And at the bottom the legend, in blue letters, AT LAST! These posters will sell at the stationers’ for between ten dollars and $12.95.
“Sweet God. What are they doing? What did they do?”
There is a lot that shocks Landsman about the image on the television screen, but the most shocking thing of all is simply that an object eight thousand miles away has been acted upon by Jews from Sitka. It seems to violate some fundamental law of the emotional physics that Landsman understands. Sitka space-time is a curved phenomenon; a yid could reach out in any direction as far as he was able and end up only tapping himself on the back.
“What about Mendel?” he says.
“I guess they were too far along to stop,” Bina says. “I guess they just went ahead without him.”
It’s perverse, but for some reason, the thought makes Landsman feel sad on Mendel’s behalf. Everything and everyone, from now on, will be going ahead without him.
For a couple of minutes Bina stands there watching the boys carry on, her arms folded, her face without expression except at the corners of her eyes.
The way she looks reminds Landsman of an engagement party they went to years ago, for a friend of Bina’s. The bride-to-be was marrying a mexican, and as a kind of joke, the party had a Cinco de Mayo theme. They hung a papier-mache penguin from a tree in the yard. Children were blindfolded and sent forth, armed with a stick, to deal the penguin blows until it broke open. The children beat the penguin with savagery, and then the candy came showering down. It was just a bunch of wrapped toffees, peppermint, butterscotch, the kind your great-aunt could be relied upon to supply from a dusty crevice of her handbag. But as it rained from the sky, the children swarmed with a bestial joy. And Bina stood there watching them with her arms folded and a pleat at the corners of her eyes.
She passes Berko back his sholem and unholsters her own.
“Shut up,” Bina says, and then in American, “Shut the fuck up!”
Some of the young men have taken out their Shoyfers and are trying to call people, but everyone in Sitka must be trying to call people. They show one another the error messages they are getting on their telephones’ screens. The network is busy. Bina goes over to the television and kicks its cord. The plug snaps out of the wall. The television sighs.
Some dark fuel seems to drain from the young men’s tanks when the television goes off.
“You are under arrest,” Bina says gently, now that she has their attention. “Go over and put your hands on the wall. Meyer.”
Landsman pats them down one by one, crouching like a tailor measuring an inseam. From the six along the wall, he collects eight handguns and two expensive hunting knives. As he finishes with each one, he tells him to sit down. His third search recovers the Beretta that Berko lent to him before he left for Yakovy. Landsman holds it up for Berko to enjoy.
“Little cutie,” Berko says, keeping his big sholem level.
