is all blood-purple velvet and gilded crust, blown-up hand-tinted postcards of the great Black Sea resorts in Tsarist times. Ladies with their lapdogs on sun struck promenades. Grand hotels that never housed a Jew.
“It’s like a stone in my belly, this deal we made,” Landsman says. “Just lying there.”
Bina rolls her eyes, hands on her hips, glances at the door. Then she comes over and drops her bag and plops down beside him. How many times, he wonders, can she have enough of him, already, and still have not quite enough?
“I can’t really believe you agreed to it,” she says.
“I know.”
“I’m supposed to be the brownnose around here.”
“Tell me about it.”
“The ass licker.”
“It’s killing me.”
“If I can’t rely on you to tell the big shots to fuck off, Meyer, why do I keep you around?”
He tries to explain to her, then, the considerations that led him to make his own personal version of the deal. He names some of the small things-the canneries, the violinists, the marquee of the Baranof Theatre-that it pleased him to cherish about Sitka when he was coming to terms with Cashdollar.
“You and your goddamned Heart of Darkness,” Bina says. “I’m not sitting through that movie ever again.” She shrinks her mouth down to a hard mark. “You forgot something, asshole. On your sweet little list. You were one item short, I’d say.”
“Bina.”
“You have no place for me on that list of yours? Because I hope you know you’re at the fucking top of mine.”
“How is that possible?” Landsman says. “I just don’t see how that could be.”
“Why not?”
“Because, you know. I failed you. I let you down. I feel like I just let you down so badly.”
“In what way?”
“Because of what I made you do. To Django. I don’t know how you can even stand to look at me.”
“ Made me? You think you made me kill our baby?”
“No, Bina, I-”
“Let me tell you something, Meyer.” She grabs his hand, digging her nails into his skin. “The day you ever have that much control over my behavior, it will be because somebody’s asking you, should she get the pine box or a plain white shroud?” She discards his hand, then retrieves it and strokes at the fiery little moons she carved into his flesh. “Oh my God, your hand, I’m sorry. Meyer, I’m sorry.”
Landsman, of course, is sorry, too. He has already apologized to her several times, alone and in the presence of others, orally and in writing, formally in measured phrases and in untrammeled spasms: Sorry I’m sorry I’m so, so sorry. He has apologized for his craziness, his erratic behavior, his glooms and jags, for the years of round-robin exaltation and despair. He has apologized for leaving her, and for begging her to take him back again, and for breaking down the door to their old apartment when she declined to do so. He has abased himself, and rent his garments, and groveled at her shoes. Most of the time Bina has, good and caring woman that she is, offered Landsman the words he wanted to hear. He has prayed to her for rain, and she has sent cool showers. But what he really requires is a flood to wash his wickedness from the face of the earth. That or the blessing of a yid who will never bless anyone again.
“It’s all right,” Landsman says.
She gets up and goes over to the lobby trash can and fishes out Landsman’s package of Broadways. From her coat pocket she pulls a dented Zippo, bearing the insignia of the 75th Ranger regiment, and lights a papiros for each of them.
“We did what seemed right at the time, Meyer. We had a few facts. We knew our limitations. And we called that a choice. But we didn’t have any choice. All we had was, I don’t know, three lousy facts and a boundary map of our own limitations. The things we knew we couldn’t handle.” She takes her Shoyfer out of her bag and hands it to Landsman. “And right now, if you’re asking me, and I kind of got the idea you were, you also don’t really have any choice.”
When he just sits there, holding the phone, she flips it open and dials a number and puts it into his hand. He raises it to his ear.
“Dennis Brennan,” says the chief and sole occupant of the Sitka bureau of that major American daily.
“Brennan. It’s Meyer Landsman.”
Landsman hesitates again. He covers the mouth hole of the phone with a thumb.
“Tell him to get his big head down here and watch us arrest your uncle for murder,” Bina says. “Tell him he has twenty minutes.”
Landsman tries to weigh the fates of Berko, of his uncle Hertz, of Bina, of the Jews, of the Arabs, of the whole unblessed and homeless planet, against the promise he made to Mrs. Shpilman, and to himself, even though he had lost his belief in fate and promises.
“I didn’t have to wait for you to drag your lamentable hide down those lousy stairs,” Bina says. “You know that. I could just have walked out the goddamned door.”
“Yeah, so why didn’t you?”
“Because I know you, Meyer. I could see what was going through your mind, sitting up there, listening to Hertz. I could see you had something you needed to say.” She pushes the phone back to his lips and brushes them with hers. “So just go ahead and say it already. I’m tired of waiting.”
For days Landsman has been thinking that he missed his chance with Mendel Shpilman, that in their exile at the Hotel Zamenhof, without even realizing, he blew his one shot at something like redemption. But there is no Messiah of Sitka. Landsman has no home, no future, no fate but Bina. The land that he and she were promised was bounded only by the fringes of their wedding canopy, by the dog-eared corners of their cards of membership in an international fraternity whose members carry their patrimony in a tote bag, their world on the tip of the tongue.
“Brennan,” Landsman says. “I have a story for you.”
