Hertz licks his lips, looking pained, sticking out his tongue. Berko gets out of the chair and takes a plastic tumbler from the coffee table. He holds it to his father’s lips, and the ice jingles in the tumbler. He helps Hertz to drain half of it without spilling. Hertz doesn’t thank him. He lies there for a long time. You can hear the water sluicing through him.
“Last Thursday,” Bina says. She snaps her fingers. “Come on. You went to his room. At the Zamenhof.”
“I went to his room. He invited me. He asked me to bring Melekh Gaystik’s gun. He wanted to see it. I don’t know how he knew I had it, I never told him. He seemed to know a lot about me that I never told him. And he told me the story. How Litvak was pressing him to play the Tzaddik again, to rope in the black hats. How he’d been hiding from Litvak, but he tired of hiding. He had been hiding his whole life. So he let Litvak find him again, but he regretted it right away. He didn’t know what to do. He didn’t want to keep using. He didn’t want to stop. He didn’t want to be what he wasn’t, he didn’t know how to be what he was. So he asked me if I would help him.”
“Help him how?” Bina says.
Hertz purses his lips, gives a shrug, and his gaze sidles toward a dark corner of the room. He is nearly eighty years old, and before this he has never confessed to anything.
“He showed me that damned problem of his, the mate in two,” Hertz says. “He said he got it off some Russian. He said if I solved it, then I would understand how he felt.”
“Zugzwang,” Bina says.
“What’s that?” Ester-Malke says.
“It’s when you have no good moves,” Bina says. “But you still have to move.”
“Oh,” says Ester-Malke, rolling her eyes. “ Chess. ”
“It’s been driving me crazy for days,” Hertz says. “I still can’t get a mate in fewer than three moves.”
“Bishop to c2,” Landsman says. “Exclamation point.”
It takes Hertz what feels to Landsman like a long time, with his eyes closed, to work it out, but at last the old man nods.
“Zugzwang,” he says.
“Why, old man? Why would he think you would do that for him?” Berko says. “You barely knew each other.”
“He knew me. He knew me very well, I don’t really know how. He knew how badly I hate losing. That I couldn’t let Litvak bring about this foolishness. I couldn’t. Everything I worked for all my life.” There must be a bitter taste in his mouth; he makes a face. “And now look what happened. They did it.”
“You got in through the tunnel?” Meyer says. “Into the hotel?”
“What tunnel? I walked in the front door. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, Meyerle, but it’s not exactly a high- security building you live in.”
Two or three long minutes unwind from their spool. Out on their closed-in balcony, Goldy and Pinky mutter and curse and hammer at their beds like gnomes at their forges deep beneath the earth.
“I helped him fix himself up,” Hertz says finally. “I waited till he was under. Way, deep down under. Then I took out Gaystik’s gun. I wrapped it in the pillow. Gaystik’s. 38 Detective Special. Rolled the boy over onto his belly. Back of the head. It was quick. There was no pain.”
He licks his lips again, and Berko is there with another cool swallow.
“Too bad you couldn’t do as good a job on yourself,” Berko says.
“I thought I was doing the right thing, that it would put a stop to Litvak.” The old man sounds plaintive, childish. “But then the bastards went ahead and decided to try it without him.”
Ester-Malke takes the lid from a glass jar of mixed nuts on the table beside the couch and stuffs a handful into her mouth. “Don’t think I’m not totally disturbed and horrified by all of this, friends,” she says, hoisting herself to her feet. “But I’m a tired lady in her first trimester, and I’m going to bed.”
“I want to sit with him, sweetness,” Berko says. He adds, “In case he’s faking and he tries to steal the television once we’re asleep.”
“Don’t worry,” Bina says. “He’s already under arrest.”
Landsman stands by the couch, watching the old man’s chest rise and fall. Hertz’s face has the hollows and facets of a flaked arrowhead.
“He’s a bad man,” Landsman says. “And he always was.”
“Yes, but he made up for it by being a terrible father.” Berko stares at Hertz for a long time with tenderness and contempt. The old man looks like some kind of demented swami in that bandage. “What are you going to do?”
“Nothing, what do you mean what am I going to do?”
“I don’t know, you have that twitchy thing happening. You look like you’re going to do something.”
“What?”
“That’s what I’m asking you.”
“I’m not going to do anything,” Landsman says. “What can I do?”
Ester-Malke walks Bina and Landsman down the hall to the front door of the apartment. Landsman puts on his porkpie hat.
“So,” Ester-Malke says.
“So,” say Bina and Landsman.
“I note that the two of you are leaving together.”
“You want us to leave separately?” Landsman says. “I can take the stairs and Bina can ride down in the elevator.”
“Landsman, let me tell you something,” Ester-Malke says. “All these people rioting on the television in Syria, Baghdad, Egypt? In London? Burning cars. Setting fire to embassies. Up in Yakovy, did you see what happened, they were dancing, those fucking maniacs, they were so happy about all this craziness, the whole floor collapsed right onto the apartment underneath. A couple of little girls sleeping in their beds, they got crushed to death. That’s the kind of shit we have to look forward to now. Burning cars and homicidal dancing. I have no idea where this baby is going to be born. My murdering, suicidal father-in-law is sleeping in my living room. Meanwhile, I’m getting this very strange vibration from the two of you. So let me just say that if you and Bina are planning to get back together, excuse me, but that’s all I need.”
Landsman considers this. Any kind of wonder seems likely. That the Jews will pick up and set sail for the promised land to feast on giant grapes and toss their beards in the desert wind. That the Temple will be rebuilt, speedily and in our day. War will cease, ease and plenty and righteousness will be universal, and humankind will be treated to the regular spectacle of lions and lambs cohabiting. Every man will be a rabbi, every woman a holy book, and every suit will come with two pairs of pants. Meyer’s seed, even now, may be wandering through darkness toward redemption, striking at the membrane that separates the legacy of the yids who made him from that of the yids whose errors, griefs, hopes, and calamities went into the production of Bina Gelbfish.
“Maybe it would be better if I took the stairs,” Landsman says.
“You go right ahead and do that, Meyer,” says Bina.
But then when he finally makes it all the way down, he finds her at the bottom, waiting for him.
“What took you so long?” she says.
“I had to stop a time or two on the way.”
“You need to quit smoking. Quit again.”
“I do. I will.” He fishes out his package of Broadways, fifteen left to burn, and arcs it into the lobby trash can like a dime carrying a wish into a fountain. He’s feeling a little giddy, a little tragic. He is ripe for the grand gesture, the operatic mistake. Manic is probably the word. “But that’s not what held me up.”
“You’re really hurt. Tell me you’re not really hurt, walking around so tough and macho when you need to be in the goddamn hospital.” She reaches for his windpipe with the fingers of both hands, ready, as ever, to choke the life from Landsman to show how much she cares. “Are you hurt badly, you idiot?”
“Only in my soul, sweetness,” Meyer says. Though he supposes it’s possible that Rafi Zilberblat’s bullet creased more than his skull. “I just had to stop a couple of times. To think. Or not to think, I don’t know. Every time I let myself try to, you know, breathe, just for ten seconds, with the air full of this thing we’re letting them get away with, I don’t know, I feel like I’m suffocating a little bit.”
Landsman sinks onto a sofa whose bruise-colored cushions give off a strong Sitka odor of mildew, cigarettes, a complicated saltiness that is part stormy sea, part sweat on the lining of a wool fedora. The lobby of the Dnyeper
