“Why?” Landsman wants to know. “Why did the games have to be kept secret?”
“Because this boy,” the boundary maven says. “The one who died in a hotel room on Max Nordau Street. Not a nice hotel, I imagine.”
“A fleabag,” Landsman says.
“He was shooting heroin into his arm?”
Landsman nods, and after a hard second or two, Zimbalist nods, too.
“Yes. Of course. Nu. The reason why I was obliged to arrange the games in secret was that this boy had been forbidden to play chess with outsiders. Somehow or other, I never learned how, Mendele’s father got wind of the match against Gaystik. It was a near thing for me. In spite of the fact that my wife was a relative of the father, I almost lost his haskama, which at that time was the foundation of my business. I built this whole operation on that endorsement.”
“The father. You’re not saying — it was Heskel Shpilman,” Berko says. “The man there in the picture is the son of the Verbover rebbe.”
Landsman notices how quiet it is on Verbov Island, in the snow, inside a stone barn, with dark coming on, as the profane week and the world that profaned it prepare to be plunged into the flame of two matched candles.
“That’s right,” Zimbalist says at last. “Mendel Shpilman, The only son. He had a twin brother who was born dead. Later, that was interpreted as a sign.”
Landsman says, “A sign of what? That he would be a prodigy? That he would turn out to be a junkie living in a cheap Untershtat flop?”
“Not that,” says Zimbalist. “That nobody imagined.”
“They said … they used to say … ” Berko begins. He screws up his face, as if he knows what he’ll say next is going to irk Landsman or give him cause for scorn. He unscrews his brown eyes, lets it pass. He can’t bring himself to repeat it. “Mendel Shpilman. Dear God. I heard some stories.”
“A lot of stories,” Zimbalist says. “Nothing but stories till he was twenty years old.”
“What kind of stories?” Landsman says, duly irked. “Stories about what? Tell me already, damn you.”
14
So Zimbalist tells them a Mendel story.
A certain woman, he says, was dying of cancer at Sitka General Hospital. A woman of his acquaintance, call her. This was back in 1973. The woman was twice a widow, her first husband a gambler shot by shtarkers in Germany before the war, her second a string monkey in Zimbalist’s employ who got tangled in a live power line. It was through supporting the widow of his dead worker with cash and favors that Zimbalist got to know her. It’s not impossible that they fell in love. They were both past the age of foolish passion, so they were passionate without being fools. She was a dark, lean woman already in the habit of controlling her appetites. They kept their affair a secret from everyone, not least Mrs. Zimbalist.
To visit his lady friend in the hospital when she took ill, Zimbalist resorted to subterfuge, stealth, and the bribing of orderlies. He slept on a towel on the floor of the ward, curled between her bed and the wall. In half-dark, when his mistress called out from the distances of morphine, he would spill water between cracked lips and cool her forehead with a damp cloth. The clock on the hospital wall hummed to itself, got antsy, kept snapping off pieces of the night with its minute hand. In the morning Zimbalist would creep back to his shop on Ringelblum Avenue — he told his wife he was sleeping there because his snoring was so bad — and wait for the boy.
Almost every morning after worship and study, Mendel Shpilman would come and play chess. Chess was permitted, even though the Verbover rabbinate and the larger community of the pious viewed it as a waste of the boy’s time. The older Mendel got — the more dazzling his feats of scholarship, the brighter his reputation for acumen beyond his years — the more painful this waste appeared. It was not just Mendel’s memory, the agile reasoning, the grasp of precedent, history, law. No, even as a kid, Mendel Shpilman seemed to intuit the messy human flow that both powered the Law and required its elaborate system of drains and sluices. Fear, doubt, lust, dishonesty, broken vows, murder and love, uncertainty about the intentions of God and men, little Mendel saw all of that not only in the Aramaic abstract but when it appeared in his father’s study, clothed in the dark serge and juicy mother tongue of everyday life. If conflicts ever arose in the boy’s mind, doubts about the relevance of the Law that he was learning in the Verbover court at the feet of a bunch of king-size ganefs and crooks, they never showed. Not when he was a kid who believed, and not when the day came that he turned his back on it all. He had the kind of mind that could hold and consider contradictory propositions without losing its balance.
It was because the Shpilmans were so proud of his excellence as a Jewish son and scholar that they tolerated the side of Mendel’s character that loved only to play. Mendel was always getting up elaborate pranks and hoaxes, staging plays that featured his sisters, his aunts, the duck. Some people thought the greatest miracle Mendel ever performed was to persuade his formidable father, year after year, to take the part of Queen Vashti in the Purimshpiel. The sight of that somber emperor, that mountain of dignity, that fearsome bulk mincing around in high-heeled shoes! A blond wig! Lipstick and rouge, bangles and spangles! It might have been the most horrible feat of female impersonation Jewry ever produced. People loved it. And they loved Mendel for making it happen each year. But it was just another proof of the love that Heskel Shpilman had for his boy. And it was the same loving indulgence that permitted Mendel to waste an hour every day at chess, with the proviso that his opponent be chosen from the community of Verbov.
Mendel chose the boundary maven, the lone outsider in their midst. It was a small display of rebellion or perversity that some, in later years, would have occasion to revisit. But in the Verbov orbit, only Zimbalist had even a prayer of beating Mendel.
“How is she?” Mendel said to Zimbalist one morning after the lady friend had been dying at Sitka General for two months and was nearly gone.
Zimbalist experienced a shock at the question — nothing to compare to the fate of the widow’s second husband, of course, but enough to stop his heart for a beat or two. He remembers every game that he and Mendel Shpilman ever played against each other, he says, except for this one; of this game he can manage to recall a solitary move. Zimbalist’s wife was a Shpilman, a cousin to this boy. Zimbalist’s livelihood, his honor, perhaps even his life, demanded that the secret of his adultery be kept. He was absolutely certain that so far it had been. Through his wires and strings, the boundary maven felt every whisper and rumor the way a spider hears in its feet the thrashings of a fly. There was no way word of it could have reached Mendel Shpilman without Zimbalist hearing about it first.
He said, “How is who?”
The boy stared at him. Mendel was not a handsome kid. He had a perpetual flush, close-set eyes, a second and hints of a third chin without clear benefit of a first. But the eyes, though too small and too near the bridge of his nose, were dense and fitful with color, like the spots on a butterfly wing, blue, green, gold. Pity, mockery, forgiveness. No judgment. No reproach.
“Never mind,” Mendel said gently. Then he moved his queen’s bishop, returning it to its original position on the board.
The move had no purpose that Zimbalist, pondering it, could see. At one moment fantastic schools of chess seemed to be contained or implied by it. The next it appeared to be only what, in all likelihood, it was: a kind of retraction.