Zimbalist struggled for the next hour to understand that move, and for the strength to resist confiding to a ten-year-old whose universe was bounded by the study house, the shul, and the door to his mother’s kitchen, the sorrow and dark rapture of Zimbalist’s love for the dying widow, how some secret thirst of his own was quenched every time he dribbled cool water through her peeling lips.
They played through the remainder of their hour without further conversation. But when it was time for the boy to go, he turned in the doorway of the shop on Ringelblum Avenue and took hold of Zimbalist’s sleeve. He hesitated as if reluctant or embarrassed. Or maybe was feeling afraid. Then he got a hard pinched expression on his face that Zimbalist recognized as the internalized voice of the rebbe, reminding his son of his duty to serve the community.
“When you see her tonight,” Mendel said, “tell her that I send her my blessing. Tell her I say hello.”
“I will,” Zimbalist said, or remembers saying.
“Tell her from me that all will be well.”
The little monkey face, the sad mouth, the eyes saying that for as much as he knew you and loved you, he might still be pulling your leg.
“Oh, I will,” Zimbalist said, and then he broke down in hiccuping sobs. The boy took a clean handkerchief from his pocket and gave it to Zimbalist. Patiently, he held the boundary maven’s hand. His fingers were soft, a bit sticky. On the inside of his wrist, his younger sister Reyzl had scrawled her name in red ink. When Zimbalist regained his composure, Mendel let go of his hand and stuffed the damp handkerchief into his pocket.
“See you tomorrow,” he said.
That night, when Zimbalist crept onto the ward, just before he spread his towel on the floor, he spooned the boy’s blessing into the ear of his unconscious mistress. He did it without hope and with very little in the way of faith. In the dark of five A.M., Zimbalist’s lady friend woke him and told him to go home and eat breakfast with his wife. It was the first coherent thing she had said in weeks.
“Did you give her my blessing?” Mendel asked him when they sat down to play later that morning.
“I did.”
“Where is she?”
“At Sitka General.”
“With other people? On a ward?”
Zimbalist nodded.
“And you gave my blessing to the other people, too?”
The idea had never occurred to Zimbalist. “I didn’t say anything to them,” he said. “I don’t know them.”
“There was more than enough blessing to go around,” Mendel informed him. “Tell them. Give it to them tonight.”
But that night, when Zimbalist went to visit his lady friend, she had been moved to another ward, one where nobody was in danger of death, and somehow or other, Zimbalist forgot the boy’s reminder. Two weeks later, the woman’s doctors sent her home, shaking their heads in puzzlement. Two weeks after that, an X ray showed no trace of the cancer in her body.
By then she and Zimbalist had broken off their affair by mutual agreement, and he slept every night in the marital bed. The daily meetings with Mendel in the back of the shop on Ringelblum Avenue continued for a while, but Zimbalist found that he had lost his pleasure in them. The apparent miracle of the cancer cure forever altered his relations with Mendel Shpilman. Zimbalist could not shake a sense of vertigo that came over him every time Mendel looked at him with his close-set eyes, flecked with pity and gold. The boundary maven’s faith in faithlessness had been shaken by simple question — How is she? — by a dozen words of blessing, by a simple bishop move that seemed to imply chess beyond the chess that Zimbalist knew.
It was as repayment for the miracle that Zimbalist had arranged the secret match between Mendel and Melekh Gaystik, king of the Cafe Einstein and future champion of the world. Three games in the back room of a shop on Ringelblum Avenue, with the boy wining two out of three. When this act of subterfuge was uncovered — and not the other; no one else ever learned f the affair — the visits between Zimbalist and Mendel Shpilman were broken of. After that, he and Mendel never shared another hour at the board.
“That’s what comes from giving out blessings,” says Zimbalist the boundary maven. “But it took Mendel Shpilman a long time to figure that out.”
15
“You met this ganef,” Landsman half asks Berko as they hump along behind the boundary maven through the Sabbath snow to the rebbe’s door. For the journey across the platz, Zimbalist washed his face and armpits in a sink at the back of the shop. He wet a comb and raked all seventeen of his hairs into a moire across the top of his head. Then he put on a brown corduroy sport coat, an orange down vest, black galoshes, and over everything, a belted bearskin coat trailing a smell of mothballs like a muffler twenty feet long. From a moose antler by the door, the maven took a football or miniature ottoman made of wolverine fur and set it on top of his head. Now he waddles along ahead of the detectives, reeking of naphthalene, looking like a small bear urged by cruel masters to perform demeaning feats. Under an hour before dark, and the snow falling is like pieces of broken daylight. The Sitka sky is dull silver plate and tarnishing fast.
“Yeah, I met him,” Berko says. “They brought me in to see him right after I started working the Fifth Precinct. They had a ceremony in his office, over the study hall on South Ansky Street. He pinned something to the crown of my latke, a gold leaf. After that he used to send me a nice basket of fruit at Purim. Delivered right to my house, even though I never gave out my home address. Every year pears and oranges until we moved out to the Shvartsn-Yam.”
“I hear he’s kind of on the large side.”
“He’s cute. Cute as a fucking button.”
“That stuff the maven was just telling us about Mendel. The wonders and miracles. Berko, you believe any of that?”
“You know it’s not about believing for me, Meyer. It never has been.”
“But do you — I’m curious — do you really feel like you’re waiting for Messiah?”
Berko shrugs, uninterested in the question, keeping his eyes on the track of the black galoshes in the snow. “It’s Messiah,” he says. “What else can you do but wait?”
“And then when he comes, what? Peace on earth?”
“Peace, prosperity. Plenty to eat. Nobody sick or lonely. Nobody selling anything. I don’t know.”
“And Palestine? When Messiah comes, all the Jews move back there? To the promised land? Fur hats and all?”
“I heard Messiah cut a deal with the beavers,” Berko says."No more fur.”
Under the glow of a big iron gas lamp mounted, by an iron bracket, to the front of the rebbe’s house, a loose knot of men is killing the last of the week. Hangers-on, the rebbe-struck, an outright simpleton or two. And the usual impromptu mess of would-be Swiss Guards who make the job tougher for the biks holding up either side of the front door. Everybody’s telling everybody else to go home and bless the light with their families, leave the rebbe to eat his Sabbath dinner in peace already. Nobody’s quite leaving, nobody’s quite sticking around. They swap authentic lies about recent miracles and portents, new Canadian immigration scams, and forty new versions of the story of the Indian with the hammer, how he recited the Alenu while dancing an Indian patch tanz.
When they hear the crunch and chiming of Zimbalist’s galoshes coming toward them across the platz, they leave off making their noises, one by one, like a calliope running out .of steam. Fifty years Zimbalist has been living in their midst and he’s still, by some tangle of choice and necessity, an outsider. He’s a wizard, a juju man, with his fingers on the strings thut ring the District, and his palms cupping the brackish water of their souls every Sabbath. Perched at the tops of the boundary maven’s poles, his crews can see into every window, they can listen in on every telephon call. Or at least that is what these men have heard.