After he dies, he wakes up lying facedown in the snow. He can’t feel snow on his cheek. The wild ringing in his ears is gone. He humps himself up to a sitting position. The blood from the back of his head has scattered rhododendrons in the snow. The man and the woman he shot have not moved, but there is no sign of the young Zilberblat who did or did not shoot and kill him. With a sudden clarity of thought and a mounting suspicion that he has forgotten to die, Landsman pats himself down. His watch, wallet, car keys, cell phone, gun, and badge are gone. He looks for his car parked in the distance, along the frontage road. When he sees that his Super Sport is gone, he knows that he is still alive, because only life could offer such a bitter vista.
“Another fucking Zilberblat,” he says. “And they’re all like that.”
He is cold. He considers entering the Big Macher, but the stench of popcorn keeps him away. He turns from the yawning doors and lifts his eyes toward the high hill and beyond it the mountains, black with trees. Then he sits down in the snow. After a while, he lies down. It’s snug and comfortable, and there’s a smell of cool dust, and he closes his eyes and falls asleep, folded up into his nice dark little hole in the wall of the Hotel Zamenhof, and for once in his life, the claustrophobia doesn’t trouble him, not a bit.
22
Landsman is holding a baby boy. The baby cries, for no very grave reason. His wailing constricts Landsman’s heart in a pleasurable way. Landsman feels relieved to discover that he has a fat handsome baby who smells of waffles and soap. He squeezes the puffy feet, gauges the weight of the little grandfather in his arms, at once negligible and vast. He turns to Bina to tell her the good news: It was all a mistake. Here is their boy. But there is no Bina to tell, only the memory in Landsman’s nostrils of rain on her hair. And then he wakes up and realizes that the crying baby is Pinky Shemets, having his diaper changed or registering a protest over some thing or other. Landsman blinks, and the world intrudes in the form of a batik wall covering, and he is hollowed out, as if it’s the first time, by the loss of his son.
Landsman is lying on Berko and Ester-Malke’s bed, on his side, facing the wall with its dyed linen scene of Balinese gardens and savage birds. Someone has undressed him, leaving him in his underpants. He sits up. The skin at the back of his head prickles, and then a cord of pain goes taut. Landsman pats the site of his injury. A bandage meets his fingers, a crinkly oblong of gauze and tape. Surrounding it, a queer hairless patch of scalp. Memories fall on top of one another with a slapping sound like crime-scene photographs fresh from Dr. Shpringer’s death camera. A jocular emergency room tech, an X ray, an injection of morphine, a looming swab dipped in Betadine. Before that, the light from a streetlamp striping the white vinyl ceiling of an ambulance. And before that. Before the ride in the ambulance. Purple slush. Steam from the spilled contents of a human gut. A hornet at his ear. A red jet bursting from the forehead of Rafi Zilberblat. A cipher of holes in a blank expanse of plaster. Landsman backs away from the memory of what happened in the Big Macher parking lot, so quickly that he bumps right into the pang of losing Django Landsman in his dream.
“Woe is me,” Landsman says. He wipes his eyes. He would give up a gland, a minor organ, for a papiros.
The bedroom door opens, and Berko comes in, carrying an almost-full pack of Broadways.
“Have I ever told you that I love you?” Landsman says, knowing full well that he never has.
“You never have, thank God,” Berko says. “I got these from the neighbor, the Fried woman. I told her it was a police seizure.”
“I am insanely grateful.”
“I note the adverb.”
Berko notes also that Landsman has been crying; one eyebrow shoots up, hangs suspended, drifts down like a tablecloth settling onto a table.
“Baby okay?” Landsman says.
“Teeth.” Berko takes a coat hanger from a hook on the back of the bedroom door. On the hanger are Landsman’s clothes, neat and brushed. Berko feels around in the hip pocket of Landsman’s blazer and produces a matchbook. Then he comes and stands by the bed and holds out the papiroses and matches.
“I can’t honestly claim,” says Landsman, “that I know what I’m doing here.”
“It was Ester-Malke’s idea. Knowing how you feel about hospitals. They said you didn’t need to stay.”
“Have a seat.”
There is no chair in the room. Landsman slides over, and Berko sits down on the edge of the bed, causing alarm among the bedsprings.
“It’s really okay if I smoke?”
“Not really, no. Go stand by the window,” Landsman tips himself out of the bed. When he rolls up the bamboo shade on the window, he is surprised to see that it’s pouring rain. The smell of rain blows in through the two inches the window has been cranked open, explaining the fragrance of Bina’s hair in his dream. Landsman looks down to the parking lot of the apartment building and observes that the snow has melted and been washed away. The light feels all wrong, too.
“What time is it?”
“Four-thirty … two,” Berko says without checking his watch.
“What day is it?”
“Sunday.”
Landsman cranks open the window all the way and hooks his left buttock over the sill. Rain falls on his aching head. He lights his papiros and takes a long drag and tries to decide if he’s disturbed by this information. “Long time since I did that,” he says. “Slept through a whole day.”
“You must have needed it,” Berko observes blandly. A sideways look in Landsman’s direction. “Ester-Malke’s the one who took your pants off, by the way. Just so you know.”
Landsman flicks ash out of the window. “I was shot.”
“Grazed. They said it’s more like a kind of burn. They didn’t need to stitch it.”
“There were three of them. Rafael Zilberblat. A pisher I made for his brother. And some chicken. The brother took my car, my wallet. My badge and my sholem. Left me there.”
“So it was reconstructed.”
“I wanted to call for help, but the little ratface Jew took my Shoyfer, too.”
The mention of Landsman’s phone makes Berko smile. “What?” Landsman says.
“So, your pisher’s tooling along. North on the Ickes, headed for Yakovy, Fairbanks, Irkutsk.”
“Dh-huh.”
“Your phone rings. Your pisher answers it.”
“And it’s you?”
“Bina.”
“I like it.”
“Two minutes on the phone with the Zilberblat, she has his whereabouts, his description, the name of his dog when he was eleven. A couple of latkes pick him up five minutes later outside Krestov. Your car is fine. Your wallet still had cash in it.”
Landsman affects to take an interest in the way that fire turns cured tobacco to flakes of ash. “And my badge and gun?” he says.
“Ah.”
“Ah.”
“Your badge and your gun are now in the hands of your commanding officer.”
“Does she intend to return them?”
Berko reaches over and smooths the indentation that Landsman left in the surface of his bed.
“It was strictly line of duty,” Landsman says, his tone sounding whiny even to his own ear. “I got a tip on Rafi Zilberblat.” He shrugs and runs his fingers along the bandage at the back of his head. “I just wanted to talk to the yid.”