“Berko said he disowned him,” Ester-Malke says, reading over Landsman’s shoulder. “He said the old man wanted nothing to do with the kid. I guess he changed his mind.”
Reading the article, Landsman suffers a cramp of envy toward Mendel Shpilman, tempered by pity. Landsman struggled for many years under the weight of fatherly expectations, but he has no idea how it might feel to fulfill or exceed them. Isidor Landsman, he knows, would have loved to father a son as gifted as Mendel. Landsman can’t help thinking that if he had been able to play chess like Mendel Shpilman, maybe his father would have felt he had something to live for, a small messiah to redeem him. Landsman thinks of the letter that he sent his father, hoping to gain his freedom from the burden of that life and those expectations. He considers the years he spent believing that he caused Isidor Landsman a fatal grief. How much guilt did Mendel Shpilman feel? Had he believed what was said of him, in his gift or wild calling? In the attempt to free himself from that burden, did Mendel feel that he must turn his back not only on his father but on all the Jews in the world?
“I don’t think Rabbi Shpilman ever changes his mind,” Landsman says. “I think somebody would have to change it for him.”
“Who would that be?”
“If I had to guess? I’m thinking that maybe it was the mother.”
“Good for her. Trust a mother not to let them toss her son out like an empty bottle.”
“Trust a mother,” Landsman says. He studies the photograph in the Tog of Mendel Shpilman at fifteen, beard patchy, sidelocks flying, coolly presiding over a conference of young Talmudists who seethed and sulked around him. “The Tzaddik Ha-Dor, in Better Days,” reads the caption.
“What are you thinking about, Meyer?” Ester Malke says, striking a note of doubt.
“The future,” Landsman says.
23
A mob of black-hat Jews chugs its way, a freight train of grief, from the gates of the cemetery — the house of life, they call it — up a hillside toward a hole cut into the mud. A pine box slick with rain pitches and tosses on the surf of weeping men. Satmars hold umbrellas over the heads of Verbovers. Gerers and Shtrakenzers and Viznitzers link arms with the boldness of school girls on a lark. Rivalries, grudges, sectarian disputes, mutual excommunications, they’ve been laid aside for a day so that everyone can mourn with due passion a yid who was forgotten by them until last Friday night. Not even a yid — the shell of a yid, thinned to transparency around the hard void of a twenty-year junk habit. Every generation loses the messiah it has failed to deserve. Now the pious of the Sitka District have pinpointed the site of their collective unworthiness and gathered in the rain to lay it in the ground.
Around the grave site, black clumps of fir trees sway like grieving Chasids. Beyond the cemetery walls, hats and black umbrellas shelter thousands of the unworthiest of the unworthy against the rain. Deep structures of obligation and credit have determined which are permitted to enter the gates of the house of life and which must stand outside kibitzing, with rain soaking into their hose. These deep structures, in turn, have drawn the attention of detectives from Burglary, Contraband, and Fraud. Landsman picks out Skolsky, Burwitz, Feld, and Globus, always with his shirttail hanging out, perched on the roof of a gray Ford Victoria. It’s not every day that the entire Verbover hierarchy comes out and stands around on a hillside, posed in relation to one another like circles on a prosecutor’s flow chart. On the roof of a Wal-Mart a quarter mile away, three Americans in blue windbreakers point their telephoto lenses and the trembling pistil of a condenser microphone. A stout blue cord of latkes and motorcycle units has been stitched through the crowd to keep it from coming undone. The press is here, too, cameramen and reporters from Channel I, from the local papers, crews from the NBC affiliate over in Juneau and a cable news channel. Dennis Brennan, without the sense or maybe enough felt in the world to cover that big head of his against the rain. Then you have the half-believing, and the half-observant, and the modern Orthodox, and the merely credulous, and the skeptical, and the curious, and a healthy delegation from the Einstein Chess Club.
Landsman can see them all from the vantage of his powerlessness and his exile, reunited witla his Super Sport on a barren hilltop across Mizmor Boulevard from the house of life. He’s parked in a cul-de-sac some developer laid out, paved, then saddled with the name of Tikvah Street, the Hebrew word denoting hope and connoting to the Yiddish ear on this grim afternoon at the end of time seventeen flavors of irony. The hoped for houses were never built. Wooden stakes tied with orange flags and nylon cord map out a miniature Zion in the mud around the cul-de-sac, a ghostly eruv of failure. Landsman is flying solo, sober as a carp in a bathtub, clutching a pair of binoculars in his clammy grip. The need for a drink is like a missing tooth. He can’t keep his mind off it, and yet there’s something pleasurable in probing the gap. Or maybe the ache of something missing is just the hole left behind when Bina lifted his badge.
Landsman waits out the funeral in his car, studying it through the good Zeiss lenses and running down the car battery with a CBC radio documentary about the blues singer Robert Johnson, whose singing voice sounds as broken and reedy as a Jew saying kaddish in the rain. Landsman has a carton of Broadways, and he burns them wildly, trying to drive from the Super Sport’s interior a lingering odor of Willy Zilberblat. It’s a foul smell, like a pot of water in which two days ago somebody boiled noodles. Berko tried to persuade Landsman that he was imagining this residue of the little Zilberblat’s brief tenure inside Landsman’s life. But Landsman is happy for the excuse to fumigate with cigarettes, which don’t kill the urge for a drink but somehow dull its bite.
Berko also tried to persuade Landsman to wait a day or two on the matter of Mendel Shpilman’s death by misadventure. As they rode down in the elevator from the apartment, he dared Landsman to look him straight in the eye and tell him that Landsman’s plan for this damp Monday afternoon did not consist of showing up, shorn of his badge and his gun, to hurl impertinent questions at the grieving queen of gangsters as she departed from the house of life and the remains of her only son.
“You can’t get near her,” Berko insisted as he followed Landsman out of the elevator and across the lobby to the door of the Dnyeper. Berko was in his elephantine pajamas. Pieces of a suit were spilling out of his arms. He had his shoes hooked over two fingers, his belt around his neck. From the breast pocket of his mustard pajamas with their white pinstripe the points of two slices of toast protruded like a pocket square. “And even if you can, you still can’t.”
He was making a nice policeman-like distinction between the things that balls could accomplish and those that the breakers of balls would never permit.
“They will stiff-arm you,” Berko said. “They will shake out your pants for the small change. They will bring you up on charges.”
Landsman could not refute the point. Batsheva Shpilman rarely set foot beyond the boundary of her deep and tiny world. But when she did, it was likely to be in a heavy thicket of iron and lawyers. “No badge, no backing, no warrant, no investigation, looking half crazy with egg on your suit, you bother the lady, you could get shot, with only minor aftereffects for the shooters.”
Berko trailed Landsman out of the building, dancing into his socks and shoes, down to the bus stop at the corner.
“You’re saying don’t do it, Berko,” Landsman said, “or just don’t do it without you? You think I’ll let you piss away whatever shot you and Ester-Malke have to get through to the other end of Reversion? You’re crazy. I’ve done you a lot of disservices and caused you a lot of trouble over the years, but I hope I’m not that much of an ass. And if you’re saying you don’t think I should do it period, well. . . ”