The Yiddish Policemen’s Union. Michael Chabon
crab traps, breaking the windows of the Alaska Native Brotherhood hall, and setting spectacular fire to a shedful of Roman candles and cherry bombs. The driver of a truckload of angry yids lost control of the wheel and plowed into the grocery store where Laurie Jo worked as a checker, killing her instantly. The Synagogue Riots remain the lowest moment in the bitter and inglorious history of Tlingit-Jewish relations.
“Is that my fault? Is that my problem?” Landsman’s mother yelled back. “An Indian living in my house, that is something I do not need!”
The children listened to them for a while, Johnny Bear standing in the doorway, kicking at his duffel bag with the toe of his sneaker.
“Good thing you don’t speak Yiddish,” Landsman told the younger boy.
“I don’t need to, dickwad,” said Johnny the Jew. “I been hearing this shit all my life.”
After the thing was settled—and it had been settled before Landsman’s mother ever started with the yelling—Hertz came in to say goodbye. His son had two inches on him. When he took the boy in his arms for a quick stiff hug, it looked like the side chair was embracing the couch. Then he stepped away.
“I’m sorry, John,” he said. He gripped his son by the ears and held on tight. He scanned the boy’s face like a telegram. “I want you to know that. I don’t want you ever to look at me and think that I’m feeling anything but sorry.”
“I want to live with you,” said the boy tonelessly.
“So you have mentioned.” The words were harsh and the manner callous, but all at once—it shocked the hell out of Landsman—there was a shine of tears in Uncle Hertz’s eyes. “I’m well-known, John, as a complete son of a bitch. You’d be worse off with me than living in the street.” He looked around his sister’s living room, the plastic slipcovers on the furniture, the art like barbed wire, the abstract menorah. “God knows what they’ll make of you here.”
“A Jew,” said Johnny Bear, and it was hard to tell whether he meant it as a boast or a prediction of ruin. “Like you.”
“That seems unlikely,” Hertz said. “I’d like to see them manage that. Goodbye, John.”
He gave Naomi a pat on the head. Just before he went out, he stopped to shake hands with Landsman. “Help your cousin, Meyerle, he’s going to need it.”
“He looks like he can help himself.”
“He does, doesn’t he?” said Uncle Hertz. “That at least he gets from me.”
Now Ber Shemets, as he came in time to style himself, lives like a Jew, wears a skullcap and four-corner like a Jew. He reasons as a Jew, worships as a Jew, fathers and loves his wife and serves the public as a Jew. He spins theory with his hands, keeps kosher, and sports a penis cut (his father saw to it before abandoning the infant Bear) on the bias. But to look at, he’s pure Tlingit. Tartar eyes, dense black hair, broad face built for joy but trained in the craft of sorrow. The Bears are a big people, and Berko stands two meters tall in his socks and weighs in at 110 kilograms. He has a big head, big feet, big belly and hands. Everything about Berko is big except for the baby in his arms, smiling shyly at Landsman with his thatch of black horsehair standing up like magnetized iron filings. Cute as a button, Landsman would be the first to acknowledge, but even after a year, the sight of Pinky still puts a dent in the soft place behind Landsman’s sternum. Pinky was born exactly two years after Django’s due date—September 22.
“Emanuel Lasker was a famous chess player,” Landsman informs Berko, who takes a mug of coffee from Ester-Malke and frowns into the steam. “A German Jew. In the teens and twenties.” He spent the hour between five and six at his computer in the desolate squad room, seeing what he could turn up. “A mathematician. Lost to Capablanca, like everybody else back then. The book was in the room. And a chessboard, set up that way.”
Berko has heavy eyelids, soulful, bruised-looking, but when he drops them down over those pop eyes, it’s like the beam of a flashlight bleeding through a slit, a look so cold and skeptical it can lead innocent men to doubt their own alibis.
“And you feel,” he says, with a significant glance at the bottle of beer in Landsman’s hand, “that the configuration of pieces on the board, what?” The slit draws narrower, the beam flares brighter. “Encodes the name of his killer?”
“In the alphabet of Atlantis,” Landsman says.
“Uh-huh.”
“The Jew played chess. And he tied off with tefillin. And somebody killed him with a great deal of care and discretion. I don’t know. Maybe there’s nothing in the chess angle. I can’t get anything out of it. I went through the whole book, but I couldn’t figure out which game he was playing. If any. Those diagrams, I don’t know, I get a headache looking at them. I get a headache just looking at the board, a curse on it.”
Landsman’s voice comes out sounding every bit as hollow and hopeless as he feels, which was not his intention at all. Berko looks over the top of Pinky’s head at his wife, to see if he really needs to worry about Landsman.
“Tell you what, Meyer. If you put down that beer,” Berko says, trying and failing not to sound like a policeman, “I’ll let you hold this nice baby. How about that? Look at him. Look at those thighs, come on. You have to squeeze them. Put down the beer, all right? And hold this nice baby for a minute.”
“He is a nice baby,” Landsman says. He removes another inch of beer from the bottle. Then he puts it down, and shuts up, and takes the baby, and smells him, and does the usual injury to his heart. Pinky smells like yogurt and laundry soap. A hint of his father’s bay rum. Landsman carries the baby to the doorway of the kitchen, and tries not to inhale, and watches as Ester-Malke peels a sheet of waffles from the iron. She is using an old Westinghouse with Bakelite handles in the shape of leaves. It can blast out four crisp waffles at a time.
“Buttermilk?” Berko says, studying the chessboard now, stroking a finger along his heavy upper lip.
“What else?” Ester-Malke says.
“Real, or milk with vinegar?”
“We did a double-blind test, Berko.” Ester-Malke hands Landsman a plate of waffles in exchange for her younger son, and even though he doesn’t feel like eating, Landsman is happy to make the trade. “You can’t tell the difference, remember?”
“Well, he can’t play chess, either,” Landsman says. “But look at him pretending.”
“Fuck you, Meyer,” Berko says. “Okay, now, seriously, which piece is the battleship?”
The family chess madness had burned out or redirected its energies by the time Berko came to live with Landsman and his mother. Isidor Landsman had been dead for six years, and Hertz Shemets had transferred his skills at feinting and attack to a much larger chessboard. That meant there was no one to teach Berko the game but Landsman, a duty that Landsman carefully neglected.
“Butter?” Ester-Malke says. She ladles fresh batter into the cells of the waffle iron while Pinky sits on her hip and offers his unsolicited advice.
“No butter.”
“Syrup?”
“No syrup.”
“You don’t really want a waffle, do you, Meyer?” Berko says. He abandons the pretense of studying the board and moves on to the volume by Siegbert Tarrasch as if he will be able to make heads or tails of that.
“Not in all honesty,” Landsman says. “But I know that I should.”
Ester-Malke eases the lid of the iron down onto the grids of batter. “I’m pregnant,” she says in a mild tone.
“What?” Berko says, looking up from the book of orderly surprises. “Fuck!” This word is spoken in American, Berko’s preferred language for swearing and harsh talk. He starts working over the stick of imaginary chewing gum that seems to appear in his mouth whenever he’s