The Yiddish Policemen’s Union. Michael Chabon
the numbers. They’re saying it’s going to be under forty percent.” Berko shakes his head, which is pretty much the national gesture at the moment when it comes to the question of where the other Sitka Jews are going to go, or what they are going to do, after Reversion. Actually, no guarantees have been made at all—the 40 percent figure is just another rumor at the end of time—and there are some wild-eyed radicals claiming that the actual number of Jews who will be permitted to remain as legal residents of the newly enlarged state of Alaska when Reversion is finally enforced will be closer to 10 or even 5 percent. These are the same people going around calling for armed resistance, secession, a declaration of independence, and so forth. Landsman has paid very little attention to the controversies and rumors, to the most important question in his local universe.
“The old man?” Landsman says. “Doesn’t he have any juice left?”
For forty years—as Denny Brennan’s series revealed—Hertz Shemets used his position as local director of the FBI’s domestic surveillance program to run his own private game on the Americans. The Bureau first recruited him in the fifties to fight Communists and the Yiddish Left, which, though fractious, was strong, hardened, embittered, suspicious of the Americans, and, in the case of the former Israelis, not especially grateful to be here. Hertz Shemets’s brief was to monitor and infiltrate the local Red population; Hertz wiped them out. He fed the socialists to the Communists, and the Stalinists to the Trotskyites, and the Hebrew Zionists to the Yiddish Zionists, and when feeding time was over, he wiped the mouths of those still standing and fed them to each other. Starting in the late sixties, Hertz was turned loose on the nascent radical movement among the Tlingit, and in time he pulled its teeth and claws, too.
But those activities were a front, as Brennan showed, for Hertz’s real agenda: to obtain Permanent Status for the District: P.S., or even, in his wildest dreams, statehood. “Enough wandering,” Landsman can remember his uncle saying to his father, whose soul retained to the day he died a tinge of romantic Zionism. “Enough with expulsions and migrations and dreaming about next year in the camel lands. It’s time for us to take what we can get and stay put.”
So every year, it turned out, Uncle Hertz diverted up to half his operating budget to corrupt the people who had authorized it. He bought senators, baited congressional honeypots, and above all romanced rich American Jews whose influence he saw as critical to his plan. Three times Permanent Status bills came up and died, twice in committee, once in a bitter and close battle on the floor. A year after that floor fight, the current president of America ran and won on a platform that showcased the long-overdue enforcement of Reversion, pledging to restore “Alaska for Alaskans, wild and clean.” And Dennis Brennan chased Hertz under a log.
“The old man?” Berko says. “Down there on his vest-pocket Indian reservation? With his goat? And a freezer full of moose meat? Yeah, he’s a fucking gray eminence in the corridors of power. But anyway, it’s looking all right.”
“Is it?”
“Ester-Malke and I both already got three-year work permits.”
“That’s a good sign.”
“So they say.”
“Naturally, you wouldn’t want to do anything to endanger your status.”
“No.”
“Disobey orders. Piss somebody off. Neglect your express duty.”
“Never.”
“That’s settled, then.” Landsman reaches into the pocket of his blazer and takes out the chess set. “Did I ever tell you about the note my father left when he killed himself?”
“I heard it was a poem.”
“Call it doggerel,” Landsman says. “Six lines of Yiddish verse addressed to an unnamed female.”
“Oho.”
“No, no. Nothing racy. It was, what, it was an expression of regret for his inadequacy. Chagrin at his failure. An avowal of devotion and respect. A touching statement of gratitude for the comfort she had given him, and above all, for the measure of forgetfulness that her company had brought to him over the long, bitter course of the years.”
“You have it memorized.”
“I did. But I noticed something about it that bothered me. So then I made myself forget it.”
“What did you notice?”
Landsman ignores the question as Mrs. Kalushiner arrives with the eggs, six of them, peeled and arranged on a dish with six round indentations, each the size of an egg’s fat bottom. Salt. Pepper. A jar of mustard.
“Maybe if they took the leash off him,” Berko says, pointing to Hershel with his thumb, “he would go out for a sandwich or something.”
“He likes the leash,” Mrs. Kalushiner says. “Without it, he doesn’t sleep.” She leaves them again.
“That bothers me,” Berko says, watching Hershel.
“I know what you mean.”
Berko salts an egg and bites it. His teeth leave castellations in the boiled white. “So this poem, then,” he says. “The verse.”
“So, naturally,” Landsman says, “everyone assumed the addressee of my father’s verse to be my mother. Starting with my mother.”
“She fit the description.”
“So it was generally agreed. That is why I never told anybody what I had deduced. In my first official case as a junior shammes.”
“Which was?”
“Which was that if you put together the first letters of each of the six lines of the poem, they spelled out a name. Caissa.”
“Caissa? What kind of name is that?”
“I believe it is Latin,” Landsman says. “Caissa is the goddess of chess players.”
He opens the lid of the pocket chess set that he bought at the drugstore on Korczak Platz. The pieces in play remain as he arranged them at the Taytsh-Shemets apartment earlier that morning, as left behind by the man who called himself Emanuel Lasker. Or by his killer, or by pale Caissa, the goddess of chess players, dropping in to bid farewell to another one of her hapless worshippers. Black down to three pawns, a pair of knights, a bishop, and a rook. White holding on to all of his major and minor pieces and a pair of pawns, one of them a move away from promotion. A strange disordered aspect to the situation, as if the game that led up to this move had been a chaotic one.
“If it was anything else, Berko,” Landsman says, apologizing with upturned palms. “A deck of cards. A crossword puzzle. A bingo card.”
“I get it,” Berko says.
“It had to be an unfinished goddamned game of chess.”
Berko turns the board around and studies it for a moment or two, then looks up at Landsman. Now is the time for you to ask me, he says with those great dark eyes of his.
“So. Like I said. I need to ask you a favor.”
“No,” Berko says, “you don’t.”
“You heard the lady. You saw her black-flag it. The thing was a piece of shit to begin with. Bina made it official.”
“You don’t think so.”
“Please, Berko, don’t start having respect for my judgment now,” Landsman says. “Not after all this work I’ve put into undermining it.”
Berko has been staring at the dog with increasing fixity. Abruptly, he gets up and goes over to the stage. He clomps up the three wooden steps and stands looking down at Hershel. Then he holds out his hand to be sniffed. The dog clambers back into a sitting position and reads with his nose the transcript of the back of Berko’s hand, babies and waffles and the interior of a 1971 Super Sport. Berko crouches heavily beside the dog and unhooks