“Three hundred boys are ready to die at his back,” Roboy said, peevish. “Thirty thousand Verbovers will be staking their lives and fortunes on this man. Uprooting their homes, putting their families at risk. If others follow, then we are talking about millions. I’m glad you can make jokes about that. I’m glad it doesn’t make you nervous to look out that window and watch the sky and know that he is finally on his way.”
Litvak stopped putting away the pieces and looked out the window again. Cormorants, gulls, a dozen fanciful variations on the basic duck, having no names in Yiddish. At any moment any one of them, wings spread against the sunset, might be taken for an approaching Piper Super Cub, coming in low from the southwest. Looking at the sky was making Litvak nervous, too. But theirs was not by definition an endeavor that attracted men with the talent for waiting.
I hope that he is the Tz H-D I really do
“No, you don’t,” Roboy said. “That’s a lie. You’re just in it for the stakes. For the game.”
Following the accident that took Litvak’s wife and his voice, it was Dr. Rudolf Buchbinder, the mad dentist of Ibn Ezra Street, who had rebuilt his jaw, restored its masonry in acrylic and titanium. And when Litvak found himself addicted to painkillers, it was the dentist who had sent him for treatment to an old friend, Dr. Max Roboy. Years later, when Cashdollar asked his man in Sitka for help fulfilling the divinely inspired mission of the president of America, Litvak thought at once of Buchbinder and Roboy.
It had taken a lot longer, not to mention every last ounce of chutzpah Litvak had, to work Heskel Shpilman into the plan. Endless pilpul and haggling through Baronshteyn. Stiff resistance from career men at Justice who viewed Shpilman and Litvak—with justice—as a ganglord and a hatchetman. At last, after months of false alarms and cancellations, a meeting with the big man at the Ringelblum Avenue Baths.
A Tuesday morning, snow twisting down in sloppy helixes, four inches of new snow on the ground. Too new, too early for the snowplow. At the corner of Ringelblum and Glatshteyn, a chestnut vendor, snow on his red umbrella, hiss and shimmer of the roasting box, parallel grooves of his cart wheels framing the slurry of his footprints in the snow. So quiet you could hear the clockwork thunking in the traffic signal box and the vibration of the pager on the hip of the gunman by the door. A pair of gunmen, those great red bears they kept to guard the body of the Verbover rebbe.
As the Rudashevsky biks handed Litvak along from the door, up the cement stairs with the vinyl treads, down the mine shaft of a hallway to the front door of the baths, the fists of their faces all cupped a minor light. Mischief, pity, the glint of a prankster, a torturer, a priest preparing to uncover the cannibal god. As for the ancient Russian cashier in his steel cage, the burly attendant in his bunker of folded white towels, these yids had no eyes at all, as far as Litvak ever knew. They kept their heads down, blinded by fear and discretion. They were elsewhere, drinking coffee at the Polar-Shtern, still at home in their beds with their wives. The baths were not even open for business at this hour. There was nobody here, nobody at all, and the attendant who slid a pair of threadbare towels across the counter to Litvak was a ghost serving up a winding sheet to a dead man.
Litvak stripped and hung up his clothes on two steel hooks. He could smell the tidal flux of the baths, chlorine and armpit and a ripe salt vapor that might on second thought have been the pickle factory on the ground floor. There was nothing to weaken him, if that was part of the intent, in obliging him to take off his clothes. His scars were numerous, in certain instances horrible, and they had their effect. He heard a low whistle from one of the two Rudashevskys working the locker room. Litvak’s body was a parchment scribed by pain and violence on which they could only hope to make the barest exegesis. He slipped his pad from the hip pocket of his jacket on its hook.
Like what you see?
The Rudashevskys could not agree on a fitting reply. One nodded; the other shook his head. They exchanged responses, to the satisfaction of neither. Then they gave him up and sent him through the misty glass door to the steam room, to confront the body they guarded.
That body, the horror and the splendor of it, naked as a giant bloodshot eyeball without a socket. Litvak had seen it only once before, years ago, topped with a fedora, rolled tight as a wad of Pinar del Río into a stiff black greatcoat that swept the toes of his dainty black boots. Now it emerged ponderous from the steam, a slab of wet limestone webbed with a black lichen of hair. Litvak felt like a fogbound airplane buffeted by updrafts into the surprise of a mountain. The belly pregnant with elephant triplets, the breasts full and pendulous, each tipped with a pink lentil of a nipple. The thighs great hand-rolled marbled loaves of halvah. Lost in the shadows between them, a thick umbilicus of grayish-brown meat.
Litvak lowered the uninsulated armature of his frame to the hot grid of tiles opposite the rabbi. The time he had passed Shpilman in the street, the man’s eyes lay in the ambit of shadow cast by the sundial of his hat brim. Now they were trained on Litvak and his vandalized body. They were kindly eyes, Litvak thought, or eyes whose employer had schooled them in the uses of kindliness. They read Litvak’s scars, the puckered purple mouth on his right shoulder, the slashes of red velour on his hip, the pit in his left thigh deep enough to hold an ounce of gin. They offered sympathy, regard, even gratitude. The war in Cuba was notorious for its futility, brutality, and waste. Its veterans had been shunned on their return. No one had offered them forgiveness, understanding, a chance at healing. Heskel Shpilman was offering Litvak and his war-torn hide all three.
“The nature of your handicap,” the rebbe said, “has been explained to me, along with the substance of your offer.” His girlish voice, baffled by steam and porcelain tile, seemed to emerge from someplace other than the kettledrum chest. “I see you’ve brought along your pad and a pen, in spite of my clear instructions that you were to carry nothing at all.”
Litvak held up the offending items, beaded with steam. He could feel the warp, the buckle, in the pages of his pad.
“You won’t need them.” The birds of Shpilman’s hands roosted on the rock of his belly, and he closed his eyes, depriving Litvak of their sympathy, real or feigned, and leaving Litvak to stew for a minute or two in the steam. Litvak had always hated a shvitz. But this fixture of the old Harkavy, secular and squalid, was the only place that the Verbover rebbe could contrive to do private business away from his court, his gabay, his world. “I don’t plan to require any further response or inquiry from you.”
Litvak nodded and prepared to stand. His mind told him that Shpilman would not have bothered to summon him to this nude and one-sided interview if he planned to turn Litvak down. But he felt in his gut that the errand was doomed, that Shpilman had called him down to Ringelblum Avenue to deliver the refusal in all the elephantine authority of his person.
“I want you to know, Mr. Litvak, that I have been giving a great deal of consideration to this proposal. I have attempted to follow its logic from every angle.
“Let’s begin with our southern friends. If it were simply a case of their wanting something, some tangible feature or resource … oil, for example. Or if they were prompted by a more purely strategic concern with regard to Russia or Persia. In either case, they clearly don’t need us. However difficult a conquest the Holy Land might be, our physical presence, our willingness to fight, our arms, can’t make a great difference to their battle plan. I have studied their claims of support for the Jewish cause in Palestine, and their theology, and to the extent that I can, based on Rabbi Baronshteyn’s reports, I have tried to form a judgment of the gentiles and their aims. And I can only conclude that when they say they wish to see Jerusalem restored to Jewish sovereignty, they mean it. Their reasoning, the so-called prophecies and apocrypha whose supposed authority underlies this wish, maybe it all strikes me as laughable. Abominable, even. I pity the gentiles for their childlike trust in the imminent return of one who never in the first place departed, let alone arrived. But I am
quite sure that they, in turn, pity us our own tardy Messiah. As a foundation for a partnership, mutual pity is not to be despised.
“As for your angle in this matter, that is easy, yes? You are a soldier for hire. You enjoy the challenge and the responsibility of generalship. I understand that. I do. You like to fight, and you like killing, as long as those who die aren’t your men. And, I dare say, after all these years with Shemets—and now, on your own behalf—you are long in the habit of appearing to please the Americans.
“For the Verbovers, there is great risk. Our entire community could be lost in this adventure. Wiped out in a matter of days, if your troops are ill prepared or simply, as seems not unlikely, outmanned. But if we stay here, well, then we are finished, too. Scattered to the winds. Our friends in the south have made that clear. That is the ‘stick.’ Reversion as the fire in the seat of the pants, yes? A restored Jerusalem as the bucket of ice water. Some of our younger men argue for making a stand here, daring them to dislodge us. But that is madness.
“On the other hand, if we agree, and you are successful, then we have regained a treasure of such incalculable value—I mean Zion, of course—that the mere thought of it opens a long-shuttered window in my soul. I have to shield my eyes from the brilliance.”
He raised the back of his left hand to his eyes. His thin wedding band was engulfed in his fingers like an ax head lost in the flesh of a tree. Litvak felt the pulse in his throat, a thumb plucking over and over at the lowest string of a harp. Dizziness. A sensation of ballooning in his feet and arms. It must be the heat, he thought. He took shallow timid breaths of rich burning air.
“I am dazzled by that vision,” the rebbe said. “Maybe as blinded by it, in my own way, as the evangelicals. So precious is the treasure. So incalculably sweet.”
No. It was not, or not only, the heat and ripeness of the shvitz that were making Litvak’s pulse thrum and his head spin. He felt certain of the wisdom of his gut: Shpilman was about to reject his proposal. But as that likelihood drew nearer, a new possibility began to dizzy him, to course through him. It was the thrill of a dazzling move.
“Still, it’s not enough,” the rebbe was saying. “I long for Messiah as I long for nothing else in this world.” He stood up, and his belly poured over his hips and groin like scalded milk foaming down the sides of a pot. “But I am afraid. I’m afraid of failure. I’m afraid of the potential for great loss of life among my yids and the utter destruction of everything we’ve worked for these last sixty years. There were eleven Verbovers left at the end of the war, Litvak. Eleven. I promised my wife’s father on his deathbed that I would never let such destruction befall us again.
“And, finally, truthfully, I fear this all may be a fool’s errand. There are numerous and persuasive teachings against acting in any way to hasten the coming of Messiah. Jeremiah condemns it. So do the Oaths of Solomon. Yes, of course, I want to see my yids settled in a new home with financial assurances from the U.S., offers of assistance and of access to all the unimaginably vast new markets your success in this operation would create. And I want Messiah like I want to sink, after this heat, into the cold dark waters of the mikvah in the next room. But, God should forgive me these words, I am afraid. So afraid that even the taste on my lips of Messiah is not enough. And you can tell them that down in Washington. Tell them the Verbover rebbe was afraid.” The idea of his fear seemed almost to entrance him with its novelty, like a teenager thinking of death or a whore of the chance of an immaculate love. “What?”
Litvak held up his right index finger. He had something, one more thing to offer the rebbe. One more clause for the contract. He had no idea how he would deliver it or if indeed it could be delivered. But as the rebbe prepared to turn his massive back on Jerusalem and on the complicated hugeness of the deal that Litvak had been putting together for months, he felt it well up in him like a chess brilliancy, notated with double exclamation marks. He scrambled to open his pad. He scrawled two words on the first clean leaf, but in his haste and panic, he pressed too hard and his pen ripped through the wet paper.
“What is it?” Shpilman said, “You have something more to offer?”
Litvak nodded, once, twice.
“Something more than Zion? Messiah? A home, a fortune?”
Litvak got up and padded across the tile floor until he stood just beside the rebbe. Naked men bearing the tales of their ruined bodies. Each of them, in his way, bereft, alone. Litvak reached out and, with the force and inspiration of that loneliness, and with the tip of his finger, inscribed two words in the vapor condensed on a white square of tile.
The rebbe read them and looked up, and they beaded over once more and were gone.
“My son,” the rebbe said.
It’s more than a game, Litvak wrote now, in the office at Peril Strait, as he and Roboy awaited the arrival of that wayward and unredeemed son. I would rather fight to take a prize however doubtful than wait to see what scraps I may be fed
“I suppose there’s a credo in there someplace,” Roboy said. “Maybe there’s hope for you yet.”
In return for providing them with manpower, a Messiah, and financing beyond their wildest dreams, the only thing that Litvak had ever asked of his partners, clients, employers, and associates in this venture was that he never be expected to believe the nonsense that they believed. Where they saw the fruit of divine wishes in a newborn red heifer, he saw the product of $1 million in taxpayer dollars spent secretly on bull semen and in vitro fertilization. In the eventual burning of this little red cow, they saw the purification of all Israel and the fulfillment of a millennia-old promise; Litvak saw, at most, a necessary move in an ancient game—the survival of the Jews.
Oh I wouldn’t go that far
There was a knock at the door, and Micky Vayner put in his head.
“I came to remind you, sir,” he said in his good American Hebrew.
Litvak stared blankly at the pink face with its peeling eyelids and baby-fat chin.
“Five minutes before twilight. You said to remind you.”
Litvak went to the window. The sky was striped in the pink, green, and luminous gray of a salmon’s hide. Sure enough, he saw a star or planet overhead. He nodded his thanks to Micky Vayner. Then he closed the box of chessmen and hooked the clasp.
“What’s at twilight?” Roboy said. He turned to Micky Vayner. “What’s today?”
Micky Vayner shrugged; as far as he knew, it was, by the lunar calendar, an ordinary day in the month of Nisan. Though, like his young comrades, he had been trained to believe in the foreordained reestablishment of the biblical kingdom of Judaea and in the destiny of Jerusalem to be the eternal capital of the Jews, he was no more strict or nice in his observance than any of the others. The young American Jews at Peril Strait observed the principal holidays, and for the most part, they kept the dietary laws. They wore the skullcap and the four-corners but kept their beards in military trim. They avoided work and training on the Sabbath, though not without exception. After forty years as a secular warrior, Litvak could stomach that much. Even in the wake of the accident, with his Sora gone, with the wind whistling through the hole she had left in Litvak’s life, with a thirst for meaning and a hunger for sense and an empty cup and a barren dish, Alter Litvak could not have taken a place among truly religious men. He never could have fallen happily, for example, among the black hats. In fact, he could not abide black hats, and since the meeting at the baths, he had kept to a minimum his contacts with the Verbovers, as they prepared in secret to be airlifted en masse to Palestine.
Today is nothing, he wrote before he pocketed the notepad and walked out of the room. Call me when they arrive
In his room Litvak took out his dental plates and dropped them with a chime of dice into a drinking glass. He unlaced his boots and sat down heavily on a folding cot. Whenever he came out to Peril Strait, he slept in this tiny room—on the blueprints, it had been shown as a utility closet—down the hall from Roboy’s office. His clothes he
hung on a hook behind the door, his kit he stashed under the cot.
He leaned back against the cold wall of painted cinder block and looked at the wall, over the steel shelf that held the glass with his teeth. There was no window, so Litvak imagined an early star. A wheeling duck. The photograph moon. The sky slowly turning to the color of a gun. And an airplane, coming in low from the southeast, bearing the man who was, in Litvak’s plan, both prisoner and dynamite, tower and trapdoor, bull’s-eye and dart.
Litvak stood up slowly, with a grunt of pain. There were screws in his hips, which ached; his knees thudded and gonged like the pedals of an old piano. There was a constant thrum of wire in the hinges of his jaw. He ran his tongue across the empty zones of his mouth with their feel of slick putty. He was accustomed to pain and breakage, but since the accident, his body no longer seemed to belong to him. It was something sawed and nailed together out of borrowed parts. A birdhouse built of scrap wood and propped on a pole, in which his soul flapped like a fugitive bat. He had been born, like every Jew, into the wrong world, the wrong country, at the wrong time, and now he was living in the wrong body, too. In the end maybe it was that sense of wrongness, that fist in the Jewish belly, binding Alter Litvak to the cause of the yids who had made him their general.
He went over to the steel shelf that was bolted to the wall under his notional window. Alongside the drinking glass that held the proof of Buchbinder’s genius, there stood a second glass. That one contained a few ounces of paraffin hardened around a piece of white string. Litvak had bought this candle in a grocery store not quite a year after his wife died, with the intention of burning it on the anniversary of her death. Now a number of such anniversaries had come and gone, and Litvak had evolved his own quaint tradition. Every year he brought the yahrzeit candle out, and looked at it, and thought about lighting it. He imagined the shy flutter of a flame. He envisioned himself lying in the darkness with the memorial candle’s light dancing over his head, scattering an alefbeys of shadows across the ceiling of the tiny room. He pictured the glass empty at the close of twenty-four hours, the wick consumed, the paraffin combusted, the metal tab drowned at the bottom in waxy dregs. And after that—but here his imagination tended to fail him.