The Yiddish Policemen's Union

45

From the summer of 1986 to the spring of 1988, when they defied the wishes of Bina’s parents and moved in together, Landsman sneaked in and out of the Gelbfish home to make love with her. Every night unless they were quarreling, and sometimes in the thick of a quarrel, Landsman climbed the drainpipe and tumbled in through Bina’s bedroom window to share her narrow bed. Just before dawn she would send him back down again,

Tonight it took him longer and cost him more effort than his vanity would care to admit. As he passed the halfway mark, just above Mr. Oysher’s dining room window, Landsman’s left loafer slipped, and he dangled free and thrilling over the black void of the Gelbfish backyard. The stars overhead, the Bear, the Snake, exchanged places with the rhododendron and the wreckage of the neighbors’ sukkoh. In regaining a purchase, Landsman tore the leg of his trousers on the aluminum bracket, his old enemy in the struggle for control of the drainpipe. Foreplay between the lovers commenced with Bina balling up a tissue to blot the cut on Landsman’s shin. His shin with its blotches and freckles, with its strange midlife bloom of black hair.

They lie there on their sides, a couple of aging yids stuck together like pages of an album. Her shoulder-blades dig into his chest. The knobs of his patellas are notched against the soft moist backs of her knees. His lips can blow softly across the teacup of her ear. And a part of Landsman that has been the symbol and the site of his loneliness for a very long time has found shelter inside of his commanding officer, to whom he was once married for twelve years. Although, it’s true, his tenure inside her has grown precarious. One good sneeze could pop him loose.

“The whole time,” Bina says. “Two years.”

“The whole time.”

“Not once.”

“Not even.”

“Weren’t you lonely?”

“Pretty lonely.”

“And blue?”

“Black. But never black or lonely enough to kid myself that having sex with a random Jewess was going to make me feel any less.”

“Actually, random sex only makes it worse,” she says.

“You speak from experience.”

“I fucked a couple of men in Yakovy. If that’s what you want to know.”

“It’s strange,” Landsman says upon reflection. “But I think I do not.”

“A couple or three.”

“I don’t need a report.”

“So, nu,” she says, “so you just beat off?”

“With a discipline you might find surprising in a yid so unruly.”

“And what about now?” she says.

“Now? Now is madness,” he says. “Not to mention uncomfort-able. Plus I think my leg is still bleeding.”

“I meant,” she says, “what about now, do you feel lonely.”

“You’re kidding, right? Squashed into this bread box?”

He buries his nose in the thick soft rasp of Bina’s hair and takes a deep breath. Raisins, vinegar, a salt whiff of the sweat of her nape.

“What does it smell like?”

“It smells red,” he says. “It does not.”

“It smells like Rumania.”

“You smell like a Rumanian,” she says. “With shockingly hairy legs.”

“I’ve become such a geezer.”

“Me, too.”

“I can’t even climb stairs. My hair’s falling out.”

“My ass is like a topographicalmap,”

He confirms this information with his fingers. Ridges and depressions, here and there a pimple in high relief. He threads his hands under and over her waist and reaches around to weigh a breast in each hand. At first he retrieves no memory of their former size or estate to compare them with, and he panics a little. Then he decides that they are the same as they have always been, spanned exactly by his palm and his outstretched fingers, formed from some mysterious compound of gravity and give.

“I’m not going back down that drainpipe,” he says. “I can tell you that much.”

“I said you could just take the stairs. The drainpipe was your idea.”

“It was all my idea,” he says. “It was always my idea.”

“Don’t I know it,” she says. ,

They lie there for a long time without saying anything more. Landsman can feel the skin beside him slowly filling with dark wine. A few minutes later, Bina begins to snore. There is no doubt that her snoring has not changed in two years. It has a double-reeded hum, the bumblebee continuo of Mongolian throat-singing. It has the slow grandeur of a whale’s respira tion. Landsman begins to drift across the surface of her bed and of the susurration of Bina’s breath. In her arms, in the scent of her on the bed linens — a strong but pleasant smell like new leather gloves — Landsman feels safe for the first time in ages. Drowsy and con tent. Here you go, Landsman, he thinks. Here is the smell and the hand on your belly that you traded for a lifetime of silence.

He sits up, wide awake and hateful to himself, craven, more unworthy than ever of the fine kidskin woman in his arms. Yes, all right, Landsman understands, so go shit in the ocean, that he made not the right but the only choice. He understands that the necessity of covering up for the dark deeds of the boys in the top drawer is one that nozzes have been making into a virtue since the dawn of police work. He understands that if he were to try to tell someone, say Dennis Brennan, what he knows, then the boys in the top drawer would find another way to silence him, this time on their own terms. So why is his heart running like a jailbird’s steel cup along the bars of his rib cage? Why does Bina’s fragrant bed suddenly feel like a wet sock, a pair of underpants riding up on him, a wool suit on a hot afternoon? You make a deal, take what you can get, move on. Get over it. So distant men in a sunny country have been lured into killing one another so that while their backs are turned, their sunny country can be boosted and fenced. So the fate of the Sitka District has been sealed. So the killer of Mendel Shpilman, whoever it was, is walking around free. So, so what?

Landsman gets out of the bed. Discontentment gathers like ball lightning around the chessboard in the pocket of his coat. He unfolds it and contemplates it and thinks, I missed something in the room. No, he didn’t miss anything; but if he missed something, it’s gone by now. Only he didn’t miss anything in the room. But he must have missed something.

His thoughts are a tattoo needle inking the spade on an ace; They are a tornado going back and forth over the same damn pancaked trailer. They narrow and darken until they describe a tiny black circle, the hole at the back of Mendel Shpilman’s head.

He re-creates the scene in his imagination, as he saw it that night when Tenenboym knocked on his door. The freckled expanse of pale back. The white under pants. The broken mask of the eyes, the right hand tumbled from the bed to brush the floor with its fingers. The chessboard on the nightstand.

Landsman lays the board on Bina’s night stand, in the pale of dim light from the lamp, a yellow porcelain affair with a big yellow daisy on the green shade. White facing the wall. Black — Shpilman, Landsman — facing the middle of the room.

Maybe it’s the context at once familiar and strange, the painted bedstead, the daisy lamp, the daisies on the wallpaper, the dresser in whose top drawer she used to keep her diaphragm. Or maybe it’s the lingering traces of endorphin in his bloodstream. But as Landsman stares at the chessboard, staring at a chessboard, for the first time in his life, feels good. It feels pleasurable, in fact. Standing there, moving the pieces in his mind, seems to slow or at least to dislodge the needle inking over the black spot in his brain. He focuses on the promotion at b8. What if you changed that pawn to a bishop, a rook, a queen, a knight?

Landsman reaches for a chair to take White’s place at the board, to sit down in his imagination for a friendly game against Shpilman. There’s a chair at the desk, painted to match the daisy-green bed, in the corner of Bina’s room. It’s right about where the fold-down desk would be in relation to the bed in Shpilman’s room at the Zamenhof. Landsman lowers himself into the green chair, eyes on the board.

A knight, he decides. And then Black has to move the pawn at d7-but to where? He settles in to play it out, not because of some forlorn hope that it might lead him to the killer, but because he really needs, all of a sudden, to play the game out. And then, as if the seat is wired to administer a charge, Landsman leaps to his feet. He yanks the green chair one-handed into the air. Four round indentations in the low-pile white carpet, faint but distinct.

He always assumed that Shpilrnan, as the reception clerks all reported, never had visitors, that the game he left behind was a form of chess solitaire played from memory, from the pages of Three Hundred Chess Games, maybe just against himself. But if Shpilman did have a visitor, maybe that visitor pulled up a chair to sit down at the board across from his opponent. Across the cardboard chess board from his victim. And that phantom patzer’s chair would have left indentations in the carpet. No doubt by now they have faded or been vacuumed over. But they might be visible in one of Shpringer’s photographs, boxed up in some storage room at the forensic lab.

Landsman steps into his trousers, buttons his shirt, knots his tie. He takes his coat from the door and, carrying his shoes, goes to pull the covers more snugly over Bina. As he bends to switch off the bedside light, a rectangle of paper falls out of his coat pocket. It’s the postcard he received from the gym that he used to frequent, with its offer of a lifetime membership good for the next two months. He studies the glossy side of the card, with its enchanted Jew. Before; after. Fat; thin. Start here; finish there. Wise; happy. Chaos; order. Exile; homeland. Before, a neat diagram in a book, its grid carefully crosshatched at the black squares and annotated like a page of Talmud; after, a battered old chessboard with a Vicks inhaler at b8.

Landsman feels it then. A hand laid on his, two de grees warmer than normal. A quickening, an unfurling like a banner in his thoughts. Before and after. The touch of Mendel Shpilman, moist, electric, conveying some kind of strange blessing on Landsman. And then nothing but the cold air of Bina Gelbfish’s childhood bedroom. The flowering O’Keeffe vagina on the wall. The stuffed Shnapish sagging on a bookshelf beside Bina’s wristwatch and her cigarettes. And Bina, sitting up in bed, propped on an elbow, watching him, sort of the way she watched those kids go after that hapless penguin piñata.

“You still do that humming thing,” she says. “When you’re thinking. Like Oscar Peterson, only with no piano.”

“Fuck,” Landsman says.

“What,Meyer?”

“Bina!” It’s Guryeh Gelbfish, that old whistling marmot, from across the hall. An ancient terror momentarily seizes Landsman. “Who is there with you?”

“Nobody, Pa, go to sleep!” Again she says, in a low whisper, “Meyer, what?”

Landsman sits down on the edge of the bed. Before; after. The exaltation of understanding; then understanding’s bottomless regret.

“I know what kind of a gun killed Mendel Shpil man,” he says.

“All right,” Bina says.

“It wasn’t a chess game,” Landsman says after a moment. “On the board in Shpilman’s room. It was a problem. It seems obvious now, I should have seen it, the setup was so freaky. Somebody came to see Shpilman that night, and Shpilman posed him a problem. A tricky one.” He moves the pieces of the pocket chess set, his grasp of them sure, his hand steady. “White is all set up to promote his pawn, see. And he wants to promote it to a knight. That’s called underpromotion, because usually, you want to get yourself a queen. With a knight here, he has three different ways to mate, he thinks. But that’s a mistake, because it leaves Black — that was Mendel — with a way to drag the game out. If you’re White, you have to ignore the obvious thing. Just make a dull move with the bishop, here at c2. You don’t even notice it at first. But after you make it, every move Black has leads directly to a mate. He can’t move without finishing himself. He has no good moves.”

“No good moves,” Bina says.

“They call that Zugzwang,” Landsman says. “’Forced to move.’ It means Black would be better off if he could just pass.”

“But you aren’t allowed to pass, are you? You have to do something, don’t you?”

“Yes, you do,” Landsman says. “Even when you know it’s only going to lead to you getting check mated.”

Landsman can see it starting to mean something to her, not as evidence or proof or a chess problem, but as part of the story of a crime. A crime committed against a man who found himself left with no good moves at all.

“How’d you do that?” she says, unable to suppress completely a mild astonishment at this evidence of mental fitness on his part. “How’d you get the solution?”

“I saw it, actually,” Landsman says. “But at the time I didn’t know I was seeing it. It was an ‘after’ picture — the wrong picture, actually — to the ‘before’ picture in Shpilman’s room. A board where White had three knights. Only chess sets don’t come with three White knights. So sometimes you have to use some thing else to stand in for the piece you don’t have.”

“Like a penny? Or a bullet?”

“Any kind of thing a man might have in his pocket,” Landsman says. “Say a Vicks inhaler.”