The Yiddish Policemen's Union

by Michael Chabon

  “Come on, Professor,” Berko says. “You know the victim since he’s a boy, right? All those memories have got to be going around and around in your head right now. As bad as you feel, it’s going to feel better if you just start talking.”

  “It isn’t that,” the boundary maven says. “It’s—It isn’t that.” He takes the lit papiros from Landsman, and this time he smokes most of it before he starts to talk. He is a learned yid, and he likes to have his thoughts in order.

  “His name is Menachem,” he begins. “Mendel. He is, or was, thirty-eight, a year older than you, Detective Shemets, but he had the same birthday, August fifteenth, isn’t that right? Eh? I thought so. You see? This is the map cabinet.” He taps his hairless dome. “Maps of Jericho, Detective Shemets, Jericho and Tyre.”

  Tapping the map cabinet gets a little out of control, and he knocks the yarmulke off his head. When he grabs at it, ash cascades all down his sweater.

  “Mendele’s IQ was measured at one-seventy,” he continues. “By the time he was eight or nine, he could read Hebrew, Aramaic, Judeo-Spanish, Latin, Greek. The most difficult texts, the thorniest tangles of logic and argument. By then Mendele was already a much better chess player than I could ever hope to be. He had a remarkable memory for recorded games; he had only to read a transcript once, and after that, he could reproduce it on a board or in his head, move by move, without a mistake. When he was older and they didn’t let him play so much anymore, he would work through famous games in his head. He must have known three, four hundred games by heart.”

  “That’s what they used to say about Melekh Gaystik,” Landsman says. “He had that kind of mind for the game.”

  “Melekh Gaystik,” Zimbalist says. “Gaystik was a freak. It was not human, the way Gaystik played. He had a mind like some kind of bug, the only thing he knew to do was eat you. He was rude. Filthy. Mean. Mendele wasn’t like that at all. He made toys for his sisters, dolls out of clothespins and felt, a house from a box of oatmeal. Always glue on his fingers, a clothespin in his pocket with a face on it. I would give him twine for the hair. Eight little sisters hanging off him all the time. A pet duck that used to follow him around like a dog.” Zimbalist’s thin brown lips hitch themselves up at the corners. “Believe it or not, I once arranged for a match to be played between Mendel and Melekh Gaystik. You could do such things—Gaystik was always broke and in debt, and he would have played against a half-drunk bear if the money was right. The boy was twelve at the time, Gaystik twenty-six. It was the year before he won the championship at Petersburg. They played three games in the back of my shop, which at that time—you remember, Detective—was on Ringelblum Avenue. I offered Gaystik five thousand dollars to play against Mendele. The boy won the first and the third. The second game he had Black and played Gaystik to a draw. Yes, Gaystik was only too happy to keep the match a secret.”

  “Why?” Landsman wants to know. “Why did the games have to be kept secret?”

  “Because this boy,” the boundary maven says. “The one who died in a hotel room on Max Nordau Street. Not a nice hotel, I imagine.”

  “A fleabag,” Landsman says.

  “He was shooting heroin into his arm?”

  Landsman nods, and after a hard second or two, Zimbalist nods, too.

  “Yes. Of course. Nu. The reason why I was obliged to arrange the games in secret was that this boy had been forbidden to play chess with outsiders. Somehow or other, I never learned how, Mendele’s father got wind of the match against Gaystik. It was a near thing for me. In spite of the fact that my wife was a relative of the father, I almost lost his haskama, which at that time was the foundation of my business. I built this whole operation on that endorsement.”

  “The father. You’re not saying—it was Heskel Shpilman,” Berko says. “The man there in the picture is the son of the Verbover rebbe.”

  Landsman notices how quiet it is on Verbov Island, in the snow, inside a stone barn, with dark coming on, as the profane week and the world that profaned it prepare to be plunged into the flame of two matched candles.

  “That’s right,” Zimbalist says at last. “Mendel Shpilman. The only son. He had a twin brother who was born dead. Later, that was interpreted as a sign.”

  Landsman says, “A sign of what? That he would be a prodigy? That he would turn out to be a junkie living in a cheap Untershtot flop?”

  “Not that,” says Zimbalist. “That nobody imagined.”

  “They said … they used to say…” Berko begins. He screws up his face, as if he knows what he’ll say next is going to irk Landsman or give him cause for scorn. He unscrews his brown eyes, lets it pass. He can’t bring himself to repeat it. “Mendel Shpilman. Dear God. I heard some stories.”

  “A lot of stories,” Zimbalist says. “Nothing but stories till he was twenty years old.”

  “What kind of stories?” Landsman says, duly irked. “Stories about what? Tell me already, damn you.”

  14

  So Zimbalist tells them a Mendel story.

  A certain woman, he says, was dying of cancer at Sitka General Hospital. A woman of his acquaintance, call her. This was back in 1973. The woman was twice a widow, her first husband a gambler shot by shtarkers in Germany before the war, her second a string monkey in Zimbalist’s employ who got tangled in a live power line. It was through supporting the widow of his dead worker with cash and favors that Zimbalist got to know her. It’s not impossible that they fell in love. They were both past the age of foolish passion, so they were passionate without being fools. She was a dark, lean woman already in the habit of controlling her appetites. They kept their affair a secret from everyone, not least Mrs. Zimbalist.

  To visit his lady friend in the hospital when she took ill, Zimbalist resorted to subterfuge, stealth, and the bribing of orderlies. He slept on a towel on the floor of the ward, curled between her bed and the wall. In the half-dark, when his mistress called out from the distances of morphine, he would spill water between her cracked lips and cool her forehead with a damp cloth. The clock on the hospital wall hummed to itself, got antsy, kept snapping off pieces of the night with its minute hand. In the morning Zimbalist would creep back to his shop on Ringelblum Avenue—he told his wife he was sleeping there because his snoring was so bad—and wait for the boy.

  Almost every morning after worship and study, Mendel Shpilman would come and play chess. Chess was permitted, even though the Verbover rabbinate and the larger community of the pious viewed it as a waste of the boy’s time. The older Mendel got—the more dazzling his feats of scholarship, the brighter his reputation for acumen beyond his years—the more painful this waste appeared. It was not just Mendel’s memory, the agile reasoning, the grasp of precedent, history, law. No, even as a kid, Mendel Shpilman seemed to intuit the messy human flow that both powered the Law and required its elaborate system of drains and sluices. Fear, doubt, lust, dishonesty, broken vows, murder and love, uncertainty about the intentions of God and men, little Mendel saw all of that not only in the Aramaic abstract but when it appeared in his father’s study, clothed in the dark serge and juicy mother tongue of everyday life. If conflicts ever arose in the boy’s mind, doubts about the relevance of the Law that he was learning in the Verbover court at the feet of a bunch of king-size ganefs and crooks, they never showed. Not when he was a kid who believed, and not when the day came that he turned his back on it all. He had the kind of mind that could hold and consider contradictory propositions without losing its balance.

  It was because the Shpilmans were so proud of his excellence as a Jewish son and scholar that they tolerated the side of Mendel’s character that loved only to play. Mendel was always getting up elaborate pranks and hoaxes, staging plays that featured his sisters, his aunts, the duck. Some people thought the greatest miracle Mendel ever performed was to persuade his formidable father, year after year, to take the part of Queen Vashti in the Purimshpiel. The sight of that somber emperor, that mountain of dignity, that fearsome bulk mincing around in
high-heeled shoes! A blond wig! Lipstick and rouge, bangles and spangles! It might have been the most horrible feat of female impersonation Jewry ever produced. People loved it. And they loved Mendel for making it happen each year. But it was just another proof of the love that Heskel Shpilman had for his boy. And it was the same loving indulgence that permitted Mendel to waste an hour every day at chess, with the proviso that his opponent be chosen from the community of Verbov.

  Mendel chose the boundary maven, the lone outsider in their midst. It was a small display of rebellion or perversity that some, in later years, would have occasion to revisit. But in the Verbov orbit, only Zimbalist had even a prayer of beating Mendel.

  “How is she?” Mendel said to Zimbalist one morning after the lady friend had been dying at Sitka General for two months and was nearly gone.

  Zimbalist experienced a shock at the question—nothing to compare to the fate of the widow’s second husband, of course, but enough to stop his heart for a beat or two. He remembers every game that he and Mendel Shpilman ever played against each other, he says, except for this one; of this game he can manage to recall a solitary move. Zimbalist’s wife was a Shpilman, a cousin to this boy. Zimbalist’s livelihood, his honor, perhaps even his life, demanded that the secret of his adultery be kept. He was absolutely certain that so far it had been. Through his wires and strings, the boundary maven felt every whisper and rumor the way a spider hears in its feet the thrashings of a fly. There was no way word of it could have reached Mendel Shpilman without Zimbalist hearing about it first.

  He said, “How is who?”

  The boy stared at him. Mendel was not a handsome kid. He had a perpetual flush, close-set eyes, a second and hints of a third chin without clear benefit of a first. But the eyes, though too small and too near the bridge of his nose, were dense and fitful with color, like the spots on a butterfly wing, blue, green, gold. Pity, mockery, forgiveness. No judgment. No reproach.

  “Never mind,” Mendel said gently. Then he moved his queen’s bishop, returning it to its original position on the board.

  The move had no purpose that Zimbalist, pondering it, could see. At one moment fantastic schools of chess seemed to be contained or implied by it. The next it appeared to be only what, in all likelihood, it was: a kind of retraction.

  Zimbalist struggled for the next hour to understand that move, and for the strength to resist confiding to a ten-year-old whose universe was bounded by the study house, the shul, and the door to his mother’s kitchen, the sorrow and dark rapture of Zimbalist’s love for the dying widow, how some secret thirst of his own was quenched every time he dribbled cool water through her peeling lips.

  They played through the remainder of their hour without further conversation. But when it was time for the boy to go, he turned in the doorway of the shop on Ringelblum Avenue and took hold of Zimbalist’s sleeve. He hesitated as if reluctant or embarrassed. Or maybe he was feeling afraid. Then he got a hard pinched expression on his face that Zimbalist recognized as the internalized voice of the rebbe, reminding his son of his duty to serve the community.

  “When you see her tonight,” Mendel said, “tell her that I send her my blessing. Tell her I say hello.”

  “I will,” Zimbalist said, or remembers saying.

  “Tell her from me that all will be well.”

  The little monkey face, the sad mouth, the eyes saying that for as much as he knew you and loved you, he might still be pulling your leg.

  “Oh, I will,” Zimbalist said, and then he broke down in hiccuping sobs. The boy took a clean handkerchief from his pocket and gave it to Zimbalist. Patiently, he held the boundary maven’s hand. His fingers were soft, a bit sticky. On the inside of his wrist, his younger sister Reyzl had scrawled her name in red ink. When Zimbalist regained his composure, Mendel let go of his hand and stuffed the damp handkerchief into his pocket.

  “See you tomorrow,” he said.

  That night, when Zimbalist crept onto the ward, just before he spread his towel on the floor, he spooned the boy’s blessing into the ear of his unconscious mistress. He did it without hope and with very little in the way of faith. In the dark of five A.M., Zimbalist’s lady friend woke him and told him to go home and eat breakfast with his wife. It was the first coherent thing she had said in weeks.

  “Did you give her my blessing?” Mendel asked him when they sat down to play later that morning.

  “I did.”

  “Where is she?”

  “At Sitka General.”

  “With other people? On a ward?”

  Zimbalist nodded.

  “And you gave my blessing to the other people, too?”

  The idea had never occurred to Zimbalist. “I didn’t say anything to them,” he said. “I don’t know them.”

  “There was more than enough blessing to go around,” Mendel informed him. “Tell them. Give it to them tonight.”

  But that night, when Zimbalist went to visit his lady friend, she had been moved to another ward, one where nobody was in danger of death, and somehow or other, Zimbalist forgot the boy’s reminder. Two weeks later, the woman’s doctors sent her home, shaking their heads in puzzlement. Two weeks after that, an X ray showed no trace of the cancer in her body.

  By then she and Zimbalist had broken off their affair by mutual agreement, and he slept every night in the marital bed. The daily meetings with Mendel in the back of the shop on Ringelblum Avenue continued for a while, but Zimbalist found that he had lost his pleasure in them. The apparent miracle of the cancer cure forever altered his relations with Mendel Shpilman. Zimbalist could not shake a sense of vertigo that came over him every time Mendel looked at him with his close-set eyes, flecked with pity and gold. The boundary maven’s faith in faithlessness had been shaken by a simple question—How is she?—by a dozen words of blessing, by a simple bishop move that seemed to imply a chess beyond the chess that Zimbalist knew.

  It was as repayment for the miracle that Zimbalist had arranged the secret match between Mendel and Melekh Gaystik, king of the Café Einstein and future champion of the world. Three games in the back room of a shop on Ringelblum Avenue, with the boy winning two out of three. When this act of subterfuge was uncovered—and not the other; no one else ever learned of the affair—the visits between Zimbalist and Mendel Shpilman were broken off. After that, he and Mendel never shared another hour at the board.

  “That’s what comes from giving out blessings,” says Zimbalist the boundary maven. “But it took Mendel Shpilman a long time to figure that out.”

  15

  You met this ganef,” Landsman half asks Berko as they hump along behind the boundary maven through the Sabbath snow to the rebbe’s door. For the journey across the platz, Zimbalist washed his face and armpits in a sink at the back of the shop. He wet a comb and raked all seventeen of his hairs into a moire across the top of his head. Then he put on a brown corduroy sport coat, an orange down vest, black galoshes, and over everything, a belted bearskin coat trailing a smell of mothballs like a muffler twenty feet long. From a moose antler by the door, the maven took a football or miniature ottoman made of wolverine fur and set it on top of his head. Now he waddles along ahead of the detectives, reeking of naphthalene, looking like a small bear urged by cruel masters to perform demeaning feats. Under an hour before dark, and the snow falling is like pieces of broken daylight. The Sitka sky is dull silver plate and tarnishing fast.

  “Yeah, I met him,” Berko says. “They brought me in to see him right after I started working the Fifth Precinct. They had a ceremony in his office, over the study hall on South Ansky Street. He pinned something to the crown of my latke, a gold leaf. After that he used to send me a nice basket of fruit at Purim. Delivered right to my house, even though I never gave out my home address. Every year pears and oranges until we moved out to the Shvartser-Yam.”

  “I hear he’s kind of on the large side.”

  “He’s cute. Cute as a fucking button.”

  “That stuff the maven
was just telling us about Mendel. The wonders and miracles. Berko, you believe any of that?”

  “You know it’s not about believing for me, Meyer. It never has been.”

  “But do you—I’m curious—do you really feel like you’re waiting for Messiah?”

  Berko shrugs, uninterested in the question, keeping his eyes on the track of the black galoshes in the snow. “It’s Messiah,” he says. “What else can you do but wait?”

  “And then when he comes, what? Peace on earth?”

  “Peace, prosperity. Plenty to eat. Nobody sick or lonely. Nobody selling anything. I don’t know.”

  “And Palestine? When Messiah comes, all the Jews move back there? To the promised land? Fur hats and all?”

  “I heard Messiah cut a deal with the beavers,” Berko says. “No more fur.”

  Under the glow of a big iron gas lamp mounted, by an iron bracket, to the front of the rebbe’s house, a loose knot of men is killing the last of the week. Hangers-on, the rebbe-struck, an outright simpleton or two. And the usual impromptu mess of would be Swiss Guards who make the job tougher for the biks holding up either side of the front door. Everybody’s telling everybody else to go home and bless the light with their families, leave the rebbe to eat his Sabbath dinner in peace already. Nobody’s quite leaving, nobody’s quite sticking around. They swap authentic lies about recent miracles and portents, new Canadian immigration scams, and forty new versions of the story of the Indian with the hammer, how he recited the Alenu while dancing an Indian patch tanz.

  When they hear the crunch and chiming of Zimbalist’s galoshes coming toward them across the platz, they leave off making their noises, one by one, like a calliope running out of steam. Fifty years Zimbalist has been living in their midst and he’s still, by some tangle of choice and necessity, an outsider. He’s a wizard, a juju man, with his fingers on the strings that ring the District, and his palms cupping the brackish water of their souls every Sabbath. Perched at the tops of the boundary maven’s poles, his crews can see into every window, they can listen in on every telephone call. Or at least that is what these men have heard.