by Max Gross
Yankel stopped paying attention after the first ten minutes or so of Dr. Babiak’s exegesis. But even the cursory introduction to the periodic table struck him as far-fetched. “You see, Yankel, gold and oxygen are really made out of the same basic matter—atoms—just a different number of protons, neutrons, and electrons.”
At the time, this hadn’t made sense. How could everything be basically the same, and yet completely different? But the doctor had answered with such authority that Yankel assumed she knew what she was talking about. As he sat in his room weeks later, he wondered how he could have possibly been so trusting.
“May I ask you something, Dr. Meslowski?” Yankel said. “What if I wanted to go back to Kreskol—could I go?”
Dr. Meslowski was surprised by the question.
“Now?” Dr. Meslowski asked. “You want to leave right now?”
“Yes.”
Dr. Meslowski reddened slightly. “If you really want to go, I’m sure you can,” he said. “I’d have to ask the doctor in charge. But how will you get home?”
Yankel ignored the question. “Will you ask the doctor in charge, please?”
Dr. Meslowski was nearly speechless. He put his pen in his pocket, put his pad away, and called an emergency meeting of the other doctors. They all agreed that they should stall for time with Yankel and try to talk him out of wanting to leave.
This was shortly before Dr. Polus’s fateful meeting with Dr. Kowalski, and the doctors told Yankel that they hadn’t yet been able to secure a meeting with the head of psychiatry, who made those decisions.
Now Dr. Meslowski grew more resigned that the patient would walk out on his own into the streets. It broke his heart. He pulled out Yankel’s file searching the notes for ideas—crazy or otherwise. Dr. Meslowski’s eyes stopped on the register of Yankel’s property. It read simply:
(1) Hat, black, custom-made
(1) Overcoat, black, custom-made
(1) Pair of trousers, black, custom-made
(1) Shirt, white, custom-made
(1) Pair of leg stockings, black, custom-made
(2) Pairs of undergarments, white, custom-made
(1) Brown sack (material unknown)
(1) Pair of boots, black, custom-made
(1) Cloth garment with strings, long, rectangular, white, custom-made
(2) Boxes, black, leather, 31 millimeters x 30 millimeters, containing compartment with small scroll and two black leather straps
(1) Velvet “yarmulke,” black, custom-made
(2) Loaves, black bread
(3) Onion rolls
(1) Quantity of nuts and berries (weight 1½ kg)
(6) Strips of dried beef
(4) Apples
(1) Pocket-sized hardcover book, title unknown, language unknown (probably Yiddish or Hebrew), antique
(1) Map, antique
(2) Sheets, antique paper
(1) Slip of notepaper, current
(20) Zlotys, coins, collector
(30) Zlotys, coins, current
He read the list twice over. It had the veneer of authenticity—the index of possessions for a poor, country hermit who had been sheltered from the machinations of the industrial age. His clothes had been made by hand. His food had come from the forest and the farm. Even the prayer book—which the patient carried with him at all times, as firmly as an infant clutching a rattle—had been bought many generations ago. When he had asked Yankel if he might be permitted to examine it, the pages looked as if they might flake off and crumble if they were handled too roughly. (The book was so old that no publisher’s information was affixed in the first or final pages.)
The two letters Yankel had been carrying—one in Yiddish, one in Polish—were also in keeping with the Charles Bertram–like forgery of a fictional shtetl in the wilderness. The parchment had been fashioned out of calfskin (or goatskin, the doctors weren’t able to determine which) and, while clearly newer than the prayer book, also gave the unmistakable impression of being the product of a simpler, bygone age.
These letters had been photocopied a dozen times and widely circulated among the staff. Like the other doctors, Meslowski had examined them, puzzled over them, and reread them. The fact that the letters had been written in a different hand from Yankel’s (more majestic and with greater flourishes) made the staff speculate that he might have co-conspirators. Another bearded Jew might just pop up with the same harebrained story—even though none ever did.
The only things that looked out of place were the final item (thirty zlotys in coins), the box with the leather straps (which caused a great deal of commotion at first, as a possible explanation of Yankel’s carnal proclivities), and the third item from the bottom.
Dr. Meslowski couldn’t remember ever looking at any slip of notepaper, or hearing any of his colleagues discuss it, and he wondered whether this was a clerical error. (As for the thirty zlotys, Yankel had recounted how the people of Smolskie had treated him like a street urchin on his first day in town. Likewise, the doctors learned that the leather straps were a common Jewish talisman, making them far less interesting.)
Dr. Meslowski went to the patient’s room and asked him if he still had the papers he’d been admitted to the hospital with.
“Yes.”
Yankel closed his book and removed the three sheets of paper he owned from under his bed and gave them to Dr. Meslowski, who stared intently at the notepaper for several long beats.
“What is this?” Dr. Meslowski asked.
“Paper.”
“I know that,” Dr. Meslowski said. “But what’s the number on it?”
Yankel shrugged.
“This is a phone number,” Dr. Meslowski replied, irritated at the patient’s obtuseness. “Where did you get it? I thought you said you didn’t know about phones.”
“The gypsy gave it to me.”
Ah, yes. The gypsies. Yankel had told the doctors all about the band of gypsies who had come through Kreskol every six months, and how they had agreed to take him into Smolskie for a mule and two dozen slippers. It had been yet another improbable fiction dismissed out of hand by the doctors (and deemed much less interesting than his stories about the village). They googled the name Yankel gave them—Washko Something-or-other—and when the search turned up nothing, were content to forget this unimportant detail.
“Is this the gypsy’s number—his phone number?”
Yankel shrugged.
As Dr. Meslowski left the room—the slip of notepaper still in his hands—he found (almost to his surprise) that his fingers were trembling.
Dr. Meslowski sat down in his office and stared at the number for several minutes before he went back into his files and looked up the gypsy’s name. Washo Zurka. He stared at the phone number for a few moments before he dialed.
The phone rang.
A mechanical voice—an automated voice from the service provider—answered, repeating the numbers Dr. Meslowski had just dialed. No name was attached. There was just a beep at the end. Dr. Meslowski hung up without leaving a message, and stared for several long minutes out the window.
And yet in those minutes some assumptions about Yankel and Kreskol began to change.
A phone number—with a real-life person at the other end—seemed like the most critical piece of evidence as to whether Yankel was mentally ill, a fraud, or, in fact, telling some unlikely truth. For the first time, there was a second party that could confirm or deny all Yankel had been saying.
And, also for the first time, Dr. Meslowski came to believe that Yankel’s story might be more credible than he, or anyone else, originally thought. (Not that he hadn’t wondered—even out loud—if his patient had been telling the truth. But every other doctor seemed to find it impossible.)
He couldn’t help but marvel at Yankel’s unflappable consistency. Even the minor details had not changed over the months, and in Dr. Meslowski’s experience most liars had short memories. He never met one who didn’t get tripped up on a trivial point edited
somewhere along the way to make the story more credible or succinct that soon sent the whole edifice of fictions collapsing to earth. But that wasn’t the case with Yankel.
Moreover, Dr. Meslowski didn’t think that a man with serious mental illness would be able to recruit a confederate into his madness. He couldn’t imagine Yankel telling a friend: “If someone calls you on this number, just say you’re a gypsy.” A normal person wouldn’t play along months after not hearing from Yankel at all.
But the biggest unanswerable in Dr. Meslowski’s mind was that Yankel had seemed so calm and untroubled as he had handed over the gypsy’s phone number. He had held on to that number patiently for months, without volunteering it to anyone. No man involved in a hoax could have that kind of restraint—at least not in Dr. Meslowski’s view.
The happenstance that seemed most logical, the more Dr. Meslowski thought about it, was that the number had been given to Yankel—just as he said—and that Yankel didn’t know what to do with it.
Dr. Meslowski dialed the number again. Again, the call went into the disembodied voicemail.
“Hello,” Dr. Meslowski said tentatively, thinking over each word as they left his lips. “My name is Ignacy Meslowski. I’m a doctor at Our Lady of Mercy Hospital in Smolskie. I’m looking for Washo Zurka concerning a very important matter.”
Dr. Meslowski paused as he considered what to say next.
“If Mr. Zurka could call me back, I would appreciate it.” He left his number twice, and before hanging up he felt compelled to add, “It’s about Yankel Lewinkopf.”
Dr. Meslowski sat in his office for an hour, not doing much of anything except staring out the window. Another hour passed. He nearly fell out of his chair when his phone rang and a nurse asked him if the nurses’ rotation could be switched next week. “Yes, of course,” he said—and hung up.
Before he got up to leave for the evening, well after eight, he called the number again and left another message, and this time he left his mobile number at the end.
“Any time, night or day, is fine to call.”
Dr. Meslowski went back to his house—which had been empty for more than two summers, since his wife had agreed to let him have it in the terms of their separation agreement—with a pack of Marlboros. With no one around to scold him, he smoked one cigarette after another, all the while staring at his mobile phone until the pack was empty. And when his first indulgence didn’t feel comforting enough, he poured himself a glass of vodka, and he fell asleep on the leather chair in his living room, still in his suit and tie. That night, he dreamed he was a shoemaker living in Kreskol.
Dr. Meslowski called again the next day. Twice. But he did not leave a message the second time. He had no intention of frightening these gypsies away before he had a chance to talk to them. So he told himself that he should just be patient and that somebody would get back to him sooner or later.
But Dr. Meslowski thought of little else over the course of the next week. When two days had passed and he hadn’t heard anything, he began asking some of his intimates: “What would you say to someone—a stranger—on their voice mail if you desperately wanted them to call you back?”
“What do you mean?” asked his friend, Aleksander.
“Let’s say you needed someone to call you back,” Dr. Meslowski said, mindful to not reveal any details about Yankel. “Let’s say that this person didn’t know you. And let’s also say that this fellow was a loner. Or, not a loner, but an introvert. He wasn’t eager to chat it up. What would you say on his voice mail to make sure he called you back?”
Aleksander considered the question for a few moments.
“I’d say that I found something that belonged to the person,” Aleksander finally replied.
An excellent idea. One that Dr. Meslowski should have been able to figure out himself, if he hadn’t been so tangled up with nerves.
After a full week had gone by with no word from the gypsies he asked one of the female orderlies, Brygida, to call the number and say that she had found something of Washo Zurka’s and would he please call back. (He also threw in a hundred zlotys, for the effort.)
“Just try to sound concerned,” Dr. Meslowski told Brygida. “Like whatever you found is important and needs to get back to its owner as soon as possible.”
“What did I find?”
“It doesn’t matter,” Dr. Meslowski replied. “Don’t say what. Just say you know that it’s his. That’s all. There’s no need to say anything else. They’re not going to pick up the line, anyway. Call from your house, though. I’ve already called him from the hospital. He might have the hospital number blocked.”
Brygida didn’t show much interest in the drama or peculiarity of what was going on. “Fine,” she said and plucked the hundred-zloty note out of the doctor’s hand.
Number 17 Przewoz Row, in the old part of Smolskie, was a much more lordly house than Ferka Gorjer was accustomed to.
As he stood outside in the late summer evening silently smoking cigarettes, Ferka checked the address a second time, just to make sure he hadn’t gone to the wrong street. And as he stared at the oversized windows with their baroque casements, he began wondering if he would have to figure out some tricky alarm system.
There were some thieves for whom spotting and disabling an alarm was second nature. They knew exactly where the wires were buried. They knew which cords to cut and which ones to leave alone. It was as if they had gotten the scent in their noses as infants and could sniff them out forever after. Ferka wasn’t quite in that league, but he wasn’t bad at it. One of his cousins had taught him the fundamentals of the closed-circuit magnet—how to remove the insulation and put a wire across the circuit, thus disabling the alarm—when he was a teenager. Ferka had been caught only three times by a missed wire. Two of these times, he had been younger than sixteen. And it wasn’t Ferka who had tripped the alarm those two times—it was his older cousin Chal.
No, in his mature years, he rarely made amateur mistakes—provided he was sensible in choosing his targets. The only time he had been nabbed by an alarm as an adult was at a jewelry store. The alarm was so well hidden that when Ferka came up from behind the counter with a fistful of ruby rings and saw a gang of policemen across from him with their guns drawn, he assumed there must have been a squad car patrolling nearby. It was only at the pretrial hearing a month later he learned that he had accidentally tripped a silent alarm.
However, his uncle had been insistent that this particular job carried little risk. Security would almost certainly be nonexistent. Ferka had asked whether he should bring Boiko and Marko—his brothers—along with him. “Not necessary,” his uncle had said. “You’ll be in and out of there in an hour.”
When the bedroom light had been turned out, and Ferka decided that the only other visible light (the kitchen) had simply been forgotten about, he threw away his cigarette, made sure that the street was empty, and took a long look at the door before deciding that he wouldn’t have much to worry about, alarm-wise. He wouldn’t even need the more complicated instruments he carried in his jacket. A paper clip and a nail file would do.
The interior of the house was not as nice as its exterior. The furniture looked cheap. There was a brown leather chair and a flat-screen television, but that was the extent of this house’s luxuries. There were no pieces of art or soft sofas or glass tables. Only books and papers. And several hundred videocassettes. (“Who still watches videos?” Ferka wondered as he examined the titles.) The house had a certain staleness about it—as if it were the dwelling of a lonely man. On the walls were framed photos of a family, but that was the only evidence of something more than solitude. The spare surfaces were littered with empty coffee mugs, and half-empty glasses of vodka. If Ferka had been hoping for chests of emeralds, he was to be disappointed.
Ferka locked the door behind him, sat on a brown metal folding chair next to a dining room table, and waited for his eyes to adjust to the darkness.
It did not take long. He pu
t his hands into his windbreaker and ran his fingers over the knife and the duct tape in his left pocket and the pistol in his right pocket—just to make sure they were still there.
And as he sat waiting to make sure his prey upstairs was helpless, he quietly went into the kitchen, turned off the lights, and in the darkness selected a butcher knife. (It was the only one in the knife block that was sharp enough to break skin, if it came to that.)
When he was satisfied that whoever was upstairs was now asleep, Ferka removed his tennis shoes and tiptoed up the stairs and toward the open door of the bedroom, from which came loud snoring.
The sleeping man was middle-aged. His eyebrows were two gray tufts of hair, and his face was lined. While not heavy, exactly, this sleeping man filled out his pajamas—as if a healthy metabolism had slowed. The sleeper was tall, too. When all was said and done, he might be as much as double Ferka’s weight. But that was never something that Ferka worried about.
He went to the dresser and removed a pair of white socks. The fellow’s mouth was wide open as he snored. Ferka stood still as he waited for his nerves to steady, and when he realized that the fellow wasn’t going to wake up without some help, he stuffed the socks in the man’s mouth.
The fellow woke up.
He gasped and coughed as if he had swallowed a mouthful of water, and his arms flapped and writhed. But Ferka was ready; as swiftly as he had stuffed the socks into the fellow’s mouth, he flung his elbow cruelly into the center of the man’s exposed stomach like a wrestler, oblivious to the whimpers of misery he fomented.
With his victim stunned and immobilized, Ferka grasped the gray roll of duct tape out of his windbreaker pocket and got to work taping the man down to his bed.
When the muffled gasps of terror and fear began spilling out of the stuffed sock, Ferka merely whispered, “Shhhhh . . .”
To accentuate the point he raised the knife he’d taken from the kitchen, which glinted in the darkness, and the squirming man suddenly stopped flailing his arms.