One of his rivals in the Polar-Shtern tonight is a bottom-rung bet runner named Penguin Simkowitz who mishandled a lot of somebody’s money a few years back and was beaten so badly by shtarkers that it addled his brain and speech. The other, working over a plate of herring in cream, Landsman doesn’t know. But the yid’s left eye socket is concealed behind a tan adhesive bandage. The left lens of his eyeglasses is missing. His hair is restricted to three downy gray patches at the front of his head. He cut his cheek shaving. When this man silently begins to weep into his plate of herring, Landsman tips over his king.

Then he sees Buchbinder, that archaeologist of delusion. A dentist, he was driven by his talent with pliers and the lost-wax mold, in classic dentist manner to take up some after-hours form of miniature madness such as jewelry making or dollhouse parquetry. But then, as happens sometimes to dentists, Buchbinder got a little carried away. The deepest, oldest madness of the Jews took hold of him. He started to turn out re-creations of the cutlery and getups employed by the ancient Koyenim, the high priests of Yahweh. To scale at first but soon full-size. Blood buckets, gobbet forks, ash shovels, all of it as required by Leviticus for the old holy barbecues in Jerusalem. He used to keep a museum, maybe it’s still there, up at the tired end of Ibn Ezra Street. A storefront in the building where Buchbinder pulled the teeth of lowlife Jews. In the display window the Temple of Solomon, built from cardboard, buried under a sandstorm of dust, ornamented with cherubim and dead flies. The place got vandalized a lot by the neighborhood junkies. You used to get a call, working the Untershtat beat, come in there at three in the morning to find Buchbinder weeping among the broken showcases, a turd flouting in some gilded copper censer of the high priest.

When Buchbinder sees Landsman, his eyes narrow with suspicion or myopia. Returning from the men’s room to his plate of corned beef and his cherry soda, working over the buttons of his fly with the absent air of a man in the grip of a startling but useless inference about the world. Buchbinder is a stout man, a German, enveloped in a cardigan with raglan sleeves and a knit sash. Between the arc of the man’s belly and the knotted sash are hints of past strife, but an understanding appears to have been reached. Tweed trousers, on his feet a pair of hiking sneakers. His hair and beard, dark blond with flecks of gray and silver. A metal clasp grips a crewel work yarmulke to the back of his head. He tosses a smile in Landsman’s direction like a man dropping a quarter in a cripple’s cup, fishes some closely printed tome from his hip pocket, and resumes his meal. He rocks back and forth while he reads and chews.

“Still running that museum of yours, Doctor?” Landsman says.

Buchbinder looks up, puzzled, trying to place this irritating stranger with the blintzes.

“It’s Landsman. Sitka Central. Maybe you remember, I used to—”

“Oh, yes,” he says with a tight smile. “How are you? We are an institute, not a museum, but that is all right.”

“Sorry.”

“No harm has been done,” he says, his supple Yiddish fitted with a stiffening wire of the German accent to which he and his fellow yekkes, even after sixty years, stubbornly cling. “It is a common mistake.”

It can’t be all that common, Landsman thinks, but he says, “Still up there on Ibn Ezra?”

“No,” says Dr. Buchbinder. He wipes a streak of brown mustard from his lips with his napkin. “No, sir, I have closed it down. Officially and permanently.”

His manner is grandiloquent, even celebratory, which strikes Landsman as odd, given the content of his declaration.

“Tough neighborhood,” Landsman suggests.

“Oh, they were animals,” Buchbinder says with the same cheeriness. “I can’t tell you how many times they broke my heart.” He stuffs a last forkful of corned beef into his mouth and subjects it to proper handling by his teeth. “But I doubt they’ll trouble me in my new location.”

“And where is that?”

Buchbinder smiles, dabs at his beard, then pushes back from the table. He raises an eyebrow, keeping the big surprise to himself a moment longer.

“Where else?” he says at last. “Jerusalem.”

“Wow,” Landsman says, keeping the straightest face he’s got. He has never seen the regulations for admission of Jews to Jerusalem, but he’s fairly certain that not being an obsessed religious lunatic is at the top of the list. “Jerusalem, eh? That’s a long way.”

“Yes, it is.”

“Lock, stock, and barrel?”

“The whole operation.”

“Know anyone there?”

There are still Jews living in Jerusalem, as there always have been. A few: They were there long before the Zionists started showing up, their trunks packed with Hebrew dictionaries, agricultural manuals, and plenty of trouble for everyone.

“Not really,” Buchbinder says. “Apart from — well.” He pauses and lowers his voice. “Messiah.”

“Well, that’s a good start,” Landsman says. “I hear he’s in with the best people there.”

Buchbinder nods, untouchable in the sugar-cube sanctuary of his dream. “Lock, stock, and barrel,” he says. He returns his book to his jacket pocket and stuffs himself and the sweater into an old blue anorak. “Good night, Landsman.”

“Good night, Dr. Buchbinder. Put in a good word for me with Messiah.”

“Oh,” he says, “there’s no need of that.”

“No need or no point?”

Abruptly, the merry eyes turn as steely as the disc of a dentist’s mirror. They assay Landsman’s condition with the insight of twenty-five years spent searching tirelessly for points of weakness and rot. Just for a moment Landsman doubts the man’s insanity.

“That’s up to you,” Buchbinder says. “Isn’t it?”

18

As Buchbinder pushes out of the Polar-Shtern, he stops to hold the door for a blazing orange parka carried on a gust of slanting snow. Bina is dragging that old overstuffed cowhide tote of hers slung over one shoulder. From it a clutch of documents protrudes, highlighted in yellow, stapled and paper-clipped and flagged with strips of colored tape. She throws back the hood of her parka. She has pushed up her hair, and pinned it up, and left it to fend for itself at the back of her head. Its color is a wistful shade that Landsman remembers observing in only one other place in his life, and that was deep in the grooves of the first pumpkin he ever beheld, a big dark red-orange brute. She lugs her tote over to the ticket lady. When she comes through the turnstile on her way to the stacks of cafeteria trays, Landsman will come directly into her line of sight.

At once Landsman makes the mature decision to pretend that he has not seen Bina. He looks out the plate windows at Khalyastre Street. The depth of snowfall he estimates at close to six inches. Three separate trails of footprints snake in and out of one another, the edges of each print blurring as it fills with fallen snow. Across the street, handbills pasted to the boarded windows of Krasny’s Tobacco and Stationery advertise the performance, last night at the Vorsht, of the guitarist who got rolled in the toilet for his finger rings and cash. From the phone pole at the corner, a craze of wires runs out in all directions, mapping the walls and doorways of this great imaginary ghetto of the Jews. The involuntary processes of Landsman’s shammes mind record the details of the scene. But his conscious thoughts are focused on the moment when Bina will see him sitting there, alone at his table, chewing on a blintz, and call his name.

This moment takes its sweet time showing up.

Landsman risks a second look. Bina already has her dinner on a tray and is waiting for her change with her back to Landsman. She saw him; she must have seen him. That is when the great fissure oozes open, the hill side gives way, and the wall of black mud comes rolling down. Landsman and Bina were married to each other for twelve years and together for five before that. Each was the other’s first lover, first betrayer, first refuge, first roommate, first audience, first person to turn to when something — even the marriage itself — went wrong. For half their lives, they tangled their histories, bodies, phobias, theories, recipes, libraries, record collections. They mounted spectacular arguments, nose to-nose, hands flying, spittle flying, throwing things, kicking things, breaking things, rolling around on the ground grabbing up fistfuls of each other’s hair. The next day he would bear the red moons of Bina’s nails in his cheeks and on the meat of his chest, and she wore his purple fingerprints like an armlet. For something like seven years of their lives together they fucked almost every day. Angry, loving, sick, well, cold, hot, half asleep. They went at it on every manner of bed, couch, and cushion. On futons and towels and old shower curtains, in the back of a pickup truck, behind a Dumpster, on top of a water tower, inside a rack of coats at a Hands of Esau dinner. They even fucked each other — once — on the giant fungus in the break room.