There is a cry of pain, feminine, a whuff of breath, and then the lady wishes a cancer upon Landsman’s testicles. Snow packs Landsman’s ears and melts into the collar of his coat and down his neck. Somebody snatches at Landsman’s gun and tries to drag him to his feet. Popcorn on the breath. The bandage over Landsman’s eyes stretches thin as he lurches upright. He can see the mustachioed snout of Rafi Zilberblat, and by the doors of the Big Macher, a plump bottle blonde lying on her back, her life pumping from her belly into the steaming red snow. And a couple of guns, one of them in Zilberblat’s hand, pointed at Landsman’s head. At the glint of the automatic, the cobweb of Landsman’s regrets and self-recriminations goes away. The smell of popcorn, coming from inside the abandoned store, alters his perception of the smell of blood and brings out the sweetness of it. Landsman ducks and lets go of his Smith Wesson.

Zilberblat was yanking so hard on the gun that when Landsman unclenches, the other man goes tumbling backward into the snow. Landsman scrambles on top of Zilberblat. He’s just acting now, without a thought in his head. He yanks his sholem loose and turns it around, and the world pulls the trigger on all its guns. Zilberblat grows a horn of blood from the crown of his head. The cobwebs are now in Landsman’s ears. He can hear only the breath at the back of his throat and his own blood pulsing.

For an instant a strange peace opens like an umbrella inside Landsman as he straddles the man he just killed, knees burning in the snow. He retains the presence of mind to recognize that this tranquillity is not necessarily a good sign. Then the doubts begin to crowd in around the knowledge of the mess he has made, bystanders gathering around a suicide leaper. Landsman staggers to his feet. He sees the gore on his coat, the tatters of brain, a tooth.

Two dead humans in the snow. The smell of pop corn, a buttery stink of feet, overwhelms him.

While he is busy heaving up his guts into the snow, another man wanders out of the Big Macher store. A young man with a rat snout and a loping gait. Landsman retains the wit to mark him as a Zilberblat. This Zilberblat has his arms raised and a wild look on his face. His hands are empty. But when he sees Landsman bleeding and sick on all fours, he abandons his project of surrender. He picks up the automatic lying on the ground by the ruin of his brother. Landsman careens to his feet, and the trail of fire at the back of his head flares up. He feels the ground give way, and then there is a roaring blackness.

After he dies, he wakes up lying facedown in the snow. He can’t feel snow on his cheek. The wild ringing in his ears is gone. He humps himself up to a sitting position. The blood from the back of his head has scattered rhododendrons in the snow. The man and the woman he shot have not moved, but there is no sign of the young Zilberblat who did or did not shoot and kill him. With a sudden clarity of thought and a mounting suspicion that he has forgotten to die, Landsman pats himself down. His watch, wallet, car keys, cell phone, gun, and badge are gone. He looks for his car parked in the distance, along the frontage road. When he sees that his Super Sport is gone, he knows that he is still alive, because only life could offer such a bitter vista.

“Another fucking Zilberblat,” he says. “And they’re all like that.”

He is cold. He considers entering the Big Macher, but the stench of popcorn keeps him away. He turns from the yawning doors and lifts his eyes toward the high hill and beyond it the mountains, black with trees. Then he sits down in the snow. After a while, he lies down. It’s snug and comfortable, and there’s a smell of cool dust, and he closes his eyes and falls asleep, folded up into his nice dark little hole in the wall of the Hotel Zamenhof, and for once in his life, the claustrophobia doesn’t trouble him, not a bit.

22

Landsman is holding a baby boy. The baby cries, for no very grave reason. His wailing constricts Landsman’s heart in a pleasurable way. Landsman feels relieved to discover that he has a fat handsome baby who smells of waffles and soap. He squeezes the puffy feet, gauges the weight of the little grandfather in his arms, at once negligible and vast. He turns to Bina to tell her the good news: It was all a mistake. Here is their boy. But there is no Bina to tell, only the memory in Landsman’s nostrils of rain on her hair. And then he wakes up and realizes that the crying baby is Pinky Shemets, having his diaper changed or registering a protest over some thing or other. Landsman blinks, and the world intrudes in the form of a batik wall covering, and he is hollowed out, as if it’s the first time, by the loss of his son.

Landsman is lying on Berko and Ester-Malke’s bed, on his side, facing the wall with its dyed linen scene of Balinese gardens and savage birds. Someone has undressed him, leaving him in his underpants. He sits up. The skin at the back of his head prickles, and then a cord of pain goes taut. Landsman pats the site of his injury. A bandage meets his fingers, a crinkly oblong of gauze and tape. Surrounding it, a queer hairless patch of scalp. Memories fall on top of one another with a slapping sound like crime-scene photographs fresh from Dr. Shpringer’s death camera. A jocular emergency room tech, an X ray, an injection of morphine, a looming swab dipped in Betadine. Before that, the light from a streetlamp striping the white vinyl ceiling of an ambulance. And before that. Before the ride in the ambulance. Purple slush. Steam from the spilled contents of a human gut. A hornet at his ear. A red jet bursting from the forehead of Rafi Zilberblat. A cipher of holes in a blank expanse of plaster. Landsman backs away from the memory of what happened in the Big Macher parking lot, so quickly that he bumps right into the pang of losing Django Landsman in his dream.

“Woe is me,” Landsman says. He wipes his eyes. He would give up a gland, a minor organ, for a papiros.

The bedroom door opens, and Berko comes in, carrying an almost-full pack of Broadways.

“Have I ever told you that I love you?” Landsman says, knowing full well that he never has.

“You never have, thank God,” Berko says. “I got these from the neighbor, the Fried woman. I told her it was a police seizure.”

“I am insanely grateful.”

“I note the adverb.”

Berko notes also that Landsman has been crying; one eyebrow shoots up, hangs suspended, drifts down like a tablecloth settling onto a table.

“Baby okay?” Landsman says.

“Teeth.” Berko takes a coat hanger from a hook on the back of the bedroom door. On the hanger are Landsman’s clothes, neat and brushed. Berko feels around in the hip pocket of Landsman’s blazer and produces a matchbook. Then he comes and stands by the bed and holds out the papiroses and matches.

“I can’t honestly claim,” says Landsman, “that I know what I’m doing here.”

“It was Ester-Malke’s idea. Knowing how you feel about hospitals. They said you didn’t need to stay.”

“Have a seat.”

There is no chair in the room. Landsman slides over, and Berko sits down on the edge of the bed, causing alarm among the bedsprings.

“It’s really okay if I smoke?”

“Not really, no. Go stand by the window,” Landsman tips himself out of the bed. When he rolls up the bamboo shade on the window, he is surprised to see that it’s pouring rain. The smell of rain blows in through the two inches the window has been cranked open, explaining the fragrance of Bina’s hair in his dream. Landsman looks down to the parking lot of the apartment building and observes that the snow has melted and been washed away. The light feels all wrong, too.

“What time is it?”

“Four-thirty … two,” Berko says without checking his watch.