On the other side of the electric fence, the fata morgana shimmers. Grass. Pastureland, rich and glossy. A hundred good-looking freckled cattle with delicate heads.
“Cows,” Landsman says, and the word sounds like a moo of doubtfulness.
“They look like dairy cows,” Berko says.
“They’re Ayrshires,” says Dick. “I snapped some pictures last time I came out here. A professor of agriculture down in Davis, California, ID’d them for me. ‘A Scottish breed.’ ” Dick works his voice up into his nose, mocking that Californian professor. “’Known for its hardiness and ability to thrive in northern latitudes.’ ”
“Cows,” Landsman says again. He can’t shake the eerie sense of dislocation, of mirage, of seeing something that is not there. Something that nonetheless he knows, recognizes, a half-remembered reality out of stories of heaven or his own past. From the days of the “Ickes colleges,” when the Alaskan Development Corporation dispensed tractors and seed and sacks of fertilizer to the fugitive boatloads, Jews of the District have dreamed and despaired of the Jewish farm. “Cows in Alaska.”
The Polar Bear generation suffered two great disappointments. The first and stupidest was due to the total absence, here in the fabled north, of icebergs, polar bears, walruses, penguins, tundra, snow in vast quantities, and, above all, Eskimos. Thousands of Sitka businesses still bear bitter and fanciful names such as Walrus Drug, or Eskimo Wig and Hairpiece, or Nanook’s Tavern.
The second disappointment was celebrated in popular songs of the period, like “A Cage of Green.” Two million Jews got off the boats and found no rolling prairies dotted with buffalo. No feathered Indians on horseback. Only a spine of flooded mountains and fifty thousand Tlingit village-dwellers already in possession of most of the flat and usable land. Nowhere to spread out, to grow, to do anything more than crowd together in the teeming style of Vilna and Lodz. The homesteading dreams of a million landless Jews, fanned by movies, light fiction, and informational brochures provided by the United States Department of the Interior — snuffed on arrival. Every few years some utopian society or other would acquire a tract of green that reminded some dreamer of a cow pasture. They would found a colony, import livestock, pen a manifesto. And then the climate, the markets, and the streak of doom that marbled Jewish life would work their charm. The dream farm would languish and fail.
Landsman feels that he’s looking at that dream, lustrous and verdant. A mirage of the old optimism, the hope for the future on which he was raised. That future itself, it seems to him — that was the fata morgana.
“There’s something funny about that one,” Berko says, staring through the binoculars that Dick brought along, and Landsman can hear the tug in his voice, a fish playing at the end of his line.
“Give me,” Landsman says, taking the binoculars and raising them to his face. He tries, but they’re all just cows to him.
“That one. By the two over there, facing the other way.” Berko guides the lenses with a brusque hand, settling them on a cow whose mottled hide is perhaps a richer red than its sisters’, a more dazzling white, its head sturdier, less ladylike. Like avid fingers, its lips tear at the grass.
“There’s something different,” Landsman allows. “But so what?”
“I’m not sure,” Berko says. It sounds slightly less than truthful. “Willie, do you know for sure these cows belong to our mystery Jews?”
“We saw the little buckaroo Jewboys with our own eyes,” Dick says. “The ones from the camp or school or whatever it is. Rounding them up. Driving them that way, toward the campus. They used some kind of bossy Scottish dog to help them. Me and my boys followed them a ways.”
“They didn’t see you?”
“It was getting dark. Anyway, what the fuck do you think, of course they didn’t see us, we’re Indians, God damn it. About half a mile in, there’s a state-of-the-art dairying barn. A couple of silos. It’s a medium-small operation, and it’s definitely all Jew.”
“So what is going on here?” Landsman says. “Is it a rehab center or a dairy farm? Or is it some kind of weird commando training facility pretending to be both?”
“Your commando likes his milk fresh from the cow,” Dick says.
They stand there looking at the cows. Landsman fights an urge to lean on the electric fence. There’s a fool of a devil in him that wants to feel the thrum of current. There’s a current in him that wants to feel the devil in the wire. Something bothers him, nags him, about this vision, this Crocker Land of cows. However real it may be, it’s also impossible. It should not be here; no yid should have been able to swing such a feat of real estate. Landsman has known or had dealings with many of the great and the wicked Jews of his generation, the rich men, the mad utopians, the so-called visionaries, the politicians who turn the law on their lathes. Landsman considers the warlords of the Russian neighborhoods with their stockpiles of weapons and diamonds and sturgeon roe. He runs through his mental docket of smuggler kings and gray-market moguls, gurus of minor cults. Men with influence, connections, unlimited funds. None of them could have pulled off something like this, not even Heskel Shpilman or Anatoly Moskowits the Wild Beast. No matter how powerful, every yid in the District is tethered by the leash of 1948. His kingdom is bound in its nutshell. His sky is a painted dome, his horizon an electrified fence. He has the flight and knows the freedom only of a balloon on a string.
Meanwhile, Berko is jerking on the knot of his neck tie in a way that Landsman has come to associate with the imminent emergence of a theory.
“What is it, Berko?” he says.
“She’s not a white cow with red spots,” Berko says with finality. “She’s a red cow with white spots.”
He sets his hat on the back of his head and purses his lips. He takes several backward steps away from the fence, and hikes up his trouser legs. Slowly at first, he lopes toward the fence. And then, to Landsman’s horror, shock, and mild elation, Berko leaps. His bulk leaves the ground. He sticks out one leg and hooks the other behind him. His trouser cuffs pull back to reveal green socks and pale shins. Then he comes down, with a gust of exhalation, on the other side of the fence. He staggers under his own impact, then plunges forward into the world of cows.
“What the fuck,” Landsman says.
“Technically, I have to arrest him now,” says Dick.
The cows react to the intrusion with complaint and protest but little in the way of emotion. Berko makes straight for the one that’s bothering him, marches right up to it. It shies away, lowing. He holds up his arms, palms outward. He speaks to it in Yiddish, American, Tlingit, Old and Modern Bovine. He circles it slowly, looking it up and down. Landsman sees Berko’s point: This cow is not like the others, in contour or coloration.
The cow submits to Berko’s inspection. He puts a hand on its crop, and it waits, hoofs spread, knock-kneed, head canted at a listening angle. Berko ducks down and peers at its underside. He runs his fingers alone its ribs, up its neck, to the poll of its head, then back along its flank to the tentlike rigging of its hips. There his hand stops, in the middle of a white patch of hide. Berko raises the fingers of his right hand to his mouth, moistens the tips, then rubs in a circular motion against the white patch of the cow’s rump. He takes his fingers away, contemplates them, smiles, frowns. Then he lumbers back across the field and stops at the fence, opposite Landsman.
He holds up his right hand as if in solemn parody of the salute of a cigar-store Indian, and Landsman sees that his fingers are streaked with flakes of white.
“Fake spots,” Berko says.
He backs up and comes at the fence again. Landsman and Dick get out of his way, and he’s up and airborne, and then the ground rings with the impact of him.