Litvak stripped and hung up his clothes on two led hooks. He could smell the tidal flux of the baths, chlorine and armpit and a ripe salt vapor that might on second thought have been the pickle factory on the ground floor. There was nothing to weaken him, if that was part of the intent, in obliging him to take off his clothes. His scars were numerous, in certain instances horrible, and they had their effect. He heard a low whistle from one of the two Rudashevskys working the locker room. Litvak’s body was a parchment scribed by pain and violence on which they could only hope to make the barest exegesis. He slipped his pad from the hip pocket of his jacket on its hook.
Like what you see?
The Rudashevskys could not agree on a fitting reply.
One nodded; the other shook his head. They exchanged responses, to the satisfaction of neither. Then they gave him up and sent him through the misty glass door to the steam room, to confront the body they guarded.
That body, the horror and the splendor of it, naked as a giant bloodshot eyeball without a socket. Litvak had seen it only once before, years ago, topped with a fedora, rolled tight as a wad of Pinar del Rio into a stiff black greatcoat that swept the toes of his dainty black boots. Now it emerged ponderous from the steam, a slab of wet limestone webbed with a black lichen of hair. Litvak felt like a fogbound airplane buffeted by updrafts into the surprise of a mountain. The belly pregnant with elephant triplets, the breasts full and pendulous, each tipped with a pink lentil of a nipple. The thighs great hand-rolled marbled loaves of halvah. Lost in the shadows between them, a thick umbilicus of grayish-brown meat.
Litvak lowered the uninsulated armature of his frame to the hot grid of tiles opposite the rabbi. The time he had passed Shpilman in the street, the man’s eyes lay in the ambit of shadow cast by the sundial of his hat brim. Now they were trained on Litvak an his vandalized body. They were kindly eyes, Litvak thought, or eyes whose employer had schooled them in the uses of kindliness. They read Litvak’s scars, the puckered purple mouth on his right shoulder, th slashes of red velour on his hip, the pit in his left thigh deep enough to hold an ounce of gin. They offered sympathy, regard, even gratitude. The war in Cuba was notorious for its futility, brutality, and waste. Its veterans had been shunned on their return. No one had offered them forgiveness, understanding, a chance at healing. Heskel Shpilman was offering Litvak and his war-torn hide all three.
“The nature of your handicap,” the rebbe said, “has been explained to me, along with the substance of your offer.” His girlish voice, baffled by steam and porcelain tile, seemed to emerge from someplace other than the kettledrum chest. “I see you’ve brought along your pad and a pen, in spite of my clear instructions that you were to carry nothing at all.”
Litvak held up the offending items, beaded with steam. He could feel the warp, the buckle, in the pages of his pad.
“You won’t need them.” The birds of Shpilman’s hands roosted on the rock of his belly, and he closed his eyes, depriving Litvak of their sympathy, real or feigned, and leaving Litvak to stew for a minute or two in the steam. Litvak had always hated a shvitz. But this fixture of the old Harkavy, secular and squalid, was the only place that the Verbover rebbe could contrive to do private business away from his court, his gabay, his world. “I don’t plan to require any further response or inquiry from you.”
Litvak nodded and prepared to stand. His mind told him that Shpilman would not have bothered to summon him to this nude and one-sided interview if he planned to turn Litvak down. But he felt in his gut that the errand was doomed, that Shpilman had called him down to Ringelblum Avenue to deliver the refusal in all the elephantine authority of his person.
“I want you to know, Mr. Litvak, that I have been giving a great deal of consideration to this proposal. I have attempted to follow its logic from every angle.
“Let’s begin with our southern friends. If it were simply a case of their wanting something, some tangible feature or resource … oil, for example. Or if they were prompted by a more purely strategic concern with regard to Russia or Persia. In either case, they clearly don’t need us. However difficult a conquest the Holy Land might be, our physical presence, our willingness to fight, our arms, can’t make a great difference to their battle plan. I have studied their claims of support for the Jewish cause in Palestine, and their theology, and to the extent that I can, based on Rabbi Baronshteyn’s reports, I have tried to form a judgment of the gentiles and their aims. And I can only conclude that when they say they wish to see Jerusalem restored to Jewish sovereignty, they mean it. Their reasoning, the so-called prophecies and apocrypha whose supposed authority underlies this wish, maybe it all strikes me as laughable. Abominable, even. I pity the gentiles for their childlike trust in the imminent return of one who never in the first place departed, let alone arrived. But I am quite sure that they, in turn, pity us our own tardy Messiah. As a foundation for a partnership, mutual pity is not to be despised.
“As for your angle in this matter, that is easy, yes? You are a soldier for hire. You enjoy the challenge and the responsibility of generalship. I understand that. I do. You like to fight, and you like killing, as long as those who die aren’t your men. And, I dare say, after all these years with Shemets — and now, on your own behalf — you are long in the habit of appearing to please the Americans.
“For the Verbovers, there is great risk. Our entire community could be lost in this adventure. Wiped out in a matter of days, if your troops are ill prepared or simply, as seems not unlikely, outmanned. But if we stay here, well, then we are finished, too. Scattered to the winds. Our friends in the south have made that clear. That is the ‘stick.’ Reversion as the fire in the seat of the pants, yes? A restored Jerusalem as the bucket of ice water. Some of our younger men argue for making a stand here, daring them to dislodge us. But that is madness.
“On the other hand, if we agree, and you are successful, then we have regained a treasure of such incalculable value — I mean Zion, of course — that the mere thought of it opens a long-shuttered window in my soul. I have to shield my eyes from the brilliance.”
He raised the back of his left hand to his eyes. His thin wedding band was engulfed in his fingers like an ax head lost in the flesh of a tree. Litvak felt the pulse in his throat, a thumb plucking over and over at the lowest string of a harp. Dizziness. A sensation of ballooning in his feet and arms. It must be the heat, he thought. He took shallow timid breaths of rich burning air.
“I am dazzled by that vision,” the rebbe said. “Maybe as blinded by it, in my own way, as the evangelicals. So precious is the treasure. So incalculably sweet.”
No. It was not, or not only, the heat and ripeness of the shvitz that were making Litvak’s pulse thrum and his head spin. He felt certain of the wisdom of his gut: Shpilman was about to reject his proposal. But as that likelihood drew nearer, a new possibility began to dizzy him, to course through him. It was the thrill of a dazzling move.
“Still, it’s not enough,” the rebbe was saying. “I long for Messiah as I long for nothing else in this world.” He stood up, and his belly poured over his hips and groin like scalded milk foaming down the sides of a pot. “But I am afraid. I’m afraid of failure. I’m afraid of the potential for great loss of life among my yids and the utter destruction of everything we’ve worked for these last sixty years. There were eleven Verbovers left at the end of the war, Litvak. Eleven. I promised my wife’s father on his deathbed that I would never let such destruction befall us again.