“And, finally, truthfully, I fear this all may be a fool’s errand. There are numerous and persuasive teachings against acting in any way to hasten the coming of Messiah. Jeremiah condemns it. So do the Oaths of Solomon. Yes, of course, I want to see my yids settled in a new home with financial assurances from the U.S., offers of assistance and of access to all the unimaginably vast new markets your success in this operation would create. And I want Messiah like I want to sink, after this heat, into the cold dark waters of the mikvah in the next room. But, God should forgive me these words, I am afraid. So afraid that even the taste on my lips of Messiah is not enough. And you can tell them that down in Washington. Tell them the Verbover rebbe was afraid.” The idea of his fear seemed almost to entrance him with its novelty, like a teenager thinking of death or a whore of the chance of an immaculate love. “What?”
Litvak held up his right index finger. He had something, one more thing to offer the rebbe. One more clause for the contract. He had no idea how he would deliver it or if indeed it could be delivered. But as the rebbe prepared to turn his massive back on Jerusalem and on the complicated hugeness of the deal that Litvak had been putting together for months, he felt it well up in him like a chess brilliancy, notated with double exclamation marks. He scrambled to open his pad. He scrawled two words on the first clean leaf, but in his haste and panic, he pressed too hard and his pen ripped through the wet paper.
“What is it?” Shpilman said, “You have somethin more to offer?”
Litvak nodded, once, twice.
“Something more than Zion? Messiah? A home, fortune?”
Litvak got up and padded across the tile floor until he stood just beside the rebbe. Naked men, bearing the tales of their ruined bodies. Each of them, in his way, bereft, alone. Litvak reached out and, with the force and inspiration of that loneliness, and with the tip of his finger, inscribed two words in the vapor condensed on a white square of tile.
The rebbe read them and looked up, and they beaded over once more and were gone.
“My son,” the rebbe said.
It’s more than a game, Litvak wrote now, in the office at Peril Strait, as he and Roboy awaited the arrival of that wayward and unredeemed son. I would rather fight to take a prize however doubtful than wait to see what scraps I may be fed
“I suppose there’s a credo in there someplace,” Roboy said. “Maybe there’s hope for you yet.”
In return for providing them with manpower, a Messiah, and financing beyond their wildest dreams, the only thing that Litvak had ever asked of his partners, clients, employers, and associates in this venture was that he never be expected to believe the nonsense that they believed. Where they saw the fruit of divine wishes in a newborn red heifer, he saw the product of $1 million in taxpayer dollars spent secretly on bull semen and in vitro fertilization. In the eventual burning of this little red cow, they saw the purification of all Israel and the fulfillment of a millennia-old promise; Litvak saw, at most, a necessary move in an ancient game — the survival of the Jews.
Oh I wouldn’t go that far
There was a knock at the door, and Micky Vayner put in his head.
“I came to remind you, sir,” he said in his good American Hebrew.
Litvak stared blankly at the pink face with its peeling eyelids and baby-fat chin.
“Five minutes before twilight. You said to remind you.”
Litvak went to the window. The sky was striped in the pink, green, and luminous gray of a salmon’s hide. Sure enough, he saw a star or planet overhead. He nodded his thanks to Micky Vayner. Then he closed the box of chessmen and hooked the clasp.
“What’s at twilight?” Roboy said. He turned to Micky Vayner. “What’s today?”
Micky Vayner shrugged; as far as he knew, it was, by the lunar calendar, an ordinary day in the month of Nisan. Though, like his young comrades, he had been trained to believe in the foreordained reestablishment of the biblical kingdom of Judaea and in the destiny of Jerusalem to be the eternal capital of the Jews, he was no more strict or nice in his observance than any of the others. The young American Jews at Peril Strait observed the principal holidays, and for the most part, they kept the dietary laws. They wore the skullcap and the four-corners but kept their beards in military trim. They avoided work and training on the Sabbath, though not without exception. After forty years as a secular warrior, Litvak could stomach that much. Even in the wake of the accident, with his Sora gone, with the wind whistling through the hole she had left in Litvak’s life, with a thirst for meaning and a hunger for sense and an empty cup and a barren dish, Alter Litvak could not have taken a place among truly religious men. He never could have fallen happily, for example, among the black hats. In fact, he could not abide black hats, and since the meeting at the baths, he had kept to a minimum his contacts with the Verbovers, as they prepared in secret to be airlifted en masse to Palestine.
Today is nothing, he wrote before he pocketed the notepad and walked out of the room. Call me when they arrive
In his room Litvak took out his dental plates and dropped them with a chime of dice into a drinking glass. He unlaced his boots and sat down heavily on a folding cot. Whenever he came out to Peril Strait, he slept in this tiny room — on the blueprints, it had been shown as a utility closet — down the hall from Roboy’s office. His clothes he hung on a hook behind the door, his kit he stashed under the cot.
He leaned back against the cold wall of painted cinder block and looked at the wall, over the steel shelf that held the glass with his teeth. There was no window, so Litvak imagined an early star. A wheeling duck. The photograph moon. The sky slowly turning to the color of a gun. And an airplane, coming in low from the southeast, bearing the man who was, in Litvak’s plan, both prisoner and dynamite, tower and trapdoor, bull’s-eye and dart.
Litvak stood up slowly, with a grunt of pain. There were screws in his hips, which ached; his knees thudded and gonged like the pedals of an old piano. There was a constant thrum of wire in the hinges of his jaw.
He ran his tongue across the empty zones of his mouth with their feel of slick putty. He was accustomed to pain and breakage, but since the accident, his body no longer seemed to belong to him. It was something sawed and nailed together out of borrowed parts. A birdhouse built of scrap wood and propped on a pole, in which his soul flapped like a fugitive bat. He had been born, like every Jew, into the wrong world, the wrong country, at the wrong time, and now he was living in the wrong body, too. In the end maybe it was that sense of wrongness, that fist in the Jewish belly, binding Alter Litvak to the cause of the yids who had made him their general.
He went over to the steel shelf that was bolted to the wall under his notional window. Alongside the drinking glass that held the proof of Buchbinder’s genius, there stood a second glass. That one contained a few ounces of paraffin hardened around a piece of white string. Litvak had bought this candle in a grocery store not quite a year after his wife died, with the intention of burning it on the anniversary of her death. Now a number of such anniversaries had come and gone, and Litvak had evolved his own quaint tradition. Every year he brought the yahrzeit candle out, and looked at it, and thought about lighting it. He imagined the shy flutter of a flame. He envisioned himself lying in the darkness with the memorial candle’s light dancing over his head, scattering an alefbeys of shadows across the ciling of the tiny room. He pictured the glass empty at the close of twenty-four hours, the wick consumed the paraffin combusted, the metal tab drowned at the bottom in waxy dregs. And after that — but here his imagination tended to fail him.