“Not all of them,” Bina says, her voice, like Landsman’s, caroming off the aluminum walls of the tunnel.
“Some of them just got comfortable here. They started to forget a little bit. They felt at home.”
“I guess that’s how it always goes,” Landsman says.
“Egypt. Spain. Germany.”
“They weakened. It’s human to weaken. They had their lives. Come on.”
They follow the planks until they come to another pipe that opens overhead, also fitted with cleats.
“You go first this time,” Bina says. “Let me check out your ass for a change.”
Landsman hoists himself up to the lowest cleat and then mounts to the top. A swatch of weak light shows through a break or hole in the lid that caps this end of the pipe. Landsman pushes against the hatch and it shoves back, a thick sheet of plywood that doesn’t budge or buckle. He puts his shoulder into it.
“What’s the matter?” Bina says from beneath his eet, her lamp wobbling into his eyes.
“It won’t move,” Landsman says. “There must be something on it. Or—”
He feels for the hole, and his hand brushes against something cold and rigid. He recoils, then his fingers return to work out the sense of an iron rod, a cable, pulled taut. He shines his light. A rubberized cable, knotted and fed through the finger hole from the top side, then drawn tight and lashed to the topmost cleat of the ladder underneath.
“What is it, Meyer? What did they do?”
“They tied it shut behind them so that nobody could follow them back down,” Landsman says. “Tied it with a nice big piece of string.”
44
A ganef wind has blown down from the mainland to plunder the Sitka treasury of fog and rain, leaving behind only cobwebs and one bright penny in a vault of polished blue. At 12: 03 the sun has already punched its ticket. Sinking, it stains the cobbles and stucco of the platz in a violin-colored throb of light that you would have to be a stone not to find poignant. Landsman, a curse on his head, may be a shammes, but he is no stone.
Driving onto Verbov Island, coming west on Avenue 225, he and Bina catch strong whiffs at every corner of the bubbling tzimmes that is cooking up all over town. The smell blows more intense and richer with both joy and panic on this island than anywhere else. Signs and banners announce the imminent proclamation of the kingdom of David and exhort the pious to prepare for the return to Eret Yisroel. Many of the signs look spontaneous, sprayed in dripping characters on bed linens and sheets of butcher paper. In the side streets, crowds of women and handlers yell at one another, trying to hold down or hyperinflate the price of luggage, concentrated laundry soap, sunscreen, batteries, protein bars, bolts of tropical-weight wool. Deeper into the alleys, Landsman imagines, in the basements and doorways, a quieter market burns like a banked fire: prescription drugs, gold, automatic weapons. They drive past huddled groups of street-corner geniuses spinning commentary on which families are to be given which contracts when they reach the Holy Land, which of the wiseguys will run the policy rackets, the cigarette smuggling, the gun franchises. For the first time since Gaystik took the championship, since the World’s Fair, maybe for the first time in sixty years, or so it feels to Landsman, something is actually happening in the Sitka District. What that something will turn out to be, not even the most learned of the sidewalk rebbes has the faintest idea.
But when they reach the heart of the island, the faithful replica of the lost heart of old Verbov, there is no hint of the end of exile, rampant price gouging, messianic revolution. Down at the wide end of the platz, the house of the Verbover rebbe stands looking solid and eternal as a house in a dream. Smoke hastens like a remittance from its lavish chimney, only to be waylaid by the wind. The morning’s Rudashevskys loiter darkly at their posts, and on the ridge of the house, the black rooster perches, coattails flapping, with his semiautomatic mandolin. Around the platz, women describe the ordinary circuits of their day, pushing strollers, trailing girls and boys too young for school. Here and there they stop to knit and unravel the skeins of breath that tangle them together. Scraps of newsprint, leaves, and dust get up impromptu games of dreydl in the archways of the houses. A pair of men in long coats leans into the wind, making for the rebbe’s house, sidelocks swinging. For the first time the traditional complaint, tantamount to a creed or at least a philosophy, of the Sitka Jew — Nobody gives a damn about us, stuck up here between Hoonah and Hotzeplotz — strikes Landsman as having been a blessing these past sixty years, and not the affliction they had all, in their backwater of geography and history, supposed.
“Who else is going to want to live in this chicken coop?” Bina says, echoing his thought in her own fashion, zipping her orange parka up past her chin. She slams the door of Landsman’s car and trades ritual glares with a gathering of women across the lane from the boundary maven’s shop. “This place is like a glass eye, it’s a wooden leg, you can’t pawn it.”
In front of the somber barn, the bachelor torments a rag with a broom handle. The rag is sloshed in solvent with a psychotropic odor, and the boy has been exiled to three hopeless islands of automobile grease on the cement. He jabs and caresses the rag with the end of his pole. When he takes note of Bina, he does so with a satisfying mixture of horror and awe. If Bina were Messiah come to redeem him in an orange parka, the expression on the pisher’s face would be more or less the same. His gaze gets stuck to her, and then he has to detach it with brutal care, like someone removing his tongue from a frozen pump.
“Reb Zimbalist?” Landsman says.
“He’s there,” says the bachelor, nodding toward the door of the shop. “But he’s really busy.”
“As busy as you?”
The bachelor gives the rag another desultory poke.
“I was in the way.” He makes the citation with a flour ish of self-pity, then aims a cheekbone at Bina without implicating any of his other features of his face in the gesture. “She can’t go in there,” he says firmly. “It isn’t appropriate.”
“See this, sweetness?” Bina has fished out her badge. “I’m like a cash gift. I’m always appropriate.”
The bachelor takes a step backward, and the mop handle disappears behind his back as if somehow it might incriminate him. “Are you going to arrest Reb Itzik?” he says.
“Now,” Landsman says, taking a step toward the bachelor, “why would we want to do that?”
One thing about a Yeshiva bachelor, he knows his way around a question.
“How should I know?” he says. “If I was a fancy pants lawyer, tell me, please, would I be standing out here slopping around with a rag on the end of a stick?”
Inside the shop, they have gathered around the big map table, Itzik Zimbalist and his crew, a dozen strapping Jews in yellow coveralls, their chins upholstered with the netted rolls of their beards. The presence of a woman in the shop flits among them like a bothersome moth. Zimbalist is the last to look up from the problem spread out on the table before him. When he sees who has come with the latest thorny question for the boundary maven, he nods and grunts with a suggestion of huffiness, as if Landsman and Bina are late for their appointment.
“Good morning, gentlemen,” Bina says, her voice weirdly fluting and unpersuasive in this big male barn. “I’m Inspector Gelbfish.”
“Good morning,” says the boundary maven.
His sharp and fleshless face is illegible as a blade or a skull. He rolls up the plan or chart with practiced hands, ties it in a length of cord, and turns to sheath it in the rack, where it disappears among a thousand of its fellows. His movements are those of an old man to whom haste is a forgotten vice. His step is herky-jerk, but his hands mannered and accurate.