The Yiddish Policemen’s Union. Michael Chabon
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conversation is the equivalent of Landsman’s kissing the mezuzah, the kind of thing that starts out as a joke and ends up as a strap to hang on to.
“You taking up chess?” Ester-Malke says when he walks back into the kitchen.
“God forbid,” says Landsman. He climbs up onto his stool and struggles with the tiny pawns and knights and kings of the travel set, setting them up to reflect the board left behind by the so-called Emanuel Lasker. He has a hard time telling the pieces apart, but every time he holds one up to his face to get a good look at it, he drops it.
“Stop looking at me that way,” he says to Ester-Malke, just guessing. “I don’t like it.”
“Damn it, Meyer,” she says, watching his hands. “You have the shakes.”
“I didn’t sleep all night.”
“Uh-huh.”
The thing about Ester-Malke Taytsh is that before she went back to school, became a social worker, and married Berko, she enjoyed a brief but distinguished career as a South Sitka fuckup. She has a couple of small-bore criminals in her past, a regretted tattoo on her belly, and a bridge in her jaw, a souvenir of the last man to mistreat her. Landsman has known her longer than Berko has, having busted her on a vandalism charge when she was still in high school. Ester-Malke understands how to handle a loser, by intuition and habit, and without any of the reproach she brings to bear on her own wasted youth. She goes to the refrigerator and takes out a bottle of Bruner Adler, pops the top, and hands it to Landsman. He rolls it against his sleepless temples, then takes a long swallow.
“So,” he says, feeling better in an instant. “You’re late?”
She puts on a half-theatrical expression of guilt, goes for the pregnancy-test stick, then leaves her hand in the pocket, clutching the stick without taking it out. Landsman knows, because she has broached the subject once or twice, that Ester-Malke worries he might envy her and Berko their successful program of breeding and their two fine sons. Landsman does, at times, with bitterness. But when she brings it up, he generally bothers to deny it.
“Shit,” he says as a bishop goes skittering across the floor and disappears under the bar counter.
“Was it a black one or a white?”
“Black. A bishop. Shit. It’s gone.”
Ester-Malke goes to the spice rack, tightens the waistband of her robe, studies her options. “Here,” she says. She takes out a jar of chocolate sprinkles, unscrews it, tips one into her palm, and hands it to Landsman. “Use that.”
Landsman is kneeling on the ground under the counter. He finds the missing bishop and manages to poke it into its hole at h6. Ester-Malke puts the jar back in the cabinet and returns her right hand to the mystery of her bathrobe pocket.
Landsman eats the chocolate sprinkle. “Berko knows?” he says.
Ester-Malke shakes her head, hiding behind her hair. “It’s nothing,” she says.
“Officially nothing?”
She shrugs.
“Didn’t you look at the test?”
“I’m afraid to.”
“You’re afraid to what?” says Berko, appearing at the door to the kitchen with young Pinchas Taytsh-Shemets—inevitably, Pinky—tucked into the crook of his right arm. A month ago they made a party for the kid, with a cake and a candle. So, Landsman reckons, that will bring in the third Taytsh-Shemets, if any, at around twenty-one, twenty-two months after the second. And seven months after Reversion. Seven months into the unknown world to come. Another diminutive prisoner of history and fate, another potential Messiah—for Messiah, say the experts, is born into every generation—to fill the sails of Elijah the Prophet’s demented caravel of dreams. Ester-Malke’s hand emerges from her pocket without the pregnancy test, and she gives Landsman a South Sitka high sign with one arched eyebrow.
“Afraid to hear what I had to eat yesterday,” Landsman says. By way of creating a diversion, he takes Lasker’s copy of Three Hundred Chess Games out of the other hip pocket of his jacket and lays it on the bar beside the chessboard.
“This is about your dead junkie?” Berko says, eyeing the board.
“Emanuel Lasker,” Landsman says. “But that was just a name in the registration. We found no kind of ID on him at all. We don’t know who he was yet.”
“Emanuel Lasker. I feel I know the name.” Berko squeezes sideways into the kitchen in his suit pants and shirtsleeves. The pants are heather-gray merino with double pleats, the shirt white on white. At his throat, tied with a handsome knot, hangs a navy necktie patterned with orange blobs. The tie is extra long, the trousers capacious and held up by navy suspenders taxed by the span and the arc of his belly. Under the shirt he wears the fringed four-corner, and a trim blue yarmulke perches on the glossy black furze at the back of his head, but no beard will grow on his chin. There is not a beard to be found on the chins of any of the men in his maternal family, reaching back all the way, no doubt, to the time when Raven created everything (apart from the sun, which he stole). Berko Shemets is observant, but in his own way and for his own reasons. He is a minotaur, and the world of Jews is his labyrinth.
He came to live with the Landsmans in the house on Adler Street on a day in late spring 1981, a shambling giant boy known, in the Sea Monster House of the Raven Moiety of the Longhair Tribe, as Johnny “the Jew” Bear. He stood five feet nine inches in his mukluks that afternoon, thirteen years old and only an inch shorter than Landsman at eighteen. Until that moment no one had ever mentioned this boy to Landsman or his little sister. Now the kid was going to be sleeping in the bedroom that had once served Meyer and Naomi’s father as Klein bottle for the infinite loop of his insomnia.
“Who the hell are you?” Landsman asked him as the kid stole sideways into the living room. Twisting a billed cap in his hands, taking everything in with his dark, all-consuming gaze. Hertz and Freydl were standing out on the front walk, screaming at each other. Apparently, Landsman’s uncle had neglected to mention to his sister that his son was coming to live at her house.
“My name is Johnny Bear,” Berko said. “I’m part of the Shemets Collection.”
Hertz Shemets remains a noted expert on Tlingit art and artifacts. At one time this hobby or pastime sent him wandering deeper and farther into the Indianer-Lands than any other Jew of his generation. So, yes, his study of Native culture and his trips into the Indianer-Lands were a beard for his COINTELPRO work during the sixties. But they were not only a beard. Hertz Shemets was drawn to the Indian way of life. He learned to gaff a seal with a steel hook, through the eye, and to slaughter and put up a bear, and to enjoy the flavor of candlefish grease as much as that of schmaltz. And he fathered a child on Miss Laurie Jo Bear of Hoonah. When she was killed during the so-called Synagogue Riots, her half-Jew son, an object of torment and scorn among the Raven Moiety, appealed for rescue to the father he barely knew. It was a zwischenzug, an unexpected move in the orderly unfolding of a game. It caught Uncle Hertz off guard.
“What are you going to do, turn him away?” he yelled at Landsman’s mother. “They’re making his life a living hell up there. His mother is dead. Murdered by Jews.”
In fact, eleven Native Alaskans were killed in the rioting that followed the bombing of a prayer house that a group of Jews had built on disputed land. There are pockets in these islands where the map drawn by Harold Ickes falters and gives way, dotted stretches of the Line. Most of them are too remote or mountainous to be inhabited, frozen or flooded year-round. But some of these crosshatched patches, choice and level and temperate, have proved irresistible over the years to the Jews in their millions. Jews want livable space. In the seventies some of them, mostly members of small Orthodox sects, began to take it.
The construction of a prayer house at St. Cyril by the splinter from a splinter of a sect from Lisianski was the final outrage for many Natives. It was met with demonstrations, rallies, lawyers, and dark rumblings from Congress over yet another affront to peace and parity