The Yiddish Policemen's Union

17

Look at Landsman, one shirttail hanging out, snow-dusted porkpie knocked to the left, coat hooked to a thumb over his shoulder. Hanging on to a sky-blue cafeteria ticket as if it’s the strap keeping him on his feet. His cheek needs the razor. His back is killing him. For reasons he doesn’t understand — or maybe for no reason — he hasn’t had a drink of alcohol since nine-thirty in the morning. Standing in the chrome and-tile desolation of the Polar-Shtern Kafeteria at nine o’clock on a Friday night, in a snowstorm, he’s the loneliest Jew in the Sitka District. He can feel the shifting of something dark and irresistible inside him, a hundred tons of black mud on a hillside, gathering its skirts to go sliding. The thought of food, even a golden ingot of the noodle pudding that is the crown jewel of the Polar-Shtern Kafeteria, makes him queasy. But he hasn’t eaten all day.

In fact, Landsman knows that he is not, by a long shot, the loneliest Jew in the Sitka District. He scorns himself for even entertaining the notion. The presence of self-pity in his thoughts is proof that he is circling the bung hole, spiraling inward and down, down, down. To resist this Coriolis motion, Landsman relies on three techniques. One is work, but work is now officially a joke. One is alcohol, which makes the drop come faster and go deeper and last longer but helps him not to care. The third is to have a bite. So he carries his blue ticket and his tray to the big Litvak lady behind the glass counter, with the hair net and the polyethylene gloves and the metal spoon, and forks it over.

“The cheese blintzes, please,” he says, not wanting cheese blintzes or even bothering to see if they are on the menu tonight. “How are you, Mrs. Nemintziner?”

Mrs. Nemintziner gentles three tight blintzes onto a white plate with a blue stripe on the rim. To ornament the evening meals of the lonely souls of Sitka, she has prepared several dozen slices of pickled crab apple on lettuce leaves. She tricks out Landsman’s dinner with one of these corsages. Then she punches his ticket and slings his plate at him. “How should I be?” she says.

Landsman acknowledges that the answer to this question is beyond him. He carries his tray of blintzes filled with cottage cheese to the coffee urns and drains off a mug’s worth. He hands over his punched ticket and his cash to the cashier, then wanders across the wasteland of the dining area, past two of his rivals for the title of loneliest Jew. He heads for the table he prefers, by the front windows, where he can keep an eye on the street. At the next table, somebody left a half-eaten plate of corned beef and boiled potatoes and a half-empty glass of what appears to be black-cherry soda. The abandoned meal, and the stained crumple of the napkin fill Landsman with a mild nausea of misgiving. But this is his table, and it is a fact that a noz likes to be able to keep an eye on the street. Landsman sits down, tucks his napkin into his collar, cuts apart a cheese blintz, and puts some into his mouth. He chews. He swallows. Good boy.

One of his rivals in the Polar-Shtern tonight is a bottom-rung bet runner named Penguin Simkowitz who mishandled a lot of somebody’s money a few years back and was beaten so badly by shtarkers that it addled his brain and speech. The other, working over a plate of herring in cream, Landsman doesn’t know. But the yid’s left eye socket is concealed behind a tan adhesive bandage. The left lens of his eyeglasses is missing. His hair is restricted to three downy gray patches at the front of his head. He cut his cheek shaving. When this man silently begins to weep into his plate of herring, Landsman tips over his king.

Then he sees Buchbinder, that archaeologist of delusion. A dentist, he was driven by his talent with pliers and the lost-wax mold, in classic dentist manner to take up some after-hours form of miniature madness such as jewelry making or dollhouse parquetry. But then, as happens sometimes to dentists, Buchbinder got a little carried away. The deepest, oldest madness of the Jews took hold of him. He started to turn out re-creations of the cutlery and getups employed by the ancient Koyenim, the high priests of Yahweh. To scale at first but soon full-size. Blood buckets, gobbet forks, ash shovels, all of it as required by Leviticus for the old holy barbecues in Jerusalem. He used to keep a museum, maybe it’s still there, up at the tired end of Ibn Ezra Street. A storefront in the building where Buchbinder pulled the teeth of lowlife Jews. In the display window the Temple of Solomon, built from cardboard, buried under a sandstorm of dust, ornamented with cherubim and dead flies. The place got vandalized a lot by the neighborhood junkies. You used to get a call, working the Untershtat beat, come in there at three in the morning to find Buchbinder weeping among the broken showcases, a turd flouting in some gilded copper censer of the high priest.

When Buchbinder sees Landsman, his eyes narrow with suspicion or myopia. Returning from the men’s room to his plate of corned beef and his cherry soda, working over the buttons of his fly with the absent air of a man in the grip of a startling but useless inference about the world. Buchbinder is a stout man, a German, enveloped in a cardigan with raglan sleeves and a knit sash. Between the arc of the man’s belly and the knotted sash are hints of past strife, but an understanding appears to have been reached. Tweed trousers, on his feet a pair of hiking sneakers. His hair and beard, dark blond with flecks of gray and silver. A metal clasp grips a crewel work yarmulke to the back of his head. He tosses a smile in Landsman’s direction like a man dropping a quarter in a cripple’s cup, fishes some closely printed tome from his hip pocket, and resumes his meal. He rocks back and forth while he reads and chews.

“Still running that museum of yours, Doctor?” Landsman says.

Buchbinder looks up, puzzled, trying to place this irritating stranger with the blintzes.

“It’s Landsman. Sitka Central. Maybe you remember, I used to—”

“Oh, yes,” he says with a tight smile. “How are you? We are an institute, not a museum, but that is all right.”

“Sorry.”

“No harm has been done,” he says, his supple Yiddish fitted with a stiffening wire of the German accent to which he and his fellow yekkes, even after sixty years, stubbornly cling. “It is a common mistake.”

It can’t be all that common, Landsman thinks, but he says, “Still up there on Ibn Ezra?”

“No,” says Dr. Buchbinder. He wipes a streak of brown mustard from his lips with his napkin. “No, sir, I have closed it down. Officially and permanently.”

His manner is grandiloquent, even celebratory, which strikes Landsman as odd, given the content of his declaration.

“Tough neighborhood,” Landsman suggests.

“Oh, they were animals,” Buchbinder says with the same cheeriness. “I can’t tell you how many times they broke my heart.” He stuffs a last forkful of corned beef into his mouth and subjects it to proper handling by his teeth. “But I doubt they’ll trouble me in my new location.”

“And where is that?”

Buchbinder smiles, dabs at his beard, then pushes back from the table. He raises an eyebrow, keeping the big surprise to himself a moment longer.

“Where else?” he says at last. “Jerusalem.”

“Wow,” Landsman says, keeping the straightest face he’s got. He has never seen the regulations for admission of Jews to Jerusalem, but he’s fairly certain that not being an obsessed religious lunatic is at the top of the list. “Jerusalem, eh? That’s a long way.”

“Yes, it is.”

“Lock, stock, and barrel?”

“The whole operation.”

“Know anyone there?”

There are still Jews living in Jerusalem, as there always have been. A few: They were there long before the Zionists started showing up, their trunks packed with Hebrew dictionaries, agricultural manuals, and plenty of trouble for everyone.

“Not really,” Buchbinder says. “Apart from — well.” He pauses and lowers his voice. “Messiah.”

“Well, that’s a good start,” Landsman says. “I hear he’s in with the best people there.”

Buchbinder nods, untouchable in the sugar-cube sanctuary of his dream. “Lock, stock, and barrel,” he says. He returns his book to his jacket pocket and stuffs himself and the sweater into an old blue anorak. “Good night, Landsman.”

“Good night, Dr. Buchbinder. Put in a good word for me with Messiah.”

“Oh,” he says, “there’s no need of that.”

“No need or no point?”

Abruptly, the merry eyes turn as steely as the disc of a dentist’s mirror. They assay Landsman’s condition with the insight of twenty-five years spent searching tirelessly for points of weakness and rot. Just for a moment Landsman doubts the man’s insanity.

“That’s up to you,” Buchbinder says. “Isn’t it?”