Michael Chabon: The Yiddish Policemen's union

Goldy is wearing his polar-bear jammies, the height of retrospective chic for an Alaskan Jewish kid. Polar bears, snowflakes, igloos, the northern imagery that was so ubiquitous when Landsman was a boy, it’s all back in style again. Only this time it seems to be meant ironically. Snowflakes, yes, the Jews found them here, though, thanks to greenhouse gases, there are measurably fewer than in the old days. But no polar bears. No igloos. No reindeer. Mostly just a lot of angry Indians, fog, and rain, and half a century of a sense of mistakenness so keen, worked so deep into the systems of the Jews, that it emerges everywhere, even on their children’s pajamas.

“You ready to work today, Goldele?” Landsman says. He lays the back of his hand against the boy’s forehead. It feels nice and cool. Goldy’s Shnapish the Dog yarmulke hangs crooked, and Landsman smooths it and adjusts the bobby pin that holds it in place. “Ready to fight crime?”

“Sure thing, Uncle.”

Landsman reaches out to shake the boy’s hand, and without even looking, Goldy slides his dry paw into Landsman’s. A minute blue rectangle of light swims on the tear layer of the boy’s dark brown eyes. Landsman has watched this program with his godson before, on the educational channel. Like 90 percent of the television they watch, it comes from the south and is shown dubbed into Yiddish. It concerns the adventures of a pair of children with Jewish names who look like they might be part Indian and have no visible parents. They do have a crystalline magical dragon scale that they wish on in order to travel to a land of pastel dragons, each distinguished by its color and its particular brand of imbecility. Little by little, the children spend more and more time with their magical dragon scale until one day they travel off to the land of rainbow idiocy and never return; their bodies are found by the night manager of their cheap flop, each with a bullet in the back of the head. Maybe, Landsman thinks, something gets lost in the translation.

“Still want to be a noz when you grow up?” Landsman says. “Like your dad and your uncle Meyer?”

“Yes,” Goldy says without enthusiasm. “You bet I do.”

“That’s the boy.”

They shake hands again. This 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.