She still had a few connections from her show career, and she brought several new clients to the practice. God knows what kind of clients they were, but her boss valued them. Before long he allowed her to handle a few small cases on her own, and she started winning them for him. For a young American her career would be considered pretty good; for a forty-year-old former circus acrobat from Russia it was brilliant.
For Leva too the divorce turned out to be for the best. He married a nice Jewish girl from Mogilev, who didn’t have the experience of the circus behind her, or any other kind of experience either. Large, plump and wide-hipped, she bore him five children in seven years, which fully reconciled him to the loss of Irina.
His sensible wife would say to her friends: “You know our men fancy shiksas, but not after they find themselves a proper Jewish wife!”
This was the limit of her wisdom, but Leva wouldn’t have disagreed with it.
Irina found him without difficulty in the telephone directory. When she asked him to meet her urgently he was greatly taken aback, and in the two hours it took her to reach him in the Bronx he anxiously awaited some major unpleasantness, or at least inconvenience, from her.
His office was rather shabby. The business he did there had been hatched by Irina, whose practical mind and easygoing attitude to money had served him well during their brief marriage. It was she who at the start of it had persuaded him to invest all his money, his laboriously accumulated five thousand dollars, in a high-risk kosher cosmetics business. This had proved to be brilliantly profitable. Irina was still in the throes of her short-lived love affair with Judaism then, a gentle, reformed Judaism to be sure, but one which respected the dramatic connection between milk and meat, especially meat which had oinked when alive.
Leva’s cosmetics were just starting to find their market when Irina, plastered in non-kosher all-American cosmetics, walked out on him. As he embarked on this new phase of his life he quickly changed orientation and betrayed reformism for orthodoxy. There was a political reason he had to stop producing the crude paints which had defiled the noble faces of Jewish women, and sold this part of his business to his cousin, reserving for himself the production of kosher soaps and shampoos. He also learned to make kosher aspirin and other drugs, and he had plenty of customers, who evidently didn’t regard the idea as a complete swindle.
Leva met Irina at the door to his office. Both were greatly changed, but these changes weren’t so much to do with the passing of time as with the new directions their lives had taken. Leva had filled out, his jowls were fleshier and his back broader, which made him appear shorter; his face had lost the pink and white hue of the young King David, and he had acquired a sallow complexion. Irina, who during their marriage used to go around in knitted jerseys with holes on the shoulder and long Indian skirts which swept the floor, dazzled him now with her impeccable, fashion-plate looks, the sculpted elegance of her brows and nose, her firm chin and soft lips.
“A pearl, a real pearl,” he thought, and said it out loud.
Irina laughed, her old light laugh. “I’m glad you like me, Leva, you don’t look bad either, you’re a serious, important-looking man now!”
“I’ve five children, Irina, five.” He pulled a small photograph album from his desk. “So how’s Maika?”
“She’s fine, she’s a big girl already.” Irina examined the album and nodded, then put it back on the desk. “The thing is, an old friend, a Jew, someone I used to know in Moscow, is very ill. He’s dying. He wants to talk to a rabbi. Could you arrange it?”
“Is that all?” Leva felt hugely relieved. He had imagined she might make some financial claim to those five thousand dollars from the time they were married. He was a good man but he was burdened by family worries, and he hated unexpected expenses. “I can get you ten if you need it.”
Immediately he had said it he felt embarrassed, but Irina didn’t notice, or pretended not to. “It’s urgent, he’s terribly ill,” she said.
Leva promised to call her that evening.
He did indeed call that evening, and told her that he would be bringing round a well-known rabbi from Israel who was delivering a course of erudite lectures at New York University; he agreed to bring him to the sick man as soon as the Sabbath was over.
It was uncharacteristic of Irina, who never forgot anything, to forget that the Jewish Sabbath ended on Saturday evening and she told Nina the rabbi would be coming on Sunday morning.
The priest, Father Victor, promised to visit on Saturday after early vespers. Nina attached great importance to the fact that the priest was coming first.
SIX
With these two it was a feeling for the human body, a sense of the circulation of the blood, a particular way of thinking: something systemic, as Berman put it. Both could spot the particular idiosyncrasies linked to a certain type of metabolism, which predisposed someone to high blood pressure, ulcers, cancer, asthma. At the start of a medical examination they would observe whether the skin was dry, the white of the eye dull, the corners of the mouth enflamed.
In recent years they rarely examined anyone, however, unless requested to by friends.
Unlike Fima, Berman had passed all the American medical exams and validated his Russian qualifications two months after he arrived, thereby setting a local record: no one had yet completed the medical course so quickly. He immediately found a job in one of the city’s hospitals. He became acquainted with American medical practice, devoting seventy hours a week to it, and it appeared to him just as unsatisfactory as medicine in Russia, although for different reasons. After this he discovered a field which enabled him to keep his distance from American doctors, for he had little respect for them. It was a new field, recently invented, called radio-medicine, a diagnostic procedure which involved passing radioisotopes through the organism, and was followed up by a computer analysis.
In Russia they wouldn’t have it for twenty years, he thought ruefully, maybe never.
Berman often said that he had used up what was left of his brains on mastering the skill to operate his new computer, his energy on raising the money to pay for it and open his diagnostic laboratory, and expected to spend what was left of his life on repaying the enormous debts he had achieved as a result. His work nevertheless went well, the business grew, increasing its turnover. For the time being, however, all of his income went on covering the interest on his loans, which in this country grew quickly and imperceptibly, like mildew across a damp wall. “We live like the rest of America,” he would grin, clapping Fima on the shoulder.
Berman’s debts were over four hundred thousand dollars. Fima’s were four hundred dollars. In other words, according to American logic, the first prospered and the other lived in penury. In fact they both lived in identically shabby apartments and ate the same cheap food, the only difference being that while Fima dressed like a tramp, Berman bought himself three respectable “doctor’s” suits.
Both knew that if lenders judged Berman’s brains, education, or speculative business project to be that creditworthy, then it was no more than his due; he could have moved to the fashionable Upper East Side of Manhattan if he hadn’t been so cautious with money.
Fima hunched into himself. It wasn’t exactly envy he felt, but something morbid stirred in his soul. To be fair, when Berman opened his laboratory he had offered him work as his lab assistant. But Fima would have had to take various special courses for this, and he was still poring over his English textbooks trying to convince himself that next year he would finally mobilize himself to take his damned exams. In a word, the amiable offer was refused; to accept would have meant his total and final capitulation.