Moving on

More from Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union:

Landsman considers the things that remain his to lose: a porkpie hat. A travel chess set and a Polaroid picture of a dead messiah. A boundary map of Sitka, profane, ad hoc, encyclopedic, crime scenes and low dives and chokeberry brambles, printed on the tangles of his brain. Winter fog that blankets the heart, summer afternoons that stretch endless as arguments among Jews. Ghosts of Imperial Russia traced in the onion dome of St. Michael’s Cathedral, and of Warsaw in the rocking and sawing of a café violinist. Canals, fishing boats, islands, stray dogs, canneries, dairy restaurants. The neon marquee of the Baranof Theatre reflected in wet asphalt, colors running like watercolor as you come out of a showing of Welles’s Heart of Darkness, which you have just seen for the third time, with the girl of your dreams on your arms.