The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay

4

THE PAIR of young German professors spelunking with their electric torches in the rafters of the Old-New Synagogue, or Altneuschul, had, as it happened, gone away disappointed; for the attic under the stair-stepped gables of the old Gothic synagogue was a cenotaph. Around the turn of the last century, Prague’s city fathers had determined to “sanitize” the ancient ghetto. During a moment when the fate of the Altneuschul had appeared uncertain, the members of the secret circle had arranged for their charge to be moved from its ancient berth, under a cairn of decommissioned prayer books in the synagogue’s attic, to a room in a nearby apartment block, newly constructed by a member of the circle who, in public life, was a successful speculator in real estate. After this burst of uncommon activity, however, the ghetto-bred inertia and disorganization of the circle reasserted itself. The move, supposed to have been only temporary, somehow was never undone, even after it became clear that the Altneuschul would be spared. A few years later, the old yeshiva in whose library a record of the transfer was stored fell under the wrecking ball, and the log containing the record was lost. As a result, the circle was able to provide Kornblum with only a partial address for the Golem, the actual number of the apartment in which it was concealed having been forgotten or come into dispute. The embarrassing fact was that none of the current members of the circle could remember having laid eyes on the Golem since early 1917.

“Then why move it again?” Josef asked his old teacher, as they stood outside the art nouveau building, long since faded and smudged with thumbprints of soot, to which they had been referred. Josef gave a nervous tug at his false beard, which was making his chin itch. He was also wearing a mustache and a wig, all ginger in color and of good quality, and a pair of heavy round tortoiseshell spectacles. Consulting his image in Kornblum’s glass that morning, he had struck himself, in the Harris tweeds purchased for his trip to America, as looking quite convincingly Scottish. It was less clear to him why passing as a Scotsman in the streets of Prague was likely to divert people’s attention from his and Kornblum’s quest. As with many novices at the art of disguise, he could not have felt more conspicuous if he were naked or wearing a sandwich board printed with his name and intentions.

He looked up and down Nicholasgasse, his heart smacking against his ribs like a bumblebee at a window. In the ten minutes it had taken them to walk here from Kornblum’s room, Josef had passed his mother three times, or rather had passed three unknown women whose momentary resemblance to his mother had taken his breath away. He was reminded of the previous summer (following one of the episodes he imagined to have broken his young heart) when, every time he set out for school, for the German Lawn Tennis Club under Charles Bridge, for swimming at the Militär- und Civilschwimmschule, the constant possibility of encountering a certain Fraulein Felix had rendered every street corner and doorway a potential theater of shame and humiliation. Only now he was the betrayer of the hopes of another. He had no doubt that his mother, when he passed her, would be able to see right through the false whiskers. “If even they can’t find it, who could?”

“I am sure they could find it,” Kornblum said. He had trimmed his own beard, rinsing out the crackle of coppery red which, Josef had been shocked to discover, he had been using for years. He wore rimless glasses and a wide-brimmed black hat that shadowed his face, and he leaned realistically on a malacca cane. Kornblum had produced the disguises from the depths of his marvelous Chinese trunk, but said that they had come originally from the estate of Harry Houdini, who made frequent, expert use of disguise in his lifelong crusade to gull and expose false mediums. “I suppose the fear is that they will be soon be”—he flourished his handkerchief and then coughed into it—“obliged to try.”

Kornblum explained to the building superintendent, giving a pair of false names and brandishing credentials and bona fides whose source Josef was never able to determine, that they had been sent by the Jewish Council (a public organization unrelated to, though in some cases co-constituent with, the secret Golem circle) to survey the building, as part of a program to keep track of the movements of Jews into and within Prague. There was, in fact, such a program, undertaken semi-voluntarily and with the earnest dread that characterized all of the Jewish Council’s dealings with the Reichsprotektorat. The Jews of Bohemia, Moravia, and the Sudeten were being concentrated in the city, while Prague’s own Jews were being forced out of their old homes and into segregated neighborhoods, with two and three families often crowding into a single flat. The resulting turmoil made it difficult for the Jewish Council to supply the protectorate with the accurate information it constantly demanded; hence the need for a census. The superintendent of the building in which the Golem slept, which had been designated by the protectorate for habitation by Jews, found nothing to question in their story or documents, and let them in without hesitation.

Starting at the top and working their way down all five floors to the ground, Josef and Kornblum knocked on every door in the building and flashed their credentials, then carefully took down names and relationships. With so many people packed into each flat, and so many lately thrown out of work, it was the rare door that went unanswered in the middle of the day. In some of the flats, strict concords had been worked out among the disparate occupants, or else there was a happy mesh of temperament that maintained order, civility, and cleanliness. But for the most part, the families seemed not to have moved in together so much as to have collided, with an impact that hurled schoolbooks, magazines, hosiery, pipes, shoes, journals, candlesticks, knickknacks, mufflers, dressmaker’s dummies, crockery, and framed photographs in all directions, scattering them across rooms that had the provisional air of an auctioneer’s warehouse. In many apartments, there was a wild duplication and reduplication of furnishings: sofas ranked like church pews, enough jumbled dining chairs to stock a large café, a jungle growth of chandeliers dangling from ceilings, groves of torchères, clocks that sat side by side by side on a mantel, disputing the hour. Conflicts, in the nature of border wars, had inevitably broken out. Laundry was hung to demarcate lines of conflict and truce. Dueling wireless sets were tuned to different stations, the volumes turned up in hostile increments. In such circumstances, the scalding of a pan of milk, the frying of a kipper, the neglect of a fouled nappy, could possess incalculable strategic value. There were tales of families reduced to angry silence, communicating by means of hostile notes; three times, Kornblum’s simple request for the relationships among occupants resulted in bitter shouting over degrees of cousinage or testamentary disputes that in one case nearly led to a punch being thrown. Circumspect questioning of husbands, wives, great-uncles, and grandmothers brought forth no mention of a mysterious lodger, or of a door that was permanently shut.

When, after four hours of tedious and depressing make-believe, Mr. Krumm and Mr. Rosenblatt, representatives of the Census Committee of the Jewish Council of Prague, had knocked at every flat in the building, there were still three unaccounted for—all, as it turned out, on the fourth floor. But Josef thought he sensed futility—though he doubted his teacher ever would have admitted to it—in the old man’s stoop.

“Maybe,” Josef began, and then, after a brief struggle, let himself continue the thought, “maybe we ought to give up.”

He was exhausted by their charade, and as they came out onto the sidewalk again, crowded with a late-afternoon traffic of schoolchildren, clerks, and tradesmen, housekeepers carrying market bags and wrapped parcels of meat, all of them headed for home, he was aware that his fear of being discovered, unmasked, recognized by his disappointed parents, had been replaced by an acute longing to see them again. At any moment he expected—yearned—to hear his mother calling his name, to feel the moist brush stroke of his father’s mustache against his cheek. There was a residuum of summer in the watery blue sky, in the floral smell issuing from the bare throats of passing women. In the last day, posters had gone up advertising a new film starring Emil Jannings, the great German actor and friend of the Reich, for whom Josef felt a guilty admiration. Surely there was time to regroup, consider the situation in the bosom of his family, and prepare a less lunatic strategy. The idea that his previous plan of escape, by the conventional means of passports and visas and bribes, could somehow be revived and put into play started a seductive whispering in his heart.

“You may of course do so,” Kornblum said, resting on his cane with a fatigue that seemed less feigned than it had that morning. “I haven’t the liberty. Even if I do not send you, my prior obligation remains.”

“I was just thinking that perhaps I gave up on my other plan too soon.”

Kornblum nodded but said nothing, and the silence so counterbalanced the nod as to cancel it out.

“That isn’t the choice, is it?” Josef said after a moment. “Between your way and the other way. If I’m really going to go, I have to go your way, don’t I? Don’t I?”

Kornblum shrugged, but his eyes were not involved in the gesture. They were drawn at the corners, glittering with concern. “In my professional opinion,” he said.

Few things in the world carried more weight for Josef than that.

“Then there is no choice,” he said. “They spent everything they had.” He accepted the cigarette the old man offered. “What am I saying—‘if I’m going’?” He spat a flake of tobacco at the ground. “I have to go.”

“What you have to do, my boy,” Kornblum said, “is to try to remember that you are already gone.”

They went to the Eldorado Café and sat, nursing butter and egg sandwiches, two glasses of Herbert water, and the better part of a pack of Letkas. Every fifteen minutes, Kornblum consulted his wristwatch, the intervals so regular and precise as to render the gesture superfluous. After two hours they paid their check, made a stop in the men’s room to empty their bladders and adjust their getups, then returned to Nicholasgasse 26. Very quickly they accounted for two of the three mystery flats, 40 and 41, discovering that the first, a tiny two-room, belonged to an elderly lady who had been taking a nap the last time the ersatz census takers came to call; and that the second, according to the same old woman, was rented to a family named Zweig or Zwang who had gone to a funeral in Zuerau or Zilina. The woman’s alphabetic confusion seemed to be part of a more global uncertainty—she came to the door in her nightgown and one sock, and addressed Kornblum for no obvious reason as Herr Kapitan—encompassing, among many other points of doubt, Apartment 42, the third unaccounted-for flat, about whose occupant or occupants she was unable to provide any information at all. Repeated knocking on the door to 42 over the next hour brought no one. The mystery deepened when they returned to the neighbors in 43, the last of the floor’s four flats. Earlier that afternoon, Kornblum and Josef had spoken to the head of this household: two families, the wives and fourteen children of brothers, brought together in four rooms. They were religious Jews. As before, the elder brother came to the door. He was a heavyset man in skullcap and fringes, with a great beard, black and bushy, that looked much more false to Josef than his own. The brother would consent to speak to them only through a four-inch gap, athwart a length of brass chain, as if admitting them might contaminate his home or expose the women and children to untoward influences. But his bulk could not prevent the escape of children’s shrieks and laughter, women’s voices, the smell of stewing carrots and of onions half-melting in a pan of fat.

“What do you want with that—?” the man said after Kornblum inquired about Apartment 42. He seemed to have second thoughts about the noun he was going to employ, and broke off. “I have nothing to do with that.”

“That?” Josef said, unable to contain himself, though Kornblum had enjoined him to play the role of silent partner. “That what?”

“I have nothing to say.” The man’s long face—he was a jewel cutter, with sad, exophthalmic blue eyes—seemed to ripple with disgust. “As far as I’m concerned, that apartment is empty. I pay no attention. I couldn’t tell you the first thing. If you’ll excuse me.”

He slammed the door. Josef and Kornblum looked at each other.

“It’s forty-two,” Josef said as they climbed into the rattling lift.

“We shall find out,” Kornblum said. “I wonder.”

On their way back to his room, they passed an ash can and into it Kornblum tossed the clipped packet of flimsy on which he and Josef had named and numbered the occupants of the building. Before they had gone a dozen steps, however, Kornblum stopped, turned, and went back. With a practiced gesture, he pushed up his sleeve and reached into the mouth of the rusting drum. His face took on a pinched, stoic blankness as he groped about in the unknown offal that filled the can. After a moment, he brought out the list, now stained with a nasty green blotch. The packet was at least two centimeters thick. With a jerk of his sinewy arms, Kornblum ripped it cleanly in half. He gathered the halves together and tore them into quarters, then tore the gathered quarters into eighths. His mien remained neutral, but with each division and reassembly the wad of paper grew thicker, the force required to tear it correspondingly increased, and Josef sensed a mounting anger in Kornblum as he ripped to smithereens the inventory, by name and age, of every Jew who lived at Nicholasgasse 26. Then, with a gelid showman’s smile, he rained the scraps of paper down into the wastebasket, like coins in the famous Shower of Gold illusion.

“Contemptible,” he said, but Josef was not sure, then or afterward, whom or what he was talking about—the ruse itself, the occupiers who made it plausible, the Jews who had submitted to it without question, or himself for having perpetrated it.

Well past midnight, after a dinner of hard cheese, tinned smelts, and pimientos, and an evening passed in triangulating the divergent news from the Rundesfunk, Radio Moscow, and the BBC, Kornblum and Josef returned to Nicholasgasse. The extravagant front doors, thick plate glass on an iron frame worked in the form of drooping lilies, were locked, but naturally this presented Kornblum with no difficulty. In just under a minute, they were inside and headed up the stairs to the fourth floor, their rubber-soled shoes silent on the worn carpeting. The sconce lights were on mechanical timers, and had long since turned off for the night. As they proceeded, a unanimous silence seeped from the walls of the stairwell and hallways, as stifling as a smell. Josef felt his way, hesitating, listening for the whisper of his teacher’s trousers, but Kornblum moved confidently in darkness. He didn’t stop until he reached the door of 42. He struck a light, then gripped the door handle and knelt, using the handle to steady himself. He passed the lighter to Josef. It was hot against the palm. It grew hotter still as Josef kept it burning so that Kornblum could get the string of his pick-wallet untied. When he had unrolled the little wallet, Kornblum looked up at Josef with a question in his eyes, a teacherly amalgam of doubt and encouragement. He tapped the picks with his fingertips. Josef nodded and let the light go out. Kornblum’s hand felt for Josef’s. Josef took it and helped the old man to his feet with an audible creaking of bones. Then he passed back the lighter and knelt down himself, to see if he still knew how to work over a door.

There was a pair of locks, one mounted on the latch and a second set higher up—a deadbolt. Josef selected a pick tipped with a bent parenthesis and, with a twitch of the torsion wrench, made short work of the lower lock, a cheap three-pin affair. But the deadbolt gave him trouble. He teased and tickled the pins, sought out their resonant frequencies as if the pick were an antenna connected to the trembling inductor of his hand. But there was no signal; his fingers had gone dead. He grew first impatient, then embarrassed, huffing and blowing through his teeth. When he let loose with a hissed Scheiss, Kornblum laid a heavy hand on his shoulder, then struck another light. Josef hung his head, slowly stood up, and handed Kornblum the pick. In the instant before the flame of the lighter was again extinguished, he was humbled by the lack of consolation in Kornblum’s expression. When he was sealed up in a coffin, in a container car on the platform in Vilna, he was going to have to do a better job.

Seconds after Josef handed over the pick, they were inside Apartment 42. Kornblum closed the door softly behind them and switched on the light. They just had time to remark on the unlikely decision someone had made to decorate the Golem’s quarters in a profusion of Louis XV chairs, tiger skins, and ormolu candelabra when a low, curt, irresistible voice said, “Hands up, gents.”

The speaker was a woman of about fifty, dressed in a green sateen housecoat and matching green mules. Two younger women stood behind her, wearing hard expressions and ornate kimonos, but the woman in green was the one holding the gun. After a moment, an elderly man emerged from the hallway at the women’s back, in stocking feet, his shirttails flapping around him, his broom-straw legs pale and knobby. His seamed, potato-nosed face was strangely familiar to Josef.

“Max,” Kornblum said, his face and voice betraying surprise for the first time since Josef had known him. It was then that Josef recognized, in the half-naked old man, the candy-producing magical waiter from his and Thomas’s lone night at the Hofzinser Club years before. A lineal descendant, as it later turned out, of the Golem’s maker, Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel, and the man who had first brought Kornblum to the attention of the secret circle, old Max Loeb took in the scene before him, narrowing his eyes, trying to place this graybeard in a slouch hat with a commanding stage-trained voice.

“Kornblum?” he guessed finally, and his worried expression changed quickly to one of pity and amusement. He shook his head and signaled to the woman in green that she could put down her gun. “I can promise you this, Kornblum, you aren’t going to find it here,” he said, and then added, with a sour smile, “I’ve been poking around this apartment for years.”

Early the next morning, Josef and Kornblum met in the kitchen of Apartment 42. Here they were served coffee in scalloped Herend cups by Trudi, the youngest of the three prostitutes. She was an ample girl, plain and intelligent, studying to be a nurse. After relieving Josef of the burden of his innocence the previous night, in a procedure that required less time than it now took her to brew a pot of coffee, Trudi had pulled on her cherry-pink kimono and gone out to the parlor to study a text on phlebotomy, leaving Josef to the warmth of her goose-down counterpane, the lilac smell of her nape and cheek lingering on the cool pillow, the perfumed darkness of her bedroom, the shame of his contentment.

When Kornblum walked into the kitchen that morning, his eyes and Josef’s sought and avoided each other’s, and their conversation was monosyllabic; while Trudi was still in the kitchen, they barely drew a breath. It was not that Kornblum regretted having corrupted his young pupil. He had been frequenting prostitutes for decades and held liberal views on the utility and good sense of sexual commerce. Their berths had been more comfortable and far more fragrant than either would have found in Kornblum’s cramped room, with its single cot and its clanging pipes. Nevertheless, he was embarrassed, and from the guilty arc of Josef’s shoulders and the evasiveness of his gaze, Kornblum inferred that the young man felt the same.

The apartment’s kitchen was redolent of good coffee and eau de lilas. Wan October sunshine came through the curtain on the window and worked a needlepoint of shadow across the clean pine surface of the table. Trudi was an admirable girl, and the ancient, abused hinges of Kornblum’s battered frame seemed to have regained an elastic hum in the embrace of his own partner, Madame Willi—the wielder of the gun.