"Right here," Thomas said. He threw himself on the floor and rolled under the bed. A moment later, a small wooden crate emerged, covered in dust-furred spider silk, its lid hinged on crooked loops of wire.
Josef knelt and lifted the lid, revealing odd bits of apparatus and scientific supplies that had survived their father"s medical education. Adrift in a surf of ancient excelsior were a broken Erlenmeyer flask, a gla.s.s pear-shaped tube with a penny-head stopper, a pair of crucible tongs, the leather-clad box that contained the remains of a portable Zeiss microscope (long since rendered inoperable by Josef, who had once attempted to use it to get a better look at Pola Negri"s loins in a blurry bathing photo torn from a newspaper), and a few odd items.
"Thomas?"
"It"s nice under here. I"m not a claustrophobe. I could stay under here for weeks."
"Wasn"t there ..." Josef dug deep into the rustling pile of shavings. "Didn"t we used to have-"
"What?" Thomas slid out from under the bed.
Josef held up a long, glinting gla.s.s wand and brandished it as Kornblum himself might have done. "A thermometer," he said.
"What for? Whose temperature are you going to take?"
"The river"s," Josef said.
At four o"clock on the morning of Friday, September 27, 1935, the temperature of the water of the River Moldau, black as a church bell and ringing against the stone embankment at the north end of KampaIsland, stood at 22.2 on the Celsius scale. The night was moonless, and a fog lay over the river like an arras drawn across by a conjuror"s hand. A sharp wind rattled the seedpods in the bare limbs of the island"s acacias. The Kavalier brothers had come prepared for cold weather. Josef had dressed them in wool from head to toe, with two pairs of socks each. In the pack he wore on his back, he carried a piece of rope, a strand of chain, the thermometer, half a veal sausage, a padlock, and a change of clothes with two extra pairs of socks for himself. He also carried a portable oil brazier, borrowed from a school friend whose family went in for alpinism. Although he did not plan to spend much time in the water-no longer, he calculated, than a minute and twenty-seven seconds-he had been practicing in a bathtub filled with cold water, and he knew that, even in the steam-heated comfort of the bathroom at home, it took several minutes to rid oneself of the chill.
In all his life, Thomas Kavalier had never been up so early. He had never seen the streets of Prague so empty, the housefronts so sunken in gloom, like a row of lanterns with the wicks snuffed. The corners he knew, the shops, the carved lions on a bal.u.s.trade he pa.s.sed daily on his way to school, looked strange and momentous. Light spread in a feeble vapor from the streetlamps, and the corners were flooded in shadow. He kept imagining that he would turn around and see their father chasing after them in his dressing gown and slippers. Josef walked quickly, and Thomas had to hurry to keep up with him. Cold air burned his cheeks. They stopped several times, for reasons that were never clear to Thomas, to lurk in a doorway, or shelter behind the swelling fender of a parked Skoda. They pa.s.sed the open side door of a bakery, and Thomas was briefly overwhelmed by whiteness: a tiled white wall, a pale man dressed all in white, a cloud of flour roiling over a shining white mountain of dough. To Thomas"s astonishment, there were all manner of people about at this hour, tradesmen, cabdrivers, two drunken men singing, even a woman crossing the CharlesBridge in a long black coat, smoking and muttering to herself. And policemen. They were obliged to sneak past two en route to Kampa. Thomas was a contentedly law-abiding child, with fond feelings toward policemen. He was also afraid of them. His notion of prisons and jails had been keenly influenced by reading Dumas, and he had not the slightest doubt that little boys would, without compunction, be interred in them.
He began to be sorry to have come along. He wished he had never come up with the idea of having Josef prove his mettle to the members of the Hofzinser Club. It was not that he doubted his brother"s ability. This never would have occurred to him. He was just afraid: of the night, the shadows, and the darkness, of policemen, his father"s temper, spiders, robbers, drunks, ladies in overcoats, and especially, this morning, of the river, darker than anything else in Prague.
Josef, for his part, was afraid only of being stopped. Not caught; there could be nothing illegal, he reasoned, about tying yourself up and then trying to swim out of a laundry bag. He didn"t imagine the police or his parents would look favorably on the idea-he supposed he might even be prosecuted for swimming in the river out of season-but he was not afraid of punishment. He just did not want anything to prevent him from practicing his escape. He was on a tight schedule. Yesterday he had mailed an invitation to the president of the Hofzinser Club: The honored members of the Hofzinser Club are cordially invited to witness another astounding feat of autoliberation by that prodigy of escapistry CAVALIERI at CharlesBridge Sunday, 29 September 1935.
at half past four in the morning.
He was pleased with the wording, but it left him only two more days to get ready. For the past two weeks, he had been picking locks with his hands immersed in a sinkful of cold water, and wriggling free of his ropes and loosing his chains in the bathtub. Tonight he would try the "feat of autoliberation" from the sh.o.r.e of Kampa. Then, two days later, if all went well, he would have Thomas push him over the railing of the CharlesBridge. He had absolutely no doubt that he would be able to pull off the trick. Holding his breath for a minute and a half posed no difficulty for him. Thanks to Kornblum"s training, he could go for nearly twice that time without drawing a breath. Twenty-two degrees Celsius was colder than the water in the pipes at home, but again, he was not planning to stay in it for long. A razor blade, for cutting the laundry sack, was safely concealed between layers of the sole of his left shoe, and Kornblum"s tension wrench and a miniature pick Josef had made from the wire bristle of a street sweeper"s push broom were housed so comfortably in his cheeks that he was barely conscious of their presence. Such considerations as the impact of his head on the water or on one of the stone piers of the bridge, his paralyzing stage fright in front of that eminent audience, or helplessly sinking did not intrude upon his idee fixe.
"I"m ready," he said, handing the thermometer to his little brother. It was an icicle in Thomas"s hand. "Let"s get me into the bag."
He picked up the laundry sack they had pilfered from their housekeeper"s closet, held it open, and stepped into the wide mouth of the bag as though into a pair of trousers. Then he took the length of chain Thomas offered him and wrapped it between and around his ankles several times before linking the ends with a heavy Ratsel he had bought from an ironmonger. Next he held out his wrists to Thomas, who, as he had been instructed, bound them together with the rope and tied it tightly in a hitch and a pair of square knots. Josef crouched, and Thomas cinched the sack over his head. "On Sunday we"ll have you put chains and locks on the cord," Josef said, his voice m.u.f.fled in a way that disturbed his brother.
"But then how will you get out?" The boy"s hands trembled. He pulled his woolen gloves back on.
"They"ll be just for effect. I"m not coming out that way." The bag suddenly ballooned, and Thomas took a step backward. Inside the sack, Josef was bent forward, reaching out with both arms extended, seeking the ground. The bag toppled over. "Oh!"
"What happened?" "I"m fine. Roll me into the water."
Thomas looked at the misshapen bundle at his feet. It looked too small to contain his brother. "No," he said, to his surprise. "Thomas, please. You"re my a.s.sistant." "No, I"m not. I"m not even in the invitation."
"I"m sorry about that," said Josef. "I forgot." He waited. "Thomas, I sincerely and wholeheartedly apologize for my thoughtlessness." "All right." "Now roll me."
"I"m afraid." Thomas knelt down and started to uncinch the sack. He knew he was betraying his brother"s trust and the spirit of the mission, and it pained him to do so, but it couldn"t be helped. "You have to come out of there this minute."
"I"ll be fine," said Josef. "Thomas." Lying on his back, peering out through the suddenly reopened mouth of the sack, Josef shook his head. "You"re being ridiculous. Come on, tie it back up. What about the Hofzinser Club, eh? Don"t you want me to take you to dinner there?" "But..." "But what?" "The sack is too small." "What?"
"It"s so dark out... it"s too dark out, Josef?"
"Thomas, what are you talking about? Come on, Tommy Boy," Come on, Tommy Boy," he added in English. This was the name Miss Horne called him. "Dinner at the Hofzinser Club. Belly dancers. Turkish delight. All alone, without Mother and Father." "Yes, but-" "Do it." he added in English. This was the name Miss Horne called him. "Dinner at the Hofzinser Club. Belly dancers. Turkish delight. All alone, without Mother and Father." "Yes, but-" "Do it."
"Josef! Is your mouth bleeding?" "G.o.d d.a.m.n it, Thomas, tie up the G.o.dd.a.m.ned sack!" Thomas recoiled. Quickly, he bent and cinched the sack, and rolled his brother into the river. The splash startled him, and he burst into tears. A wide oval of ripples spread across the surface of the water. For a frantic instant, Thomas paced back and forth on the embankment, still hearing the explosion of water. The cuffs of his trousers were drenched and cold water seeped in around the tongues of his shoes. He had thrown his own brother into the river, drowned him like a litter of kittens.
The next thing Thomas knew, he was on the CharlesBridge, running past the bridge"s statues, headed for home, for the police station, for the jail cell into which he would now gladly have thrown himself. But as he was pa.s.sing Saint Christopher, he thought he heard something. He darted to the bridge parapet and peered over. He could just make out the alpinist"s rucksack on the embankment, the faint glow of the brazier. The surface of the river was unbroken.
Thomas ran back to the stairway that led back down to the island. As he pa.s.sed the round bollard at the stair head, the slap of hard marble against his palm seemed to exhort him to brave the black water. He scrambled down the stone stairs two at a time, tore across the empty square, slid down the embankment, and fell headlong into the Moldau.
"Josef!" he called, just before his mouth filled with water.
All this while Josef, blind, trussed, and stupid with cold, was madly holding his breath as, one by one, the elements of his trick went awry. When he had held out his hands to Thomas, he had crossed his wrists at the bony k.n.o.bs, flattening their soft inner sides against each other after he was tied, but the rope seemed to have contracted in the water, consuming this half inch of wriggling room, and in a panic that he had never thought possible, he felt almost a full minute slip away before he could free his hands. This triumph calmed him somewhat. He fished the wrench and pick from his mouth and, holding them carefully, reached down through the darkness for the chain around his legs. Kornblum had warned him against the tight grip of the amateur picklock, but he was shocked when the tension wrench twisted like the stem of a top and spun out of his fingers. He wasted fifteen seconds groping after it and then required another twenty or thirty to slip the pick into the lock. His fingertips were deafened by the cold, and it was only by some random vibration in the wire that he managed to hit the pins, set the drivers, and twist the plug of the lock. This same numbness served him much better when, reaching for the razor in his shoe, he sliced open the tip of his right index finger. Though he could see nothing, he could taste a thread of blood in that dark humming stuff around him.
Three and a half minutes after he had tumbled into the river, kicking his feet in their heavy shoes and two pairs of socks, he burst to the surface. Only Kornblum"s breathing exercises and a miracle of habit had kept him from exhaling every last atom of oxygen in his lungs in the instant that he hit the water. Gasping now, he clambered up the embankment and crawled on his hands and knees toward the hissing brazier. The smell of coal oil was like the odor of hot bread, of warm summer pavement. He sucked up deep barrelfuls of air. The world seemed to pour in through his lungs: spidery trees, fog, the flickering lamps strung along the bridge, a light burning in Kepler"s old tower in the Klementinum. Abruptly, he was sick, and spat up something bitter and shameful and hot. He wiped his lips with the sleeve of his wet wool shirt, and felt a little better. Then he realized that his brother had disappeared. Shivering, he stood up, his clothes hanging heavy as chain mail, and saw Thomas in the shadow of the bridge, beneath the carved figure of Bruncvik, chopping clumsily at the water, paddling, gasping, drowning.
Josef went back in. The water was as cold as before, but he did not seem to feel it. As he swam, he felt something fingering him, plucking at his legs, trying to s.n.a.t.c.h him under. It was only the earth"s gravity, or the swift Moldau current, but at the time, Josef imagined that he was being pawed at by the same foul stuff he had spat onto the sand.
When Thomas saw Josef splashing toward him, he promptly burst into tears.
"Keep crying," Josef said, reasoning that breathing was the essential thing and that weeping was in part a kind of respiration. "That"s good."
Josef got an arm around his brother"s waist, then tried to drag them, Thomas and his ponderous self, back toward the Kampa embankment. As they splashed and wrestled in the middle of the river, they kept talking, though neither could remember later what the subject of the discussion had been. Whatever it was, it struck them both afterward as having been something calm and leisurely, like the murmurs between them that sometimes preceded sleep. At a certain point, Josef realized that his limbs felt warm now, even hot, and that he was drowning. His last conscious perception was of Bernard Kornblum cutting through the water toward them, his bushy beard tied up in a hair net Josef came to an hour later in his bed at home. It took two more days for Thomas to revive; for most of that time, no one, least of all his doctor parents, expected that he would. He was never quite the same afterward. He could not bear cold weather, and he suffered from a lifelong snuffle. Also, perhaps because of damage to his ears, he lost his taste for music; the libretto for Houdini Houdini was abandoned. was abandoned.
The magic lessons were broken off-at the request of Bernard Kornblum. Throughout the difficult weeks that followed the escapade, Kornblum was a model of correctness and concern, bringing toys and games for Thomas, interceding on Josef"s behalf with the Kavaliers, shouldering all the blame himself. The Doctors Kavalier believed their sons when they said that Kornblum had had nothing to do with the incident, and since he had saved the boys from drowning, they were more than willing to forgive. Josef was so penitent and chastened that they even would have been willing to allow his continued studies with the impoverished old magician, who could certainly not afford to lose a pupil. But Kornblum told them that his time with Josef had come to an end. He had never had so naturally gifted a student, but his own discipline- which was really an escape artist"s sole possession-had not been pa.s.sed along. He didn"t tell them what he now privately believed: that Josef was one of those unfortunate boys who become escape artists not to prove the superior machinery of their bodies against outlandish contrivances and the laws of physics, but for dangerously metaphorical reasons. Such men feel imprisoned by invisible chains-walled in, sewn up in layers of batting. For them, the final feat of autoliberation was all too foreseeable.
Kornblum was, nevertheless, unable to resist offering that final criticism to his erstwhile pupil on his performance that night. "Never worry about what you are escaping from from," he said. "Reserve your anxieties for what you are escaping to." to."
Two weeks after Josef"s disaster, with Thomas recovered, Kornblum called at the flat off the Graben to escort the Kavalier brothers to dinner at the Hofzinser Club. It proved to be a quite ordinary place, with a cramped, dimly lit dining room that smelled of liver and onions. There was a small library filled with moldering volumes on deception and forgery. In the lounge, an electric fire cast a negligible glow over scattered armchairs covered in worn velour and a few potted palms and dusty rubber trees. An old waiter named Max made some ancient hard candies fall out of his handkerchief into Thomas"s lap. They tasted of burned coffee. The magicians, for their part, barely glanced up from their chessboards and silent hands of bridge. Where the knights and rooks were missing, they used spent rifle cartridges and stacks of prewar kreuzers; their playing cards were devastated by years of crimps, breaks, and palmings at the hands of bygone cardsharps. Since neither Kornblum nor Josef possessed any conversational skills, it fell upon Thomas to carry the burden of talk at the table, which he dutifully did until one of the members, an old necromancer dining alone at the next table, told him to shut up. At nine o"clock, as promised, Kornblum brought the boys home.
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 rea.s.serted 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 embarra.s.sing 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 tortoisesh.e.l.l spectacles. Consulting his image in Kornblum"s gla.s.s 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 pa.s.sing 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 Nicholasga.s.se, his heart smacking against his ribs like a b.u.mblebee at a window. In the ten minutes it had taken them to walk here from Kornblum"s room, Josef had pa.s.sed his mother three times, or rather had pa.s.sed 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 Militar- 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 he was the betrayer of the hopes of another. He had no doubt that his mother, when he pa.s.sed her, would be able to see right through the false whiskers. "If even was the betrayer of the hopes of another. He had no doubt that his mother, when he pa.s.sed her, would be able to see right through the false whiskers. "If even they they can"t find it, who could?" 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 gla.s.ses 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." 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-const.i.tuent 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 sem-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 doc.u.ments, 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, m.u.f.flers, 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 cafe, a jungle growth of chandeliers dangling from ceilings, groves of torcheres, 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 circ.u.mstances, 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. Circ.u.mspect 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 pa.s.sing 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 pa.s.sports 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, you, my prior obligation remains." 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 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." 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 Cafe and sat, nursing b.u.t.ter and egg sandwiches, two gla.s.ses of Herbert water, and the better part of a pack of Letkas. Every fifteen minutes, Kornblum consulted his wrist.w.a.tch, 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 Nicholasga.s.se 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 Zw.a.n.g 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- encompa.s.sing, 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 bra.s.s 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!" 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 pa.s.sed 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 rea.s.sembly 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 Nicholasga.s.se 26. Then, with a gelid showman"s smile, he rained the sc.r.a.ps of paper down into the waste-basket, 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 pa.s.sed in triangulating the divergent news from the Rundesfunk, Radio Moscow, and the BBC, Kornblum and Josef returned to Nicholasga.s.se. The extravagant front doors, thick plate gla.s.s 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 pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.sed 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 embarra.s.sed, huffing and blowing through his teeth. When he let loose with a hissed Scheiss, 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. 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 k.n.o.bby. 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 amus.e.m.e.nt. 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." he guessed finally, and his worried expression changed quickly to one of pity and amus.e.m.e.nt. 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 prost.i.tutes. 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 prost.i.tutes for decades and held liberal views on the utility and good sense of s.e.xual 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 embarra.s.sed, 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. 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. 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.
"Good morning," Kornblum muttered.
Josef blushed deeply. He opened his mouth to speak, but a spasm of coughing seemed to seize him, and his reply was broken and scattered on the air. They had wasted a night on pleasure at a time when so much seemed to depend on haste and self-sacrifice.
Moral discomfort notwithstanding, it was from Trudi that Josef derived a valuable piece of information.
"She heard some kids talking," he told Kornblum after the girl, leaning down to plant a brief, coffee-scented kiss on Josef"s cheek, had padded out of the kitchen and down the hall, to regain her disorderly bed. "There is a window in which no one ever sees a face."
"The children," children," Kornblum said, with a curt shake of his head. "Of course." He looked disgusted with himself for having neglected this obvious source of surprising information. "On what floor is this mysterious window?" Kornblum said, with a curt shake of his head. "Of course." He looked disgusted with himself for having neglected this obvious source of surprising information. "On what floor is this mysterious window?"
"She didn"t know."
"On which side of the building?"
"Again, she didn"t know. I thought we could find a child and ask it."
Kornblum gave his head a shake. He took another puff on his Letka, tapped it, turned it over, studied the tiny airplane symbol that was printed on the paper. Abruptly, he stood up and started to go through the kitchen drawers, working his way around the cabinets until he came up with a pair of scissors. He carried the scissors into the gilded parlor, where he began opening and closing cabinets. With gentle, precise movements, he went through the drawers of an ornate sideboard in the dining room. At last, in a table in the front hall, he found a box of notepaper, heavy sheets of rag tinted a soft robin"s-egg blue. He returned to the kitchen with paper and scissors and sat down again.
"We tell the people we forgot something," he said, folding a sheet of the stationery in half and cutting it, without hesitation, his hand steady and sure. With a half-dozen strokes, he had snipped the three-pointed outline of a paper boat, the sort that children fold from pieces of newspaper. "We say they have to put one of these in every window. To show they have been counted."
"A boat," Josef said. "A boat?"
"Not a boat," Kornblum said. He put the scissors down, opened the cropped piece of paper at the center pleat, and held up a small blue Star of David.
Josef shivered at the sight of it, chilled by the plausibility of this imaginary directive. "They won"t do it," he said, watching as Kornblum pressed the little star against the kitchen windowpane. "They won"t comply."
"I would like to hope that you"re right, young man," Kornblum said. "But we very much need you to be wrong."
Within two hours, every household in the building had spangled its windows in blue. By means of this base stratagem, the room that contained the Golem of Prague was rediscovered. It was on the top floor of Nicholasga.s.se 26, at the back; its lone window overlooked the rear courtyard. A generation of children at play had, like sky-gazing shepherds in ancient fields, perfected a natural history of the windows that looked down like stars upon them; in its perpetual vacancy, this window, like a retrograde planetoid, had attracted attention and fired imaginations. It also turned out to be the only simple means of ingress for the old escape artist and his protege. There was, or rather there had once been, a doorway, but it had been plastered and papered over, no doubt at the time of the Golem"s installment in the room. Since the roof was easily accessible via the main stair, Kornblum felt that it would attract less notice if they lowered themselves, under the cover of darkness, on ropes and came in through the window than if they tried to cut their way in through the door.
Once again they returned to the building after midnight-the third night of Josef"s shadow-existence in the city. This time they came dressed in somber suits and derby hats, carrying vaguely medical black bags, all supplied by a member of the secret circle who ran a mortuary. In this funereal garb, Josef lowered himself, hand under leather-gloved hand, down the rope to the ledge of the Golem"s window. He dropped much faster than he intended, nearly to the level of the window on the floor below, then managed to arrest his fall with a sudden jerk that seemed to wrench his shoulder from its socket. He looked up and, in the gloom, could just distinguish the outline of Kornblum"s head, the expression as unreadable as the fists clutching the other end of the rope. Josef let out a soft sigh between his clenched teeth and pulled himself back up to the Golem"s window. It was latched, but Kornblum had provided him with a length of stout wire. Josef dangled, ankles snaked around the end of the rope, clinging to it with one hand while, with the other, he jabbed the wire up into the gap between the upper, outer sash and the lower, inner one. His cheek sc.r.a.ped against brick, his shoulder burned, but Josef"s only thought was a prayer that this time he should not fail. Finally, just as the pain in his shoulder joint was beginning to intrude on the purity of his desperation, Josef succeeded in popping the latch. He fingered the lower sash, eased it up, and swung himself into the room. He stood panting, working his shoulder in circles. A moment later, there was a creaking of rope or old bones, a soft gasp, and then Kornblum"s long narrow legs kicked in through the open window. The magician turned on his torch and scanned the room until he found a lightbulb socket, dangling on a looped cord from the ceiling. He bent to reach into his mortician"s bag, took out a lightbulb, and handed it to Josef, who went up on tiptoe to screw it in.
The casket in which the Golem of Prague had been laid was the simple pine box prescribed by Jewish law, but wide as a door and long enough to hold two adolescent boys head to toe. It rested across the backs of a pair of stout sawhorses in the center of an empty room. Alter more than thirty years, the floor of the Golem"s room looked new; free of dust, glossy, and smooth. The white paint on the walls was spotless and still carried a sting of fresh emulsion. Hitherto, Josef had been inclined to discount the weirdness in Kornblum"s plan of escape, but now, in the presence of this enormous coffin, in this timeless room, he felt an uneasy p.r.i.c.kling creep across his neck and shoulders. Kornblum, too, approached the casket with visible diffidence, extending toward its rough pine lid a hand that hesitated a moment before touching. Cautiously he circled the casket, feeling out the nail heads, counting them, inspecting their condition and the condition of the hinges, and of the screws that held the hinges in place.
"All right," he said softly, with a nod, clearly trying to hearten himself as much as Josef. "Let us continue with the remainder of the plan."
The remainder of Kornblum"s plan, at whose midpoint they had now arrived, was this: First, using the ropes, they would convey the casket out of the window, onto the roof, and thence, posing as undertakers, down the stairs and out of the building. At the funeral home, in a room that had been reserved for them, they would prepare the Golem for shipment by rail to Lithuania. They would begin by gaffing the casket, which involved drawing the nails from one side and replacing them with nails that had been trimmed short, leaving a nub just long enough to fix the gaffed side to the rest of the box. That way, when the time came, Josef would be able, without much difficulty, to kick his way out. Applying the sacred principle of misdirection, they would next equip the coffin with an "inspection panel," making a cut across its lid about a third of the way from the end that held the head and equipping this upper third with a latch, so that it could, like the top half of a Dutch door, be opened separately from the lower. This would afford a good view of the dead Golem"s face and chest, but not of the portion of the coffin in which Josef would crouch. After that, they would label the casket, following all the complicated regulations and procedures and affixing the elaborate forms necessary for the transshipment of human remains. Forged death certificates and other required papers would have been left for them, properly concealed, in the mortuary"s workroom. After the coffin was prepared and doc.u.mented, they would load it into a hea.r.s.e and drive it to the train station. While riding in the back of the hea.r.s.e, Josef was to climb into the coffin alongside the Golem, pulling shut the gaffed panel after him. At the station, Kornblum would check to see that the coffin appeared sealed and would consign it to the care of the porters, who would load it onto the train. When the coffin arrived in Lithuania, Josef, at his earliest opportunity, would kick aside the gaffed panel, roll free, and discover what fate awaited him on the Baltic sh.o.r.e.
Now that they were confronted with the actual materials of the trick, however-as was so often the case-Kornblum encountered two problems.
"It"s a giant," Kornblum said, with a shake of his head, speaking in a tense whisper. With his miniature crowbar, he had pried loose the nails along one side of the coffin"s top and lifted the lid on its creaking, galvanized-tin hinges. He stood peering at the pitiable slab of lifeless and innocent clay. "And it"s naked."