The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay

“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,” 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 Nicholasgasse 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 protégé. 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 scraped 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. After 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 prickling 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 documented, they would load it into a hearse and drive it to the train station. While riding in the back of the hearse, 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 shore.

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.”

“It is very big.”

“We’ll never get it through the window. And if we do, we’ll never get it dressed.”

“Why do we have to dress it? It has those cloths, the Jewish scarves,” Josef said, pointing to the tallises in which the Golem had been wrapped. They were tattered and stained, and yet gave off no odor of corruption. The only smell Josef could detect arising from the swarthy flesh of the Golem was one too faint to name, acrid and green, that he was only later to identify as the sweet stench, on a summer afternoon in the dog days, of the Moldau. “Aren’t Jews supposed to be buried naked?”

“That is precisely the point,” Kornblum said. He explained that, according to a recent promulgation, it was illegal to transport even a dead Jew out of the country without direct authority of Reichsprotektor von Neurath. “We must practice the tricks of our trade.” He smiled thinly, nodding to the black mortician’s bags. “Rouge his cheeks and lips. Fit that dome of his with a convincing wig. Someone will look inside the coffin, and when he does, we want him to see a dead goyische giant.” He closed his eyes as if envisioning what he wanted the authorities to see, should they order the coffin to be opened. “Preferably in a very nice suit.”

“The most beautiful suits I ever saw,” said Josef, “belonged to a dead giant.”

Kornblum studied him, sensing an implication in the words that he was unable to catch.

“Alois Hora. He was over two meters tall.”

“From the Circus Zeletny?” Kornblum said. “‘The Mountain’?”

“He wore suits made in England, on Savile Row. Enormous things.”

“Yes, yes, I remember,” Kornblum said, nodding. “I used to see him quite often at the Café Continental. Beautiful suits,” he agreed.

“I think—” Josef began. He hesitated. He said, “I know where I can find one.”

It was not at all uncommon in this era for a doctor who treated glandular cases to maintain a wardrobe of wonders, stocked with under-linens the size of horse blankets, homburgs no bigger than berry bowls, and all manner of varied prodigies of haberdashery and the shoemaker’s last. These items, which Josef’s father had acquired or been given over the years, were kept in a cabinet in his office at the hospital, with the laudable but self-defeating intention of preventing their becoming objects of morbid curiosity to his children. No visit to their father at his place of work was ever complete without the boys at least making an attempt to persuade Dr. Kavalier to let them see the belt, fat and coiling as an anaconda, of the giant Vaclav Sroubek, or the digitalis-blossom slippers of tiny Miss Petra Frantisek. But after the doctor had been dismissed from his position at the hospital, along with the rest of the Jews on the faculty, the wardrobe of wonders had come home and its contents, in sealed packing boxes, stuffed into a closet in his study. Josef was certain that he would find some of Alois Hora’s suits among them.

And so, after living for three days in Prague as a shadow, it was as a shadow that he finally went home. It was well past curfew, and the streets were deserted but for a few long, flag-fendered sedans with impenetrable black windows and, once, a lorry loaded with gray-coated boys carrying guns. Josef went slowly and carefully, inserting himself into doorways, ducking behind a parked car or bench when he heard the clank of gears, or when the fork of passing headlights jabbed at the housefronts, the awnings, the cobbles in the street. In his coat pocket, he carried the picks Kornblum had thought he would need for the job, but when Josef got to the service door of the building off the Graben he found that, as was not uncommonly the case, it had been left propped open with a tin can, probably by some housekeeper taking unauthorized leave, or by a vagabond husband.

Josef met no one in the back hall or on the stairs. There was no baby whimpering for a bottle, no faint air of Weber from a late-night radio, no elderly smoker intent on the nightly business of coughing up his lungs. Although the ceiling lights and wall sconces were lit, the collective slumber of the building seemed even more profound than that of Nicholasgasse 26. Josef found this stillness disturbing. He felt the same prickle on his nape, the creeping of his flesh, that he had felt on entering the Golem’s empty room.

As he slunk down the hall, he noticed that someone had discarded a pile of clothes on the carpet outside the door of his family’s home. For a preconscious instant, his heart leaped at the thought that, by some dreamlike means, one of the suits he sought had somehow been abandoned there. Then Josef saw that it was not a mere heap of clothing but one actually inhabited by a body—someone drunk, or passed out, or expired in the hallway. A girl, he thought, one of his mother’s patients. It was rare, but not unheard of, for an analysand, tossed by tides of transference and desublimation, to seek the safety of Dr. Kavalier’s doorstep or, by contrast, inflamed with the special hatred of countertransference, to leave herself there in some desperate condition, as a cruel prank, like a paper sack of dog turds set afire.

But the clothes belonged to Josef himself, and the body inside them was Thomas’s. The boy lay on his side, knees drawn to his chest, head pillowed on an arm that reached toward the door, fingers spread with an air of lingering intention, as if he had fallen asleep with a hand on the doorknob, then subsided to the floor. He had on a pair of trousers, charcoal corduroy, shiny at the knee, and a bulky cable sweater, with a large hole under the arm and a permanent Czechoslovakia-shaped ghost of bicycle grease on the yoke, which Josef knew his brother liked to put on whenever he was feeling ill or friendless. From the collar of the sweater protruded the piped lapels of a pajama top. The cuffs of the pajama bottoms poked out from the legs of the borrowed pants. Thomas’s right cheek was flattened against his outstretched arm, and his breath rattled, regular and clamorous, through his permanently rheumy nose. Josef smiled and started to kneel down beside Thomas to wake him, and tease him, and help him back to bed. Then he remembered that he was not permitted—could not permit himself—to make his presence known. He could not ask Thomas to lie to their parents, nor did he really trust him to do so in any sustained manner. He backed away, trying to think what could have happened and how best to proceed. How had Thomas gotten himself locked out? Was this who had left the service door propped open downstairs? What could have prompted him to risk being out so late when, as everyone knew, a girl in Vinorhady, not much older than Thomas, had just a few weeks before sneaked outside to look for her lost dog and been shot, in a gloomy alley, for violating curfew? There had been official expressions of regret from von Neurath over the incident, but no promise that such a thing would not happen again. If Josef could somehow manage to wake his brother undetected—say by throwing a five-haleru piece at his head from around the corner of the hallway—would Thomas ring to be let in? Or would he be too ashamed, and choose to continue to pass the night in the chilly, dark hall, on the floor? And how would he, Josef, possibly be able to get to the giant’s clothes with his brother lying asleep in the doorway or else with the whole household awakened and in an uproar over the boy’s waywardness?

These speculations were cut short when Josef stepped on something that crunched, at once soft and rigid, under his heel. His heart seized, and he looked down, dancing backward in disgust, to see not a burst mouse but the leather wallet of lock picks that had once been his reward from Bernard Kornblum. Thomas’s eyes fluttered, and he snuffled, and Josef waited, wincing, to see if his brother would sink back into sleep. Thomas sat up abruptly. With the back of his arm he wiped the spittle from his lips, blinked, and gave a short sigh.

“Oh, dear,” he said, looking sleepily unsurprised to find his Brooklyn-bound brother crouched beside him, three days after he was supposed to have departed, in the hallway of their building in the heart of Prague. Thomas opened his mouth to speak again, but Josef covered it with the flat of his hand and pressed a finger to his own lips. He shook his head and pointed at the door.

When Thomas cast his eyes in the direction of the door to their flat, he finally seemed to awaken. His mouth narrowed to a pout, as if he had something sour on his tongue. His thick black eyebrows piled up over his nose. He shook his head and again attempted to say something, and again Josef covered his mouth, less gently this time. Josef picked up his old pick-wallet, which he had not seen in months, perhaps years, and which he had supposed, when he gave the matter any thought at all, to be lost. The lock on the Kavaliers’ door was one that, in another era, Josef had successfully picked many times. He got them inside now with little difficulty, and stepped into the front hall, grateful for its familiar smell of pipe smoke and paper-whites, for the distant hum of the electric icebox. Then he stepped into the living room and saw that the sofa and piano had been draped in quilts. The fish tank stood empty of fish and drained of water. The box orange in its putti-crusted terra-cotta pot was gone. Crates stood piled in the center of the room.

“They moved?” he said, in the softest whisper he could manage.

“To Dlouha eleven,” Thomas said, in a normal tone. “This morning.”

“They moved,” Josef said, unable now to raise his voice, though there was no one to hear them, no one to alert or disturb.

“It’s a vile place. The Katzes are vile people.”

“The Katzes?” There were cousins of his mother, for whom she had never cared much, who went by this name. “Viktor and Renata?”

Thomas nodded. “And the Mucus Twins.” He gave a vast roll of his eyes. “And their vile parakeet. They taught it to say ‘Up your bum, Thomas.’” He sniffed, snickered when his brother did, and then, with another slow agglomeration of his eyebrows, began to discharge a series of coughing sobs, careful and choked, as if they were painful to let out. Josef took him into his arms, stiffly, and thought suddenly how long it had been since he had heard the sound of Thomas freely crying, a sound that had once been as common in the house as the teakettle whistle or the scratch of their father’s match. The weight of Thomas on his knee was unwieldy, his shape awkward and unembraceable; he seemed to have grown from a boy to a youth in just the last three days.

“There’s a beastly aunt,” Thomas said, “and a moronic brother-in-law due tomorrow from Frydlant. I wanted to come back here. Just for tonight. Only I couldn’t work the lock.”

“I understand,” Josef said, understanding only that, until now, until this moment, his heart had never been broken. “You were born in this flat.”

Thomas nodded.

“What a day that was,” Josef said, trying to cheer the boy. “I was never so disappointed in my life.”

Thomas smiled politely. “Almost the whole building moved,” he said, sliding off of Josef’s knee. “Only the Kravniks and the Policeks and the Zlatnys are allowed to stay.” He wiped at his cheek with a forearm.

“Don’t get snot on my sweater,” Josef said, knocking his brother’s arm to one side.

“You left it.”

“I might send for it.”

“Why aren’t you gone?” Thomas said. “What happened to your ship?”

“There have been difficulties. But I should be on my way tonight. You mustn’t tell Mother and Father that you saw me.”

“You aren’t going to see them?”

The question, the plaintive rasp in Thomas’s voice as he asked it, pained Josef. He shook his head. “I just had to dash back here to get something.”

“Dash back from where?”

Josef ignored the question. “Is everything still here?”

“Except for some clothes, and some kitchen things. And my tennis racket. And my butterflies. And your wireless.” This was a twenty-tube set, built into a kind of heavy valise of oiled pine, that Josef had constructed from parts, amateur radio having succeeded illusion and preceded modern art in the cycle of Josef’s passions, as Houdini and then Marconi had given way to Paul Klee and Josef’s enrollment at the Academy of Fine Arts. “Mother carried it on her lap in the tram. She said listening to it was like listening to your voice, and she would rather have your voice to remember you than your photograph, even.”

“And then she said that I never photograph well, anyway.”

“Yes, she did, as a matter of fact. The wagon is coming here tomorrow morning for the rest of our things. I’m going to ride with the driver. I’m going to hold the reins. What is it you need? What did you come back for?”

“Wait here,” Josef said. He had already revealed too much; Kornblum was going to be very displeased.

He went down the hall to their father’s study, checking to make sure that Thomas did not follow, and doing his best to ignore the piled crates, the open doors that ought at this hour to have been long shut, the rolled carpets, the forlorn knocking of his shoe heels along the bare wooden floors. In his father’s office, the desk and bookcases had been wrapped in quilted blankets and tied with leather straps, the pictures and curtains taken down. The boxes that contained the uncanny clothing of endocrine freaks had been dragged from the closet and stacked, conveniently, just by the door. Each bore a pasted-on label, carefully printed in his father’s strong, regular hand, that gave a precise accounting of the contents of the crate:

DRESSES (5)—MARTINKA

HAT (STRAW)—ROTHMAN

CHRISTENING GOWN—SROUBEK

For some reason, the sight of these labels touched Josef. The writing was as legible as if it had been typeset, each letter shod and gloved with serifs, the parentheses neatly crimped, the wavy hyphens like stylized bolts of lightning. The labels had been lettered lovingly; his father had always expressed that emotion best through troubling with details. In this fatherly taking of pains—in this stubbornness, persistence, orderliness, patience, and calm—Josef had always taken comfort. Here Dr. Kavalier seemed to have composed, on his crates of strange mementos, a series of messages in the very alphabet of imperturbability itself. The labels seemed evidence of all the qualities his father and family were going to require to survive the ordeal to which Josef was abandoning them. With his father in charge, the Kavaliers and the Katzes would doubtless manage to form one of those rare households in which decency and order prevailed. With patience and calm, persistence and stoicism, good handwriting and careful labeling, they would meet persecution, indignity, and hardship head-on.

But then, staring at the label on one crate, which read

SWORD-CANE—DLUBECK

SHOE TREE—HORA

SUITS (3)—HORA

ASSORTED HANDKERCHIEFS (6)—HORA

Josef felt a bloom of dread in his belly, and all at once he was certain that it was not going to matter one iota how his father and the others behaved. Orderly or chaotic, well inventoried and civil or jumbled and squabbling, the Jews of Prague were dust on the boots of the Germans, to be whisked off with an indiscriminate broom. Stoicism and an eye for detail would avail them nothing. In later years, when he remembered this moment, Josef would be tempted to think that he had suffered a premonition, looking at those mucilage-caked labels, of the horror to come. At the time it was a simpler matter. The hair stood up on the back of his neck with a prickling discharge of ions. His heart pulsed in the hollow of his throat as if someone had pressed there with a thumb. And he felt, for an instant, that he was admiring the penmanship of someone who had died.