A Perfect Madness

A Perfect Madness

A novel

By Frank H. Marsh

Published by Brandylane Publishers at
Smashwords

Print copies available at
http://www.brandylanepublishers.com

Copyright 2012 by Frank H. Marsh.

This book is a work of historical fiction.
References to real people, events, places, and establishments are
done so to provide a sense of authenticity to the story. All other
characters, and all incidents and dialogue, are drawn from the
author’s imagination and are not to be construed as
real.

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***

For my dear deceased friend,

Dr. David L. Dungan

***

“There is a divinity that shapes our
ends,

Rough hew them how we will.”

(Hamlet, V, ii, 10)

***

ONE

Prague, 1992

I
t wasn’t Anna’s idea
to take Julia’s ashes back to her beloved Prague. She would have
sprinkled them up and down the banks of the Merrimack River running
the rear property line on their small farm outside Franklin, New
Hampshire. It was a God-given place to Julia for sure, as still and
reverent as any cemetery except for the flowing sounds of the
passing waters, which she loved. To have done so, though, meant
betraying the only real promise she had ever made to her mother, a
promise crammed full with the final chapters of a long odyssey her
mother began years back, in 1939, when Prague found itself standing
naked with all of Europe in a gathering storm of madness. So
Julia’s ashes would be buried soon where they should be, next to
Rabbi Loew’s grave in the Old Jewish Cemetery, even though no new
soul had been allowed to rest there in over two hundred years.

The promise, strange as it was to
become, came from Anna the year before Julia died. Following the
Velvet Revolution, Prague had quickly beckoned all that was good to
come home again to the old city. So they went there together, Anna
and Julia—Anna out of curiosity, or better, perhaps, from the
metaphysical tugging of ancient kin long dead and buried there,
Julia to find the lost innocence of her youth buried along with her
heart somewhere beneath a rubble of trampled dreams fifty-two years
earlier. The dreams would still be there waiting, she would tell
Anna during one of her many stories, scattered along the cobbled
brick streets in the old Jewish quarters. But she was dying now at
seventy-four. A doctor herself, Julia knew the end was near, so the
promise given by Anna was all she really had left.

When their plane began circling the
great city that day, waiting to land, the special moment came. At
first Julia sat silent, looking down on the vast carpet of
red-tiled roofs covering the city, wondering if distant memories of
magical places and golden dreams would betray her. Stories she had
told Anna many times were there waiting. It was then that the
strange promise was pulled from Anna’s lips by Julia. When death
came to her, wherever it might be, Anna was to somehow smuggle her
remains into the Old Jewish Cemetery. There she was to dig a small,
shallow hole alongside the great Maharal Rabbi Loew’s grave, where
God stayed close, and bury her ashes. For Julia it was the
necessary place, the place where many of her childhood dreams had
played out. She would go there to talk with Rabbi Loew and his
gentle golem, called Josef, about the struggles of her people and
the madness in her own life. No one else would be there except
those that danced and played in her imaginary world, and that was
good enough for her. Rabbi Loew and his golem were legends then—and
her friends. Sooner or later, she believed, they would come to her,
stepping out of the misty stillness covering the graves, and listen
to her cries.

One afternoon late, she decided to try
and make another golem, one she could see and touch and of the
female gender. Following the instructions in her father’s tomes on
Jewish mysticism, she set out to complete the task. Carrying
buckets of wet clay dug from the banks of the Vltava River to the
cemetery, she fashioned the form of a woman alongside the rabbi’s
grave, three cubits long, lying on her back, and then shaped a face
and arms and legs. Then she walked around her golem six times, the
days God took to create the world, reciting loudly various
combinations of words she had pulled from the Book of Genesis. But
the mud-shaped golem stayed still and quiet, like Josef. After
chanting new combinations of words and walking around her golem
many more times with no result, Julia decided that the secret to
life was where it should be, with Rabbi Loew. And she was glad,
because he was her friend.

After they had landed and were
departing from the airport, Julia cried, “We must hurry to the
cemetery now before the luggage is unpacked. The ringing of hand
bells will start soon, telling everyone to leave.”

The skies over Prague had turned to a
gray dusk by the time Anna and Julia arrived at the historical gate
that separates one’s existence from eternity, a place where, for a
brief moment, the ends of time come together and become
one.

“
Hurry,” Julia
urged.

Anna stood still, though, trapped in a
timeless zone, gazing through the open gate at the crowded graves
squeezed together in the small plot, their headstones looking like
so many crooked and jagged teeth. There were no clear rows before
her, only confusion. Over 100,000 souls layered twelve deep in
their graves, all yielding in turn their identity to the top tier
of buried bodies. Yet the totality of each grave clung silently
persistent to its own tiny share of a thousand years of the Jew in
Prague.

“
Which one is Rabbi Loew’s
grave?” Anna asked, unable to distinguish any clearly marked
headstone.

“
Look closely, there
towards the middle,” Julia responded excitedly.

Anna had missed it at first, but then
she saw a blackened and weathered headstone with coins and pebbles
strewn out before it, some resting on bits of folded
paper.

“
Rabbi Judah Loew ben
Balazel. 1520-1609.”

“
Yes! Yes!” Julia shouted,
making her way slowly through an army of tall headstones circling
the good rabbi’s grave like concrete sentinels.

“
Why the rocks and paper?”
Anna asked, reaching down to pick up a small yellow note faded by
time.

“
No, don’t! They are
private prayers to Rabbi Loew asking for help or advice. It would
be like listening in on someone’s confession.”

“
I suppose some were
answered?” Anna said, trying hard to share this special moment with
her mother.

Julia knelt down and gently traced her
fingers across the rabbi’s headstone.

“
Maybe, but mine
weren’t.”

“
You left messages
too?”

“
Oh yes, many. The last
two on the day before my brother Hiram and I left for England. The
Nazis had begun closing all roads to the city then. I asked that
Papa and Mama would soon follow. But they didn’t,” Julia murmured,
her voice trailing off to a whisper.

“
And the other
note?”

“
To my precious Erich,
about whom I have told you many stories. I was sure we would meet
again someday when the world came to its senses, and be married. It
was very romantic.”

“
Did Erich believe in the
golem?

“
I don’t know. I think
maybe he believed because I did. I told him, if Rabbi Loew made the
golem, then he had to have a direct line to God. That’s why so many
people left their prayers and wishes with the good rabbi, and still
do. He was seen as a Jewish savior by many. But Papa always got too
intellectual when I talked about the golem, said he was like the
good fairy. I know Erich agreed with him, because he said many
Germans saw their ancient warriors as still alive, but he wouldn’t
say he did.”

Anna looked tenderly at Julia and the
tears forming in her eyes as she continued talking about Erich. How
old she looked at seventy-four, stooped and wrinkled all over. Time
had not been gentle to her. She often referred to herself as a
lonely woman—she would call it that loneliness that is so hard on
the young, but so sweet to the old—and in a sense that was true.
Only an occasional twinkle in her eyes gave hint to the joy she
once held for simply being alive. No one had danced through life to
so many different tunes as she had. She gave so much, it seemed
like all of nature borrowed life from her. Blessed with an
insatiable curiosity about the way the world worked, she would
spend her Sundays around Old Town, simply watching life happen. So
intimate and passionate was her love of life, she seemed a part of
every living thing. There wasn’t one thing about living she didn’t
like, because it was a one-time affair. She knew that when it was
over, it was over. But now she had become obsessed with death and
the journey her soul would take when it came.

“
How often would you come
here?” Anna asked, still mystified by the rabbi’s grave.

“
Once a week, maybe. I
tried to come every day, though, after the Sudetenland was annexed
by Germany. It was one of the few places where Jews were not spit
on.”

“
With Erich?”

“
Oh yes, with Erich. Many
times we were here together. Especially when darkness came and the
city was quiet.”

“
You made love in a
cemetery?” Anna asked, grinning, amazed at such a revelation from
her mother.

“
Certainly. It was funny,
though, that when we first would come here and lay together, he was
very shy, thinking for a long time we were being watched. But I
told him the golem was asexual and cared little about what we were
doing. What was important to him was that we were in love,” Julia
said, laughing loudly before continuing.

“
We came unashamedly at
first, then secretly until I left and he was to return to Dresden.
When the final hour came for separation, there were no more words
to say. I left my prayer with the rabbi and walked home alone. We
both vowed, though, that our love would stay here with Rabbi Loew’s
grave until we were together again.”

“
We should go to Dresden
while we’re this close; perhaps he is still alive and living there.
What a surprise that would be,” Anna said teasingly.

Julia frowned and turned away, yet
Anna’s words had quickened her dying heart. She had left him here,
standing alone by the gate after their last moments together. Now,
fifty-two years later, all she could recall about him was the
warmth of his body. Nothing more. Not even the outlines of his
face.

Before she could respond to Anna’s
jesting words, the caretaker began walking among the headstones
ringing a hand bell like a town crier of old.

“
You know now what you
must do when I die, and where,” Julia said, quickly pointing once
more to Rabbi Loew’s grave. “Now we must hurry into the Pinkas
Synagogue before they close the doors. Papa and Mama will be
there.”

Julia and Anna walked a few paces from
the cemetery gate to a small courtyard fenced around a side
entrance to the synagogue and stepped inside the door. Neither one
was prepared for what followed. With each step they took, silent
voices from thousands of faceless victims reached out to them from
behind the countless rows of names spread across every inch of the
synagogue’s stone walls. All that they were and ever would be was
there, squeezed into each letter of their names. This was all any
of us would ever know about them, Julia knew. Yet each name knew
the others. They had all walked the same road to their deaths.
Looking around, Julia believed there was no place on earth large
enough to contain so much sorrow staring back at her from the
eighty thousand names spread across the walls.