A Perfect Madness (2 page)

Turning to her right, she walked
slowly along the side wall of the nave, occasionally touching a
name or two as if she knew them. Suddenly, as if lifted from within
the host of names by some mysterious force, two names she had long
pretended would not be here were hurled into Julia’s searching
eyes. Jiri Kaufmann and Anka Kaufmann, names she had not seen
written in fifty-two years. Julia could not bring herself to touch
her mother and father’s names, though Anna did. Later, on the
return trip to America, Anna would hold Julia’s hand as they
discussed the strangeness of love and its force after so many years
of silence.

From the moment the Nazi atrocities at
Auschwitz were revealed, Julia tried to believe her mother and
father had died some other way, at some other place and time.
Suicide at home maybe, as some Jews in Prague did. At least it
would have been their choice. But truth has a way of hanging around
long enough to keep reality from becoming fiction. For Julia,
though, closure of her loss was finally there before her, two small
names among the thousands huddled about them, all sharing the same
horrific ending.

Julia could no longer hold back a
lifetime of waiting tears as she and Anna moved upstairs in the
synagogue. There the drawings and brightly colored paintings of
children waiting on their deaths in the gas chambers were spread
across the walls like a thousand rainbows. No fear or sadness. Only
a radiant hope that danced and sang endlessly through their colors.
There were so many of the truly innocent before her that Julia
could only wonder where God was hiding then.

Julia stopped before two paintings
that had caught her eye.

“
Brehova Street, Anna! I
recognize the row of houses and apartment buildings,” she beamed,
wiping the rivers of tears from her face. Then she reached out and
touched the name, Viktor Fischer, scribbled across the bottom of
each painting, connecting the distant past with the present. His
small round face appeared before her eyes as it was when she left
Prague in 1939, frozen in the wonders and expectations that would
come from a thousand tomorrows. Though several years younger than
she, Julia would always stop for a few minutes to laugh and play
games with him. As Julia moved along the thousands of paintings,
she realized other childhood friends would be there waiting to say
hello after fifty-two years of separation. She began to sob
uncontrollably. The scene was something Anna could understand but
neither feel nor share with her mother. She knew that such moments
in history belonged only to those that were there and no one
else.

Taking Julia in her arms, she said
softly, “They are closing now, Mother. We will come back tomorrow
if you like. But right now you must tell me more about Rabbi Loew’s
golem on the way back to the hotel.”

“
Yes, yes, the golem, my
playmate. We must talk of him more.”

Before leaving, Julia turned back once
more to gently touch her young friend’s paintings.

“
I am sorry, Anna. I
didn’t expect this to be so heavy after all these years. It
shouldn’t be, I would think.”

“
All your life has been
heavy. I’m not sure you could have existed if it weren’t so,” Anna
smiled, reaching out to take Julia’s hand.

Julia moved away from Anna and stood
still for a moment looking at her.

“
There were some
wonderful, light years, too—my childhood and my moments with Erich.
Those were good times, if one could say that, for Jews in
Prague.”

“
You’ve never lost your
love for him, have you?”

“
I don’t know, maybe.
There were other times.”

“
Even after all you
suffered—our family erased from the face of the earth?”

“
He was a doctor, not a
German soldier, or the Gestapo. And everything that happened was so
long ago.”

“
But still he was your
enemy.”

“
That was then, but I
never hated him. He was my lover, you know. We would have married
had things been different,” Julia said softly.

Looking at her mother’s tired face,
Anna could still see at times the faint shadows of a loveliness and
grace that once captured the hearts and minds of all those she came
in contact with. It was easy to imagine her raven hair, now white,
tumbling across her face as she ran to meet each day with a
precious joy known only to a few. The pain that had followed her
through the years was there to be seen, though she would deny
it.

“
Was Erich my father?”
Anna asked, surprising Julia.

At first, Julia appeared stunned by
the question, but then gently smiled. “I don’t know. There were so
many,” she said, laughing before quickly turning grim again.
“Perhaps we should talk no further about him, or the Holocaust. I
saw what I wanted to see. Anyway, we need to return to the hotel.
The evening plenary session convenes at 7:30 and I would like to
rest for a little while.”

Anna took Julia’s arm as they began
the short walk back to the hotel. She had asked the question a
thousand times throughout the years about her phantom father, and
always the answer, “I don’t know.” Perhaps Julia really didn’t
know. Perhaps she had experienced many men. It was an extraordinary
time then, a time when ancient rules were papered over and hidden
from the eyes. Not even God could be found, save on the lips of
those dying in the gas chambers. Anna decided then and there that
she would no longer concern herself with Erich. He was too dear to
her mother.

***

TWO

S
tepping into the
lobby of the Continental Hotel, it seemed to Julia and Anna that
every doctor in the world was there, squeezed tightly into one
compact voice, jabbering thunderously a multitude of different
languages all at the same time. What was being said didn’t make any
sense, but no one really cared. It was being there and living such
a moment that mattered. All had come to inhale until they were
giddy the fresh air of freedom in Prague, and to sip like fine wine
the reawakening of the city’s rich culture, so long trampled into
silence by the Nazis and then by the Communist Party.

Julia eagerly sought out among the
mingling throng the one familiar face that had lured her back to
Prague after so many years of a self-imposed exile. Would she
recognize her cousin Abram? During the war years, he had been
transported first to Treblinka and then to Auschwitz by the Nazis,
along with her mother and father and everyone else in their family
living in Prague. He was twenty-eight then, healthy and strong
bodied, ready to be exploited in heavy labor by the Germans for
three years. With the Russian army nearing the death camp, many
guards began murdering the remaining Jews as they prepared to
abandon the camp. To escape the slaughter, Abram crawled beneath a
decaying pile of dead bodies, laying face down to shield his nose
from the rotting stench, and waited until the last truckload of
guards had left. In time, Abram’s mind would heal from the
atrocities he had witnessed, but not his soul. Like the few Jews
who had survived, there was nothing waiting for him after returning
to Prague but memories. All his family had vanished like pollen in
the wind, never to be seen again. Still, until the Velvet
Revolution finally set him free, he was destined to endure a second
lifetime of brutal treatment, this time under the Communist regime.
Now bearing only a faint image of the man he once was, broken in
spirit and health with lungs ravaged by tuberculosis, finding Julia
in America restored a wondrous hope he had once harbored a long
time ago.

Abram’s surprising phone call had left
Julia dazed and gasping for air. Fifty-two years had passed since
she left her father standing alone at Hlavni station, their eyes
drenched in sadness, each looking to the other one last time as the
train pulled slowly away, carrying Hiram and her and scores of
young Czech children to Rotterdam. All were dead in her family,
Julia had been told at the war’s end. Even aunts, uncles, and
cousins had perished in the death camps. No one was left. That
Abram was alive was a gift that only a loving God could give her
now, she believed.

Julia finally spotted Abram resting
with his back against a long wall near the elevators.

“
Abram, Abram, here!” she
cried hoarsely, trying to make her voice heard above the rising
shouts of the happy throng reverberating around the
lobby.

Her voice reached Abram. Turning to
his left, he saw Julia trying to push her way through the
jungle-like mass of jousting bodies blocking her path to where he
was standing. Waving to her, Abram slowly limped towards her with
support of a wooden cane.

“
Abram, my sweet cousin,”
Julia screamed, before rushing to him and collapsing in his arms,
crying with joy.

Minutes passed before either one would
let the other go, and then only because of the attention they were
receiving from the curious crowd of strangers pushing and moving
around them. At times they could hardly stand with the weight of
the growing crowd shoving against them in the small hotel
lobby.

Wiping her eyes, Julia found her voice
again.

“
How long has it been,
Abram?”

“
I count fifty-two—you
left in 1939,” Abram replied, bracing himself once more against the
wall. “Walls and chairs are my good friends now; it is difficult
for me to stand long.”

“
Yes, fifty-two years,
almost a lifetime.”

Abram turned to Anna, who was standing
slightly behind Julia, saying nothing, but smiling at her mother
and Abram.

“
You are Anna, I know. You
look like your grandmother Anka. She was as soft and gentle as
God’s hands, you know,” Abram said, taking hold of Anna’s arm
first, then embracing her. “She was my favorite aunt. We will talk
some more later so that I may know you better, but now I’m afraid I
must be rude. There is much I need to talk with your mother about
in private. You understand, don’t you?”

Anna nodded. No explanation was
needed. Looking at her mother and Abram, it was easy to sense the
crushing emptiness of the moment that overshadowed their joyous
reunion. There were but a few tomorrows left for both of them. Like
so many families swept cruelly aside by history, nothing was left
of theirs now except the two of them, with each knowing they
probably would never see the other again. In her letters, Julia had
pleaded with Abram after his return to Prague from Russia to
quickly come to America, but his answer was always the same: “God
kept me alive through the dark valley of death, so that I might die
in Prague, as history intended it to be for my family. There is no
other place for me.”

Julia never questioned his reasoning.
He had endured the horrors of the Nazi death camps for three years,
and then forty-seven more years of hard labor in the terrible
gulags in Russia, when he should have been a free man. He simply
disappeared from the streets in Prague one day, not to be seen
again for all those years. His political fights against the
Communist Party in Prague before the war had not been forgotten by
the party after it seized power under the Russian umbrella. Now
death, like the dropping sands in an hourglass, was nothing more
than a passing moment to him. His broken and aged body held little
hope for life much longer; so he would wait here, in his beloved
Prague, for that which was sure to come and find him. Nothing
mattered now except his dear Julia’s existence and presence before
him, and that he would share with no one, not even Anna.

After a short period of silence, Abram
spoke directly to Julia. “We must go someplace to talk, where our
voices can be heard. There is a small coffee house across the
square. Not too exciting like the University Café in the old days,
but there is some intimacy to be gained there.”

“
Not now, Abram,” Julia
said. “I need to rest a while. I will meet you for dinner there at
seven.”

Saying nothing, Abram nodded, turned
and shuffled back into the crowd towards a side exit door from the
lobby. Anna found the whole scene unnerving. Two people, long dead
to the other, feeling the strange rush of family love again. Yet
she knew Abram and her mother shared a common history she was not a
part of, at least for the moment. Her time of sharing would come in
the days ahead, listening to her mother’s final stories before she
closed her eyes for the last time.

Later, as Julia prepared to leave
their hotel room to meet Abram, she took Anna in her arms, holding
her tightly. “There’s so much to talk about with Abram. It will
take time. He was with Papa and Mama at Auschwitz. I have never
known the moment they died nor how they went—he will tell
me.”

“
I’ll wait up for you. The
stories will be there for you to tell during the long journey
home,” Anna said, gently wiping away the small tears forming in her
mother’s eyes.

“
You must go to the
Charles Bridge while I am gone. I never tired of doing so.
Especially when the night was very dark with only the stars to keep
you company. I could feel the winds of a thousand years of history
spinning across my face,” Julia whispered to Anna as she shut the
door behind her.

Anna did go, but while the evening was
still light. Picking her way through the labyrinth of streets
between the Old Town square and the river, she moved in awe across
the magnificent ancient bridge. Before her lay thirty religious
statues, fifteen along each side of the bridge, that through the
ages had watched over the transit of millions. Anna knew nothing
about the Christian saints given a statue there, except one, St.
John of Nepomuk, and then only from the wonderful stories Julia had
told her when she was a child. It was magical for those who rubbed
his face, which she had done a thousand times and more. And the
good St. John, Julia would sing out with a thespian flair while
Anna clapped her hands with anticipation, was thrown, bound and
gagged but very much alive, from the bridge by a jealous King
Wenceslas because he refused to tell all the queen had revealed to
him in confession. At that very moment, Julia would shout
gleefully, dancing and flipping the lights on and off in the room
and sweeping her arms upward, a cluster of bright shinning stars
suddenly appeared over the spot where he was drowned, lighting the
way for him to heaven. That is why he is magical.