He, She and It (24 page)

Nobody remembers seeing her, nobody remembers anybody bearing a suspicious burden into the ghetto. Joseph wonders if she exists, this adolescent he is vainly pursuing. Sometimes an image of her forms in his mind, but it keeps shifting. He realizes after a while he is using faces of women he has seen in the streets to make this girl more real, for he feels the futility of his search slowing him day after night after day.

Joseph has run out of places to search in the ghetto. He swears to the Maharal that the girl cannot be hidden within the walls. Joseph cannot find Maria, and now Isa the Deaf, who delivers kosher wine, has disappeared as well. Samuel the tailor provides Joseph with the clothes of a gentile drayman. So that Joseph can pass through the city freely, Judah gives him permission to remove the yellow badge they all must wear. The Maharal fills Joseph’s pocket with coins, warning him about their use and display. Now Joseph must search in the large and strange world outside.

As he passes through the gates of the ghetto he knows now as well as any of the humans who live there, he feels a heady mixture of fear and exultation. He is escaping—from who he is. From the Maharal. From his many duties, although in the service of one of them. From observation. From accountability minute by minute. From the knowledge and potential knowledge of who and what he is. He is just a huge man jostled by others in the street. It occurs to him that he could run off from his fate and live as other men do, as it has occurred to Jews in every time to sneak out of being Jewish, to take on the coloration and the jargon of the prevailing culture—Christian, Islamic, corporate—and simply give up the prickly destiny, the treasure that so often kills. If he simply keeps walking, he could hire out his strength and live in pleasant obscurity, enjoying his daily bread and wine.

Out of the ghetto he goes, along the river to the square of the
knights of the cross and the fortified tower entrance to the great stone bridge named after the emperor Charles, the Karl bridge. As he traverses the Vltava, he can see the towers and spires of the vast block where Hradcany Castle and the cathedral stand, but his way leads at once into the partly aristocratic Malá Strana, where he hopes to bring the mystery to ground. How many crosses stand everywhere. They seem to him sinister as swords drawn.

The knight’s house is near the river, in a neighborhood dominated by a seminary and a brewery. Joseph’s careful observation of human behavior provides him with an idea how to proceed. He finds a likely tavern near the house of the knight. He requires gossip, ordinary neighborhood gossip. He requires a sense of who is connected to whom.

He gets little in the first tavern, except an offer for an afternoon’s work, which he takes to increase his credibility. He helps the man load a cart with barrels from the brewery, to which the tavern is attached, and then deliver them. In the course of the afternoon he learns that Maria was a house servant and seldom seen outside. Her parents only arrived in the city after her disappearance. Previously they had worked in a dairy at the knight’s country estate. Stefan Zacek is the knight’s name.

In the next tavern, where he spends the evening drinking and standing drinks, he learns that although Maria has rarely been glimpsed, all agree on her beauty, especially those who have never laid eyes on her. Her beauty, like her odor of sanctity, gathers interest and grows with the retelling. The wife of the knight is widely regarded as a much put upon woman, usually pregnant. She has borne the knight eight living children, nobody bothering with a count of miscarriages and stillbirths. She is pious and suffers from most complaints known to too often pregnant women, including early toothlessness.

Fortunately the Golem can pour alcohol into himself without consequence, except that after a while, his body being finite, it must pass on out. Water, wine, beer, brandy, milk: his body processes what energy it can from them, and one substance is like another. Still, he imitates the mannerisms of the men around him lest they notice how impervious he is. They admire his capacity, but he is careful to slur his words. When he tries to eat the local salami, the first bite burns his mouth as if it were corrosive. Then he understands. He can eat bricks, chew stones, eat crockery, but he cannot eat traif. He shakes his head sadly. His fantasies of disappearing into the world dwindle. How can
a golem who eats bricks but not pork ever hope to pass in Bohemia?

The knight Stefan, the men say, some with admiration, others with contempt, is a gambler. He bets on everything from horse races to whether it will rain or snow, the outcome of fights and matches, how many balls a juggler can keep aloft. He has squandered his wife’s dowry and much of his own inheritance in games of chance. When he wins, he thinks of his bounty as money from heaven and spends it fast, often on the higher class of prostitutes, sometimes on presents for his wife and many children. When he loses, he always imagines his misfortune temporary and borrows to pay off his gambling debts. Who does he borrow from? The Jews, of course, those bloodsucking sly greedy monsters; they lend him money.

Who in particular? Who lends money so easily to a gambler? Why, Maisl the Weasel. Not the richest man in the ghetto, Mordecai, but his less astute baby brother, Eli. That’s the bloodsucker Stefan owes his ass to. Joseph has seen Eli in the synagogue. He resembles the weasel the gentiles call him only in his extreme thinness and his nervous habit of moving fast. His complexion is yellowish. He has stomach troubles. Otherwise he is a timid man of forty-five with a slight stammer and a history of having failed at the export-import business and several others. Mordecai, the greatest success the ghetto knows, who lends money to emperors and finances exploration and trading expeditions off the edge of charted lands, picks up his brother, dusts him off, gives him a few wise words to no avail, sets him on his feet and gives him a new business to fail at every few years.

After the tavern closes, Joseph, awash but still sober as a paving stone, stands in a doorway, contemplating the knight’s house. In there must lie the answer. He hopes they are all asleep. As he circles the block of which the house is part, dodging from shadow to shadow, he listens. On the back side of the house, toward the river, he scales a low wall, dropping into a courtyard. How much more spacious the houses are here, wasting the land behind them in trees and a kitchen garden. A dog lunges at him, barking. The Golem stands still. The dog falls silent, hangs back, sniffing. This does not smell like a man. This smells like nothing but a wall. He comes tentatively forward to sniff again. Joseph does not even blink. The dog sidles closer yet. Joseph reaches out and breaks its neck in one blow. He feels the surprised life leaving the dog, and he has a moment of severe guilt. The dog, the men of the watch, they are the same,
alive and now dead. Dead under his hands. He stands over the cooling body of the dog and prays for it. If it has no soul, whatever that is, presumably neither does he.

But he has been given his orders, and he knows the necessity. From the courtyard there is an entrance to a cellar. The wide double doors are locked, but he breaks the lock without hesitation, cautiously descending the broad steps where barrels of wine and beer, apples and cabbages, are carried down. It is dark and damp; it is the inside of a black and slightly rotten potato, perhaps one that has frozen and thawed. Mice scuttle away. Hams are hung from the ceiling, sausages cured in the fall. He has discovered that he cannot eat traif, so he dips out sauerkraut from a barrel to satisfy his hunger while he stumbles around looking for a body. He finds an old carpet, broken chairs, rusted weapons, stored grain and mice to eat it. As he chews thoughtfully on a piece of tile, he wonders what he is doing in this cellar, creeping around in the middle of the night. He helps himself to a supply of candles and a tinder to light them.

What he does find, after an intensive search of the wine cellar, the root cellar, the vault where ice is stored in straw, is a locked passage, which he unlocks with his hands. This is even darker. To find his way, he must light a candle. The air is poor and the candle flickers wildly, a small drooping flame as he passes from under the knight’s house, on and on for what feels like miles but is probably a hundred yards. Finally he reaches the end of the passage, locked also but easily opened. He is now in another cellar, colder, just as dark, with a strong smell of fish and human piss. Water is dripping. He suspects he has approached the river. It seems to him he can feel the river flowing past the far wall.

A hoarse voice calls out in the darkness: “Let me out. Who is it? Vaclav? I’m hungry. Vaclav, where are you?”

He follows the voice to another locked door, which he breaks open, shattering the heavy wood with one blow. He raises his candle and stares at the woman cowering at the end of a chain running from her leg to a loop set in the wall. Her hair is matted and her face swollen. She shrinks from him, covering her face as if to make him vanish. “Who are you?” he asks.

“Maria,” the woman says. “Pane, sir, are you going to kill me?”

“I’m Joseph. I’m here to get you out.” He reaches for her arm.

She backs from him. “You’re going to kill me! I know it.

Pane Stefan sent you. This is his.” She pats her belly. “Why should he care? Other men have bastards and take care of them.”

“He does plan to have you killed, for he’s put it out you were kidnapped.” Joseph rips the chain from the wall, lifting the candle to examine her leg.

“Who’d kidnap me? Who wants a servant with her master’s bastard in her belly? Not even my parents would take me back.”

“Everyone in the city is saying the Jews took you for your blood.”

“Are you a Jew? Are you going to kill me?”

“Don’t scream. We don’t kill, even when we should. I’m here to prove you’re still alive. We’re going to the town hall.”

“How can I believe you? Vaclav said I was going to die today.”

“Come on.” Picking her up like a sack of potatoes, he slings her over his shoulder. She starts screaming. He tears off part of his shirt and binds her mouth. He finds another exit, but the steps lead to a door not only locked but wedged into place. He puts her down, holding her with one hand while he shoves at the door. With a loud clatter, stones roll, and then he can force it. They are indeed just off the quay. The moon is up, two days short of the full. Tomorrow the Passover matzoh will be baked. In the stable, horses wait in their stalls, and between the rows of stalls, a delivery cart stands loaded with kosher wine. That’s Isa the Deaf’s cart. What is it doing here? This is nowhere near the kosher winery. One empty barrel stands beside the cart. Over the seat are laid the clothes of the deliveryman, Isa the Deaf. On the overcoat Joseph notices a little blood. He doubts they will see Isa again.

He turns to pick her up. She has risen to her feet but is not running. She pulls the gag loose. Backed against the wall, she glares at him.

“Don’t start screaming again,” Joseph says wearily. “If you rouse one of them, the men who captured you, you’ll end up in that barrel and I’ll lie on the bottom of the river like the poor man whose clothes are spattered with his blood. I’m not rescuing you because I like you. I’ve been sent to save you for the good of my people. Now shut up and let me get you out of here.”

“I can walk.”

“You can’t walk fast enough. You’re too weak.” He picks
her up again over his shoulder. This time she does not scream but beats on his back.

“Don’t carry me with my head down, you ox, you horse, you beast! The blood rushes to my head.”

“How shall I carry you?” Joseph is trotting at a steady clip along an alley and then in the general direction of the town hall, uphill.

“In front, like a man is supposed to carry a woman.”

Her head is thumping against his back, so he obeys her, finding a position she seems to like. She puts an arm around his neck. “This isn’t so bad. Are we really going to the Malá Strana town hall?”

“Yes. You aren’t frightened of me any longer?”

“Well, not so much. If you were going to kill me, you wouldn’t carry me around in the streets for an hour first.”

“I told you the truth. Shh.” He takes refuge in a doorway, cupping his hands over her mouth.

She bites him, and he inadvertently draws his hand back. But she does not scream. She just pokes him and whispers, “We should crouch and cover our faces. They have torches. Skin picks up light—did you ever notice?”

Four men march along with a quasi-military step in the direction Joseph planned to take.

“Look, the town hall won’t open till morning. We might as well take our time. You don’t have to haul me around like a sack of potatoes.” She has recovered her spirits. Beautiful she isn’t, even in the soft light of the moon. Of course she is dirty and odorous from her captivity, her hair matted. But her features are sharp, pointy. “What’s your name, giant?”

He lets her walk and marches beside her. “I’m Joseph.” Something seems to be happening farther up the hill. He is not certain what to do.

“Maria and Joseph and little baby in the womb, the son of the lord! Lord Stefan.” She laughs mischievously, sliding her arm through his. Her laugh is deep and rowdy, making him want to laugh with her, only he does not ever laugh. He does not know how. “You smashed that door as if it was woven of reeds and you threw the stones away from the entrance to the cellar like cushions.”

“The holy one made me strong.”

“He sure did.” She squeezes his arm. “You have muscles like rocks, Joe. Is that what they call you—Joe?”

“No … They just call me Joseph.”

“Come on, take this chain off me. It weighs a ton, and my ankle is bleeding from it.”

He kneels to bend the metal apart. Her ankle is bloody. He watches her carefully as he bends over the chain, but she does not try to play any tricks. When he stands, she takes his arm again, ready to walk on. She wraps the chain around her arm like a bracelet, swinging the end. He is worrying about the armed men who just passed them. A patrol? “I think we should go to the Old Town Hall, across the river. It might be safer.”