Make It Concrete

by Miryam Sivan

  “But it’s not then. Ghetto. Gestapo. Transports,” Isabel spoke out loud into the empty alley. “I am here now. Cell phones. High speed travel. Internet.”

  She stole around a corner, looked nervously to all sides, appraising what she was not sure. She pressed her hands hard against the building and its rough brick surface returned her to the moment.

  “Reality check: children arriving tomorrow morning. We’ll tour. Eat a lot. Have fun.” Isabel reassured herself with words spoken out loud. To hear them. Feel their concrete shape. They helped keep her afloat for a moment but then time’s warp pulled her. Josefov shifted. The undertow of imagining, no, it was much more than imagining, the actual feel of torments, violence and loss dragged her to the sandy bottom. She struggled to remain upright. To not slide down the prickly brick wall. She searched for chewing gum inside her bag. The sharp spray of mint in her mouth steadied her. Somewhat. She chewed hard. Swallowed saliva. Then set out again.

  Isabel stuck close to the buildings. Rage and loathing washed over her for those who sold Kafka and golem trinkets. Pariahs who grew rich on Josefov’s legends. Dead Jews exploited for a quick buck. She opened her mouth to scream. She wanted to lose control. Smash stands. Trample clay golem figurines. Abraham in Ur destroying his father’s idol shop. She wanted to mount a soapbox and tell the real story. How once, right before daybreak, Rabbi Loewe’s golem discovered men planting the body of a dead Christian child near the carpenter’s home. The Rabbi was summoned. The Constable sent for. That one time justice was served. A blip on the screen.

  Isabel made her way towards the river. A sign over a doorway displayed a hulking black figure. The Golem Restaurant. A small dark café with pastries in the window. She ran from it and found herself outside squat Altneuschule. Its outsized brick gable shaped like a saw’s sharp teeth gave the diminutive synagogue a menacing air.

  For once there was no long line of tourists and Isabel rushed inside. She scanned the walls for a door. What she wouldn’t give to see the golem’s remains, to coax them back to life. Local legend had it that the stairs to the attic were demolished after a German soldier died trying to pry open its door. Jacob’s ladder retracted. A place of no return. But she didn’t believe it. That neat tie-up fit too well with the overall revisionism on display. The attic was here. The door and stairs to the attic were here. Probably blocked off by sheetrock. The golem’s remains were here. All one had to do was find the way.

  Isabel circled the synagogue. She knocked lightly on thick walls searching for the lighter sound of a new wall. With each turn around the dark room she picked up speed and her headache returned. Except for the brief hundred years that separated their construction, this space had nothing in common with the airy sanctuary of Toledo’s El Transito Synagogue, yet for a moment Isabel felt suspended between both. So close and yet so far apart from each other.

  The guard at the entrance watched her. She began to sweat. He might call the authorities. They would send her somewhere. She tried to blend in with the wall. And when that didn’t work, she looked up confidently. Play the part. Act naturally. History seized her. Which was why she needed to see Rabbi Loewe’s pile of dirt. For just one second. It would release her. It was the antidote to the piles at Auschwitz. To the screams inside brisk winds.

  Isabel’s phone rang. She answered but said nothing.

  “Can you talk?” Jiri asked.

  She could but didn’t.

  “Meet me in half an hour at the foot of the Charles Bridge, Old Town side. I have something to show you.” Jiri hung up before she said hello.

  Frightened by the guard, Isabel left the synagogue and made her way indirectly to the Bridge, just in case she was being followed. One lane led to another. She grazed the walls making sure not to trip on the slippery cobblestones. She avoided eye contact. These narrow stone streets were like Toledo’s, they were Toledo’s. Bohemia and Castile-La Mancha enclosed her.

  The persistent dusk kept the street lights off and shadows long. A large misshapen figure appeared on a wall. Probably another café using the golem as logo. She approached and only saw cracked plaster and a small window secured with metal whorls. Then suddenly again, out of the corner of her eye, movement. She turned her head quickly. Too late. Nothing to see. And absolutely no café sign or mark on the wall.

  Surreptitiously Isabel lurched towards the Vltava. The golem was not a pile of dirt in a closed off synagogue attic. It was alive and mobile in the Old City’s streets. And it yearned to be seen by the right person. And here she was. The one to see it. She made her way to the water. Suddenly. There it was again. A large squarish form running under the bridge’s fat legs. Jewish history, so blatantly cyclical, bad things always came round. Why not something good?

  “Why not a return of the golem?” Isabel said out loud and ran after it. The darkening outline of roofs, spires, tortured metalwork, and gargoyles loomed above. She looked for a foothold in the riverbank wall. But suddenly couldn’t move. Someone had taken firm hold of her arm.

  “Aahh,” Isabel moaned. They had come for her. Who would let her children know?

  Jiri pulled her back. She collapsed against him. Saved. He kissed her lightly on the cheek and led her away. Isabel glanced back momentarily to remember where and how while Jiri took her down a narrow lane by the river quay. Because he held her hand so firmly, she wanted to tell him that she was losing the battle against the whispers of pogroms, lurking golems, Crusader massacres, and Kafka watching the Hilsner blood-libel riots from his bedroom window. 1899. But she lacked courage. She didn’t want Jiri to know her ghost self and maybe what she saw was not real and would fade like an image in a dream in the remaining night hours. Could be that by morning she’d realize she had seen a shadow or a passing cloud. It was just her mind hostage to twisted inbred remembrances.

  Better not to say anything to Jiri who was leading her up a set of narrow steps. An old apartment had been converted into an art gallery. Immediately she recognized two of his pieces. The River Styx. A highly polished black stone composed into a vertical slab with a narrow groove. A phallic and vaginal road block to death. The other piece, Investigations, was sculpted out of light brown stone. A child crouched low as if looking at ants on the ground. Jiri brought her over to a third piece made of pale wood. A soft curved back. Subtle planes on a turned down face that could be a woman’s. She read the name: Toledo. Jiri waited beside her.

  “So beautiful.” Isabel hugged him. “I’m honored. Thank you.”

  “Thank you.” He held her close. “Enough formalities. Now beer.”

  They walked to a nearby pub in the middle of Old Town. Tourists swarmed outside like bees around a hive, but the pub was filled mainly with locals. Apparently this place wasn’t listed in the guidebooks. Busts of large elk, moose, and stag hung on the walls. Waitresses with profound cleavage brought tall mugs of Pilsner to the heavy wood tables. They drank until midnight. When Jiri dropped her off at the hotel, she kissed him passionately under a streetlamp. She didn’t care that Prague was essentially a small town and he a married native son.

  ✶

  Exhausted, Isabel fell asleep immediately and slept well. The half liters of Pilsner smoothed the bumps and canyons in her mind. She woke not from disturbing dreams, but from what felt like none at all. By the time she met Lia and Uri at the airport later that morning she had all but forgotten the golem sightings of the day before. The very blue sky and high yellow sun cordoned off the past and its grief.

  They parked their bags at the hotel and headed out to Old Town and Charles Bridge. Thirty statues of saints on pedestals presided proud and lonely along the bridge’s balustrade. Uri wanted to know about each one. Isabel explained as best she could what saints were but she didn’t even come close to satisfying his appetite for details. She knew some life stories. Like that of St. Francis of Assisi. But others, like St. Luthgard and St. Crucifix, were unfamiliar. He was, to put it mildly,
very disappointed in her. They made their way through the smash of tourists, painters, and souvenir sellers to the middle of the bridge. A very large Jesus on the cross made Uri come to a complete stop.

  “Who is this?” he asked dramatically, staring at the emaciated man flanked by Mary and the apostle John. “He’s got nails in his hands and feet! And there’s Hebrew.” Excitedly Uri read the words blazing gold above the man’s head, “קדוש,” and on either side of the cross, “קדוש .קדוש.” Holy. Holy. Holy.

  “According to the prophet Isaiah the angels celebrate God singing Holy Holy Holy,” Isabel explained.

  Lia read out the Hebrew that encircled the torso of the tortured man and that completed the gilded necklace of words: “יהוה צבאות.” YHVH is the Lord of Hosts.

  “I don’t understand.” Uri kept his eyes on Jesus. “Who is he and why does he know Hebrew?”

  “Angels speak Hebrew,” Lia said.

  Uri stared up at Lia and back again at the tall statue of a dying man. A look of astonishment on his face. “He’s an angel?”

  “Not exactly,” Isabel said, not sure how to begin to explain Jesus of Nazareth to him. “Itka told me that in 1700, when these statues were put up, the Jewish community was forced to supply the gold for these words.” She spoke in Hebrew, not wanting to be overheard by passersby. Not wanting to be misunderstood. Not wanting to offend. Or endanger the children. “Elias Backoffen, a Jew from the ghetto, was accused of desecrating a crucifix in a church.”

  “So collective punishment’s not a new invention.” Lia shook her head back like a horse throwing off reins. “Guess we learned our methods well from our tormentors.”

  “Those are the letters with the goats.” Uri pointed excitedly to the YHVH. “That’s one of God’s secret names. Idit told us that on Yom Kippur one goat was killed in the desert. And one with God’s secret name was killed in the Temple.”

  “Idit taught you that?” Isabel asked surprised. Lia and Yael learned nothing about Temple rites when they were in grammar school.

  “Yes. Was he sacrificed too?” Uri looked up at the man on the cross.

  Lia and Isabel looked at one another. The child was smart. He had what Suri called a yiddisher kop.

  “Sacrificed in a way, but not on Yom Kippur. That man is Jesus of Nazareth,” Isabel spoke carefully. Slowly. Still in Hebrew. “Yes,” she responded to Uri’s eyes opening wide, “lived right near us. Jesus lived when the Romans ruled Israel, a little before Yehuda HaNassi’s time. He was a big teacher, a revolutionary even. The rabbis hated him. The Romans killed him. Some say he was the son of god.”

  “And a billion people agree with this,” Lia chimed in. “It’s called Christianity.”

  “How can anyone be the son of God?” Uri asked. “God doesn’t have a body.”

  “They say the spirit of god entered his mother Miryam, the woman standing next to him. She became pregnant with Jesus.”

  “So he’s a half god, like Hercules?”

  “No, not really. He’s considered a full god. They say he’s the messiah,” Isabel added.

  Uri looked back up at the sad dying man. Then he looked away at the sky stretching out beyond the dark outlines of the bridge’s statuaries. His face was stern.

  “What d’you mean, the messiah?” His shoulders rose to his ears and his palms lifted to the sky, making him look like a miniature Tevye from a Sholem Aleichem story.

  Lia and Isabel burst out laughing.

  “What’s so funny?”

  “Nothing,” Isabel controlled herself. “It’s an excellent question.”

  Lia bent down to hug him. Uri’s posture was funny, but the sub-text of his words was not. The voice of Jewish dissent. An almost instinctive, fastidious, decidedly not-humorous resistance to the revision of the ancient religion. A Jew’s simple no. A stubborn insistence. What d’you mean, the messiah? And millennia of bloodshed in response.

  5

  On their third day of wandering the streets on both sides of the Vltava River, Isabel decided they had had enough. It was time for nature, for a glorious forest. Time to go to Karlštejn one hour away from the center by coach. Uri’s mood changed as soon as they drove past the Communist-era concrete apartment blocks at the edge of the city. Suddenly there was green. Fields, pastures, then mountains. He chattered on, made funny faces from the seat in front. After days of frowning, a half smile emerged on Isabel’s face too when they rolled more deeply into the countryside. The golem, a phantom limb left behind in some dark alley, ceased to throb. With the bus safely ensconced in the greens of the not-urban, Uri began to hum. He had been an amazing sport for days now, especially since tramping in and out of buildings did not yield much emotional payback for a seven-year-old. But he had followed Isabel obediently into Hradčany Castle and Ottla Kafka’s diminutive cottage on Alchemist’s Way. He had wandered with her through flamboyant Baroque and Rococo churches, the likes of which he and his Israeli sister had never seen before. He sat quietly through chamber music performances in these churches, Bach on organ, Vivaldi on strings. And in between there was endless walking on cobbled streets, broken up by a serene boat ride up the Vltava to see Gehry’s playful Dancing House on the medieval riverbank. Only now, seeing his face fill with light and lightness, did Isabel realize how the city had weighed on him. Like her girls, Uri was raised on and near farms, surrounded by animals and verdant fields. He knew them. Needed them.

  What kept him going were the shops with candy in glass cases sold by weight. He made selections by pressing a specific number of fingers near a particular chocolate or licorice. Then he watched closely as the saleslady deposited the pieces into a little white bag. But Jesus also played his part. After that first day on Charles Bridge, Uri didn’t ask any more questions about the man from Nazareth, but it was clear that ubiquitous displays all over the city of the tortured man on the cross fascinated him.

  The bus stopped not far from the fourteenth-century castle. They strolled up a path through an old thicket of trees. Sweet pine saturated the air. Uri walked ahead with a local woman and her Wire-Haired Dachshund. Uri usually made instant friends with people and their dogs. A family trait.

  “Look. The buildings are built one on top of the other. Like steps,” Isabel said to Lia as they approached the castle. “And that tower. Massive. What beautiful off-white plaster. Not possible to reach that quality of plaster anymore.”

  “I like those elegant black roofs and turrets.” Lia kept an eye on Uri who walked ahead with the woman and her dog.

  On an English speaking tour of Karlštejn the guide informed them that the castle was built to house King Charles IV’s collection of holy relics and the coronation jewels of the Roman Empire. Up staircases and through rooms, they trailed behind him and his hard-to-follow accent into small dark chambers. They looked out narrow windows set into thick walls. They ducked through short door openings. He continually banged doors open and shut as they entered and exited each room.

  “Vandalism and theft over the years force the castle management to keep the small tour groups isolated,” he explained.

  “A bizarre method of crowd control,” Lia whispered to her mother.

  “Typical medieval construction,” Isabel whispered back when they entered the tenth identical room. She stopped listening to the guide’s laconic explanations.

  He perked up unexpectedly on the stairs to the Great Tower. “You are now in the Chapel of the Holy Cross.” He managed a smile. “Please notice the semi-precious stones decorating the vaults. They are set in the shape of crosses. This is the most expensive and luxurious part of the castle, consecrated in 1357. And these panel paintings, 129 in total, make up the largest collection of its kind in the world. Here are portraits of saints, prophets, and angels. Some will be familiar to you. Theodoric was court painter to the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles IV. The first Czech painter to be recognized for his art.”
The small English speaking group wandered beneath Master Theodoric’s work. The guide threw open the door on the far wall. Time to move on. The group passed through. The guide banged the door shut.

  In the last room of the tour, Uri stood before a wooden sculpture of Jesus on the cross. Bright red blood dripped down the dying body. Deep folds of pain combed his face. Eyelids opened fractionally. The body was slack with resignation. Isabel watched Uri take it all in. He folded his small hand into hers.

  “Ema, what if they’re right?”

  She was stunned. By the power of persuasion. This impressionable, curious, and open-minded seven-year-old had been inundated with churches, statues, paintings, frescoes, even tapestries of Jesus on the Cross for three days now. The medium and the message converged as they had throughout history to make the masses believe in the son sacrificed by the father for the world to know salvation.

  “What if they’re right?” Uri asked again. This was not a rhetorical question. Children did not ask rhetorical questions.

  “What if?” she answered. “No one knows for certain. It’s a matter of what you believe, Uri, more than what is right or not right. Those who believe this, advertise it to persuade everyone it’s true. Like seeing Coca-Cola posters everywhere and suddenly you’re thirsty and want a Coke.”

  “It’s not exactly the same thing,” Lia threw in. “The desire to have spirituality in your life is not just a matter of suggestion. It comes from within. Religion developed out of a genuine need for meaning.”