I wondered how many had already lost their parents, and then wondered about the parents who’d lost their children.
I wondered about my own parents, and whether they thought they’d lost me.
And what it would do to them if they did.
“You’re shivering,” Eli said. I jumped at the sound of his voice; I’d forgotten he was there.
“No I’m not.” Yes, I was.
We’d learned about the Holocaust in school, just like we’d learned about the Spanish explorers, the Aztecs, the Emancipation Proclamation, and the Chapman-founding pilgrims. They’d all seemed equally distant—equally unreal. But this building was five hundred years old, on a street whose stones had been laid five hundred years before that, in a city founded in the ninth century. Seventy years was nothing; seventy years was yesterday. Seventy years ago, this synagogue had been a synagogue, with rabbis and services and bored kids running up and down the aisles, tugging at starchy collars and sneaking outside to get mud on their fancy Shabbat dresses. Kids who were in their eighties now, or who were nowhere. The synagogue was beautiful, all stained glass and vaulted ceilings. You’d have to love God quite a bit to build a place like that just for the privilege of worshipping him. Lot of good it did, I thought. Easier to believe in no God than one incapable of loving you back.
“Let’s get out of here,” I said. There were a hundred thousand bodies buried in the old cemetery, more than had been symbolically interred in the Pinkas’s engraved walls. But cemeteries, at least, I understood.
24
Out in the open air, I could breathe again. The cemetery was bounded by a high stone wall, riven with deep cracks whose elaborate designs looked like they’d been graffitied onto its skin. It was nothing like the cemeteries I was used to, with their neat matrices of polished stones. Here the worn, chipped, dented, tired graves were crammed together, sagging at alarming angles, their inscriptions mostly worn away. A few clusters of three, even four stones leaned on one another, as if the ground beneath them had mercifully shifted to allow for the comfort of contact.
The Germans were still milling about the synagogue, which left us nearly alone with the morning fog settling over the tombs and the moldering bodies piled six deep. We found Max and Adriane near the cemetery’s largest tombstone, watching a lumpen older woman who was using a spindly branch to scrape it clean of moss.
“Where have you been?” Adriane whispered.
“We thought she might know something,” Max said. “But …” He looked at Eli.
“But you realized you need me?” Eli said. “The horror.”
“You think she does that for free?” I wondered, watching the woman closely. From this distance, in her shapeless flowered tunic and shoes that bore a suspicious resemblance to bedroom slippers, she looked like anyone’s grandmother—though admittedly not mine, who shopped exclusively at designer outlet stores and had an allergy to the sartorial category containing concepts like aprons and muumuus.
“Weird hobby,” Adriane said, but I wasn’t so sure.
“Maybe she’s related to him,” I said, though I knew it was wishful thinking that any of the long-dead corpses were still remembered, much less mourned, by the living. “And this is some kind of sacred family task handed down through the generations.”
“Guess I shouldn’t complain so much about having to empty the dishwasher,” Adriane said.
Max frowned. “We’re wasting time. That’s Loew’s grave. If she’s related, which I doubt, all the more reason to talk to her.”
The woman didn’t look up as we approached. She just kept at it with her stick, scritch-scratching against the worn stone, one inch of moss at a time.
“S dovolením,” Eli said softly. “Dobrý den.”
“Dobrý den,” the woman muttered, and finally looked up, scowling. “Americans,” she said. It wasn’t a question.
“You speak English?” I asked, wondering how she’d known.
She nodded.
“Can we ask you a question?”
“Find a stick,” she said, in a heavy Czech accent.
“Excuse me?”
“You want my time, you give some of your own to the Maharal.”
We found sticks.
“We’re trying to find out more about the golem.” I dug the edge of my branch into a pocket of hard-packed dirt that girded the two-tailed lion on the face of the tomb.
She snorted. “Always, they’re looking for the golem. You want to find it? Look in your fairy tales and your Hollywood stories. It lives there. Nowhere else.”
“Well, we know the basic story,” I said. “The rabbi made the golem and then it went on a rampage—”
“Lies! This is all they know to do!” Her hands tightened on the stick, and she scraped furiously. Silvery wisps of hair had slipped from the pins holding back her tight bun, softening her face. I tried to see the young woman in the older one, but I couldn’t find her anywhere in the pinched lips and weathered skin. I couldn’t imagine her being anything but what she was. “To say a Jew—the greatest of Jews—helps destroy his people? This way is easier for them. They hide from their guilt.”
“They who?”
“Jewish?” she asked.
“Excuse me?”
“You. Americans. Are you Jewish?”
The others mumbled a no. I didn’t say anything. I didn’t feel Jewish, not here, in the shadow of the temple, with Prague’s chief rabbi decomposing beneath my feet.
But Adriane gave me up. “She is.”
“Sort of,” I said.
“Sort of.” The woman echoed me in a broad American accent. In her voice, my words couldn’t have sounded more stupid. “Sort of pregnant. Sort of dead. Sort of Jewish. These are impossibles.”
“Whatever you say.”
“Jewish is not something you decide,” she said.
“Right,” I said. “So … you decide?”
“He decides.” She didn’t have to look up at the gathering storm clouds for me to know which “he” she meant. “He chooses.”
“Not for me,” I said.
Max cleared his throat. “We don’t mean any disrespect,” he said, apologizing for me like I was his unruly child. “We’re just curious about the rabbi.”
She ignored him. “This city was founded by a woman, did you know that?” she asked me.
I shook my head.
“A witch, they say. The prophetess Libuše, wise and powerful. But Libuše is a woman. It is said she cannot rule without a man. And so she marries Přemysl. He rules the new city of Praha and the men are happy. But Libuše’s maidens miss the old way. They want their power. So they do what men have always done. They raise an army. Libuše’s maidens kill hundreds, thousands, but they cannot win. In the end, they are destroyed. That is Praha, from the very beginning. Prophecy, vengeance, murder, defeat. It was a bloody birth, this city. Its heart is darkness.”
“Maybe it’s time to think about moving,” Adriane said.
“I love Praha,” the woman snapped. “This city is in our blood. As our blood runs in its streets, its rivers.” She stamped the ground. “Its earth. The story of Praha is the story of tragedy. Again we fight, we rise up, and again, again we fall. And always when we fall, the Jews must pay. The ritual, a virgin in the volcano, a sacrifice for the Lord, you know this, yes?” She didn’t wait for an answer. “It is like this, I believe. They throw us into the darkness. Throw Jews out windows. Throw our Torah into a pile of shit. We are azazel, you understand?”
“The devil?” Eli said.
“This word you use for devil, it means goat,” she said. “Your village, it lays all its sin onto a goat, then kills the goat and—pffft.” She whistled through her teeth. “You are cleansed. And the dead goat? After all, it is only a goat.”
“Scapegoat,” I said.
“We’ll pay you a hundred U.S. dollars if you can help us find what we’re looking for,” Max said abruptly. “Otherwise, we’re done here.”
The woman rest
ed her stick on the ground beside the tomb, then kissed her palm and pressed it to the stone. “You need to find the golem so bad because?”
“We’re students,” Eli said. “It’s important for our research.”
She shrugged.
“Very important,” Adriane added quickly.
“I do not help liars.”
“She doesn’t know anything,” Max said. “Let’s go.”
I leaned into him. “You’re being rude,” I whispered.
“We don’t have time for this,” he replied, aloud. “Thank you for your help, but we’ll go now.”
“The golem is a story,” the woman said. “It never was. But if what never was, was, you will never find it without my help.”
“What do you know?” Max asked.
“I know enough. Tell me a true story, and I will have one for you.”
Enough. “Fine,” I said. “Truth.”
Eli looked alarmed. “Nora, we can’t—”
“Someone killed my best friend,” I said. “Now they’re trying to kill me. Unless I can find a piece of the golem.”
“These people, they kill for a handful of dirt out of a storybook?”
“No, it makes way more sense than that,” Adriane said. “They kill for a storybook machine—”
“Ignore her,” Max cut in.
“Even for an American, you are very rude,” the woman told him. Eli smothered a laugh. “What machine is this?”
“Lumen Dei,” Adriane said, drawing out the vowels to give the phrase a ghostly oomph.
The woman stiffened. “Then I cannot help you. But I will take you where you need to go.”
25
Her name was Janika, she told us. She was a trustee for Dobrovolníci židovského města, she told us, the Jewish Community Volunteers trusted with the keys to the sacred kingdom and all its strictly off-limits domains. Which, she told us, meant she could get us into the attic of the Alt-Neu Shul, the forbidden alcove of Prague’s oldest synagogue—where, according to legend, Rabbi Loew had lain the remains of his golem to rest.
She told us all that but would tell us nothing about the Lumen Dei. Not where she had heard of it, nor how. Not why mention of it had persuaded her to help us, even though the words, each time we repeated them, turned her face a lighter shade of pale until, with a convoluted set of hand motions to (I assumed) ward off the evil eye, she forbade us to utter them again.
After hours, the Alt-Neu Synagogue was empty, lit only by dim bulbs that mimicked the orange flickering of candlelight. I’d had an art teacher once whose favorite line was that Michelangelo’s sculptures were living inside each block of stone; he needed only to let them out. That was how the temple felt, with its curving off-white stone walls and the prayer benches that bloomed from them. As if the building had sprouted from the earth, fully formed. Notre Dame, the Kostel sv Boethia, these had felt old and—even to me—somehow sacred. But they’d also been fearful and imposing, with their elaborate stained glass, gilded statues, towering spires, scowling gargoyles, and impossibly tall stone pillars all working in tandem to make you feel dwarfed, inconsequential, human. I could understand how people who lived in squat wooden houses, who pissed in gutters and spent their sixteenth-century days shaping metal or cobbling shoes or begging for scraps, could, confronted by the mountain of glass and stone and gold, have no choice but to believe their lives had been shaped by divine forces, because what else but a divine force could turn stone, glass, and mortar into that? The temple felt different. Older, though it wasn’t. Old like the desert; old like Jerusalem. Maybe it was the sand-colored walls or the warm glow of false candlelight, or the lack of a gilded altar—here there was only simplicity, an embroidered tapestry covering the ark. It was unsettlingly easy to imagine an earlier time, a bearded man supine before the ark, begging his God for the power to refute death.
Janika ushered us past two security guards—“Golem,” she said, and they winked—and up a narrow flight of stairs, into the synagogue’s attic, a musty, surprisingly cramped space with sloping walls and eight centuries’ worth of accumulated spiritual detritus.
“This is it,” she said. “You look, as many have looked before you. There is nothing here.”
“Thank you so much,” I said.
She coughed, a dry, hacking smoker’s cough. “Don’t break anything.”
We dug through layers of rusted menorahs, moth-eaten linens, dusty tomes in ancient languages. Each of the walls was examined carefully for secret niches, a loose brick or hidden doorway that might relinquish a treasure.
Janika stood in a corner, fingers twitching like they would have been more comfortable holding a cigarette, or at least a stick, watching us carefully and offering the occasional pronouncement on the mildewed curiosities.
A tarnished silver menorah bearing the candle wax of Hanukkahs past: “Menorah belonging to Kafka’s great-grandparents. Don’t touch.”
A slim, rectangular stone box, only slightly wider and longer than my index finger, each end molded into the face of a child. “Mezuzah belonging to the Maharal’s daughter. Don’t touch.”
A squat cup of blackened silver, engraved at its base with Hebrew: “Kiddush cup belonging to the Tosafos Yom Tov. Don’t touch.”
Looking for something was hard enough when you didn’t know what you were looking for; harder still when, deep down, you didn’t believe that it existed. I peered out the window, as if the rooftops of Prague would offer an answer. But the slate and stone were silent. Below me, a set of iron rungs marched halfway down the exterior of the church, forming a makeshift ladder. The window was unlocked and, with the gentle pressure of only my index finger, eased itself open. An escape route, I thought.
“Enough,” I said. We’d covered every crack and cranny. “There’s nothing here.”
“We can’t give up,” Max argued.
I lowered my voice so Janika wouldn’t hear. “We don’t even know if we’re looking for the right thing—maybe we were wrong about what Elizabeth meant.”
Max grabbed my arm. “Do you understand what’s happening here?” He squeezed. His nails dug into my skin. “This isn’t for fun.”
“Who’s having fun?” Adriane said lightly.
“I know that,” I told him.
“But you just want to give up.” Max squeezed tighter. “Like you don’t care what happens.”
“Let go of me.” I would not raise my voice.
“It’s here, and we can find it. We need it.”
“Max. Let go.”
He looked down, as if surprised to see himself holding on. He let go, and we both stared at the red marks his fingers had left behind on my skin. No one spoke. I couldn’t look at any of them.
“Be careful,” Eli said finally. I didn’t know which one of us he was talking to.
Max looked ready to spit. “Shut up.”
“You know what?” Adriane looped an arm around Max’s shoulders. “You and I are going outside, where we will have a deep, meaningful conversation on the merits of stress relief and not turning into a brooding psycho on us, because pop-cultural opinion notwithstanding, that is distinctly not hot. Come.”
I braced myself for him to argue, or worse, but instead, he dropped his head, like a nod he couldn’t be bothered to finish, and left with her.
“He’s not usually like this,” I said.
Eli didn’t answer.
“He’s actually never like this,” I added. “He’s under a lot of pressure.” I was fully aware of how lame it sounded. What had they done to Max in that basement that left him so angry and desperate? And why did I keep saying exactly the wrong thing, when I was supposed to be the one who knew him best? He’d actually left the building to remove himself from my presence, and the worst part: When he had, I’d been relieved.
Eli shrugged.
“Well?” I said. “Well what?”
“Aren’t you going to say something?”
“You don’t want me to say something.”
“And that suddenly stops you?”
“You’re not very good at making excuses,” he said. “Which is strange.”
“Why is that?” I asked before I realized that the right response would have been to deny that I was making excuses, or that Max needed them.
“Because it seems like you must have had a lot of practice.”
“This may be a tough concept for you to grasp, but that’s what you do when you love someone.”
He sighed. “No, Nora. It’s not.”
Before I could argue, he turned abruptly to Janika, still in her corner, taking everything in. “Děkuji,” he said.
“Yes, thank you for taking us up here even though you warned us it was pointless,” I told her, keeping a careful distance from Eli. I just wanted to get away from him, and to find Max. “Děkuji. I hope you don’t get in trouble or anything.”
“You run around Praha asking stupid questions about Lumen Dei”—she made those convoluted hand gestures again, and I caught a keyn aynhoreh murmured under her breath, my grandmother’s favorite method for warding off the evil eye—“and you worry about me?” She laughed, but there was no mirth in it. “Trouble will find you. Be sure.”
“Why do you say that?” I asked, fed up with all the vague warnings. “If you know something, can’t you just tell us?”
“When I am young, every child knows the Lumen Dei,” she said, looking past us into some middle distance of her past. “My father learns from his father, who learns from his father, and the lesson is passed down.”
“What lesson? You mean you know how to build it?” Eli said. “Or what it does?” There was doubt in his voice, but beneath it, something else. Fear?
She shook her head. A few more wiry curls sprung free. “In English, you say that curiosity killed the cat, yes?”
I nodded. “That’s not exactly my philosophy, but—”
The Book of Blood and Shadow Page 23
