by Bram Presser
- My destination?
- Why, the northern part of west or the western part of north, however you wish to say it.
- How did you…?
- I can see it in your face. Everyone like you heads that way.
- Yes, but—
- Sir, might I save you time and recommend this fine hat, lined with fur for the ultimate in comfort.
- It is a fine hat.
- And I hope I am not being presumptuous in suggesting this coat that matches so perfectly. It will keep you free from the dirt…
- I suppose I could—
- Here, let me help you, young man, and, yes…see how it fits you. Your very own tailor could not have done better.
- I am sorry, but I don’t think I can afford both.
- Oh, but, sir, look at you, suddenly a fine city gentleman, sure to be quite the ladies’ man.
- I will take the hat.
- And the coat, you must, to be grey with the city. There’s no telling what predator might see fortune in a country boy.
- Very well, but I only have—
- I’ll take it.
And with that, Jakub R, in a new long coat and gentleman’s chapeau, ventured into the city.
3
The baby, little Hana, slept on her mother’s naked breast, and with her slept the dreams of her father. It had been a girl after all, and the name Roubíček, his Roubíček, would not live on. Now Ludvík had four of these miraculous blessings, four hearts hollowed out by disappointment, unable to dream like other children—the sort of dreams that might one day come true. He could not hold down a job for more than a few months. He owed God knows what to only God knows who. Some nights he could not even look up from the table.
When the midwife appeared in the entry hall to tell him of the new arrival, there was a resounding Mazal tov! His neighbours slapped his back, shook his hand, before disappearing behind their doors. Mazal tov? Another mouth for her hats to feed? Not that he disliked bread dumplings, but occasionally he would have liked some duck fat smeared across them. Or zeli, cabbage, with caraway seeds.
That night Ludvík would be expected to show his miserable face at the local inn and shout everyone rounds of drinks until they could no longer stand. That is what a father does to mark such an occasion. Doubly so if the child is a girl, for his friends could not get drunk at a shalom zacher or bris. The first time, with Daša, it was only the finest spirits for everyone—Becherovka and slivovice. For Irena it was a red wine from the Vinařská region, cheaper but still respectable. By the time Marcela arrived he was struggling, but the minute he stepped into the inn and saw those faces, waiting, longing, he called out, ‘Pilsner for everyone, it is another girl!’ and was met with a rowdy cheer. But what is left when one cannot even afford beer? Perhaps this time they will shout him rounds in commiseration. After all, they must know that nobody suffers like he who fathers only daughters. They bring you heartache from the start. Your initial disappointment is swept away by their beauty, and you worry about their every move. And when they leave the house, when they no longer need you, the tragedy is even greater.
Oh, to be his neighbour Jiří B. Fortune had smiled upon him, bestowing but one child, a boy whose birth name was a distant memory but whom everyone lovingly called Bohuš. Ludvík and Františka had been married only two months when they arrived in Žižkov. Jiří B came from across the road to introduce himself and invite them to his newborn son’s bris. It was Františka’s first taste of a Jewish celebration and she almost fainted. The speck of blood. The pathetic little wail. ‘Please,’ she had whispered to Ludvík at the feast that followed, ‘let us have only girls.’
When Daša was born, Jiří B was the first at their door, holding flowers and a bottle of wine. Little Bohuš, almost two, was clutching at his hand, making a game of jumping up and snatching petals. ‘So let me see my future daughter-in-law,’ Jiří roared and pulled Ludvík into an embrace. That night at the inn, while the whole neighbourhood toasted the latest arrival, Ludvík confided to Jiří that he desperately wanted a son. ‘And you aren’t willing to wait another few years to have mine?’ the other joked. The mirth grew with each new daughter: ‘Well, now little Bohuš has a choice.’
Time was like salt in Ludvík’s wound; he stood by, helpless, forced to watch the fruit of his dream grow on another’s tree. At school Bohuš excelled; in the streets he was everyone’s favourite. An amiable boy, unafraid to engage with the world around him. His parents didn’t boast like most Jewish parents. They didn’t need to exaggerate. News about Bohuš had a habit of just wafting out like the fine aroma of a royal banquet. There was no doubt about it. Bohuš was destined to be someone. And now, separated only by a quiet street, there were four girls for the boy to pass over.
Ludvík leaned across his wife and looked down at the baby. ‘So this is her, then?’
‘Yes,’ she said, trying to shield little Hana from her father’s disappointment, ‘this is her.’
4
Indeed it was a fine coat because Jakub R did not feel too hot as the sun beat down on him in the Old Town Square. He paused for a moment at the statue of Jan Hus and watched the city bow before the great philosopher’s bronzed feet. The surrounding spires cast spectacled shadows across Hus’s brow, their rims as thick as railings. The resemblance was uncanny. Look closely, it could be Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk himself, ready to defend the Czechoslovak state from the invading hordes.
Jakub spun around in a daze as a column of marionettes danced past, heads bowed low. Faceless patrons at cafés swayed gaily to the fine melodies of the buskers who skipped from corner to corner. And to think that everything he knew had once fitted into a town the size of this square. Jakub wanted to take off his hat in deference to the great Masaryk, but he feared that the marionettes, the priests, the café patrons, the buskers, the kings in their surrounding castles would all stop their endeavours to point at him and laugh.
Jakub reached into his bag for the few coins that remained from the journey, walked to a food stall and found his way to the back of the queue.
Please, you first. Jakub let people through, afraid of this thing, whatever it was, that God did not condone.
How many would you like, sir? He was face to face with the saleswoman. The smell, baked goods and, well, something else. Jakub held up a single finger.
We who have seen such things in every corner store know the ingredients: yeast, flour, sugar, oil, duck fat, minced pork and spices. And we know the flavour. But Jakub R, the rabbi’s son, would never find the words to describe the taste of that bun, the bun that saved him from hunger, but which also might have damned him forever in God’s eyes.
Jakub leaned against the statue of Jan Hus and ate. Colour washed over the square, its denizens rising to a standing ovation. In the windows of the nearest buildings, he saw people smiling, waving. One woman, her breasts pressed against the glass, was signalling to him with her right arm. Go, she mouthed. Go. He tipped the last morsels on the ground and watched the pigeons descend to feast. One of the flock, instead of filling its belly, perched on the statue beside him and whispered in his ear: ‘You are almost there.’
Pařížská Street extended from the walkway in the town square. Jakub felt his bag lighten, his strength returning with each new street name that appeared in its metal bracket. Jáchymova. Kostečná. Josefovská. He found himself on a deserted corner, the wind whistling, not a soul about. He had never felt more alive. Down a set of uneven stone steps, an open door. Flashes of movement from behind. Whispers. On the doorframe he spotted a familiar wooden box, a mezuzah. He huffed into his hand, and quickly sucked the breath back up through his nostrils.
In the street, or from behind the door, laughter.
Soon it would be dark.
5
The day she moved into the basement apartment at 13 Biskupcova Street, Františka Roubíčková was so full of joy that anyone encountering her might have thought she had just taken up residence in Vyšehrad Castle itse
lf. It was as if she had forgotten her childhood home altogether—the large country cottage in the region of Miličín, with its adjoining fields beneath rolling hills—for the four rooms she now proudly called her own seemed infinitely more grand. Ludvík had promised her a good life, a city life, and, while she had faith in her new husband, she never dared hope for such an apartment with its own kitchen, a separate dining room, a spacious bedroom and even its own bathroom. I expected to share a closet with the neighbours, she boasted to her sister Emílie in the first letter back to her family. Ludvík has even bought me a table to set up my sewing station. Emí, I have a studio. A studio! You must come on the next train.
The arrival of little Daša served only to compound her elation. The baby slept through the rattle of her machine, and did not stir when Františka flew into a fury over a broken thread. ‘Tell me what to do, little muse,’ she said to the child, and instantly the storm would pass. Three years later, when Irena was born, Ludvík hung a gauze curtain across a third of the bedroom so the children could have some space of their own. ‘You won’t mind if we reduce your studio by a few feet,’ Ludvík said, more a statement than a question. ‘This way we will have a lounge too, to spend time as a family.’ Františka liked the idea of looking up from her machine to see the girls playing in this lounge. Surely only the most pampered women in Žižkov have a lounge! He also surprised her with an ornate dresser, made of oak, with blackened handles on its drawers. ‘For your supplies,’ he said as he placed it next to her table.
Little Marcela arrived three and a half years later and, again, Ludvík took it upon himself to modify Františka’s studio. ‘This is a good thing,’ he said as he dragged the table and chest to the back corner of what they both now thought of as the girls’ room. ‘By day this whole area will be yours. You can draw the curtain if you don’t wish to be disturbed. Daša is old enough to watch over the little ones. She’ll call you if there’s any trouble.’
‘And at night?’ asked Františka.
‘At night you should rest.’
Františka didn’t have the strength to protest. She pulled the crib nearer her station and returned to work.
Františka Roubíčková no longer boasted to her sisters, and would have stopped inviting them over had she not needed help with the girls. One day, while Marcela slept on Emílie’s lap and the other two played on the patch of grass in the courtyard, Františka held up a needle only to realise that her entire kingdom fitted neatly within its eye.
Now Hana’s broken wooden crib stood blocking access to Františka’s corner. ‘You will still have room,’ Ludvík had tried to comfort her when she told him there was to be another. ‘How much space can you possibly need to make your hats?’ What would he know? The end product might be compact, but to get to that point one must spread out. Lining board from here, a feather from there, felt from somewhere else.
On top of the dresser, its lacquer now chipped and faded, was the enduring symbol of her life’s failure. A hat, unfinished, grey, with a red bow. A hat for the rabbi’s wife, intended to be worn on Rosh Hashanah. ‘You will make one, simple but elegant,’ the woman had instructed. ‘You know I depend on you.’ Depend indeed. Františka Roubíčková knew that the rabbi’s wife referred to her as ‘that darling, unfortunate shikse’ behind her back. She was a charity case, to be pitied. When Ludvík first brought her to the rabbi’s house for lessons before conversion, the wife clucked and crowed, as if this exotic girl with the golden hair was manna from heaven. Like Moses’s people wandering in the desert, suddenly gifted this strange white substance, the rabbi’s wife could make of her whatever she wanted.
When they were alone, at the start of her first lesson, the woman had raised an eyebrow and said: ‘So…Ludvík Roubíček? Of all our people, why him?’
She was expecting it. Ludvík had warned that he was not held in high esteem. ‘He is a good man,’ Františka had replied. ‘A kind man.’
Not like the rest of you. That is what Františka wanted to say. She had grown up believing all sorts of terrible things about the people she had committed to join. They featured in the ghost stories she was told as a child—as sorcerers, murderers, cannibals. What a shock when she learned that Ludvík, the boy she had met on a country path in the nearby town of Sudoměřice, the town of all her fondest childhood memories, was one of them. He didn’t seem capable of any of that. He had disarmed her, lulled her into loving him, and convinced her to be his wife. Their first years together were perfect and Ludvík paid his faith no heed; he enjoyed her rituals, her traditions. He didn’t seem to care that his mother would not speak to them, that she had not even tried to see her granddaughter. ‘She lives in the past,’ he said. ‘It is her loss.’ Later, when she told him of his father’s plea, she was shocked by his response: he was quiet, and then muttered, ‘I am all they have.’
Persuading the Beth Din to allow her to undertake the conversion process proved difficult. These Jews were not fond of proselytising, they were not missionaries. ‘No,’ one of the older rabbis said, not two minutes after she entered the room. ‘Don’t worry,’ said Ludvík, ‘they always try to discourage you. You won’t even be considered before they have refused you three times.’ He was right, it was not until their fourth appearance that the same rabbi asked her why she wanted to join such an accursed nation. ‘We have great traditions to offer you,’ he said, ‘but also suffering and persecution. That is the lot your children will inherit.’ Františka gasped. ‘We cannot permit a conversion simply because you married a Jew. You must believe. We must find in you and your child a Jewish neshamah, a soul that was misplaced at birth and that wishes to be reunited with its true corporeal vessel. So tell me, young lady, what is it that you believe?’
Františka turned to her husband, who met her pleading glance for a moment then looked away. He was sweating. It all came down to this. ‘Rabbi, sir…I do not know enough to believe.’ She was dismissed, and Ludvík followed her out to the anteroom. What would become of them, she wondered, now that the court was certain to deny her application?
‘You will learn with my wife,’ said the young rabbi who came to deliver the verdict. ‘And you,’ turning to Ludvík, ‘you must learn with me. This process will be as difficult, perhaps more difficult, for you than it is for her. And whether or not she will pass will depend as much on your observance as hers.’ He gestured for them to stand, then ushered them towards the door. ‘Wait a few days,’ he said. ‘I will call for you. That is all.’ Overcome with gratitude, Františka went to grasp his hand but he pulled away. The door slammed, and from behind it several others.
The following Sabbath, Papa Roubíček attended synagogue—reluctantly and very much at his wife’s insistence—for the first time in three years. When he was called to the Torah he blessed the young couple in their absence and pledged a contribution, so that God might look favourably on the conversion process and, perhaps, see fit to hurry it along.
Františka Roubíčková knew they had secrets, terrible secrets, but nothing prepared her for what she was learning from the rabbi’s wife. It was an entire world, hidden from view. Six hundred and thirteen commandments. A way of life that made sense only if you had faith. The dietary laws of kashrut. The laws of niddah, family purity. The Sabbath. ‘It is beyond me,’ she said one evening. ‘Before your mother interfered you didn’t care, and now I am supposed to live like the matriarch Sarah herself?’ Ludvík only laughed. He had thought much the same thing. ‘You think I could live like that? Let’s discuss what we’ve learned and draw up a ledger. Some rules we will follow. Others, well…They cannot know everything that goes on in our house.’ Ludvík pulled out a small leather-bound book, opened it to the first page, and drew a line down the middle. ‘On the left, the things you cannot abide. On the right, concessions we make for God.’
‘I shan’t give up my favourite foods.’
‘I shan’t hand my underwear to a rabbi for inspection every month.’
‘Only once will I dip i
n their dirty rainwater but after that, never!’
‘If there is a show at the theatre on the Sabbath that I particularly wish to see, we will go.’
‘If there is a dress I love, or a suit for you, I shan’t care if it mixes wool and linen.’
‘The children will know their cousins, their family, my family.’
‘Christmas trees. Our children will have Christmas trees.’
‘We shall have one bed. We will not be separated. Ever.’
Each class brought new rules to put in the book, in one column or the other. But mostly the one. To correct the disparity, Ludvík took to writing the few rules they could follow in grand, exaggerated letters and the rest in the most compact script he could manage. ‘There,’ he said, holding it out before her. ‘Perfectly even.’
‘And what of the witchcraft?’ she said one night as he lay beside her, waiting for sleep. ‘I listen to her and wonder what she doesn’t tell me.’
‘There are stories, yes,’ he said. ‘But good stories. Stories that give strength. One day I will tell our children. It is what I can give them of this faith.’
‘Please,’ she said and nestled into her pillow. The gauze curtain fluttered beside them. ‘Just one. Tell me.’
‘I know this to be true because my grandfather told it to me. As did his to him. And so forth right up to the very man who witnessed it.’ Františka rolled closer to her husband. ‘Once there was a great rabbi who watched over his congregation, the people of our lands. They called him the Maharal, though his name was Rabbi Judah Löew, a great sage and mystic like none we have known before or since. For the most part, his was a time of peace, of prosperity. And then…you know our history. The Maharal could see it, could sense the change. And so he made a man, like Adam, from the mud of the riverbank and gave him the task of protecting his people. This golem was both manservant and warrior, simpleton and sleuth. He did his master’s bidding by day and, come night, he would appear before the Maharal and, with a whisper and a gust of breath from the sage’s lips, be put to sleep.
