by Bram Presser
‘It so happened that on Purim—or maybe it was Walpurgisnacht—there was a great celebration and the Maharal drank until he fell by the side of the road. A loyal student ran to his house and summoned the golem, who came quickly and carried his master home. The great rabbi slept as his creation lay him in bed. Having never experienced the night, the golem ran outside and into the heart of the city. Startled by the flaming lamps, the masks, the painted faces, and the strange and awful sounds of revelry, he took fright and began to rampage. He tore down fences, chased animals from their pens, set fires. The people began to—’
‘Ludya,’ Františka said as she clutched her pillow.
Ludvík looked down and saw that she was trembling. He had been lost in the story, and had perhaps embellished too much. ‘I was just trying to say—’
She lifted her hand to his mouth and placed a finger across his lips. ‘Shhh…Promise me this.’ She waited to feel the movement of a nod. ‘You will never tell it to the children. Never.’
‘So, you make hats?’ the rabbi’s wife asked one day. Františka smiled. ‘Ludvík made me a studio.’ ‘Well,’ the other continued, ‘it is a fine profession, millinery. I am always in need of new hats. You can’t possibly know the demands on a woman like me. They say one can judge the health of a community by the appearance of its rebbetzin. She must be plump, but not fat, elegantly dressed but not ostentatious.’ The woman adjusted herself on the seat, upright, confident. ‘When this is over, when you have returned to your people, our people, I will look after you. We will look after each other, you and I. Yes, you will make my hats. And I will pay you, though one can only afford so much on a rabbi’s stipend. But everyone will see me wearing your hats and they, too, will want one. I assure you, dear, you won’t be able to keep up with demand.’
The hat on Františka Roubíčková’s dresser lay as a scornful reminder of her initial trust. The rabbi’s wife had kept her promise to wear only her hats. And she paid, yes, it’s true, but Františka dared not protest the few coins she was given. ‘I’d give you more but I have a congregation to feed,’ the rabbi’s wife would say. And each time Františka stepped into the synagogue she would see her hats, the ones she had made for the rabbi’s wife, on other women. For the rabbi’s wife gave them away as charity. ‘Is it right that those who can’t afford should covet their rebbetzin’s hat? It is a mitzvah you are doing, little Roubíčková. A good deed. And, moreover, you are helping me to do a mitzvah that otherwise I could never do.’
So there was the hat, the one she had not been able to finish before going into labour. There was her career, or what was left of it. There were her children, and her husband, gone again on one of his trips. She was alone.
It was like the day she became one of them. The mikveh, the ritual bath, two weeks after Irena was born. The rabbi’s wife led her through the halls of the synagogue, out the back door to the windowless structure against the fence. She was holding a towel and a prayer book. The day was cold and Františka was shivering, clutching the baby against her chest to keep it warm. ‘Once you have been submerged, you will come out a Jew. I need only report it to my husband, to the Beth Din, and we will welcome you as one of our own.’ Františka handed over her sleeping daughter and removed her clothes, disconcerted by the other woman’s refusal to avert her gaze. She lowered herself into the pool, the water stinging every inch of her body. Františka repeated the words after the rabbi’s wife.
‘Now, hold yourself under.’
Darkness. Only her hair remained on the surface. How long was she in the water? Forever. Františka, daughter of humble farm owners, would be left behind, frozen in place. Rushes of warmth. Roaring, a storm of voices calling her Jewish name. Rachel. Ancestors welcoming her back. So this is the neshamah, the Jewish soul? Františka shot up from the mikveh, icy water dripping from her skin. The hair on her arms was standing on end. Through a film of water she saw the rabbi’s wife standing there, grinning. ‘Get out, dear girl. You will catch your death.’
And so she emerged, this dripping, trembling rag doll. A Jew.
6
From the bottom of the stairs, a voice. ‘Ah, you’re here. May I take your hat and coat?’
Jakub R clumsily removed the coat and raised his hand to the brim of his hat. The old man held out a cloth kippah and smiled at Jakub. ‘I thought you’d got lost but I’m glad you’re here. The rabbi asked me to welcome you. I am the shammas.’ A flourish of the arm. ‘Please.’
The shammas led Jakub through a stone archway to the central hall. Two rows of wooden pews lined the walls on either side. At one end, a simple ark with a faded velvet curtain pulled across its opening. Beside it, a large, ornate throne carved from oak. On the other end, cases filled with leather-bound books. Everything faced towards a podium enclosed in wrought-iron latticework. There, where the rabbi usually stood, where the Torah was unfurled three times a week, where God’s words were sung back to Him with joy and reverence, Jakub saw his father: a phantom, a warning. Then he was gone.
‘You know,’ the shammas said, ‘this is not Avraham’s tent. We don’t welcome every traveller. Unless there are services, this door is closed. But our dear rabbi forbade me to lock up before you arrived. When will he be back? Who knows? Time means nothing while we wait for the Messiah. Let me tell you a story to calm your nerves. For every arrival there is a new story to tell and this one is yours. So listen already.’
On the balcony of a sanatorium for the criminally insane, a prisoner sits strapped to a rickety wheelchair. He peers into a telescope at a distant hill upon which there stands a tower that reaches to the sky and beyond. It is a tower of pure onyx, no visible entrance, no discernible purpose. The prisoner is convinced that it is the axis pole around which the world rotates.
One day, when he is admiring the perfect blackness, the prisoner is startled by a shock of colour in the corner of his eye. He swings the telescope, trying to centre it in his view. He gasps. It is a young girl, completely unlike anyone else he has ever seen. She does not face him. Instead, she slides her hands up and down and across the tower’s smooth surface as if she is searching for something. He watches her in awe for eight days as she traverses the width of the tower before disappearing over the other side. For three weeks his view returns to black. Then, just when the prisoner has consigned her to memory, she appears. ‘Kaja!’ he calls out, as if he has always known her name, but she does not answer. She just faces the tower and begins her search anew.
And so it continues: eight days on his side of the tower, three weeks on the other. Month after month. Year after year. The prisoner comes to count his sentence by her presence—never mind that his sentence is indefinite—and readies his telescope on the twenty-second day for her arrival, waiting to see how she has grown. Without fail Kaja is there. Older. More beautiful. It is a routine from which he does not tire, for that is the nature of love and madness.
In his twelfth year of watching, on a day that Kaja is over the other side, the prisoner looks into his telescope and sees an open door at the base of the tower. He is aghast. Could this be the answer? The thing for which his beloved has been searching? The prisoner scans the area around the door until his gaze lands on a crumpled, impish man tilling the earth. All day this man continues to toil. Then, as the sun begins to set, he gathers his things, hobbles back to the tower and closes the door behind him.
Kaja passes by. Another time. Then another. The prisoner watches with glee as a beautiful vegetable garden sprouts at the foot of the tower, but Kaja does not turn around. She cannot see the life that is rising from the earth behind her. She continues to run her hands against the smooth black surface, searching, searching.
In time, the garden becomes a forest, its vines and branches tangled across the wall, obscuring the prisoner’s view of the tower. When Kaja appears, he can see her only in glimpses: a snatch of hair, a patch of blouse. He is quite unprepared for the pink of her face. She has turned around. The prisoner watches as Kaja approaches the
thicket with caution. She glances about, as if suspecting a trap. Then she picks at some of the vegetables, rubs them against her dirty skirt, and eats them. She darts back to the tower and resumes her search, slamming her fists against the blackness.
Years pass. Kaja is now an old woman. The prisoner, too, is approaching his end. The garden is dying, its branches dry and broken. Still the prisoner watches and waits. Until the day that Kaja begins to dig. She scratches frantically, not in the garden, or the earth around it, but into the tower itself. The prisoner stares as her hands turn calloused and bloody. He notices that, slowly but surely, she makes an indent into the smooth tower wall. The hole is lined with her blood.
The digging continues for a year. The garden is all but gone. The prisoner is ravaged by illness; every breath is an effort. Still he watches longingly as Kaja digs away with her broken hands, burrowing deeper and deeper, until one day she has made a hole big enough to climb inside. She nestles into the grotto and turns to look directly at the prisoner. Then she lies down and dies. After seven days, he sees the crumpled, impish man come out of the tower, brick up the hole, smooth over his handiwork with thick black sludge, and hurry back to the door.
Not long after, the prisoner succumbs to consumption. He is given a pauper’s funeral, which no one attends. The little man in the tower is never seen again.
Jakub sat motionless on the stone bench. From beyond the archway he could hear murmurs, greetings. Men began to file into the synagogue and take their seats for the morning service. ‘I’m afraid the rabbi has taken ill,’ said the shammas. ‘Come back another time if you must, but for now take this.’ He passed Jakub a scrap of paper with a few scribbled words: Dr J. Langer, The Jewish School. 3 Jáchymova Street. ‘It is not far. He is expecting you.’
7
25.VIII
My dearest Emí,
How is it that almost a month has passed and yet I still feel like I am with you in Sudoměřice? Every morning I wake up in a daze, hoping to run outside and jump in the lake like we did as children. I so miss you when we are apart! Last night I dreamed that I was on the stairs, where the bees gather near the attic. A whole swarm had blocked out the sun and I was sure I would fall back down. I called out to you but you didn’t come. I woke with a start—I could still hear them. Would you believe it was the light bulb near my head? I must have fallen asleep without turning it off.
As always, returning to the city has taken some adjustment, but we have settled back into our life. Little Hanička is growing fat in time for the winter. Marcela has been parading around town in the dress you gave her, stopping strangers in the street and telling them what a wonderful aunt she has in the country. So, too, with Irena, who accompanies me to the store and asks why they don’t sell honey from her Babička’s town.
Last week we celebrated Daša’s eleventh birthday. It was a quiet affair, but joyous nonetheless. She was particularly enamoured of your present and is convinced that you sewed it yourself. Only Auntie Emí can sew like this, she insists. (Should I be insulted?)
When the birthday meal was over, I sat her down and tried to impress upon her the importance of the next twelve months. In a fortnight she will begin her middle schooling at a Jewish academy in Josefov. I want to tell her that it is not my doing, that I am sorry for dragging her into this with me. I try my best not to turn her against her father or grandparents, and so I explain what I can of the choice she will have to make when, next year, she attains the age of bat mitzvah. She can cast it all away, escape the confines of this spiritual prison. If that’s what she decides, which, secretly, is my heart’s desire, it will be as if she were never Jewish at all. If, on the other hand, she chooses to embrace it, then she, too, must find her way with God.
I dread what sort of impression the horrible things I learned will have on her delicate mind. So I must remind her of her mother’s heritage. Send me pinecones and tinsel. Have the carpenters of Miličín carve us a glorious angel. This year we will have the grandest tree in all of Žižkov.
You asked about Ludvík, why he did not come with us this time. I am grateful that you did not push further when I said he stayed in the city for work. I know how you feel about him. But it was the truth, Emí. So here it is at last, what I couldn’t tell you in Sudoměřice: we are getting a car! I can scarcely contain myself. That is why he stayed, to work and make the payments. Can you believe it? He has changed! Not like the other times. This time he really has! It is like the life he always promised. We also had a little help from Mama Roubíčková—she was so glad we decided to enrol the girls in the Jewish school that she offered to help get them there in style. You should have seen her crowing when I told her. ‘No grandchild of mine will arrive like a gypsy!’ Papa Roubíček helped us with the calculations. It can be paid off in less than a year, he said.
Could you ever have imagined your sister being driven around in her very own car? Ludvík and I spent many afternoons perusing the garages of Prague. What fun we had! Eventually we settled on the Škoda 420 in deep cherry red. The standard, not the sports model. You will see it soon enough. I can’t wait to watch your face, and Mama’s and Agnes’s, even Maria’s, when we arrive for our visit. They will think it’s the queen herself who has come!
As I write this I have the last payment beside me. You don’t want to know how much. Ludvík hardly sleeps as the time draws near. Next week he will return from work after lunch so that he can take the money to the garage and return with our chariot. I promise to send a picture as soon as possible with the car and the girls and Ludvík and…Finally, a happy family, a portrait that you can hang in the house so that Mother can look at it and know that it all works out in the end.
I smother you all with kisses.
Ever your loving sister,
Františka
Every car turning into Biskupcova Street was met with yelps of excitement.
‘Is that the one, Mama?’
‘Is that Papa?’
Františka Roubíčková had to hold them back, to stop them from running onto the road. ‘No,’ she said, laughing. ‘Compared to Papa’s car, that is an old pushcart.’ Or ‘That one is green, Irča. Papa’s car is red.’ The girls cheered as the cars passed, some of the drivers waving back or tooting their horns in good humour. Františka blushed as the occasional hat was tipped in her direction. If she was not mistaken, one man even pulled the cigarette from his mouth and winked. Fancy that. Such a perfect picture they must have made at the doorway, this young family in their finest summer dresses.
Looking down the length of their street to the intersection with Mladoňovicova, as Daša and Irena raced back and forth, as Marcela weaved between the trees along the kerb, feeling Hana’s tiny hands clutching her ankles, it occurred to Františka that for the first time since her second child was born, she was truly content.
It did not concern her when Ludvík failed to appear at the appointed hour. Purchases like that took time; there were contracts to sign, registration forms to complete. She imagined Ludvík sitting in the salesman’s cluttered office when it was all over, the two of them puffing on cigars and raising tumblers of whisky in celebration. It would take a while for him to steady himself, to settle his nerves. Looking out towards Mladoňovicova, Františka gasped, thinking she had spotted him. But it was the wrong model. She let out a sigh and hoped that nobody would notice the dawning of her doubt.
The delay only fuelled the girls’ excitement; their energy was boundless. They had no expectations of their father; he was a ghost, a chimera. It was something they gleaned from the outset, something they saw replicated in other houses. If he was present at all, a father was the lingering musk of tobacco smoke, the odd cough, the melting cubes of ice in a glass on the kitchen bench. He was the snap of a belt, an ever-looming threat. His approval, a hug, a kiss; these were treasured. The boiled sweets, the toys, the moments of joy, when the family was together. Like now. This summer. This street. This family.
Another gasp. At last, the car.
A Skoda 420. Red. It was exactly as Františka remembered. The colour of the richest Moravian wine. A shiny silver grill, with its crossbar of lights, the new Roubíček coat of arms. The whole street had frozen: the children, the neighbours. A few people had their hands to their foreheads, to shield their eyes from the sun, to make certain this apparition wasn’t a play of shadows. The girls clung to their mother.
Františka could barely make him out through the cloud of cigarette smoke in the cabin. Just as he had once promised, Ludvík Roubíček was now the very height of modern sophistication. The horn sounded once, twice, a regal call to attention. Františka stepped forward, pushing the girls in front. The car slowed to a crawl, veered towards the kerb. Another step. Františka readied herself for the moment, pictured herself as the princess in the stories she read to their children at night. Close enough now that she could hear the whir of spinning tyres. Františka looked around, smiled and took one last step onto the road.
The girls screamed as the car came to a sudden stop, its horn bleating like a wounded sow. From inside, an explosion of curses, clearer as the window rolled down. ‘Are you crazy, lady? Get off the road.’ Smoke spewed out, revealing the driver, face crooked with rage, shaking his fist. ‘I should call the police. How could you involve your children in this farce? For shame!’ The elegant gentleman—blond, with a waxed moustache, in other words nothing like her husband—continued to rant, but Františka could not hear a word. The two younger girls were crying, huddled against the door to number thirteen, removing themselves from the damaged creature on the road.
The neighbours. Children. Passers-by. They were all watching, aghast. Her shoe was off, the heel wedged into the rusted grate beneath the concrete lip of the gutter. She refused to scream, refused to cry. Let them have their moment of mirth, of condemnation. Františka took a deep breath and cautiously touched her foot to the ground. It would require ice, a tight compress. Biskupcova Street swirled around her. Another breath, this time for composure. Curse them all. She put her hand on the car’s bonnet and reached down to remove the other shoe. Pain was her ally; it slowed her every move. A pull. Nothing. Just as sure as the other was ensnared in the drain, this shoe seemed nailed to her foot. Again she straightened, tugged at the hem of her dress. To return home, those few steps, to collect the girls and continue with their day as if none of this had happened. She would come back for her shoe later, once the sun had set, on the street, on her, on Ludvík.
