The Book of Dirt

by Bram Presser

  ‘The Kavalier Barracks are filled with such people.’

  ‘Pshah…Listen. There was one exhibit towards the end of her tour…something clearly tacked on to appease her imaginary audience. Like all our visitors they hungered for local fare. So she told them of a book, an ordinary siddur, with no identifying marks other than a clasp made of silver, a lion facing the rising sun, its claws stretching outwards, holding a grape. The Maharal’s own prayer book. Nobody dared open it, she said, so great was the respect for this holy man. Just as well. They would have been horrified. Its pages were rubbed clean. Before he died, she said, he gathered the words so that he could take them with him to heaven. But there was another more pious reason for the harvest: he didn’t want to desecrate a holy book. You see, she said, he had one final task before he could depart this world, something that would ensure he could die in peace, and the siddur was to play an integral part. Using the blade with which he had performed countless circumcisions, he fashioned a storage compartment within its pages. Then, she continued, in the middle of the night, while his students and followers slept, he dragged himself up the stairs into the attic genizah of the Altneu Synagogue where, in the back corner, under the old discarded Torah scrolls and holy books, there lay a splintered pine coffin with the disintegrated remains of his beloved golem. Rabbi Löew shuffled over, reached into the area that would have been the corpse’s chest and, whispering a solemn prayer, pulled out a fistful of dirt.’

  ‘The clay man’s heart?’

  ‘Precisely. I could see from the glint in her eye that she knew her audience was, like you, feasting on her every word. She went on: For years the Maharal had ascended his pulpit, confident in the knowledge that the golem was resting peacefully above his head. But one day he noticed that it had become an effort to take those steps. He could no longer address his people in the same strong voice that, for so long, had filled them with awe. He was an old man. Soon God would call on him to return to the kingdom of souls. Naturally, his thoughts turned to his child. What would become of it when he was gone? He’d watched his congregation grow sick, watched saintly men turn devious and conniving. They spoke openly of finding the golem, bringing it back to life. With such a servant they would have no need of faith. He summoned his beloved disciples, Yitzchok ben Shimshon Ha-Cohen and Yaakov ben Chaim Sasson Halevi, to prepare them for what was to come. When I am gone, take the dirt and bury it in the cemetery on the hill, he said. Mix it with the earth so it may rest undisturbed, free from the designs of man.

  ‘A few days later, on what would soon be his deathbed, she said, he was struck with a sudden bout of remorse. To think his beloved child would return to the earth like any other man, that he would be nothing more than a memory. He simply could not bear it. What father can contemplate the erasure of his child? And so he resolved to use what remained of his strength to save the most vital organ, the clay man’s heart. It would live on forever in the known world, in a simple siddur, hidden within the shelves of the eternal library of life.’

  ‘And you think this…’ Jakub angled the cup towards the old man.

  ‘Is dirt. By its very nature it is what you make of it. But now I must go. Come by my kambal tomorrow night. Bring the dirt. There is something else you must know.’

  Cold water sputtered from the washroom tap. Hands pushed forward, scrubbing, stippling the trough with the muck of a day’s toil. A steamy haze emanated from the stinking bodies crammed together. Some soaked their shirts, squeezed them out, applied the cool dampness to their skin. Others threw handfuls of water against their chests. Jakub held his spot, watching the earth swallow the murky liquid and congeal into a muddy sludge that would not be washed away.

  Alone on his bunk he spooned the mud into his hand and rolled it between his palms. It took form, not quite a ball, more the uneven contours of a child’s fist. He squeezed and waited for a response but none came. The clay was heavy, warm. It left no residue on his skin.

  When he woke it was still beside him. Who would steal a lump of clay, anyway? Shoes, cups, spoons, yes. But not this. Not dirt. Jakub reached out, slid his finger along its smooth surface. It was still moist. Across the narrow gap between the bunks, he saw Georg beginning to stir. Soon there would be moans, movement, chaos. Jakub slid the clay under the corner of his straw mattress and hoisted himself from the bunk.

  For the first time he made mistakes. The books felt foreign, otherworldly. He had to check each detail, double-check. The words would not come, there was nothing to say. Had he not fled the village and escaped the folktales of his ancestors? Was he not a man of reason? Of enlightenment? Why now, in this ghetto prison, must his mind retreat into fiction?

  Jakub rested his pen on the desk and looked around. The work continued as normal. That night he would go to the Magdeberg Barracks and find the Professor’s kambal. Jakub knew little of such places, only that they existed. Neither bunkrooms nor apartments, they were the requisitioned nooks under staircases, behind storage shelves, in disused spaces, closed off and decorated for personal use. It was in these kambals that contraband changed hands, that young lovers met for undisturbed trysts, that false kings held court. But it was also where composers filled pages with clefs and crotchets, artists created life with whatever substances they could find, great minds distilled their thoughts. Professor Glanzberg’s kambal was at the back of the Hall of Souls, the central filing room in which every prisoner’s details were kept in triplicate, one copy for this world, one for the next and one to hang precariously in geheinem Terezín, the purgatory of Theresienstadt.

  The halls of Magdeberg’s administrative wing were deserted when he arrived. For once the ghetto was at peace. Jakub made his way past the department offices to the door of the Hall of Souls. He held the cup firmly to his shirt. The ball of clay had dried during the day and crumbled. By the time he returned to his bunk it was as he had first found it, an unremarkable mound. Jakub was careful to scoop what he could back into the cup.

  The door opened to a narrow staircase lit only by a dull glow from the corridor. Scraggy grey carpet lined the stairs, crushed by the recent passage of ten thousand feet. He removed his shoes and socks and stepped down into the dim passage. The door whined shut behind him, drawn back by a rusted spring. Blackness. Jakub steadied himself against the wall, picking up speed on the stairs as plaster turned to stone against his hand. He knew he had reached the subterranean maze, an arterial system of tunnels that ran beneath the fortress town, where soldiers once scrambled to defend their empress’s name against invading hordes that never arrived and partisans now ferried whatever necessities they could carry on their crooked backs. The hollowed earth held the chill of winters past.

  A sliver of light across the ground signalled a door. He searched for a handle but felt only wood and cold metal straps. The light caressed his toes, and with it a warm breeze that carried the drone of a chant. He pressed his shoulder to the door and nudged it open. It was exactly as the bonkes had it: a vast corridor of filing cabinets reaching to the ceiling, lit by bulbs, stretching into the distance. At the far end, Jakub could make out a curtain, behind which were the shadows of two figures sitting in stillness over a raised ledge. The drone grew louder, swirling from all around in the dead air—AH, H, AH, AV, V, AV—a diminuendo of sighs.

  As he approached the curtain, Jakub saw the shadow figures stir. One slid back and rose, growing to a monstrous height then shrinking as it darkened against the fluttering fabric. The curtain was pulled aside to reveal a squinting face. ‘Jakub!’ It was Professor Glanzberg.

  ‘Please, please,’ the old man said. ‘You’ll have to excuse the state of the place. With every new trainload the filing room expands and I have to make the necessary adjustments. The clerks fuss over the files. Bureaucrats! The noise is unbearable—paper brushing against paper…I tell you, it toys with one’s sphincter. Then they ship a trainload off and I’m back to where I started.’ Professor Glanzberg held open the curtain to allow Jakub through.

 
It took a moment for Jakub’s eyes to adjust to the harsh light of an unshaded floor lamp near the hanging divide. The kambal was sparsely appointed: a single mattress wedged into the corner, a plain bookshelf against one wall and a table near the centre with four chairs—short, like those found in a house of mourning—placed around it. The man sitting down did not turn around but Jakub recognised his shape.

  ‘In Prague we were ten,’ said Otto Muneles without waiting for Jakub to sit. ‘Now we are two. The Council of Formations. Or what’s left of it. For years we gathered in the attic of the Altneu where nobody dared tread, but here…Please, take a seat.’ Jakub lowered himself onto a chair. ‘We weren’t sure that you’d come,’ continued Muneles. ‘You have enough to worry about without this. And old Leopold’s tales…I know how it must sound.’

  ‘Prague is a city of stories,’ said Glanzberg. ‘Words are in its very mortar. Mostly we dismiss what we hear as legend or gossip. But know this, young Jakub: much of it is true. Take us, for example.’

  Muneles shifted in his chair. ‘Five hundred years ago, Rabbi Löew had a private audience with Emperor Rudolf II. To this day what they discussed remains a closely guarded secret.’

  ‘Rudolf was a kind, tolerant man,’ said Glanzberg. ‘But he was surrounded by advisers who wished only ill for the Jews, and who filled the emperor’s head with false accusations: sorcery, witchcraft, all kinds of treachery. Naturally, he grew fearful of what he had been told, but he trusted the great rabbi. He trusted in his reputation for learning and wisdom and honesty. And so the emperor summoned Rabbi Löew to an apartment in the castle where they could speak in private, and laid out his offer: Rabbi Loew was to investigate the legends and report back to the emperor. Bring them to me, Rudolph said, so that my mind will be at ease. Together we can banish your sheds and mazziks from these lands. In return, the emperor vowed to revoke all expulsion orders that his father had made, and allow the Jews to live freely in his kingdom.

  ‘Rabbi Löew rushed back and called together nine of his most trusted friends to form the Council of Formations, and appointed as its leader the one who dwelled with the spirits, the head of the Chevra Kadisha. On the first night, they met in the attic of the Altneu. We will do as he asks, Rabbi Löew said. We will make the proper enquiries. Then we will report back that it is all rumour, the superstitions of country folk. Quell his fears, yes, but whatever we find we must save. Beware the king with good intentions.’

  ‘Since then,’ said Muneles, ‘it has fallen upon those in my position to continue the holy charge. Here we are. Still searching.’

  ‘There are others,’ said Glanzberg. ‘All working with the burden of their titles. The librarian, the architect, the slaughterer, the keeper of youth. You’d be surprised by the evidence they’ve found. The brick thrown at King Wenceslas—for which, legend has it, the quiet Jew Shime Sheftels paid a martyr’s price—uncovered by my predecessor in 1753. Then, at the turn of the last century, a lump of dripping coal, prised from the hand of a dead woman as her body was being prepared for the grave. It was brought before the Council and tested extensively. Wouldn’t you know, it proved to be just as its finder suspected: a magical artefact from the underwater kingdom, one of the gold coins given by the water sprite of the Vltava River as a dowry for his beloved on condition that her family remain absolutely silent. Legend has it that when the girl’s mother could keep the secret no more, the riches turned to ashen clumps that continued to cry freshwater tears…

  ‘It is a complex charge,’ continued Glanzberg. ‘These legends have a way of growing into themselves, multiplying. In every one there is the seed of the next. Our job is to examine those seeds, but also to scatter others so that the Jews do not make idols of them.’

  ‘And so we obfuscate,’ said Muneles. ‘We muddy the waters. In that way we, too, have grown into ourselves, into our names. And we have lost control.’

  Professor Glanzberg rocked back and forth in his seat, as if praying. ‘When the stories began to circulate about Rabbi Löew, the Council of Formations did what it could to cultivate them. Let him become a myth, a legend. Then the Germans came.’

  ‘They came and it all changed,’ said Muneles. ‘We met as the Council of Formations always did, in the attic. Leopold here saw in the occupation a chance to gather whatever artefacts remained and test them for evidence of folk magic. We approached the Department of Rural Affairs to petition the authorities, and ask that everything from around the Protectorate be shipped to Prague.’

  ‘We also sent out teams in the city,’ said Glanzberg, ‘under the strict watch of a particular Jewish brute, to search every house that had been left empty by deportation. Only the odd piece proved to be of any worth. There were, however, two things…two things that made us reconsider the legend of Rabbi Löew.’

  Jakub felt his fingers tighten around the metal cup. He pulled it back along the table, towards him. It seemed somehow heavier, as if the dirt inside had grown dense with Glanzberg’s words.

  ‘The first,’ said Muneles, ‘was a simple wooden box. On its sides were unsophisticated carvings, symbols that might have been a forgotten language or just mindless doodles. We could find no opening, nothing to indicate its purpose. We’d have tossed it aside had it not started jingling every time our colleague Pavel Pařík picked it up. For two days we watched as it rang out or stayed mute according to his presence. It became something of a game. We would place it wherever we thought he’d be going next. We even joked about giving it as a gift to his wife. Then, on the third day, he didn’t come to the museum. At ten o’clock we received the call. Pavel Pařík was dead. He’d suffered a stroke overnight. It was then that we remembered the story: Rabbi Löew, in an effort to cheat death, once made a box that would chime out whenever the dark angel was approaching. Leopold rushed with the box to the nearby hospital and, just as we feared, the moment he stepped inside, it began to ring out and shake uncontrollably.’

  ‘The second thing,’ said Glanzberg, ‘was a great deal more confounding. You are no doubt aware that the whole fascination with Rabbi Löew and his man of clay is based mostly on the work of the Polish Rabbi, Yudl Rosenberg, and his book Nifla’ot Maharal. Rosenberg claims to have come across the manuscript about Rabbi Loëw and the golem in the Royal Library at Metz in Northern France. He claims it was written by Rabbi Löew’s own son-in-law.’

  ‘But neither the library nor the son-in-law ever existed.’

  ‘In his introduction,’ continued Glanzberg, ‘Rosenberg wrote of a second manuscript, penned by Rabbi Löew himself, that Rosenberg was willing to sell for eight hundred kopeks. An exorbitant amount at the time. He could be certain that nobody would take him up on it.’

  ‘Except,’ said Muneles, ‘it appears that somebody did. And it was sold on through the years until it fell into the hands of the industrialist Max Landsberger. We found it in his son’s house. Actually, you and Georg found it. You just didn’t know.’

  ‘We were forced to review our position on Rabbi Löew.’ Professor Glanzberg gestured towards the cup. ‘We had to face the possibility that the tales about him were real, that his golem was real.

  ‘Prague was all abuzz over the clay man. Books, movies, plays—a steady stream to fill their heads with wonder. We began to hear new stories: the Nazis had tried to burn down the Altneu Synagogue only to be thwarted by the raging golem; a senior Gestapo man was found dead on the stairs leading to the attic, his body battered and broken. The people had found in this golem a saviour more tangible than any messiah. The transports were already in full swing. If only the force of the golem’s fury could be released before the last Jew was taken away. Frightened fathers beseeched the chief rabbi to open the attic, to let the clay man out to save their children. The rabbi came to me one night. What could he do? We both knew there was nothing to be found up there. The genizah had been cleared out years ago and, other than ten wooden benches upon which we would sit to meet, the attic was empty. But what rabbi will take away hope when it is all th
at is left to his congregants? And who will admit to having broken Rabbi Löew’s prohibition forbidding anyone from ever entering the attic again?’

  ‘So we did the only thing we could do,’ said Muneles. ‘We returned to the sources, studied every permutation of the legend, scoured the notes of our predecessors, hoping to find sign of the creature. Perhaps they had been too quick to dismiss it.’

  ‘Picture this if you will: ten of Prague’s greatest minds, crawling along the banks of the Vltava River,’ said Glanzberg, ‘feeling for the spot where the clay had maintained its shape. We searched the cemeteries, dug up the graves where damaged books and Torah scrolls were buried, went to Rabbi Löew’s old house in Široká Street and lifted the floorboards. But we found nothing.’

  Jakub peered into the cup. The dirt rested loosely inside, a few clay pebbles on top. He wanted to tell the men about it, about how it had kept its form, how it had stayed moist and firm beside him for one night before drying and crumbling in his hands. But, all of a sudden, he was not so sure. Had that even happened? Could it be that his memory was being shaped by the stories they told, that they were building golems in his mind? He shook the cup and watched the dirt tumble from side to side.

  ‘It shames me to say,’ continued Glanzberg, ‘that we even tried to create him anew. Only this year, just before Passover, Otto and I went down to the water’s edge and fashioned a figure from the mud. We followed the formula, recited the two hundred and thirty-one gates in the Sefer Yetzirah, just as the great Rabbi Eleazar of Worms instructed. We stayed there until morning, chanting, praying, crying and pleading, dancing in circles until the water lapped at our inanimate lump and called it back to the river. We trudged home but there was no clay man to keep us company.’

  ‘We had failed,’ said Muneles. ‘And God laughed from on high, thunder rumbling in the distance.’ He rested his hands on the table and lowered his head. Jakub had not seen him so uncertain, so defeated. Then: ‘I returned to the museum and kept an eye out for artefacts until, two months later, I received my summons and was brought here.’