The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (with bonus content)

by Michael Chabon

  “By all means,” Joe said.

  “What did you wish to speak to me about?”

  Joe was thrown into confusion. “What did I wish?” he said. “You telephoned me.”

  Now it was Herr Milde’s turn to look confused. “Did I?”

  “Fraulein Tulpe did. She said you had found some problem in the paperwork for my brother. Thomas Masaryk Kavalier.” He inserted the middle name as a patriotic gesture.

  “Ah, yes,” Milde nodded, frowning. It was clear he had no idea what Joe was talking about. He reached for the ranked dossiers waiting in a wire rack on his desk and found Joe’s. He paged through it for a few minutes with an air of great diligence, flipping back and forth amid the crinkly sheets of onionskin it contained. He shook his head and clucked his tongue. “I’m sorry,” he said, lifting the file to replace it in the rack. “I can’t seem to find any reference to—Hello.”

  A piece of pale yellow paper that looked as if it might have been torn from a teletype machine fell out. Milde picked it up. He appeared to make his way very slowly through its contents, forehead furrowed, as if they presented an argument that was difficult to follow.

  “Well, well,” he said. “This is regrettable. I don’t—It appears that your father has died.”

  Joe laughed. For the briefest instant, he thought that Milde was making a joke. But Milde had never made a joke before in Joe’s hearing, and Joe saw that he was not kidding now. His throat tightened. He felt his eyes burning. If he had been alone, he would have broken down, but he was not alone, and he would rather have died himself than allow Milde to see him cry. He looked down at his lap, clamping down on his emotions and setting his jaw.

  “I just had a letter …” he said weakly, his tongue thick amid his teeth. “My mother said nothing.…”

  “When was the letter posted?”

  “Nearly a month ago.”

  “Your father has been dead for only three weeks. It says here that the cause was pneumonia. Here.”

  Milde passed the ragged sheet of soft yellow paper across the desk to Joe. It had been torn from a much longer list of the dead. The name KAVALIER EMIL DR was one of nineteen, beginning with Eisenberg and running alphabetically through to Kogan, each of them followed by a terse notation of age and date and cause of death. It appeared to be a partial list of the Jews who had died in Prague or environs during the months of August and September. Joe’s father’s name had been circled in pencil.

  “Why …?” Joe could not seem to sort out the knot of questions interfering with his thoughts. “Why was I not informed?” he managed finally.

  “I have no idea how that piece of paper, which I have never seen before, even found its way into your dossier,” Milde said. “It’s perfectly mysterious. Bureaucracy is a mysterious force.” He seemed to realize that humorous remarks might not be appropriate at this time. He coughed. “It is regrettable, as I said.”

  “It may be an error,” Joe said. It must be, he thought, for I saw him only this afternoon, in Hoboken! “A case of mistaken identity.”

  “Such things are always possible,” Milde said. He stood up and extended a condolent hand. “I shall write a memorandum to my successor about your father’s case. I will see that inquiries are made.”

  “You are most kind,” Joe said, rising slowly from his chair. He felt a flush of gratitude to Herr Milde. Inquiries would be made. He had at least managed to obtain that much for his family. Someone now would take an interest, if only to this extent, in their case. “Goodbye, Herr Milde.”

  “Goodbye, Herr Kavalier.”

  Afterward, Joe found he had no memory of how he got out of Milde’s office, along the warren of corridors, down the elevator, into the lobby. He wandered up Broadway for a block before it occurred to him to wonder where he was going. He went into a saloon and telephoned the office. Sammy was in. He started in about Joe’s pages in grandiloquent terms, but when he perceived the silence on Joe’s end, he ran out of steam and asked, “What?”

  “I come from the consulate,” Joe said. The telephone was old-fashioned, with a speaking tube and a cylindrical earpiece. There had been one like it in the kitchen of the house off the Graben. “They had some bad news for me.” Joe told him how, quite by accident, he had learned that his father was dead.

  “Could there be a mistake?”

  “No,” Joe said. He was thinking more clearly now. He was a little shaky, but it seemed to him that his thoughts were clear. His gratitude toward Adjutant Milde had turned once again to anger. “I’m sure it is not a mistake.”

  “Where are you?” Sammy said.

  “Where am I?” Joe looked around and realized for the first time that he was in a saloon on Broadway, down at the toe of the city. “Where am I.” It was not a question the second time he said it. “I’m on my way to Canada.”

  “No,” he heard Sammy say, as he hung the receiver back on its hook. He went over to the bar. “I wonder if you can help me?” he said to the bartender.

  The bartender was an elderly man with a shining pate and big rheumy blue eyes. He had been trying to explain to one of his customers, when Joe interrupted him, how to work the abacus he used to figure tabs. The customer looked glad of the interruption.

  “Montreal, Canada,” the bartender repeated, when Joe told him where he wanted to go. “I believe you want to leave from Grand Central Station.”

  The customer agreed with this. He said Joe wanted to take the Adirondack.

  “What do you want to go there for?” he said. “If you don’t mind my being so nosy?”

  “I’m going to enlist in the R.A.F.,” Joe said.

  “Are you?”

  “Yes. Yes, I’m tired of waiting.”

  “Attaboy,” said the customer.

  “They speak French up there,” the bartender said. “Watch out.”

  JOE DID NOT STOP at home to pack a bag. He did not want to risk running into someone who would try to talk him out of his plan. Anyway, there was nothing he needed that he could not buy in a drugstore or find in a bus-station vending machine; his passport and visa he carried with him at all times. The Royal Air Force would dress and shoe and feed him.

  He distracted himself for a while on the train by worrying about his interview with the recruiters. Would his resident-alien status in the United States be an impediment to his enlisting in the R.A.F.? Would they find some unknown flaw in his body? He had heard of guys being rejected for having flat feet and bad eyesight. If the air force didn’t take him, he would join the Royal Navy. If he was not deemed fit for the navy, then he would take his chances in the infantry.

  By Croton-on-Hudson, however, his spirits began to flag. He tried to cheer himself with thoughts of dropping bombs on Kiel or Tobruk, but his fantasies struck him as uncomfortably reminiscent of his slugfests in the pages of Radio, Triumph, and The Monitor. In the end, neither fretting nor bravado could distract him any longer from the thought that he was fatherless.

  He and his father had in their jocular, gingerly fashion loved each other, but now that his father was dead, Joe felt only regret. It was not just the usual regret over things left unsaid, thanks unexpressed and apologies withheld. Joe did not yet regret the lost future opportunities for expatiation on favorite shared subjects, such as film directors (they revered Buster Keaton) or breeds of dogs. Such regrets would come only belatedly, a few days after, when he made the realization that death really did mean that you were never going to see the dead person ever again. What he regretted most of all just now was simply that he had not been there when it happened; that he had left to his mother, grandfather, and brother the awful business of watching his father die.

  Emil Kavalier, like many doctors, had always been a terrible patient. He refused to acknowledge that he could fall prey to an illness, and had never taken a sick day in his life. When laid low by a grippe, he would suck mentholated pastilles, consume copious amounts of chicken broth, and go about his business. Joe could not even imagine him sick. How had he died?
In a hospital? At home? Joe pictured him lying in a heavy scrolled bed in the middle of a jumbled apartment like the ones he had seen in the building where the Golem had been hidden.

  What would become of his mother, grandfather, and brother? Their names might have appeared already on some other list of deaths that no one had bothered to report to him. Was pneumonia contagious? No, he felt fairly certain it was not. But it could be brought on by ill health and misery. If his father had been vulnerable to something like that, what kind of shape must Thomas be in? He imagined that the little food or medicine they possessed went to Thomas before it went to anyone else. Perhaps his father had sacrificed his health for the sake of Thomas’s. Had his entire family died? How would he ever find out?

  By the time the Adirondack pulled into Albany that afternoon, Joe’s adventure into the unknown of war had come to seem one unknown too many for him to bear. He had convinced himself that it was far more likely that both his mother and Thomas were still alive. And if this was so, then they required rescue no less than they had before. He could not abandon them further by running off and trying, like the Escapist, single-handedly to end the war. It was imperative for him to remain focused on the possible. At least—it was a cruel thought, but he could not prevent himself from thinking it—there would now be one visa fewer to try to wrest from the Reich.

  He got down from the train at Union Station in Albany and stood on the platform, getting in the way of people who were boarding. A man with round rimless spectacles brushed past, and Joe remembered the man on the Rotterdam’s gangway whom he had mistaken for his father. In retrospect, it seemed like an omen.

  The conductor urged Joe to make up his mind; he was holding up the train. Joe wavered. All his doubts were counterbalanced by a powerful urge to kill German soldiers.

  Joe let the train go without him, then suffered sharp stabs of regret and self-reproach. He stood outside by the taxi stand. He could get in a cab and order the driver to take him to Troy. If he missed the train at Troy, then he could have the driver take him straight on to Montreal. He had plenty of money in his wallet.

  Five hours later, Joe was back in New York City. He had suffered through seven changes of mind on the way down the Hudson. He had spent the entire trip back in the train’s club car, and he was much the worse for drink. He stumbled out in the evening. A cold front seemed to have moved in. The air burned his nostrils, and his eyes felt raw. He wandered up Fifth Avenue and then went into a Longchamps and ordered himself whiskey and soda. Then he went once again to the phone.

  It took Sammy half an hour to get there; by that time, Joe was drunk enough, if not yet quite filthy stinking. Sammy walked into Long-champs’ boisterous bar, pulled Joe off his stool, and caught him in his arms. Joe tried, but this time he could not stop himself. His weeping sounded to his own ears like sad, hoarse laughter. None of the people in the bar knew what to make of him. Sammy guided him to a booth at the back of the barroom and handed Joe his handkerchief. After Joe had swallowed the rest of his sobs, he told Sammy the little he knew.

  “Could there be some mistake?” Sammy said.

  “Such things are always possible,” Joe said bitterly.

  “Oh, Jesus,” Sammy said. He had ordered two bottles of Ruppert’s and was staring down at the neck of his. He was not a drinker and had not taken even a sip. “I hate to tell my mother this.”

  “Your poor mother,” Joe said. “And my poor mother.” The thought of his mother a widow started him crying all over again. Sammy came around from the other side of the table and slid into the booth alongside him. Then they just sat there for a while. Joe thought back to that morning, when he had stuck his head out into the day and felt as powerful as the Escapist, surging with the mystic Tibetan energies of his rage.

  “Useless,” he said.

  “What is?”

  “I am.”

  “Joe, don’t say that.”

  “I’m worthless,” Joe said. He felt that he must leave the bar. He did not want to sit around drinking and crying anymore. He wanted to do something. He would find something that could be done. He grabbed Sammy by the sleeve and shoulder of his peacoat and gave him a push, nearly knocking him out of the booth.

  “Out,” he said. “Let’s go.”

  “Where are we going?” Sammy said, rising to his feet.

  “I don’t know,” Joe said. “Work. I’m going to work.”

  “But you just—all right,” Sammy said, looking into Joe’s face. “Maybe that isn’t a bad idea.” They left Longchamps and went down into the cool, foul gloom of the subway.

  On the southbound platform, a few feet from the cousins, stood a dark, glowering gentleman—reading the cut of his topcoat, or some indefinable emission radiating from his chin or eyes or haircut, Joe felt certain that he was German. This man was giving them the fish-eye. Even Sammy had to agree afterward that the man had been giving them the fish-eye. He was a German right out of a panel by Joe Kavalier, massive, handsome in a prognathous, lupine way, wearing a beautiful suit. As the wait for the train dragged on, Joe decided that he did not like what he considered to be the superior manner in which the theoretically German man was looking at him. He considered a number of possible styles, in German and in English, of expressing his feelings about the man and his fish-eye. Finally opting for a more universal statement, he spat, as if casually, onto the platform between him and the man. Public spitting was common enough at the time in that city of smokers, and the gesture might have remained safely ambiguous if Joe’s missile had not overshot its mark. Spittle frosted the tip of the man’s shoe.

  Sammy said, “Did you just spit at that man?”

  “What?” said Joe. He was a little surprised himself. “Eh, yes.”

  “He didn’t mean it, mister,” Sammy told the man. “He’s just a little upset right now.”

  “Then he makes the apology,” the man suggested not unreasonably. His accent was thick and unquestionably German. He waited for his apology with the air of one accustomed to receiving apologies when he asked for them. He took a step closer to Joe. He was younger than Joe had thought at first, and even more imposing. He looked as if he could more than handle himself in a fight.

  “Oh, my God,” Sammy said in an undertone. “Joe, I think that man is Max Schmeling.”

  There were other people waiting for the train, and they had taken an interest. They started to argue about whether the man whose shoes Joe had spat on was or was not Schmeling, the Black Bull of the Uhlan, former heavyweight champion of the world.

  “I’m sorry,” Joe mumbled, sort of meaning it.

  “What was that?” said the man, cupping a hand to his ear.

  “Go to hell,” Joe said, this time with greater sincerity.

  “Shit-head,” the man said, taking care with his English. With pugilistic quickness, he crowded Joe against an iron pillar, crooked an arm around Joe’s neck, and gave him a swift punch in the stomach. Joe’s breath deserted his body in a single hard gust and he pitched forward, striking his chin on the concrete platform. His eyeballs seemed to clang in their sockets. He felt as if someone had opened an umbrella inside his rib cage. He waited, flopped on his belly, unblinking as a fish, to see if he would ever again be able to draw a breath. Then he let out a long, low moan, a little at a time, testing the muscles of his diaphragm. “Wow,” he said finally. Sammy knelt beside him and helped him to one knee. Joe gulped up big lopsided gouts of air. The German man turned to the other people on the platform, one arm raised in challenge or, perhaps, it seemed to Joe, in appeal. Everyone had seen Joe spit on his shoe, hadn’t they? Then the big man turned and stalked off, way down to the far end of the platform. The train came, and the people all got on it, and that was the end of that. When they got back to Palooka Studios, Sammy, at Joe’s request, said nothing about Joe’s father. But he did tell everyone that Joe had gotten his ass kicked by Max Schmeling. Joe received their ironic congratulations. He was informed that he was lucky Schmeling had pulled his punch.
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br />   “Next time I see that guy,” Joe said, to his surprise, “I am going to hit him back.”

  Joe never did encounter Max Schmeling, or his doppelgänger, again. In any case, there is good reason to believe that Schmeling was not in New York at all but in Poland, having been drafted into the Wehrmacht and sent to the front as punishment for his defeat by Joe Louis in 1938.

  THERE COULD NOT HAVE BEEN more than a couple of thousand German citizens in New York at that time, but in the following two weeks, wherever Joe went in the city, he managed to run across at least one. He seemed to have acquired, as Sammy remarked, a superpower of his own: he had become a magnet for Germans. He found them in elevators, on buses, in Gimbel’s and at Longchamps restaurants. At first he would just watch them, or eavesdrop, sizing them up as good Germans or evil ones with sweeping certainty even if they were just talking about the rain or the taste of their tea, but it wasn’t long before he began to approach them and attempt to engage them in conversation that was menacingly bland and suggestive. Often enough, his advances were met with a certain amount of resistance.

  “Woher kommen Sie?” he asked a man he met buying a pound of steak at the butcher on Eighth Avenue, around the corner from Palooka Studios. “Schwabenland?”

  The man nodded warily. “Stuttgart,” he said.

  “How is everything back there?” He could feel the note of intimidation creeping into his voice, of menacing innuendo. “Is everybody all right?”

  The man shrugged, blushing, and made a mute appeal to the butcher with a raised eyebrow.

  “Is there a problem?” the butcher asked Joe. Joe said that indeed there was not. But when he walked out of the butcher shop with his lamb chops, he felt strangely pleased with himself for having discomfited the man. He supposed that he ought to be ashamed of this feeling. He believed that on some level he was. But he could not seem to keep himself from remembering with pleasure the furtive look and the flushed cheeks when he had addressed the man in his own language.