Alessandro agreed. “A preliminary visit to the synagogue is certainly in order. But I have made a commitment to be at the last session this afternoon and my absence from that will be noticed, if not by George.” He turned to Sophia. “Let’s go to the synagogue, and if takes too long, I’ll dash back to the conference and trust your estimate of the situation.”
“Fair enough.” Sophia said. They had reached the entrance of Angel House. She kissed her husband on the cheek, reminding him, “I’ll find you at dinner.” He nodded, kissing her cheek in turn. He then turned and went back into the conference for the afternoon sessions. Sophia and Alessandro continued walking down the sidewalk and crossed a street.
“So,” Alessandro remarked, “we need to get to the Old-New Synagogue. I can find it once we get to the Old Town Square, but are you sure how to get that far without getting lost?”
“Yes,” Sophia laughed lightly. “I have my guidebook with me!” She pulled it out of her handbag and opened it to the maps in the back. She studied one and then pointed ahead of them, announcing, “This way! Follow me!” Together they laughed and set out towards the Old Town Square.
Sophia led them towards a tower straddling the street and the tramway rails set into the cobblestones. Windows made of small panes of thick glasses joined by seams of lead interrupted the rows of stonework that grew towards the sky. The tower rose to a needle-nose point of tiles on its steeply pitched turret, colorful banners hanging limp in the air along its side as the breeze that had stirred the air before lunch had now dissipated. As they passed underneath the tower, Alessandro saw placards announcing both that the restaurant within was open for lunch and that diners could be admitted to the turret to appreciate the views. He bent his head back to take in the view of the whole tower from this vantage point. It was an impressive piece of work.
“This looks a bit like that church on the Old Town Square,” he observed to Sophia, who was studiously immersed in her guidebook. She glanced at him, then up at the tower. She returned her attention to her guidebook and bit her lower lip.
“It seems to be a remnant of the walls that were built to protect the Old Town,” she announced. “We need to turn there.” She pointed towards another similar tower down another street. She charged off and Alessandro hurried to catch up.
When they arrived at the base of this next tower, which was several minutes’ walk away, they discovered that this tower was much more massive. It straddled not only a street but also an intersection, and its supports were pierced by several doors. Signs advertised the American Bar downstairs. Several upscale hotels and department stores surrounded the tower, but more working-class neighborhoods seemed to spread out behind them, flowing away from the tower like ripples spreading across a pond. Sophia consulted her guidebook again.
“This is known as the Powder Tower,” she reported. “It was one of the principal gates into the Old Town and was connected by the wall to the other watchtowers, like the one we passed before.”
“Powder Tower?” repeated Alessandro. “Like make-up? This was the Cosmetics Tower?” They laughed.
“No, silly,” Sophia chided him. “Powder, as in gunpowder. This was where the ammunition was stored for cannons or—later on—guns used to defend the Old Town.” She again consulted the guidebook. “That street should lead us right into the Old Town Square.” She pointed down one of several lanes that ran away from the feet of the tower and the more modern buildings that stood outside what had been the medieval fortifications.
“Then down that street we go!” Alessandro stepped forward, even as he turned his head to drink in all the architectural details he was passing. He was fascinated by the juxtaposition of bright, modern department stores with broad display windows sitting cheek-by-jowl alongside much older, darker structures from the time of the wall’s construction. He could not pry his eyes away from the medieval buildings with their intricate stonework and wooden carvings and leaded windows. Many of the modern stores along this street seemed to specialize in Bohemian crystal. Their display windows were filled with endless shelves of goblets, glasses, and other stemware or decorative objects. Inside one of the stores, well-dressed matrons moved slowly along other display cases as they selected glasses for red wine or white. Clerks packed crystal glasses into boxes while others ran a pen or bamboo skewer along the edge of a row of glasses to demonstrate their quality and strength.
The street was full of shoppers and sightseers. No one was moving quickly and Alessandro had to watch carefully, as he nearly ran into several clumps of folks who had suddenly stopped to take a photo or have their photos taken. Navigating the busy street was treacherous; at least it was off limits to cars and busses. He noticed that Sophia, who was attempting to keep her eyes both on the pages of her guidebook and on the buildings they were passing, did run into several people, who were also attempting to do the same thing: walk, read, and gawk all simultaneously. It was amazing more people didn’t hurt themselves or twist an ankle as the crowds milled about or haltingly moved first in one direction, then another.
“This street was the Royal Road,” Sophia read to Alessandro as they moved further along. “The king’s official residence used to be near the Powder Tower, and on state occasions, he would make a formal entrance into the Old Town through the Powder Tower gate. Then he and the court would process along this street and through the square, then across the bridge and up the hill to the castle for the important events of the day.” She looked up at him. “Such as his coronation, it says.”
Alessandro looked up and down the tourist-clogged shopping street they were moving along. “Royal Road?” he repeated. “It seems to have dropped a notch or two since those days!”
Sophia giggled. “Even so, its origins seem humble enough. Evidently there were a series of bakeries here which gave the street its official name—Celetna—from the buns and rolls, the calty, which they baked. But there are still buildings here from the glory days of the Royal Road. Like this one.” She pointed to a gateway crowned with a gently curving arch they were passing and consulted her book again. “Apparently, this was the twelfth-century residence of Princess—then Queen—Elizabeth, who was the successor of Queen Judith, who built the first stone bridge across the river.” Alessandro paused and nodded appreciatively. Sophia pointed across the street to another arched gateway.
“That one—I do not see the building number so I could be wrong—was the parish school attached to Our Lady of Tyn church in the twelfth century.” The sturdy wooden door that filled the gate was beautiful but silent, keeping whatever secrets the old school housed away from the prying eyes of modern sightseers.
Alessandro and Sophia navigated their way through the larger knots of tourists who stood about or were walking to and from the Old Town Square, now only a few feet away. The priest’s wife and the Australian professor emerged alongside the Tyn church and a house that boasted Einstein having been a frequent guest at tea there.
“Isn’t the Jewish Quarter across the square, in that direction?” Alessandro pointed towards the Jan Hus memorial that filled the opposite side of the square. Sophia turned a page or two in her book and then nodded.
“Yes.” She pointed in more or less the same direction without taking her eyes from the page. “The Old-New Synagogue should be along that street.”
“So,” Alessandro asked as they made their way across the busy square, “does your guidebook say why it is the both the Old and the New Synagogue at the same time?”
“Well, there seems to be more than one explanation,” Sophia reported. She glanced down the page in her hand, alighting on the photograph and description of their destination. “One theory is that the stones used to build the synagogue were brought by angels from the Temple in Jerusalem, so that when a new synagogue was built here in 1270, it was already old. Ancient, even. The designation Old-New might be a corruption of the Hebrew word altnai, which means ‘provisional,’ since the angels were expected to take the stones back to Jerusalem to re
build the Temple when the Messiah was revealed.”
“Another possibility,” Alessandro offered, “might be that there was another synagogue built around the same time and this was either the older of the two new synagogues…
“…or the newer of the two old synagogues!” Sophia completed his sentence and they both laughed again. Weaving and dodging their way through the crowds, they discovered the synagogue on their left, down a short embankment from the sidewalk.
The synagogue was squatter than Alessandro had expected but the worn stones seemed warm and inviting. The gabled roof hugged the walls that supported it, as if afraid to stand too tall and draw unwanted attention. “Was the building always so shy, or do you think that was the result of the Nazi occupation?” Alessandro wondered, half-aloud, to Sophia.
Sophia seemed not to have heard him. She charged down the uneven steps to the level of the synagogue and joined the end of a line of noisy tourists making their way through the small door that served as the synagogue’s entrance. Alessandro hustled to catch up as she stepped into the synagogue. He skidded along the rough stones and ducked through the door.
His eyes took a moment to adjust to the dusty half-light of the lobby. Another short flight of worn stone steps led down to the level of the synagogue’s main floor. The lobby was long, the length of the building, but narrow. Only a few feet across, he could make out benches along the walls and small ovens that must have been used for warmth during the winter. A handful of narrow windows pierced the wall, allowing glimpses of the sanctuary within.
The noisy tourists were all stopping at the foot of the stairs to show their admission tickets to a pair of stocky older women who sat behind a table laden with flyers, an ancient cash register, and stacks of flimsy, disposable skullcaps for the men to don if they had no other headgear. The women took the tickets presented, stamped them, and returned them to each visitor along with a flyer about the synagogue. They pointed to the yarmulkes for the men. One oblivious bare-headed gentleman tried to walk past the table into the synagogue, prompting the second of the women to jump up in consternation, exclaiming and shouting in Czech, waving her arms with a yarmulke in one hand. The man paused and took the proffered head covering and smiled, nodding at the woman, but seemingly unsure of what to do with the thing.
The other woman bustled from behind the table and took the yarmulke and set it on his head. He reached up to hold the cap in place and nodded again, several times, before he turned and walked into the sanctuary, his camera swinging around his neck and one hand still delicately holding his new headgear in place.
The woman returned to her place behind the table but unlike her companion remained standing, as if tired of sitting all day. She smiled at the remaining tourists who filed past like a general pleased with his troops on parade. There were no further incidents of men forgetting to take a yarmulke if they needed one.
Sophia and Alessandro stepped to the desk.
“Excuse me,” Sophia began in English. The woman who had returned to her spot looked at her, smiling, but blinked rapidly. She reached out her palm.
“Ticket?” she asked.
Sophia turned to the standing woman. “Pardon me,” Sophia began again.
The second woman cocked her head to one side as if to hear better. “Prosim?”
Sophia turned to Alessandro.
“This certainly complicates things, doesn’t it?” he whispered.
“Yes. It does,” she agreed. She whispered back to him, “But they seem to be of that certain age, as the Americans like to say. All of the Eastern bloc countries were required to teach Russian in the days of the Soviet Union, even though the students would much rather have been learning English. Everyone resented it, but even I had to learn it as a child in Latvia. After the fall of Communism, though, most people have refused to use it. These women might well refuse to admit they know it. But let me see if that gets us any further.”
Sophia turned again to the woman who was sitting and smiled beguilingly as she rattled off a few sentences in Russian.
Alessandro could sense an immediate hostility in the small lobby. Both women narrowed their eyes and studied Alessandro and Sophia suspiciously. Alessandro could see the generalissimo making mental calculations. She leaned towards Sophia, resting her fingertips on the tabletop, next to the flyers. The sitting woman looked at the general again and the general nodded.
The woman in the seat turned back to Sophia and several Russian words dribbled out of her mouth. She looked as if they left a very bad taste in her mouth.
Sophia, still smiling, responded with more Russian. She gestured to Alessandro, who smiled and nodded at the women. The general raised an eyebrow.
Sophia paused and looked from the sitting woman to the general and back again. She spoke in Russian again and pointed to the ceiling. Alessandro guessed she must have gotten to the part of the conversation about the rabbi’s staff possibly hidden in the attic.
The woman who was sitting blanched and looked nervously at the general, whose arms immediately crossed her chest. Although not pale, her face was stern and unyielding. She shook her head.
“Nyet.”
Even Alessandro understood that word. Even if he hadn’t, the tone of voice left no doubt as to its meaning.
Sophia tried again, a pleading tone entering her voice.
The general shook her head again and took a few steps back. For the first time, Alessandro noticed a small door in the corner behind her, set atop a short flight of three or four steps. The general kept her arms crossed and answered Sophia. What seemed to be a whole paragraph of Russian tumbled from her lips. She pointed at the door behind her and then at the ceiling above before crossing her arms again.
The woman sitting behind the desk looked from the general to Sophia and back to the general. Then she folded her hands together on the table and shook her head, adding her “Nyet!” to the general’s.
Sophia turned to Alessandro, crestfallen.
“Well?” he asked.
Sophia turned back to the general and began again but the general cut her off, her words becoming not just defensive but angry. She pointed and gesticulated wildly towards the synagogue’s door and the city beyond. She stormed to the table and banged her fist on it.
There was no choice but to admit defeat. Sophia looked from one woman to the other, thanking them for their time and apologizing for bothering them. Then she glanced at Alessandro and led him up the stairs behind them back to the small plaza.
“What just happened?” Alessandro asked.
Sophia sighed. “Well, I think you can guess. They did not like being addressed in Russian but they were even more upset at being asked to show us the attic. It seems to be a point of pride that no one—no one in hundreds of years—has gone into that attic. It is said that the Golem rests there, the Frankenstein-like creature that the rabbi created to protect the Jews of Prague, and that it would be sacrilege to disturb the Golem’s rest. Sacrilege. And dangerous to let anyone up into the attic, especially if we wanted the rabbi’s staff, because if we were careless with the staff and mistakenly roused the Golem—then there is no telling what disaster might be unleashed.”
“But wouldn’t it take an elaborate ceremony to rouse the Golem?” Alessandro asked. “How could we do that if we simply went upstairs and picked up the staff? Presuming, of course, that it was there at all.”
“Apparently a few students broke into the attic sometime in the nineteenth century and attempted to rouse the Golem, but failed,” Sophia repeated what the general had so angrily told her. “All she knows is that they unleashed a plague on the city and the disease wasn’t stopped until some portion of the Golem’s remains was taken out and buried in the plague burial ground. But she won’t be responsible for another outbreak of plague—or of anything else, for that matter—that comes of strangers poking around in the attic.”
Alessandro’s shoulders slumped. “I did not think this would be easy, but now what do we do?”
Alessandro ran his fingers through his hair and looked around him. There seemed no way into the attic from outside, no high-set doors or windows. There seemed no other doors at all except for the one they had just come out of.
Sophia seemed just as disappointed as he was. Then she gasped. “Didn’t you need to attend an afternoon session at the conference?”
Alessandro looked at his watch and also gasped. “You’re right! I’m going to have to run to make it on time! Thanks for reminding me!” He dashed off, waving over his shoulder as he disappeared up the steps to the modern street and into the crowds milling about on a hot and humid summer afternoon.
As Alessandro dashed to the conferences, Sophia looked back at the Old-New Synagogue.
She slowly walked away, aimlessly, down the old street through the Jewish Quarter. The open door, with more tourists ducking their heads as they entered it, seemed to mock her and her efforts to retrieve the staff of the rabbi. She shook her head. They would need ideas from the others as to how to discover if the staff was still in the synagogue attic—and if so, how to retrieve it.
She found herself making her way past a series of market stalls filled with Golem mementos and other souvenirs of Prague’s Jewish history. There seemed an exceptionally large crowd standing in the road. She couldn’t make her way through it and decided to wait until whatever was blocking the way forward allowed the crowd to move again. She made her way to the side of the road.
The crowd was focused on a tall older woman holding a British flag at shoulder height. The woman looked like she could have been the cousin of the general guarding the secrets of the synagogue. But the tour guide, as Sophia realized the woman was, seemed to be leading the group on a tour of sites in the Jewish Quarter associated with the Golem.
Come Hell or High Water: The Complete Trilogy Page 52
