Snow in August

by Pete Hamill

  “All three die in the camps,” Rabbi Hirsch said, his eyes suddenly milky. “Kafka himself, he was lucky. Before Hitler he died, of the TB. The girls, they went to the camps.”

  There was a finality to the last sentence that made Michael feel clumsy, as if his own curiosity had led the rabbi somewhere the man did not want to go. Maybe the spell had been broken. Maybe now the rabbi would close the book and leave Prague. Michael didn’t know what to say, but he did not want the rabbi to stop talking. Finally he stammered a few words.

  “Tell me abut Josefeva.”

  The rabbi shifted in his chair, cleared his throat as if gathering his strength, turned to another page of the book, and then reached into the past. He talked about a street called U Stareho Hrbitova, a street that was there in the book, and how if you hugged that gray stone wall, right there, and kept going, you would come to the heart of the old ghetto. Michael knew the word ghetto from the blue books. The rabbi talked about how Jews had been there since before the Czechs, perhaps from as far back as the time of the expulsion from Jerusalem. But the walls that sealed the Jews into the ghetto were not built for another thousand years. He described the wall to Michael, its porous stone and mossy base, the huge wooden gates, and how within the gates everything was separate from the rest of Prague. There was a Jewish court, a Jewish jail, even a Jewish post office.

  “That was dumb,” Michael said.

  “Yes, but a long time the dumbness lasted, right up to about 1850,” the rabbi said. “You know what is the most stupid? When the Christians sealed us in, they sealed themselves out.”

  “From what?”

  “From learning. From tradition.” A pause. “From miracles.”

  Michael knew he couldn’t mean Catholic miracles, like the one about the loaves and the fishes or the water turned into wine at Cana.

  “You mean, like… magic?”

  The rabbi looked up from the book, and raised an eyebrow.

  “Maybe,” he said. Another pause. “Magic, you like to hear about?”

  “Yes.”

  The rabbi took a deep breath, turned a page, and took Michael into another Prague, one that could not be described by geometry or science. A magical city of goblins and ghosts and doppelgangers (“a kind of bad twin,” the rabbi explained). In that city, Michael looked up and saw angels. Not fat little pink cherubs from greeting cards. Great silvery creatures with wings as wide as buses, dancing in clouds, swooping behind the spires. As big as Finn MacCool. In a narrow street called Golden Lane, he saw a man in a dark robe covered with silver stars, a man who looked like what the wizard Shazam might have looked like when he was young. Rabbi Hirsch said he was called an alchemist, part scientist and part astrologer. Michael knew an astrologer was a guy who could read the stars and make horoscopes like the ones in the Daily News that claimed they could predict the future and never did. These alchemists, the rabbi went on, were always trying to turn cheap metal, like lead or zinc or iron, into gold.

  There were hundreds of them in Prague, brought from all over Europe by a mad emperor named Rudolf, who lived in the shadows of Hradany Castle because his face was made of fruits and vegetables. There was even a painting of him showing radishes and carrots and onions where his nose and chin and ears should have been. One of Rudolf’s alchemists had invented a magic mirror where the future revealed itself through smoky glass. Another, bent and old, had spent his entire life searching for the philosopher’s stone, a single object, made of the hidden minerals of the earth, that would contain all wisdom and the secrets of eternal life. Another wore a silver nose and traveled with a dwarf and claimed to be 312 years old. All carried vials of sulfur and mercury. They studied stars and meteors and the movements of planets. They prayed to gods without names.

  Wandering with Rabbi Hirsch in this ancient Prague, Michael felt mystery and wonder on all sides. They watched a man disappear in a puff of smoke. They passed the bodies of two alchemists who made gaudy promises to Rudolf and then failed to deliver; as punishment, they were covered with tinsel and hung with gold-painted ropes from gold-painted scaffolds. An innocent man was heaved from the upper story of Hradany Castle and then two angels dove to his rescue. A slatternly women was transformed into a cow. A bird became a soldier. Donkeys danced. Metal trees bore iron fruit. Snow fell in August, the rain rose from the Vltava and hurled itself at the clouds, and once the sun appeared at midnight. Stars exploded and showered the earth with crystals. Ravens circled the evening sky and flew in and out of the gates of Hell.

  “Magic everywhere,” the rabbi said. “In the Jews too. Maybe even more in the Jews.”

  “What kind of magic?”

  He stared at his hands.

  “In the Jews, the magic of the Kabbalah,” he said.

  The word itself sounded magical to Michael Devlin, lush with images of exotic places and gorgeous costumes, men with curved swords and women with bare bellies, in lands where minarets glinted in the sun. Turhan Bey and Sabu and Yvonne DeCarlo… Kabbalah, Where She Danced.

  Those movie images were wrong. He returned in his mind to Prague and listened as the rabbi spoke of formulas passed across the millennia, whispered from one Jewish wise man to another from the time of Adam. Kabbalah, meaning the secret wisdom. And how the Kabbalah contained special alphabets and magic words, the most important of which, the most powerful, the most awesome, was the secret name of God.

  “What is the secret name of God?” Michael asked.

  “If I tell you, it’s a secret?”

  “No, but why does He have a secret name? What’s the matter with just ‘God’?”

  “God you don’t ask why He does things.”

  Kabbalah was the true philosopher’s stone, as real as this drawing, in this leather-bound book, of a very special place Judah Hirsch had often visited with his father. Michael wanted to hear more about the Kabbalah and the secret name of God, but Rabbi Hirsch turned away from both subjects and traced a finger across the next drawing.

  “This, right here, this is the Old Jewish Cemetery,” he said, and his voice grew hushed. “Not the one dug up for a building. The cemetery where the dead still sleep.”

  In the drawing, Michael saw hundreds of tombstones. No, not hundreds. Thousands. As he moved among them in the tight walled space of the cemetery, with Judah Hirsch as his guide, the stones were jammed together in jumbled disorder, some sinking into the earth, the coffins going twelve layers down, the rabbi said, each bearing words in blocky Hebrew. Michael’s shoes were thick with mud, and then he was sinking into the graveyard and felt a sudden terror; he could sink all the way down, twelve layers deep, to the rotting corpses or bony skeletons of the dead. He lifted a foot with all his strength and the mud made a sucking sound, and then his friend Judah grabbed his arm and pulled him to the safety of a gravel path. A silvery rain began to fall. Some stones bore symbols, which the rabbi explained: scissors on the grave of a tailor, a mortar and pestle for a man who sold medicines, a book to memorialize a printer. Michael could not read the names or the dates on the wet tombstones because all were in Hebrew. Even if he could read Hebrew, the task was impossible; the edges of the letters had been worn away by rain and snow, sun and time. In the Old Jewish Cemetery, not only God had a secret name.

  The rabbi pointed to a statue of a man rising dramatically above the tombstones. In the drawing, the man was wearing furled robes and a bucketlike hat, his eyes and face in darkest shadow. Like a true wizard. Not some fake of an alchemist. Michael was certain he could see the eyes burning a bright blue through the shadow.

  “This man, very important man,” the rabbi said.

  “Who is that?” Michael asked. “He’s got the biggest tombstone in the cemetery.”

  The rabbi paused.

  “That,” he said, “is Rabbi Loew.”

  “L-O-E-W?” Thinking: Like Loew’s Metropolitan on Fulton Street?

  “Yes. Judah Loew. I am named for him.”

  “Why does he have a separate picture?”

&
nbsp; “Because he is the most famous rabbi in the history of Prague.”

  “Did you know him?”

  Rabbi Hirsch laughed. “No. He is from the sixteenth century and I am born in 1908.”

  Eight from forty-seven. Nine. Carry the one. He’s thirty-nine, Michael thought, gazing at Rabbi Hirsch. Maybe thirty-eight, if he was born after February. Just a few years older than my mother. But he looks much older.

  “Why was he so famous?” Michael asked.

  “A long story,” the rabbi said. “A great story. A… what is the word? Terrible story. But a story that it’s too long to tell you tonight.”

  Michael didn’t want to leave. He didn’t want to walk out of the dark wonders of Prague into the ordinary streets of Brooklyn. He wanted to know more about the amazements of the world.

  The name of God.

  Kabbalah.

  Magic.

  But he heard himself saying good night.

  10

  The cops came to see Michael one Monday night while his mother was working at the Grandview. He was at the kitchen table, rushing through homework before getting to a new Captain Marvel and a Crime Does Not Pay that he had traded for with Jimmy Kabinsky. There were books on the table, his canvas schoolbag open on a chair. His fingers were stained with ink from the leaky fountain pen. The stew his mother had left in the pot was still warm on the stove, his plate in the sink, to be washed and dried before she came home. WNEW played quietly on the radio. Harry James. “Ciribiribin.” He finished the long division and was halfway through the English grammar homework, glancing in a longing way at the cover story on Pretty Boy Floyd in the crime comic, when he heard heavy steps in the hall outside the door. Then a baritone murmur. Two sharp knocks.

  “Who is it?” he called.

  “Police,” came the voice. “Open up.”

  Michael’s heart thumped. This was the first time the police had ever been to their flat. He wished his mother were there.

  “Let’s go,” the hard voice said. “We ain’t got all night.”

  He opened the door and saw Abbott and Costello, the two detectives who had been moving around the parish for weeks. Up close, Costello was very fat, with slabs of pink flesh framing a small mouth and tiny nose. Abbott had gray skin, deep black circles under his eyes, a flattened prizefighter’s nose, and an unlit cigar wedged between his fingers. Each wore an overcoat. Each wore a gray fedora.

  “You Michael Devlin?” Costello said.

  “Yes.”

  “Your mother home?”

  “No. She’s at work.”

  “What about your father?”

  “He’s dead.”

  They gazed warily past Michael into the kitchen.

  “You’re alone?”

  “Yes.”

  They stepped past him, one on either side, and Abbott closed the kitchen door behind him. Their bulk made the kitchen smaller.

  “We’re detectives,” the fat one said. They remained standing, eyes moving around the kitchen and into the dark rooms beyond.

  “You know Mr. Greenberg? Yossel Greenberg? Guy they call Mister G?”

  “I used to go in his candy store. But he moved away.”

  “He moved into a hospital, kid,” the gray-faced one said. He put the cigar in his mouth, snapped a lighter, and took a drag. Blue smoke drifted from his mouth. “His skull is fractured in two places. He might never come out alive.”

  “We understand you was in the candy store the day he got beat up by this bum Frankie McCarthy,” Costello said.

  Michael said nothing. He could feel the knife entering his cheek at the hinge of his jaw and the slash that would give him the mark of the squealer for the rest of his life. He stared at the floor. If he stared long enough, maybe they would be gone when he looked up.

  “Well?” the gray-faced Abbott said.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Michael said.

  Costello sighed. He put a fat finger on Michael’s catechism book.

  “You’re a Catlick, right?” he said.

  “Yes.”

  “Me too,” he said, wheezing sadly. “And I see a surplice on a hanger over there, so you must be an altar boy, right?”

  “Right.”

  “I was one too,” he said. “Years ago. Ad Deum qui laetificat and all that.”

  “Two altar boys,” the gray-faced cop said. “Fancy that.”

  Costello stood over Michael. He picked up the book and dropped it again.

  “And I see you study the Baltimore Catechism.”

  “Yes.”

  “So you know lyin’ is a sin, don’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “So why are you lyin’, Michael?”

  The boy was quiet for a long moment.

  “Maybe you should come back when my mother’s here,” he said in a low voice, looking away from them.

  “You think your mother would tell you to lie? She’s a Catlick too. And a brutal crime has been committed. Your mother would understand we can’t put this Frankie McCarthy away unless we got witnesses. And you’re a witness, kid. According to our sources…. So why would you lie?”

  “Maybe this explains it,” Abbott said. He was holding up a small Yiddish-English phrase book. Costello took it from him and held it in his short, pudgy fingers.

  “A Yiddish phrase book?” Costello said. “I see, said the blind man. I see. It comes clearer. Like maybe you was helpin’ yourself to some stuff in Mister G’s when Frankie was beating him into a pulp?”

  “No!” Michael said. He lunged for the phrase book, but Costello held it out of his reach.

  “Where’d you get this, then?” the fat cop said.

  “Rabbi Hirsch gave it to me,” Michael said.

  “Who the hell is Rabbi Hirsch?”

  “From the synagogue on Kelly Street,” Michael said. “I’m the Shabbos goy there.”

  Costello turned to the gray-faced detective. “Well, whattaya know? An altar boy that speaks Hebe.”

  Abbott chuckled.

  “Maybe he can say in Hebe: You’re going to the fucking can.”

  And then the fat cop slammed his hand against the icebox door.

  “You love the fuckin’ Jews so much,” he shouted, “then help us catch the bum that beat one up!”

  Michael wanted to cry, but he held back the tears. He felt himself trembling.

  “Mister G is in Kings County Hospital,” the fat one said. “His head is broke. He could die. You know what that means? It means a murder rap against Frankie McCarthy. You know what it means to you? It means you could be an accessory after the fact. You keep your mout’ shut, you’re guilty too. Of coverin’ up a homicide! You and your friends that were in the candy store that day. Alla yiz. And I’ll see that yiz get put away.”

  “That would be some disgrace,” Abbott said, dragging on the cigar. “Break your mother’s heart.”

  The fat one pointed at the framed photograph on the wall.

  “That your father?”

  “Yes.”

  “He die in the war?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where?”

  “The Battle of the Bulge.”

  Costello sighed.

  “The worst battle of the war.”

  “Much worse than Pearl Harbor,” the gray-faced cop said.

  “You think he died for nothin’?” Costello asked, poking a finger in Michael’s chest.

  “No! He died for his country!”

  “You think he died so a shithead like Frankie McCarthy could beat up a Jew?”

  “No.”

  “You think he’d be proud of you, you cover up for a bum like that?”

  The door opened behind them, and Kate Devlin stood there, her face surprised. Michael went to her, trying very hard not to cry.

  “Jesus Mary and Joseph, what is this?” she said. “Who the hell are you two bozos?”

  The fat cop reached into his back pocket for a wallet. Michael could see his gun, polished blue steel in a worn
leather holster.

  “Sorry, ma’am,” the fat one said. “We’re detectives.” He showed his badge and handed her a business card. She didn’t take it, and he laid it on the table. “We’re investigating the beating of Mr. Greenberg, from the candy store. He might die, y’ see. And—”

  She glowered at them.

  “Get out of my house,” she said.

  “Listen, we think your son knows—”

  “If you don’t get out,” she said, “I’ll throw you out.”

  The two cops tipped their fedoras to her and eased around toward the door. Kate Devlin continued hugging her son.

  “We’ll be back,” the gray-faced cop said.

  “I’m sure you will,” she said sharply. “Good night.”

  She locked the door behind them. Then she exhaled and separated from Michael and sat down hard at the table.

  “What was that all about?”

  He told her. When he was finished, she shook her head sadly. And then got up to run water into the teapot.

  “You’re more Irish than I thought,” she said, almost proudly. “In the Old Country, there was nobody lower than an informer. Scum of God’s sweet earth, informers. The bloody British used them against us for centuries. They corrupted weak men, they destroyed families.” While the teapot simmered on the gas range, she started washing Michael’s plate. “It goes all the way back to Judas, who took his money and informed on Jesus. Many’s a gutless man took the king’s shilling and left for Australia or London, leaving a load of misery behind him. I’m proud of you, son.”