Prague Noir

by Pavel Mandys

  Naturally, in the ghost of the murdered king, Max saw the ghost of his own father who had been killed by the Nazis. But the deep vindication which he experienced avenging that murder brought him to diametrically different thoughts while riding home in a tram. When he was thirteen, he was helping a man who lived on his street in the Journalist Houses to translate books from Yiddish to Czech. The story the man gave him to correct was his own, and he’d written it in Czech. Max thought the story was peculiar—not only due to its awkward Czech, which he had to correct. It was as if the story was from another world, and he was not all that impressed by it. After all, Mr. Polakovič fought the Nazis in the Svoboda army and could have talked about more interesting things than nomads without a leader wandering through a desert.

  If Max were writing a novel, he would write about the life of his father until his heroic death; unfortunately, he did not have enough material for it. He himself did not remember his father. Based on his mother’s sketchy information, it seemed that she married him—a much older man, and a Jew to boot—more out of pity than love.

  They discussed other things in addition to the story—things that were not possible to talk about otherwise. Max was interested in global politics: why the Marshall Plan was rejected, the Korean War, the atom bomb, and so on. He also wanted to know whether Hitler would have won the war if Stalin hadn’t gotten military assistance from the United States. Mr. Polakovič answered his questions diplomatically—yes and no, or not at all. His stepfather, on the other hand, always had answers ready, but one could not believe him. They argued often because he didn’t like that Max went to see Soviet military films. According to him, most of the Russian soldiers didn’t even have shoes and their officers led them by the thousands against German tanks; human life had no value for the Bolsheviks. “Their mantra was,” smirked his stepfather, “there’s a lot of us!” He also said that without American help, Hitler would have killed all the Jews in concentration camps.

  But what could he know about the situation in the Soviet Union if he spent the entire war in concentration camps—first in Germany, later in Russia? In the summer, when they went fishing, he overheard his stepfather telling the water bailiff that he was a colonel in the Svoboda army, trying to impress him so that he would let them fish without a permit. That’s why it never occurred to Max to write a novel based on his stepfather’s stories, even though he would certainly enjoy it. He talked about Mr. Polakovič as one of those Polish Jews from the Journalist Houses who had joined the Communists during the war. In reality, he was just jealous of the fact that Max would talk so much with Mr. Polakovič, whereas with him, Max would only argue. According to his stepfather, the “Polish Jew” was simply using him; otherwise, he would have to pay somebody to edit his story.

  The boy was not entirely self-centered. He did realize that the old man talked to a boy from the street only because he could not talk about similar things with his friends from the Journalist Houses. Somebody else might rat him out. Maybe that was the reason why Mr. Polakovič never invited him to his apartment after their walks. Max was curious about his living situation, and he would have liked to look at the Jewish books that were being published in the Soviet Union. Yiddish is written right to left using Hebrew letters and he was interested in this. Mr. Polakovič said that the same writing was used to write the Torah, which is more than a thousand years older than the New Testament.

  At the end of February 1956, when Max was almost fourteen, he learned for the first time from Mr. Polakovič about the atrocities in the Soviet Union. He was surprised—they didn’t walk toward Vyšehrad, as they always did on the main street past his school, but instead they turned right, past the Garden Store, toward the Na Děkance stadium. Mr. Polakovič led him to a barren pear tree, which had been growing there on the small, snowy, clay-filled patch of land. From here, Mr. Polakovič had a panoramic view. He leaned on his cane and, looking left and right, talked to Max for about an hour about the Soviet Communist Congress that condemned Stalin’s atrocities, including all the trials of Jewish doctors, and a mass murder of Polish officers in Katyn. While he was telling him all of this, quietly and excitedly, leaning toward Max, his face turned completely blue with winding red capillaries under the skin.

  “Katyn?” the boy said.

  “You know something about that?” asked the old man.

  “Me? No. Not at all.”

  His stepfather did sometimes talk about Katyn. He said that the Germans deported them there and then they had to bring out the bodies from mass graves, dredge hundreds of already decomposed corpses from the mud. He would not hear Max’s argument that surely the Russians would not do such a thing. After all, the Polish fought on their side during the war, and the Russians liberated them. Those corpses must have been Soviet war prisoners who were shot by the Germans and now they wanted to get rid of them. Mother ended their argument, as always, and his stepfather had the same obstinate look on his face as Mr. Polakovič did when Max criticized one of his stories.

  Max did think of things other than just politics, but with Mr. Polakovič that was their only topic. Max continued seeing him even after the story which, with his help, had been published in the Jewish Yearly.

  “Of course, without any mention of your assistance,” his stepfather teased. The Suez crisis was being discussed in the press and so Max again argued with him, because he was worried that there were thousands more Arabs than Jews.

  It was a somewhat clumsy turn in the discourse. More importantly, soon after, a nephew of his father came to visit them. He was the son of his father’s sister from Bratislava, which would have made this a significant event even without what it eventually led to. Despite the fact that his father’s nephew was born in 1916, like his stepfather, and was twenty-six years Max’s senior, they were cousins. That’s why the boy could stay after dinner for the conversation in the living room with his cousin, mother, and stepfather. In addition, it was Saturday and there was no school the next day. Max could not remember what his father looked like because he lost him when he was still very small. His father had been killed by the Germans in Theresienstadt, and Max knew him only from photographs. But he believed that Fred looked like him, and so he felt a little as if his father were sitting there with them. Therefore, he was not really listening to the conversation. His curiosity was piqued when he overheard mention of an amulet that Max’s father was supposed to be in possession of, as a protection against evil.

  It was a magic amulet, inscribed by the learned Trnavian rabbi Simon Sidon, Fred was saying, and the lives of many in his family had been saved thanks to the amulet, during both war and peace. According to him, even if Mom disagreed, it saved Max’s father’s life too during the First World War—he came back with no injury, which was a miracle. If only he’d had the amulet with him when the Gestapo took him, the poor man would have survived that war too! Mom kept shaking her head: “That’s ridiculous, Fred. My own father also fought in the war and he returned just like hundreds of others did. And it is not true that Willy came back home uninjured from World War I. He went deaf from all the explosions. And I never heard about any amulet from him.”

  “I think,” interjected the omniscient stepfather, “that whether somebody survives or not is decided not by God or an amulet, or by being an engineer or a famous heavyweight boxer. I know what I’m talking about because I saw them dying like flies—within a month they were all dead. Even a boxer who had biceps like mountains.”

  He (and this Max believed) had survived only because his body had been made resilient by hard work. Plus, he was not scared of anything, even if he had no education and no exceptional accomplishments to speak of. Max still did not understand how this amulet was linked to his cousin’s visit; he only understood that Fred had come from as far a place as Bratislava because of it. That would explain why he would not leave without it. Max had never heard his mother mention that his father believed in talismans, never mind having possessed one. His cousin sighed, saying he ne
eded it badly even though he didn’t even know what it looked like. All he knew about it was that it was magical and it had Hebrew writing on it. He even said to Max’s mother: “The fact that Uncle did not discuss these things with you is understandable! You are, after all, a Christian, and this is a family secret. Perhaps he didn’t want to show it to you, and when he needed it most, it was too late.” Suddenly, Fred pointed above the boy’s head toward the library. “What if he hid it in a book?”

  “It’s not in the books, I would have noticed,” Max assured him.

  “That’s true—he has read everything, especially those health books with pictures,” his stepfather added sarcastically.

  “And you know what? Why shouldn’t we look?” Max’s mother sided with Fred. “We’ll divide the bookshelves and check every single book.” And so that the boy wouldn’t think she was ignoring him, she added: “Max can go through the bottom shelves.” She stood up from the sofa. “Besides, I cannot remember the last time I dusted those shelves.”

  Because Max was kneeling as he was going through the books and the rest of them were standing, they forgot about him and discussed things he really shouldn’t have heard.

  “Oh please, don’t try to convince us that you have a right to it because you’re family—just stop that, okay?” his stepfather said. “You’re in trouble and you need to get out of it, am I right?”

  That’s how the boy learned that his cousin had decided to immigrate with his entire family to Israel and he dearly needed the amulet, because Israel was at war with the Arabs.

  “Oh my God—what if they send you to Suez?” blurted Max’s mother, holding a dust rag.

  “That’s precisely why I was hoping I would find the amulet somewhere here.” Fred sighed and put back the copy of The Valley of Decisions by Davenport that he had been searching through.

  Later, his stepfather said: “If it was ten years ago, you’d be good enough for them even in your fifties, but today they have younger ones. I would not go there even if they promised me gold. It will all end badly, anyway. If not now, then very soon. You cannot believe the French and British. They’ll betray Israel as they betrayed us in 1938 before the war, and as they always do with the Jews. In the end, they will throw all the Jews in the sea and you’ll be happy that you stayed with your family sitting on your ass in Bratislava.”

  When they had checked all the books to no avail, Fred sat down near the bottom shelves with glass doors and noticed Max. For a while, they simply peered into each other’s eyes. “Nope,” Fred finally said glumly, “the Jew has no choice today. If he stays here, his daughters will marry Aryans and he will have no Jewish grandchildren, only some crossbreeds. In Slovakia, they would for sure baptize them. There, even Communists believe in God. In America or England, they would marry goys.”

  The boy put the lid on the box of photographs he was looking through. “I am no crossbreed,” he said defensively.

  “Well, be happy about that,” the stepfather rejoined. “If your dad had married a Jewish woman, you’d have ended up the same way he and my entire family did.”

  That night, his mother prepared the bed in Max’s bedroom for Fred, and Max slept by the window on a pullout couch. Max asked a lot of questions about his father but he didn’t learn anything new, only that he was a skier and, when he was young, he had been a boxing champion in Slovakia. Later he moved to Prague because of some actress, and from then on he and Fred didn’t see each other much.

  “That was my aunt,” Max said.

  “Hm,” Fred grunted. The only thing on his mind was the amulet. “They would not deny me it,” he meditated, lying in the boy’s bed.

  “What will you do?” Max asked. And when he didn’t get an answer, he said: “I think they need plumbers in Israel.”

  “Why do you think so?”

  “They’re needed everywhere, right?”

  “Do you want to be a plumber?”

  “No! I will be a writer.”

  “So why do you talk about it?”

  “Because of you. You would not be able to make a living as an agronomist. There’s only desert.”

  * * *

  Max woke up early, at dusk. First he thought that the light was on in the hall, but that was the dawn. Through the grainy glass door in the hall, the early-morning light created a beautiful mosaic of colors, from light blue to pink. Then he heard his mother and stepfather talking quietly. With one hand on the door handle, he stopped and listened to them. Suddenly, without him even moving, the room fell silent. In the light, he observed a diminishing shadow on the glass so he closed himself fast in the bathroom. He peed and flushed the toilet. When he came out to the hall, his mother stood by the living room door already—or still—dressed.

  “It was just Max.” She turned toward her son and said: “I got worried that Fred became sick.”

  “I am a Jew,” he said.

  “Come here, give me a kiss.” She reached out to him.

  He felt her probing gaze as he kissed her on the face. When he was small, he believed she could see right through him. With time, he understood that she could not and he could lie without being uncovered. That was a great discovery in his life. But now she had no reason—why was she suspicious again?

  “I wanted to tell you later, but since Fred has already broached the subject, I’m going to tell you now,” she said. “Do you know what Daddy told me before they took him away? He sat down on the shelves—just like Fred did last night—and he said very solemnly, with his Slovak accent: When our Max is grown up, he cannot marry a Jewish woman, and if he does, then she should be baptized.”

  Max returned to his room but couldn’t get back to sleep. His head was full of everything he had heard that night. It all came back to his mother’s look when he kissed her. Maybe she thought he was listening behind the closed door, he said to himself. And what were they talking about the entire night that she was still wearing the same dress? His curiosity got the better of him and—barefoot so as not to wake up Fred—he opened the door and stepped out into the hall again. On his tippy toes, he walked past the closet and stopped in the corner by the living room door. He wasn’t surprised to hear them discussing the amulet again. But it hurt him to realize that they had lied to him and Fred.

  “You should give it to him if he came only for that,” he heard his mother say. “At least the thing will be out of our house once and for all.”

  “And what do I tell him? That I had it hidden in the safe?”

  “I could tell him it was in the kitchen.”

  “Sure, with all the pots and pans. Or better yet, in the bathroom! Don’t be dumb. He’s forty—what would they do with him in the army? He would not believe you anyway, and what would he think of us then?”

  “I’ll tell him that it has been tucked away behind the glass in the credenza since 1939, and that we had no idea about it.” Her voice was firm. “Perhaps between the two telegrams from Helena that she had sent me from the ship. What do you think? I hadn’t known about that at all until one morning when I was getting coffee cups. It just occurred to me to have a look and what do you know, Fred—I found this! You know, if we don’t give it to him and then something happens to him, it would be on our conscience until we die. Certainly on mine.”

  Suddenly, the door opened.

  The boy, scared, pressed himself against the wall and stopped breathing.

  “I’m going to wash the dishes from last night’s dinner,” his mother said, too loudly, as if she wanted Fred to hear. Passing by Max, she entered the kitchen and turned on the light, as the morning light was still dim. Max watched her through the partially opened kitchen door, cleaning plates from the table and putting them away in the sink. He would so very much like to know why they had to look through all the books the previous night if his stepfather had the amulet hidden in the safe behind a painting of ships. But that would mean asking his mother, which was out of the question right then. It was far more important to get back to bed without her notici
ng him.

  Finally, she turned her back and stood near the credenza. He noticed she slid aside the glass behind which were those telegrams she had mentioned; then, very fast, he got back to his room, to his makeshift bed under the window.

  When he woke up, he remembered dreaming that his father was alive. He did not die—they did not kill him—but he knew that his mother had remarried and, therefore, he had lived the entire time in Germany and did not let anybody know. They were all sitting in the living room—his mother in the chair by the window, near the huge lampshade, and his father and stepfather across from him (Dad looked like Mr. Polakovič). They were trying to figure out what to do, since she had ended up with two husbands. The best solution would be for his father to move to the neighboring apartment—that way, Max would be able to visit him anytime he wanted to. Sadly, it was only a dream. But maybe not entirely; he was able to remember, just between dreaming and waking up, that he’d had the same dream before and could return to it again.

  Then he noticed the bed in which his cousin Fred had slept. The bed was empty and that reminded him of the amulet. The thought that he had fallen asleep and that Fred had already left with the magical amulet belonging to his father made him alert. He was in luck—all three of them were still sitting in the living room and Fred was staring at the table between them.

  “Good morning,” Max announced himself.

  “Wash and brush your teeth!” his mother ordered.

  “I have already washed,” he lied.

  “Then go dress and don’t run around here in pajamas.”