The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay Part 3

"It is very big."

"We'll never get it through the window. And if we do, we'll never get it dressed."

"Why do we have to dress it? It has those cloths, the Jewish scarves," Josef said, pointing to the tallises in which the Golem had been wrapped. They were tattered and stained, and yet gave off no odor of corruption. The only smell Josef could detect arising from the swarthy flesh of the Golem was one too faint to name, acrid and green, that he was only later to identify as the sweet stench, on a summer afternoon in the dog days, of the Moldau. "Aren't Jews supposed to be buried naked?"

"That is precisely the point," Kornblum said. He explained that, according to a recent promulgation, it was illegal to transport even a dead Jew out of the country without direct authority of Reichsprotektor von Neurath. "We must practice the tricks of our trade." He smiled thinly, nodding to the black mortician's bags. "Rouge his cheeks and lips. Fit that dome of his with a convincing wig. Someone will look inside the coffin, and when he does, we want him to see a dead goyische goyische giant." He closed his eyes as if envisioning what he wanted the authorities to see, should they order the coffin to be opened. "Preferably in a very nice suit." giant." He closed his eyes as if envisioning what he wanted the authorities to see, should they order the coffin to be opened. "Preferably in a very nice suit."

"The most beautiful suits I ever saw," said Josef, "belonged to a dead giant."

Kornblum studied him, sensing an implication in the words that he was unable to catch.

"Alois Hora. He was over two meters tall."

"From the Circus Zeletny?" Kornblum said. " 'The Mountain'?"

"He wore suits made in England, on Savile Row. Enormous things."

"Yes, yes, I remember," Kornblum said, nodding. "I used to see him quite often at the Cafe Continental. Beautiful suits," he agreed.

"I think-" Josef began. He hesitated. He said, "I know where I can find one."

It was not at all uncommon in this era for a doctor who treated glandular cases to maintain a wardrobe of wonders, stocked with underlinens the size of horse blankets, homburgs no bigger than berry bowls, and all manner of varied prodigies of haberdashery and the shoemaker's last. These items, which Josef's father had acquired or been given over the years, were kept in a cabinet in his office at the hospital, with the laudable but self-defeating intention of preventing their becoming objects of morbid curiosity to his children. No visit to their father at his place of work was ever complete without the boys at least making an attempt to persuade Dr. Kavalier to let them see the belt, fat and coiling as an anaconda, of the giant Vaclav s...o...b..k, or the digitalis-blossom slippers of tiny Miss Petra Frantisek. But after the doctor had been dismissed from his position at the hospital, along with the rest of the Jews on the faculty, the wardrobe of wonders had come home and its contents, in sealed packing boxes, stuffed into a closet in his study. Josef was certain that he would find some of Alois Hora's suits among them.

And so, after living for three days in Prague as a shadow, it was as a shadow that he finally went home. It was well past curfew, and the streets were deserted but for a few long, flag-fendered sedans with impenetrable black windows and, once, a lorry loaded with gray-coated boys carrying guns. Josef went slowly and carefully, inserting himself into doorways, ducking behind a parked car or bench when he heard the clank of gears, or when the fork of pa.s.sing headlights jabbed at the housefronts, the awnings, the cobbles in the street. In his coat pocket, he carried the picks Kornblum had thought he would need for the job, but when Josef got to the service door of the building off the Graben he found that, as was not uncommonly the case, it had been left propped open with a tin can, probably by some housekeeper taking unauthorized leave, or by a vagabond husband.

Josef met no one in the back hall or on the stairs. There was no baby whimpering for a bottle, no faint air of Weber from a late-night radio, no elderly smoker intent on the nightly business of coughing up his lungs. Although the ceiling lights and wall sconces were lit, the collective slumber of the building seemed even more profound than that of Nicholasga.s.se 26. Josef found this stillness disturbing. He felt the same p.r.i.c.kle on his nape, the creeping of his flesh, that he had felt on entering the Golem's empty room.

As he slunk down the hall, he noticed that someone had discarded a pile of clothes on the carpet outside the door of his family's home. For a preconscious instant, his heart leaped at the thought that, by some dreamlike means, one of the suits he sought had somehow been abandoned there. Then Josef saw that it was not a mere heap of clothing but one actually inhabited by a body-someone drunk, or pa.s.sed out, or expired in the hallway. A girl, he thought, one of his mother's patients. It was rare, but not unheard of, for an a.n.a.lysand, tossed by tides of transference and desublimation, to seek the safety of Dr. Kavalier's doorstep or, by contrast, inflamed with the special hatred of countertransference, to leave herself there in some desperate condition, as a cruel prank, like a paper sack of dog t.u.r.ds set afire.

But the clothes belonged to Josef himself, and the body inside them was Thomas's. The boy lay on his side, knees drawn to his chest, head pillowed on an arm that reached toward the door, fingers spread with an air of lingering intention, as if he had fallen asleep with a hand on the doork.n.o.b, then subsided to the floor. He had on a pair of trousers, charcoal corduroy, s.h.i.+ny at the knee, and a bulky cable sweater, with a large hole under the arm and a permanent Czechoslovakia-shaped ghost of bicycle grease on the yoke, which Josef knew his brother liked to put on whenever he was feeling ill or friendless. From the collar of the sweater protruded the piped lapels of a pajama top. The cuffs of the pajama bottoms poked out from the legs of the borrowed pants. Thomas's right cheek was flattened against his outstretched arm, and his breath rattled, regular and clamorous, through his permanently rheumy nose. Josef smiled and started to kneel down beside Thomas to wake him, and tease him, and help him back to bed. Then he remembered that he was not permitted-could not permit himself-to make his presence known. He could not ask Thomas to lie to their parents, nor did he really trust him to do so in any sustained manner. He backed away, trying to think what could have happened and how best to proceed. How had Thomas gotten himself locked out? Was this who had left the service door propped open downstairs? What could have prompted him to risk being out so late when, as everyone knew, a girl in Vinorhady, not much older than Thomas, had just a few weeks before sneaked outside to look for her lost dog and been shot, in a gloomy alley, for violating curfew? There had been official expressions of regret from von Neurath over the incident, but no promise that such a thing would not happen again. If Josef could somehow manage to wake his brother undetected-say by throwing a five-haleru piece at his head from around the corner of the hallway-would Thomas ring to be let in? Or would he be too ashamed, and choose to continue to pa.s.s the night in the chilly, dark hall, on the floor? And how would he, Josef, possibly be able to get to the giant's clothes with his brother lying asleep in the doorway or else with the whole household awakened and in an uproar over the boy's waywardness?

These speculations were cut short when Josef stepped on something that crunched, at once soft and rigid, under his heel. His heart seized, and he looked down, dancing backward in disgust, to see not a burst mouse but the leather wallet of lock picks that had once been his reward from Bernard Kornblum. Thomas's eyes fluttered, and he snuffled, and Josef waited, wincing, to see if his brother would sink back into sleep. Thomas sat up abruptly. With the back of his arm he wiped the spittle from his lips, blinked, and gave a short sigh.

"Oh, dear," he said, looking sleepily unsurprised to find his Brooklyn-bound brother crouched beside him, three days after he was supposed to have departed, in the hallway of their building in the heart of Prague. Thomas opened his mouth to speak again, but Josef covered it with the flat of his hand and pressed a finger to his own lips. He shook his head and pointed at the door.

When Thomas cast his eyes in the direction of the door to their flat, he finally seemed to awaken. His mouth narrowed to a pout, as if he had something sour on his tongue. His thick black eyebrows piled up over his nose. He shook his head and again attempted to say something, and again Josef covered his mouth, less gently this time. Josef picked up his old pick-wallet, which he had not seen in months, perhaps years, and which he had supposed, when he gave the matter any thought at all, to be lost. The lock on the Kavaliers' door was one that, in another era, Josef had successfully picked many times. He got them inside now with little difficulty, and stepped into the front hall, grateful for its familiar smell of pipe smoke and paper-whites, for the distant hum of the electric icebox. Then he stepped into the living room and saw that the sofa and piano had been draped in quilts. The fish tank stood empty of fish and drained of water. The box orange in its putti-crusted terra-cotta pot was gone. Crates stood piled in the center of the room.

"They moved?" he said, in the softest whisper he could manage.

"To Dlouha eleven," Thomas said, in a normal tone. "This morning."

"They moved," Josef said, unable now to raise his voice, though there was no one to hear them, no one to alert or disturb.

"It's a vile vile place. The Katzes are place. The Katzes are vile vile people." people."

"The Katzes?" There were cousins of his mother, for whom she had never cared much, who went by this name. "Viktor and Renata?"

Thomas nodded. "And the Mucus Twins." He gave a vast roll of his eyes. "And their vile vile parakeet. They taught it to say 'Up your b.u.m, Thomas.' " He sniffed, snickered when his brother did, and then, with another slow agglomeration of his eyebrows, began to discharge a series of coughing sobs, careful and choked, as if they were painful to let out. Josef took him into his arms, stiffly, and thought suddenly how long it had been since he had heard the sound of Thomas freely crying, a sound that had once been as common in the house as the teakettle whistle or the scratch of their father's match. The weight of Thomas on his knee was unwieldy, his shape awkward and unembraceable; he seemed to have grown from a boy to a youth in just the last three days. parakeet. They taught it to say 'Up your b.u.m, Thomas.' " He sniffed, snickered when his brother did, and then, with another slow agglomeration of his eyebrows, began to discharge a series of coughing sobs, careful and choked, as if they were painful to let out. Josef took him into his arms, stiffly, and thought suddenly how long it had been since he had heard the sound of Thomas freely crying, a sound that had once been as common in the house as the teakettle whistle or the scratch of their father's match. The weight of Thomas on his knee was unwieldy, his shape awkward and unembraceable; he seemed to have grown from a boy to a youth in just the last three days.

"There's a beastly aunt," Thomas said, "and a moronic brother-in-law due tomorrow from Frydlant. I wanted to come back here. Just for tonight. Only I couldn't work the lock."

"I understand," Josef said, understanding only that, until now, until this moment, his heart had never been broken. "You were born in this flat."

Thomas nodded.

"What a day that was," Josef said, trying to cheer the boy. "I was never so disappointed in my life."

Thomas smiled politely. "Almost the whole building moved," he said, sliding off of Josefs knee. "Only the Kravniks and the Policeks and the Zlatnys are allowed to stay." He wiped at his cheek with a forearm.

"Don't get snot on my sweater," Josef said, knocking his brother's arm to one side.

"You left it."

"I might send for it."

"Why aren't you gone?" Thomas said. "What happened to your s.h.i.+p?"

"There have been difficulties. But I should be on my way tonight. You mustn't tell Mother and Father that you saw me."

"You aren't going to see them?"

The question, the plaintive rasp in Thomas's voice as he asked it, pained Josef. He shook his head. "I just had to dash back here to get something."

"Dash back from where?"

Josef ignored the question. "Is everything still here?"

"Except for some clothes, and some kitchen things. And my tennis racket. And my b.u.t.terflies. And your wireless." This was a twenty-tube set, built into a kind of heavy valise of oiled pine, that Josef had constructed from parts, amateur radio having succeeded illusion and preceded modern art in the cycle of Josef's pa.s.sions, as Houdini and then Marconi had given way to Paul Klee and Josef's enrollment at the Academy of Fine Arts. "Mother carried it on her lap in the tram. She said listening to it was like listening to your voice, and she would rather have your voice to remember you than your photograph, even."

"And then she said that I never photograph well, anyway."

"Yes, she did, as a matter of fact. The wagon is coming here tomorrow morning for the rest of our things. I'm going to ride with the driver. I'm going to hold the reins. What is it you need? What did you come back for?"

"Wait here," Josef said. He had already revealed too much; Kornblum was going to be very displeased.

He went down the hall to their father's study, checking to make sure that Thomas did not follow, and doing his best to ignore the piled crates, the open doors that ought at this hour to have been long shut, the rolled carpets, the forlorn knocking of his shoe heels along the bare wooden floors. In his father's office, the desk and bookcases had been wrapped in quilted blankets and tied with leather straps, the pictures and curtains taken down. The boxes that contained the uncanny clothing of endocrine freaks had been dragged from the closet and stacked, conveniently, just by the door. Each bore a pasted-on label, carefully printed in his father's strong, regular hand, that gave a precise accounting of the contents of the crate: DRESSES (5)-MARTINRA HAT (STRAW)-ROTHMAN CHRISTENING GOWN-s...o...b..K For some reason, the sight of these labels touched Josef. The writing was as legible as if it had been typeset, each letter shod and gloved with serifs, the parentheses neatly crimped, the wavy hyphens like stylized bolts of lightning. The labels had been lettered lovingly; his father had always expressed that emotion best through troubling with details. In this fatherly taking of pains-in this stubbornness, persistence, orderliness, patience, and calm-Josef had always taken comfort. Here Dr. Kavalier seemed to have composed, on his crates of strange mementos, a series of messages in the very alphabet of imperturbability itself. The labels seemed evidence of all the qualities his father and family were going to require to survive the ordeal to which Josef was abandoning them. With his father in charge, the Kavaliers and the Katzes would doubtless manage to form one of those rare households in which decency and order prevailed. With patience and calm, persistence and stoicism, good handwriting and careful labeling, they would meet persecution, indignity, and hards.h.i.+p head-on.

But then, staring at the label on one crate, which read SWORD-CANE-DLUBECK SHOE TREE-HORA SUITS (3)-HORA a.s.sORTED HANDKERCHIEFS (6)-HORA Josef felt a bloom of dread in his belly, and all at once he was certain that it was not going to matter one iota how his father and the others behaved. Orderly or chaotic, well inventoried and civil or jumbled and squabbling, the Jews of Prague were dust on the boots of the Germans, to be whisked off with an indiscriminate broom. Stoicism and an eye for detail would avail them nothing. In later years, when he remembered this moment, Josef would be tempted to think that he had suffered a premonition, looking at those mucilage-caked labels, of the horror to come. At the time it was a simpler matter. The hair stood up on the back of his neck with a p.r.i.c.kling discharge of ions. His heart pulsed in the hollow of his throat as if someone had pressed there with a thumb. And he felt, for an instant, that he was admiring the penmans.h.i.+p of someone who had died.

"What's that?" Thomas said, when Josef returned to the parlor with one of Hora's extra-large garment bags slung over his shoulder. "What happened? What's wrong?"

"Nothing," said Josef. "Look, Thomas, I have to go. I'm sorry."

"I know." know." Thomas sounded almost irritated. He sat down cross-legged on the floor. "I'm going to spend the night." Thomas sounded almost irritated. He sat down cross-legged on the floor. "I'm going to spend the night."

"No, Thomas, I don't think-"

"You don't get to say," Thomas said. "You aren't here anymore, remember?"

The words echoed Kornblum's sound advice, but somehow they chilled Josef. He could not shake the feeling-reportedly common among ghosts-that it was not he but those he haunted whose lives were devoid of matter, sense, future.

"Perhaps you're right," he said after a moment. "You oughtn't to be out in the streets at night, anyway. It's too dangerous."

A hand on each of Thomas's shoulders, Josef steered his brother back to the room they had shared for the last eleven years. With some blankets and a slipless pillow that he found in a trunk, he made up a bed on the floor. Then he dug around in some other crates until he found an old children's alarm clock, a bear's face eared with a pair of bra.s.s bells, which he wound and set for five-thirty.

"You have to be back there by six," he said, "or they'll miss you."

Thomas nodded and climbed between the blankets of the makes.h.i.+ft bed. "I wish I could go with you," he said.

"I know," Josef said. He brushed the hair from Thomas's forehead. "So do I. But you'll be joining me soon enough."

"Do you promise?"

"I will make sure of it," Josef said. "I won't rest until I'm meeting your s.h.i.+p in the harbor of New York City."

"On that island they have," Thomas said, his eyelids fluttering. "With the Statue of Liberation."

"I promise," Josef said.

"Swear."

"I swear."

"Swear by the River Styx."

"I swear it," Josef said, "by the River Styx."

Then he leaned down and, to the surprise of both of them, kissed his brother on the lips. It was the first such kiss between them since the younger had been an infant and the elder a doting boy in knee pants.

"Goodbye, Josef," said Thomas.

When Josef returned to Nicholasga.s.se, he found that Kornblum had, with typical resourcefulness, solved the problem of the Golem's extrication. Into the thin panel of gypsum that had been used to fill the door frame at the time when the Golem was installed, Kornblum, employing some unspeakable implement of the mortuary trade, had cut a rectangle, at floor level, just large enough to accommodate the casket end-on. The obverse of the gypsum panel, out in the hall, was covered in the faded Jugendstil paper, a pattern of tall interlocking poppies, that decorated all the hallways of the building. Kornblum had been careful to cut through this thin outer hide on only three of his rectangle's four sides, leaving at its top a hinge of intact wallpaper. Thus he had formed a serviceable trapdoor.

"What if someone notices?" Josef said after he had finished inspecting Kornblum's work.

This gave rise to another of Kornblum's impromptu and slightly cynical maxims. "People notice only what you tell them to notice," he said. "And then only if you remind them."

They dressed the Golem in the suit that had belonged to the giant Alois Hora. This was hard work, as the Golem was relatively inflexible. It was not as rigid as one might have imagined, given its nature and composition. Its cold clay flesh seemed to give slightly under the pressure of fingertips, and a narrow range of motion, perhaps the faintest memory of play, inhered in the elbow of the right arm, the arm it would have used, as the legend records, to touch the mezuzah on its maker's doorway every evening when it returned from its labors, bringing its Scripture-kissed fingers to its lips. The Golem's knees and ankles, however, were more or less petrified. Furthermore, its hands and feet were poorly proportioned, as is often the case with the work of amateur artists, and much too large for its body. The enormous feet got snagged in the trouser legs, so that getting the pants on was particularly difficult. Finally, Josef had to reach into the coffin and grasp the Golem around the waist, elevating its lower body several inches, before Kornblum could tug the trousers over the feet, up the legs, and around the Golem's rather sizable b.u.t.tocks. They had decided not to bother with underwear, but for the sake of anatomical verisimilitude-in a display of the thoroughness that had characterized his career on the stage-Kornblum tore one of the old tallises in two (kissing it first), gave a series of twists to one of the halves, and tucked the resulting artifact up between the Golem's legs, into the crotch, where there was only a smooth void of clay.

"Maybe it was supposed to be a female," Josef suggested as he watched Kornblum zip the Golem's fly.

"Not even the Maharal could make a woman out of clay," Kornblum said. "For that you need a rib." He stood back, considering the Golem. He gave a tug on one lapel of the jacket and smoothed the billowing pleats of the trousers front. "This is a very nice suit."

It was one of the last Alois Hora had taken delivery of before his death, when his body had been wasted by Marfan's syndrome, and thus a perfect fit for the Golem, which was not so large as the Mountain in his prime. Of excellent English worsted, gray and tan, shot with a burgundy thread, it easily could have been subdivided into a suit for Josef and another for Kornblum, with enough left over, as the magician remarked, for a waistcoat apiece. The s.h.i.+rt was of fine white twill, with mother-of-pearl b.u.t.tons, and the necktie of burgundy silk, with an embossed pattern of cabbage roses, slightly flamboyant, as Hora had liked his ties. There were no shoes-Josef had forgotten to search for a pair, and in any case none would have been large enough-but if the lower regions of the casket's interior were ever inspected, the trick would fail anyway, shoes or no.

Once it was dressed, its cheeks rouged, its smooth head bewigged, its forehead and eyelids fitted with the tiny eyebrow and eyelash hairpieces employed by gentile morticians in the case of facial burning or certain depilatory diseases, the Golem looked, with its dull grayish complexion the color of boiled mutton, indisputably dead and pa.s.sably human. There was only the faintest trace of the human handprint on its forehead, from which, centuries before, the name of G.o.d had been rubbed away. Now they only had to slide it through the trapdoor and follow it out of the room.

This proved easy enough; as Josef had remarked when he lifted it to get the trousers on, the Golem weighed far less than its bulk and nature would have suggested. To Josef, it felt as if they were struggling, down the hallway, down the stairs, and out the front door of Nicholasga.s.se 26, with a substantial pine box and a large suit of clothes, and little besides.

" 'Mach' bida lo nafsho,' 'Mach' bida lo nafsho,' " Kornblum said, quoting Midrash, when Josef remarked on the lightness of their load. " 'His soul is a burden unto him.' This is nothing, this." He nodded toward the lid of the coffin. "Just an empty jar. If you were not in there, I would have been obliged to weight it down with sandbags." " Kornblum said, quoting Midrash, when Josef remarked on the lightness of their load. " 'His soul is a burden unto him.' This is nothing, this." He nodded toward the lid of the coffin. "Just an empty jar. If you were not in there, I would have been obliged to weight it down with sandbags."

The trip out of the building and back to the mortuary in the borrowed Skoda hea.r.s.e-Kornblum had learned to drive in 1908, he said, taught by Franz Hofzinser's great pupil Hans Kreutzler-came off without incident or an encounter with the authorities. The only person who saw them carrying the coffin out of the building, an insomniac out-of-work engineer named Pilzen, was told that old Mr. Lazarus in 42 had finally died after a long illness. When Mrs. Pilzen came by the flat the next afternoon with a plate of egg cookies in hand, she found a wizened old gentleman and three charming if somewhat improper women in black kimonos, sitting on low stools, with torn ribbons pinned to their clothes and the mirrors covered, a set of conditions that proved bemusing to the clientele of Madame Willi's establishment over the next seven days, some of whom were unnerved and some excited by the blasphemy of making love in a house of the dead.

Seventeen hours after he climbed into the coffin to lie with the empty vessel that once had been animate with the condensed hopes of Jewish Prague, Josef's train approached the town of Oshmyany, on the border between Poland and Lithuania. The two national railway systems employed different gauges of track, and there was to be a sixty-minute delay as pa.s.sengers and freight were s.h.i.+fted from the gleaming black Soviet-built express of Polish subjugation to the huffing, Czarist-era local of a tenuous Baltic liberty. The big Iosef Stalin-cla.s.s Iosef Stalin-cla.s.s locomotive eased all but silently into its berth and uttered a surprisingly sensitive, even rueful, sigh. Slowly, for the most part, as if unwilling to draw attention to themselves by an untoward display of eagerness or nerves, the pa.s.sengers, a good many young men of an age with Josef Kavalier, dressed in the belted coats, knickers, and broad hats of Chasidim, stepped down onto the platform and moved in an orderly way toward the emigration and customs officers who waited, along with a representative of the local Gestapo bureau, in a room overheated by a roaring pot-bellied stove. The railway porters, a sad crew of spavined old men and weaklings, few of whom looked capable of carrying a hatbox, let alone the coffin of a giant, rolled back the doors of the car in which the Golem and its stowaway companion rode, and squinted doubtfully at the burden they were now expected to unload and carry twenty-five meters to a waiting Lithuanian boxcar. locomotive eased all but silently into its berth and uttered a surprisingly sensitive, even rueful, sigh. Slowly, for the most part, as if unwilling to draw attention to themselves by an untoward display of eagerness or nerves, the pa.s.sengers, a good many young men of an age with Josef Kavalier, dressed in the belted coats, knickers, and broad hats of Chasidim, stepped down onto the platform and moved in an orderly way toward the emigration and customs officers who waited, along with a representative of the local Gestapo bureau, in a room overheated by a roaring pot-bellied stove. The railway porters, a sad crew of spavined old men and weaklings, few of whom looked capable of carrying a hatbox, let alone the coffin of a giant, rolled back the doors of the car in which the Golem and its stowaway companion rode, and squinted doubtfully at the burden they were now expected to unload and carry twenty-five meters to a waiting Lithuanian boxcar.

Inside the coffin, Josef lay insensible. He had fainted with an excruciating, at times almost pleasurable, slowness over a period of some eight or ten hours, as the rocking of the train, the lack of oxygen, the deficit of sleep and surfeit of nervous upset he had acc.u.mulated over the past week, the diminished circulation of his blood, and a strange, soporific emanation from the Golem itself that seemed connected to its high-summer, rank-river smell, all conspired to overcome the severe pain in his hips and back, the cramping of his leg and arm muscles, the near-impossibility of urination, the tingling, at times almost jolting, numbness of his legs and feet, the growling of his stomach, and the dread, wonder, and uncertainty of the voyage on which he had embarked. When they took the coffin from the train, he did not waken, though his dream took on an urgent but inconclusive tinge of peril. He did not come to his senses until a beautiful jet of cold fir-green air singed his nostrils, lighting his slumber with an intensity matched only by the pale shaft of sunlight that penetrated his prison when the "inspection panel" was abruptly thrown open.

Once more it was Kornblum's instruction that saved Josef from losing everything in the first instant. In the first dazzling panic that followed the opening of the panel, when Josef wanted to cry out in pain, rapture, and fear, the word "Oshmyany" seemed to lie cold and rational between his fingers, like a pick that was going, in the end, to free him. Kornblum, whose encyclopedic knowledge of the railroads of this part of Europe was in a few short years to receive a dreadful appendix, had coached him thoroughly, as they worked to gaff the coffin, on the stages and particulars of his journey. He felt the jostle of men's arms, the sway of their hips as they carried the coffin, and this, together with the odor of northern forest and a susurrant snippet of Polish, resolved at the last possible instant into a consciousness of where he was and what must be happening to him. The porters themselves had opened the coffin as they carried it from the Polish train to the Lithuanian. He could hear, and vaguely understand, that they were marveling both at the deadness and giantness of their charge. Then Josef's teeth came together with a sharp porcelain chiming as the coffin was dropped. Josef kept silent and prayed that the impact didn't pop the gaffed nails and send him tumbling out. He hoped that he had been thrown thus into the new boxcar, but feared that it was only impact with the station floor that had filled his mouth with blood from his bitten tongue. The light shrank and winked out, and he exhaled, safe in the airless, eternal dark; then the light blazed again.

"What is this? Who is this?" said a German voice.

"A giant, Herr Lieutenant. A dead giant."

"A dead Lithuanian giant." Josef heard a rattle of paper. The German officer was leafing through the sheaf of forged doc.u.ments that Kornbium had affixed to the outside of the coffin. "Named Kervelis Hailonidas. Died in Prague the night before last. Ugly b.a.s.t.a.r.d."

"Giants are always ugly, Lieutenant," said one of the porters in German. There was general agreement from the other porters, with some supporting cases offered into evidence.

"Great G.o.d," said the German officer, "but it's a crime to bury a suit like that in a dirty old hole in the ground. Here, you. Get a crowbar. Open that coffin."

Kornblum had provided Josef with an empty Mosel bottle, into which he was, at rare intervals, to insert the tip of his p.e.n.i.s and, sparingly, relieve his bladder. But there was no time to maneuver it into place as the porters began to kick and sc.r.a.pe at the seams of the giant coffin. The inseam of Josef's trousers burned and then went instantly cold.

"There is no crowbar, Herr Lieutenant," one of the porters said. "We will chop it open with an ax."

Josef struggled against a wild panic that scratched like an animal at his rib cage.

"Ah, no," the German officer said with a laugh. "Forget it. I'm tall, all right, but I'm not that tall." After a moment, the darkness of the coffin was restored. "Carry on, men."

There was a pause, and then, with a jerk, Josef and the Golem were lifted again.

"And he's ugly, too," said one of the men, in a voice just audible to Josef, "but he's not that that ugly." ugly."

Some twenty-seven hours later, Josef staggered, dazed, blinking, limping, bent, asphyxiated, and smelling of stale urine, into the sun-tattered grayness of an autumn morning in Lithuania. He watched from behind a soot-blackened pillar of the Vilna station as the two dour-looking confederates of the secret circle claimed the curious, giant coffin from Prague. Then he hobbled around to the house of Kornblum's brother-in-law, on Pylimo Street, where he was received kindly with food, a hot bath, and a narrow cot in the kitchen. It was while staying here, trying to arrange for pa.s.sage to New York out of Priekule, that he first heard of a Dutch consul in Kovno who was madly issuing visas to Curacao, in league with a j.a.panese official who would grant rights of transit via the Empire of j.a.pan to any Jew bound for the Dutch colony. Two days later he was on the Trans-Siberian Express; a week later he reached Vladivostok, and thence sailed for Robe. From Robe he s.h.i.+pped to San Francisco, where he wired his aunt in Brooklyn for money for the bus to New York. It was on the steamer carrying him through the Golden Gate that he happened to reach down into the hole in the lining of the right pocket of his overcoat and discover the envelope that his brother had solemnly handed to him almost a month before. It contained a single piece of paper, which Thomas had hastily stuffed into it that morning as they all were leaving the house together for the last time, by way or in lieu of expressing the feelings of love, fear, and hopefulness that his brother's escape inspired. It was the drawing of Harry Houdini, taking a calm cup of tea in the middle of the sky, that Thomas had made in his notebook during his abortive career as a librettist. Josef studied it, feeling as he sailed toward freedom as if he weighed nothing at all, as if every precious burden had been lifted from him.

PART II

A COUPLE of BOY

GENIUSES