Body of Glass (10 page)

Shira had her eyes closed too. Hermes lay in her lap awkwardly, for he more than overlapped, while she pretended to be studying. Instead she was tuned in to a program in the Net of lights and shapes that formed on her closed eyes, vaguely watery, shimmering greys, greens, bronzes. She was not fully projected but detached, watching from without, letting her pain fill her lightly now as flowing water.

Suddenly, at half past twenty, the house announced Gadi. Shira jerked to her feet, displacing the cat. The jack wrenched from the socket in her temple, leaving her nauseated at the sudden disconnection. The house had been programmed for years to recognize and admit Gadi, so it had simply opened to him and spoken to them. Stupid house!

Shira resolved to stand there in a dignified silence and wait him out. But the moment he came ambling with his loose long gait into the courtyard, she burst out, “What are you doing here? Why aren’t you with her?”

Malkah was present but not conscious, blind and deaf, fully projected into the Net. Gadi glanced at her, recognized her state, and they both proceeded as if she were a piece of furniture.

“Come on, that didn’t mean anything,” Gadi began in a voice that suggested he was cosseting a child in a tantrum. “Here I am, with you as usual. If you hadn’t come barging in today, you wouldn’t be upset at all.”

“Oh, you can do anything, and it’s my fault if I find out!”

“Are we married? That’s how you act. We’ve been married since we were seven, and it’s a damned prison.”

“If you think I’m keeping you in prison, escape! The door’s open. Use it.”

“I intend to. I have a right to live, to know other people, to find out who I am and who they are.”

“Oh, was it a transcendent experience, finding out about Hannah’s twat?”

“Shira, we’re seventeen years old. Ask Malkah if we shouldn’t be open to knowing other people.”

They both glanced at Malkah, oblivious, eyes shut. She might be researching something, she might be involved in a seminar with twenty other projected minds, she might be carrying on a flirtation or a debate.

Shira vibrated with outrage. “Now all of a sudden common sense rules, adults are right, let’s forget we love each other and play at being cartoon teenagers.”

“Why did you come charging over there anyhow? Because you got your auction results. Right?”

“I wanted to talk about what we were going to do about college.”

“We? Show me your auction results. Come on, show it to me.”

“I don’t want to show you anything.”

“They’re fighting over you, aren’t they? They think they can make money off you. Just keep bashing away for four more years, and they’ll get a good price when multis bid on you. Who wants an artist? Old Avram’s going to have to pay to get me into college, tough on him. You see, we don’t have the same options, do we?” He stepped close, his face twisted with anger.

“Not if your option is to fuck Hannah in the same bed we shared.”

“It’s my house and my room.”

“You wanted me to walk in. You knew the same as I did the results were coming this afternoon. You’re punishing me because you didn’t do as well. But that doesn’t matter, Gadi, it doesn’t! I believe in you.”

He walked away from her to stand in the centre of the courtyard, looking around warily as if the house might attack him. He was as uneasy as if he were hitting her. The house of course would attack with sonics if he were doing physical damage. I’ve got to get out, Shira. We’re dying, to two of us. We’re dying together. Don’t you feel it?”

She stared at him as he stood braced, seeming taller than he ever had, or perhaps her knees were buckling. He was lost to her. She wanted to die. There was no more Shira, only bleeding meat, a roaring vacuum. Couldn’t he see he was killing both of them? They were a double organism, one being. “All I feel now is pain.” She would put an ocean between them. She would punish Malkah for insulting her love and Gadi for betraying it; she would go far, far from both of them, to Europa. She would take Avram’s advice and remove herself to Paris, to Prague, to Edinburgh. Anywhere far away from here.

seven

Malkah

He tries to think to whom he can turn. His wife? The rebitzin, Perl, is four years older than her husband and wise in entirely other ways: she has learned through the years how to run a household on hope, how to cook feasts out of not much, how to hide money from a man who would give the last cent away, how to intercede between Judah and his children, who were expected to be far holier than they desired. Judah and Perl had been engaged for ten years before the rabbi had enough money to marry her. Her own father had lost all his money (which had never amounted to much except in his reminiscences) when his business failed. She had waited all that time, running a bakery and saving for the day when they would finally be together as husband and wife.

When she was thirty and he was twenty-six, they finally married. Perl gave birth to six daughters and to one son, of all those children who lived beyond infancy. She started late and she continued late. She bore her last daughter when she was fifty-two and her oldest daughter was also pregnant.

To say that Perl adores Judah would be true; to say she worships him would not. She is perhaps the only person who knows Judah well but does not fear his temper, for she has one of her own. She is used to giving orders, to managing a bakery, to keeping track of details and pennies. She is a big woman with a still handsome ruddy face. She had been zoftik in her middle years, but age has whittled at her so that her bones are more obvious now than her flesh. She has strong hands, big enough to engulf the slender shapely hands of Judah. Her pelt of white hair is kept clipped to ringlets that look like lamb fleece under the henna-red wig she wears as a respectable wife whose hair might tempt the angels.

All the daughters married, two of them to the same Itzak Cohen, for after his young bride Leah died of pneumonia from a cold that should have passed off easily, he married the next sister, Vogele. Three of her own children Perl has outlived, two daughters and her only son; she does not want to survive the others. Let them bury me and not otherwise, she prays to the Eternal. She prays in Yiddish, for like most women, she never learned Hebrew.

Judah knows what she would advise him. Forget this nonsense. Pay attention to your grandchildren, who are growing up too fast, pay attention to your congregation, for there are two adulterous couples I know about already. No, Perl would rail against such a dangerous experiment.

Chava would understand, but it does not seem appropriate to consult with his own granddaughter. The year before, Itzak’s daughter Chava had come back to live with them. Chava had married young and been widowed young. She is content to be the Widow Bachrach.

Chava is attractive and learned and always has suitors. Perl is in no hurry to see Chava married again, because Chava is a great help to her. Perl is slowing down with arthritis. She does not want to be left at home alone with the Maharal, who knows himself to be poor company to a woman. Chava works as a midwife in the ghetto, and she has taken over her father Itzak’s duties as the Maharal’s secretary.

The Maharal, too, feels in no hurry to find her a second husband, although he would have leaned hard on any of his flock who behaved as he is behaving. He has often remarked and still believes it: Chava is his smartest child. She has the drive that his own son lacked. How he tried to push Bezalel, to train his son’s intellect to surpass his own. He pushed too hard. He pushed his son away. Now Bezalel is dead, and there are no second chances.

He himself taught Chava Hebrew and even Aramaic, like a son. She helps him in his researches, she fair-copies his sermons and his writings for him in her beautiful Hebrew script and she sees his books through the Gersonides press, the Hebrew printing press of Prague. No, he does not want to lose her to some dolt of a husband who will wear her out with childbearing. Of course she must bear more children beside the son her in-laws kept; she must be fruitful and multiply with the right husband, but Perl did not marry till she was thirty and did not bear her first child till she was thirty-one, and she was healthy and strong to this day, bar a little arthritis of late. Plenty of time.

Chava for her part shows little interest in young men, even the pious ones the Maharal briefly considers for her. She likes working as a midwife, earning her living. Judah has heard her say to Perl, I deal with babies all day and all night. All the babies born here are mine. I have a huge family already.

Why does he suspect that Chava will see the creation of the golem, supposing he really were to risk it, as usurping not only the power of the Eternal but the power of women, to give birth, to give life. No, to discuss something this holy with a woman, he cannot do it.

The Maharal and his family live on the second floor, the third daughter, Yentel, and her husband and children upstairs, and downstairs, Samuel, a tailor who also deals in secondhand clothing. The three-storey house was built with a doorway leading through to the courtyard and another house, the way things are slammed together in the ghetto, in any slot that stands empty, narrow houses craning towards the sky like saplings growing up starved from insufficient light. In the courtyard lives the astronomer and historian David Gans, in his brother’s narrow house. From the window of the Maharal’s parlour, Perl can speak across the few feet between the buildings. “Come and share our little supper tonight, Duvey.” She addresses him as a son although he is in his fifties; he seems younger than he is because he is spry and curious.

David is bright but pragmatic and dislikes conflict. He has modern ideas about astronomy. He is welcome in the observatory Tycho Brahe built under Rudolf’s patronage, the finest and most accurate observatory in all Europe. His work popularizing new discoveries in geography includes the best maps anybody has put together of the New World. But David Gans is no kabbalist. About matters of the spirit he is timid. He loves to discuss ideas, but those concerning what he considers the real world, that of matter.

Shall Judah consult his ex-secretary and son-in-law, Itzak Cohen? Itzak is a good man, a bright man, but he follows the Maharal’s lead. What he would strive to understand if the proposition were set to him is what Judah wants him to say. He is doubly precious to Judah because he married first Leah, then, after her death, Vogele, and because he fathered Chava, dearest of all to Judah, but to consult Itzak’s opinions is to look into a watery mirror.

Itzak Cohen is in his early fifties, with his beard bushy and white. Out in the world, he is a famous scholar, a man other people consult, considered both wise and also able in his business matters, a rare combination. As soon as he is with the Maharal, however, his awe for his teacher takes over. His voice rises slightly. He seems smaller. He is a boy again.

Perhaps he might fill the role of surrogate son had his own father been less in evidence. With his real father, Itzak is firm, generous, forgiving: he fathers his own hapless sire, whom he has taken into his house to support. The elder Cohen is a born mark, fleeced by one confidence man after another.

How about Judah’s brightest disciple, Yakov Sassoon ha-Levi? Yakov is twenty years younger than Itzak; he has come to brighten the rabbi’s old age with his first-rate mind. He is undisciplined; in him the Maharal recognizes his own love of verbal combat. Judah seeks to temper that fire with wisdom and judgement. No, Yakov would immediately want to create a golem simply because it’s dangerous and on the verge of blasphemy. He has still a great need to prove himself, does Yakov Sassoon.

Yakov Sassoon is a lean leathery tall man, recently widowed. He has been left with three children, all sons, and he is looking for a wife. He has already indicated his interest in Chava, who declined politely but fervently. Yakov is stubborn, sure he can persuade her. He wants to marry into the Maharal’s family more than he wants to marry Chava, but she is attractive and bright. Yakov walks with a slight limp from a street brawl with a Christian gang in his adolescence. He has a fine strong deep voice, and he often sings for company, not only religious songs but Yiddish songs about wonder-working rabbis and lovesick adolescents and marriages and deaths. Music transports him till his eyes shine in his long thin face. Judah is fond of him, would not mind too much if Chava chose him, but his judgement needs tempering with experience and more wisdom.

Yakov lives nearby, in a house owned by Chaim the Silversmith, who has been doing very well and who is making for the Altneushul a beautiful silver crown for the Torah scroll, to be ready by Rosh Hashanah. It is his own gift. The various synagogues already have lavers and candelabra Chaim made, but they have been paid for by rich patrons like Mordecai Maisl. This is the first time Chaim has felt he could make such a contribution himself, out of his own workshops and his own pockets. The Maharal has spent several nights with Chaim working on the design of the crown, which is to apply to silver a method often used in calligraphic drawings, of using many small Hebrew letters to make up objects such as flowers and leaves.

Events decide for Judah. What makes up his mind is the arrest of Chaim the Silversmith, accused of consorting with the Turks and passing military secrets but in trouble for having quietly begun making fine candelabra and ceremonial objects of an original and striking design, competing with the Christian silversmiths. He is being tortured in the prison, and no amount of bribery on the part of his wife or his family seems able to get him free short of death. The Maharal goes on foot to the town hall, to the emperor’s representative. He goes to see Father Jiri, with whom he is guardedly friendly. All the intercessions run into a wall of iron.

That the silversmith had been seized on such a trumped-up charge is a clear warning to the Maharal that he is reading the weather signs accurately and a blood storm is gathering. On the day bailiffs come into the ghetto with pikemen to seize the assets of the silversmith and turn his family out into the street, the Maharal tells Itzak and Yakov to come to him quietly, secretly and without speaking to anyone. “Begin a fast. Go to the baths tonight and purify yourselves. Then come at midnight to the Altneushul. I will be there.” It is Rosh Hodesh, the new moon.

He has decided to take only Itzak and Yakov with him. He thought of taking David also, then speedily discarded him. David would be wanting to ask questions constantly and take notes. Further, the Maharal suspects that it would be hard for David not to view the evening’s planned activities as a physics experiment and impossible to keep him from writing up that experiment in copious notes with proffered explanations. No, only Itzak and Yakov may accompany him.

At midnight he stands in the doorway to the Altneushul, where I myself have stood, although never at midnight. It is a small but powerful Gothic building, with the front wall shaped like a jagged menorah. The oldest synagogue in Europe, it is at the farthest end of ostentation from a cathedral, being small, narrow and yet of a penetrating simple grandeur. You step down into it, and then your eyes rise to the narrow windows slitting the tall white walls. From the Altneushul the Maharal removes a Torah, wrapping it carefully in a cloak and then in another, larger cloak over that one, against the damp wind of March that slithers between buildings, down the twisted filthy streets and then unfurls in the cemetery beyond the synagogue. The Maharal leads his helpers into the cemetery, seeing the glances of apprehension they exchange. What is he doing in the cemetery in the middle of the night? Has a dybbuk seized one of their own, or does a ghost rise because of some impropriety in the burial?

“Take each a shovel.” He opens the caretaker’s little shed.

Every night in Prague, the gates of the ghetto are locked, the Jews penned up inside for the night, the Christians supposedly fenced out: just as we are hidden behind our electronic walls, our surveillance devices, our amateur guards, seeking to survive. But a wall can be climbed over or tunnelled under, or a few strategic stones can be quietly loosened. The Maharal knows the ghetto’s every brick. It’s tight living, everyone smelling everybody else’s supper and hearing everybody’s quarrels. Privacy, are you joking? In Prague in the Jewish cemetery, even the dead are crowded, buried on top of each other, the stones rammed crazily together like crooked teeth. The dead cannot be moved, it would be lacking in respect, but Jews are not allowed to bury their dead outside the ghetto. Therefore a fresh layer of soil is shovelled over the graves periodically, the tombstones are moved up to the new surface, a new grave dug in and one more tombstone added to the crowd, like rush hour on the tubes leaving a corporate enclave.

The Maharal walks in the lead with the Torah and a dark lantern swinging. Behind, Itzak trots, short and heavyset, with his white beard shining against the darkness of his cloak, and on his left side Yakov, tall as the Maharal, skinny, taking one slightly lopsided stride to every two of Itzak’s, both of them with shovels over their shoulders like pikemen going into battle and Yakov carrying also a large but light wooden frame, which the Maharal gave him.

They are frightened, but they trust him and they obey him. At the end of the street of the willows, where no trees at all grow but tradition says there once flowed a stream that still wanders through cellars, Judah knows of a weak spot in the ghetto wall. The same stream that creeps like a ghost through the earth of the ghetto flows out to the Vltava. Here one can crawl out of the ghetto under the cover of darkness. They flit through the forbidden Christian streets, keeping silent, and into open country.

In the woods on the banks of the river, it is a cold clammy night with no light but that of the dark lantern, its feeble rays glimmering, and the river beyond like black shot silk mumbling over its stones. The leaves have not even begun to split their buds. The bare branches of winter rub together in the brisk wind. Somewhere an owl is calling as it hunts.

They set to work digging clay from the bank while the Maharal chants in a low singsong, praying all the while he, an old, old man, is working furiously, taking the shovel from first Itzak and then Yakov, digging faster than they can. They stare at him in great fear, fear he will suddenly die, because how can an eighty-one-year-old man stoop and lift, stoop and lift and haul like an eighteen-year-old? Fear because what are they doing, what vast grave are they excavating?