The Golem of Paris (4 page)

BROOKLYN, NEW YORK

AUGUST 21, 1968

B
arbara Reich says, “I’m going out.”

Her mother frowns, dragging a wooden spoon through the simmering pot of
hovězí guláš
. The stew breathes savory and sour, oily and oppressive, turning the cramped kitchen to a swamp. “Where?”

“I’m studying with Cindy. We have a test.”

“You must eat.”

“I’ll grab something at her place.”

If Věra’s frown deepens, it’s to hide her approval. Barbara has left her knapsack carelessly undone, textbooks poking out—doorstops with titles like
Practical Biology: A Cellular Approach
and
Fundamental Principles of Organic Chemistry.

“Budes okradená,”
Věra says, closing the flap and buckling it.
You’ll get mugged.

“Anyone who wants to steal these deserves what they get,” Barbara says.

Her mother clucks. “Very expensive.”

“I’m kidding, Maminka.”

“It is not funny.”

Right
Barbara thinks.
Nothing is.

In the living room, her father is arguing with the
New York Times
.

“Bye, Taťka
.
”

Jozef Reich slams the paper shut. Like most of his gestures, it lacks the intended punch: no satisfying bang, just a noncommittal crinkle.

CZECHOSLOVAKIA INVADED BY RUSSIANS AND FOUR OTHER WARSAW PACT FORCES; THEY OPEN FIRE ON CROWDS IN PRAGUE

TANKS ENTER CITY

Deaths Are Reported—Troops Surround Offices of Party

SOVIET EXPLAINS

Says Its Troops Moved at the Request of Czechoslovaks

Jozef’s grin is sick and ironic as he hoists his shot glass of
slivovice.

“Socialismus s lidskou tváří,”
he says.

Socialism with a human face.

Before he has set the glass down, he’s groping in the direction of the bottle. Barbara hands it to him and bends to kiss the vein in the center of his forehead. He smells like overripe plums and motor oil. Each day, he comes home from the garage slathered in grease, and Věra fills the kitchen sink and shampoos his woolly arms up to the elbow.

“Study good,” he says.

“I will.”

Outside it’s so muggy the mosquitoes are complaining. Exactly the wrong weather for beef stew. Her mother’s cookery is driven primarily by economics. Chuck roast is on special, twenty-nine cents a pound, they will eat
guláš.

Barbara trudges down Avenue D in the direction of Cindy’s house, rolling up her sleeves as she goes, aware of Věra watching from the kitchen window, staring down with that weird mix of suspicion and satisfaction. She can feel the knapsack imprinting itself in sweat on her back, the clasp of her brassiere biting into her spine, her blouse patching at the underarms. A group of boys wearing St. Vincent’s ties and listening to the Yankee game wonder aloud what’s hiding beneath her skirt.

Barbara pinches off a smile.
Use your imagination, if you’ve got any.

She turns down Thirty-first, then circles back to Nostrand Avenue, where Cindy waits, tan and grinning, a one-woman conspiracy in a lime-green shift dress.

“Clockwork, baby.”

The dress hits halfway up her thighs. Her feet are squished into matching lime-green go-go boots. Her handbag has bright pink flowers on the side. She looks like she’s going dancing. She always does. It’s how she comes to class. Beside her, Barbara feels like a dust mop.

Her own skirt comes secondhand. She tried raising the hemline, so it wouldn’t look so dowdy. The first time she tried to walk out of the house, her mother screamed.

They will rape you.

It wasn’t funny; nothing about her family life was, but Barbara struggled to keep herself from laughing. Because Věra made these dire predictions in her even more dire Slavic accent, trilling the
r
like a cartoon villain.

They—will—rrrrrrrRRRRape you!

Who were
they
, these rapists prowling the streets of Flatbush? The blacks? The Puerto Ricans? The young men of St. Vincent’s Academy? In Věra’s mind, it could have just as easily been the Nazis or the Communists.

Either way, it wasn’t worth arguing about. Barbara went to her room and pulled out the stitching, leaving the skirt raggedy and misshapen.

Sometimes Cindy offers her stuff she never wears anymore.
It’s not like you’re up to the minute, baby.
Barbara declines. In the first place, her parents would never approve, of the clothes or the charity.

Plus she’d look ridiculous. As it is, Cindy’s half a foot shorter than her. Two of her minis wouldn’t begin to cover Barbara’s tush.

“Oof,”
Cindy says, hefting the knapsack. “What’s in here, bricks?”

“Books,” Barbara says.

“I know you’re going for
realism
, baby, but come
on.
”

Barbara smiles. She left the flap undone for effect. If her mother had been paying attention, she might have thought to question what class required textbooks for four different subjects. Or wondered how in the world Barbara could already have an exam when today is Wednesday and registration was on Monday.

Cindy drops the knapsack on the sidewalk and begins fiddling with Barbara’s hair.

“You ought to use a little makeup, baby. You’re so pale.”

Barbara shrugs.

“I
wish
I had eyes like yours. You got it, flaunt it . . . you know what, hang on.” Cindy rummages in her handbag for a bottle of liquid eyeliner. “Hold still.”

As she gets to work, Barbara thinks what an odd spectacle they
must make, the Groovy Gal and the Flying Nun. Last spring they shared a dissection table in Introduction to Vertebrate Anatomy, making up a full two-thirds of the class’s female population. Of course Barbara ended up doing all the dirty work. Cindy couldn’t bring herself to lift a scalpel, she’d get one whiff of formaldehyde and break for the ladies’. The next day, Barbara would hand her a copy of the finished report.

Thanks, baby. I owe you one.

As a premed, Barbara had to take VA. Cindy, on the other hand, was then a junior without portfolio, flirting with becoming a nurse, although that went out the window the minute she met Stan, cause, baby, he’s the one. Not ashamed to want that, husband-house-kids, the whole shebang, she’s no crazy man-hating feminist, no way.

You got a boyfriend?
she asked Barbara.

No.
Then, sensing this was the wrong answer:
Not yet.

Don’t worry, baby. You’re young.

That’s the problem. She’s too young for her life.

High school was hard enough; she skipped two grades and still her parents called the principal weekly to complain she wasn’t being sufficiently challenged. The schedule they set left little time for socializing, and she spent her first semester at Brooklyn College more or less alone.

Irrelevant, her parents say. You go to college for one purpose: to learn.

You learn for one purpose: to get a good job.

A good job ensures that you owe nobody nothing. It guarantees money. It guarantees your survival when civilization collapses, as it inevitably will. People will always need doctors. Even more so during the Apocalypse.

But it’s her—not her parents—walking the halls, adrift in a sea of hormones and freedom, mismatched in every conceivable way.

Her sophomore math professor, an elderly Austrian, looked her up and down and said
The face is fourteen, but the body is twenty
.

She felt humiliated. She didn’t know what to do. She told Cindy, who brayed a laugh.
You’ll probably get an A.

She got an A+.

Now, as Cindy continues to work on Barbara’s right eye, foot traffic streams around them, folks barking to get off the damn sidewalk, quit blocking the steps.

“Shove it,” Cindy says pleasantly. With a confident hand, she starts on the left eye. It’s too bad she can’t handle blood and guts; she’d make a terrific surgeon. “Sooo,” she says. “When do I get to meet him?”

“Who.”

“
Who?
Don Juan, dummy.”

It’s a reasonable assumption. The need for secrecy; the cover story.

Sure, why not? Her parents wouldn’t approve of her real destination, either.

For that matter, neither would Cindy.

“I don’t know,” Barbara says.

“I dig, baby. You’re feeling it out, right?”

“Right.”

“He’s your first, isn’t he?”

“Mm.”

Cindy sighs happily. “Nothing like your first.”

The ground begins to tremble: the arriving train.

“I have to go,” Barbara says.

“Almost done.” Cindy steps back. “Voilà, baby. Jeepers creepers, look at them peepers. Before they were green. Now they’re
green
.”

“Thanks,” Barbara says, and she runs down into the station, praying Cindy doesn’t forget to take the knapsack.

•   •   •

S
HE RESURFACES AT
B
LEECKER
S
TREET
into the same steam, here charged with urgent energy. Faces are younger, pants are tighter, the music trickling from the windows earth-shaking bass and fuzzy guitars.

Hello, I love you, won’t you tell me your name?

She’s still unhip, although not as obviously. For all anyone knows, she’s making a statement with her outfit, like those gals who don’t shave their legs as an expression of solidarity with the Vietnamese.

Address in hand, she crosses the NYU campus, littered with fliers protesting the war; protesting the treatment of the people protesting the war outside the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. The news about Czechoslovakia is hours old, far too fresh to have permeated the collective consciousness. She can imagine the discomfort it will cause to those who like to talk about the humanity and beauty of the Soviet system.

Her own view is hopelessly colored by her parents, which makes her hopelessly square. Sometimes she’ll disagree with her father about nuclear weapons or whatever, but without much heart. He gets so upset, turns red and pounds the table, spilling his drink, bellowing at her in Czech.

Tys tam nebyla.

You were not there.

How can she argue with that? She can’t, that’s how.

An American daughter cannot lay claim to suffering; her parents have gobbled up the entire supply, having endured the twin catastrophes of the Germans and the Russians. Věra was twelve when
her mother, father, and younger brother perished in Theresienstadt concentration camp. She escaped to the countryside with her older brother, Jakub, sheltering with a friend of his from the Communist Party. During the purges, the same friend would denounce Jakub as a Trotskyite and a Titoist and a Zionist, sending him to the gallows.

Barbara has no memory of the event, which took place when she was an infant, after her parents had left Prague. Věra keeps her brother’s photo on the mantel, and she lights a candle on the anniversary of his death, a rare concession to tradition in their godless home.

Her father’s story is less well understood. He claims not to know his exact age, insisting people didn’t keep track of things like that. Barbara guesses he’s Věra’s senior by fifteen years or more; his face is at once layered and eroded, like a fortress that has endured centuries of trial, centuries of repair.

This much she knows: he had another family before the War.

He never talks about them. But once, during a screaming match, Věra slipped up, demanding to know how she could compete with a ghost. He did not love her as much as Jitka, he could never love her as much as Jitka.

Through two closed doors, Barbara heard the slap, then weeping in two registers.

Later, much later, she asked her mother who Jitka was.

A friend of your father’s.

Did you know her?

Věra shut her eyes.
Do your homework.

The third girl in last spring’s anatomy class was Japanese, quiet and shy, with a blunt-cut bob and discount eyeglasses that gave her the same anxious gawp as the frogs they cut open. Right away Barbara
identified her as another child of immigrants; the deliberation, the wait-and-see, the rounded shoulders bowed under expectation.

When the instructor announced that it was time to pair up, the girl, whose name was Ka-something but who went by Kathy, looked hopefully at Barbara. Barbara felt intense heat, like she was confronting the sun in a mirror, and she turned away to partner with pretty, chatty, happy, incompetent Cindy Gorelick.

Kathy ended up working with a boy named Leon Fine, and Barbara spent the rest of the semester avoiding eye contact with her. But sometimes their paths crossed, and in the brief moments that they regarded each other, Barbara saw no disappointment, and certainly no surprise. Kathy, too, grasped the dog-eat-dog truth of the world; given the chance, she would’ve done the same to Barbara.

The lack of judgment made Barbara feel even guiltier.

It didn’t change her mind, though.

•   •   •

T
HE AD IN THE
V
OICE
led her to expect something grand, an art studio with nice light, but Minetta Street turns out to be a short, twisted passage lined with private homes. The door to number eleven is painted bright red. There’s a note.

CLASS MOVED TO THE GARDEN