The Golem of Paris (7 page)

Jacob wondered how bad it had gotten since they’d last talked.

He wanted to ask.

He kept his mouth shut.

Nigel said, “He’s been trying to reach you for a while.”

He finished his water, set it down, sat up straight and tall.

Jacob felt a nervous flutter. Could he be one of them, too? In his most paranoid moments, anyone over six feet tall fell under suspicion of working for Special Projects.

He’d have to suspect himself, then.

Where did it end?

Nigel said, “Would it kill you to talk to him?”

“That’s a lousy standard for decision-making.”

Nigel opened a palm. “‘Bear with one another and if anyone has a complaint against another, forgive each other; just as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive.’”

“Sounds New Testament.”

“Colossians.”

“Lucky me,” Jacob said. “Not my book.”

“Good advice is good advice, no matter who’s giving it.”

Jacob shrugged.

Nigel said, “You two got your differences, it’s not my business. But I do know—”

“Hang on a minute,” Jacob said.

“He’s suffering, and you know he’s had enough suffering in his life. That’s something you ought to be able to appreciate. He’s a good man, one of the finest I know. You get a little older, you realize how rare that is.”

Jacob pressed the heel of his hand to his forehead. “You have no idea, do you.”

“I told you, not my business.”

“What did he tell you happened? He must’ve told you something.”

“I asked why you haven’t come around, he said you won’t talk to him.”

“He didn’t tell you why.”

“No, and I didn’t ask.”

Jacob hated himself for what he was about to do. It had to be done, though.

“Every week,” he said, “you drive him to Alhambra. To a long-term care facility.”

“Wednesday.”

“You don’t go in with him.”

“I drop him off,” Nigel said. “Pick him up in a couple hours.”

“You’ve never been inside.”

Nigel shook his head.

“Who does he say he’s going to visit?”

“A friend.”

“What friend?”

“He never saw fit to mention it,” Nigel said. “It’s his business.”

“It’s my mother,” Jacob said.

Nigel seemed to short-circuit. His head jerked, his forehead clumped into wrinkles. “Your mother’s dead.”

“Not as of six o’clock yesterday, she wasn’t. I talked to her myself. In person.”

“. . . I don’t—”

“He buried a box,” Jacob said. He didn’t have the energy to raise his voice. “Then he lied about it. He lied to you. More important, he lied to me, for close to half my life.”

Nigel grimaced, felt for his cross, squeezing it as though to draw strength. “I know your father. He doesn’t do things without a reason.”

“Can you come up with one?”

“I haven’t had a chance to ask him.”

“Start there,” Jacob said. “Then you can feel free to lecture me.”

Nigel’s lips shook. He rose, stooping as he walked to the door. Turning the knob, he looked back at Jacob, then left without a word.

BROOKLYN, NEW YORK

APRIL 3, 1969

B
arbara stops on the fifth-floor landing to remove her shoes, climbing the last flight on the balls of her feet. Outside her parents’ apartment she pauses again. The crack at the bottom of the door is dark, the silence beyond sleepy and settled. Above her, a fluorescent tube buzzes; insects hurl themselves against it in worship.

She slides her key into the lock, one ridge at a time.

Her father’s voice, in Czech, harsh: “You are late.”

Both her parents are up, occupying opposite ends of the sofa, like counterweights. Lights doused. Very clever. What in the world made her think she could fool them? For God’s sake, they survived the Holocaust.

Jozef says, “Sit.”

Barbara obeys, cursing her own stupidity. She got careless, telling them she had to study three, four, sometimes five nights a week. Or maybe Cindy sold her out, annoyed because she never gets to meet “the boyfriend,” fed up with Barbara’s excuses.

He’s shy . . . under the weather . . . it’s his birthday, he wants to spend it with me . . .

Dumb, dumb, dumb.

“Do you know the time?”

“About three-thirty,” she says in English.

He replies in Czech: “Three. Forty. Three.”

She hadn’t realized. Enjoying herself, she’d lost track of time.

“Why are you coming home so late?”

“I’m sorry.”

Jozef grunts. “I did not ask you to apologize. I asked why you are so late.”

“It took a while for the train to come.”

He switches on the floor lamp, causing her to flinch. He’s wearing his coveralls and cap, a bath towel beneath him to protect the sofa from grease. His name patch blackened:
JOE
. A blunt Americanism no one uses. Věra wears a prim dress, faultlessly smooth, as though she has ironed it to mark the occasion.

Jozef says, “Where are you coming from?”

“I said I’m sorry.”

“You keep apologizing. Nobody is asking you to.”

“I am anyway.”

“Why?”

“Because you’re mad.”

“And how do you know this?”

She fights back sarcasm. “You’re waiting up for me.”

“Yes?”

“So, I’m assuming you’re mad.”

“This is your problem,” Jozef says. “You assume.”

Barbara says nothing.

“Where are you coming from,” he says.

“Manhattan.”

“What is in Manhattan?”

She can’t help herself. “Pigeons.”

“
Neopovažuj se
,” Věra says.
Don’t you dare.

“Why did you go there?” Jozef says.

“To see a friend.”

“Don’t lie,” Věra says.

“I’m not,” Barbara says.

“You went to see a boy,” Věra says.

Jozef says, “Who is this friend?”

“You don’t know her.”

“She has a name.”

“Frayda.”

“Frayda what.”

“What difference does it make? You don’t know her.”

“Answer your father.”

“Gonshor. Okay? Happy?”

“Frayda Gonshor,” Jozef says. “Where did you meet Frayda Gonshor?”

“Around.”

“Around where.”

“Just around, okay?”

“What kind of friend is she?”

Bina rolls her eyes. Only they would ask a question like that. “A good one.”

“A good friend does not keep you up until the morning,” Věra says.

But they’re wrong. That’s just what a good friend does.

•   •   •

I
T BEGAN
at that first Shabbat dinner.

Barbara arrived early, nervously crushing a bouquet of flowers as she climbed the stairs to the Gonshors’ third-floor walk-up. The door was open and she stepped into silken light and raucous laughter and the soft golden aroma of fresh challah.

And people. So many faces smiling at her, names thrown at her like rice at a wedding. Frayda was the fourth of six. Her older siblings lived in the neighborhood and had brought their own small children, as they did every Friday night. Barbara smiled politely, struggling to memorize the full roster: Elie, Dina, Ruthie, Danny, Benjie, Shoshie, Yitzchak, Menachem, Little Sruli, who plucked the flowers from her hand.

Yonatan, Frayda’s quasi-fiancé, was a sturdy, well-proportioned fellow with a reddish beard and an abstracted mien. He acknowledged Barbara, saying how much he’d heard about her. Then he went back to his book.

Don’t mind him
Frayda said, leading her to a table set with white beeswax candles.

Barbara copied her: gathering the light, covering her eyes. She tripped through the blessing, a syllable at a time. The Gonshors’ unit faced the airshaft, and Barbara could see dozens more flames waving. The building was half-Jewish, Frayda explained—down from what it had once been, as families gained a financial foothold and relocated uptown.

Mrs. Gonshor took her hands.
We’re so happy to meet you.

Three folding tables of unequal height stretched from the kitchen to the front door. The chairs didn’t match; the couch had been
pressed into service. There was no art, just yards of books on sagging shelves. Frayda’s sister Naomi shrieked as her daughter lurched for the window, cracked to relieve the heat pouring from the kitchen, the heady smell of yeast now mingling with chicken soup and garlic and vegetables roasted a deep caramel. Everyone talked at once. Despite the hubbub—because of it—the space felt more expansive than her own home, choked with the unspoken.

Mr. Gonshor clapped his hands, summoning everyone to their seats. Frayda had gotten her height from him. A towering man, six-six, at least, and like his daughter, thin as a thread. He taught social studies at PS 110 but dressed like a Hasid, black hat and satin coat belted at the waist, black beard meticulously barbered.

The singing began—noisy, joyously out of sync. People swayed, people stood still. There seemed to be no rules, yet Barbara felt she was breaking one simply by existing. A little white booklet appeared in front of her. She stared at Hebrew, blocks and blocks of incomprehensible Hebrew. For all she knew, she was holding it upside-down. She felt like a dunce. She wondered how bad it would look if she ran out. She would’ve, except it was raining, and she didn’t know where they’d stashed her coat, and her mother would kill her if she came home without it.

Frayda’s hand slipped into hers, squeezed.
Relax.

They sang another song. Mr. Gonshor blessed each of his children, one by one.

And welcome, Bina.

Nobody had ever addressed her by her Jewish name. She smiled back self-consciously.
Thanks for having me.

Mr. Gonshor recited a blessing and distributed silver thimble cups of wine. The family rose en masse—the sound of chairs scraping the parquet was earsplitting—and filed into the kitchen to wash their
hands at the sink. Scarred pans covered the range, the countertops, the table, the chairs. There was a single dented oven, hardly bigger than a shoebox. That it had produced so much food seemed nothing short of biblical.

Like this
Frayda said, showing her how to wash her hands from the ritual cup.

Back at the table they broke bread, and in short order courses began flying out of the kitchen. Barbara tried to help and was shooed away, leaving her sitting with Mr. Gonshor, who amiably peppered her with questions. What did her parents do? Where did they come from originally? Did they change their names when they emigrated?

The more she answered, the more specific he got.

Stop interrogating her
Mrs. Gonshor said, handing him a platter of potatoes, which he promptly passed along.

I’m not interrogating, I’m making conversation.

The meal was simple, tasty, massive. Five or six conversations ran in parallel, currents weaving and tangling. Barbara’s neck began to hurt from turning to address this person, then that. A fight broke out between two of the youngest children. A peace was brokered with chocolate layer cake.

The racket would have driven her parents up the wall. At home, they could eat an entire meal without so much as a request for salt.

Yonatan got up to bus his plate, leaving his book open at his seat. Barbara stared at it as though it might leap up and bite her.

Frayda pointed to a spot in the text and read:
“These are the generations of Noah. He was perfectly righteous in his generation.”

She slid her finger to a paragraph at the bottom.
“Some of the Rabbis interpret this favorably: if he lived in a righteous generation, he would have been even more righteous. But others see it negatively: only in his evil generation did he stand out.”

She smiled at Barbara.
Context is everything.

A second round of desserts arrived. Barbara noticed that Frayda hadn’t touched her cake. She’d barely eaten, in fact. The same went for Mr. Gonshor. Barbara had to wonder how you got to grow that tall on a diet.

They recited the Grace After Meals, Frayda pointing to the words in the booklet.

When they were done, she kissed the cover.
Would you like to stay awhile? We could learn more.

Thanks
Barbara said.
I don’t want my parents to worry.

Or to call Cindy’s house. She thanked Frayda’s parents and walked to the subway, her mind inflated with sweet wine and filled to capacity with strange, intoxicating words.

•   •   •

S
OON AFTERWARD
the pottery class came to an abrupt end. Sri Sri announced that he was moving to California to be with his (much older, much richer) girlfriend.

Fly free, little chicks
he said.

Barbara traded the hours devoted to working clay for sitting in the Gonshors’ apartment, practicing letters in a composition book.

Bet
looks like a
bayit
, a house.

Yod
is a hand raised up in the air.

Nun
makes a nose.

Hay
, a little man hides inside.

Writing her own name brought her unexpected pleasure, and by spring she was devoting as much energy to learning Hebrew as she was to her coursework.

On days when she’d had enough book learning, she and Frayda would take walks around the Lower East Side, dissecting their
dreams, talking anthropologically about boys. Or they simply sat in the kitchen, Barbara eating cookies, reveling in the presence of people who—gasp—talked! And smiled! Wanting badly to feel like she could give something in return, she loaned Frayda copies of her favorite books.

An inky, creased edition of Kafka’s
Metamorphosis
.

The Bell Jar
, bristling with dog-ears.

Should I be worried?
Frayda asked.

Happiness snuck up on her. Barbara had never doubted the correctness of the school-work-job-money-safety equation. She’d never felt anything missing from her life. Certainly she didn’t see herself on a spiritual quest.

The Gonshors gave her permission to want joy, instead of merely avoiding pain.

It was as though she’d been starving without realizing it.

That evening was Passover. She sat at the Gonshors’ table and sang the Four Questions. It was a role traditionally reserved for the youngest child, and as the family rose to give her a standing ovation, she felt that she had indeed become newborn.

•   •   •

N
OW SHE SAYS
, “They invited me for Seder.”

When her father speaks, his voice has dropped to a low, dangerous place.

“We do not do this.”

“Speak for yourself,” Barbara says.

Her father says nothing.

“It’s my right, Taťka.”

Věra slaps her thighs and whoops. “Listen to this. She has rights.”

“I’m eighteen in a month,” Barbara says. “So, actually, I do.”

“Oh, very good. What a big girl you are. What a
grown-up
woman
.”

“I don’t get what the big deal is.”

“You will go to your room,” Věra says.

“You’ve never given it a chance,” Barbara says. “I love Frayda’s family. I love their life. It’s beautiful.”

“We do not do this,” her father repeats. But the fight has gone out of him; he sounds mangled.

“I’m sorry if it upsets you, Taťka, but it’s what I choose.”

“I will count to ten,” Věra says.

What is she, four years old? She didn’t expect the conversation to go well and it hasn’t. They’re not even trying to understand. She may as well drop the hammer.

“I’ve changed my mind,” she says. “I’m not going to summer school. I’m going to Israel.”

She waits for the explosion that does not come. Her father has turned deep red, a thick cord pulsing in his forehead, as if his skull might cleave in two. Barbara nods at each of them and goes to her room.

•   •   •

T
HE COUNTERATTACK CO
MMENCES
the next morning, Věra leading the charge.

“We forbid it.”

Barbara places her knapsack on the kitchen floor.

“You will take physics, as planned.”

Barbara slides aside the plate of toast and reaches into her knapsack for the box of
matzah
the Gonshors gave her. With her parents watching in stunned silence, she takes out a cracker and puts it on a napkin.

“Can you please pass the marmalade?”

Věra doesn’t know what to do; she hands Barbara the jar.

“Thank you,” Barbara says.

The scrape of the knife against the
matzah
is deafening.

Věra, collecting herself, says, “You will not go to see this person anymore.”

The crunch between Barbara’s teeth is even louder, bombs bursting in her head.

Jozef has his unshaven face buried in his hands and is muttering.

Barbara says, “May I please say something?”

“No,” Věra says.

“Fine.” Barbara finishes her breakfast. She stands up, kisses her father on the crown of his head, and leaves for class.

•   •   •

O
VER TH
E ENSUING MONTH
, her mother’s arguments grow progressively more desperate. Who will pay for this trip? How can Barbara live on her own? Doesn’t she read the news? Israel is a terrible, dangerous place. A war zone.