End of the Jews (5 page)

“Come on, boy.” Earl beckons with a fist. “You ain't no Maxie Baer. I'll—” But his agenda goes undivulged, interrupted by shouts of “
Dolores
!” and stampeding footsteps on the staircase, and then the room is filling up with men and Charles is pushing through them, striding straight for Tristan, seizing him by the shirt, pinning him against the wall. The back of Tristan's skull thuds into the plaster, and exploding lights spangle his vision. He blinks himself toward clarity, each blink a stroke against a current that wants to pull him out to sea.

As he comes within reach of the shore, Dolores's screams sound in his ears like seagulls' caws. She is flailing at her father's rigid arm, his hand now clamped around the base of Tristan's throat in a near chokehold. The mere anticipation of being strangled robs Tristan of breath. Charles begins to shake him back and forth. Again and again, Tristan's head hammers the plaster. Flakes fall from the wall like snow, dusting the ground.

Tristan stares back at his aggressor bug-eyed, wondering what the fuck Charles thinks is going on and whether he is mad enough to kill, snap Tristan's skinny neck like one of those dangling shtetl-butchered chickens.

“You just calm the hell down,” Charles growls, giving Tristan a final shake and then shoving him against the wall and letting go. “I don't know where the hell you come from, but nobody fights in my house, understand?”

Before Tristan can wheeze a breathless assent, Earl lurches into view behind the host, hand cupped to his nose. “He was tryna put the make on Dee, Charles. If I hadn't got suspicious and come up, who knows what—”

Charles's eyes snap over to Earl, silencing him, then back to Tristan, who opens his mouth to defend himself and finds he cannot muster words. The looped internal protest of his innocence.
I did nothing! I did nothing!
pounds through his head, blending with a deeper, contrary, wholly unexpected rumble of understanding for Charles—sympathy even, because in some strange new crevice of his soul, Tristan understands that he can be guilty of everything and nothing all at once.

Tristan's guts, tormented with alcohol and terror, knot and rebel. He stares into Charles's livid, searing eyes for an instant, and then Tristan buckles and a torrent of vomit gushes out of him and splashes onto Charles and the carpet.

“Goddamn it!” Charles darts back too late, raises his hands to his shoulders, and grimaces down at his ruined trousers. Tristan peers up, doubled over, his hands on his knees, a tendril of drool still connecting him to the reeking puddle. He closes his eyes, takes a deep breath, waits for a blow to explode against his jaw and drop him to the floor.

Instead, there's a commotion, and a commanding male voice says, “Charles. Get ahold of yourself.” Tristan opens his eyes and sees feet, bodies, a man dragging Charles backward by the waist, and then Dolores's stockings planted between himself and her father. Tristan stumbles; the wall catches him and he straightens against it, stomach clenched with nausea.

There, sure enough, stands Dolores, her face streaked with tears. Behind her is Charles, wrapped up in a pair of suit-jacketed arms, violence glowing in his eyes.

“Take it easy,” counsels the man behind him, working to lock his hands around Charles's broad, heaving chest. Not for a second does it look like he is any match for Charles if Charles will not allow himself to be restrained. “Don't do anything stupid.”

Tristan knows the voice. He has been rescued by Peter Pendergast.

“Get off me,” Charles says through his teeth. “This is none of your damn business. You're in my house, Peter, and I'll do what I want with this son of a bitch.” He twists at the waist, shakes free of the professor's arms.

Pendergast takes a step back. Tristan sees a flash of something like fear cross his face, and then the professor regains control.

“I think you ought to let it go, old man.”

“Let it go? Man, where the hell do you get off? He was trying to—” He glances at Dolores, who has turned toward him now to plead with her eyes, and Charles cannot utter the words. He looks the other way. “Trying to—”

“No he wasn't,” Pendergast says, edging forward. “Ask her yourself. They were only talking. You don't have to like it, but it's certainly no grounds for murder.”

“Murder? What the hell you talkin' 'bout, murder?” Charles stares at Pendergast as if the professor is crazy, but Peter doesn't appear to notice.

A tall man emerges from the shadow just outside the threshold. “All right,” he says, brushing past the others in the room until he reaches the host's side. “Come on, Charles. Let's get you into some new clothes, huh?”

“Good idea,” says Pendergast. “And while you do that, I'll get this son of a bitch out of here.”

“You do that.” The tall man reaches for Charles's elbow, and he allows himself to be led away.

“I see you again, your sheeny ass is dead,” calls Earl by way of farewell as he, too, is escorted from the room, flanked by two more men.

Dolores throws a final inscrutable look Tristan's way, then follows the procession, pulling the door shut behind her. Only Tristan and Pendergast remain in the room, the moat of vomit between them.

Pendergast spreads his legs, sweeps back his suit jacket, and drops his hands onto his belt.

“I'm willing to let it go this time, Brodsky. But if you leave my class early again, I'll have no choice but to mark you absent.”

Tristan forces a smile. “Won't happen again,” he promises, and swipes his sleeve across his mouth.

“Good man. Now then. Let's get you out of here, shall we?”

“Shouldn't we clean this up?” The smell of Tristan's own breath makes his eyes water. He stares down at the floor. “We can't just leave it here.”

The professor's forehead wrinkles. “How thoughtful of you. No. Come on. Someone will take care of it.”

Reluctantly, Tristan high-steps the puddle. “Where's Albert?” he asks. “I'd like to say good-bye.”

“This is no time for pleasantries. And anyway, he was embarking on an errand when I arrived. Seems the party had run low on some of his favorite delicacies.” Pendergast studies him. “You keep fast company, Brodsky. Hurry up.”

A minute later, they are standing on the curb. The tonic water Tristan guzzles splashes cold into his empty stomach, powerless to wash the bitterness out of his mouth. Pendergast sucks down another fancy cigarette, blinking up at his smoke as it curls in the beam of the street-lamp, as if enchanted by every single thing that comes out of his mouth.

As soon as he polishes off the drink the professor was thoughtful enough to grab on their way out, Tristan will have to look him in the eye and thank him. The bottle pops off his lips and Tristan takes a deep breath. “I want to—”

“Don't bother.” Pendergast glances out into the darkness from within his shaft of light. “Charles is my friend. I came upstairs to help him, Brodsky, not you.”

Tristan mulls this over, wondering if Pendergast even knows how close Charles came to taking a pop at him, too. “Well, at least now I'll have something to write about,” he offers.

In one incredible motion, Pendergast flicks his cigarette into the shadows and spins on his heel to point the flicking finger at his student. “Quite right. If you want my advice, you'll find someplace quiet and empty your mind into a notebook.”

Tristan feels his chest swell up with hope again. His head throbs harder, not just from the pain but the fresh blood coursing to it.

“Yes, sir. That's just what I was thinking about doing.”

“Good. Keep my name out of it.” Pendergast wags his haircut at the ground. “I am not wholly unimpressed with you, Brodsky. I hope tonight's events have not soured you on…” He pauses, and Tristan hears the professor's lighter, in his pocket, click open and closed. “On adventure.”

Pendergast slides another cigarette from his pack, taps it. The sizzle of a cymbal escapes the house, and both of them look up at it. “I'd better head back in. You'll find your way home, I trust?” Tristan nods. “Of course. Until Tuesday, then.” Pendergast cups his hands, lights his smoke, and strolls back toward the house, untouched by any of this.

Tristan's hand flutters and he remembers something.

“Professor?” Pendergast stops but does not turn around.

“Brodsky.”

“I left my notebook upstairs. By Dolores's bed.”

“One moment.” He lopes up the steps. The building bulges with people, music, laughter, and Tristan thinks of Moses standing on the mountain overlooking the Promised Land, forbidden entry as punishment for his sins. A minute passes, and then a notebook and a pencil sail out of a top-floor window and fall to the ground, paces from Tristan's feet. He picks them up, drifts toward the subway.

For hours he rides, down through Brooklyn and back uptown again, with his pencil clutched and poised over the page. Tristan's brain pulses in its sheath, and his entire throat is tender to the touch, beginning to bruise. It is an act of great willpower to avoid thinking about what his mother will do when she sees him, but Tristan manages. The darkness of the night grows dilute and he stumbles off the train, walks through the silent streets of the neighborhood until he reaches his building. He sits down atop the stoop, wedges himself against a wall, and finds his fatigue burned away, his mind clear, his frustration with himself acute.

There is so much he wants to write, but Tristan does not know what any of it is. He feels as if ghosts or elves or angels are following him, flitting in and out of shadows, cackling, and every time he stops and whirls around, he's too slow and they disappear. The world feels heavy with life, the air thunderstorm-electric with a potency that won't last. He leans against the cold stone and feels the desire to capture everything overtake and erode all he has ever felt—his protector love for Benjamin at its strongest, the most intense, restless, disgusted claustrophobia that's ever gripped him at his parents' dinner table, the lift-and-crush-the-world-and-let-its-juice-gush-down-your-chin rush of elation he's felt at the moments when his brain and body have best served him.

The only thing that has the power to endow existence with meaning is the very game of trying to transcribe it, and nothing has ever sliced through Tristan like not being able to play. He blinks in the dawn light, rubs the goose pimples from his arms, and catches sight of a ghastly future: a lifetime of sitting here, incapable of filling these pages and unable to stop trying, until he is catatonic, frozen on the outside and still burning uselessly within.

CHAPTER
TWO

T
he aria playing on Czechoslovak National Radio is turned up loud enough to dominate the kitchen, where Nina's mother rolls fat sausages in a pan and her father tends to the sizzling eggs, an unlit pipe clamped in his teeth. It is the famous 1982 recording of José Carreras singing
La Bohème
in New York; Nina has heard it at least a dozen times since last year's live broadcast and knows it is supposed to be great, but it doesn't do much for her. Miklos catches his daughter padding into the room, spits the pipe into his palm, and belts a brutal, off-key accompaniment, throwing out his arms as if he's hugging a barrel to his chest. Twelve-year-old Nina giggles.

Her father is a stout, thick-handed man, with a trim brown beard she likes to rub her cheek against. People often say he's full of life, but Nina has never understood the phrase. It makes more sense to say that life is full of him. Wherever he goes, Miklos
presides.
Even at dinner tables not his own, he is seated at the head. Nina watches him solicit opinions and conduct stories with jabs and sweeps of his fork, and waits to return the winks he throws her way.

Her father is frequently furious, but his ire is directed only at phantoms, serves only to delineate the
us
of family and friends from the broad, dull
them
of government officials and corrupt policemen, closed-minded fools and blind lackeys and the majority of Miklos's colleagues in the philosophy department at Univerzita Karlova. Most of the time, when he is angry, he is also very funny.

Today is a day Nina has looked forward to for weeks. She is skipping school and coming to work with her parents. She and her father pass into the school's gated cement courtyard and stop before the enormous fenced-off statue of the university's founder, Emperor Charles IV. He is green with age, severe and bearded, and he stands bearing an outstretched scroll Miklos says symbolizes knowledge. The other hand hovers near the hilt of his sword, as if he'll cut off the head of anyone who fails to accept the proffered wisdom.

They bid the emperor farewell, and Miklos settles Nina at the back of a high-ceilinged classroom musty with the smell of books. From ten to twelve, she watches her father meander back and forth before nine graduate students, seven blanched young men and two mouse-faced women, none of whom ever look up from their gyrating pencils. Nina follows very little of her father's speech, but she observes intently. Even in this austere place, he's unafraid to shoot a few quick winks her way.

Professor Hricek, as the kids call him, is more the man she recognizes during the final hour of class, which begins when he rocks back on his heels, folds his hands before his stomach, and says, “Well, then?” Hands flutter up on willowy arms and Miklos jokes with his brood, draws them into discussion like a set of dinner guests. Nina is sure he knows the answers to the questions they ask, but her father does not give them. Instead, so cleverly that she can hardly bear it, he hints and kneads until the class, and sometimes even the man who asked the question, arrives at an answer. It reminds Nina of playing charades, only with words.

She and her father sit down to lunch in the drafty, spartan faculty mensa, its bronze chandeliers set so near to the ceiling that the light they cast loses its way before reaching the tables. Miklos leans over his tray, smiling in a way she has never seen.

“You want to hear something funny?”

Nina nods, knowing it will not be funny like a joke, but funny in that other way.

“This is the only place in all of Prague where anybody cares about the things we talk about in my classroom.”

She frowns. “Why?”

Miklos shrugs as if it doesn't much matter, but Nina is not fooled. “Most people, they only want to bring home enough food for their families, perhaps a black-market video machine for Christmas. They have enough to think about without really thinking at all. And who can blame them, in an environment like this? Can you imagine, Nina, what it would be like to live in a place where—”

She must look scared or lost or both, because her father waves his hand and drops the subject, whatever it is. He asks her if she wants dessert, gets up without waiting for an answer, and returns with two servings of chocolate pudding. “Sometimes I forget how young you are,” he says, handing her one. “We'll talk about this later, as a family. Let's get you to Abnormal Psych, shall we?”

He hands Nina off to her mother at the lip of a cavernous, tiered lecture hall, so big that Rayna speaks into a microphone. Nina seats herself at the very top, amid students who squirm and whisper like kids at her own school. She understands a lot of what her mother says, follows along as Rayna points out parts of the brain on a slide screen projected behind her. The only questions here are asked by the professor, and they are answered through the consultation of a seating chart, the calling of a surname. Nina decides that when she's old enough, she will choose courses like her father's.

That night, after they have cooked and eaten supper, Rayna brews a pot of tea and turns off the radio. They settle into the living room, three in a row on the overstuffed couch. Nina sits in the middle, hot mug cradled in her hands.

“This is an in-the-house discussion, Nina,” her father says. “Okay?”

She nods, solemn and thrilled. Nobody else she knows has a house in which to keep secrets. All her friends live in apartments or in houses shared between two families, even three—and if Nina understands correctly what she's overheard, her father paid someone a lot of money to keep this house unparceled. It was his grandfather's, and then his mother's.

The list of subjects that can be broached only at home is long, and sometimes confusing, but the main things Nina knows never to tell anyone else, or even mention to her parents in public, are that her father is trying to obtain a travel visa and that her mother, and thus Nina herself, are something called Jewish. Both facts she learned a year ago, when the in-the-house rule was instituted and life started to grow heavy with secrets.

There were once hundreds of thousands of Jews in Czechoslovakia, according to her parents, but most of them were killed, or left before they could be. Today, the number is perhaps as low as three thousand, or as high as ten. It is hard to know, because being Jewish is still dangerous, illegal, something to conceal—but then again, Nina tells herself, practically everything is something to conceal. Many Jews don't even know that they are Jewish; their parents spared them the knowledge that they were different, vulnerable, in an attempt to remove them from peril or to forget the fact themselves.

It's a religion?
Nina asked when they first told her, unclear on what Jews were besides hidden, persecuted.

Yes,
her mother said.
Well, partly.

But we're intellectuals. Aren't we?

Her father laughed.
You can be an intellectual and also a Jew, Nina.

Being Jewish isn't like other religions,
Rayna explained.
You don't have to believe in anything—I've never believed. You're Jewish by birth, like being Czech. If your mother is a Jew, you're one.

Do I have to do anything?

Not unless you want to,
Miklos said.
I can try to get you some books that explain more, if you like.

Nina shrugged. Books were his answer to everything.
What about Deda? Is he one?

Her mother's father lives in Bratislava. Every time they see him, he tells Nina the same gentle jokes, and she pretends they're new. When he exhausts his repertoire, Deda goes quiet, smacks his lips together, stares at nothing she can see. The skin beneath his eyes sags; fascinating bushels of hair sprout from the valleys of his ears. Once, she asked him why he was so sad. Deda looked over Nina's shoulder, at her mother, and didn't answer.

No,
Rayna said.
Your grandmother was Jewish. Her name was Eliska.
She got up from her seat on the couch, squatted before Nina.
She died giving birth to me, as you know. When the war started, a year later, Deda sent my sister and me to live in an Anglican convent, to hide us from the Germans. He was afraid that even though he wasn't Jewish, they would find out we were. And take us away.

How long did you live there? Was it scary?

Until I was six. It was very scary. But Lenka was with me, and Deda would come visit.
Rayna smiled.
The nuns were not very nice, but I don't want to think about that now. And you don't have to be scared, Nina. All that was a long time ago. It will never happen again.

A few weeks later, Miklos brought her a book, wrapped in the ubiquitous brown paper that concealed any item one might wish to hide from the public eye, anything bought on the black or gray or pink market, anything purchased with foreign currency or subversive intent or from a vendor whose storefront was unmarked and locked from the inside—all in all, about half the items tucked under the arms of people scurrying through the Staromák at any given moment.

It was called
The Story of the Jewish People,
and Nina opened it reluctantly. It looked babyish, with its cover illustration of rosy-cheeked children sitting before a row of burning candles in a holder. She flipped through it, growing more and more perplexed. Jews lit candles every Friday night and prayed. They didn't eat pork. They read Hebrew, believed in God, maintained that somebody named Moses split open the sea and led them out of Egypt when they were slaves, then went up a mountain and came down with laws that God wrote down on huge pieces of stone—although in the illustration, Moses was carrying one in each hand, so it must have been a very light kind of stone, something they had only in the desert outside Egypt.

It was like one long fairy tale, with holidays and rules added, and not even a good one at that; the collection of Greek myths her father had given her the month before put it to shame. Nina hid the book deep in her closet, so none of her friends would find it. Most of the time, she forgot she was Jewish. When she remembered, it filled Nina with fear, and she had to convince herself that it was probably one of those things adults made a big deal about for no reason, like skateboarding.

Tonight's in-the-house talk, though, has nothing to do with religion or heritage or whatever. Miklos has finally succeeded in securing travel papers, and he will be leaving next week to attend a philosophy of language conference in San Francisco, California.

It is easy enough to visit one of the neighboring Communist countries, Yugoslavia or Poland, but if you want to venture outside Eastern Europe, you have to be everything her father is: well educated, prosperous, entrenched. Even so, getting this visa has taken him a year. Owning a home was what finally did it. The government, he tells Nina with a bitter laugh, considers property as great an incentive to return as family.

The three of them take the bus to the airport together, Nina making use of the long gray ride to recite, one last time, the list of toys and clothes she wants her father to bring back for her. They walk him to his gate, hug and kiss him good-bye, stand before a huge window and watch the plane taxi, ascend, vanish. Nina misses her father pleasantly for two weeks. Then the whispering begins.

“I have a surprise for you,” Rayna confides, tucking her into bed. “We're going to go to San Francisco and meet Daddy. We might go very soon, so I want you to say your good-byes to the house, okay my love?” Nina gasps, kicks her heels against the mattress in delight, then sits up and clutches at her mother's arm. Questions tumble from her lips, each one erasing the last: “Will we stay in a hotel with a swimming pool?” “What if my English is no good and everyone laughs at me?” “How far is San Francisco from Disneyland?” Before Nina can get any answers, her exhilaration proves too much for her small body to sustain and she falls giddily asleep.

The next night, because Nina insists on hearing all of it again, Rayna renews the promise of America. She does so every day for the next month, and Nina bounds through life in a constant state of near delirium, bursting with anticipation and the burden of keeping the trip a secret as instructed.

“Today?” she asks each morning—in English, all she speaks at home now—and each morning her mother, a coffee mug hiding her mouth, head-shakes a no.

“Tomorrow?”

“I don't know, baby.”

Every evening, Nina practices filling her small suitcase, meticulous and artful in her conservation of space. The thought of any of her stuffed animals missing out on the trip distresses her, but Nina considers herself too old to sidestep the dilemma by asking if there is any extra room in her mother's luggage.

It is during a packing session that Rayna tells her they aren't going to be leaving as soon as she thought.

“There have been complications,” she says in a voice taut as piano wire, and bends at the knees, palms resting on the trim thighs of her olive slacks, to come face-to-face with Nina. “Did you tell anyone that we were going?”

“No,” Nina whispers. “Of course not.” Her mother continues to look at her, so Nina shakes her head from side to side.

“You're sure? Not even Beta?”

“I kept the secret, Mama.”

Rayna drops her head and rubs her eyes, then squeezes Nina's hand. “I'm sorry, child. I believe you.”

“What happened?”

Her mother stands. “Someone has informed on us.”

“Who?” Nina asks, aghast. She knows, from listening to her parents and their friends, that informing is a terrible thing, the reason one must always be careful around whom one speaks. Anyone could be an agent. Miklos sometimes made light of it, carrying on in that grand, farcical way of his, which, if it went on long enough, made Rayna stop laughing, reducing her mouth to a thin line.
Your auntie,
he'd boom, pinching Nina on the nose and moving past her through the room,
she's been eyeing your teddy bear collection. Your best friend, he follows you home from the pub to see whether you talk to anyone seditious. The old grandmama at the bakery is bugging your bread.
By this point, his audience of dinner guests would be awash in pained hysterics, and Miklos would draw himself up for the denouement:
For if we help the government to rob our comrades of their freedom, it is sure to reward us with our own!