The Book of Blood and Shadow (31 page)

We had intended to canvass the neighborhood in search of someone who might know more about the golem than we could find in books, hidden knowledge handed down through the generations as myth or bedtime story. But as soon as we crossed Kaprova, the street separating Staré Město from Josefov, our mistake became clear. Maybe this had once been a neighborhood. No more. From what I could tell, it wasn’t anything anymore but a holding pen for tourists whose toddlers toted stuffed golems while their parents dragged them from one pristinely preserved synagogue to the next, occasionally pausing to buy a memorial postcard and candlesticks or pop into the Prada store just down the street.

Flyers slapped to the front of every building noted the times for morning prayers and the provisions for mourners needing access to the cemetery for a private kaddish: Somewhere, hiding from the hordes, someone lived here, worked here, prayed here. It was hard to imagine. According to one of the plaques we passed as we wandered in and out of the old temples, trying to get our bearings, the Nazis had razed and plundered Jewish ghettos all over the Continent, but they’d left this one largely intact, not just preserving its treasures but shipping in abandoned and stolen Jewish artifacts from hundreds of miles away. The idea being that, once the Final Solution came to fruition and Europe had been cleansed
of its so-called scourge, Prague’s Jewish quarter would stand as a museum to the vanished people, the architectural equivalent of a dinosaur skeleton or a wax caveman. It occurred to me that if things had gone according to plan, it probably would have looked a lot like this.

Rabbi Loew—along with every other Prague Jew to have died between the years of 1439 and 1787—was buried in the Old Jewish Cemetery, a small patch of stone and weed that could only be accessed through the Pinkas Synagogue. A sixteenth-century Gothic temple built in tribute to a destroyed German synagogue, it had been rededicated as a shrine to the children of Terezín. The concentration camp on the outskirts of Prague took in more than fifteen thousand children over the course of the war; 132 made it out.

I was only a few steps through the door when a gnarled hand grabbed my shoulder. I froze, choking on a voiceless scream. Nails bit into my arm, digging deep. Next would come the blade, in my back or across my neck, blood staining the ancient floor, a scene the tourists would capture on film to spice up their vacation slide show: Girl stumbles, girl falls, girl bleeds.

I wondered if it would hurt.

“Your friends,” a creaking voice said. I finally shook off my paralysis and ripped myself out of his grip. “For their heads.”

I spun around. The man who’d grabbed me was old and stooped and, even standing straight, couldn’t have been much more than five feet tall. He held a basket of paper head coverings. “Men cannot enter without,” he said.

All my breath came rushing back and now, through sheer relief, I almost did scream. But instead I took two of the small white head coverings, shoved them at Max and Eli, and promised myself I wouldn’t forget again: Bad things happen in the daylight, too.

We entered the sanctuary on a wave of German teenagers,
their teachers barking orders at them as they pretended to read the inscribed names rather than their text messages. Max and Adriane muscled through the crowd and into the cemetery, where Loew’s massive stone tomb was waiting. But I stayed behind for a moment, trapped by the watercolors painted by the young prisoners of Terezín. Some of the children had been talented; most had just been children, drawing lollipop trees and stick-figure people with fat, round heads. There were paintings that could have been hung anywhere—on a kindergarten wall, a refrigerator—seascapes of tropical fish, a giant octopus, a dragon facing off against a golden-haired sorceress, a house in the mountains, all perfectly sweet until you noticed the plaques alongside each picture, inscribed with birth and death dates, nearly all within a decade of each other. Then it was hard not to imagine the squat red and blue house as a distant dream of a safer childhood, the dragon as a Nazi commandant. It was hard not to notice the recurring nightmare captured in one painting after another, the black locomotive puffing smoke into a blacker night, the tracks leading straight to Terezín.

I wondered how many had already lost their parents, and then wondered about the parents who’d lost their children.

I wondered about my own parents, and whether they thought they’d lost me.

And what it would do to them if they did.

“You’re shivering,” Eli said. I jumped at the sound of his voice; I’d forgotten he was there.

“No I’m not.” Yes, I was.

We’d learned about the Holocaust in school, just like we’d learned about the Spanish explorers, the Aztecs, the Emancipation Proclamation, and the Chapman-founding pilgrims. They’d all seemed equally distant—equally unreal. But this building was five hundred years old, on a street whose stones had been laid five hundred years before that, in a city founded in the ninth century.
Seventy years was nothing; seventy years was yesterday. Seventy years ago, this synagogue had been a synagogue, with rabbis and services and bored kids running up and down the aisles, tugging at starchy collars and sneaking outside to get mud on their fancy Shabbat dresses. Kids who were in their eighties now, or who were nowhere. The synagogue was beautiful, all stained glass and vaulted ceilings. You’d have to love God quite a bit to build a place like that just for the privilege of worshipping him. Lot of good it did, I thought. Easier to believe in no God than one incapable of loving you back.

“Let’s get out of here,” I said. There were a hundred thousand bodies buried in the old cemetery, more than had been symbolically interred in the Pinkas’s engraved walls. But cemeteries, at least, I understood.

24

Out in the open air, I could breathe again. The cemetery was bounded by a high stone wall, riven with deep cracks whose elaborate designs looked like they’d been graffitied onto its skin. It was nothing like the cemeteries I was used to, with their neat matrices of polished stones. Here the worn, chipped, dented, tired graves were crammed together, sagging at alarming angles, their inscriptions mostly worn away. A few clusters of three, even four stones leaned on one another, as if the ground beneath them had mercifully shifted to allow for the comfort of contact.

The Germans were still milling about the synagogue, which left us nearly alone with the morning fog settling over the tombs and the moldering bodies piled six deep. We found Max and Adriane near the cemetery’s largest tombstone, watching a lumpen older woman who was using a spindly branch to scrape it clean of moss.

“Where have you been?” Adriane whispered.

“We thought she might know something,” Max said. “But …” He looked at Eli.

“But you realized you need
me
?” Eli said. “The horror.”

“You think she does that for free?” I wondered, watching the woman closely. From this distance, in her shapeless flowered tunic and shoes that bore a suspicious resemblance to bedroom slippers, she looked like anyone’s grandmother—though admittedly not mine, who shopped exclusively at designer outlet stores and had an allergy to the sartorial category containing concepts like aprons and muumuus.

“Weird hobby,” Adriane said, but I wasn’t so sure.

“Maybe she’s related to him,” I said, though I knew it was wishful thinking that any of the long-dead corpses were still remembered, much less mourned, by the living. “And this is some kind of sacred family task handed down through the generations.”

“Guess I shouldn’t complain so much about having to empty the dishwasher,” Adriane said.

Max frowned. “We’re wasting time. That’s Loew’s grave. If she’s related, which I doubt, all the more reason to talk to her.”

The woman didn’t look up as we approached. She just kept at it with her stick, scritch-scratching against the worn stone, one inch of moss at a time.

“S dovolením,”
Eli said softly.
“Dobrý den.”

“Dobrý den,”
the woman muttered, and finally looked up, scowling. “Americans,” she said. It wasn’t a question.

“You speak English?” I asked, wondering how she’d known.

She nodded.

“Can we ask you a question?”

“Find a stick,” she said, in a heavy Czech accent.

“Excuse me?”

“You want my time, you give some of your own to the Maharal.”

We found sticks.

“We’re trying to find out more about the golem.” I dug the edge of my branch into a pocket of hard-packed dirt that girded the two-tailed lion on the face of the tomb.

She snorted. “Always, they’re looking for the golem. You want to find it? Look in your fairy tales and your Hollywood stories. It lives there. Nowhere else.”

“Well, we know the basic story,” I said. “The rabbi made the golem and then it went on a rampage—”

“Lies! This is all they know to do!” Her hands tightened on the stick, and she scraped furiously. Silvery wisps of hair had slipped from the pins holding back her tight bun, softening her face. I tried to see the young woman in the older one, but I couldn’t find her anywhere in the pinched lips and weathered skin. I couldn’t imagine her being anything but what she was. “To say a Jew—the greatest of Jews—helps destroy his people? This way is easier for them. They hide from their guilt.”

“They who?”

“Jewish?” she asked.

“Excuse me?”

“You. Americans. Are you Jewish?”

The others mumbled a no. I didn’t say anything. I didn’t feel Jewish, not here, in the shadow of the temple, with Prague’s chief rabbi decomposing beneath my feet.

But Adriane gave me up. “She is.”

“Sort of,” I said.

“Sort of.” The woman echoed me in a broad American accent. In her voice, my words couldn’t have sounded more stupid. “
Sort of
pregnant.
Sort of
dead.
Sort of
Jewish. These are impossibles.”

“Whatever you say.”

“Jewish is not something you decide,” she said.

“Right,” I said. “So … 
you
decide?”

“He decides.” She didn’t have to look up at the gathering storm clouds for me to know which “he” she meant. “He chooses.”

“Not for me,” I said.

Max cleared his throat. “We don’t mean any disrespect,” he said, apologizing for me like I was his unruly child. “We’re just curious about the rabbi.”

She ignored him. “This city was founded by a woman, did you know that?” she asked me.

I shook my head.

“A witch, they say. The prophetess Libuše, wise and powerful. But Libuše is a woman. It is said she cannot rule without a man. And so she marries Přemysl. He rules the new city of Praha and the men are happy. But Libuše’s maidens miss the old way. They want their power. So they do what men have always done. They raise an army. Libuše’s maidens kill hundreds, thousands, but they cannot win. In the end, they are destroyed. That is Praha, from the very beginning. Prophecy, vengeance, murder, defeat. It was a bloody birth, this city. Its heart is darkness.”

“Maybe it’s time to think about moving,” Adriane said.

“I love Praha,” the woman snapped. “This city is in our blood. As our blood runs in its streets, its rivers.” She stamped the ground. “Its earth. The story of Praha is the story of tragedy. Again we fight, we rise up, and again, again we fall. And always when we fall, the Jews must pay. The ritual, a virgin in the volcano, a sacrifice for the Lord, you know this, yes?” She didn’t wait for an answer. “It is like this, I believe. They throw us into the darkness. Throw Jews out windows. Throw our Torah into a pile of shit. We are
azazel
, you understand?”

“The devil?” Eli said.

“This word you use for
devil
, it means
goat
,” she said. “Your
village, it lays all its sin onto a goat, then kills the goat and—
pffft
.” She whistled through her teeth. “You are cleansed. And the dead goat? After all, it is only a goat.”

“Scapegoat,” I said.

“We’ll pay you a hundred U.S. dollars if you can help us find what we’re looking for,” Max said abruptly. “Otherwise, we’re done here.”

The woman rested her stick on the ground beside the tomb, then kissed her palm and pressed it to the stone. “You need to find the golem so bad because?”

“We’re students,” Eli said. “It’s important for our research.”

She shrugged.

“
Very
important,” Adriane added quickly.

“I do not help liars.”

“She doesn’t know anything,” Max said. “Let’s go.”

I leaned into him. “You’re being rude,” I whispered.

“We don’t have time for this,” he replied, aloud. “Thank you for your help, but we’ll go now.”

“The golem is a story,” the woman said. “It never was. But if what never was, was, you will never find it without my help.”

“What do you know?” Max asked.

“I know enough. Tell me a true story, and I will have one for you.”

Enough. “Fine,” I said. “Truth.”

Eli looked alarmed. “Nora, we can’t—”

“Someone killed my best friend,” I said. “Now they’re trying to kill me. Unless I can find a piece of the golem.”

“These people, they kill for a handful of dirt out of a storybook?”

“No, it makes way more sense than that,” Adriane said. “They kill for a storybook machine—”

“Ignore her,” Max cut in.

“Even for an American, you are very rude,” the woman told him. Eli smothered a laugh. “What machine is this?”

“Lumen Dei,”
Adriane said, drawing out the vowels to give the phrase a ghostly oomph.

The woman stiffened. “Then I cannot help you. But I will take you where you need to go.”

25

Her name was Janika, she told us. She was a trustee for Dobrovolníci židovského města, she told us, the Jewish Community Volunteers trusted with the keys to the sacred kingdom and all its strictly off-limits domains. Which, she told us, meant she could get us into the attic of the Alt-Neu Shul, the forbidden alcove of Prague’s oldest synagogue—where, according to legend, Rabbi Loew had lain the remains of his golem to rest.