The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay

“Don’t get snot on my sweater,” Josef said, knocking his brother’s arm to one side.

“You left it.”

“I might send for it.”

“Why aren’t you gone?” Thomas said. “What happened to your ship?”

“There have been difficulties. But I should be on my way tonight. You mustn’t tell Mother and Father that you saw me.”

“You aren’t going to see them?”

The question, the plaintive rasp in Thomas’s voice as he asked it, pained Josef. He shook his head. “I just had to dash back here to get something.”

“Dash back from where?”

Josef ignored the question. “Is everything still here?”

“Except for some clothes, and some kitchen things. And my tennis racket. And my butterflies. And your wireless.” This was a twenty-tube set, built into a kind of heavy valise of oiled pine, that Josef had constructed from parts, amateur radio having succeeded illusion and preceded modern art in the cycle of Josef’s passions, as Houdini and then Marconi had given way to Paul Klee and Josef’s enrollment at the Academy of Fine Arts. “Mother carried it on her lap in the tram. She said listening to it was like listening to your voice, and she would rather have your voice to remember you than your photograph, even.”

“And then she said that I never photograph well, anyway.”

“Yes, she did, as a matter of fact. The wagon is coming here tomorrow morning for the rest of our things. I’m going to ride with the driver. I’m going to hold the reins. What is it you need? What did you come back for?”

“Wait here,” Josef said. He had already revealed too much; Kornblum was going to be very displeased.

He went down the hall to their father’s study, checking to make sure that Thomas did not follow, and doing his best to ignore the piled crates, the open doors that ought at this hour to have been long shut, the rolled carpets, the forlorn knocking of his shoe heels along the bare wooden floors. In his father’s office, the desk and bookcases had been wrapped in quilted blankets and tied with leather straps, the pictures and curtains taken down. The boxes that contained the uncanny clothing of endocrine freaks had been dragged from the closet and stacked, conveniently, just by the door. Each bore a pasted-on label, carefully printed in his father’s strong, regular hand, that gave a precise accounting of the contents of the crate:

DRESSES (5)—MARTINKA

HAT (STRAW)—ROTHMAN

CHRISTENING GOWN—SROUBEK

For some reason, the sight of these labels touched Josef. The writing was as legible as if it had been typeset, each letter shod and gloved with serifs, the parentheses neatly crimped, the wavy hyphens like stylized bolts of lightning. The labels had been lettered lovingly; his father had always expressed that emotion best through troubling with details. In this fatherly taking of pains—in this stubbornness, persistence, orderliness, patience, and calm—Josef had always taken comfort. Here Dr. Kavalier seemed to have composed, on his crates of strange mementos, a series of messages in the very alphabet of imperturbability itself. The labels seemed evidence of all the qualities his father and family were going to require to survive the ordeal to which Josef was abandoning them. With his father in charge, the Kavaliers and the Katzes would doubtless manage to form one of those rare households in which decency and order prevailed. With patience and calm, persistence and stoicism, good handwriting and careful labeling, they would meet persecution, indignity, and hardship head-on.

But then, staring at the label on one crate, which read

SWORD-CANE—DLUBECK

SHOE TREE—HORA

SUITS (3)—HORA

ASSORTED HANDKERCHIEFS (6)—HORA

Josef felt a bloom of dread in his belly, and all at once he was certain that it was not going to matter one iota how his father and the others behaved. Orderly or chaotic, well inventoried and civil or jumbled and squabbling, the Jews of Prague were dust on the boots of the Germans, to be whisked off with an indiscriminate broom. Stoicism and an eye for detail would avail them nothing. In later years, when he remembered this moment, Josef would be tempted to think that he had suffered a premonition, looking at those mucilage-caked labels, of the horror to come. At the time it was a simpler matter. The hair stood up on the back of his neck with a prickling discharge of ions. His heart pulsed in the hollow of his throat as if someone had pressed there with a thumb. And he felt, for an instant, that he was admiring the penmanship of someone who had died.

“What’s that?” Thomas said, when Josef returned to the parlor with one of Hora’s extra-large garment bags slung over his shoulder. “What happened? What’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” said Josef. “Look, Thomas, I have to go. I’m sorry.”

“I know.” Thomas sounded almost irritated. He sat down cross-legged on the floor. “I’m going to spend the night.”

“No, Thomas, I don’t think—”

“You don’t get to say,” Thomas said. “You aren’t here anymore, remember?”

The words echoed Kornblum’s sound advice, but somehow they chilled Josef. He could not shake the feeling—reportedly common among ghosts—that it was not he but those he haunted whose lives were devoid of matter, sense, future.

“Perhaps you’re right,” he said after a moment. “You oughtn’t to be out in the streets at night, anyway. It’s too dangerous.”

A hand on each of Thomas’s shoulders, Josef steered his brother back to the room they had shared for the last eleven years. With some blankets and a slipless pillow that he found in a trunk, he made up a bed on the floor. Then he dug around in some other crates until he found an old children’s alarm clock, a bear’s face eared with a pair of brass bells, which he wound and set for five-thirty.

“You have to be back there by six,” he said, “or they’ll miss you.”

Thomas nodded and climbed between the blankets of the makeshift bed. “I wish I could go with you,” he said.

“I know,” Josef said. He brushed the hair from Thomas’s forehead. “So do I. But you’ll be joining me soon enough.”

“Do you promise?”

“I will make sure of it,” Josef said. “I won’t rest until I’m meeting your ship in the harbor of New York City.”

“On that island they have,” Thomas said, his eyelids fluttering. “With the Statue of Liberation.”

“I promise,” Josef said.

“Swear.”

“I swear.”

“Swear by the River Styx.”

“I swear it,” Josef said, “by the River Styx.”

Then he leaned down and, to the surprise of both of them, kissed his brother on the lips. It was the first such kiss between them since the younger had been an infant and the elder a doting boy in knee pants.

“Goodbye, Josef,” said Thomas.

When Josef returned to Nicholasgasse, he found that Kornblum had, with typical resourcefulness, solved the problem of the Golem’s extrication. Into the thin panel of gypsum that had been used to fill the door frame at the time when the Golem was installed, Kornblum, employing some unspeakable implement of the mortuary trade, had cut a rectangle, at floor level, just large enough to accommodate the casket end-on. The obverse of the gypsum panel, out in the hall, was covered in the faded Jugendstil paper, a pattern of tall interlocking poppies, that decorated all the hallways of the building. Kornblum had been careful to cut through this thin outer hide on only three of his rectangle’s four sides, leaving at its top a hinge of intact wallpaper. Thus he had formed a serviceable trapdoor.

“What if someone notices?” Josef said after he had finished inspecting Kornblum’s work.

This gave rise to another of Kornblum’s impromptu and slightly cynical maxims. “People notice only what you tell them to notice,” he said. “And then only if you remind them.”

They dressed the Golem in the suit that had belonged to the giant Alois Hora. This was hard work, as the Golem was relatively inflexible. It was not as rigid as one might have imagined, given its nature and composition. Its cold clay flesh seemed to give slightly under the pressure of fingertips, and a narrow range of motion, perhaps the faintest memory of play, inhered in the elbow of the right arm, the arm it would have used, as the legend records, to touch the mezuzah on its maker’s doorway every evening when it returned from its labors, bringing its Scripture-kissed fingers to its lips. The Golem’s knees and ankles, however, were more or less petrified. Furthermore, its hands and feet were poorly proportioned, as is often the case with the work of amateur artists, and much too large for its body. The enormous feet got snagged in the trouser legs, so that getting the pants on was particularly difficult. Finally, Josef had to reach into the coffin and grasp the Golem around the waist, elevating its lower body several inches, before Kornblum could tug the trousers over the feet, up the legs, and around the Golem’s rather sizable buttocks. They had decided not to bother with underwear, but for the sake of anatomical verisimilitude—in a display of the thoroughness that had characterized his career on the stage—Kornblum tore one of the old tallises in two (kissing it first), gave a series of twists to one of the halves, and tucked the resulting artifact up between the Golem’s legs, into the crotch, where there was only a smooth void of clay.

“Maybe it was supposed to be a female,” Josef suggested as he watched Kornblum zip the Golem’s fly.