The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. Michael Chabon
Kornblum regretted having corrupted his young pupil. He had been frequenting prostitutes for decades and held liberal views on the utility and good sense of sexual commerce. Their berths had been more comfortable and far more fragrant than either would have found in Kornblum’s cramped room, with its single cot and its clanging pipes. Nevertheless, he was embarrassed, and from the guilty arc of Josef’s shoulders and the evasiveness of his gaze, Kornblum inferred that the young man felt the same.
The apartment’s kitchen was redolent of good coffee and eau de lilas. Wan October sunshine came through the curtain on the window and worked a needlepoint of shadow across the clean pine surface of the table. Trudi was an admirable girl, and the ancient, abused hinges of Kornblum’s battered frame seemed to have regained an elastic hum in the embrace of his own partner, Madame Willi—the wielder of the gun.
“Good morning,” Kornblum muttered.
Josef blushed deeply. He opened his mouth to speak, but a spasm of coughing seemed to seize him, and his reply was broken and scattered on the air. They had wasted a night on pleasure at a time when so much seemed to depend on haste and self-sacrifice.
Moral discomfort notwithstanding, it was from Trudi that Josef derived a valuable piece of information.
“She heard some kids talking,” he told Kornblum after the girl, leaning down to plant a brief, coffee-scented kiss on Josef’s cheek, had padded out of the kitchen and down the hall, to regain her disorderly bed. “There is a window in which no one ever sees a face.”
“The children,” Kornblum said, with a curt shake of his head. “Of course.” He looked disgusted with himself for having neglected this obvious source of surprising information. “On what floor is this mysterious window?”
“She didn’t know.”
“On which side of the building?”
“Again, she didn’t know. I thought we could find a child and ask it.”
Kornblum gave his head a shake. He took another puff on his Letka, tapped it, turned it over, studied the tiny airplane symbol that was printed on the paper. Abruptly, he stood up and started to go through the kitchen drawers, working his way around the cabinets until he came up with a pair of scissors. He carried the scissors into the gilded parlor, where he began opening and closing cabinets. With gentle, precise movements, he went through the drawers of an ornate sideboard in the dining room. At last, in a table in the front hall, he found a box of notepaper, heavy sheets of rag tinted a soft robin’s-egg blue. He returned to the kitchen with paper and scissors and sat down again.
“We tell the people we forgot something,” he said, folding a sheet of the stationery in half and cutting it, without hesitation, his hand steady and sure. With a half-dozen strokes, he had snipped the three-pointed outline of a paper boat, the sort that children fold from pieces of newspaper. “We say they have to put one of these in every window. To show they have been counted.”
“A boat,” Josef said. “A boat?”
“Not a boat,” Kornblum said. He put the scissors down, opened the cropped piece of paper at the center pleat, and held up a small blue Star of David.
Josef shivered at the sight of it, chilled by the plausibility of this imaginary directive. “They won’t do it,” he said, watching as Kornblum pressed the little star against the kitchen windowpane. “They won’t comply.”
“I would like to hope that you’re right, young man,” Kornblum said. “But we very much need you to be wrong.”
Within two hours, every household in the building had spangled its windows in blue. By means of this base stratagem, the room that contained the Golem of Prague was rediscovered. It was on the top floor of Nicholasgasse 26, at the back; its lone window overlooked the rear courtyard. A generation of children at play had, like sky-gazing shepherds in ancient fields, perfected a natural history of the windows that looked down like stars upon them; in its perpetual vacancy, this window, like a retrograde planetoid, had attracted attention and fired imaginations. It also turned out to be the only simple means of ingress for the old escape artist and his protégé. There was, or rather there had once been, a doorway, but it had been plastered and papered over, no doubt at the time of the Golem’s installment in the room. Since the roof was easily accessible via the main stair, Kornblum felt that it would attract less notice if they lowered themselves, under the cover of darkness, on ropes and came in through the window than if they tried to cut their way in through the door.
Once again they returned to the building after midnight—the third night of Josef’s shadow-existence in the city. This time they came dressed in somber suits and derby hats, carrying vaguely medical black bags, all supplied by a member of the secret circle who ran a mortuary. In this funereal garb, Josef lowered himself, hand under leather-gloved hand, down the rope to the ledge of the Golem’s window. He dropped much faster than he intended, nearly to the level of the window on the floor below, then managed to arrest his fall with a sudden jerk that seemed to wrench his shoulder from its socket. He looked up and, in the gloom, could just distinguish the outline of Kornblum’s head, the expression as unreadable as the fists clutching the other end of the rope. Josef let out a soft sigh between his clenched teeth and pulled himself back up to the Golem’s window.
It was latched, but Kornblum had provided him with a length of stout wire. Josef dangled, ankles snaked around the end of the rope, clinging to it with one hand while, with the other, he jabbed the wire up into the gap between the upper, outer sash and the lower, inner one. His cheek scraped against brick, his shoulder burned, but Josef’s only thought was a prayer that this time he should not fail. Finally, just as the pain in his shoulder joint was beginning to intrude on the purity of his desperation, Josef succeeded in popping the latch. He fingered the lower sash, eased it up, and swung himself into the room. He stood panting, working his shoulder in circles. A moment later, there was a creaking of rope or old bones, a soft gasp, and then Kornblum’s long narrow legs kicked in through the open window. The magician turned on his torch and scanned the room until he found a lightbulb socket, dangling on a looped cord from the ceiling. He bent to reach into his mortician’s bag, took out a lightbulb, and handed it to Josef, who went up on tiptoe to screw it in.
The casket in which the Golem of Prague had been laid was the simple pine box prescribed by Jewish law, but wide as a door and long enough to hold two adolescent boys head to toe. It rested across the backs of a pair of stout sawhorses in the center of an empty room. After more than thirty years, the floor of the Golem’s room looked new; free of dust, glossy, and smooth. The white paint on the walls was spotless and still carried a sting of fresh emulsion. Hitherto, Josef had been inclined to discount the weirdness in Kornblum’s plan of escape, but now, in the presence of this enormous coffin, in this timeless room, he felt an uneasy prickling creep across his neck and shoulders. Kornblum, too, approached the casket with visible diffidence, extending toward its rough pine lid a hand that hesitated a moment before touching. Cautiously he circled the casket, feeling out the nail heads, counting them, inspecting their condition and the condition of the hinges, and of the screws that held the hinges in place.
“All right,” he said softly, with a nod, clearly trying to hearten himself as much as Josef. “Let us continue with the remainder of the plan.”
The remainder of Kornblum’s plan, at whose midpoint they had now arrived, was this:
First, using the ropes, they would convey the casket out of the window, onto the roof, and thence, posing as undertakers, down the stairs and out of the building. At the funeral home, in a room that had been reserved for them, they would prepare the Golem for shipment by rail to Lithuania. They would begin by gaffing the casket, which involved drawing the nails from one side and replacing them with nails that had been trimmed short, leaving a nub just long enough to fix the gaffed side to the rest of the box. That way, when the time came, Josef would be able, without much difficulty, to kick his way out. Applying the sacred principle of misdirection, they would next equip the coffin with an “inspection panel,” making a cut across its lid about a third of the way from the end that held the head and equipping this upper third with a latch, so that it could, like the top half of a Dutch door, be opened separately