The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. Michael Chabon
crouch. After that, they would label the casket, following all the complicated regulations and procedures and affixing the elaborate forms necessary for the transshipment of human remains. Forged death certificates and other required papers would have been left for them, properly concealed, in the mortuary’s workroom. After the coffin was prepared and documented, they would load it into a hearse and drive it to the train station. While riding in the back of the hearse, Josef was to climb into the coffin alongside the Golem, pulling shut the gaffed panel after him. At the station, Kornblum would check to see that the coffin appeared sealed and would consign it to the care of the porters, who would load it onto the train. When the coffin arrived in Lithuania, Josef, at his earliest opportunity, would kick aside the gaffed panel, roll free, and discover what fate awaited him on the Baltic shore.
Now that they were confronted with the actual materials of the trick, however—as was so often the case—Kornblum encountered two problems.
“It’s a giant,” Kornblum said, with a shake of his head, speaking in a tense whisper. With his miniature crowbar, he had pried loose the nails along one side of the coffin’s top and lifted the lid on its creaking, galvanized-tin hinges. He stood peering at the pitiable slab of lifeless and innocent clay. “And it’s naked.”
“It is very big.”
“We’ll never get it through the window. And if we do, we’ll never get it dressed.”
“Why do we have to dress it? It has those cloths, the Jewish scarves,” Josef said, pointing to the tallises in which the Golem had been wrapped. They were tattered and stained, and yet gave off no odor of corruption. The only smell Josef could detect arising from the swarthy flesh of the Golem was one too faint to name, acrid and green, that he was only later to identify as the sweet stench, on a summer afternoon in the dog days, of the Moldau. “Aren’t Jews supposed to be buried naked?”
“That is precisely the point,” Kornblum said. He explained that, according to a recent promulgation, it was illegal to transport even a dead Jew out of the country without direct authority of Reichsprotektor von Neurath. “We must practice the tricks of our trade.” He smiled thinly, nodding to the black mortician’s bags. “Rouge his cheeks and lips. Fit that dome of his with a convincing wig. Someone will look inside the coffin, and when he does, we want him to see a dead goyische giant.” He closed his eyes as if envisioning what he wanted the authorities to see, should they order the coffin to be opened. “Preferably in a very nice suit.”
“The most beautiful suits I ever saw,” said Josef, “belonged to a dead giant.”
Kornblum studied him, sensing an implication in the words that he was unable to catch.
“Alois Hora. He was over two meters tall.”
“From the Circus Zeletny?” Kornblum said. “‘The Mountain’?”
“He wore suits made in England, on Savile Row. Enormous things.”
“Yes, yes, I remember,” Kornblum said, nodding. “I used to see him quite often at the Café Continental. Beautiful suits,” he agreed.
“I think—” Josef began. He hesitated. He said, “I know where I can find one.”
It was not at all uncommon in this era for a doctor who treated glandular cases to maintain a wardrobe of wonders, stocked with under-linens the size of horse blankets, homburgs no bigger than berry bowls, and all manner of varied prodigies of haberdashery and the shoemaker’s last. These items, which Josef’s father had acquired or been given over the years, were kept in a cabinet in his office at the hospital, with the laudable but self-defeating intention of preventing their becoming objects of morbid curiosity to his children. No visit to their father at his place of work was ever complete without the boys at least making an attempt to persuade Dr. Kavalier to let them see the belt, fat and coiling as an anaconda, of the giant Vaclav Sroubek, or the digitalis-blossom slippers of tiny Miss Petra Frantisek. But after the doctor had been dismissed from his position at the hospital, along with the rest of the Jews on the faculty, the wardrobe of wonders had come home and its contents, in sealed packing boxes, stuffed into a closet in his study. Josef was certain that he would find some of Alois Hora’s suits among them.
And so, after living for three days in Prague as a shadow, it was as a shadow that he finally went home. It was well past curfew, and the streets were deserted but for a few long, flag-fendered sedans with impenetrable black windows and, once, a lorry loaded with gray-coated boys carrying guns. Josef went slowly and carefully, inserting himself into doorways, ducking behind a parked car or bench when he heard the clank of gears, or when the fork of passing headlights jabbed at the housefronts, the awnings, the cobbles in the street. In his coat pocket, he carried the picks Kornblum had thought he would need for the job, but when Josef got to the service door of the building off the Graben he found that, as was not uncommonly the case, it had been left propped open with a tin can, probably by some housekeeper taking unauthorized leave, or by a vagabond husband.
Josef met no one in the back hall or on the stairs. There was no baby whimpering for a bottle, no faint air of Weber from a late-night radio, no elderly smoker intent on the nightly business of coughing up his lungs. Although the ceiling lights and wall sconces were lit, the collective slumber of the building seemed even more profound than that of Nicholasgasse 26. Josef found this stillness disturbing. He felt the same prickle on his nape, the creeping of his flesh, that he had felt on entering the Golem’s empty room.
As he slunk down the hall, he noticed that someone had discarded a pile of clothes on the carpet outside the door of his family’s home. For a preconscious instant, his heart leaped at the thought that, by some dreamlike means, one of the suits he sought had somehow been abandoned there. Then Josef saw that it was not a mere heap of clothing but one actually inhabited by a body—someone drunk, or passed out, or expired in the hallway. A girl, he thought, one of his mother’s patients. It was rare, but not unheard of, for an analysand, tossed by tides of transference and desublimation, to seek the safety of Dr. Kavalier’s doorstep or, by contrast, inflamed with the special hatred of countertransference, to leave herself there in some desperate condition, as a cruel prank, like a paper sack of dog turds set afire.
But the clothes belonged to Josef himself, and the body inside them was Thomas’s. The boy lay on his side, knees drawn to his chest, head pillowed on an arm that reached toward the door, fingers spread with an air of lingering intention, as if he had fallen asleep with a hand on the doorknob, then subsided to the floor. He had on a pair of trousers, charcoal corduroy, shiny at the knee, and a bulky cable sweater, with a large hole under the arm and a permanent Czechoslovakia-shaped ghost of bicycle grease on the yoke, which Josef knew his brother liked to put on whenever he was feeling ill or friendless. From the collar of the sweater protruded the piped lapels of a pajama top. The cuffs of the pajama bottoms poked out from the legs of the borrowed pants. Thomas’s right cheek was flattened against his outstretched arm, and his breath rattled, regular and clamorous, through his permanently rheumy nose. Josef smiled and started to kneel down beside Thomas to wake him, and tease him, and help him back to bed. Then he remembered that he was not permitted—could not permit himself—to make his presence known. He could not ask Thomas to lie to their parents, nor did he really trust him to do so in any sustained manner. He backed away, trying to think what could have happened and how best to proceed. How had Thomas gotten himself locked out? Was this who had left the service door propped open downstairs? What could have prompted him to risk being out so late when, as everyone knew, a girl in Vinorhady, not much older than Thomas, had just a few weeks before sneaked outside to look for her lost dog and been shot, in a gloomy alley, for violating curfew? There had been official expressions of regret from von Neurath over the incident, but no promise that such a thing would not happen again. If Josef could somehow manage to wake his brother undetected—say by throwing a five-haleru piece at his head from around the corner of the hallway—would Thomas ring to be let in? Or would he be too ashamed, and choose to continue to pass the night in the chilly, dark hall, on the floor? And how would he, Josef, possibly be able to get to the giant’s clothes with his brother lying asleep in the doorway or else with the whole household awakened and in an uproar over the boy’s waywardness?
These speculations