TWO
Stepping into the lobby of the Continental Hotel, it seemed to Julia and Anna that every doctor in the world was there, squeezed tightly into one compact voice, jabbering thunderously a multitude of different languages all at the same time. What was being said didn’t make any sense, but no one really cared. It was being there and living such a moment that mattered. All had come to inhale until they were giddy the fresh air of freedom in Prague, and to sip like fine wine the reawakening of the city’s rich culture, so long trampled into silence by the Nazis and then by the Communist Party.
Julia eagerly sought out among the mingling throng the one familiar face that had lured her back to Prague after so many years of a self-imposed exile. Would she recognize her cousin Abram? During the war years, he had been transported first to Treblinka and then to Auschwitz by the Nazis, along with her mother and father and everyone else in their family living in Prague. He was twenty-eight then, healthy and strong bodied, ready to be exploited in heavy labor by the Germans for three years. With the Russian army nearing the death camp, many guards began murdering the remaining Jews as they prepared to abandon the camp. To escape the slaughter, Abram crawled beneath a decaying pile of dead bodies, laying face down to shield his nose from the rotting stench, and waited until the last truckload of guards had left. In time, Abram’s mind would heal from the atrocities he had witnessed, but not his soul. Like the few Jews who had survived, there was nothing waiting for him after returning to Prague but memories. All his family had vanished like pollen in the wind, never to be seen again. Still, until the Velvet Revolution finally set him free, he was destined to endure a second lifetime of brutal treatment, this time under the Communist regime. Now bearing only a faint image of the man he once was, broken in spirit and health with lungs ravaged by tuberculosis, finding Julia in America restored a wondrous hope he had once harbored a long time ago.
Abram’s surprising phone call had left Julia dazed and gasping for air. Fifty-two years had passed since she left her father standing alone at Hlavni station, their eyes drenched in sadness, each looking to the other one last time as the train pulled slowly away, carrying Hiram and her and scores of young Czech children to Rotterdam. All were dead in her family, Julia had been told at the war’s end. Even aunts, uncles, and cousins had perished in the death camps. No one was left. That Abram was alive was a gift that only a loving God could give her now, she believed.
Julia finally spotted Abram resting with his back against a long wall near the elevators.
“Abram, Abram, here!” she cried hoarsely, trying to make her voice heard above the rising shouts of the happy throng reverberating around the lobby.
Her voice reached Abram. Turning to his left, he saw Julia trying to push her way through the jungle-like mass of jousting bodies blocking her path to where he was standing. Waving to her, Abram slowly limped towards her with support of a wooden cane.
“Abram, my sweet cousin,” Julia screamed, before rushing to him and collapsing in his arms, crying with joy.
Minutes passed before either one would let the other go, and then only because of the attention they were receiving from the curious crowd of strangers pushing and moving around them. At times they could hardly stand with the weight of the growing crowd shoving against them in the small hotel lobby.
Wiping her eyes, Julia found her voice again.
“How long has it been, Abram?”
“I count fifty-two—you left in 1939,” Abram replied, bracing himself once more against the wall. “Walls and chairs are my good friends now; it is difficult for me to stand long.”
“Yes, fifty-two years, almost a lifetime.”
Abram turned to Anna, who was standing slightly behind Julia, saying nothing, but smiling at her mother and Abram.
“You are Anna, I know. You look like your grandmother Anka. She was as soft and gentle as God’s hands, you know,” Abram said, taking hold of Anna’s arm first, then embracing her. “She was my favorite aunt. We will talk some more later so that I may know you better, but now I’m afraid I must be rude. There is much I need to talk with your mother about in private. You understand, don’t you?”
Anna nodded. No explanation was needed. Looking at her mother and Abram, it was easy to sense the crushing emptiness of the moment that overshadowed their joyous reunion. There were but a few tomorrows left for both of them. Like so many families swept cruelly aside by history, nothing was left of theirs now except the two of them, with each knowing they probably would never see the other again. In her letters, Julia had pleaded with Abram after his return to Prague from Russia to quickly come to America, but his answer was always the same: “God kept me alive through the dark valley of death, so that I might die in Prague, as history intended it to be for my family. There is no other place for me.”
Julia never questioned his reasoning. He had endured the horrors of the Nazi death camps for three years, and then forty-seven more years of hard labor in the terrible gulags in Russia, when he should have been a free man. He simply disappeared from the streets in Prague one day, not to be seen again for all those years. His political fights against the Communist Party in Prague before the war had not been forgotten by the party after it seized power under the Russian umbrella. Now death, like the dropping sands in an hourglass, was nothing more than a passing moment to him. His broken and aged body held little hope for life much longer; so he would wait here, in his beloved Prague, for that which was sure to come and find him. Nothing mattered now except his dear Julia’s existence and presence before him, and that he would share with no one, not even Anna.
After a short period of silence, Abram spoke directly to Julia. “We must go someplace to talk, where our voices can be heard. There is a small coffee house across the square. Not too exciting like the University Café in the old days, but there is some intimacy to be gained there.”
“Not now, Abram,” Julia said. “I need to rest a while. I will meet you for dinner there at seven.”
Saying nothing, Abram nodded, turned and shuffled back into the crowd towards a side exit door from the lobby. Anna found the whole scene unnerving. Two people, long dead to the other, feeling the strange rush of family love again. Yet she knew Abram and her mother shared a common history she was not a part of, at least for the moment. Her time of sharing would come in the days ahead, listening to her mother’s final stories before she closed her eyes for the last time.
Later, as Julia prepared to leave their hotel room to meet Abram, she took Anna in her arms, holding her tightly. “There’s so much to talk about with Abram. It will take time. He was with Papa and Mama at Auschwitz. I have never known the moment they died nor how they went—he will tell me.”
“I’ll wait up for you. The stories will be there for you to tell during the long journey home,” Anna said, gently wiping away the small tears forming in her mother’s eyes.
“You must go to the Charles Bridge while I am gone. I never tired of doing so. Especially when the night was very dark with only the stars to keep you company. I could feel the winds of a thousand years of history spinning across my face,” Julia whispered to Anna as she shut the door behind her.
Anna did go, but while the evening was still light. Picking her way through the labyrinth of streets between the Old Town square and the river, she moved in awe across the magnificent ancient bridge. Before her lay thirty religious statues, fifteen along each side of the bridge, that through the ages had watched over the transit of millions. Anna knew nothing about the Christian saints given a statue there, except one, St. John of Nepomuk, and then only from the wonderful stories Julia had told her when she was a child. It was magical for those who rubbed his face, which she had done a thousand times and more. And the good St. John, Julia would sing out with a thespian flair while Anna clapped her hands with anticipation, was thrown, bound and gagged but very much alive, from the bridge by a jealous King Wenceslas because he refused to tell all the queen had revealed to him in confession. At that very moment, Juli
a would shout gleefully, dancing and flipping the lights on and off in the room and sweeping her arms upward, a cluster of bright shinning stars suddenly appeared over the spot where he was drowned, lighting the way for him to heaven. That is why he is magical.
Anna gently touched and caressed the burnished statue several times with both hands, trying to feel her mother’s fantasies when she had stood before St. John as a child, and then again as an adult swept up in the rapture of her love for Erich. They would both come to the bridge together to listen to the voices of the river below and then to touch the shiny brass face of Nepomuk and make sacred wishes as they did at Rabbi Loew’s grave. God would never distinguish between a Jew and a Christian where love was involved, they knew. But as the cry against the Jews grew louder in Prague with the approaching insanity, they stopped coming for fear of being watched by the authorities.
With evening shadows falling, and not wishing to navigate the winding streets leading to the hotel in the dark, Anna started back across the bridge. Nearing the end, she stopped for a brief moment in front of a statue of the Crucifixion. She knew little about the Christian religion, and even less about her own. She had not been to the synagogue in Franklin in over two years, though the rabbi would drop by to visit. Julia had stopped going altogether until she received the surprising letter from Abram.
As Anna stood in front of the Crucifixion studying the agony in Jesus’s face, she felt the presence of someone standing near her and moved away instinctively.
“I’m sorry if I startled you. But I was watching how gently you touched St. John’s face, and for a minute I thought you were someone I knew, but I am mistaken.”
Anna looked at the voice’s author.
“It is beautiful, isn’t it—the art?” he said, looking carefully at Anna’s face.
“Not really. I find it sad.”
“That is a strange thing to say. Most people, I think, would find it a magnificent work of art. It dates back to 1648, you know.”
“The sadness is in his death, not the art.”
“That is even stranger. Christians would say there is a glory in his death,” the stranger said, puzzled by Anna’s words.
“I wouldn’t know since I’m not a Christian, and a glorious death doesn’t interest me. What does, though, is the crazy idea that someone would take it upon himself to die for all the bad things I’m responsible for. That makes no sense at all,” Anna replied and started to turn away, not wishing to talk further with the man.
“You are an atheist then?”
Anna studied the man’s face a second before responding, wondering how she stumbled into such an insane dialogue five thousand miles from home.
“No, I am a Jew—an agnostic Jew, if there is such a thing,” she said, turning her back to him and walking away.
“Are there many Jews like you?” were the last words Anna heard as she quickened her pace, leaving the stranger alone by the Crucifixion.
When she reached the end of the bridge, Anna looked back and saw the man still standing beside the statue looking at her. How she would describe the strange man to Julia was her only conscious thought as she quickly started up Karlova towards the Old Town square. There was nothing about him that merited remembering except his eyes. Not his eyes, actually, but the sockets where they should be. It was as if they had been hollowed out and brushed over with a dull grayness that one only sees in death. He wasn’t blind but he might as well have been. And she was haunted by those eyes.
Back in the safety of her hotel room, Anna sat down on the edge of the bed to gather her thoughts. More angry than upset that she would stumble into such an unguarded conversation with a total stranger, Anna took pen and paper from her briefcase and wrote down, sentence by sentence, what had been said. Sin and forgiveness were inseparable emotions private to the soul. This much was true, she knew, whether you were a Jew or a Christian. But having someone pick up the tab for the mess you’ve made, made life too easy. It was like letting the neighbors pile all their dirty dishes in your sink, if you’re the chosen one to wash them. However, dying to get them clean made no sense at all. And maybe, just maybe, your dirty dishes shouldn’t be washed at all, but handed back to you.
Anna put down the pen, crumbled up the paper and threw it in the wastebasket next to her bed. The episode was too brief and silly to let it bother her as it had. She was a cardiologist, not a theologian, and trying to heal a sick heart was all she knew and cared about. Healing the soul belonged to God, and He’d had thousands of years to get it done right, if He existed at all. Tired and exhausted from the long trip to Prague, Anna lay back on the bed, drifting off for what she had imagined would be a short nap before taking a late supper. Five hours later she awoke, startled by Julia knocking over a chair while trying to undress in the dark.
“Mother?”
“Sorry, thought I could make it without awakening you.”
“I need to get up anyway. I haven’t had dinner, and I am really quite hungry.”
“Supper? You’re way into the early morning. It’s after one.”
Anna looked at her mother, puzzled by her long absence.
“You’re too old to be a night owl, especially with your cousin. Where have you been?”
“Warped in time, I think, walking with Abram everywhere our youth had taken us. There wasn’t much left to see, though. Mostly our imagination of what had passed,” Julia said, her voice pitched in obvious sadness.
Anna summoned her mother to sit by her on the bed and began to gently massage her neck.
“A stroll in one’s memory is sometimes better than the real thing. It shuts out the ugly,” she said.
“I suppose. But the passion is missed. There were distant feelings, though, and anger.”
“Anger?”
“Yes, at what once was and could have been, had things been different. Even fifty years is not enough to heal a broken heart, Anna.”
“Did Abram speak of Erich?”
“Not really. I listened for hours to his stories about Auschwitz and the Russian prisons he was lost in for years. He should write a book,” Julia replied, getting up from Anna’s bed to check the safety latch on the hotel door.
“He told stories that I didn’t want to hear anymore, that was all,” she said, walking back to her bed instead of Anna’s.
“About Grandpapa?”
“Yes, and more. We will talk again in the morning, but now you must go to bed hungry,” Julia said teasingly, as if she were punishing Anna for missing dinner.
Then, turning the small bed lamp off, she added in a hushed tone, “We should go home tomorrow, not Friday, I am very tired. Abram will never leave Prague, even after he dies, so we said our last goodbyes, just as we did fifty-two years ago. We can make arrangements in the morning.” These were the last words Anna heard before Julia closed her eyes to sleep.
Shared stories would fill their time on the long trip back to America, but the sudden cancellation of an exciting trip and medical conference bothered Anna and made no sense. She had traveled five thousand miles to see a graveyard where her mother’s ashes were to be surreptitiously buried, meandered halfway across the legendary Charles Bridge, only to engage in a disquieting conversation with a total stranger over the crucifixion of Jesus, and now she was to go home. Perhaps tomorrow there will be answers, not stories, Anna mused as she found her own precious sleep.
Morning came too soon for Anna and Julia. Each would have been content to let the morning pass by unnoticed. However, Julia’s abrupt altering of her long-awaited return to Prague was fixed in stone the minute Anna suggested giving the day to the old city and then taking an early morning flight home the following day.
“There is nothing more for me here, nothing,” Julia said in an unusually sad voice, one that Anna had seldom heard from her mother.
Julia tossed her small luggage piece on the bed, which had remained unpacked, and began putting her toiletries in a small case she had used for thirty years. Stopping, she turn
ed to Anna, who was still lying in bed. “You will have mountains of time to take in Prague when you return with my ashes, but we must hurry now. There is a train leaving for Rotterdam in less than an hour.”
“A train to Rotterdam? I don’t understand. Our return flight doesn’t leave until six in the evening,” Anna said, clearly puzzled by what was taking place.
“This train crosses Germany over the same route that carried my brother and me and five hundred young children to safety only a few days before Hitler occupied Prague. That should be reason enough,” Julia responded, showing impatience with Anna’s questions.
“You are trying to reach back over fifty years, Mother, and—”
“Stop! You have no right to judge me, not now, or ever. Only those who were there at that moment can judge me, and they never will.”
With this outburst from Julia, Anna quickly got out of bed, standing for a brief second looking at her mother, stunned by the stinging discipline in her voice. She had suddenly become a stranger to her.
Finishing packing, Julia said nothing, and moved quickly to the door, looking at Anna as if she wanted to apologize for her sudden outburst. All she could offer was a forced smile, which to Anna was worse than no apology.
“Coffee and pastries are waiting for you in the lobby,” she mumbled, stepping into the hallway, leaving Anna alone to her thoughts about what had taken place.
Fifteen minutes later, they were on their way to the train station, riding in polite silence like two strangers forced to share the same taxicab. Once there, Anna’s offer to carry her mother’s small luggage piece was quietly ignored as they boarded the train and found their compartment. Even though Julia still seemed angry, her stories would begin again in time, Anna knew. They always did when traveling.
Julia leaned back against the cushioned seat just as the train’s movements began to accelerate, realizing she was leaving behind for the second time her beloved Prague. One’s remembrance of suffering can invade the mind with tiny flashes of fantasy, uncertain in their truths, yet bold and absolute in their pronouncements. Some opt to pass through unnoticed or ignored except by a few still-frightened souls. For Julia in leaving Prague the first time, having the frightened soul of a young woman was never an option, only the anguish of realizing she probably would never see her family again. Like the present moment, the train had pulled out slowly and then rapidly accelerated away from the conquered city, carrying five hundred children and young adults across Nazi Germany into another world they had never known—but one that would let them live. From the moment she and Hiram boarded the train, they were pushed into service as caretakers for scores of hysterical children doubly frightened by separation from family and the scowling brown-shirted Nazi guards standing at both ends of the car. Patience and compassion for crying and unruly children, an ancient virtue of the German family, was absent. These were Jews, though, which required no excuses from the guards. Twelve hours later, Julia and Hiram and the trainload of children refugees from Prague crossed into the Netherlands and safety.
Julia closed her eyes for a second, listening to the monotonous clicking of the train’s wheels passing over the connecting rails, keeping time like the rhythmical ticking of her father’s treasured metronome. Though she was only five at the time, Julia remembered now, faintly, her father’s madness one day over her inability to keep time with even the simplest of musical beats. Every day thereafter, except on the Sabbath, she was required to sit alone in the parlor facing the ticking metronome for one hour, nothing less, counting and tapping her feet in time with it. For two months the torture ran unchecked until the instrument somehow miraculously disappeared, never to be found again, at least by her father. Julia believed the good Rabbi Loew had sent his golem to steal it away when everyone was sleeping, having visited his grave every day for a week with silent prayers for deliverance. But her mother knew differently, and would only smile at Julia’s golem stories. When the day came for Julia to leave Prague, she had carefully wrapped the metronome, placing it in the small suitcase Julia would be taking to England. Two days later, as Julia settled into her temporary quarters outside London with the other refugees, the sudden discovery of her childhood metronome brought loud shrieks of tearful joy that would overshadow her sadness for days to come. Later Julia would find the note from her mother hidden beneath a pink sweater she had secretly knitted for her coming birthday. It was then that Julia believed they would all be together again soon—a belief that quickly shattered into a thousand pieces five months later when German troops stormed into Poland. World War II had begun, spinning the many roads Julia would travel. The metronome would follow her wherever she went and, in the end, come to rest on the mantle in her home in America, there to teach Anna, as it had her, how to keep time in a crazy world.
Julia opened her eyes and looked out at the passing scenery as the train began slowing down for Chemnitz, Germany, the first stop since leaving Prague. Nothing was familiar, nothing to help her capture the same moment fifty-two years back. There were no green-clad German soldiers crowding the passenger platforms this time, gawking arrogantly at the packed railcars of terrified Jewish children, only small groups of casually dressed people, summer tourists mostly, waiting to move on. Each station, and the land in between, seemed the same to Julia. It was as if she had never passed this way before.
“This is a terrible mistake,” she said, glancing at Anna sitting across the compartment from her.
“A mistake?”
“Yes, a damn foolish one, riding this train trying to live in the past as if it were here in front of me.”
“And it’s not?” Anna asked gently, sensing the disappointment in her mother’s voice.
“No, and it never will be. Your mind may tease you some, letting you feel a distant warmth or horror for a moment, but never the completeness of the experience itself.”
“You must be right, Mother, because the world’s full of middle-aged people emulating and dressing and running around like twenty-year-olds and asking their therapists if that’s alright,” Anna said, laughing, trying to lighten the moment for Julia, who immediately began laughing with her.
Happy that the coolness between them had warmed, Anna began reading the International Herald Tribune again, which she had picked up before leaving the hotel. Folding over the front page, she stopped suddenly, focusing her eyes first on a small photograph at the bottom of the page before reading the few lines next to it.
“What a strange thing,” she blurted out. “A grotesque naked body of an old man was found late last night sprawled across Rabbi Loew’s grave in the Old Jewish Cemetery. And—”
“What are you saying?”
“The story says the man lying across Rabbi Loew’s grave was naked and wrinkled with age as an old rhino, his eyes staring at nothing, much like the piles of dead waiting for the furnaces at Auschwitz. In one hand was a small crumpled pink name tag, the kind babies used to wear in a hospital.”
“How did he die, does it say?”
“No, but the indications are it was suicide,” Anna said, handing the paper to Julia and pointing to the picture of the dead man.
“He looks so much like the man I talked with briefly on Charles Bridge.”
“What man? You’re not making any sense.”
Anna then told Julia about her encounter with the strange man on the bridge by the Crucifixion and the insaneness of their dialogue. It was as if their meeting was a prelude to what was to come later. That is, if he was the same man. She couldn’t be sure, Anna told Julia, but the lifeless eyes were the same.
“That is a good story, much better than the ones I’ve told you lately. We must talk about it some more after I have rested,” Julia said, leaning back against the cushion again and closing her eyes.
It was a good story, but it bothered Anna that the dead man might very well be the stranger on the bridge. She really couldn’t tell for sure, but the closer she looked at his face the more certain she became. The article said
little about him, though, not even how he died or who he was. If he was the stranger, it would be foolish for her to think their brief conversation earlier on Charles Bridge was connected in some way to his death. Yet, if suicide was the cause of the man’s death, her sharp words criticizing the atonement could have pushed him over the edge. It doesn’t take much, when someone is looking for an excuse to die.
Looking at Julia sleeping, Anna believed one year, maybe two, was all that was left of her mother’s incredible journey in this world. Maybe it will continue in the next one, if there is one. It would be a shame to deprive God of such an experience. Feeling drowsy herself, Anna stretched out on the long compartment seat. The one story she had expected to hear from Julia this morning remained untold: last night’s visit with Abram. Why she had been purposely excluded by Abram still puzzled her. The deaths of her grandfather and grandmother in the gas chambers meant nothing to her, other than the sadness Julia might still feel about their loss, or the way they died. She didn’t know them, or any of the other six million Jews that were murdered. They were Jews and she was, too, and that was the closest she would ever be to them. Julia had told her beautiful stories about her mother and father, and Anna knew she would have loved them dearly had she known them. And she would have loved Erich, too—more so, in fact, if he were her father. When the stories began again on the long flight home, which they would, she would ask Julia about Abram and Erich, but mostly about Erich.
***
A Perfect Madness Page 2