The Golem of Paris

by Jonathan Kellerman

  At best, two broken ankles.

  Then he recalled a second stairwell in the northeastern corner. He’d passed it while looking for a way out.

  Getting there meant traversing the left tine of the balcony’s U. He sighted along its length. The torque in the floor was pronounced.

  A loud scrape, sourceless. Vibrations.

  He edged forward, brailling the carpet, hunting for soft spots. Through the walls came a taunting, hungry rumble.

  He was a quarter of the way there and it was getting harder to crawl, his body listing to the right in accordance with the steepening floor.

  Wind slapped the building, plaster flakes showering his sweat-drenched neck.

  He slid along. Halfway.

  The balcony had begun to wag. Then bounce. Like a gently activated diving board. Picking up momentum, a deadly rhythm, prologue to collapse.

  The worst urge rose: run.

  He crawled. The scar on his lip had of course chosen that moment to begin itching ferociously. He didn’t dare reach for it; that was extraneous movement, and the balcony was swaying and cackling, a suicidal hag, threatening to give way.

  He reached the landing.

  Not in the clear yet. There were steps to be conquered. He went backward, treading delicately and briefly. The carpet was loose, the braces torn out. Down, down he went, until he reached the blessed horizontal and giddily broke for the sanctuary aisle. He could see the vestibule doors. He was going to make it. He had to hope the guy had not yet come back. But he was going to make it outside.

  A wretched whine from above, and he instinctively froze and looked up and felt an onrush of air and a cobweb tendril kissing his cheek, mild forerunner to the chandelier plummeting toward him.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  PRAGUE

  OCTOBER 29, 1982

  Bina says, as they bundle her into the car, “I am an American.”

  She feels ashamed, exploiting her status in front of Ota Wichs, who lacks recourse.

  Hrubý tells the driver to go.

  “Where are you taking us?” she asks.

  Wichs stares through the gap between his knees.

  “This is outrageous.” She’s making a poor show of indignation. Not her forte. Bad service, even in the cruddiest of restaurants, prompted her mother to pitch a grade-A fit. Don’t tell me quiet, this is their job. The wanton sense of self always embarrassed Bina.

  “I de—” Her throat catches. “—demand to speak to the American embassy.”

  “It will rain tomorrow,” Hrubý says to the driver, who nods.

  “Did you hear me?”

  Wichs squeezes her wrist to shut her up.

  • • •

  AT THE INTERROGATION CENTER, they are placed in adjacent rooms. Bina’s leg is cuffed to a table. She sits there, listening to the screams boring through cinder block. Clamps her ears, brings her elbows together, prays.

  A song of ascents: from out of the depths I cry to you, God.

  The noise is horrific; the quiet, worse.

  Hrubý enters, accompanied by two men carrying black rubber truncheons. They station themselves in the corners, half-faced in ghastly relief.

  “I am an American citizen,” she says in Czech. “I want to speak to my embassy.”

  Hrubý opens his briefcase and lays out a series of photographs as though dealing a hand of solitaire. Blurry, taken from a distance, they show her tugging at her head scarf as she enters the Alt-Neu Synagogue. A boy’s shape intrudes into the frame: little Peter Wichs.

  Hrubý says, “You are an agent of the world Zionist conspiracy.”

  Bina laughs. She knows she shouldn’t, but it’s so absurd.

  “You deny it?”

  “Of course I do.”

  One of the guards crosses his arms. The other lightly swings his truncheon by its strap. A black drop wells at its tip and breaks free, spreading red on the concrete.

  Bina says, “You can’t do this.”

  Hrubý says, “Put her in the bear.”

  They wrap her head-to-toe in chains, carry her, thrashing, down the corridor.

  The cell is morbidly overcrowded. Yet the other women manage to skitter wide. The guards set her, still chained, on the ground. All night long, no one comes near, and eventually she gives up struggling and lays her head down and weeps.

  • • •

  “GOOD MORNING.”

  She has spent the last hour listening to Ota Wichs scream; swallowing snot to balm her bleeding throat, rehearsing four words, shuffling the stresses.

  She says, “I have a son.”

  “What a coincidence,” Hrubý says. “So do I.”

  It appears that he was right about the weather. His jacket sleeve is dark with rain as he lays out the photographs, along with a typed confession for her to sign.

  “You are an agent of the world Zionist conspiracy. You have come to Czechoslovakia under the guise of participating in a cultural mission. You have consulted with counterrevolutionary elements in order to obtain classified information and disseminate misinformation.”

  “Please,” she says. “I’m sure we can get this cleared up.”

  Hrubý presses his middle finger to the photo, obliterating her face. “This is you.”

  “Yes, but—”

  “Then it is perfectly clear.”

  “No. No.”

  He frowns, as though it pains him to point out that she has contradicted herself.

  “I went into the synagogue. We all went. It was part of our tour.”

  “You went again. While your group remained at the National Day celebration, you slipped away to engage in counterrevolutionary activities.”

  “Mr. Hrubý. Please, let me talk to Ota, we can explain—”

  “The person you speak of is a traitor to the State.”

  “He’s—no. How can you . . . All he talked about was how lucky he is to live here.”

  “And you believed him?”

  She almost steps right into it.

  Yes: a lie.

  No: an indictment.

  She says, “I swear to you, we didn’t discuss politics.”

  “What did you do?”

  “Nothing. We did nothing.”

  “I understand,” Hrubý says. He takes a cigarette from a dented pack and lights up. “You are lonely,” he says, exhaling smoke. “Far from home.”

  He offers her the pack. She doesn’t move, so he tucks it away. “He was married to a Jewess, once, but now he comes home to a gentile woman. He longs for a taste of the familiar.”

  The guards smirk.

  “It’s not a crime to fall in love,” Hrubý says.

  She can’t begin to imagine what this man thinks he knows about love. “No.”

  “Then what did you do, in the synagogue?”

  “We made pottery,” she says.

  “Pottery.”

  “For the synagogue. Ask him. He’ll say the same thing.”

  “There is nothing wrong with art,” Hrubý says. “Sneaking off, on the other hand, late at night—it’s what a criminal does. You don’t look like a criminal.”

  “I’m not.”

  “So then tell me what you did. I am the liaison to the Jewish community, I’m acquainted with your customs. For example, perhaps you made a Sabbath candlestick.”

  “Yes, exactly.”

  “No. We searched the building. There was no candlestick.”

  “We left it in the attic.”

  “We searched the attic,” Hrubý says. “We found a pair of jars, not quite dry. Why did you make them?”

  He answers for her: “You made them to smuggle out information.”

  “That’s insane.”

  “Is it?”

  “It’s—I mean, it’s ridicul
ous. It’s clay. It’s delicate.”

  “Wrap it carefully, smile at the customs officers, ‘Please, expensive, handle with care,’ and they wave you along.”

  “I just . . . I don’t know what to tell you, other than it’s nonsense.”

  “What is the real explanation?” says Hrubý.

  “. . . spices. Spice jars.”

  “For the havdalah ceremony,” he says.

  She nods eagerly.

  “Ah. But your companion indicated otherwise.”

  Her stomach drops. “What did he say?”

  White wisps curl from Hrubý’s nostrils as he gazes at her.

  “Whatever he told you, you can believe him,” she says.

  Hrubý laughs. “He told me an old story,” he says. “About a monster. I learned it in school. It’s an idiotic myth. Our modern schools don’t teach it anymore.”

  He slides the confession toward her.

  “I don’t understand,” she says. “Can’t you just sign it for me and be done with it?”

  “That would be dishonest,” he says.

  After a beat, she picks up the paper.

  On 25 October 1982, I, Bina Lev, an agent of the United States and Israel, acting under instructions from the CIA and the Mossad, entered the ČSR under false pretenses

  “If I sign,” she says. “What will happen?”

  He raises his hands, miming freedom.

  “And Ota?”

  An identical gesture, a secondary meaning: who knows?

  “Promise me you’ll let him go.”

  Hrubý takes a final drag, stubs his cigarette out on the table, leaving a black smudge on the steel. “The person you speak of,” he says, rubbing at the stain with the flat of his thumb, “is a traitor to the State.”

  Bina puts out her hands to be cuffed.

  • • •

  THE NEXT DAY she waits for the screaming to begin.

  There is only a chilling silence.

  “Good morning.”

  The photos, the confession, the pen.

  “Where’s Ota?” she says.

  “You are an agent of the world Zionist—”

  “What have you done to him?”

  “The world Zionist—”

  “Where is he.”

  Hrubý takes out a cigarette.

  With a shriek, she sweeps the table clean, pen clattering, papers slowly drifting.

  Hrubý sighs and waves the guards forward.

  • • •

  TIME BEGINS TO LOOP.

  “You are an agent—”

  And she resists, but with waning vigor. Yes, she is an American, yes, they know. So what? They bear her no malice; there is no malice, none whatsoever; there is a nationwide shortage of malice, of any authentic emotion; there is nothing but an erosive apathy, gritty and mucoid and oozing, a net of un-rules that binds them one and all, prisoner and guard alike. You cannot hate a machine for doing its job. The longer they detain her, the longer they must continue to detain her. Her punishment has become its own justification, and hope, once plucked a feather at a time, is torn out in handfuls.

  • • •

  SHE WILL SIGN.

  What else can she do? She’ll sign. Nothing left to lose. No point worth proving and no way of proving it.

  It is the morning of the nth day. The guards arrive to collect her and she rolls over docilely. They pick her up and carry her past the interrogation room, down the hall and outside, to a loading dock, where an ambulance awaits.

  The sight of pure sky briefly stuns her. Then she grasps that this is different, that the difference is danger, and she reverts to kicking, screaming, calling for her country, her husband, for Wichs.

  They gag her, hood her, strap her in, drive over rutted streets. She is carried and seated, the hood snatched away, the gag removed, and she beholds a faceless room, she might as well have gone nowhere.

  Sitting across from her is not Hrubý but a doughy man in a white lab coat, notepad at the ready. On his left index finger, he wears a huge, crude ring made of black metal. He taps it against the table as he scans the file in his lap.

  “I have been reviewing your case,” he says. “You admit to entering a restricted area, yet deny engaging in counterrevolutionary activity. Rather, you claim that you were participating in an esoteric ritual, seeking contact with an inanimate creature called ‘golem.’ Am I pronouncing that correctly?”

  She curls on the chair, shaking.

  “Very well. According to your statement, a member of the local Jewish community requested that you fashion a jar capable of containing this creature. For reasons that are not wholly clear to me, you judge yourself uniquely suited to this task.”

  He peers over the page at her. “Stop me if you feel I am misrepresenting you.”

  She can’t remember. She’s said so many things. Anything to end this nightmare.

  “One imagines that one has heard most of what one will hear at this stage of one’s career. But this is a delusion I have never encountered. Usually people like to puff themselves up. Apply a bit of historical shine. Jesus, or the Czar. Interesting, as well, that you have displaced the subject of the delusion from your own person onto an imaginary object, as though some part of you recognizes that your beliefs cannot be true. In rejecting the falsehood, you project it outward, thereby ‘creating’ an independent entity.”

  He shakes his head. “A golem . . . Fascinating. I’m grateful to Hrubý for bringing it to my attention.”

  He studies her. “Do you have any idea what I’m saying? I was told you speak Czech. My English is regretfully limited. I’m working on it, though. Nothing to say? No comment whatsoever? All right, let us continue, shall we . . .”

  His Czech is perfectly correct, unwieldy in its formality, an overstarched shirt.

  “Additionally, you have on multiple occasions expressed opinions critical of the socialist system. For example, you said—this was on the second of November—‘You’re a liar. You are all liars, your whole world is a lie.’”

  “No,” she whispers.

  He stops reading. “No what?”

  “It’s not true.”

  “Which part? That you said it? Or that you meant it? Or perhaps you maintain that I am a liar—”

  “No.”

  “—we are all liars, the system is false. Excuse me, though, please: excuse me. I have it here. You said it. Other statements you made convey much the same idea, so let us agree that I am not twisting your words. We must agree that, at one point, at least, you held that position. And this idea is irrefutable proof of madness, for the principles of Marxism-Leninism are grounded in scientific fact. They have been empirically validated. To deny them is by definition a denial of reality.”

  “You’re right.”

  The man smiles. “Is that what you think?”

  “Yes. Yes. Yes.”

  “But I have pages”—he parades them in front of her—“pages and pages of evidence to the contrary.”

  “I, I, I’ve changed my mind.”

  “Mm.” He writes in his pad. “And may I ask how that change came about?”

  “Time,” she says, “to think it over.”

  “And are there other things you’ve changed your mind about?”

  “. . . everything.”

  “I see.” He puts down the pad, crosses his legs high, hugs his knee. “Can’t you see how unhealthy that is, though? To swap your opinions for new ones so easily? It’s a sign that your psyche is unstable. It’s typical of what we observe in Western patients. You are addicted to choice. You turn this way, that way. You grasp at the shiny ring. The self is never permitted to firm up and thus fails to integrate a sense of purpose or duty.”

  He reaches under the table to depress a hidden button.

  “I understand
it’s a popular legend around these parts, the golem. Personally, I had never heard of it, although my assistant said his mother told it to him when he was a boy.” He resumes writing. “What a concept. Life from nothing. I can appreciate the appeal. What storyteller wouldn’t? What scientist? Myths have their place.”

  The door opens and a young man enters the room.

  He is a giant.

  Slavic cheekbones dotted with acne, his close-cropped hair colorless in defiance of nature, as though he has gotten a terrible fright and gone white overnight. He wears green rubber gloves. His is the shorter coat of an orderly. On his spindly frame, it hits six inches above the waist.

  “Da, Doktor Tremsin?”

  The doctor puts an emphatic period on his sentence and flips the notepad shut. “Take the patient to room nine to begin immediate treatment.”

  • • •

  “MY PRIMARY PASSION,” Tremsin says, “is the relationship between brain chemistry and truth. What is the physical mechanism for deception? Can we locate it in space? In time?”

  A steel bracket, a quarter sphere like an orange slice sucked to the peel, is latched across her head. A second bracket secures her chin.

  “To understand these processes is of the utmost importance.”

  The gurney has been partially raised, the wheels locked. Leather straps fix her limbs; a wide leather belt across her waist, pliable from countless bucklings and unbucklings, straining and sweating, blood.

  “A pill that opens the innermost chambers of the human heart . . . You might call it the Holy Grail.”

  The tall orderly has left, and now Tremsin stands at the sink, twisting at his ring.

  It won’t come off. He spits on his finger and it slides loose. He sets it on the counter with a clack, turns on the water, and begins lavishly soaping his hands.

  “I’ll be honest: at first, I was not terribly thrilled at the notion of coming to Czechoslovakia. The most exciting work is being done back home. Already I had found success far beyond what we had achieved with sodium pentothal, which, frankly, I’ve never trusted.”

  Tremsin wrings his hands out, opens a plywood cabinet, finds a needle and a syringe. “Do you have any idea how difficult it is to find a halfway decent bathhouse in Prague? I’ll tell you. It’s not difficult at all. It’s impossible. There are none.”