Come Hell or High Water: The Complete Trilogy

by Stephen Morris

  The wooden table she remembered from a school visit to the synagogue was still there, strewn with souvenir yarmulkes and flyers that briefly described the synagogue. There were two women on duty this morning, a pair of stocky matrons. One was sitting behind the desk, taking tickets, while the other stood slightly behind her, arms crossed and eyebrow raised, clearly ready for any visitor who did not behave properly.

  “Good morning,” Magdalena began hopefully, unsure which woman she ought to be addressing. She looked from the sitting woman to the one standing behind, and back to the first.

  “Good morning, dear,” the woman sitting responded. The one standing nodded warily in acknowledgment of the greeting.

  “We don’t get many local visitors,” the sitting woman continued, surprised at Magdalena’s use of local Czech. “Are you collecting information for out-of-town guests that are coming to visit?”

  “No, I’m not collecting information for visitors,” Magdalena answered, relieved that at least one woman seemed to be somewhat interested in speaking with her. “But I am here on a somewhat unusual errand.”

  “Oh, yes? What is that, dear?” the woman sitting leaned forward. The woman behind cocked her head to one side, her attention clearly snagged.

  Magdalena produced her university employee identification card from her purse to show the two guardians of the synagogue. “I work with Professor Hron of the Charles University,” she proceeded to explain. “He specializes in the folklore and legends of old Bohemia?” She intoned the statement as if to ask if they recognized Hron and his position in the university.

  The standing woman, more reticent but domineering, spoke for the first time, as if to a small child, seemingly insulted by Magdalena’s suggestion that she, a synagogue ticket taker, might not know the esteemed professor’s name. “Yes, of course we recognize the name of such a distinguished scholar,” she answered. “How could we not know the name of one who has written so extensively not just of the legends of Old Bohemia but has also been such a friend to our beloved synagogue? How well I remember the lectures he gave some years ago, a series on the figures of Rabbi Judah ben Loew and his creature, the Golem.” She peered down her nose at Magdalena, daring the secretary to attempt to impress her again.

  “Yes, well, I work closely with Professor Hron,” Magdalena reiterated.

  “In what capacity, may I ask?” the older woman asked.

  “As… a research assistant. Senior research assistant.” Magdalena thought the slight exaggeration of her professional relationship to Hron was justified to achieve her goal of accessing the attic. She thrust her university identification card at the woman again.

  “And why does the esteemed professor send his senior research assistant to us today?” the generalisimo of the ticket takers wanted to know. She took the card from Magdalena’s hand and examined it, turning it over before returning it to Magdalena, who replaced it in her purse.

  Magdalena swallowed. This was the part where she needed to be convincing. “Have you heard the reports this morning?” she wanted to know.

  “No,” the woman answered. “What reports?”

  “You have not heard?” demanded Magdalena, using the most overbearing tone she could manage. She thought of herself as Lida, the overbearing senior secretary of the departmental office, and attempted to model both her tone and vocabulary on how she thought Lida would respond to the self-important synagogue worker. “The Vltava is predicted to flood at any time. The record-breaking rainfalls to our south have swollen the tributaries of the Vltava and caused extensive flooding—with landslides—in northern Italy, Austria, and across the south of our own Czech Republic. Priceless artifacts have been lost. Professor Hron is concerned that the floods will reach Prague before adequate precautions can be taken to protect the physical artifacts of our cultural heritage. He is organizing efforts to secure the most valuable of these, given the short time available before the arrival of the floodwaters, and will secure them in the university buildings, high above the likely reach of any flooding. After the flood has passed, of course, the items will be returned to the institutions that have traditionally housed each of them.”

  “I see.” The woman was neither impressed nor persuaded by Magdalena’s performance. “Floods? Rushing toward Prague? It seems unlikely that such reports, if true, would not be more thoroughly broadcast and the custodians of our cultural institutions, such as our important synagogue, properly notified.”

  “Oh, but it is true!” burst out the woman sitting at the desk. “It is, Aviva! I heard on the radio this morning! There have been floods all along the rivers that feed the Vltava!”

  “Hush, Milka! Hush!” The older woman, Aviva, shot a commanding look at her colleague. “I am sure that the authorities would notify the synagogue officials, who would, in turn, notify us if there was any real danger.” She turned her attention back to Magdalena. “If these floods are coming,” she continued, “what is it that you hope to accomplish here? The synagogue itself is one of the most valuable artifacts of our cultural heritage. Surely you have no expectation of taking the synagogue into your university buildings for safekeeping.”

  “No, hardly,” Magdalena hastened to reassure Aviva. “The synagogue is well-built and sturdy. It will survive the onslaught of the floods quite well, I am sure. No, Professor Hron is more concerned about the smaller, more fragile and vulnerable artifacts of our cultural heritage. Such as some of the papers of the synagogue that might be stored here. Records. The moisture could be quite destructive of such things, even if the flood does not actually sweep them away. Personal items of historical value must be preserved. Such as perhaps those of the famous rabbi, Judah ben Loew. In the attic.”

  Aviva gasped and clutched at the back of Milka’s chair to support herself. Magdalena could not have dropped a bigger bombshell if she had asked Aviva to climb onto the roof and jump to the street below.

  “The attic? You hope to gain entrance to, and retrieve items of historical value, from the attic?” Aviva seemed to be trying to compose herself and reassert her dominance of the conversation.

  Milka looked from Aviva to Magdalena and back again. “No one has ever been allowed entrance to the attic,” she whispered.

  “Indeed not.” Aviva pulled herself back together and shook her shoulders, her dress rustling around her. She folded her arms across her front again and clasped her hands. “Never in the history of the synagogue has the attic been opened. Those two foreign professors were here just the other day, hoping to convince us to admit them into the attic. Do you think they succeeded? Of course not! Not since the unfortunate death of Rabbi Judah ben Loew and his internment in our cemetery. The door was locked and sealed on his order and its contents have not been disturbed since.” She took a deep breath. “Not even the Nazis, during their terrible occupation, dared violate the sanctity of our synagogue or attempt to enter the attic.”

  “Yes, yes,” Milka hurried to agree, bobbing her head at Magdalena. Then consternation flashed across her face and she turned back to the woman behind her. “But, remember Aviva, how stories say that rabbinical students broke into the attic in the 1880s because they wanted to revive the Golem? They did, didn’t they?”

  “Nonsense!” barked Aviva. “Those students—if the account is even halfway true—broke into the attic and attempted to revive the Golem, it is true, but they failed. They were inexperienced practitioners of the kabbalah, which the rabbi had taken decades to study. But they did unleash a plague on the city which was only halted when—according to the fabrications told at the time—they packed the Golem’s remains into a coffin and transported it out of Prague for burial in the plague cemetery beyond the city. But,” she concluded grandly, “everyone knows that the Golem’s remains still rest undisturbed in the attic above us, just as the rabbi ordered. Those students only made up the tale of opening the attic to impress those gullible enough to believe them.”

  “Wait!” Magdalena’s head began to swim. “You said two profes
sors were here this week hoping you would admit them to the attic?”

  “Well, yes,” Aviva confirmed. “They came, the foolish foreigners, with no papers or credentials of any kind and expected us to just open the attic and let them in. Just like that! Poof!” She snapped her fingers. “Just on their say-so.”

  “Can you tell me what they looked like?” Magdalena could not help herself from asking. Who had attempted to get into the attic—to retrieve the staff?—before her?

  Aviva thought. “It was a man and a woman. She was very pretty, but spoke Russian. He was handsome but spoke only English, with an accent, a Western accent of some sort. British, perhaps?”

  “Irish!” announced Milka. “The gentleman was Irish!”

  “No, he spoke with an accent, but it was no Irish accent,” said Aviva with a sigh. “But yes, British.”

  Magdalena had met all the visiting academics, and their voices or accents had all fascinated her. But she could recall only one woman who spoke with a Slavic accent, though there were several men with a British lilt to their speech. What had the two who came here wanted with the things in the attic? But she did not have all day to stand there and pursue those thoughts. She could take it up with George later. She needed to focus on getting the staff.

  “Nevertheless,” Magdalena interjected, nervous that the women were taking so much time arguing with each other, “the fact remains that the floods are coming and that valuable, precious artifacts must be retrieved from the attic for safekeeping. Do you have the key?”

  Aviva looked unsure. “Certainly, the artifacts the rabbi left in the attic must be preserved,” she agreed. “They can be in no safer hands than those of the renowned Professor Hron. But we should consult with the current rabbi, with the board that oversees the functioning of the synagogue…”

  “There is no time!” Magdalena leaned forward and slammed her fist on the table, startling the nearby visitors to the synagogue. “We must open the attic and retrieve the items while there is still time to save them, and then I have other precious artifacts to retrieve from other institutions. Some from the collection of medieval art at the St. Agnes cloister,” she added spontaneously, to make the story sound more authentic and the time pressures more demanding. “Surely you must have the key. Or do you wish to consign the treasures to the floodwaters?”

  “Aviva!” whispered Milka. “We can’t let the rabbi’s legacy be carried away by the flood!”

  Aviva looked behind her, and Magdalena noticed for the first time a narrow set of stairs in the corner, leading up into the walls of the building.

  “The stairs to the attic!” Magdalena realized. She stepped around Milka’s table and stood beside Aviva.

  Aviva glanced rapidly from the stairs to Magdalena to Milka and back to the stairs. “We cannot leave the door to the synagogue unattended,” she explained. “And the attic door is old, its hinges ancient and doubtless rusty. The door will be difficult to open. Perhaps impossible, after all this time. You will need help. But we cannot leave our post.”

  “Then give me the key and I will struggle with the door myself,” Magdalena offered. “But, surely, it would be enough if only one of you remained at the synagogue entrance?” she suggested. “It would be an honor if you were to assist me, Aviva, with this task of such historic importance.”

  Aviva considered this possibility. Magdalena could see that it appealed to the other woman.

  “Help me, Aviva!” Magdalena urged again. “But we must move quickly” Aviva slowly pulled a ring of keys from her pocket and held up one, a large and rusty iron key with elaborate decorative scrollwork.

  “This is the original key to the front door of the synagogue,” she said, gesturing with it to the door immediately beside the admission desk. “It is the oldest key we have and we still use it to lock the synagogue door at night. I was told, when I began working here in the synagogue as a young girl, that it was common for the same key to be used to open all the locked doors of a building as old as the Old-New Synagogue.”

  “So this is the key to the attic, then?” Magdalena asked. She reached out to touch it.

  “Yes. It is.” Aviva snatched the key away. “It has to be. I will go with you and mount the stairs to the attic. There must be someone from the synagogue to supervise the evacuation of the precious things from upstairs, someone to make a record of what is removed for safekeeping so we can be sure everything is returned once the danger is past.”

  “Exactly. My thoughts as well,” Magdalena confirmed. “After you, Aviva.” She gestured toward the narrow stairs.

  “Milka, remain here and maintain the security of the entrance,” Aviva instructed.

  “Yes, yes. Of course.” Milka nodded her head eagerly and turned to face the next handful of tourists who were just arriving and presenting their tickets for admission.

  Aviva led Magdalena to the stairs and began to climb. The older, larger woman had to twist herself nearly sideways to make her way up the stairs. Magdalena followed, wishing there had been a handrail to steady herself against. As it was, she let one shoulder brush the rough stonework beside her to keep her balance.

  Shadows quickly enveloped them as they climbed in mutual silence, and Magdalena realized that this area of the synagogue had probably never been modernized with electricity or even gaslights when the rest of the building had been because no one was ever supposed to come up these stairs. The stairs beneath her feet were, however, chipped with age if not use.

  “But they must have been used a lot, at least before the rabbi sealed the attic,” Magdalena muttered. Her foot scraped the edge of the next step and she heard a cascade of pebbles tumble down the stairs behind her. She pulled a flashlight from her bag and held it to illuminate the steps as they climbed.

  The staircase bent back on itself twice so as to take up the least amount of space in the wall as possible. The flashlight, bobbing in Magdalena’s hand, cast shadows that leapt around them. She could see Aviva’s back ahead of her, hear Aviva gasping for breath. The older woman had clearly done nothing that involved such physical exertion in many years. Magdalena only hoped that Aviva would not collapse and fall back onto her. Then, abruptly, Aviva stopped climbing and Magdalena nearly ran into her back. Aviva twisted to one side and Magdalena saw an ancient wooden door.

  Magdalena ran her flashlight along it. The door was just shy of being Magdalena’s height and was nearly square, its top frame slightly rounded. The boards were held together by three bands of iron, studded with roundels the size of her thumbnail. A certificate, its edges frayed and its print faded, hung askew in its frame near the top of the door. There was a brief handwritten notice inscribed on it, in both Czech and Hebrew. Magdalena leaned closer, with some trepidation, to read it.

  “Do not enter,” it proclaimed in neatly written large block letters. “This attic is sealed and all entrance to it forbidden to all who would open this door.” A florid signature was scrawled beneath it, the name identified by more block letters on the next line. “This order given by the chief rabbi of Prague, Judah ben Loew, on this first day of Nisan of the year 5351 since the creation of the world, otherwise known as the 26th of March, 1591.” Magdalena was certain that the Hebrew paragraph that followed repeated the same injunction.

  Magdalena took a deep breath. She peered at the keyhole, halfway down the door on the right-hand side. A large smear of wax, marked with a seal showing a shield and two lions, stretched across the door and the wall just above the lock. But the wax was dry and riddled with a network of cracks, like a frozen pond whose icy surface was about to give way, and its edges were crumbling. A large crack ran down the crevice between the door and the wall. Magdalena ran her fingers along that crack.

  “It has been opened at least once since it was sealed,” she decided. But more often than that? It was impossible to tell.

  Beside her, Aviva seemed as much in awe of the door as Magdalena, but she finally took the ancient key from her pocket and slid it into the keyhole, seemi
ng to hold her breath. The key rattled as she attempted to find its proper place in the rusty workings of the lock. Magdalena was gratified when a distinct click sounded. Aviva pushed the door.

  Nothing. The door did not move. The hinges did not creak. The wood didn’t even sigh as she pressed her palms against it.

  Aviva tested the key in the lock again and the door refused, again, to open.

  Almost without thinking, Magdalena reacted instinctively, as she would have done with a door that had stuck and refused to open for her grandmother and the old woman had called for assistance. Magdalena leaned her shoulder against the door and pressed against it with the full force of her weight.

  Still nothing. Magdalena and Aviva leaned into the door again together, harder this time. There was a scraping sound as the door gave way an inch or two, the bottom of the wood scraping against the stone of the stair’s landing. Magdalena pressed her shoulder against the door again as Aviva pressed her palms against it and pushed. Magdalena felt it straining to resist her. But then the hinges turned with a wrenching squeal, and without warning, the door opened into the attic.

  A thrill of—excitement? fear? both?—ran up her spine and caused the small hairs on the back of her neck to rise. The realization that she would be only the second or third person to enter the attic in more than two hundred years made Magdalena’s skin tingle. She would, in fact, probably be only the second or third person to enter the attic since it had been sealed more than four hundred years ago. What secrets had he hidden here? Was she about to find the remains of his creation, the Golem? She peered through the doorway into the cobwebs and shadows of the attic beyond. Aviva stepped through the door. Magdalena followed.

  It was dark in the attic and difficult to make out what lay within. Magdalena stepped beyond Aviva, swinging her flashlight’s beam around. There seemed to be a great deal of dust—great clouds of which, evidently disturbed by her opening of the door, whirled in the beam of her flashlight—and a disorganized accumulation of debris on the floor, but nothing dangerous. For an instant, the motes that danced in the beam of electric light seemed to gather together in a cloud that—in the dancing shadows of the attic—took on the indistinct shape of an old man whose long beard tumbled from his chin. Magdalena coughed. She took another deep breath and stepped through the door, staying near the walls and avoiding the clutter that seemed to be piled high in the center of the room. The cloud of dust hovered near the pile, as if guarding it.