by Pete Hamill
And while Michael washed the hall, his mother was sweeping the apartment, straightening up, changing the bedsheets and pillowcases, washing underwear by hand in the sink, and all the while listening to Martin Block on the staticky old radio. Usually with the door open. Music made the work easier for Michael, smoother somehow, a pleasure, the mop moving to the rhythms of a dance band, his body bending and twisting, his skin beaded with sweat on the coldest days. The static didn’t matter. He hummed along with Benny Goodman and Glenn Miller, sang the words with Bing Crosby, Buddy Clark, and Frank Sinatra. It was like being in a movie, where people always had music in their lives. Music came from the other apartments too—opera music from Mr. Ventriglio, classical music from Mrs. Krauze—and sometimes Michael would wonder again what Jewish music sounded like, what songs the rabbi would sing when he was alone, what songs he had heard while dancing with his wife, long ago in Prague.
9
The rabbi was cleaning the stove, scrubbing hard with a rough cloth. While he did this, he murmured a litany of his jeweled new English words: stove, cleaning, teapot, cleanser, oven, range, jet, matches, with Michael occasionally correcting his accent. There were now scraps of paper Scotch-taped around the room, naming each object in English: door, table, sink, wall, bookcase, with the Yiddish word written underneath in English letters. Tir, tish, vashtish, vant, bikhershank. They were there for Michael. Occasionally the rabbi would stop in midsentence and point at a door and Michael would shout back: Tir! Or he’d touch the low ceiling and Michael would bark: Sofit! Their lessons were continuous and practical, with an undertone of magic; like magicians, they were showing each other that nothing was what it seemed to be, that one name for a thing might be hiding another name. A secret name.
One afternoon, Michael squatted down and eased a tall leather-bound book from the bottom shelf of the bookcase. He opened it and saw an illustration of a huge, looming castle, its spires rising into fog. It looked like the place where Dracula lived, in the movie that had sent Michael running for the sunshine one Saturday afternoon from the slithery darkness of the Venus.
“Is this Prague?” he asked, turning the open book to the rabbi. The words were all in Hebrew.
The rabbi slipped his glasses to the tip of his nose.
“Yes,” he said. “Prague.”
He looked at the drawing, then leaned closer.
“That is St. Vitus Cathedral, in Hradany,” he said. “The Castle.”
“Man, it’s scary-looking.”
“Yes.”
“Was Prague a scary place?”
“Sometimes,” the rabbi said. “In the bad times.” He took the book from Michael, holding it open with both hands. “But also beautiful.”
He laid the open book upon the table.
“Yes,” he repeated. “Beautiful.”
The cleaning stopped now, and the rabbi sat down and tried to explain faraway Prague to the boy from Ellison Avenue. Michael listened as the man talked about how it was on Prague mornings in spring, walking along the banks of the Vltava with the trees budding and the light a pale green. Michael began to visualize the crowds on the bridges in summer. “Always pretty girls, with boyfriends,” the rabbi said. “Priests. Old rabbis…” As he slowly turned the pages, Michael walked with him through the palace where the Hapsburgs stayed when they came over from Vienna. He gazed at the guards who marched outside in polished boots and plumed hats and gold scabbards, even when the kings and queens were gone. He strolled with Rabbi Hirsch through the royal gardens where the Hapsburgs grew their tulips in vast dazzling rows. They peered together at the orange tile roofs and cobblestoned streets and weeping willows of the Mala Strana, at the foot of the Castle on the left bank of the river, and saw the old aristocrats and the rich artists and heard their horses trotting on the wet stones after a summer rain.
Michael went with the rabbi to the 1920s, and the rabbi’s father was with them as they took long walks and heard about history and stopped before houses that were built in the thirteenth century. Imagine: on these very streets, Schiller once strolled with his head full of poems. And there, down that path where the rabbi’s father was pointing, just beyond the gurgling fountains and the beech trees, there are the Waldstein Gardens.
“Waldstein, he was a meshuggener, a crazy man, a general, one of those, how do you… men of destiny?” He smiled. “The Thirty Years’ War, he started with a murder. No: three murders! Three of his enemies he had thrown out from the window in the Castle. But it was a happy ending his story, that you would like. He was killed by an Irisher! A dragoon that put a dagger in his heart!”
“What was an Irishman doing in Prague?”
“Making a living,” the rabbi said. “Killing, in those days, it was a job.”
Then they were together on another street in the Mala Strana, and in that corner house lived the violin makers, and up the street was the Italian Hospital and the Lobkowicz Palace, and Michael imagined nuns in starched white habits moving down bright corridors and a princess walking barefoot on marble floors in the moonlight. And there, that small house? That was where Mozart stayed when he came to Prague for the world premiere of Don Giovanni.
“The first time Don Giovanni I saw,” the rabbi said, “I am your age. I have never seen anything like it ever before. The music. The beauty.”
Michael didn’t know who Mozart was or what Don Giovanni was about, but he listened carefully and pictured the orchestra with the musicians all in tuxedos and the balconies full of powdered women, and chandeliers glittering on the ceiling, like in The Phantom of the Opera with Claude Rains. And there in the crowd, beardless, smaller, his blue eyes wide, was Rabbi Hirsch. Then they were walking together on a weekday along the river in Prague and crossing into the little island young Judah Hirsch said was called Kampa. They were the same age, and they watched the young woman washing clothes on the banks of the river. Or it was Sunday and families held picnics on the grass. There were artists everywhere, a forest of easels pitched along the riverbank, men in berets painting the bridges and the turrets of Charles University across the river, and the sky above them all.
“And the birds,” the rabbi said. “Thousands of birds, getting lunch in the river.”
The rabbi turned a page now and pointed beyond some small houses and told Michael that in the old days there had been a Jewish cemetery there. Then it was dug up and replaced by buildings. Now it was lost to history, the graves and the names of the dead long forgotten.
“The old people, they used to say that the spirits from the lost graves, all the souls, they floated up in the sky forever, trying to get home,” he said. “Now they have plenty of company.”
Michael saw them now, hundreds of them, floating in the air, cartwheeling, swooping, men searching for women, and children searching for parents, high above the spires of St. Vitus, mixed in with Finn MacCool’s lost followers, the fianna, all of them careening like birds, like a lost flock of robins. And as he listened to the rabbi recall his own childhood fears, he was standing in Kampa, watching as the spires detached themselves from the cathedral and slowly rose into the sky and circled Prague, like knobby rockets reaming the air, scattering ghosts and angels and fianna, before driving hard and ferociously through the flock of ghosts into the Jewish Quarter.
The rabbi’s eyes were drowsy with the past, his face loose. And then he was a young man, taking Michael with him into the cellar cafés, the air blue with cigarette smoke, and Mucha posters on the walls full of women with thick coils of hair and red lips, and all of them, Judah Hirsch and Michael Devlin and their friends, talking about naturalism and symbolism. Mallarme and Nietzsche and Rilke. The names meant nothing to Michael as he listened hard, trying to shape the rabbi’s life in his own mind, living it with him.
“This is a time, the first time I try to live without God,” the rabbi said, his eyes drifting to the door that led to the sanctuary. “Is a surprise, a rabbi can try to live without God?”
“Yes,” the boy said.
“We are, were young,” the man said.
He kept talking, as much to himself as to Michael, trying to explain a time in the 1920s when he and his friends and most other Czechs believed that culture would unite them all. Michael didn’t exactly understand the word culture; it made him think of pictures of rich people he’d seen in the Daily Mirror. But the rabbi spoke about a time, in those cellar cafés, when all of them thought that culture would be the cement of Prague, strong enough to bind together Christians and Jews and atheists, men and women, old and young. Culture would end the ancient quarrels of Europe, preventing bloodshed and bitterness and cruelty.
“God we didn’t need,” he said, “if we had Vermeer. Or Picasso. Or Mondrian. On every wall, we had their pictures pasted.”
None of this talk made pictures in Michael’s mind, nor carried him high above the distant city to share the sky with ghosts. But he could see himself with young Judah Hirsch, sitting beside the first radio in a smoky corner of the Café Montmartre on Celetna Street, smoking cigarettes, listening to words coming through the air in other languages. Michael could not tell one language from another but knew that there were Germans speaking, and Slavs, and Austrians and Russians, and he wished that Father Heaney was with them, because he had been to Europe and could help sort them out.
Then the rabbi talked about the arrival of the phonograph record in Prague, and Michael saw his friend Judah Hirsch winding up a Victrola and putting the needle on the record and heard him telling his friends that in this new Czechoslovakia, this new Europe, this place free of hatred and war, they would drown together in the music of Dvoák and Mahler and Smetana. Names that Rabbi Hirsch pronounced as if they were saints. Names that Michael did not recognize, could not even imagine how to spell. The rabbi made the boy long to hear their music. He wished his mother would save up and buy a phonograph, even a windup Victrola from the St. Vincent DePaul Society, where things were cheap, so he could hear the music of these men, and Don Giovanni too. And suddenly he realized that the rabbi, who spoke about music as if it were played by God, lived here in the synagogue without a radio, without even the company of Bing Crosby and Benny Goodman.
“Modern, we all were,” the rabbi said, with no music in his voice. “That was the new religion. Modernism.” He paused, and glanced at Michael’s puzzled face. “Too modern for believing in God, we were.”
Such talk made Michael uneasy. He could not imagine how a man of God, a rabbi, could admit that once upon a time he did not believe in God. The priests in Sacred Heart could have no such doubts. They seemed born to be priests, chosen by God himself. Or if they had the doubts, they surely would not tell Michael. But when Rabbi Hirsch spoke of his doubting youth, Michael felt even closer to him, for Michael had his own unspoken doubts, his own questions.
“Eh, you are a boy,” the rabbi said, as if understanding that he had wandered too far from the streets of Prague and the names of buildings and streets and rivers. “I am saying too much of grown-up things.”
He returned to the pictures in the book, like a man examining a map, tracing paths into the New Town Square and showing Michael the astrological clock on the walls of the church, with the apostles moving through two windows every hour, hour after hour, so accurate that even the passing Jewish businessmen would look up and check their pocket watches. Then Michael and young Judah Hirsch were gazing up at the lacy facade of the Palace of Industry. Its clock tower seemed to float in the air above its roof, and the facade’s pattern of intricate iron grills and repeated circles turned yellow in the August sun. Stone flowers sprouted from other buildings and curled around each other in stained-glass windows, and then Michael was on the steps of the National Museum, standing with Judah Hirsch and his father as they looked out over Wenceslas Square and listened to the great leader Masaryk speak about democracy and hope to half a million roaring Czechs.
“How can you remember all these things?” Michael said.
“A Jew, he must watch, and he must remember,” the rabbi said, and smiled in a detached way. “If he wants to live.”
“Like the Irish with the English,” Michael said, remembering the tales his mother told him of British soldiers on the streets of Belfast in 1923, when she was a girl.
“Yes,” the rabbi said. “Like that.”
He turned a few more pages, and there, finally, among the drawings of Old Town and the Jewish Quarter, was the house where he had lived with his father and mother. In a street called U Prasne. In his mind, Michael saw the father’s face: grave, severe, with a trimmed gray beard and pince-nez glasses, checking his pocket watch as he passed the clock where the apostles appeared every hour. Michael was beside Judah Hirsch when his father came home through the winter snows from the clothing store, to slump gray-faced in a chair beside the fire, sitting in the same way that Michael’s mother sat in the living room chair with her book by A. J. Cronin. Then Judah’s mother began to play Mozart on the piano, and the color slowly returned to his father’s face.
“Perfect, it wasn’t,” the rabbi said. “But some nights always I remember it.”
“Do you have pictures of them?”
“All lost.”
“Your mother—”
“Home from school I corned, came, one day, and she is gone,” the rabbi said. “Clothes gone. Jewelry gone. To Vienna, they tell to me. My father that night… he said never again her name is to be said in the house. Thirteen years old I am at this time. In bed, when I finished crying, I heared him in his room, crying too. And never again we say her name.”
“I’m sorry, Rabbi. I didn’t mean to—”
“Is okay. In the life, worst things happen.”
That day, the rabbi told no more stories of Prague. He closed the book and returned it to its shelf and then asked Michael for the latest news about Jackie Robinson.
But at home in the darkness of his room, Michael wondered what it must be like to have your mother disappear, her name erased from all conversation. He could not conceive of his mother leaving his father and going off to Boston or Chicago or the Bronx, never to return. He imagined himself as the rabbi when he was a boy, Judah Hirsch lying in his room in Prague, knowing he would never see his mother again. And knew that Judah Hirsch must have felt the way Michael felt that night in early 1945, after the two soldiers had come up the stairs to their door and talked to his mother, and she had wept without control for the first and last time, and then had to tell the boy that his father wasn’t coming home.
That was only two years ago. It seemed like a hundred. He had bawled like a baby that night, and she had to console him, and hug him, and tell him that someday he would see his father in Heaven. And she told him that he must pray for his father, Private Tommy Devlin of the United States Army, God rest his soul, and offer up his own pain for the souls in Purgatory. But he had prayed for his father every day during the war and still he had died, so Michael did not know why he must keep praying for him. After all, he said to his mother, Daddy can’t be in Purgatory: he died for his country. But she said they must still pray for him, and if Private Tommy Devlin of the United States Army didn’t need the prayers he would give them to someone who had no prayers at all. There were orphans who died in the war, and babies who had never been baptized, and Jews and Chinese and Russians. All sorts of people are dying in this awful war, she said, and we must pray for all of them.
When he was finished crying, his mother dried his face and told him that now he must be the man in the family, that he must not show his grief to strangers, that they must keep their feelings behind the door. And he had done that, refusing to ask for pity from his friends, embarrassed when a teacher at school told the class that they must pray for Michael Devlin’s father, who had died in the war.
But alone behind the door of his room, he would make his father come to life again, with his muscled arms, and his deep voice, and his booming laugh. He would hear him sing. He would walk with him in the park and see a flock of robins. He would sit with him in the balcony
of the Grandview. And when he had remembered all the Sticky stories his father had told him, Michael would invent others. He would hit a soft grounder past second base, and Sticky would appear and he would ride the great dog around the bases. A bully would wrestle him to the ground in the schoolyard, and Sticky would seize the bully by the belt and hurl him fifty feet. He would see his father as alone as Custer, surrounded by Germans in the whirling snows of Belgium, and through the forest Sticky would come running, to snatch him away and take him home to Brooklyn.
Michael did not cry in front of others, and his mother was his strongest model: he had never seen her cry again. On this night more than two years after she had last cried, as he thought about the somber voice of Rabbi Hirsch when he explained his own mother’s departure, Michael was glad he had come to know this strange bearded man. The rabbi did not cry. The rabbi did not ask for pity. At least not in front of others.
On a frigid Thursday a week later, the huge leather book about Prague was back on the table, and the rabbi was showing him the routes he took each day to school when he was the boy’s age, moving easily into the Jewish Quarter called Josefeva. Now the rabbi’s words were full of magical images, as if he had remembered them during the week. Michael walked with the rabbi past black suns and black Madonnas, heading for Josefeva. In Old Town Square, Michael pictured Jews tied to the stake among soaring flames in the fourteenth century, their screams filling the air along with the odor of scorched flesh. Men in black robes piled on the wood. Children wept.
Then he was coming out of the house with Judah Hirsch, and the young man crossing the street was Franz Kafka, who was some kind of a writer. Kafka’s father ran a haberdashery right there, around that corner, in a building called the Kinsky Palace, and maybe that’s why Kafka always appeared in a black suit and a tight necktie and sometimes even a bowler hat. Then the boys went to inspect the glories of Pariszka Street. The name meant Paris in Czech. A Paris it wasn’t, the rabbi said, but it was pretty good anyway. They saw Kafka’s father, shouting, arguing with Judah’s father… what was the word? Debating. Michael heard Kafka’s father’s voice, high-pitched, angry, always right while everybody else was wrong, and his anger made Michael laugh. Then they were playing beside a fountain, with Kafka’s sisters. Ottla, Valli, Elli. Younger than the man who was some kind of a writer.