by Pavel Mandys
Because he was worried that if he left they would never show him the amulet, he ignored her and entered the room. Before they got a chance to say anything, he moved to the coffee table between his mother and Fred. His stepfather was sitting on the sofa, dark circles under his eyes; he put his huge, work-hardened hand far out on the table. He looked so guilty that Max had no doubt that under his hand, he was hiding the amulet.
Their visitor had nothing to hide and was vindicated as it became clear he had been right all along. “Feel free to show it to him,” Fred laughed. “Imagine—your dad slipped the amulet behind the credenza glass and your mom came upon it this morning! Do you want to have a look?”
Max stared at his stepfather’s hand.
“Show it to him already,” the mother pressed.
He lifted his hand and under it, on the white crochet doily, was a yellowed square in celluloid, smaller than the matchbox vignettes Max had been collecting. Max’s face betrayed his disappointment. Firstly, he had imagined the amulet would be much bigger, maybe a little worn since it was so old. And most importantly, he expected there to be magic signs on it, which clearly were not there. For the life of him he could not figure out why they had all been arguing so hard about it the night before. In the morning, when he overheard his mother talking to his stepfather, who said he’d had it put away in the safe, he still thought the amulet was very valuable and that his stepfather was hiding it so that he could sell it later. His mom, however, earned respect in Max’s mind because she had decided to return the amulet to his father’s nephew. Still—how valuable could this tiny card be?
Fred was clearly satisfied. He took the amulet in celluloid and, holding it between two fingers, showed it to the boy. “Should you ever, God forbid, need it, Max, write to me in Israel and I will send it to you,” he promised.
The hard, small card was covered with small symbols of a writing Max could not read—probably Hebrew, which is read just like Yiddish, from right to left.
“Do you know what’s written on the card?” he asked his cousin.
“I do not speak Hebrew, boy. But in Bratislava, I will ask a rabbi to translate it right away.”
“Some spell,” his stepfather chimed in dismissively.
It now occurred to Max: “Listen, I know a man who speaks Hebrew and he lives nearby. He translates from Yiddish and he is Jewish. I’m sure he’ll translate it if I ask him.”
“Who is this?” Fred asked the stepfather.
The stepfather only shrugged and, surprisingly, had nothing negative to say about Mr. Polakovič: “He’s a decent man.” They must have been very curious about what magic this card, with its short text, was hiding.
Fred hesitated as he pondered whether or not to entrust such a valuable thing to Max. “Do you promise to come back right away? And not to go anywhere else?”
“Where would I go?”
“Well, I don’t know—to your girlfriend so that you can show off . . .” He finally handed over the amulet in the small transparent bag.
“I don’t have a girlfriend.” Max shook his head and hurried to dress.
Now he was really interested in seeing what Mr. Polakovič would do when he rang the bell—whether or not he’d let him into his apartment. His home seemed to Max far more mystical than the amulet itself. Soon, he was running up the street toward the Journalist Houses. But it was Sunday and the building was locked. By the door, however, there were buttons with the names of tenants and a microphone. Pushing the Jakub Polakovič button meant that Mrs. Polakovič could answer. She had never learned Czech well; she mostly spoke Russian. But if he returned without his goal accomplished, he’d be embarrassed. So he pushed the button and waited. Fortunately, Mr. Polakovič answered the intercom and when Max said that his mom had sent him, the door lock rattled. The door opened by itself, and when he entered the building the door closed behind him. It was like entering another world. There were many windows so the building was full of light, like a palace.
Mr. Polakovič was in a very good mood when Max came in. He wore a housecoat, and underneath, pants and a shirt. So Max had not woken him up. The smell in the hall was completely different from the smell in his apartment. He took Max to his room where, under a window on an office table, there was a flat portable typewriter made of brown Bakelite. There were also two phones, an open book, and a stack of papers with writing on them. Above low bookshelves, overfilled with books, hung many framed drawings and photographs, and on one of the cabinets there was a lit-up old radio. There was no bed or sofa so there had to be a separate bedroom, a kitchen, and probably a child’s room too, Max thought.
“Who is this?” Max pointed to a colored pencil etching right across the door. Based on the attire, it could have been Mr. Polakovič’s grandfather.
“That’s Jicchok Lejb Perec, a great Yiddish writer.”
“And this?” He moved on to the photograph.
“That’s Salom As, also a great Yiddish writer.”
Then the boy’s interest was piqued by the portrait of a young man, which reminded him of a reproduction of the portrait by Alois Jirásek that hung in the corridor in his school. Under the sketch was the signature Max Švabinský. “And who is this?” wondered Max, since such a famous Czech painter would surely not paint portraits of famous Yiddish writers.
“That’s me.”
“You knew him?”
“I still do, he lives in Dejvice.”
“But you’re so young here!”
“I too was young once, you know.”
“Well, yes, but you are a foreigner!”
Max had thought that Mr. Polakovič immigrated to Czechoslovakia after the war. But he learned that Mr. Polakovič had actually lived in Prague before the war—until 1942—because he had Romanian citizenship. He worked for a Romanian import-export business. The biggest surprise, however, was that when Max finally handed the amulet to Mr. Polakovič asking him to translate it, the man looked at it and said, “I’ve seen that already,” and returned it to him. “There’s no magic—it is a priestly blessing which you can find in the Bible. It’s behind you, on the table. I can find it for you. I also showed it to your father.”
“What? To my father?” Max couldn’t believe what he was hearing.
“Back then, I lived right above you, where the Povroznuks live now. I even saw you as a newborn, when we drove your mom and you from Doctor Ulman’s maternity ward. As a foreign diplomat, I was allowed to have a car and the Germans couldn’t do anything about the fact that I was a Jew; not until the end of 1942.”
“And why is that?”
“Because Romania was one of Hitler’s allies. But you know that, right?”
“Why did Dad show it to you?”
Right then, Mr. Polakovič started to squirm in his chair by the radio, as if Max’s visit was of no interest to him anymore. But Max could not leave—he had more questions now than before he came in. So he stubbornly sat down on the chair at the table and tried to explain to Mr. Polakovič what he’d learned last night, and what happened in their apartment. Even though Mr. Polakovič was looking at him attentively, he did not appear to be listening to him at all. He clenched his hands against the chair armrests so hard they shook, and then the shaking moved into his face. His left eyelid started quivering as if he had a tic. Max didn’t know whether Mrs. Polakovič was home, but he became so scared that he couldn’t even stand up. If Mr. Polakovič dies of a stroke, he thought, the last image he’ll take with him is my face.
But then the possibly dying man suddenly recovered, leaned toward the radio, and started to adjust a knob. He slowly turned the radio dial, and then a tune sounded. But it was not Radio Free Europe or the Voice of America that Max’s stepfather listened to. The male voice sounded agitated and spoke a language that Max had never heard before, though he did catch the words Kol Jisrael! Instantly, he understood everything. Now he understood why the old man was so nervous! Every day at the same hour, he listened to Israeli radio. When Max told him th
at his mom had sent him, Mr. Polakovič thought it wouldn’t take long and he could still catch the radio program. Then, Max figured, he got worried about revealing that he was listening to the Israeli radio show and he became agitated—in the end, he simply gave up and turned the radio on.
While the program was playing, Max skimmed the Bible. It was an old Czech translation and there were words he could not understand; it contained the New Testament too.
When the program was over, Mr. Polakovič tuned the radio to a different station and then turned it off. Without commenting on what had just transpired, he asked the boy for the Bible and put his glasses on. As if nothing odd had happened, he answered the question Max had posed half an hour before: “Your father wanted to know what the amulet said before he lost it. I also thought, just as your father did, that it would be some magical formula, and we were both disappointed that it’s only a small square of parchment with a priestly blessing. Here we go.” He pushed his glasses to the end of his nose and slowly read: “May God bless you and protect you. May God always watch over you and be merciful. May God always be with you and give you peace.” He exhaled and fell silent.
The boy felt that Mr. Polakovič hadn’t told him everything. He remembered what he had heard, and asked: “If it was before you left, and then they took Dad two years later, why did he think he would lose it?”
“Promise you will not tell anybody.” The man looked up from the open book after a short while. “Do you promise?”
“Yes.”
“Your father carried the amulet with him throughout the entire First World War, and because he trusted its power, he later—in 1942—gave it to your stepfather when he learned he’d be deported to Theresienstadt.”
“What? He gave it to him?” The boy jumped out of the chair.
“Your mother asked him to do that. At least that’s what he told me. Josef was the only child of our landlady. She was already a widow and, understandably, she worried because he had been prone to problems since his childhood. He played cards and mixed with the wrong crowd. But your mother believed that she’d be able to protect your father until the end of the war since she was a Christian, and so she persuaded William to give up the amulet. They couldn’t know that the respite would protect them only until 1944, when Jews from mixed marriages also started to be targeted. But at least your father saved our landlady’s son, and you should be very proud of him. Of your mother too—she was a very beautiful woman.”
Only then did Max understand what he’d witnessed the night before and why his mom and stepfather were so secretive about the amulet. They would have to acknowledge that his stepfather had survived the war at the expense of his father! Fred, too, talked about it—if his father had had the amulet when the Gestapo took him, he would have survived that war too. When he now imagined how they murdered his father in the concentration camp, he didn’t feel his throat tighten and his eyes didn’t become teary as had always happened; he was overcome by pure anger. Anger directed at his stepfather, mother, and God. If God existed and orchestrated everything like that, why didn’t he at least make sure his mom would marry somebody else after the war?
* * *
Since then, in Max’s mind, a whole lot of years had passed. In reality it had only been six. The reason his mother had persuaded his father to give the magical amulet to his stepfather became curiously clear after he watched Hamlet in the National Theatre. There could be no other backdrop but the lustful love of a young woman for a man much younger than her husband. The most peculiar thing was that he felt as if he’d known about this since his childhood. He just couldn’t admit the consequences which befell him—still reeling from the bloodshed at the end of the tragedy—during his tram ride home through the poorly lit city.
Two years prior to seeing Hamlet, his half-sister had been born and his parents moved the sofa bed to her bedroom. He slept on a bed by the kitchen window leading to the balcony, right across from the credenza. Any new mail had always been slid behind the credenza glass, and when he returned home late that evening and sat down on his bed, he noticed there was a letter from abroad. He got up to see who’d sent the letter to his parents. It was stamped USA, and it came from New York. The sender was Freddy Goldsmith. Before he realized that this was his older cousin who’d emigrated to Israel, he noticed that the addressee was Mr. Max Deutsch—he himself! It was black on white, in a light-blue tissue-paper envelope. He was even more surprised when, opening the envelope, the amulet and a hundred-dollar bill fell out.
The first portion of the letter explained why Freddy had moved to the United States. In Tel Aviv he had built a successful plumbing business, but he’d always known that he’d have far more opportunities in America. In fact, he did it all for his daughters, who he successfully married off to Israeli Hungarians (Jews born in Israel) from good families. He and Vera had five grandchildren from their daughters, but both sons-in-law lived under the threat of a war breaking out. What’s more, there was a terribly humid climate for a period of six months every year in Tel Aviv, and Vera struggled to breathe due to the heat. And so on, and so forth. A whole lot of bragging; the number of branches his business had, and how if he were not retired and didn’t give all his property to his daughters, he’d be a multimillionaire by now. At the end, with fairly unintelligible language, he indicated why he believed that Max was going to need the magical amulet far more than he or his sons-in-law. Max understood this from the news. Like a true American, his cousin probably thought the same as his stepfather—that if Khrushchev didn’t remove the rockets from Communist Cuba, America would completely erase Cuba, the Soviet Union, and quite possibly Czechoslovakia from the map.
But Max was far more interested in the amulet than in Fred’s bragging. Not because he thought he’d have to go to war or because he feared a nuclear war, but because the amulet had found its way back into his hands on that particular day. As if he hadn’t gotten it from Fred; as if his father’s ghost was thus telling him: If you have ever loved your father—then avenge his extraordinary murder! The sudden appearance of the amulet and the timing would certainly support that. But in reality, his mother did not kill his father—he suddenly resisted the voice in his head—she only persuaded him to give the amulet to his stepfather.
He put the letter away and, holding the amulet, sat down under the light at the kitchen table. He remembered what Mr. Polakovič had told him about the priestly blessing, and he tried to remember the awkward old-Czech translation of those three sentences. It could have been from the Bible of Kralice they studied at school. Peculiar that he bought the Bible of Kralice—had it in his book collection, and read all sorts of things from it—but this passage he never looked for. He peered closely at the small card and tried to read the faded words from right to left. The letters reminded him of the keyboard on a child’s piano. He looked at a letter—and it rang out. If he wanted, he could have played the words until he could grasp how to pronounce each one and what they meant.
It was as if he had just woken up. He lurched and realized that something very peculiar was happening to him. Instead of seeing the letters, he was hearing their voices. It was as if the voices recorded what Mr. Polakovič told him so long ago, when he read it for Max from the Bible, and now he was saying it with two voices, in slow motion, in both Czech and Hebrew, so that even Max Deutsch could understand. And when at the end it sang the letters , a true peace came over Max. Everything fit—all he had ever thought, all that had ever happened to him—including his mother in the hall, who was now watching him. He knew that she was there watching him, but he also knew that he couldn’t look up from the amulet. He had to wait, until his anger at the two people in the living room from his childhood disappeared, and God would grant him peace.
Marl Circle
by Ondřej Neff
Malá Strana
The guy just laid there, with the chisel of a jackhammer stuck in his crushed chest. His face was covered with dust and pieces of brick. He looked as if he’d be
en crucified—his hands thrown apart, his head a bit to one side. His dead eyes stared at the top of the arch, strongly lit by a halogen lamp. I felt sick, and quite possibly like my stomach would proceed from the stage of protesting to the stage of vomiting, if the dumb girl behind my back didn’t stop shrieking.
“He got what he deserved, the piece of shit. He shouldn’t have meddled in things he knew nothing about . . .”
She wriggled and twitched, giving a hard time to the two men holding her. One was a security guy, the other a construction worker, a hulk of a man with hands as large as shovels.
“Shut off, cow,” he urged her politely.
Shut off—that’s a good one, I thought. Probably a Ukrainian who’s trying to speak like a native Czech. Shut off, really great.
I noticed the look on the engineer Vavřinec’s face. What else is going to happen? What else is awaiting us? I could read it in his eyes. A death in the workplace and a hysterical girl, that’s truly a murderous combination.
We both knew her. Her name was Adéla Turková. A fanatic believer in the sanctity of anything historical. She belonged to a group that called themselves the Trace. When something is being built in Prague, first the conservationists come running like a pack of hyenas and behave wildly, especially when somebody tries to fix something or, God forbid, build something in the historical center. But even the most callous conservationist—who will comment on the shade of the lightning rod cover in the corner of the inside courtyard of an art nouveau house in Vinohrady—is helpful and tolerant compared to anybody from the Trace. And that Turková was, among all of them, the worst berserker.
“You’ll all croak—and you deserve it, every single one who dares to touch the thread will die . . .”
The thread, that’s the favorite notion of those nuts. The past, according to them, does not disappear with time. It establishes a fine thread, tying various elements into one living organism. A city like Prague—founded around a former ford in the times when the English, following Caesar’s invasion, painted their asses blue—is knotted all around, in every which way, with the thread. The activists from the Trace loiter around any hole in the ground so that they can sniff out and rescue that thread of theirs. When they learned what was underneath that former Jesuit Palace adjacent to the Church of St. Nicolas, they rambled around Malostranské Square like red ants. Rotunda number five! In Prague, there are four Roman churches with a circle platform, that’s why they’re called rotundas. This St. Wenceslaus was a found treasure, hence the indignation of the Trace group. Most of them had given up with time, except this Turková. Security had a very clear order not to admit her into the building, but she always found a way to get in and make a scene. She would do anything—like dress up as a dachshund so that she could suddenly appear where she should not be at all.