“Good thing we didn’t eat the cake,” he said, voicing a relief I suddenly felt for entirely different reasons. “The organist has put off his suicide for another day. He’ll be here in five minutes. We should bring this to a close. I hope I haven’t been too hard on Detective Soros. I don’t wish to seem unsympathetic. When I came to Prague fifteen years ago, I was going to be a poet. Like pretty much every other American here then, I guess. As you can see, the universe had other ideas. Meaning only that few of us intend what we become.”
After that, he recommended a couple good places to eat and gave me the name of bakery where I could get a cake just like the one he had. Sturdy boxes, too, he added. I thanked him for his time and made my way down the center aisle, back toward the entrance at the rear of the church.
I was nearly to the door when I saw what looked like a withered length of tree branch dangling from a chain attached to a metal rod that jutted from the wall fifteen feet above. I figured it was some splinter from the cross or other bogus relic. Then I recalled the entry in Prague Unbound, the part about the mummified human hand hanging inside the church for the last four hundred years as a warning to thieves. I couldn’t tell whether it was the left or the right one.
The Cruel Geometry of Zugzwang
March 12, 1938
My Dearest Klara,
As I write to you, the sun creeps over the horizon to render the city outside my window as a study in charcoals, embellished by a dirt-streaked window in dire need of cleaning. You know I was never much for tidiness, and I’m afraid even rudimentary upkeep on this modest apartment is beyond me now. But at long last, I do finally have news to report. Such a remarkable day has finished that I scarce know where to begin.
The Black Rabbit is as good a place as any. I spend a fair deal of my leisure there these days, despite stern doctoral warnings against the foul airs of the tavern. The establishment is ill suited for a serious chess match, but it’s the only venue our nephew Max Froehlich and I can agree upon. A neutral battlefield suspended in its own unmistakable gloom, faces subsumed in the old shadows, conversations muted as if by the blanket of hovering smoke.
Let’s begin with me at my usual table, me fumbling for my tobacco pouch, relighting the meerschaum pipe you gave me on our anniversary, my face rigid with mock concentration as I consider the chessboard. The elaborate pantomime is lost on our nephew Max, who is busy ordering another coffee to be put, as always, on Uncle Jan’s tab. After a charade of painstaking, brow-knit deliberation, I pick up my rook and send it the length of the board, capturing an unprotected white bishop and imperiling a knight. A bold move, improvisational audacity I dare say reminiscent of Alekhine himself. Max takes no notice. He is distracted of late, preoccupied. He seems to subsist solely on coffee and paranoia, and all afternoon he’s been wiping his spectacles and dusting off his coat like Emil Jannings in that film about the hotel porter.
“Have you made a decision?” asks Max.
“I’ve decided to take your bishop.”
“You know what I’m talking about.”
I maintain silence, studying the board.
“Don’t you read the papers, listen to the radio?”
“Let me guess. A recent spate of bad news?”
March winds rattle the upstairs windows as Max leans across the table, his face close enough I can see the wrinkles blooming at the corners of his eyes. It shocks me to realize he’s thirty-nine years old, the same age as our Franz. No sooner do you reluctantly accept yourself growing old than the younger generation demands you acknowledge their aging as well.
“While you worry over these useless wooden pieces,” Max says, “the whole world is poised for war. Slovakia is soon to declare independence. The Germans will invade the moment they do. Be sure of it. Then it will be too late for you. Too late for Franz, too late for Europe.”
“So I was right,” I grumble. “Bad news.”
Max crosses his arms and pouts, but I know it won’t last. His silences are brief and strategic. He never retreats, this one, only shifts his angle of attack. But for once, I must admit, our nephew’s paranoia may be justified. The Little Mustache is on the march.
You’ll recall my account from last September, when I wrote of fighting my way through the throngs in Wenceslas Square on the night news of the Munich betrayal broke, looking for Franz that night the country learned we were alone, orphaned at Europe’s center (though “learned” seems disingenuous; how could we ever have imagined otherwise?). Since returning from the war our son can’t resist a crowd, gets swept up in any peopled mass that winds its way near the little apartment we share on Bilkova Street. Workers’ demonstrations, drunken Majáles spring revels, a parade for the World Cup runners-up, Masaryk’s funeral—it’s all the same to Franz, just another ocean of heaving humanity in which to throw himself.
You’ll recall that September night he’d lost himself among those hurling invective against President Beneš for his surrender of the Sudetenlands, a crowd made mostly of angry students denouncing the French and British for appeasing The Little Mustache. You’ll recall I eventually found Franz huddled in a narrow lane not far from the protest, propped against the wall like an unstrung puppet, imbecile grin slanted across his unshaven face as he clutched his tattered army coat around his shoulders and shivered against the cold. Twice in the last twenty-two years I’ve tried to throw out the jacket. Franz shrieked and wept hysterically on both occasions until I was forced to retrieve the ragged, soiled garment from the dust heap. Let none doubt his commitment to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, relic though it has become.
Our nephew Max breaks his petulant silence. In Austria, he says, they’re dragging Jews into the streets. I remind him that just because we’re in a coffeehouse doesn’t make us Viennese. There was Czechoslovakia before Austria, there will be Czechoslovakia after. There will be Czechoslovakia after our chess match and Czechoslovakia after The Little Mustache, too.
Why does he allow himself to get so caught up in the narrative of world affairs? The world has but one unchanging drama. The setting may shift, the players occasionally exchange roles, but the story is always that of the powerful taking advantage of the powerless, with the Czech people typically cast in the latter role, and we Jews never cast as anything else.
Oh yes, Klara, I nearly forgot to tell you.
I am a Jew!
No joke. Not the sort to provoke a laugh, at any rate. Though I’ve never set foot inside a synagogue, don’t celebrate Chanukah, and have long since ceased believing in any God whatsoever, I am now among His chosen people. You protest that I speak fluent German, barely passable Czech, know nary a word of Yiddish, and can scarce distinguish between Hebrew and Swahili? You argue that I converted to Catholicism years ago to appease your family, you note that our son Franz was baptized in the St. Nicholas Cathedral in front of God and everyone?
Still a Jew!
Max tells me when the Nazis take Czechoslovakia they’ll impose some decree under which anyone with Jewish grandparents is racially impure. Because my mother’s maiden name was Weil, if the Nazis come—abracadabra!—Franz and I metamorphose into Jews.
And the Nazis will come. About this Max is right. Europe’s old axes are poised and our land ripe for the hacking. The end of our fledgling democracy leaves me with the same numb sense of inevitability as the death of a distant uncle long diagnosed with cancer. Too bad, certainly, but no great surprise. Last time it was the Austrians, this time the Germans, next time the Russians, the Hungarians, the Swedes, the Turks. Perhaps one day the Americans will invade. Perhaps one day I shall be transformed into a Hindi, an Aztec, an Eskimo!
If Franz and I are to become Jews, we will have a great deal of company. Refugees are already flooding Prague—German Jews, Austrian Jews, Moravians, Slovakians, all living in vast makeshift encampments on the city’s outskirts. Inside the city they go door to door in peddler’s rags, hawking pencil nubs, matches, used razors, and speaking with a rabbinical fervor impossible to credi
t.
Max now casually maneuvers his white knight out of danger and tells me he’s spoken to his contact at the embassy (yes, that fellow again). He’s like a love-struck schoolboy when he speaks of this man. Max tells me the embassy is overwhelmed, that five thousand emigration requests have been filed since Kristallnacht.
I try to concentrate on the game. Max’s last move has forked my queen and bishop. The Black Rabbit proprietor plays an American Negro tune on the gramophone, one which I grudgingly tolerated the first two dozen times I heard it but whose boisterous charms have faded the three dozen times since. This is no dancehall, but people can’t stand silence now, must always obliterate their thoughts with music, the more raucous the better.
A headache blossoms in my skull. How could I not have anticipated Max’s counterstrike? I’d have to sacrifice my bishop to save my queen, leaving my attack in shambles. I’d captured more pawns, gained control of the center of the board, built an intricate defense, and yet was suddenly at a disadvantage. No choice but to withdraw to the safety of the back line. Across the room, an old woman begins coughing. Looking up, I see she is not old at all.
“I’m leaving in three days,” Max says.
“You can’t be serious.”
“There are Froehlings overseas. In Chicago. I found a family in an American telephone directory at the Central Post Office. I’ve been exchanging letters with them since last summer. I’ve convinced them I’m their cousin. They’ve filed an affidavit on our behalf.”
“You want to go, go. I can’t stop you.”
“Listen to me. They’ve submitted paperwork for you and Franz as well. A document that pledges that you’re not criminals, that you’re both able to work—”
“Franz work? What sort of work do you imagine him doing in America? Rustling cattle? Fighting Indians?”
Max makes a horseshoe of his mouth and runs through his repertoire of compulsory poses. The Insouciant Slouch. The Double-Elbow Hunch. Rodin’s Thinker. Ankle Upon Knee. Reverse Ankle Upon Knee. The Negro tune ends and soon Karel Vacek’s voice is singing about the fairy tale of our youth and how it will never return. I think you would have liked this song. Dust particles dance in the failing light ,and time hemorrhages from unseen corners of the room.
And just when the game looks abandoned, Max takes up his rook and swings it down the right flank, knocking out a black pawn. Thanks to all his embassy blather, he’s overlooked the obvious and my bishop is spared. Max realizes his error as soon as he’s made it and hastily pushes himself from the table.
In four moves, the game will be mine.
“Three days,” he says, buttoning his overcoat.
“Four words,” I say. “Talk less, win more.”
“And a word for you, Uncle Jan. Checkmate.”
Max unleashes a withering smile rich with the condescension that has become his unfortunate trademark of late. My eyes dart over the board. Black is indeed in check—but checkmate? Surely not. Surely there is a way out. But Max is already up the stairs and through the door by the time the cruel geometry upon the tabletop forces me to conclude that, no matter what move I next make, the game is well and truly lost.
Maybe this isn’t the place to begin.
Maybe I should begin after I leave the Black Rabbit and make my way through the streets that lead to our apartment. Begin with the lacerating wind racing down the corridors of Altstadt, knifing through the angled passageways with such violence that the very buildings seem to bow to its force, bending and twisting until the whole cityscape resembles the Old Jewish Cemetery with its layers of stone rising jumbled from the earth, a mouth crammed with rotting teeth where in days of old it’s said the ghosts of children would at midnight emerge to make a terrible ruckus until the wise Rabbi Löew confronted them and learned they were but endeavoring to reveal the source of a plague afflicting the Fifth Quarter by dancing and playing about a tombstone showing the name of the sorcerer who had brought the pestilence upon them.
Perhaps we should begin when I reach Josefstadt—Židovské Msto, Josefov as they call it now—the Fifth Quarter by any name not itself since it was razed by the government for fear it was a breeding ground for disease. True, disease had long plagued the Fifth Quarter, the disease of poverty, incurable by sledgehammers and wrecking balls. I contend its destruction had little to do with those old anti-Semitic urges now freshly fashionable as by the time of its annihilation, Josefstadt was devoid of all but the most desperate of Jews. No, there was something else there, some nameless something in that teeming ghetto that terrified the bureaucratic heart, something mutinous and ungovernable that laughed in the face of lofty notions like progress and order. The poor were driven out, who knows where they went, but the rich never moved in as planned. Towering art nouveau apartments now line the widened rectilinear avenues, their immodest façades already maudlin and timeworn. And yet still something of the old ghetto survives. Any landlord in our city knows ghosts are the most difficult tenants to evict.
We begin our goodbye in Josefs tadt then, begin with this old man ambling through those emptied streets, conjuring phantom glimpses of the vanished ghetto. Ulcerated wooden hovels piggybacked one atop another, houses growing from houses like malignant tumors, streets expanding ever inward, a maze with no exit. We begin our farewell with an old man recollecting those sunless shrunken lanes, uneven surfaces with the pitch and roll of a troubled sea, streets rife with blind turns plunging to sudden dead ends. As he walks he conjures disembodied faces floating gaunt and silent in the misshapen windows above, the filthy stark-eyed children running riot below, the bearded junkmen and shadowy soothsayers, the cadaverous whores and consumptive drunks in a decaying labyrinth echoing with the music and laughter of madness.
Now these streets all but empty.
Soundless but for the wind.
Yet amongst the faint scent of acacias, this old man’s nose still registers the stench of onions and sewage. He ducks now beneath the sapling branches and recalls nowhere then were there trees, flowers, nor bushes, nor even weeds, save for those in the untended cemetery. Atop the walls still lingered broken coils of rusted barbed wire strung up centuries past, fragmented reminders that this was once a forbidden city-within-a-city, an impoverished funhouse reflection of the castle complex across the river.
This is the world the old man remembers, the world he’d found himself in when accompanying his father all the way from their home in the affluent Bubeneč suburbs to slum in Josef stadt for antiques. Afterward, his father would stop off for a beer at the Black Eagle tavern, while this boy would be left to his own devices in the nearby Valentinské market square, too frightened to do anything but remain frozen in the long-fingered shadows until his father wobbled out and they set homeward.
It’s a world you never experienced, Klara, this vanished carnival, this sordid emporium. Streetcart chemists pedaled bottled cures for baldness, impotence, and bad luck. One mad cart pusher hawked patchwork animals, ravens painted as parrots, small dogs sewn into the skins of foxes. For years an old Turkish woman clad in flowing purple led a black bear by a chain attached to a thick ring through its nose. For a few ducats, the bear would perform a clumsy waltz, lurching on its hind legs, salivating great parabolic ropes from its mouth. One morning the bear arrived in Valentiské Square alone, the woman nowhere in evidence save for her left leg clutched between its jaws. It’s said the bear was dancing when the police killed it, firing several rounds and wounding two of their own in the process.
Only slightly more respectable than the street vendors were the shopkeepers, a species cursed to lack powers of discrimination, habitually ensconcing their few worthy items amid stockpiled hordes of bent spoons, broken umbrellas, keyless locks, lockless keys, mangled birdcages, watches without hands, dolls without heads–it was as if they were amassing items willy-nilly inside their gloomy little shops in an effort to prepare for some coming catastrophe, or perhaps to memorialize the world as it existed before the last one.
It
was here in the Fifth Quarter that I first contracted the disease of collecting, and so perhaps its no surprise that here I returned when your much crueler disease claimed you. Was it to my childhood I was retreating in coming here? No, my childhood was sun and tall grass, summer breezes and azure skies. And like my childhood, the dark mystery of Josefstadt is gone now, irretrievable no matter where I chose to live.
What ultimately drew me here was the lack of you, Klara. You were everywhere in our old house. Sleeping in the bed we shared, hovering over the stove, sitting under the willow tree, stacking jars in the root cellar. You in the sunlight pouring through summer windows, you in the crackling fire and creaking floorboards of winter, you in the dancing patter of spring rain upon the rooftop. You as if you never left. You reminding me you were never returning.
I find reminders of you strewn throughout the city. On the bench where we shared our first kiss that July afternoon, you wrapped in a thick towel after we’d frolicked in the river, me with wet hair clinging to my pale forehead. At the Three Foxes where we danced, in Weinberge Park where in autumn we’d stroll and talk for hours. I smile now and wonder what could we have possibly talked about, knowing as little as we did.
Nothing so precious as memory, nothing so useless.
Our Franz is unburdened by such recollections. To him, you’re little more than a figure in a sun-bleached photograph that sits atop the corner bookshelf, one half of a happy young couple posed in front of a Marienbad hot springs resort. She in high-collared white dress, he in dark suit and bowler hat, both of them gazing out with unyielding, vexed expressions, as if unsure how best to arrange their features for the camera. I find our Franz staring at this photo sometimes. On such occasions I envy his lack of understanding.
If I am thankful for anything, it is that the Spanish flu claimed you when it did, that you never lived to see your only child return from the Great War with a hole under his chin and another out the top of his skull, the wounds mapping the trajectory of the pea-sized bead of shrapnel that effectively severed the twin hemispheres of his brain. Better you never heard the military doctor say it was God’s own miracle Franz had lived. Better you never heard me curse a God capable of such miracles.
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