The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

by Michael Chabon

  From the age of six, he had sold seeds, candy bars, houseplants, cleaning fluids, metal polish, magazine subscriptions, unbreakable combs, and shoelaces door-to-door. In a Zharkov’s laboratory on the kitchen table, he had invented almost functional button-reattachers, tandem bottle openers, and heatless clothes irons. In more recent years, Sammy’s commercial attention had been arrested by the field of professional illustration. The great commercial illustrators and cartoonists—Rockwell, Leyendecker, Raymond, Caniff—were at their zenith, and there was a general impression abroad that, at the drawing board, a man could not only make a good living but alter the very texture and tone of the national mood. In Sammy’s closet were stacked dozens of pads of coarse newsprint, filled with horses, Indians, football heroes, sentient apes, Fokkers, nymphs, moon rockets, buckaroos, Saracens, tropic jungles, grizzlies, studies of the folds in women’s clothing, the dents in men’s hats, the lights in human irises, clouds in the western sky. His grasp of perspective was tenuous, his knowledge of human anatomy dubious, his line often sketchy—but he was an enterprising thief. He clipped favorite pages and panels out of newspapers and comic books and pasted them into a fat notebook: a thousand different exemplary poses and styles. He had made extensive use of his bible of clippings in concocting a counterfeit Terry and the Pirates strip called South China Sea, drawn in faithful imitation of the great Caniff. He had knocked off Raymond in something he called Pimpernel of the Planets and Chester Gould in a lockjawed G-man strip called Knuckle Duster Doyle. He had tried swiping from Hogarth and Lee Falk, from George Herriman, Harold Gray, and Elzie Segar. He kept his sample strips in a fat cardboard portfolio under his bed, waiting for an opportunity, for his main chance, to present itself.

  “Japan!” he said again, reeling at the exotic Caniffian perfume that hung over the name. “What were you doing there?”

  “Mostly I was suffering from the intestinal complaint,” Josef Kavalier said. “And I suffer still. Particular in the night.”

  Sammy pondered this information for a moment, then moved a little nearer to the wall.

  “Tell me, Samuel,” Josef Kavalier said. “How many examples must I have in my portfolio?”

  “Not Samuel. Sammy. No, call me Sam.”

  “Sam.”

  “What portfolio is that?”

  “My portfolio of drawings. To show your employer. Sadly, I am obligated to leave behind all of my work in Prague, but I can very quickly do much more that will be frightfully good.”

  “To show my boss?” Sammy said, sensing in his own confusion the persistent trace of his mother’s handiwork. “What are you talking about?”

  “Your mother suggested that you might to help me get a job in the company where you work. I am an artist, like you.”

  “An artist.” Again Sammy envied his cousin. This was a statement he himself would never have been able to utter without lowering his fraudulent gaze to his shoe tops. “My mother told you I was an artist?”

  “A commercial artist, yes. For the Empire Novelties Incorporated Company.”

  For an instant Sammy cupped the tiny flame this secondhand compliment lit within him. Then he blew it out.

  “She was talking through her hat,” he said.

  “Sorry?”

  “She was full of it.”

  “Full of …?”

  “I’m an inventory clerk. Sometimes they let me do pasteup for an ad. Or when they add a new item to the line, I get to do the illustration. For that, they pay me two dollars per.”

  “Ah.” Josef Kavalier let out another long breath. He still had not moved a muscle. Sammy couldn’t decide if this apparent utter motionlessness was the product of unbearable tension or a marvelous calm. “She wrote a letter to my father,” Josef tried. “I remember she said you create designs of superb new inventions and devices.”

  “Guess what?”

  “She talked into her hat.”

  Sammy sighed, as if to suggest that this was unfortunately the case; a regretful sigh, long-suffering—and false. No doubt his mother, writing to her brother in Prague, had believed that she was making an accurate report; it was Sammy who had been talking through his hat for the last year, embroidering, not only for her benefit but to anyone who would listen, the menial nature of his position at Empire Novelties. Sammy was briefly embarrassed, not so much at being caught out and having to confess his lowly status to his cousin, as at this evidence of a flaw in the omniveillant maternal loupe. Then he wondered if his mother, far from being hoodwinked by his boasting, had not in fact been counting on his having grossly exaggerated the degree of his influence over Sheldon Anapol, the owner of Empire Novelties. If he were to keep up the pretense to which he had devoted so much wind and invention, then he was all but obliged to come home from work tomorrow night clutching a job for Josef Kavalier in his grubby little stock clerk’s fingers.

  “I’ll try,” he said, and it was then that he felt the first spark, the tickling finger of possibility along his spine. For another long while, neither of them spoke. This time, Sammy could feel that Josef was still awake, could almost hear the capillary trickle of doubt seeping in, weighing the kid down. Sammy felt sorry for him. “Can I ask you a question?” he said.

  “Ask me what?”

  “What was with all the newspapers?”

  “They are your New York newspapers. I bought them at the Capitol Greyhound Terminal.”

  “How many?”

  For the first time, he noticed, Josef Kavalier twitched. “Eleven.”

  Sammy quickly calculated on his fingers: there were eight metropolitan dailies. Ten if you counted the Eagle and the Home News. “I’m missing one.”

  “Missing …?”

  “Times, Herald-Tribune”—he touched two fingertips—“World-Telegram, Journal-American, Sun.” He switched hands. “News, Post. Uh, Wall Street Journal. And the Brooklyn Eagle. And the Home News in the Bronx.” He dropped his hands to the mattress. “What’s eleven?”

  “The Woman’s Daily Wearing.”

  “Women’s Wear Daily?”

  “I didn’t know it was like that. For the garments.” He laughed at himself, a series of brief, throat-clearing rasps. “I was looking for something about Prague.”

  “Did you find anything? They must have had something in the Times.”

  “Something. A little. Nothing about the Jews.”

  “The Jews,” said Sammy, beginning to understand. It wasn’t the latest diplomatic maneuverings in London and Berlin, or the most recent bit of brutal posturing by Adolf Hitler, that Josef was hoping to get news of. He was looking for an item detailing the condition of the Kavalier family. “You know Jewish? Yiddish. You know it?”

  “No.”

  “That’s too bad. We got four Jewish newspapers in New York. They’d probably have something.”

  “What about German newspapers?”

  “I don’t know, but I’d imagine so. We certainly have a lot of Germans. They’ve been marching and having rallies all over town.”

  “I see.”

  “You’re worried about your family?”

  There was no reply.

  “They couldn’t get out?”

  “No. Not yet.” Sammy felt Josef give his head a sharp shake, as if to end the discussion. “I find I have smoked all my cigarettes,” he went on, in a neutral, phrase-book tone. “Perhaps you could—”

  “You know, I smoked my last one before bed,” said Sammy. “Hey, how’d you know I smoke? Do I smell?”

  “Sammy,” his mother called, “sleep.”

  Sammy sniffed himself. “Huh. I wonder if Ethel can smell it. She doesn’t like it. I want to smoke, I’ve got to go out the window, there, onto the fire escape.”

  “No smoking in bed,” Josef said. “The more reason then for me to leave it.”

  “You don’t have to tell me,” Sammy said. “I’m dying to have a place of my own.”

  They lay there for a few minutes, longing for cigarettes and for all the things that this lon
ging, in its perfect frustration, seemed to condense and embody.

  “Your ash holder,” Josef said finally. “Ashtray.”

  “On the fire escape. It’s a plant.”

  “It might be filled with the … spacek?… kippe?… the stubbles?”

  “The butts, you mean?”

  “The butts.”

  “Yeah, I guess. Don’t tell me you’d smoke—”

  Without warning, in a kind of kinetic discharge of activity that seemed to be both the counterpart and the product of the state of perfect indolence that had immediately preceded it, Josef rolled over and out of the bed. Sammy’s eyes had by now adjusted to the darkness of his room, which was always, at any rate, incomplete. A selvage of gray-blue radiation from the kitchen tube fringed the bedroom door and mingled with a pale shaft of nocturnal Brooklyn, a compound derived from the halos of streetlights, the headlamps of trolleys and cars, the fires of the borough’s three active steel mills, and the shed luster of the island kingdom across the river, which came slanting in through a parting in the curtains. In this faint glow that was, to Sammy, the sickly steady light of insomnia itself, he could see his cousin going methodically through the pockets of the clothes he had earlier hung so carefully from the back of the chair.

  “The lamp?” Josef whispered.

  Sammy shook his head. “The mother,” he said.

  Josef came back to the bed and sat down. “Then we must to work in the darkness.”

  He held between the first fingers of his left hand a pleated leaf of cigarette paper. Sammy understood. He sat up on one arm, and with the other tugged the curtains apart, slowly so as not to produce the telltale creak. Then, gritting his teeth, he raised the sash of the window beside his bed, letting in a chilly hum of traffic and a murmuring blast of cold October midnight. Sammy’s “ashtray” was an oblong terra-cotta pot, vaguely Mexican, filled with a sterile compound of potting soil and soot and the semipetrified skeleton, appropriately enough, of a cineraria that had gone unsold during Sammy’s houseplant days and thus predated his smoking habit, still a fairly recent acquisition, by about three years. A dozen stubbed-out ends of Old Golds squirmed around the base of the withered plant, and Sammy distastefully plucked a handful of them—they were slightly damp—as if gathering night crawlers, then handed them in to his cousin, who traded him for a box of matches that evocatively encouraged him to EAT AT JOE’S CRAB ON FISHERMAN’S WHARF, in which only one match remained.

  Quickly, but not without a certain showiness, Josef split open seven butts, one-handed, and tipped the resultant mass of pulpy threads into the wrinkled scrap of Zig Zag. After half a minute’s work, he had manufactured them a smoke.

  “Come,” he said. He walked on his knees across the bed to the window, where Sammy joined him, and they wriggled through the sash and thrust their heads and upper bodies out of the building. He handed the cigarette to Sammy and, in the precious flare of the match, as Sammy nervously sheltered it from the wind, he saw that Josef had prestidigitated a perfect cylinder, as thick and straight and nearly as smooth as if rolled by machine. Sammy took a long drag of True Virginia Flavor and then passed the magic cigarette back to its crafter, and they smoked it in silence, until only a hot quarter inch remained. Then they climbed back inside, lowered the sash and the blinds, and lay back, bedmates, reeking of smoke.

  “You know,” Sammy said, “we’re, uh, we’ve all been really worried … about Hitler … and the way he’s treating the Jews and … and all that. When they, when you were … invaded.… My mom was … we all …” He shook his own head, not sure what he was trying to say. “Here.” He sat up a little, and tugged one of the pillows out from under the back of his head.

  Josef Kavalier lifted his own head from the mattress and stuffed the pillow beneath it. “Thank you,” he said, then lay still once more.

  Presently, his breathing grew steady and slowed to a congested rattle, leaving Sammy to ponder alone, as he did every night, the usual caterpillar schemes. But in his imaginings, Sammy found that, for the first time in years, he was able to avail himself of the help of a confederate.

  IT WAS A CATERPILLAR SCHEME—a dream of fabulous escape—that had ultimately carried Josef Kavalier across Asia and the Pacific to his cousin’s narrow bed on Ocean Avenue.

  As soon as the German army occupied Prague, talk began, in certain quarters, of sending the city’s famous Golem, Rabbi Loew’s miraculous automaton, into the safety of exile. The coming of the Nazis was attended by rumors of confiscation, expropriation, and plunder, in particular of Jewish artifacts and sacred objects. The great fear of its secret keepers was that the Golem would be packed up and shipped off to ornament some institut or private collection in Berlin or Munich. Already a pair of soft-spoken, keen-eyed young Germans carrying notebooks had spent the better part of two days nosing around the Old-New Synagogue, in whose eaves legend had secreted the long-slumbering champion of the ghetto. The two young Germans had claimed to be merely interested scholars without official ties to the Reichsprotektorat, but this was disbelieved. Rumor had it that certain high-ranking party members in Berlin were avid students of theosophy and the so-called occult. It seemed only a matter of time before the Golem was discovered, in its giant pine casket, in its dreamless sleep, and seized.

  There was, in the circle of its keepers, a certain amount of resistance to the idea of sending the Golem abroad, even for its own protection. Some argued that since it had originally been formed of the mud of the River Moldau, it might suffer physical degradation if removed from its native climate. Those of a historical bent—who, like historians everywhere, prided themselves on a levelheaded sense of perspective—reasoned that the Golem had already survived many centuries of invasion, calamity, war, and pogrom without being exposed or dislodged, and they counseled against rash reaction to another momentary downturn in the fortunes of Bohemia’s Jews. There were even a few in the circle who, when pressed, admitted that they did not want to send the Golem away because in their hearts they had not surrendered the childish hope that the great enemy of Jew-haters and blood libelers might one day, in a moment of dire need, be revived to fight again. In the end, however, the vote went in favor of removing the Golem to a safe place, preferably in a neutral nation that was out of the way and not entirely devoid of Jews.

  It was at this point that a member of the secret circle who had ties to Prague’s stage-magic milieu put forward the name of Bernard Kornblum as a man who might be relied upon to effect the Golem’s escape.

  Bernard Kornblum was an Ausbrecher, a performing illusionist who specialized in tricks with straitjackets and handcuffs—the sort of act made famous by Harry Houdini. He had recently retired from the stage (he was seventy, at least) to settle in Prague, his adopted home, and await the inescapable. But he came originally, his proponent said, from Vilna, the holy city of Jewish Europe, a place known, in spite of its reputation for hardheadedness, to harbor men who took a cordial and sympathetic view of golems. Also, Lithuania was officially neutral, and any ambitions Hitler might have had in its direction had reportedly been forsworn by Germany, in a secret protocol to the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact. Thus Kornblum was duly summoned, fetched from his inveterate seat at a poker table in the card room of the Hofzinser Club to the secret location where the circle met—at Faleder Monuments, in a shed behind the headstone showroom. The nature of the job was explained to Kornblum: the Golem must be spirited from its hiding place, suitably prepared for transit, and then conveyed out of the country, without attracting notice, to sympathetic contacts in Vilna. Necessary official documents—bills of lading, customs certificates—would be provided by influential members of the circle, or by their highly placed friends.

  Bernard Kornblum agreed at once to take on the circle’s commission. Although like many magicians a professional unbeliever who reverenced only Nature, the Great Illusionist, Kornblum was at the same time a dutiful Jew. More important, he was bored and unhappy in retirement and had in fact been considering a perhaps i
ll-advised return to the stage when the summons had come. Though he lived in relative penury, he refused the generous fee the circle offered him, setting only two conditions: that he would divulge nothing of his plans to anyone, and accept no unsolicited help or advice. Across the entire trick he would draw a curtain, as it were, lifting the veil only when the feat had been pulled off.

  This proviso struck the circle as not only charming, in a certain way, but sensible as well. The less any of them knew about the particulars, the more easily they would be able, in the event of exposure, to disavow knowledge of the Golem’s escape.

  Kornblum left Faleder Monuments, which was not far from his own lodgings on Maisel Street, and started home, his mind already beginning to bend and crimp the armature of a sturdy and elegant plan. For a brief period in Warsaw in the 1890s, Kornblum had been forced into a life of crime, as a second-story man, and the prospect of prizing the Golem out of its current home, unsuspected, awoke wicked old memories of gaslight and stolen gems. But when he stepped into the vestibule of his building, all of his plans changed. The gardienne poked her head out and told him that a young man was waiting to see him in his room. A good-looking boy, she said, well spoken and nicely dressed. Ordinarily, of course, she would have made the visitor wait on the stair, but she thought she had recognized him as a former student of Herr Professor.