“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 longing, 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