LITMIR.BIZ

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Thomas said, when Josef returned to the parlor with one of Hora’s extra-large garment bags slung over his shoulder. “What happened? What’s wrong?”

      “Nothing,” said Josef. “Look, Thomas, I have to go. I’m sorry.”

      “I know.” Thomas sounded almost irritated. He sat down cross-legged on the floor. “I’m going to spend the night.”

      “No, Thomas, I don’t think—”

      “You don’t get to say,” Thomas said. “You aren’t here anymore, remember?”

      The words echoed Kornblum’s sound advice, but somehow they chilled Josef. He could not shake the feeling—reportedly common among ghosts—that it was not he but those he haunted whose lives were devoid of matter, sense, future.

      “Perhaps you’re right,” he said after a moment. “You oughtn’t to be out in the streets at night, anyway. It’s too dangerous.”

      A hand on each of Thomas’s shoulders, Josef steered his brother back to the room they had shared for the last eleven years. With some blankets and a slipless pillow that he found in a trunk, he made up a bed on the floor. Then he dug around in some other crates until he found an old children’s alarm clock, a bear’s face eared with a pair of brass bells, which he wound and set for five-thirty.

      “You have to be back there by six,” he said, “or they’ll miss you.”

      Thomas nodded and climbed between the blankets of the makeshift bed. “I wish I could go with you,” he said.

      “I know,” Josef said. He brushed the hair from Thomas’s forehead. “So do I. But you’ll be joining me soon enough.”

      “Do you promise?”

      “I will make sure of it,” Josef said. “I won’t rest until I’m meeting your ship in the harbor of New York City.”

      “On that island they have,” Thomas said, his eyelids fluttering. “With the Statue of Liberation.”

      “I promise,” Josef said.

      “Swear.”

      “I swear.”

      “Swear by the River Styx.”

      “I swear it,” Josef said, “by the River Styx.”

      Then he leaned down and, to the surprise of both of them, kissed his brother on the lips. It was the first such kiss between them since the younger had been an infant and the elder a doting boy in knee pants.

      “Goodbye, Josef,” said Thomas.

      When Josef returned to Nicholasgasse, he found that Kornblum had, with typical resourcefulness, solved the problem of the Golem’s extrication. Into the thin panel of gypsum that had been used to fill the door frame at the time when the Golem was installed, Kornblum, employing some unspeakable implement of the mortuary trade, had cut a rectangle, at floor level, just large enough to accommodate the casket end-on. The obverse of the gypsum panel, out in the hall, was covered in the faded Jugendstil paper, a pattern of tall interlocking poppies, that decorated all the hallways of the building. Kornblum had been careful to cut through this thin outer hide on only three of his rectangle’s four sides, leaving at its top a hinge of intact wallpaper. Thus he had formed a serviceable trapdoor.

      “What if someone notices?” Josef said after he had finished inspecting Kornblum’s work.

      This gave rise to another of Kornblum’s impromptu and slightly cynical maxims. “People notice only what you tell them to notice,” he said. “And then only if you remind them.”

      They dressed the Golem in the suit that had belonged to the giant Alois Hora. This was hard work, as the Golem was relatively inflexible. It was not as rigid as one might have imagined, given its nature and composition. Its cold clay flesh seemed to give slightly under the pressure of fingertips, and a narrow range of motion, perhaps the faintest memory of play, inhered in the elbow of the right arm, the arm it would have used, as the legend records, to touch the mezuzah on its maker’s doorway every evening when it returned from its labors, bringing its Scripture-kissed fingers to its lips. The Golem’s knees and ankles, however, were more or less petrified. Furthermore, its hands and feet were poorly proportioned, as is often the case with the work of amateur artists, and much too large for its body. The enormous feet got snagged in the trouser legs, so that getting the pants on was particularly difficult. Finally, Josef had to reach into the coffin and grasp the Golem around the waist, elevating its lower body several inches, before Kornblum could tug the trousers over the feet, up the legs, and around the Golem’s rather sizable buttocks. They had decided not to bother with underwear, but for the sake of anatomical verisimilitude—in a display of the thoroughness that had characterized his career on the stage—Kornblum tore one of the old tallises in two (kissing it first), gave a series of twists to one of the halves, and tucked the resulting artifact up between the Golem’s legs, into the crotch, where there was only a smooth void of clay.

      “Maybe it was supposed to be a female,” Josef suggested as he watched Kornblum zip the Golem’s fly.

      “Not even the Maharal could make a woman out of clay,” Kornblum said. “For that you need a rib.” He stood back, considering the Golem. He gave a tug on one lapel of the jacket and smoothed the billowing pleats of the trousers front. “This is a very nice suit.”

      It was one of the last Alois Hora had taken delivery of before his death, when his body had been wasted by Marfan’s syndrome, and thus a perfect fit for the Golem, which was not so large as the Mountain in his prime. Of excellent English worsted, gray and tan, shot with a burgundy thread, it easily could have been subdivided into a suit for Josef and another for Kornblum, with enough left over, as the magician remarked, for a waistcoat apiece. The shirt was of fine white twill, with mother-of-pearl buttons, and the necktie of burgundy silk, with an embossed pattern of cabbage roses, slightly flamboyant, as Hora had liked his ties. There were no shoes—Josef had forgotten to search for a pair, and in any case none would have been large enough—but if the lower regions of the casket’s interior were ever inspected, the trick would fail anyway, shoes or no.

      Once it was dressed, its cheeks rouged, its smooth head bewigged, its forehead and eyelids fitted with the tiny eyebrow and eyelash hairpieces employed by gentile morticians in the case of facial burning or certain depilatory diseases, the Golem looked, with its dull grayish complexion the color of boiled mutton, indisputably dead and passably human. There was only the faintest trace of the human handprint on its forehead, from which, centuries before, the name of God had been rubbed away. Now they only had to slide it through the trapdoor and follow it out of the room.

      This proved easy enough; as Josef had remarked when he lifted it to get the trousers on, the Golem weighed far less than its bulk and nature would have suggested. To Josef, it felt as if they were struggling, down the hallway, down the stairs, and out the front door of Nicholasgasse 26, with a substantial pine box and a large suit of clothes, and little besides.

      “‘Mach’ bida lo nafsho,’” Kornblum said, quoting Midrash, when Josef remarked on the lightness of their load. “‘His soul is a burden unto him.’ This is nothing, this.” He nodded toward the lid of the coffin. “Just an empty jar. If you were not in there, I would have been obliged to weight it down with sandbags.”

      The trip out of the building and back to the mortuary in the borrowed Skoda hearse—Kornblum had learned to drive in 1908, he said, taught by Franz Hofzinser’s great pupil Hans Kreutzler—came off without incident or an encounter with the authorities. The only person who saw them carrying the coffin out of the building, an insomniac out-of-work engineer named Pilzen, was told that old Mr. Lazarus in 42 had finally died after a long illness. When Mrs. Pilzen came by the flat the next afternoon with a plate of egg cookies in hand, she found a wizened old gentleman and three charming if somewhat improper women in black kimonos, sitting on low stools, with torn ribbons pinned to their clothes and the mirrors covered, a set of conditions that proved bemusing to the clientele of Madame Willi’s establishment over the next seven days, some of whom were unnerved and some excited by the

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