“You mean you convey regards and don’t know the fate of the man?”
I let his prickly remark brush by me.
“Here’s the story. We met in shul in New York two Sabbaths in a row. Then I saw him one day at the hospital. Then the hospital refused to give me any information, citing the new privacy laws. It’s so frustrating. Oh, my God! Poor Jiri. I’m so sorry to hear this. I liked him so much. I can’t tell you how sad I am to hear that he died. What a mentch. I only knew him a short while but we established a kinship. He even called me bruderl, little brother.”
“I know what bruderl means.”
His third sarcastic remark. Well, at least he wasn’t a moron.
“Sorry, I just wanted to make myself clear. I felt I had found a long-lost relative in Jiri. All this in three meetings.”
“So you liked him.”
If I were combative, I would have said, Isn’t it obvious? I just told you I liked him. But I toned it down to:
“As you can see.”
I sat down next to the golem.
Wait a minute. What happened to my scenario? He still hadn’t told me his name.
“You see,” I said, “when they stonewalled me at the…”
“Excuse me, what is this stonewalled?”
“At the hospital, no matter how hard I tried, they refused to give me any information. They wouldn’t tell me if he was a patient, if he was well, if he was discharged, if he died. Like a stone wall was put up in front of me.”
“Stonewalled,” he said, closing his good eye and staring at me, golem-like, with his glass.
“Stonewalled. Good word. Excellent word. I like that word, ‘stonewalled.’”
“Exactly. I even went to his apartment afterward to see his wife.”
“Wife?”
“Well, it looked like a wife. It sure talked like a wife.”
“Jiri was not married. His wife and son were killed by the Germans. He never remarried.”
“All right, then. A housekeeper.”
“Ah, yes. Keeper of the house. Keeper of the keys.”
Then he winked, not with the good eye but with the bad. An eerie, empty wink. But perhaps it was just the lid moving, a mechanical flaw.
“But when I arrived at his apartment the next day,” I continued, “the house manager told me the apartment was empty. His housekeeper had moved out.”
“And his books, his signed copy of Meditation?”
“I know nothing about that.” I wanted to tell him about Jiri’s and Betty’s secret language but I held back.
“And… and…” The golem wanted me to continue. He dangled a word magnet right in front of me and waited. His face conveyed two messages, both contradictory. Puppet stiffness and animation. But on one thing both sides of his face agreed: talk some more. Reveal.
Broke then my resistance, especially when he said:
“Did he tell you any special word?”
“You mean like a password, or, like in banking, a personal identification number?”
The golem didn’t answer.
What special word did Jiri give me? None that I could recall. Or should I tell the golem about “nepa tara glos”?
But he had inserted the magic key, turned it, and now the words tumbled, bubbled, out of me, oozing the pleasure of juicy gossip.
“All right, I might as well tell you. Sometimes, in my presence, especially at the hospital at our last meeting, they spoke a secret language I could not penetrate. Well, maybe I did get a word or two.”
The golem laughed. “That means they liked you.”
What kind of nonsense is that? I thought. If they liked me they would have spoken a language I could understand. Then I considered my relationship with Jiri. There was a difference between he liking me and they liking me. On his own, it was love. Conjoined with Betty, the affection underwent a chemical change.
“I never thought discourtesy was synonymous with affection.”
“You are very philosophical. But wrong. I said they liked you. I didn’t say they trusted you.”
“Another misalliance. Another moyshe-kapoyr—yes, I know you know it means upside down — another strange coupling… About what didn’t they trust me? Inheritance? Bank accounts? I hardly knew them, for goodness’ sake.”
“I don’t know either. But when people use a secret language…” But he didn’t finish his thought.
“And how does a woman who isn’t a wife get to know such an arcane language?”
The golem shrugged. “Yes,” he said.
“It must have been a made-up language, because it had no affinity to any language grouping I know.”
“You’ll have to ask him that.”
“I’m in no rush to meet him again. But Jiri did say you could be helpful to me, to introduce me to some people.”
Should I tell him about the magic pen? No, I thought. Why give him another excuse for sarcastic laughter?
Thud. Thud. Thud. The sudden banging in the synagogue startled us. Someone pounded with a leather paddle on a leather-covered board for silence.
“I’ll talk to you after davenning,” said the golem softly without moving his lips.
“I still haven’t fully expressed how I feel about Jiri,” I told the golem later. “Sometimes you know people for years and don’t know them and yet sometimes you meet someone and in an instant you feel you’ve known and loved them a lifetime. I can’t tell you what a loss I feel.”
The golem must have been touched by my words for both sides of his face softened.
“Let me tell you something about Jiri he never would tell you himself. He was head of archives for the Jewish Museum here just before the Germans came. Since he had a PhD the Germans chose him to head the Jewish Museum they had in mind. The Germans respected titles and even called him Herr Doktor. He was going to be the director of what the Germans would call the Museum of an Extinct Race. Of course, they never told Jiri or any other Jew that name. Every day they brought truckloads of items stolen from the Jews they were killing, and they wanted Jiri and his staff to catalog them. And for cataloging the thousands of items the Germans were pillaging all over Czechoslovakia and surrounding regions, Jiri told them he needed lots of help. This way he was able to save many Jews in Prague. He stayed up nights teaching the Jews what to do so they could prove they were useful. When the Germans complained how many people he hired, he told them, If you want to have an accurate and precise cataloging we need every man and woman here. And the children are especially useful for handling the small items. ‘Precise’ and ‘accurate’ were totemic words for the Germans and they relented.”
“Jiri never told me that.”
“And he never would. I told you that. That’s the sort of man he is, was. An unsung hero of the Holocaust, whom we call the Schindler of Prague. But, near the end, they still sent him to Terezin. But thank God the staff he created survived.”
I shook my head in wonder.
The golem clapped his hands once. “So! What brought you to Prague, tovarish?”
“A direct flight from JFK in New York.”
He laughed a crooked smile, one side of his face happier than the other.
“Rather, I meant to say, what brings you to Prague?”
“My camera. I’m a maker of documentary films. Here I’m hoping to make a film about the Jewish uniqueness of Prague, with an accent on K.”
“Uh-huh,” said the golem. He licked his lips. “And no doubt you want to begin with this old shul.”
“Yes. Starting with the attic.” Seeing who stood before me I refrained from saying golem.
“The what?” said the golem.
“The attic.”
The golem leaned against the wall and burst out laughing. But not laughing laughing. I mean laughing laughing. He laughed out of the two sides of his mouth, a sad twitching laugh on the glass eye side, and a raucous double-barreled laugh on the left side, as if making up for the lack on the right with an extra dose on the left. He held his sides. His belly shook. He was a cartoon stereotype of a laughing man.