The rabbi’s eyes were drowsy with the past, his face loose. And then he was a young man, taking Michael with him into the cellar cafés, the air blue with cigarette smoke, and Mucha posters on the walls full of women with thick coils of hair and red lips, and all of them, Judah Hirsch and Michael Devlin and their friends, talking about naturalism and symbolism. Mallarme and Nietzsche and Rilke. The names meant nothing to Michael as he listened hard, trying to shape the rabbi’s life in his own mind, living it with him.
“This is a time, the first time I try to live without God,” the rabbi said, his eyes drifting to the door that led to the sanctuary. “Is a surprise, a rabbi can try to live without God?”
“Yes,” the boy said.
“We are, were young,” the man said.
He kept talking, as much to himself as to Michael, trying to explain a time in the 1920s when he and his friends and most other Czechs believed that culture would unite them all. Michael didn’t exactly understand the word culture; it made him think of pictures of rich people he’d seen in the Daily Mirror. But the rabbi spoke about a time, in those cellar cafés, when all of them thought that culture would be the cement of Prague, strong enough to bind together Christians and Jews and atheists, men and women, old and young. Culture would end the ancient quarrels of Europe, preventing bloodshed and bitterness and cruelty.
“God we didn’t need,” he said, “if we had Vermeer. Or Picasso. Or Mondrian. On every wall, we had their pictures pasted.”
None of this talk made pictures in Michael’s mind, nor carried him high above the distant city to share the sky with ghosts. But he could see himself with young Judah Hirsch, sitting beside the first radio in a smoky corner of the Café Montmartre on Celetna Street, smoking cigarettes, listening to words coming through the air in other languages. Michael could not tell one language from another but knew that there were Germans speaking, and Slavs, and Austrians and Russians, and he wished that Father Heaney was with them, because he had been to Europe and could help sort them out.
Then the rabbi talked about the arrival of the phonograph record in Prague, and Michael saw his friend Judah Hirsch winding up a Victrola and putting the needle on the record and heard him telling his friends that in this new Czechoslovakia, this new Europe, this place free of hatred and war, they would drown together in the music of Dvořák and Mahler and Smetana. Names that Rabbi Hirsch pronounced as if they were saints. Names that Michael did not recognize, could not even imagine how to spell. The rabbi made the boy long to hear their music. He wished his mother would save up and buy a phonograph, even a windup Victrola from the St. Vincent DePaul Society, where things were cheap, so he could hear the music of these men, and Don Giovanni too. And suddenly he realized that the rabbi, who spoke about music as if it were played by God, lived here in the synagogue without a radio, without even the company of Bing Crosby and Benny Goodman.
“Modern, we all were,” the rabbi said, with no music in his voice. “That was the new religion. Modernism.” He paused, and glanced at Michael’s puzzled face. “Too modern for believing in God, we were.”
Such talk made Michael uneasy. He could not imagine how a man of God, a rabbi, could admit that once upon a time he did not believe in God. The priests in Sacred Heart could have no such doubts. They seemed born to be priests, chosen by God himself. Or if they had the doubts, they surely would not tell Michael. But when Rabbi Hirsch spoke of his doubting youth, Michael felt even closer to him, for Michael had his own unspoken doubts, his own questions.
“Eh, you are a boy,” the rabbi said, as if understanding that he had wandered too far from the streets of Prague and the names of buildings and streets and rivers. “I am saying too much of grown-up things.”
He returned to the pictures in the book, like a man examining a map, tracing paths into the New Town Square and showing Michael the astrological clock on the walls of the church, with the apostles moving through two windows every hour, hour after hour, so accurate that even the passing Jewish businessmen would look up and check their pocket watches. Then Michael and young Judah Hirsch were gazing up at the lacy facade of the Palace of Industry. Its clock tower seemed to float in the air above its roof, and the facade’s pattern of intricate iron grills and repeated circles turned yellow in the August sun. Stone flowers sprouted from other buildings and curled around each other in stained-glass windows, and then Michael was on the steps of the National Museum, standing with Judah Hirsch and his father as they looked out over Wenceslas Square and listened to the great leader Masaryk speak about democracy and hope to half a million roaring Czechs.
“How can you remember all these things?” Michael said.
“A Jew, he must watch, and he must remember,” the rabbi said, and smiled in a detached way. “If he wants to live.”
“Like the Irish with the English,” Michael said, remembering the tales his mother told him of British soldiers on the streets of Belfast in 1923, when she was a girl.
“Yes,” the rabbi said. “Like that.”
He turned a few more pages, and there, finally, among the drawings of Old Town and the Jewish Quarter, was the house where he had lived with his father and mother. In a street called U Prasne. In his mind, Michael saw the father’s face: grave, severe, with a trimmed gray beard and pince-nez glasses, checking his pocket watch as he passed the clock where the apostles appeared every hour. Michael was beside Judah Hirsch when his father came home through the winter snows from the clothing store, to slump gray-faced in a chair beside the fire, sitting in the same way that Michael’s mother sat in the living room chair with her book by A. J. Cronin. Then Judah’s mother began to play Mozart on the piano, and the color slowly returned to his father’s face.
“Perfect, it wasn’t,” the rabbi said. “But some nights always I remember it.”
“Do you have pictures of them?”
“All lost.”
“Your mother—”
“Home from school I corned, came, one day, and she is gone,” the rabbi said. “Clothes gone. Jewelry gone. To Vienna, they tell to me. My father that night… he said never again her name is to be said in the house. Thirteen years old I am at this time. In bed, when I finished crying, I heared him in his room, crying too. And never again we say her name.”
“I’m sorry, Rabbi. I didn’t mean to—”
“Is okay. In the life, worst things happen.”
That day, the rabbi told no more stories of Prague. He closed the book and returned it to its shelf and then asked Michael for the latest news about Jackie Robinson.
But at home in the darkness of his room, Michael wondered what it must be like to have your mother disappear, her name erased from all conversation. He could not conceive of his mother leaving his father and going off to Boston or Chicago or the Bronx, never to return. He imagined himself as the rabbi when he was a boy, Judah Hirsch lying in his room in Prague, knowing he would never see his mother again. And knew that Judah Hirsch must have felt the way Michael felt that night in early 1945, after the two soldiers had come up the stairs to their door and talked to his mother, and she had wept without control for the first and last time, and then had to tell the boy that his father wasn’t coming home.