That was only two years ago. It seemed like a hundred. He had bawled like a baby that night, and she had to console him, and hug him, and tell him that someday he would see his father in Heaven. And she told him that he must pray for his father, Private Tommy Devlin of the United States Army, God rest his soul, and offer up his own pain for the souls in Purgatory. But he had prayed for his father every day during the war and still he had died, so Michael did not know why he must keep praying for him. After all, he said to his mother, Daddy can’t be in Purgatory: he died for his country. But she said they must still pray for him, and if Private Tommy Devlin of the United States Army didn’t need the prayers he would give them to someone who had no prayers at all. There were orphans who died in the war, and babies who had never been baptized, and Jews and Chinese and Russians. All sorts of people are dying in this awful war, she said, and we must pray for all of them.
When he was finished crying, his mother dried his face and told him that now he must be the man in the family, that he must not show his grief to strangers, that they must keep their feelings behind the door. And he had done that, refusing to ask for pity from his friends, embarrassed when a teacher at school told the class that they must pray for Michael Devlin’s father, who had died in the war.
But alone behind the door of his room, he would make his father come to life again, with his muscled arms, and his deep voice, and his booming laugh. He would hear him sing. He would walk with him in the park and see a flock of robins. He would sit with him in the balcony of the Grandview. And when he had remembered all the Sticky stories his father had told him, Michael would invent others. He would hit a soft grounder past second base, and Sticky would appear and he would ride the great dog around the bases. A bully would wrestle him to the ground in the schoolyard, and Sticky would seize the bully by the belt and hurl him fifty feet. He would see his father as alone as Custer, surrounded by Germans in the whirling snows of Belgium, and through the forest Sticky would come running, to snatch him away and take him home to Brooklyn.
Michael did not cry in front of others, and his mother was his strongest modeclass="underline" he had never seen her cry again. On this night more than two years after she had last cried, as he thought about the somber voice of Rabbi Hirsch when he explained his own mother’s departure, Michael was glad he had come to know this strange bearded man. The rabbi did not cry. The rabbi did not ask for pity. At least not in front of others.
On a frigid Thursday a week later, the huge leather book about Prague was back on the table, and the rabbi was showing him the routes he took each day to school when he was the boy’s age, moving easily into the Jewish Quarter called Josefeva. Now the rabbi’s words were full of magical images, as if he had remembered them during the week. Michael walked with the rabbi past black suns and black Madonnas, heading for Josefeva. In Old Town Square, Michael pictured Jews tied to the stake among soaring flames in the fourteenth century, their screams filling the air along with the odor of scorched flesh. Men in black robes piled on the wood. Children wept.
Then he was coming out of the house with Judah Hirsch, and the young man crossing the street was Franz Kafka, who was some kind of a writer. Kafka’s father ran a haberdashery right there, around that corner, in a building called the Kinsky Palace, and maybe that’s why Kafka always appeared in a black suit and a tight necktie and sometimes even a bowler hat. Then the boys went to inspect the glories of Pariszka Street. The name meant Paris in Czech. A Paris it wasn’t, the rabbi said, but it was pretty good anyway. They saw Kafka’s father, shouting, arguing with Judah’s father… what was the word? Debating. Michael heard Kafka’s father’s voice, high-pitched, angry, always right while everybody else was wrong, and his anger made Michael laugh. Then they were playing beside a fountain, with Kafka’s sisters. Ottla, Valli, Elli. Younger than the man who was some kind of a writer.
“All three die in the camps,” Rabbi Hirsch said, his eyes suddenly milky. “Kafka himself, he was lucky. Before Hitler he died, of the TB. The girls, they went to the camps.”
There was a finality to the last sentence that made Michael feel clumsy, as if his own curiosity had led the rabbi somewhere the man did not want to go. Maybe the spell had been broken. Maybe now the rabbi would close the book and leave Prague. Michael didn’t know what to say, but he did not want the rabbi to stop talking. Finally he stammered a few words.
“Tell me abut Josefeva.”
The rabbi shifted in his chair, cleared his throat as if gathering his strength, turned to another page of the book, and then reached into the past. He talked about a street called U Stareho Hrbitova, a street that was there in the book, and how if you hugged that gray stone wall, right there, and kept going, you would come to the heart of the old ghetto. Michael knew the word ghetto from the blue books. The rabbi talked about how Jews had been there since before the Czechs, perhaps from as far back as the time of the expulsion from Jerusalem. But the walls that sealed the Jews into the ghetto were not built for another thousand years. He described the wall to Michael, its porous stone and mossy base, the huge wooden gates, and how within the gates everything was separate from the rest of Prague. There was a Jewish court, a Jewish jail, even a Jewish post office.
“That was dumb,” Michael said.
“Yes, but a long time the dumbness lasted, right up to about 1850,” the rabbi said. “You know what is the most stupid? When the Christians sealed us in, they sealed themselves out.”
“From what?”
“From learning. From tradition.” A pause. “From miracles.”
Michael knew he couldn’t mean Catholic miracles, like the one about the loaves and the fishes or the water turned into wine at Cana.
“You mean, like… magic?”
The rabbi looked up from the book, and raised an eyebrow.
“Maybe,” he said. Another pause. “Magic, you like to hear about?”
“Yes.”
The rabbi took a deep breath, turned a page, and took Michael into another Prague, one that could not be described by geometry or science. A magical city of goblins and ghosts and doppelgangers (“a kind of bad twin,” the rabbi explained). In that city, Michael looked up and saw angels. Not fat little pink cherubs from greeting cards. Great silvery creatures with wings as wide as buses, dancing in clouds, swooping behind the spires. As big as Finn MacCool. In a narrow street called Golden Lane, he saw a man in a dark robe covered with silver stars, a man who looked like what the wizard Shazam might have looked like when he was young. Rabbi Hirsch said he was called an alchemist, part scientist and part astrologer. Michael knew an astrologer was a guy who could read the stars and make horoscopes like the ones in the Daily News that claimed they could predict the future and never did. These alchemists, the rabbi went on, were always trying to turn cheap metal, like lead or zinc or iron, into gold.
There were hundreds of them in Prague, brought from all over Europe by a mad emperor named Rudolf, who lived in the shadows of Hradčany Castle because his face was made of fruits and vegetables. There was even a painting of him showing radishes and carrots and onions where his nose and chin and ears should have been. One of Rudolf’s alchemists had invented a magic mirror where the future revealed itself through smoky glass. Another, bent and old, had spent his entire life searching for the philosopher’s stone, a single object, made of the hidden minerals of the earth, that would contain all wisdom and the secrets of eternal life. Another wore a silver nose and traveled with a dwarf and claimed to be 312 years old. All carried vials of sulfur and mercury. They studied stars and meteors and the movements of planets. They prayed to gods without names.