It was soft!
“You see, she touches the Golem’s ass!” Rabbi Hirsch said. “Sticking through the hole he chopped in the wall! And then he gives them — how do you say it?”
He flipped through the dictionary, stopped.
“Effluvium! He puts in the air, effluvium!”
“A fart!”
“Yes! Yes! A great big fart! And the ladies fall over, like with poison gas, and Brother Thaddeus begins to sob and the Golem runned away, laughing and laughing!”
They laughed together at the image of the Golem’s triumph. And then slowly the rabbi’s face settled. His eyes grew grave.
“Brother Thaddeus, he never gived, gave up,” Rabbi Hirsch said. “But then, a terrible crime he planned. So terrible, this time he must be punished.”
In the week before Passover, a small Christian girl disappeared, and in a dream, Rabbi Loew saw that this was part of a wicked plot for which the Jews, of course, would be blamed. Echoing through the rabbi’s dream were two words: Fünfter Palast. Michael pictured him waking in his candlelit study from the dream, murmuring, “Fünfter Palast, Fünfter Palast…” Then he turned to Michael, played thoughtfully with his beard, furrowed his brow, and said that the words were the key to thwarting the evil intentions of Brother Thaddeus.
Those words, Fünfter Palast, were the name of the ruined Fifth Palace. It had once belonged to an emperor who went mad a century before Rudolf came to Prague. That forgotten emperor imagined all sorts of enemies coming to get him, so he had built a network of secret tunnels from the Fifth Palace to other buildings in the area. He lived to escape. One tunnel even reached into the cellars of the Old-New Synagogue, where he could disguise himself as a Jew and disappear into the fog. Another was connected to the Green Building, where Brother Thaddeus now lived. When the emperor finally abdicated, his enemies destroyed the Fifth Palace. Now the entrances were buried in the ruins, and no maps or plans had survived.
That night, Michael followed Rabbi Loew and the Golem as they dodged spies and policemen in the streets and went to the ruins of the Fifth Palace. The Golem lifted huge slabs of broken walls and collapsed beams, clearing a path, until they found steps leading underground to a sealed door. The Golem ripped the door off its hinges as if playing with a dollhouse. Rabbi Loew stepped inside. Ahead of them lay a dark, damp tunnel. Rats crawled at their feet. Water dripped from the ceilings. Michael saw it all, moving in the darkness of the tale.
Then Rabbi Loew lit two havdalah candles and he and the Golem eased into the tunnel. After a while, they came to a kind of crossroads, where other tunnels led away in different directions. The Golem paused, sniffing the air. Then he indicated with a nod of his head that Rabbi Loew was to follow him into the tunnel to the right. There was a coppery stench in the air. Rabbi Loew looked as if he were entering the outskirts of Hell.
Finally they came to a large room with glistening stone walls, filled with rotting tables, cobwebbed pots, beakers, tubes: the abandoned workshop of an alchemist. Rabbi Loew felt a chill that would remain with him the rest of his life. Even now, more than four hundred years later, it seeped into Michael.
And then the Golem became excited, growling, alert, his nose flaring. He made his way into a dark corner. He returned with two baskets. They were not draped in cobwebs. In one of them, Rabbi Loew found almost thirty vials filled with fresh human blood. Each was labeled with the name of a well-known Jew. In the other, wrapped in a Jewish prayer shawl called a tallis, was the body of a child.
“Right away,” Rabbi Hirsch whispered, “he knows the plot.”
It was obvious: just before Passover, Brother Thaddeus would have the body and the vials of blood moved through the tunnels to the cellar of the Old-New Synagogue. From there, under cover of night, his henchmen would plant the vials throughout the Jewish Quarter, and the child’s body in Rabbi Loew’s own house. Brother Thaddeus could then bring the police to discover them and “prove” that the Jews were engaging in human sacrifice.
A blood libel!
Rabbi Loew acted quickly. He told the Golem to carry the child’s body back through the tunnels and hide it in the wine cellar of Brother Thaddeus’s mansion. The Golem smiled and went away with the body, while Rabbi Loew prayed for the child’s soul. When the Golem returned, Rabbi Loew ordered him to dig a deep hole in the earthen floor and bury the vials of blood. The Golem did what he was told, covering the holes with dirt, stones, and smashed beams. Then they retraced their steps. They noticed something new: the squealing of the rats had ended.
The next morning — it was the day before Passover — the police began raiding houses all over the Jewish Quarter, using a list of names from Brother Thaddeus. Michael watched them arrive in horse-drawn carriages outside the house of Rabbi Loew, two detectives in plain clothes, one tall and gray, the other short, fat, and flushed. More than thirty uniformed policemen were behind them on horseback. And then a gloating Brother Thaddeus arrived in his own fine carriage, his leather boots clacking on the cobblestones.
The police found nothing. Brother Thaddeus was stunned. As he marched with the police past the ruins of the Fifth Palace, he suggested to the detectives that they search the cellars of the ruined palace and the nearby Old-New Synagogue. He reminded them that there were always rumors of secret tunnels.
The detectives did what he asked, and for hours they searched. They found nothing. Michael saw Brother Thaddeus grow pale. Beads of sweat appeared on his bald head. He blinked his hairless eyelids and scurried away, in search of his henchmen, to find out what had gone wrong. But, fearful of his rage, they had vanished into the hills when they realized the blood was missing.
And so the eight days of Passover ended without the planned pogrom. And then it was Easter. Brother Thaddeus invited all the most important people in Prague to a lavish banquet, including the mayor and the chief of police, who brought his detectives as bodyguards. They were all assembled at table when Brother Thaddeus sent a servant to the wine cellar to bring up some of the oldest and finest bottles. After a few minutes, the servant returned, his eyes wide with horror.
“She’s there!” he exclaimed. “There — in the cellar!”
Pandemonium!
All rushed to the wine cellar, except Brother Thaddeus.
When they returned, the police chief was carrying the dead baby. Michael saw its face, as white as flour. The detectives glanced at each other and then at Brother Thaddeus. The monk backed into a corner like a trapped animal. The mayor said: “It was you.” And Brother Thaddeus began to weep.
There was a long silence in the basement of the Brooklyn synagogue.
“Did they hang him?” Michael said. “Chop his head off?”
“No. Him, they didn’t need to make a martyr, and Rabbi Loew agreed. So Brother Thaddeus was sent to prison for twelve years. He died there, blaming the Jews.”
“And what happened to the Golem?”
“He — well, it’s another story. And sad. Because it is a love story. And all love stories are sad.”
For a moment, Michael Devlin saw his mother and father together, dancing slowly, like a couple in a sad movie. He in an army uniform, she in a gown. Dancing in marble halls. Rabbi Hirsch stared at his own fingers, and for the first time Michael noticed that he was wearing a wedding band on the third finger of his left hand.