The dummy opens her lipsticked mouth and says, “Take my partner,” pauses and deadpans, “please.”
The audience comes back silent, caught communally wondering if this is one of those ultrahip performance artistes, a socio-cultural commentator playing the part of retro borscht-belt comedian while in actuality holding up a mirror to their hidden bourgeois pretensions.
“That’s not nice at all, Zwack,” says Langer in a halting, stagey voice as he wags a finger at his wooden cohort. “Now you behave or you go back into the trunk.”
Zwack swivels her head and looks out at the crowd.
“You’ll have to forgive Shecky,” she says. “He just flew in from Maisel and, boy, is his soul tired.”
A nervous undercurrent begins to sound and a rimshot only accentuates the discomfort.
“My darling,” says Langer, leaning forward and lifting the water glass from the floor, “don’t you know any new material? These good people would like something a bit more relevant.”
The golem somehow manages to roll her eyes. This actually produces a sympathetic if abbreviated laugh from the crowd.
“Knock knock,” the dummy says.
“Who’s there?” Langer responds.
“The Censor.”
Langer suddenly drops his stage face and stares at the dummy as if the puppet has launched into an improvisation, as if this were not the line they’ve rehearsed a hundred times. Flustered, Langer makes a production of bringing the water glass to his lips.
“The Censor who?” he asks hesitantly, then tilts his head back and sips from his glass theatrically as Zwack launches into song.
The Censor of Maisel
The Censor of Maisel
Hi ho the derry-oh
I’ll send you straight to hell
After a shocked second or two, the crowd begins to shower the duo with a smattering of applause. And of the two performers it’s the dummy who seems to respond to the approval, nodding to the room, a sense of confidence installing itself on the pinewood face. The golem rolls with the audience’s minuscule endorsement and seems to take over the act.
“There was a young girl from Maisel,” she crows,
Whose talent for tales was quite swell.
She built a library
But things got a bit scary
When Meyrink rang the front bell.
Langer gets furious and suddenly it’s more difficult to tell if his anger is genuine or part of the stage act.
“Now you stop this nonsense at once,” he bellows at the dummy, his face growing flushed. “You perform as you are meant to perform. You will tell the story that these people came to hear.”
Zwack the golem stares into her master’s face. The partners glare at each other for an uncomfortable parcel of time and the audience begins to get antsy, maybe even a little unnerved.
Finally, Zwack turns her gaze from Langer to the crowd, as if inspecting their worth, as if the wooden dummy were trying to calculate this small mob’s value as listeners. Her bottom jaw drops open, then seals closed, then slowly opens again. And a voice emerges. It’s neither Langer’s voice nor Zwack’s, but some other persona utilizing the golem’s wooden mouth, some entity possessing the larynx of both performers and uttering a new sound that nobody in the room can possibly ignore.
And the voice says, “This is the story of the girl who disappeared.”
15
There was a young woman in our community, really a girl, but quite beautiful and very mature for her age. She was, in fact, only seventeen years old at the time of the July Sweep. She never knew her mother — the woman died of typhus when the daughter was still an infant. The child lived in the attic of Haus Levi with her widower father, who was a kind man but not the best of providers and, to be honest, he had a propensity for the drink. The creature, as he sometimes called it. Nevertheless, he loved his daughter with all of his being and he attempted to do his best by her.
The daughter was named Alicia. She learned to read at a very young age. Her father was both amazed and proud of her skill with words and he was known to bring the girl to the neighbors’ kitchens after supper and have her perform, reading from the storybooks, the cheap little fable pamphlets and tissue-paper parables that he would purchase with the meager wages he earned as a marginal performer in the Goldfaden Carnival Troupe. The child loved her fairy tales, came to memorize them, so that after a time, she did not even need the books to tell the story. The neighbors in Haus Simeon — Miss Svetla, Mr. and Mrs. Wasserman, the Brezina family — appeared to enjoy these visits and would remark that the child indeed seemed blessed with a natural gift for language and the architecture of the tale.
Alicia’s talents blossomed as she grew and her skills were noted and praised by Mrs. Gruen, the teacher at the unchartered and makeshift school that was operated, somewhat clandestinely, in the basement of Haus Zebulun. I have never seen anything like it, Mrs. Gruen would croon to the father; she has been given this blessing for a reason. And the widower would nod and smile at the honor lavished on his only child. But he could never completely understand the teacher’s point. If there were a way that Alicia’s talents could secure her escape from the poverty of the Schiller, he couldn’t imagine what it was. And if Mrs. Gruen knew of a method by which Alicia could utilize her gifts to flee the privation of her surroundings, then why not come out and announce it instead of hinting at some vague and hidden destiny?
By the time Alicia was a teenager, she was contributing as much to the household support as her father. She took in washing and mending and for a time she held a delivery route for Der Kehlkopf in the German Quarter of the city. But the papergirl job kept her out of the Schiller past dusk and with the pogroms increasing at this time, her worried father made her give up the position. Still, these were good years. They ate fairly well and, most important, there was enough money to prevent Alicia from having to take a violet passport, the term, at that time, given to the government license for sanctioned brothel whores. Many of the Schiller girls, upon turning fourteen, were brought to the so-called tailor shops of Kaprova Boulevard for a pitiful bounty that the madams liked to call a dowry. It had been the fate of Alicia’s closest friend. The father promised the daughter he would cut off his legs and beg as a cripple before he would allow his angel to dance with the perverts of Kaprova.
In fact, this small family made out comparatively well with daughter laundering and stitching for a growing list of happy customers and father working the circuit of cafes near the university and sometimes near the fountains in the Park of Love, bringing home each night a top hat full of tips which amounted to more than one might think. For a time it was a happy existence, and when they realized they had the resources to actually move out of the attic of the Levi and into more comfortable quarters, they decided that they’d grown to like their room too much to leave it, that it had, in fact, become their home and that it was unlikely they would ever desire another.
Alicia’s passion for words and stories and, ultimately, for books did not abate during this period. If anything, it increased. When most of her peers began babbling incessantly about boys and the mysteries of courtship, Alicia found her own interests tending toward the novels she was discovering in the bins of the Wednesday bazaar. On the afternoons that she managed to finish her cleaning early, she would haunt the book stalls near the Teachers’ College, searching sometimes an hour or more for the single secondhand, threadbare paperback that she could afford that month. The bane of her life was not the agonies of first-time romance and unrequited puppy love but the unimaginable fact that, due to her race and her sex, her creed and her status in this city, she could not gain entrance to the massive library that sat like a foreboding temple in the central square, holding in its belly half a million books which would never fall under the decoding gaze of her Schiller-born eyes.