Джонатан Келлерман - The Golem of Paris

She plunges.

Up on the ground floor, Peter has unlocked the women’s section.

They cross to the curtain that conceals the garret entrance. Peter slides it aside and they crowd into the booth. Bina seals her lips, her eyes, waits for the blast of dust.

Nothing happens.

She looks at Peter.

He has his flashlight pointed at the trapdoor in the ceiling.

He’s waiting for her to pull the rope.

He’s too short to reach it.

Her whirling sense of déjà vu dissolves, as she perceives the contrast between then and now, what’s missing.

Ota Wichs.

She considers what Dmitri appears to know.

The jar. Its location. Its significance. Her significance.

She considers that he has saved her, in a way, escorting her out of hell.

To bring her here.

Is there really a train to Berlin?

There are other things he does not know.

Under no circumstances can it leave this building.

Or he knows, and does not care.

For me, greater things lie ahead.

She says, “That man outside. Have you ever met him before?”

Peter shakes his head. “He called on the phone.”

“When?”

“Yesterday. He said to come tonight and bring the key to the shul . He said don’t tell my stepmother.”

“Did he tell you what he wants me to do?”

“Move the golem,” Peter says. “He said my father asked him to do it.”

Silence.

She says, “Have you seen your father recently? Spoken to him?”

“No. But the man said that he would take me to him if I did what he said.”

A brick in her throat. She starts to reply, but Peter speaks first:

“He lied, didn’t he.”

She says nothing.

A businesslike nod. “I thought so. I was excited when he told me. But he lied. My father is dead.”

She says, “He might still be alive.”

“That’s what Pavla thinks,” Peter says.

“Well, she’s — I’m sure she’s right.”

“No,” the boy says leadenly. “She’s wrong.”

He appears to be aging before her very eyes.

“He’s been arrested before,” he says. “We always got a letter. But we didn’t get one, this time. So I know. It was the same when they took my mother.”

No child of nine ought to wield such arid logic.

Bina says, “I’m so sorry, Peter.”

He is tight around the mouth, but dry-eyed, his mind already aligned with hers, toward survival.

“All right,” he says. “What should we do?”

She describes a plan, as best she can. It’s getting harder and harder to keep her thoughts in order. “Does that sound all right?”

Peter nods. He shuts his eyes against the dust. “Go ahead.”

Her second ascent is more difficult than the first. The sedative moves through her bloodstream in spurts, and her limbs feel alternately flimsy and sandbagged as she climbs through stinging, choking clouds of dust. She has no strong arms to guide her; no enduring faith; she follows only her instincts and the bead of Peter’s flashlight as it ricochets in infinity; flickering, feinting, collapsing to zero.

Jacob.

A heartbeat, a wheel, a contracting womb.

Jacob. Jacob. Jacob.

Up, up, up she goes, toward the new light that spreads like a canopy. She pulls herself onto the attic floor, striving to raise her head, hoping to catch another sweet glimpse of her Jerusalem.

Her chance has passed.

Nothing but broken furniture.

And no time to mourn: Peter has kindled the lantern and stands expectantly.

Bina coughs, pounds her chest. Rises.

They begin to walk.

In her memory, the journey across the garret took hours. Now space telescopes, and they arrive at the scene, laid as it was on the night of the National Day celebration.

Cabinet, wheel, stool, portable stove.

The lump of clay. The bucket of water, gone scummy.

The tool roll.

She was supposed to come back.

She was supposed to make as many jars as possible.

A hundred more, we’ll be fine.

Bina and Peter remove the drop cloth and open the cabinet.

Inside is the completed pair of jars. Despite never having been fired, they’ve set up well, the surfaces dully polished.

She moves them aside and thrusts her arm deep into the cabinet. Her fingertips skim the old jar that holds the beetle. She senses its warmth, the magnetism. She can’t quite reach it. Ota made sure of that.

Peter drags over a crate for her to stand on, hands her the arm from a coatrack.

“Thank you.”

She uses the hook to ease the jar out, trying not to knock it over, not to touch it with her bare skin. Once she’s gotten it close enough, she lets the boy take over.

He sets the jar on the floor beside one of the newer jars.

“You need to help me,” he says. “I only have two hands.”

She smiles despite her nerves. “Tell me what to do.”

“You lift the lids. I’ll tip her out into that one. Then you put the lid down.”

She nods. She gets down on her knees. Then she says, “Her?”

“Ready?” Peter says.

She positions her hands over the clay knobs.

“One, two, three.”

The operation takes a fraction of a second, Peter’s lithe hands darting in, the beetle tumbling through open space and landing at the bottom of the new jar, where it stirs and rolls over, sitting up like a dog, its forelegs working excitedly, waving.

Bina stares, mesmerized.

Peter acts fast, snatching the lid from between her fingers and dropping it into place. There’s a moment, before it comes down, when Bina sees the beetle’s limbs fly toward her, a gesture of indignation and anguish.

Peter puts the golem in the cabinet, using the coatrack arm to edge the jar far back on the shelf. They cover the cabinet with the drop cloth and tie it down.

Bina wraps the second new jar in a rag. “I’ll make copies and send them to you. I’ll need the tools.”

“Clay, too,” he says.

She regards the lump, dried rock hard. “I don’t know if I’m going to be able to revive it. I’ll try.”

They pack the items in a tallis bag. When she wraps the old, cracked jar, it no longer feels living, but cold and stiff.

She gives the shuttered cabinet a parting glance.

As they pick their way across the garret, square throbs of dislocation press at the interior of her skull, hideous surges of terror and delight, the urge to laugh, to scream, to speak. Her blurred vision is clearing, but not to normal; instead there is an excruciating sharpness, a hellish bombardment of detail.

They arrive at the peaked door that opens above the rear terrace. Up close, it’s hardly larger than it looks from thirty-five feet below.

She anxiously fingers the iron bar that holds it shut, the hinges bloated with rust. “Have you ever gone out this way?”

Peter shakes his head. “It’s not supposed to be opened.”

“You can come back later and lock it,” she says.

He nods.

“You’ll go first. When you reach the bottom, what are you going to do?”

“Run as fast as I can.”

“Where?”

“Away from you.”

“That’s right,” she says. “It’s me he wants, not you. But you must be careful all the same. He’s supposed to leave Prague soon. Until he does, you won’t be safe. Don’t go anywhere without a grown-up.”

As if that matters.

She says, “Do you understand, Peter?”

He nods again.

Still she hesitates. She can’t abandon him.

“I just thought of something,” she says. “You could come with me. I can tell the embassy — we’ll tell them that it’s not safe for you to stay here. We’ll ask for asylum.”

“No,” he says.

“You’d like America once you got there,” she says. “Pavla, too.” She is a con woman, crazy promises rushing out of her. “I’m sure we can—”