Джонатан Келлерман - The Golem of Paris

Her mother clucks. “Very expensive.”

“I’m kidding, Maminka.”

“It is not funny.”

Right Barbara thinks. Nothing is.

In the living room, her father is arguing with the New York Times .

“Bye, Taťka.”

Jozef Reich slams the paper shut. Like most of his gestures, it lacks the intended punch: no satisfying bang, just a noncommittal crinkle.

Jozef’s grin is sick and ironic as he hoists his shot glass of slivovice.

“Socialismus s lidskou tváří,” he says.

Socialism with a human face.

Before he has set the glass down, he’s groping in the direction of the bottle. Barbara hands it to him and bends to kiss the vein in the center of his forehead. He smells like overripe plums and motor oil. Each day, he comes home from the garage slathered in grease, and Věra fills the kitchen sink and shampoos his woolly arms up to the elbow.

“Study good,” he says.

“I will.”

Outside it’s so muggy the mosquitoes are complaining. Exactly the wrong weather for beef stew. Her mother’s cookery is driven primarily by economics. Chuck roast is on special, twenty-nine cents a pound, they will eat guláš.

Barbara trudges down Avenue D in the direction of Cindy’s house, rolling up her sleeves as she goes, aware of Věra watching from the kitchen window, staring down with that weird mix of suspicion and satisfaction. She can feel the knapsack imprinting itself in sweat on her back, the clasp of her brassiere biting into her spine, her blouse patching at the underarms. A group of boys wearing St. Vincent’s ties and listening to the Yankee game wonder aloud what’s hiding beneath her skirt.

Barbara pinches off a smile. Use your imagination, if you’ve got any.

She turns down Thirty-first, then circles back to Nostrand Avenue, where Cindy waits, tan and grinning, a one-woman conspiracy in a lime-green shift dress.

“Clockwork, baby.”

The dress hits halfway up her thighs. Her feet are squished into matching lime-green go-go boots. Her handbag has bright pink flowers on the side. She looks like she’s going dancing. She always does. It’s how she comes to class. Beside her, Barbara feels like a dust mop.

Her own skirt comes secondhand. She tried raising the hemline, so it wouldn’t look so dowdy. The first time she tried to walk out of the house, her mother screamed.

They will rape you.

It wasn’t funny; nothing about her family life was, but Barbara struggled to keep herself from laughing. Because Věra made these dire predictions in her even more dire Slavic accent, trilling the r like a cartoon villain.

They — will — rrrrrrrRRRRape you!

Who were they , these rapists prowling the streets of Flatbush? The blacks? The Puerto Ricans? The young men of St. Vincent’s Academy? In Věra’s mind, it could have just as easily been the Nazis or the Communists.

Either way, it wasn’t worth arguing about. Barbara went to her room and pulled out the stitching, leaving the skirt raggedy and misshapen.

Sometimes Cindy offers her stuff she never wears anymore. It’s not like you’re up to the minute, baby. Barbara declines. In the first place, her parents would never approve, of the clothes or the charity.

Plus she’d look ridiculous. As it is, Cindy’s half a foot shorter than her. Two of her minis wouldn’t begin to cover Barbara’s tush.

“Oof,” Cindy says, hefting the knapsack. “What’s in here, bricks?”

“Books,” Barbara says.

“I know you’re going for realism , baby, but come on. ”

Barbara smiles. She left the flap undone for effect. If her mother had been paying attention, she might have thought to question what class required textbooks for four different subjects. Or wondered how in the world Barbara could already have an exam when today is Wednesday and registration was on Monday.

Cindy drops the knapsack on the sidewalk and begins fiddling with Barbara’s hair.

“You ought to use a little makeup, baby. You’re so pale.”

Barbara shrugs.

“I wish I had eyes like yours. You got it, flaunt it... you know what, hang on.” Cindy rummages in her handbag for a bottle of liquid eyeliner. “Hold still.”

As she gets to work, Barbara thinks what an odd spectacle they must make, the Groovy Gal and the Flying Nun. Last spring they shared a dissection table in Introduction to Vertebrate Anatomy, making up a full two-thirds of the class’s female population. Of course Barbara ended up doing all the dirty work. Cindy couldn’t bring herself to lift a scalpel, she’d get one whiff of formaldehyde and break for the ladies’. The next day, Barbara would hand her a copy of the finished report.

Thanks, baby. I owe you one.

As a premed, Barbara had to take VA. Cindy, on the other hand, was then a junior without portfolio, flirting with becoming a nurse, although that went out the window the minute she met Stan, cause, baby, he’s the one. Not ashamed to want that, husband-house-kids, the whole shebang, she’s no crazy man-hating feminist, no way.

You got a boyfriend? she asked Barbara.

No. Then, sensing this was the wrong answer: Not yet.

Don’t worry, baby. You’re young.

That’s the problem. She’s too young for her life.

High school was hard enough; she skipped two grades and still her parents called the principal weekly to complain she wasn’t being sufficiently challenged. The schedule they set left little time for socializing, and she spent her first semester at Brooklyn College more or less alone.

Irrelevant, her parents say. You go to college for one purpose: to learn.

You learn for one purpose: to get a good job.

A good job ensures that you owe nobody nothing. It guarantees money. It guarantees your survival when civilization collapses, as it inevitably will. People will always need doctors. Even more so during the Apocalypse.

But it’s her — not her parents — walking the halls, adrift in a sea of hormones and freedom, mismatched in every conceivable way.

Her sophomore math professor, an elderly Austrian, looked her up and down and said The face is fourteen, but the body is twenty .

She felt humiliated. She didn’t know what to do. She told Cindy, who brayed a laugh. You’ll probably get an A.

She got an A+.

Now, as Cindy continues to work on Barbara’s right eye, foot traffic streams around them, folks barking to get off the damn sidewalk, quit blocking the steps.

“Shove it,” Cindy says pleasantly. With a confident hand, she starts on the left eye. It’s too bad she can’t handle blood and guts; she’d make a terrific surgeon. “Sooo,” she says. “When do I get to meet him?”

“Who.”

“ Who? Don Juan, dummy.”

It’s a reasonable assumption. The need for secrecy; the cover story.

Sure, why not? Her parents wouldn’t approve of her real destination, either.

For that matter, neither would Cindy.

“I don’t know,” Barbara says.

“I dig, baby. You’re feeling it out, right?”

“Right.”

“He’s your first, isn’t he?”

“Mm.”

Cindy sighs happily. “Nothing like your first.”

The ground begins to tremble: the arriving train.