Michael Chabon - The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay

“Ask me what?”

“What was with all the newspapers?”

“They are your New York newspapers. I bought them at the Capitol Greyhound Terminal.”

“How many?”

For the first time, he noticed, Josef Kavalier twitched. “Eleven.”

Sammy quickly calculated on his fingers: there were eight metropolitan dailies. Ten if you counted the Eagle and the Home News. “I’m missing one.”

“Missing …?”

“Times, Herald-Tribune”—he touched two fingertips—“World-Telegram, Journal-American, Sun.” He switched hands. “News, Post. Uh, Wall Street Journal. And the Brooklyn Eagle. And the Home News in the Bronx.” He dropped his hands to the mattress. “What’s eleven?”

“The Woman’s Daily Wearing.”

“Women’s Wear Daily?”

“I didn’t know it was like that. For the garments.” He laughed at himself, a series of brief, throat-clearing rasps. “I was looking for something about Prague.”

“Did you find anything? They must have had something in the Times.”

“Something. A little. Nothing about the Jews.”

“The Jews,” said Sammy, beginning to understand. It wasn’t the latest diplomatic maneuverings in London and Berlin, or the most recent bit of brutal posturing by Adolf Hitler, that Josef was hoping to get news of. He was looking for an item detailing the condition of the Kavalier family. “You know Jewish? Yiddish. You know it?”

“No.”

“That’s too bad. We got four Jewish newspapers in New York. They’d probably have something.”

“What about German newspapers?”

“I don’t know, but I’d imagine so. We certainly have a lot of Germans. They’ve been marching and having rallies all over town.”

“I see.”

“You’re worried about your family?”

There was no reply.

“They couldn’t get out?”

“No. Not yet.” Sammy felt Josef give his head a sharp shake, as if to end the discussion. “I find I have smoked all my cigarettes,” he went on, in a neutral, phrase-book tone. “Perhaps you could—”

“You know, I smoked my last one before bed,” said Sammy. “Hey, how’d you know I smoke? Do I smell?”

“Sammy,” his mother called, “sleep.”

Sammy sniffed himself. “Huh. I wonder if Ethel can smell it. She doesn’t like it. I want to smoke, I’ve got to go out the window, there, onto the fire escape.”

“No smoking in bed,” Josef said. “The more reason then for me to leave it.”

“You don’t have to tell me,” Sammy said. “I’m dying to have a place of my own.”

They lay there for a few minutes, longing for cigarettes and for all the things that this longing, in its perfect frustration, seemed to condense and embody.

“Your ash holder,” Josef said finally. “Ashtray.”

“On the fire escape. It’s a plant.”

“It might be filled with the … spacek? … kippe? … the stubbles?”

“The butts, you mean?”

“The butts.”

“Yeah, I guess. Don’t tell me you’d smoke—”

Without warning, in a kind of kinetic discharge of activity that seemed to be both the counterpart and the product of the state of perfect indolence that had immediately preceded it, Josef rolled over and out of the bed. Sammy’s eyes had by now adjusted to the darkness of his room, which was always, at any rate, incomplete. A selvage of gray-blue radiation from the kitchen tube fringed the bedroom door and mingled with a pale shaft of nocturnal Brooklyn, a compound derived from the halos of streetlights, the headlamps of trolleys and cars, the fires of the borough’s three active steel mills, and the shed luster of the island kingdom across the river, which came slanting in through a parting in the curtains. In this faint glow that was, to Sammy, the sickly steady light of insomnia itself, he could see his cousin going methodically through the pockets of the clothes he had earlier hung so carefully from the back of the chair.

“The lamp?” Josef whispered.

Sammy shook his head. “The mother,” he said.

Josef came back to the bed and sat down. “Then we must to work in the darkness.”

He held between the first fingers of his left hand a pleated leaf of cigarette paper. Sammy understood. He sat up on one arm, and with the other tugged the curtains apart, slowly so as not to produce the telltale creak. Then, gritting his teeth, he raised the sash of the window beside his bed, letting in a chilly hum of traffic and a murmuring blast of cold October midnight. Sammy’s “ashtray” was an oblong terra-cotta pot, vaguely Mexican, filled with a sterile compound of potting soil and soot and the semipetrified skeleton, appropriately enough, of a cineraria that had gone unsold during Sammy’s houseplant days and thus predated his smoking habit, still a fairly recent acquisition, by about three years. A dozen stubbed-out ends of Old Golds squirmed around the base of the withered plant, and Sammy distastefully plucked a handful of them—they were slightly damp—as if gathering night crawlers, then handed them in to his cousin, who traded him for a box of matches that evocatively encouraged him to EAT AT JOE’S CRAB ON FISHERMAN’S WHARF, in which only one match remained.

Quickly, but not without a certain showiness, Josef split open seven butts, one-handed, and tipped the resultant mass of pulpy threads into the wrinkled scrap of Zig Zag. After half a minute’s work, he had manufactured them a smoke.

“Come,” he said. He walked on his knees across the bed to the window, where Sammy joined him, and they wriggled through the sash and thrust their heads and upper bodies out of the building. He handed the cigarette to Sammy and, in the precious flare of the match, as Sammy nervously sheltered it from the wind, he saw that Josef had prestidigitated a perfect cylinder, as thick and straight and nearly as smooth as if rolled by machine. Sammy took a long drag of True Virginia Flavor and then passed the magic cigarette back to its crafter, and they smoked it in silence, until only a hot quarter inch remained. Then they climbed back inside, lowered the sash and the blinds, and lay back, bedmates, reeking of smoke.

“You know,” Sammy said, “we’re, uh, we’ve all been really worried … about Hitler … and the way he’s treating the Jews and … and all that. When they, when you were … invaded.… My mom was … we all …” He shook his own head, not sure what he was trying to say. “Here.” He sat up a little, and tugged one of the pillows out from under the back of his head.

Josef Kavalier lifted his own head from the mattress and stuffed the pillow beneath it. “Thank you,” he said, then lay still once more.

Presently, his breathing grew steady and slowed to a congested rattle, leaving Sammy to ponder alone, as he did every night, the usual caterpillar schemes. But in his imaginings, Sammy found that, for the first time in years, he was able to avail himself of the help of a confederate.

IT WAS A CATERPILLAR SCHEME—a dream of fabulous escape—that had ultimately carried Josef Kavalier across Asia and the Pacific to his cousin’s narrow bed on Ocean Avenue.

As soon as the German army occupied Prague, talk began, in certain quarters, of sending the city’s famous Golem, Rabbi Loew’s miraculous automaton, into the safety of exile. The coming of the Nazis was attended by rumors of confiscation, expropriation, and plunder, in particular of Jewish artifacts and sacred objects. The great fear of its secret keepers was that the Golem would be packed up and shipped off to ornament some institut or private collection in Berlin or Munich. Already a pair of soft-spoken, keen-eyed young Germans carrying notebooks had spent the better part of two days nosing around the Old-New Synagogue, in whose eaves legend had secreted the long-slumbering champion of the ghetto. The two young Germans had claimed to be merely interested scholars without official ties to the Reichsprotektorat, but this was disbelieved. Rumor had it that certain high-ranking party members in Berlin were avid students of theosophy and the so-called occult. It seemed only a matter of time before the Golem was discovered, in its giant pine casket, in its dreamless sleep, and seized.