Michael Chabon - The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

"Well, well," he said. "This is regrettable. I don't- It appears that your father has died."

Joe laughed. For the briefest instant, he thought that Milde was making a joke. But Milde had never made a joke before in Joe's hearing, and Joe saw that he was not kidding now. His throat tightened. He felt his eyes burning. If he had been alone, he would have broken down, but he was not alone, and he would rather have died himself than allow Milde to see him cry. He looked down at his lap, clamping down on his emotions and setting his jaw.

"I just had a letter…" he said weakly, his tongue thick amid his teeth. "My mother said nothing…"

"When was the letter posted?"

"Nearly a month ago."

"Your father has been dead for only three weeks. It says here that the cause was pneumonia. Here."

Milde passed the ragged sheet of soft yellow paper across the desk to Joe. It had been torn from a much longer list of the dead. The name kavalier emil dr was one of nineteen, beginning with Eisenberg and running alphabetically through to Kogan, each of them followed by a terse notation of age and date and cause of death. It appeared to be a partial list of the Jews who had died in Prague or environs during the months of August and September. Joe's father's name had been circled in pencil.

"Why…?" Joe could not seem to sort out the knot of questions interfering with his thoughts. "Why was I not informed?" he managed finally.

"I have no idea how that piece of paper, which I have never seen before, even found its way into your dossier," Milde said. "It's perfectly mysterious. Bureaucracy is a mysterious force." He seemed to realize that humorous remarks might not be appropriate at this time. He coughed. "It is regrettable, as I said."

"It may be an error," Joe said. It must be, he thought, for I saw him only this afternoon, in Hoboken! "A case of mistaken identity."

"Such things are always possible," Milde said. He stood up and extended a condolent hand. "I shall write a memorandum to my successor about your father's case. I will see that inquiries are made."

"You are most kind," Joe said, rising slowly from his chair. He felt a flush of gratitude to Herr Milde. Inquiries would be made. He had at least managed to obtain that much for his family. Someone now would take an interest, if only to this extent, in their case. "Goodbye, Herr Milde."

"Goodbye, Herr Kavalier."

Afterward, Joe found he had no memory of how he got out of Milde's office, along the warren of corridors, down the elevator, into the lobby. He wandered up Broadway for a block before it occurred to him to wonder where he was going. He went into a saloon and telephoned the office. Sammy was in. He started in about Joe's pages in grandiloquent terms, but when he perceived the silence on Joe's end, he ran out of steam and asked, "What?"

"I come from the consulate," Joe said. The telephone was old-fashioned, with a speaking tube and a cylindrical earpiece. There had been one like it in the kitchen of the house off the Graben. "They had some bad news for me." Joe told him how, quite by accident, he had learned that his father was dead.

"Could there be a mistake?"

"No," Joe said. He was thinking more clearly now. He was a little shaky, but it seemed to him that his thoughts were clear. His gratitude toward Adjutant Milde had turned once again to anger. "I'm sure it is not a mistake."

"Where are you?" Sammy said.

"Where am I?" Joe looked around and realized for the first time that he was in a saloon on Broadway, down at the toe of the city. "Where am I." It was not a question the second time he said it. "I'm on my way to Canada."

"No," he heard Sammy say, as he hung the receiver back on its hook. He went over to the bar. "I wonder if you can help me?" he said to the bartender.

The bartender was an elderly man with a shining pate and big rheumy blue eyes. He had been trying to explain to one of his customers, when Joe interrupted him, how to work the abacus he used to figure tabs. The customer looked glad of the interruption.

" Montreal, Canada," the bartender repeated, when Joe told him where he wanted to go. "I believe you want to leave from Grand Central Station."

The customer agreed with this. He said Joe wanted to take the Adirondack.

"What do you want to go there for?" he said. "If you don't mind my being so nosy?"

"I'm going to enlist in the R.A.F.," Joe said.

"Are you?"

"Yes. Yes, I'm tired of waiting."

"Attaboy," said the customer.

"They speak French up there," the bartender said. "Watch out."

Joe did not stop at home to pack a bag. He did not want to risk running into someone who would try to talk him out of his plan. Anyway, there was nothing he needed that he could not buy in a drugstore or find in a bus-station vending machine; his passport and visa he carried with him at all times. The Royal Air Force would dress and shoe and feed him.

He distracted himself for a while on the train by worrying about his interview with the recruiters. Would his resident-alien status in the United States be an impediment to his enlisting in the R.A.F.? Would they find some unknown flaw in his body? He had heard of guys being rejected for having flat feet and bad eyesight. If the air force didn't take him, he would join the Royal Navy. If he was not deemed fit for the navy, then he would take his chances in the infantry.

By Croton-on-Hudson, however, his spirits began to flag. He tried to cheer himself with thoughts of dropping bombs on Kiel or Tobruk, but his fantasies struck him as uncomfortably reminiscent of his slugfests in the pages of Radio, Triumph, and The Monitor. In the end, neither fretting nor bravado could distract him any longer from the thought that he was fatherless.

He and his father had in their jocular, gingerly fashion loved each other, but now that his father was dead, Joe felt only regret. It was not just the usual regret over things left unsaid, thanks unexpressed and apologies withheld. Joe did not yet regret the lost future opportunities for expatiation on favorite shared subjects, such as film directors (they revered Buster Keaton) or breeds of dogs. Such regrets would come only belatedly, a few days after, when he made the realization that death really did mean that you were never going to see the dead person ever again. What he regretted most of all just now was simply that he had not been there when it happened; that he had left to his mother, grandfather, and brother the awful business of watching his father die.

Emil Kavalier, like many doctors, had always been a terrible patient. He refused to acknowledge that he could fall prey to an illness, and had never taken a sick day in his life. When laid low by a grippe, he would suck mentholated pastilles, consume copious amounts of chicken broth, and go about his business. Joe could not even imagine him sick. How had he died? In a hospital? At home? Joe pictured him lying in a heavy scrolled bed in the middle of a jumbled apartment like the ones he had seen in the building where the Golem had been hidden.

What would become of his mother, grandfather, and brother? Their names might have appeared already on some other list of deaths that no one had bothered to report to him. Was pneumonia contagious? No, he felt fairly certain it was not. But it could be brought on by ill health and misery. If his father had been vulnerable to something like that, what kind of shape must Thomas be in? He imagined that the little food or medicine they possessed went to Thomas before it went to anyone else. Perhaps his father had sacrificed his health for the sake of Thomas's. Had his entire family died? How would he ever find out?

By the time the Adirondack pulled into Albany that afternoon, Joe's adventure into the unknown of war had come to seem one unknown too many for him to bear. He had convinced himself that it was far more likely that both his mother and Thomas were still alive. And if this was so, then they required rescue no less than they had before. He could not abandon them further by running off and trying, like the Escapist, single-handedly to end the war. It was imperative for him to remain focused on the possible. At least-it was a cruel thought, but he could not prevent himself from thinking it-there would now be one visa fewer to try to wrest from the Reich.