The Golem of Paris

Chapter twenty

Jacob cupped the clay bird in his palms, as if cradling a living creature.

It was difficult to compare it to the one Bina had recently made — mashed potatoes didn’t make for a precise medium — but the general dimensions and shape matched.

He said, “Where did you get this?”

“She made hundreds of them,” Sam said. “They were an obsession of hers. So far as I’m aware, there’s nothing special about this one in particular, other than it survived.”

“Survived?”

“She destroyed the rest.”

All at once, the clay bird felt malignant as lead. Jacob set it down. It rocked slightly, as if bobbing on a lake. Sam laid a finger on its spine to still it, removing then his magnifying spectacles. His eyes were red and loose.

“She went to Prague,” he said. “She was never the same after that.”

A fist through Jacob’s midsection. “When?”

“You were very young,” Sam said. “You’d just turned two. We had a visit from an old friend of ours. She mentioned to your mother a mission of Jewish artists traveling to Prague, giving lectures and workshops and that sort of thing.”

He paused. “This woman, Frayda, she’s one of them. I didn’t know that, then. If I had, I never would have done what I did, which was to encourage your mother to go.”

“Why did you?”

“I thought it would be good for her to get out of the house. She’d been struggling. We didn’t call it depression. Certainly, there weren’t signs of mania yet. She just had the blues. Her father, rest in peace, he was probably depressed his whole life. That generation, the subject was taboo. Everyone knew someone who’d been put away, but it was considered shameful. We— I— should have known better. But your mother was young, healthy, educated. I figured she’d take a break, it would pass, she’d be normal again.”

Sam’s lips trembled. “She was supposed to be gone for two and a half weeks. I didn’t hear from her once she left, but it didn’t worry me. Remember, this is long before cell phones or e-mail. The eastern bloc... It might as well have been another planet.

“About ten days in, I got a call from the foundation that had organized the trip. There had been some trouble in Prague. The mission was being cut short. They were arranging to get the group out of the country on various flights, but they were having problems reaching your mother. They were very vague. I think they wanted to keep me from panicking, which of course had the opposite effect. Finally they admitted that she’d been unaccounted for, for several days.”

He lifted his water glass, the rim knocking against his teeth.

“It was chaos. I stopped sleeping. I think I lost ten pounds in the first week. As I mentioned, communication was next to impossible. I tried the U.S. embassy in Prague, but the phone would ring and ring. Finally I got through to them and they started calling hospitals on my behalf. I went to the police. I went to the FBI. The best anyone could do was to take a statement or refer me to a different agency. I went to the Federal Building and walked up and down the halls, pushing you in the stroller, knocking on doors. They thought I was out of my mind. And I was, I was petrified.

“The community rallied behind me. They took care of you when I couldn’t, they scared up some local media. For the most part, we were ignored. Reporters got confused, they thought your mother was a refusenik.

“I wanted to apply for a visa to go to Prague myself and look for her. The Czechoslovakian consulate wouldn’t grant me an appointment. Abe got me a meeting with a congressman, and a few days later the consulate says, all right, you can have your visa appointment, the soonest opening is March. This was November.

“A month without contact, people began to talk as if she was already dead. I actually had someone suggest I should start saying kaddish.

“Then the embassy in Prague called. Your mother had turned up at their door. She’d had some kind of breakdown. She was covered in blood and she was raving. They tried to call an ambulance for her, but she began screaming incoherently. They had to have her forcibly sedated.

“When I finally got to speak to her, she sounded as if she was at the end of a tunnel. It wasn’t just a bad connection. Her voice — I didn’t recognize it.

“Another week went by before they got her on a flight home. They had to drug her, and they sent a doctor along on the plane, to keep injecting her so she’d stay calm.

“I met her at the airport. I’d brought you with me, and several people from the community had come along, as well. They were cheering as she came through customs. She was being pushed in a wheelchair. Jacob, when I saw how she looked...”

He shut his eyes against the memory.

“I tried to hand you to her, but she wouldn’t move. She sat there, with a TWA bag on her lap, staring into space. I tried to kiss her, to hug her. I could feel her bones.”

Nauseated, Jacob fingered the faint patterns in the tablecloth.

“People expect an explanation,” Sam said. “They expect their heroes to be heroic, and their victims to suffer in a way that they can understand. Your mother would not oblige on either count. She was absent. In the beginning, we had all sorts of people coming by, to say hello, drop off food. She would lock herself in the back room. Do that enough and they stop coming.

“I was just as bad — just as entitled. I can admit that, now. It hurt me to sleep apart. She wouldn’t undress in front of me. If I tried to ask her questions, she simply shut down. Whatever was happening to her was happening behind closed doors.

“I dragged her, against her will, to see a psychiatrist, but the moment she saw him she began shaking and ran out of the office. The same thing happened again and again. It was clearly torture for her, so I backed off. In those days we were living in the place on Doheny. She kept her studio on the roof. That was the only thing that gave her any peace. She spent hours alone up there, making those damned birds.

“Anger I could deal with. Fear. But what can you do in the face of blankness? I’ve replayed that period a thousand times and I still can’t find an opening. It’s my fault for not looking harder. She was in pain and I didn’t want to make it worse. I believed she would open up when she was ready. And I know it sounds like an excuse, but I was simply so grateful to have her back.

“The hardest part was watching her relationship to you change. Suddenly it was agony for her to be near you. She loved you. She never stopped loving you, you must know that, Jacob. But any sign that you were in distress overwhelmed her. If you started crying, it was as if the volume was louder for her than for anyone else. She fought and fought, but eventually she couldn’t handle it. She had to escape.

“I wish you had gotten the chance to know her as I did. Her life — her real life — began the moment you came into the world. She had seven miscarriages before you.”

Jacob said, “You never told me.”

“Why would we? Who would that help?”

“You never told me any of it.”

“I’m sorry. Does it matter that I’m sorry?”

Jacob said nothing.

“That level of stress — you can’t grapple with it every waking moment. You block it out, because you need to buy groceries. My major achievement was that I managed to get her on lithium, which allowed a minimal level of functioning, as long as she remembered to take it.

“Looking back, it was crazy to think you weren’t affected. It was my fault; I treated you like an adult. That’s how you seemed. Grave, and wise. You tried so hard to be good.”

Sam pinched the bridge of his nose. “About six months after she returned, I went up to the roof to bring her a cup of tea and found her bleeding at the wrists. I have to assume she wasn’t serious, because she could’ve just as easily jumped. And she didn’t cut the right way, thank God.

“Perhaps I should’ve kept her hospitalized longer than I did. They tried to give her ECT, and she began shrieking as if she was being torn apart. I undid the straps myself and took her home.

“The summer you stayed in Boston,” Sam said. “That was her second attempt. I was supposed to be teaching a class, but it got canceled, and I came home early.”

Alone in an otherwise empty Harvard dorm, listening to his mother’s last words to him, a voicemail left the day she’d supposedly died.

I’m sorry, Jacob.

Sam said, “She’d cut the right way.”

His face was riven with anguish. “I let my guard down. It had been so long by then. I fooled myself into thinking we were safe. We were a family, we’d made a life. Maybe not somebody’s ideal, but what is ideal? There is no ideal. You can get used to anything. You have a strong incentive to forget. One terrible month, in the course of a lifetime — it’s nothing. A blip.

“And we were happy, sometimes. That’s what I thought. Was I wrong? I was wrong to think we were out of danger. I’ve been wrong about so many things.

“I don’t expect this to mean much to you. And I know you don’t want more excuses. But when I told you she died, it was only half a lie. Because she did die, to me.”

The room had grown dim.

“Who’s Micah?” Jacob asked.

Sam shook his head.

“She screamed that name. She was screaming it in her sleep.”

“I don’t know, Jacob.”

“You put her away.”

“I couldn’t take care of her any longer. She was too sick. She stopped talking, she fought taking her medication. It was a matter of time before she tried again. I couldn’t keep vigil over her day and night. My eyes... I couldn’t handle it, Jacob. And I worried, constantly, that they’d come for her again.”

“Special Projects.”

“I was trying to protect her. Both of you.”

“Don’t you dare put that decision on me.”

“I’m not—” A rare glint of anger, quickly stifled. “I’m not blaming you for my decisions. You’re my son, Jacob. I wanted you to live free of burdens. I stuck my head in the sand. Whatever that makes me, I accept it. If a fool, then I’m a fool.”

“That’s not the word that comes to mind.”

Sam did not reply.

“You could have told me,” Jacob said.

“You never would have believed me,” Sam said.

“Maybe not right away, but you could’ve said something, at some point.”

Sam seemed not to agree. But he said, “I’m sorry.”

Silence.

“Two years ago,” Jacob said. “Did she really ask for me?”

“I wouldn’t lie to you about that.”

“Well, excuse me, Abba, but I don’t quite get how you draw the lines.”

Sam looked away, chastened.

“I see her every week,” Jacob said. “I’ve never heard her speak.”

“I give you my word. She said your name.”

“Prompted by what?”

Sam rubbed his temples. “It happened shortly before Rosh Hashana.”

Jacob said, “Around my birthday.”

“Yes. I suppose so.”

“I turned thirty-two that year,” Jacob said. “Meaning, thirty years since her trip.”

Silence.

“You tried to stop me from going to Prague,” Jacob said. “You thought the same thing would happen to me.”

Sam hesitated. “Did it?”

The memory pierced Jacob. An infinite climb up a trembling finite ladder. A cloak of dust. The voice of Peter Wichs, the synagogue sexton, urging him upward.

Every moment since then had been different.

He said, “I guess we’ll find out.”