The Golem of Paris

Chapter thirty-eight

PRAGUE

OCTOBER 29, 1982

Bina says, as they bundle her into the car, “I am an American.”

She feels ashamed, exploiting her status in front of Ota Wichs, who lacks recourse.

Hrubý tells the driver to go.

“Where are you taking us?” she asks.

Wichs stares through the gap between his knees.

“This is outrageous.” She’s making a poor show of indignation. Not her forte. Bad service, even in the cruddiest of restaurants, prompted her mother to pitch a grade-A fit. Don’t tell me quiet, this is their job. The wanton sense of self always embarrassed Bina.

“I de—” Her throat catches. “—demand to speak to the American embassy.”

“It will rain tomorrow,” Hrubý says to the driver, who nods.

“Did you hear me?”

Wichs squeezes her wrist to shut her up.

At the interrogation center, they are placed in adjacent rooms. Bina’s leg is cuffed to a table. She sits there, listening to the screams boring through cinder block. Clamps her ears, brings her elbows together, prays.

A song of ascents: from out of the depths I cry to you, God.

The noise is horrific; the quiet, worse.

Hrubý enters, accompanied by two men carrying black rubber truncheons. They station themselves in the corners, half-faced in ghastly relief.

“I am an American citizen,” she says in Czech. “I want to speak to my embassy.”

Hrubý opens his briefcase and lays out a series of photographs as though dealing a hand of solitaire. Blurry, taken from a distance, they show her tugging at her head scarf as she enters the Alt-Neu Synagogue. A boy’s shape intrudes into the frame: little Peter Wichs.

Hrubý says, “You are an agent of the world Zionist conspiracy.”

Bina laughs. She knows she shouldn’t, but it’s so absurd.

“You deny it?”

“Of course I do.”

One of the guards crosses his arms. The other lightly swings his truncheon by its strap. A black drop wells at its tip and breaks free, spreading red on the concrete.

Bina says, “You can’t do this.”

Hrubý says, “Put her in the bear.”

They wrap her head-to-toe in chains, carry her, thrashing, down the corridor.

The cell is morbidly overcrowded. Yet the other women manage to skitter wide. The guards set her, still chained, on the ground. All night long, no one comes near, and eventually she gives up struggling and lays her head down and weeps.

“Good morning.”

She has spent the last hour listening to Ota Wichs scream; swallowing snot to balm her bleeding throat, rehearsing four words, shuffling the stresses.

She says, “I have a son.”

“What a coincidence,” Hrubý says. “So do I.”

It appears that he was right about the weather. His jacket sleeve is dark with rain as he lays out the photographs, along with a typed confession for her to sign.

“You are an agent of the world Zionist conspiracy. You have come to Czechoslovakia under the guise of participating in a cultural mission. You have consulted with counterrevolutionary elements in order to obtain classified information and disseminate misinformation.”

“Please,” she says. “I’m sure we can get this cleared up.”

Hrubý presses his middle finger to the photo, obliterating her face. “This is you.”

“Yes, but—”

“Then it is perfectly clear.”

“No. No.”

He frowns, as though it pains him to point out that she has contradicted herself.

“I went into the synagogue. We all went. It was part of our tour.”

“You went again. While your group remained at the National Day celebration, you slipped away to engage in counterrevolutionary activities.”

“Mr. Hrubý. Please, let me talk to Ota, we can explain—”

“The person you speak of is a traitor to the State.”

“He’s — no. How can you... All he talked about was how lucky he is to live here.”

“And you believed him?”

She almost steps right into it.

Yes: a lie.

No: an indictment.

She says, “I swear to you, we didn’t discuss politics.”

“What did you do?”

“Nothing. We did nothing.”

“I understand,” Hrubý says. He takes a cigarette from a dented pack and lights up. “You are lonely,” he says, exhaling smoke. “Far from home.”

He offers her the pack. She doesn’t move, so he tucks it away. “He was married to a Jewess, once, but now he comes home to a gentile woman. He longs for a taste of the familiar.”

The guards smirk.

“It’s not a crime to fall in love,” Hrubý says.

She can’t begin to imagine what this man thinks he knows about love. “No.”

“Then what did you do, in the synagogue?”

“We made pottery,” she says.

“Pottery.”

“For the synagogue. Ask him. He’ll say the same thing.”

“There is nothing wrong with art,” Hrubý says. “Sneaking off, on the other hand, late at night — it’s what a criminal does. You don’t look like a criminal.”

“I’m not.”

“So then tell me what you did. I am the liaison to the Jewish community, I’m acquainted with your customs. For example, perhaps you made a Sabbath candlestick.”

“Yes, exactly.”

“No. We searched the building. There was no candlestick.”

“We left it in the attic.”

“We searched the attic,” Hrubý says. “We found a pair of jars, not quite dry. Why did you make them?”

He answers for her: “You made them to smuggle out information.”

“That’s insane.”

“Is it?”

“It’s — I mean, it’s ridiculous. It’s clay. It’s delicate.”

“Wrap it carefully, smile at the customs officers, ‘Please, expensive, handle with care,’ and they wave you along.”

“I just... I don’t know what to tell you, other than it’s nonsense.”

“What is the real explanation?” says Hrubý.

“... spices. Spice jars.”

“For the havdalah ceremony,” he says.

She nods eagerly.

“Ah. But your companion indicated otherwise.”

Her stomach drops. “What did he say?”

White wisps curl from Hrubý’s nostrils as he gazes at her.

“Whatever he told you, you can believe him,” she says.

Hrubý laughs. “He told me an old story,” he says. “About a monster. I learned it in school. It’s an idiotic myth. Our modern schools don’t teach it anymore.”

He slides the confession toward her.

“I don’t understand,” she says. “Can’t you just sign it for me and be done with it?”

“That would be dishonest,” he says.

After a beat, she picks up the paper.

“If I sign,” she says. “What will happen?”

He raises his hands, miming freedom.

“And Ota?”

An identical gesture, a secondary meaning: who knows?

“Promise me you’ll let him go.”

Hrubý takes a final drag, stubs his cigarette out on the table, leaving a black smudge on the steel. “The person you speak of,” he says, rubbing at the stain with the flat of his thumb, “is a traitor to the State.”

Bina puts out her hands to be cuffed.

The next day she waits for the screaming to begin.

There is only a chilling silence.

“Good morning.”

The photos, the confession, the pen.

“Where’s Ota?” she says.

“You are an agent of the world Zionist—”

“What have you done to him?”

“The world Zionist—”

“Where is he.”

Hrubý takes out a cigarette.

With a shriek, she sweeps the table clean, pen clattering, papers slowly drifting.

Hrubý sighs and waves the guards forward.

Time begins to loop.

“You are an agent—”

And she resists, but with waning vigor. Yes, she is an American, yes, they know. So what? They bear her no malice; there is no malice, none whatsoever; there is a nationwide shortage of malice, of any authentic emotion; there is nothing but an erosive apathy, gritty and mucoid and oozing, a net of un-rules that binds them one and all, prisoner and guard alike. You cannot hate a machine for doing its job. The longer they detain her, the longer they must continue to detain her. Her punishment has become its own justification, and hope, once plucked a feather at a time, is torn out in handfuls.

She will sign.

What else can she do? She’ll sign. Nothing left to lose. No point worth proving and no way of proving it.

It is the morning of the nth day. The guards arrive to collect her and she rolls over docilely. They pick her up and carry her past the interrogation room, down the hall and outside, to a loading dock, where an ambulance awaits.

The sight of pure sky briefly stuns her. Then she grasps that this is different, that the difference is danger, and she reverts to kicking, screaming, calling for her country, her husband, for Wichs.

They gag her, hood her, strap her in, drive over rutted streets. She is carried and seated, the hood snatched away, the gag removed, and she beholds a faceless room, she might as well have gone nowhere.

Sitting across from her is not Hrubý but a doughy man in a white lab coat, notepad at the ready. On his left index finger, he wears a huge, crude ring made of black metal. He taps it against the table as he scans the file in his lap.

“I have been reviewing your case,” he says. “You admit to entering a restricted area, yet deny engaging in counterrevolutionary activity. Rather, you claim that you were participating in an esoteric ritual, seeking contact with an inanimate creature called ‘golem.’ Am I pronouncing that correctly?”

She curls on the chair, shaking.

“Very well. According to your statement, a member of the local Jewish community requested that you fashion a jar capable of containing this creature. For reasons that are not wholly clear to me, you judge yourself uniquely suited to this task.”

He peers over the page at her. “Stop me if you feel I am misrepresenting you.”

She can’t remember. She’s said so many things. Anything to end this nightmare.

“One imagines that one has heard most of what one will hear at this stage of one’s career. But this is a delusion I have never encountered. Usually people like to puff themselves up. Apply a bit of historical shine. Jesus, or the Czar. Interesting, as well, that you have displaced the subject of the delusion from your own person onto an imaginary object, as though some part of you recognizes that your beliefs cannot be true. In rejecting the falsehood, you project it outward, thereby ‘creating’ an independent entity.”

He shakes his head. “A golem... Fascinating. I’m grateful to Hrubý for bringing it to my attention.”

He studies her. “Do you have any idea what I’m saying? I was told you speak Czech. My English is regretfully limited. I’m working on it, though. Nothing to say? No comment whatsoever? All right, let us continue, shall we...”

His Czech is perfectly correct, unwieldy in its formality, an overstarched shirt.

“Additionally, you have on multiple occasions expressed opinions critical of the socialist system. For example, you said — this was on the second of November — ‘You’re a liar. You are all liars, your whole world is a lie.’”

“No,” she whispers.

He stops reading. “No what?”

“It’s not true.”

“Which part? That you said it? Or that you meant it? Or perhaps you maintain that I am a liar—”

“No.”

“—we are all liars, the system is false. Excuse me, though, please: excuse me. I have it here. You said it. Other statements you made convey much the same idea, so let us agree that I am not twisting your words. We must agree that, at one point, at least, you held that position. And this idea is irrefutable proof of madness, for the principles of Marxism-Leninism are grounded in scientific fact. They have been empirically validated. To deny them is by definition a denial of reality.”

“You’re right.”

The man smiles. “Is that what you think?”

“Yes. Yes. Yes.”

“But I have pages” — he parades them in front of her — “pages and pages of evidence to the contrary.”

“I, I, I’ve changed my mind.”

“Mm.” He writes in his pad. “And may I ask how that change came about?”

“Time,” she says, “to think it over.”

“And are there other things you’ve changed your mind about?”

“... everything.”

“I see.” He puts down the pad, crosses his legs high, hugs his knee. “Can’t you see how unhealthy that is, though? To swap your opinions for new ones so easily? It’s a sign that your psyche is unstable. It’s typical of what we observe in Western patients. You are addicted to choice. You turn this way, that way. You grasp at the shiny ring. The self is never permitted to firm up and thus fails to integrate a sense of purpose or duty.”

He reaches under the table to depress a hidden button.

“I understand it’s a popular legend around these parts, the golem. Personally, I had never heard of it, although my assistant said his mother told it to him when he was a boy.” He resumes writing. “What a concept. Life from nothing. I can appreciate the appeal. What storyteller wouldn’t? What scientist? Myths have their place.”

The door opens and a young man enters the room.

He is a giant.

Slavic cheekbones dotted with acne, his close-cropped hair colorless in defiance of nature, as though he has gotten a terrible fright and gone white overnight. He wears green rubber gloves. His is the shorter coat of an orderly. On his spindly frame, it hits six inches above the waist.

“Da, Doktor Tremsin?”

The doctor puts an emphatic period on his sentence and flips the notepad shut. “Take the patient to room nine to begin immediate treatment.”

“My primary passion,” Tremsin says, “is the relationship between brain chemistry and truth. What is the physical mechanism for deception? Can we locate it in space? In time?”

A steel bracket, a quarter sphere like an orange slice sucked to the peel, is latched across her head. A second bracket secures her chin.

“To understand these processes is of the utmost importance.”

The gurney has been partially raised, the wheels locked. Leather straps fix her limbs; a wide leather belt across her waist, pliable from countless bucklings and unbucklings, straining and sweating, blood.

“A pill that opens the innermost chambers of the human heart... You might call it the Holy Grail.”

The tall orderly has left, and now Tremsin stands at the sink, twisting at his ring.

It won’t come off. He spits on his finger and it slides loose. He sets it on the counter with a clack, turns on the water, and begins lavishly soaping his hands.

“I’ll be honest: at first, I was not terribly thrilled at the notion of coming to Czechoslovakia. The most exciting work is being done back home. Already I had found success far beyond what we had achieved with sodium pentothal, which, frankly, I’ve never trusted.”

Tremsin wrings his hands out, opens a plywood cabinet, finds a needle and a syringe. “Do you have any idea how difficult it is to find a halfway decent bathhouse in Prague? I’ll tell you. It’s not difficult at all. It’s impossible. There are none.”

He screws the needle onto the syringe.

“In a certain sense, though, the atmosphere here is more intellectually open than in Moscow. One is freer to take risks, to make mistakes and learn from them.”

He cranes back, smiles. “Don’t tell anyone I said that.”

From the cabinet, he takes a vial containing an amber liquid. “To lie successfully involves many complex and often competing calculations. What do I know? What does my interlocutor know? What does he know I know, and what do each of us not know?”

Tears run from the outside corners of her eyes, collect inside her ears; she is crying backward.

“Don’t look so glum. As I said, your case presents a rare opportunity. You’re advancing the cause of science. You should feel proud.” Tremsin holds up the notebook. “And flattered. I’m dedicating a whole lab book, a fresh one, just to you.”

He opens the book, slashes lines. “The third of November. Patient number — ah, but you haven’t got one yet, have you? We’ll fix that. For the time being, though... ‘A-me-ri-can.’ There. That suits you. Diagnosis: sluggish schizophrenia, distinguished by an exceptionally pronounced systematic delusion. I’ll fill in the details later. We don’t have a minute to lose. Haloperidol—”

He stops writing and peers at her. “Please try to relax. Can’t you see how agitated you are? That’s the first obstacle.”

He stabs the needle into the vial, draws up a nauseating quantity. He flicks the syringe, holds it to the light, squirts a tiny bit back into the vial. “Let’s say thirty milligrams. We’ll start there and see how it goes.”

He folds her gown over her stomach and crushes a handful of thigh.

The needle bores to the bone.

A freezing cavity blooms.

Her spasms loosen the rags in her mouth. Tenderly he tucks them back in, then begins unbuckling his own trousers, pausing to turn the wheel beneath the gurney, lowering it to a more manageable height.

“I’m sorry about the discomfort,” he says. He unbuttons his fly. “It has to deliver deep into the muscle to be effective.”

His words are water through a sieve, the holes expanding.

and now

      how

            do

                  you

                        feel

“Sister.”

She is nothing.

“Sister. Can you hear me?”

Her tongue flopped out, rancid air.

“Here. Over here. Look.”

A white flutter at her periphery.

“Take it, please. You’ve made a little mess.”

It’s true. Bina can smell it.

“Sister—”

“Shut up, Majka.”

“They’ll punish her for soiling herself.”

“Then they’ll punish her.”

“All right, sister,” Majka says. “I’ll leave it here for you. When you can.”

“Shut,” the second voice says, “your idiot mouth.”

Hours pass. Bina finds that she can make the world stand still by bearing down. She lies in something like an outsize chicken coop, a bed with wire walls and a wire roof and a rusty padlock. The room is just big enough to hold four such cages, two on each wall, set end to end. A cuboid window opaque with dirt beats back the light.

“You’re awake.”

Through two layers of wire, bright blue eyes search her; a sharp, sad smile. “Let’s not wake them, eh? Fat Irena is a bitch and she’s worse when she’s tired. Can you reach the paper?”

A scrap, crumpled and stuffed into the three-inch gap between their cages. Bina tries to pluck at it, but her unhinged fingers dislodge it and it spirals to the floor.

“Don’t worry. Let’s try again. What I’m going to do is make a baton. Okay? I’m rolling it up, and you take it. Can you take it? Don’t fall asleep on me, now.”

The paper noses its way into her cage. Bina’s hand sways in midair.

“Almost there. A little to the left... Now take it.”

Bina scissors the paper between her pinkie and her ring finger, and it unfurls, revealing the masthead of Práce, the trade union daily.

Majka laughs softly. “All it’s good for. Go on, clean yourself up... Good. Showers are in three days, that’s not so bad. It’s on your back. Can you — you can’t reach it, that’s all right, don’t worry about it. It’s just a small... They won’t notice. I’m sorry I mentioned it. I’m glad you’re here. I can see you’ve had a tough time. You’ve been to see Doktor Tremsin. It won’t last forever. It happens with new patients. He might play favorites for a week or two. At some point, he’ll get bored of you. What did they bring you in for? Better yet, don’t tell me. We’ll talk later, when you’ve had a chance to rest. They’ll be coming in to wake us before you know it. Try to gather your strength.”

Exhausted, Bina lets the shit-smeared paper drop from her hand. She can hear Majka bedding down a few inches away, a comforting sound soon overtaken.

For her second treatment, Tremsin announces that he is considering reducing the dosage.

“Your file lists you at fifty-eight kilograms. I gather that was true at admission, but it is no longer so, since the file further indicates that you have all but refused to eat. I can count your ribs. Nutrition is essential for rehabilitation.”

A single wooden bowl of vegetable stew, brought at dawn by a nurse. No utensils provided — We might hurt ourselves Majka whispered, winking — so they sat on the floor, a few feet from the overflowing Turkish toilet, passing the bowl around the circle, scooping up the thin liquid with their unwashed hands. Bina couldn’t sit up, let alone feed herself; Majka did it for her. Fat Irena got the final handful. Olga grumbled that she always got the final handful, and Fat Irena said In your ass and then they went at each other as the nurse wearily blew her whistle.

“For the moment,” Tremsin says, “the important thing is to get a new and accurate measurement. I ask that you please step on the scale.”

It wasn’t an ordinary fight between women. They were vicious as wolves. Olga’s ear disappeared into Fat Irena’s mouth, and Bina could feel the crunch in her own teeth.

“The patient,” Tremsin says, “will stand on the scale.”

What he perceives as defiance is in fact inability: Bina’s legs cannot bear weight.

She thinks of her parents, alive in body but not in spirit.

There are many kinds of survival, not all equal.

She raises her head, seizes control of her tongue.

“I have a name.”

With satisfaction, she watches the color creep up over Tremsin’s collar, into his shapeless face.

He walks abruptly to the door, throws it open, shouting down the hall in Russian until the giant orderly appears.

“The patient will be placed on the scale,” Tremsin says.

“My name is Bina.”

The orderly dutifully hoists her out of the wheelchair.

“Bina Reich Lev.”

“The patient will stop struggling.”

“My name is Bina Reich Lev.”

“The patient will be silenced.”

She shouts once more before the orderly gets the rags into her mouth. He carries her to the scale, draping her across it so that her heels and head brush the ground.

“That’s no good. She’s half — sit her up, you imbecile.”

She flops around.

“The patient will cease.”

The orderly kneels, applying light pressure to her shoulders.

“Don’t make it harder,” he murmurs.

“Sit her up,” Tremsin says. “Dmitri. What are you waiting for.”

Bina stares into the orderly’s eyes. He nods.

She relaxes, allowing herself to be balanced and weighed.

“Put her on the table,” Tremsin says. “Hurry up.”

The orderly moves her to the gurney, his white face orbiting in and out of view as he straps her in. Bending to screw down the chin bracket, he whispers in her ear.

“Blink if it’s too tight.”

“Spasiba, Dmitri Samilovich.” Tremsin is scribbling furiously in the lab book. “Chorosho.”

She blinks.

The orderly loosens the bracket a bit, bows to Tremsin, and exits.

Tremsin locks the door. “I was right,” he says.

He stabs the vial of amber liquid, draws up the syringe.

“You have slimmed down, quite a bit. However.”

He taps out air bubbles, squirts off the excess.

“Upon further consideration, given your level of agitation, I cannot help but think that it would be premature to lower your dose.”

He throws back her gown. “We’ll stay at thirty.”