The Golem of Paris

Chapter forty-three

BOHNICE PSYCHIATRIC HOSPITAL

PRAGUE

FALL 1982

Bina lies on the cell floor, shivering, her head in Majka’s lap, soft filthy fingers kneading her locked shoulders.

“I was pretty,” Majka says. “That was my problem.”

She still is. Bina wishes she could tell her.

“My father was a railway mechanic. When I was seventeen, a hydraulic lift failed and crushed him. His pension wasn’t enough to support my mother and me, so I took a job as a typist for the Ministry of Information.”

A deep, unexpected laugh. “I thought it’d be a good way to meet a nice man.”

From down the hall comes the gruff duet of a scuffle, whistles blown, orderlies responding. The law dictates that patients remain out of their cages from seven a.m. to seven p.m., a requirement scrupulously observed, due to the entertainment it provides: fights are an hourly occurrence on Lunatics’ Boulevard.

In some ways, the ward affords greater license than the world outside. Statements that would get an ordinary citizen thrown in jail are here made with impunity. The food is shit, the government a bunch of assholes. Who cares what they say? They’re crazy. The result is the highest concentration of rational thought in Czechoslovakia.

Majka massages Bina’s forearms. “You feel looser today, sister.”

Bina nods her head a fraction of an inch. They wheeled her from room nine less than an hour ago and already she can move her extremities.

A good sign. A bad one? Her body is acclimating, accepting its fate.

From there it’s a short distance to surrender.

This morning marked the sixth day of her treatment.

Or the eighth.

The twentieth.

Does it matter?

Yes. Yes. It matters. She has a son, she must see him again, she will see him, she owes it to him to keep count.

When Dmitri, the tall Russian orderly, comes to unlock her cage; when he wheels her down the corridor toward room nine and other patients look away and fall silent; when she is draped like an offering upon the gurney; when Tremsin enters, chatting about the weather; when he screws off the iron ring and clacks it down on the counter and snaps on rubber gloves and draws up the syringe, it is Jacob’s face that Bina fixes in her mind.

The image has begun to bleed at the edges.

She can hardly remember what he looks like.

How did it happen so fast?

She is weak.

To keep herself from drifting, she clings to Majka’s voice.

“The apparatchik in charge of my bureau — his name was Smolak — he used to keep a bowl of almonds on his desk.”

Gently, she bends and straightens Bina’s right hand. Bina funnels her entire consciousness there, driving her soul into her fingers.

Majka nods encouragingly. “That’s it. Pretty soon you’ll be massaging me.”

Bina grunts.

“Don’t think I won’t hold you to it. I could use a massage. I could use a shower, eh? It’s not hot, but it’s water. Keep thinking of that, it’ll give you something to live for.”

Jacob. I have Jacob to live for.

“This fellow, Smolak, he never ate the almonds. They sat there in the bowl, day after day, driving me mad with their pointlessness. I couldn’t stand it any longer. I snuck into his office and stole a few to take home for my mother. You’ve never seen anyone so excited. The joy a few stale almonds could bring... It broke my heart and filled it.

“The next day I braced myself for consequences. Nothing happened, so I did it again. Just a few. Again, nothing happened. I began scooping them out by the handful.”

She moves on to Bina’s left fingers. Bina shifts her awareness accordingly.

“The bowl... It was an elegant little crystal thing. Genuine Moser, I think. It never seemed to empty out. I would come in and find it miraculously refilled. It had to end, of course: Smolak summoned me to his office. He had a strange-looking lamp on the desk. When I held my hands under the light, my skin lit up. He’d put invisible powder on the almonds. It was all over me — under my nails, on my sleeves.

“He was an ugly one, Smolak. He came around the desk and put his hand on my cheek. Then up my dress. He said, ‘Show me what you know.’”

Majka shifts out from under her, resting Bina’s head on a bunched woolen blanket.

“Can you bend your knees?”

Bina tries.

“Good, sister. Keep at it. ‘Show me what you know...’ I knew nothing. I was a virgin. After he finished, he said, ‘You have a lot to learn. But you’re pretty, that can’t be taught.’

“He sent me to an address in Zličín. It was a plain-looking house. From the outside you’d never guess what went on in there. Our instructors were a pair of StB officers, one male and one female. We knew them as Uncle and Aunt. They would mock up different settings: a fancy restaurant, a bus stop, a hotel room. The two of them would act out scenarios, from a script, which we then had to copy. Bend your leg. You can do it.”

Bina fights against the rigidity. Pain flares brightly up and down her spine. Recently, Tremsin has begun adding a dose of purified sulfur to her daily thirty milligrams of haloperidol, interested in how the two drugs interact.

They interact to create a scorching fever; chisels rammed through her joints.

Majka says, “They may have actually been married, Uncle and Aunt. Each would smile when the other one misspoke, filing it away for the future. Their lovemaking was very thorough, too, like they were going down a checklist.

“In addition to me, there were eight girls and three boys. The boys were ravens and we were swallows, so obviously the house was called the Nest. I was the only one from Prague. Aunt said they preferred to recruit from the countryside, because city air destroyed a woman’s skin. She never liked me. She always called me by my full name, Marie. No one ever called me that, except her. Uncle, though. He was nice.”

Majka reaches for Bina’s right thigh, the tenderer of the two. The pressure makes Bina want to weep. She can’t. Her system won’t respond. So she weeps in her mind. She sees herself doing it and feels some small relief.

She could live the rest of her days like this. An imagined life.

She wonders if she could imagine herself to death. Picture her wrists opening and then actually have it render in the flesh, like stigmata. So easy to yield.

Jacob.

Her innards heave; her knee bends.

“Sister. Well done. You rest a bit, now... Those were busy months, in the beginning of my training. We learned how to make conversation with a Westerner, how to flirt; we learned how to drink without losing control. We learned how to please a man, the ravens how to please a woman. We practiced while everyone watched. Aunt and Uncle would take notes or shout out instructions. ‘Lift your leg higher.’ ‘Make more noise! Men like noise.’” She shakes her head. “When the boys ran out of steam — they were young, but we outnumbered them — we practiced on Uncle.”

Another laugh. “Perhaps that explains why he was so cheerful. He practiced with the boys, too. Everyone had to be prepared for all types. That was a revelation, that a person could like both men and women. We never questioned or resisted. We were patriots. My mother’s pension checks doubled, she could afford cigarettes. The night before there was meat in the shops, someone called to tell her.

“It wasn’t all fun and games. We learned anti-interrogation techniques. Not the heavy stuff — they couldn’t damage the merchandise — but enough. I already knew some Russian, and they taught me basic English and German. My first assignment was Vienna.

“I don’t think they wanted to challenge me excessively, right out of the gate. He was a file clerk in the Ministry for Foreign Affairs. I met him in the lobby of the Hotel Imperial, they used to have a nice café there... Can you imagine me, barely nineteen, a seductress? They taught us to step out of ourselves. It’s a skill you never forget, it comes in handy throughout life.”

Doesn’t it. Bina forces up the corners of her mouth.

“How nice to see you smile, sister.”

Soft filthy fingers stroke the inside of Bina’s wrist.

“They rented me a flat in Alsergrund, and before long the clerk was turning up in the middle of the day, two, three times a week. His breath stank of mustard. He was married — they always were, to give you leverage if things soured — and in his wallet I found a snapshot of his wife. He’d done well for himself. She wasn’t at all bad-looking. Yet he would lie there, smoking and complaining about her, his boss, his coworkers. He was one of those who believes the world hasn’t given him his due.

“I was with him for about a year. I got what I could. Uncle and Aunt were pleased. They reassigned me to Berlin, then back to Vienna. Everywhere I went, I brought my lingerie and my F-21. I carried that stupid camera all over Europe. They even sent me to Oslo, which was considered the most difficult environment for a swallow to operate in, because of the Scandinavians’ clinical attitude toward sex. My lover there was very handsome. He thought he was doing me a favor. Americans and British were the easiest to turn. I don’t mean to be rude, sister; that was what I was taught, and in my experience it held true.

“I was good at my job. My mother had what she needed, right up until the end. When she died, it was in the hospital, like a civilized person, not languishing at the bottom of a waiting list. I traveled. I met people. I served my country and the cause.

“It ended. It always does. I got pregnant. A faulty pill, I guess, or I forgot to take one. The father was a chemist for a Swiss petroleum corporation, working to improve the efficiency of diesel fuel. Odd, what stays with you: I couldn’t tell you the color of his eyes, but if you gave me a pencil and paper, I could probably reproduce the formulas.

“I reported back to Uncle and Aunt, assuming they would have me end the pregnancy. That was the usual method. No, they said; it could be used to our advantage. I had recently turned thirty. They wanted to wring every last drop out of me. They had me blackmail the chemist by threatening to tell his wife.”

Majka resumes working Bina’s calves. “It didn’t go to plan. He poisoned himself.”

Out in the hall, a bell rings.

“I’d botched the assignment, but they surprised me, saying I could keep the baby. A token, I suppose, for my service. Try moving your ankle, please. Harder. Good.

“My gift... His name is Daniel. He’ll be seven soon. Almost girlish, he’s so pretty.”

Sorrow fogs her smile. “You know, sister, I love our conversations, but you should feel free to speak up.”

“Jacob,” Bina says.

Majka blinks, startled.

“Jacob,” Bina says. Her jaw, a wedge. The effort, unthinkable. “Jacob.”

“Sister.” Majka starts to laugh, tears slicing dirt. “Sister. That’s your son? Jacob?”

The bell rings on, insistent.

“Jacob. That’s good, sister, a good solid name. Don’t let go of it.”

The door opens.

Dmitri enters pushing the wheelchair, murmurs in his accented Czech:

“Occupational therapy.”

Majka bends over, forehead to the floor, while he slides his rubber gloves beneath Bina’s knees and lifts her into the chair.

They join the line headed down the Boulevard, a caravan of ghosts in paper slippers. Dmitri flares his elbows to protect Bina from jostling bodies. The blanket slips down her knees and he reaches down to draw it back up.

“Are you warm enough?” he asks.

Does he expect an answer? If anything, she feels hot, because of the sulfur.

Dmitri Samilovich. She’s heard Tremsin call him that. A banality she clutches, to keep her memory from atrophying along with her body.

They reach the Group Therapy Room, set with five long tables, twenty seats apiece. He wheels her to her assigned spot.

The law dictates sixty minutes of productive labor per day. For the past week, the women have made boxes out of cardboard scraps. Unable to lift her hands, Bina has received seven demerits, resulting in loss of food, which some might consider a blessing.

Now an excited buzz rises: paper and glue are gone, replaced by lemon-yellow balls of Plasticine.

The head nurse stands on the podium and toots her whistle three times. “Today the patients will be making ashtrays.”

The buzz hardens to a discontented edge. Ashtrays? For whom? Each patient receives one cigarette per day, to be hoarded or traded or fought over. Ashtrays? It’s a task meant to degrade them.

“The patients will be quiet, please.” The whistle shrills. “Quiet.”

The silence fills with the sound of two hundred diligent thumbs.

Fat Irena leans in. “Did you hear? Brezhnev is dead.”

Olga snorts.

“I don’t give a damn if you don’t believe me. It’s true.”

“How many times has Brezhnev died before? And yet he’s still alive.”

Bina stares at the table, distant and swimming, the knob of yellow like a close and unreachable sun.

You can’t make anything meaningful from Plasticine. It doesn’t last.

Nothing lasts.

“You’ll see,” Olga says. “You’ll be eating your words.”

“I’ll be eating your liver, you dried-up cunt,” Fat Irena says.

A nurse comes storming up the aisle. “No talking.”

“She started it,” Olga says.

“No. Talking. You,” the nurse says to Bina. “Why are you sitting there.”

“She can’t move,” Majka says.

The nurse grabs the ball of Plasticine and shoves it roughly into Bina’s hands.

“Work heals,” she says, and walks on.

A weak squeeze is all Bina can manage, yet the material yields, as though bowing to a higher authority. The coolness against her burning skin feels delicious and strange.

She is hardly aware of what she’s doing while she’s doing it. Nobody else notices her. They are busy not talking, busy looking busy.

The bells rings and Majka turns around and her mouth falls open in astonishment.

“Oh, sister.”

Bina thinks The edges could be sharper.

The women crowd around to gawk.

“Look at that,” Fat Irena says. “It lives.”

“Hers is better than yours,” Olga says.

“Shut your fucking mouth.”

Tittering, they clear the aisle to make way for Dmitri and the chair.

He stops short, staring like the rest of them.

The nurse returns. “What’s going on here? What is that?”

“You were right,” Majka says tremulously. “Work does heal.”

“We’re not making jars. We’re making ashtrays.” The nurse snatches the tiny, symmetrical form from Bina’s limp fingers and crushes it back into a ball. “Next time pay attention to the assignment.”

Brezhnev is dead. Like the collective soup bowl, the rumor gets passed around so that all may have a taste. After a while even Olga is forced to admit it smacks of truth, and Fat Irena takes to parading up and down Lunatics’ Boulevard, crowing that it was she, she was the one to break the news, until Olga spreads a counter-rumor that Fat Irena got the news from a guard in exchange for sucking him off, leading to a brawl that sends one woman to the infirmary, the other to solitary confinement.

Brezhnev is dead.

They do not allow themselves to hope. Hope is too costly, hope is a mythic beast. Schadenfreude, though, that they have, in spades. For they have outlived him, the bastard Brezhnev with his pompous eyebrows and his titanic jowls, military medals spilling down his left breast; Brezhnev, architect of their despair, who sent in the tanks in ’68 to flatten the green shoots of change.

He is dead.

The next morning, no one comes to fetch Bina for treatment.

“See?” Majka says. “I told you he’d get bored of you, eventually.”

That much hope Bina can’t afford.

But then a second day passes and no one comes to collect her, and Bina can move her arms and legs. No one has seen Tremsin at all, and more rumors bubble up: the doctor has fled, fearing the retribution that accompanies any change in regime. He has (imagine it!) committed suicide out of solidarity with the General Secretary.

A third day arrives. No one comes to get her. Bina can talk now, a few words at a stretch, and she greedily repurposes the hours spent in Majka’s company, scrambling to tell her. Tell her everything, do it while her tongue is working, while she has the chance, before the nightmare resumes, put it all on record: who she is, where she comes from, the names of her loved ones.

She talks until her mouth runs dry, telling Majka the story of her life. A pact: if one of them does not survive, the other will carry her memory out. That night, they sleep with fingertips touching through the wire of their cages, another pact, one beyond words.

The next day, Bina feels even better.

She wouldn’t have thought it possible, given her circumstances, but she feels good. She decides to tell Majka her story again, start to finish. Only it’s different now: she’s remembering new things, parts of herself that she forgot to include yesterday.

“It’s good to talk, sister. Get it all out.”

She will, she will. There’s so much more to her than Bina Lev, wife and mother. There’s Barbara Reich, the thinker, the seeker, who gave up her name. Both of them.

Why did she give up her name?

She almost regrets it now. Reich means “rich,” she comes from royalty, they hate her because she is better.

By the fifth morning, she has learned not to fear the dawn. No one is coming for her. The worst is over. And she’s remembering even more.

She starts talking.

Majka says, “Sister, are you feeling all right?”

Bina’s more than all right. She’s fantastic. She wants to tell Majka, tell the world.

“Lower your voice,” Majka says, watching her with worried eyes. “Someone will hear you.”

Bina laughs. So someone will hear. So what? She’s not afraid of them. She’s not afraid of anything.

She walks in circles around their cell, talking about what she’s going to do once she leaves. She promises: she’s going to get out of this place — fly through the window, if necessary — and once she does, she’s going to come back for Majka, for all of them; she will tear down the walls of the asylum and set them free hallelujah!

“Sister, please rest. You’re going to exhaust yourself.”

Who needs rest? It’s the fifth day of her own personal creation, the day of the animals and beasts of the field; she has more energy than ever, certainly the most she’s had since Jacob was born, and by the way, did she tell Majka about Jacob, her son, Jacob?

For a moment, her heart swells with pain.

In the next moment, though, the pain is gone, and she resumes walking talking laughing planning. She has so much to do. So much to say.

Fat Irena returns to the cell, eleven thick stitches over her eye.

“What the hell is wrong with her?” she asks. “Why won’t she shut up?”

Majka tearfully shakes her head.

Bina doesn’t understand. Why is Majka crying? She ought to be happy for her, she feels incredible, the best she has in her whole life.

“She’s gone mad,” Fat Irena says. “She wasn’t before, but the place did it to her.”

Bina laughs and goes over to help her. She has healing in her fingertips. She will make those stitches vanish!

Fat Irena swats her hand. “Don’t touch me, you crazy cow.”

On the sixth day, which is the day of the creation of man, Bina receives visitors.

Her father, her mother, Rav Kalman, her uncles Jakub and Jakub.

Her husband. Her son.

Oh how happy she is to see them! She weeps joyously. She missed them. They come to surround her with their love, their thousands of arms.

Dmitri says, “Hold her down.”

Bina screams.

The needle goes in.

On the seventh day, Bina rests.

A crag of filtered light on the ceiling. Weight on her chest.

“Good afternoon.”

She sits up, with difficulty. Swivels her aching head.

Beside her sits Dmitri, his spindly frame bent forward. He smiles kindly.

“You had a psychotic episode,” he says. “It can happen when medication is withdrawn abruptly. You’ve been asleep for twenty-two hours. Before that, you were awake for four days. You must be hungry.”

She is — painfully thirsty, too.

He nods. “I’ll be back in a minute.”

Alone, coming to her senses, she takes in her new surroundings: a concrete room, high and narrow, like an elevator shaft. Unlike her previous bed, this one has no cage surrounding it. Otherwise it’s just as ugly as her former cell.

She peels back layers of holey, sopping blankets, swings her bare feet to the floor, and stands, leaning on the chair. She lets go of the chair and swoons. Once she’s sure her knees aren’t going to give out, she hobbles to the window, trying to see out. Bird droppings and soot streak the glass.

Behind her, the door opens.

She spins around, nearly losing her balance.

Dmitri stands on the threshold, looking fairly astonished to find her out of bed. He holds a tray with a mug, a few slices of brown bread.

A syringe.

Bina sees it and her stomach bottoms out; she sinks down against the wall, pressing herself back, trying to make herself small, whimpering and covering her face.

“No,” she says. “Please.”

“Listen to me,” he says.

She hears him set the tray down; the sound echoes strangely.

“Bina. This is not the same as before.”

“No.”

“He was giving you enormous doses. This is much less. It’s not going to hurt you. You need it, or else you could become psychotic again. Please listen to me.”

“No, no, no...”

He takes a step toward her, and she flinches, bracing herself for the bite of the needle. But it doesn’t come, and when she looks again, he is simply standing there, a forlorn look on his face. The syringe still sitting on the tray.

Dmitri picks it up. “I’ll be back later,” he says. “For now you should eat.”

By nightfall, she has started to see and hear things, to rage at the air, attack the walls, every cell in her body in rebellion. She possesses just enough of her faculties to experience it as pure torture.

At some point Dmitri returns with the syringe, and she does not resist as he swabs her arm. He has swapped out his rubber gloves for leather ones, his ill-fitting orderly’s jacket for a greatcoat that gives him an unexpected grandeur. He carefully injects her with a small amount of amber liquid. “There.”

Almost immediately, calm drapes her. Her head lolls. She starts to lie down.

“No no,” he says, propping her up. “I need you to get dressed.”

He faces away to give her privacy.

Moving in syrup, she pulls on the clothes he has brought her — underwear, a pair of stiff canvas pants, a woolen sweater, woolen socks. They might have fit her at one point, but her drastic weight loss means they hang on her like damp rags. Rubber-soled shoes are close enough. She wiggles her toes, amazed not to feel the dirty floor. She had forgotten the dignity of real shoes.

He turns, looks her up and down. Nods. “Hurry, please. I left the car running.”