The Golem of Paris

Chapter seven

BROOKLYN, NEW YORK

AUGUST 21, 1968

Barbara Reich says, “I’m going out.”

Her mother frowns, dragging a wooden spoon through the simmering pot of hovězí guláš. The stew breathes savory and sour, oily and oppressive, turning the cramped kitchen to a swamp. “Where?”

“I’m studying with Cindy. We have a test.”

“You must eat.”

“I’ll grab something at her place.”

If Věra’s frown deepens, it’s to hide her approval. Barbara has left her knapsack carelessly undone, textbooks poking out — doorstops with titles like Practical Biology: A Cellular Approach and Fundamental Principles of Organic Chemistry.

“Budes okradená,” Věra says, closing the flap and buckling it. You’ll get mugged.

“Anyone who wants to steal these deserves what they get,” Barbara says.

Her mother clucks. “Very expensive.”

“I’m kidding, Maminka.”

“It is not funny.”

Right Barbara thinks. Nothing is.

In the living room, her father is arguing with the New York Times.

“Bye, Taťka.”

Jozef Reich slams the paper shut. Like most of his gestures, it lacks the intended punch: no satisfying bang, just a noncommittal crinkle.

Jozef’s grin is sick and ironic as he hoists his shot glass of slivovice.

“Socialismus s lidskou tváří,” he says.

Socialism with a human face.

Before he has set the glass down, he’s groping in the direction of the bottle. Barbara hands it to him and bends to kiss the vein in the center of his forehead. He smells like overripe plums and motor oil. Each day, he comes home from the garage slathered in grease, and Věra fills the kitchen sink and shampoos his woolly arms up to the elbow.

“Study good,” he says.

“I will.”

Outside it’s so muggy the mosquitoes are complaining. Exactly the wrong weather for beef stew. Her mother’s cookery is driven primarily by economics. Chuck roast is on special, twenty-nine cents a pound, they will eat guláš.

Barbara trudges down Avenue D in the direction of Cindy’s house, rolling up her sleeves as she goes, aware of Věra watching from the kitchen window, staring down with that weird mix of suspicion and satisfaction. She can feel the knapsack imprinting itself in sweat on her back, the clasp of her brassiere biting into her spine, her blouse patching at the underarms. A group of boys wearing St. Vincent’s ties and listening to the Yankee game wonder aloud what’s hiding beneath her skirt.

Barbara pinches off a smile. Use your imagination, if you’ve got any.

She turns down Thirty-first, then circles back to Nostrand Avenue, where Cindy waits, tan and grinning, a one-woman conspiracy in a lime-green shift dress.

“Clockwork, baby.”

The dress hits halfway up her thighs. Her feet are squished into matching lime-green go-go boots. Her handbag has bright pink flowers on the side. She looks like she’s going dancing. She always does. It’s how she comes to class. Beside her, Barbara feels like a dust mop.

Her own skirt comes secondhand. She tried raising the hemline, so it wouldn’t look so dowdy. The first time she tried to walk out of the house, her mother screamed.

They will rape you.

It wasn’t funny; nothing about her family life was, but Barbara struggled to keep herself from laughing. Because Věra made these dire predictions in her even more dire Slavic accent, trilling the r like a cartoon villain.

They — will — rrrrrrrRRRRape you!

Who were they, these rapists prowling the streets of Flatbush? The blacks? The Puerto Ricans? The young men of St. Vincent’s Academy? In Věra’s mind, it could have just as easily been the Nazis or the Communists.

Either way, it wasn’t worth arguing about. Barbara went to her room and pulled out the stitching, leaving the skirt raggedy and misshapen.

Sometimes Cindy offers her stuff she never wears anymore. It’s not like you’re up to the minute, baby. Barbara declines. In the first place, her parents would never approve, of the clothes or the charity.

Plus she’d look ridiculous. As it is, Cindy’s half a foot shorter than her. Two of her minis wouldn’t begin to cover Barbara’s tush.

“Oof,” Cindy says, hefting the knapsack. “What’s in here, bricks?”

“Books,” Barbara says.

“I know you’re going for realism, baby, but come on.”

Barbara smiles. She left the flap undone for effect. If her mother had been paying attention, she might have thought to question what class required textbooks for four different subjects. Or wondered how in the world Barbara could already have an exam when today is Wednesday and registration was on Monday.

Cindy drops the knapsack on the sidewalk and begins fiddling with Barbara’s hair.

“You ought to use a little makeup, baby. You’re so pale.”

Barbara shrugs.

“I wish I had eyes like yours. You got it, flaunt it... you know what, hang on.” Cindy rummages in her handbag for a bottle of liquid eyeliner. “Hold still.”

As she gets to work, Barbara thinks what an odd spectacle they must make, the Groovy Gal and the Flying Nun. Last spring they shared a dissection table in Introduction to Vertebrate Anatomy, making up a full two-thirds of the class’s female population. Of course Barbara ended up doing all the dirty work. Cindy couldn’t bring herself to lift a scalpel, she’d get one whiff of formaldehyde and break for the ladies’. The next day, Barbara would hand her a copy of the finished report.

Thanks, baby. I owe you one.

As a premed, Barbara had to take VA. Cindy, on the other hand, was then a junior without portfolio, flirting with becoming a nurse, although that went out the window the minute she met Stan, cause, baby, he’s the one. Not ashamed to want that, husband-house-kids, the whole shebang, she’s no crazy man-hating feminist, no way.

You got a boyfriend? she asked Barbara.

No. Then, sensing this was the wrong answer: Not yet.

Don’t worry, baby. You’re young.

That’s the problem. She’s too young for her life.

High school was hard enough; she skipped two grades and still her parents called the principal weekly to complain she wasn’t being sufficiently challenged. The schedule they set left little time for socializing, and she spent her first semester at Brooklyn College more or less alone.

Irrelevant, her parents say. You go to college for one purpose: to learn.

You learn for one purpose: to get a good job.

A good job ensures that you owe nobody nothing. It guarantees money. It guarantees your survival when civilization collapses, as it inevitably will. People will always need doctors. Even more so during the Apocalypse.

But it’s her — not her parents — walking the halls, adrift in a sea of hormones and freedom, mismatched in every conceivable way.

Her sophomore math professor, an elderly Austrian, looked her up and down and said The face is fourteen, but the body is twenty.

She felt humiliated. She didn’t know what to do. She told Cindy, who brayed a laugh. You’ll probably get an A.

She got an A+.

Now, as Cindy continues to work on Barbara’s right eye, foot traffic streams around them, folks barking to get off the damn sidewalk, quit blocking the steps.

“Shove it,” Cindy says pleasantly. With a confident hand, she starts on the left eye. It’s too bad she can’t handle blood and guts; she’d make a terrific surgeon. “Sooo,” she says. “When do I get to meet him?”

“Who.”

“Who? Don Juan, dummy.”

It’s a reasonable assumption. The need for secrecy; the cover story.

Sure, why not? Her parents wouldn’t approve of her real destination, either.

For that matter, neither would Cindy.

“I don’t know,” Barbara says.

“I dig, baby. You’re feeling it out, right?”

“Right.”

“He’s your first, isn’t he?”

“Mm.”

Cindy sighs happily. “Nothing like your first.”

The ground begins to tremble: the arriving train.

“I have to go,” Barbara says.

“Almost done.” Cindy steps back. “Voilà, baby. Jeepers creepers, look at them peepers. Before they were green. Now they’re green.”

“Thanks,” Barbara says, and she runs down into the station, praying Cindy doesn’t forget to take the knapsack.

She resurfaces at Bleecker street into the same steam, here charged with urgent energy. Faces are younger, pants are tighter, the music trickling from the windows earth-shaking bass and fuzzy guitars.

Hello, I love you, won’t you tell me your name?

She’s still unhip, although not as obviously. For all anyone knows, she’s making a statement with her outfit, like those gals who don’t shave their legs as an expression of solidarity with the Vietnamese.

Address in hand, she crosses the NYU campus, littered with fliers protesting the war; protesting the treatment of the people protesting the war outside the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. The news about Czechoslovakia is hours old, far too fresh to have permeated the collective consciousness. She can imagine the discomfort it will cause to those who like to talk about the humanity and beauty of the Soviet system.

Her own view is hopelessly colored by her parents, which makes her hopelessly square. Sometimes she’ll disagree with her father about nuclear weapons or whatever, but without much heart. He gets so upset, turns red and pounds the table, spilling his drink, bellowing at her in Czech.

Tys tam nebyla.

You were not there.

How can she argue with that? She can’t, that’s how.

An American daughter cannot lay claim to suffering; her parents have gobbled up the entire supply, having endured the twin catastrophes of the Germans and the Russians. Věra was twelve when her mother, father, and younger brother perished in Theresienstadt concentration camp. She escaped to the countryside with her older brother, Jakub, sheltering with a friend of his from the Communist Party. During the purges, the same friend would denounce Jakub as a Trotskyite and a Titoist and a Zionist, sending him to the gallows.

Barbara has no memory of the event, which took place when she was an infant, after her parents had left Prague. Věra keeps her brother’s photo on the mantel, and she lights a candle on the anniversary of his death, a rare concession to tradition in their godless home.

Her father’s story is less well understood. He claims not to know his exact age, insisting people didn’t keep track of things like that. Barbara guesses he’s Věra’s senior by fifteen years or more; his face is at once layered and eroded, like a fortress that has endured centuries of trial, centuries of repair.

This much she knows: he had another family before the War.

He never talks about them. But once, during a screaming match, Věra slipped up, demanding to know how she could compete with a ghost. He did not love her as much as Jitka, he could never love her as much as Jitka.

Through two closed doors, Barbara heard the slap, then weeping in two registers.

Later, much later, she asked her mother who Jitka was.

A friend of your father’s.

Did you know her?

Věra shut her eyes. Do your homework.

The third girl in last spring’s anatomy class was Japanese, quiet and shy, with a blunt-cut bob and discount eyeglasses that gave her the same anxious gawp as the frogs they cut open. Right away Barbara identified her as another child of immigrants; the deliberation, the wait-and-see, the rounded shoulders bowed under expectation.

When the instructor announced that it was time to pair up, the girl, whose name was Ka-something but who went by Kathy, looked hopefully at Barbara. Barbara felt intense heat, like she was confronting the sun in a mirror, and she turned away to partner with pretty, chatty, happy, incompetent Cindy Gorelick.

Kathy ended up working with a boy named Leon Fine, and Barbara spent the rest of the semester avoiding eye contact with her. But sometimes their paths crossed, and in the brief moments that they regarded each other, Barbara saw no disappointment, and certainly no surprise. Kathy, too, grasped the dog-eat-dog truth of the world; given the chance, she would’ve done the same to Barbara.

The lack of judgment made Barbara feel even guiltier.

It didn’t change her mind, though.

The ad in the voice led her to expect something grand, an art studio with nice light, but Minetta Street turns out to be a short, twisted passage lined with private homes. The door to number eleven is painted bright red. There’s a note.

CLASS MOVED TO THE GARDEN

Barbara retraces her steps to Bleecker Street, where the acute intersection forms a small, overgrown park. Through cascading greenery she spots a circle of people sitting cross-legged on the ground. She walked right past them.

“Welcome, sister.”

The speaker is a white man in his midforties wearing a saffron robe. He has a shaved head and a dark, knife-point Vandyke. He beams at her.

“I’m looking for the pottery class,” Barbara says.

The man raises his palms. Behold.

All she sees is a bunch of hippies. There are no tools, no tables, no wheels. Nobody has any clay.

“Please,” the man says, “join us.”

Confused, annoyed, Barbara settles herself awkwardly on the ground between two older women who shift to give her room. A couple wearing matching peasant shirts gaze at each other through dilated pupils.

No, her parents would not approve.

There’s no word in Czech for hobby.

The fifth student is a tall, thin girl about Barbara’s age. She’s not a hippie. In fact, she’s dressed like a Quaker, in a plain navy skirt that spreads around her generously and a long-sleeved white blouse buttoned to the neck. She ought to be burning up in the heat, but her skin is dry, and she sits up high and dignified.

Catching Barbara’s eye, she tilts her head at the robed man, then raises a doubtful eyebrow, and Barbara smiles, knowing immediately that they’re going to be friends.

Not a quaker; not even close.

Her name is Frayda Gonshor, and she lives in the Grand Street Projects on the Lower East Side. Like Barbara, she was caught off guard by the announcement that payment for next week’s class was due in advance.

The ad said free.

I share my wisdom freely the robed man said. He called himself Sri Sri Jivanmukta Swami. The supplies cost three dollars.

“Chutzpah,” Frayda says as she and Barbara wait for the light to change.

Barbara agrees. All the same, they both coughed up the money. Three bucks isn’t too bad, and she senses that she and Frayda share a common goal: escaping their parents.

“I wonder what his real name is,” Frayda says.

“Probably something like Henry,” Barbara says.

“Ralph.”

“Mickey.”

“Mickey,” Barbara says, giggling. “Sri Sri Mickey Lowenstein.”

“Guru Goldblatt.”

“Swami Schwartzbaum.”

The two of them teeter down Bleecker Street, arm in arm, in hysterics, exchanging information in a rush. Barbara has to force her long legs to slow down, as does Frayda, who is even taller than her, maybe the tallest woman Barbara’s ever seen, high-waisted, with hands that flap excitedly, evoking nothing so much as a flightless bird.

“Have you ever made pottery before?”

“A little,” Barbara says.

“I haven’t.” Frayda shrugs. “It said no experience necessary.”

“I think that means Mickey,” Barbara says.

Signs for the subway come into view, and Barbara feels herself slowing further, unwilling to part yet.

“Next week?” Frayda says.

“You bet.”

Cindy is waiting for her on the corner of Nostrand and Avenue D, the knapsack slumped at her feet.

Barbara blows out an anxious breath. “Thanks.”

“Yeah, baby, sure. So?” Cindy bites off a cuticle. “How did it go? Is it true love?”

“You bet,” Barbara says.

The second class meets indoors at 11 Minetta, in Sri Sri Jivanmukta Swami’s second-floor studio apartment. Again the group sits in a circle on the floor, which is really the only option, because Sri Sri doesn’t own any furniture.

There’s clay, at least — a little ball, the diameter of a nickel.

“All creation begins from a single point,” he says.

They spend the hour forming tiny bowls by hand.

“You’re really good at this,” Frayda says.

Barbara shrugs.

Sri Sri presses his palms together. “The purity of the beginner.”

Each week he allots a bit more raw material, until, by week eight, they are making vases using hand-turned wheels. Sri Sri shuttles back and forth, dispensing advice and mopping up gray water with a rag.

“Next week,” he says, “we return to the garden to seek inspiration.”

“And to protect your floors,” Frayda mutters.

Barbara’s parents are happy to see her taking her studies so seriously.

Cindy, on the other hand, is starting to get restless.

“I’m happy to keep covering for you, baby, but don’t I deserve to meet him?”

“It’s tricky,” Barbara says.

“What, he’s a secret agent?”

“Something like that.”

The following Wednesday it’s drizzling. Barbara and Frayda arrive at the park to find it deserted. On the door to number eleven Minetta hangs a sodden note, ink running.

They head to a café.

Frayda says, “I don’t understand why he doesn’t just put down a drop cloth.”

“He’s wearing it,” Barbara says. She picks up her turkey sandwich but hesitates. Frayda isn’t eating or drinking, and that makes her feel weird — observed. “You’re sure you don’t want anything? A cup of coffee?”

“No, thanks.”

Barbara takes a bite, chews, swallows. Frayda has missed a couple of pottery classes due to a spate of Jewish holidays.

“You keep kosher,” Barbara says.

Frayda nods.

“I’m sorry.”

“That I keep kosher?”

Barbara laughs. “I don’t want to be rude,” she says, putting the sandwich down.

“Please,” Frayda says. “Enjoy.”

“You don’t mind?”

“Why would I mind?”

“I don’t know,” Barbara says.

Frayda gestures to the carnival that is Greenwich Village. “A turkey sandwich,” she says, “is the least of my concerns.”

They talk about their families, about school. Frayda studies accounting at Hunter. She’s nineteen, two years older than Barbara, but also a junior. With a detached air, she mentions that she’s engaged.

“Cool,” Barbara says, although she’s amazed. “When’s the happy day?”

“We don’t know yet. We’re not formally engaged. More like... betrothed.”

“That sounds fancy.”

“It’s not. We’ve known each other since we were five. Our families are friends.”

Her accepting manner disquiets Barbara. “What’s his name?”

“Yonatan. You could meet him sometime. You could come for Shabbos dinner.”

“Sounds like fun,” Barbara says, hoping she sounds more sincere than she feels.

“It really is,” Frayda says. “You could come this Friday, if you wanted.”

“Maybe.” She promised Cindy they’d go to a movie. “I have to check.”

“Sure.”

There’s a silence. Then Frayda peers at her suddenly.

“Do you have a Hebrew name?” she asks.

She does, but it’s purely an abstraction. Talk of God enrages her father. He is clear: God perished in the camps. It is with barely contained disgust that he watches his wife light the yahrzeit candle for her brother. They eat pork, they drive on Saturdays, they socialize with other Czechs, Jewish or Christian, it doesn’t matter, every last one of them is a devout atheist.

And yet he has chosen to live in Flatbush, surrounded by Jews. And when he drinks too much, he boasts. Reich is German for “rich,” does she know that? They come from royalty.

They hate us because we are better.

Barbara looks across the café table at Frayda’s cool, benevolent face, the temples tinged with premature gray. She decides she will cancel her plans with Cindy; she will go to Friday night dinner, if for no other reason than to please her new friend, a friend who asks questions and then actually listens to her answers.

Plus, she’s curious. The concept of the Sabbath is foreign, and mysterious, and a bit naughty — an attractive combination.

“Bina,” she says. “My name is Bina.”