Snow in August (16 page)

Then, the scene shifted, and a second mob assembled in a square in the shadow of a cathedral, loading baskets with stones,
sharpening knives, while Brother Thaddeus called on God to bless them. But the sky grew abruptly dark, lightning scribbled
a warning, clouds burst across the city, and for more than an hour, dogs rained from the heavens. Thousands of them, landing
softly on all four paws, barking and howling, their fangs bared. Brother Thaddeus rushed to the cathedral.
His followers shivered in fear and cringed in fright, dropped their stones and knives, and ran home. Michael was certain some
gallant ancestor of Sticky had been there in the rain and the howling.

Rabbi Hirsch explained that through the magic of Kabbalah, Rabbi Loew could speak to all dogs and many birds, and they often
came to him with warnings of the evil plots of Brother Thaddeus. That is how he learned of the planned revolution against
Emperor Rudolf. Brother Thaddeus was telling his followers that the Emperor had gone mad and must be overthrown. They were
storing arms, preparing for the day.

Late one night, while Michael watched, Rabbi Loew wrote a long, detailed letter to the Emperor, warning him of the great trouble
that was brewing and asking him to protect the Jewish Quarter. He sealed the letter with wax and asked Michael to deliver
it to the Castle. After all, Michael was a Shabbos goy. Nobody would stop
him
on the streets beyond the ghetto. The boy took the letter and slipped into the Prague night, through narrow alleys, where
buildings leaned at strange angles and rats scurried in the dark. He hugged the shadowy walls of deserted squares, crossed
the river into Mala Strana, and then began climbing climbing climbing to the walls of the Castle. When he came close, six
guards appeared, their faces masked by iron visors, holding lances and giant axes. Growling and nasty, they yanked the letter
from his hands and told him to go home. From the walls of the Castle he could see fires burning in the mountains. One guard
laughed and said that these were happy fires. They are sending Jews to Hell, he said.

Michael reported this to Rabbi Loew, but a raven had already delivered the news. All over the kingdom, Jews found outside
the ghetto were being killed. Next, the Jew-killers
would breach the walls of the Jewish Quarter itself. We will wait three days, the rabbi told Michael, and then we will be
forced to do something drastic.

Three days passed. More Jews were killed. There was no word from Rudolf. And then Rabbi Loew took his drastic action.

He decided to make the Golem.

“The what?” Michael asked, in the synagogue in Brooklyn.

“The Golem,” Rabbi Hirsch answered. “The word, it means in dictionary English, like a robot. But the English word, you know,
is not really true. Not good enough. Not
right
. To Rabbi Loew, the Golem has another meaning.”

The story of the Golem had really started a year earlier, when Rabbi Loew made a night visit to Emperor Rudolf in the Castle.
Among the Emperor’s collection of thousands of artifacts was a heavy silver spoon, almost eighteen inches long, with Hebrew
letters engraved upon the handle. The Emperor asked Rabbi Loew for a translation. Rabbi Loew was astounded at what he saw,
but gave Rudolf an incomplete version of the words. He didn’t lie. He just didn’t tell Rudolf all the words. For a good reason:
he was afraid of what they said.

The object was laid aside, as the Emperor turned in excitement to show Rabbi Loew a monkey that could play the clavichord
and then a portrait of the Virgin Mary that wept real tears. But when the evening was over, the Emperor presented the silver
spoon to Rabbi Loew as a gift.

“He says, take it home, use it for soup,” Rabbi Hirsch said. “Rabbi Loew takes it home. He doesn’t make soup.”

All the way home through the foggy streets, Rabbi Loew’s heart thumped with excitement. He knew that he had been given the
silver spoon that was mentioned in the Book of Creation. With this spoon, he could shape a man from mud. And
by saying the correct words from the Kabbalah, he could bring the mud to life.

That is, through the wisdom of God, he could make the Golem.

The Golem, that huge creature whispered about in secret books and hinted at in the Book of Psalms.

The Golem, who could not be destroyed.

The Golem, who was obliged to do whatever the Jews asked him to do.

“It’s like
Frankenstein
,” Michael said in a hushed voice. “You know, the movie?
Frankenstein
, with Boris Karloff?”

“I have not seen this movie,” Rabbi Hirsch said.

Michael told him about the movie starring Boris Karloff as the monster who was created from the parts of dead bodies by Dr.
Frankenstein. It played every year at the Venus.

“The Golem,” Rabbi Hirsch said, “was not a movie.”

He talked then about how Rabbi Loew fasted and prayed for three days, purifying his body and his soul. Then one moonless midnight,
accompanied by two young and pure assistants, he slipped out of the ghetto through a secret passage. Michael saw him carrying
the silver spoon. He noticed that under his coat, Rabbi Loew was dressed completely in white. The three men made their way
to the banks of the Vltava. Sweating in silence, they began to shape the body of a man from the pure mud of the riverbank.

Then Michael saw Rabbi Loew take from his jacket a piece of parchment upon which he had written certain words in Hebrew. Letters
only he understood. This was called a
shem
. It included the secret name of God. He inserted the
shem
in the Golem’s mouth and leaned close to his ear and whispered a secret prayer. With the tip of a pointed tool, he etched
a word in the Golem’s brow, a word that Michael could not read. Then
Rabbi Loew removed the
shem
and he and his assistants danced in a circle, moving one way and then another, chanting seven times the secret name of God.
Michael could not understand the words.

But slowly, after the mud first turned very red, as if it were baking, and then cooled in a mysterious wind, the Golem rose
from the riverbank.

Alive.

“The Golem, he’s almost seven feet tall, his skin is the color of the clay,” Rabbi Hirsch whispered. “He stands up naked on
the riverbank and then one of the assistants gives to him a robe. They find out he can’t speak, the Golem, but his eyes, and
what he
does
, tell them he understands everything.”

“Did he understand Yiddish?”

“Of course. And Hebrew. And German. And Czech, and maybe a little Greek too. He understands what he has to understand.”

Shazam!

“It’s like Captain Marvel,” Michael said.

“Who?”

Michael was embarrassed. “A story in the comics.” He leaned forward. “Tell me the rest.”

“The rest?”

“What did the Golem
do
?”

Rabbi Hirsch looked uneasy.

“What the Jews need him to do,” he said.

And then, leaning back in his chair, his eyes half-closing, Rabbi Hirsch transported Michael to Prague to witness the doings
of the Golem. Michael could see the Golem lumbering through the dark nights to rescue a Jewish girl who was being baptized
against her will. He could see the Golem summoning a million birds to darken the skies and shit on the heads of the
legions of Brother Thaddeus. He could see the Golem in the shadowed doorway of Brother Thaddeus’s house, filling the locks
with mortar, so that for three days and three nights Brother Thaddeus could not get out and his followers could not get in
to plot against the Jews.

“Could he make himself invisible?” Michael asked, thinking of Claude Rains in
The Invisible Man
.

“Sure. If Rabbi Loew says is okay.”

But it was clear to Michael that the Golem sometimes acted without orders from Rabbi Loew. The creature knew he was a soldier
in a war, and he had a few personal ideas about how to fight it. Once, the invisible Golem entered the house of Brother Thaddeus
on an evening when Thaddeus was entertaining another big Jew-hater from Vienna. The Golem made Michael invisible too, and
took the boy along as he moved through the huge kitchen. Michael saw him piss in the wine bottles and switch the serving trays.
And then saw the great uproar when the gleaming silver dishes were uncovered on the dining table and Brother Thaddeus and
his guests stared down at the roasted remains of rats.

“Great!” Michael shouted, laughing out loud.

“Yes, the Golem, he has a sense of humor,” the rabbi said, looking merry. The Golem had magical powers, he explained, but
he was not a god; in some ways he was a large boy.

On another visit to Brother Thaddeus’s house, they saw the hairless monk showing some visiting aristocratic ladies his private
art collection, which was housed in a vast gallery full of nooks and crannies. The monk was very rich now, because all of
the people who hated the Jews gave him money. Under his robe he wore polished leather boots, just like the Nazis, and they
clacked as he walked down the halls. Then Brother Thaddeus turned into one corner, with the perfumed duchess and
the silken princess and their ladies-in-waiting rustling beside him. All the time he was delivering a running commentary on
the great works of art and his own great taste and how art would be better if only they could get rid of the Jews.

They paused in front of a work that even Brother Thaddeus had never seen before: two giant terra-cotta globes, protruding
from a perfect rectangle in the wall. Brother Thaddeus began to expound on the glorious discoveries made in Italy of Etruscan
culture, the delicate processes of glazing, firing, aging. The ladies leaned in closer, and then one of them reached forward
to touch the terra-cotta globe.

It was soft!

“You see, she touches the Golem’s ass!” Rabbi Hirsch said. “Sticking through the hole he chopped in the wall! And then he
gives them—how do you say it?”

He flipped through the dictionary, stopped.

“Effluvium! He puts in the air,
effluvium!
”

“A fart!”

“Yes! Yes! A great big
fart!
And the ladies fall over, like with poison gas, and Brother Thaddeus begins to sob and the Golem runned away, laughing and
laughing!”

They laughed together at the image of the Golem’s triumph. And then slowly the rabbi’s face settled. His eyes grew grave.

“Brother Thaddeus, he never gived,
gave
up,” Rabbi Hirsch said. “But then, a terrible crime he planned. So terrible, this time he must be punished.”

In the week before Passover, a small Christian girl disappeared, and in a dream, Rabbi Loew saw that this was part of a wicked
plot for which the Jews, of course, would be blamed. Echoing through the rabbi’s dream were two words:
Fünfter Palast
. Michael pictured him waking in his candlelit study from
the dream, murmuring, “Fünfter Palast, Fünfter Palast…” Then he turned to Michael, played thoughtfully with his beard, furrowed
his brow, and said that the words were the key to thwarting the evil intentions of Brother Thaddeus.

Those words, Fünfter Palast, were the name of the ruined Fifth Palace. It had once belonged to an emperor who went mad a century
before Rudolf came to Prague. That forgotten emperor imagined all sorts of enemies coming to get him, so he had built a network
of secret tunnels from the Fifth Palace to other buildings in the area. He lived to escape. One tunnel even reached into the
cellars of the Old-New Synagogue, where he could disguise himself as a Jew and disappear into the fog. Another was connected
to the Green Building, where Brother Thaddeus now lived. When the emperor finally abdicated, his enemies destroyed the Fifth
Palace. Now the entrances were buried in the ruins, and no maps or plans had survived.

That night, Michael followed Rabbi Loew and the Golem as they dodged spies and policemen in the streets and went to the ruins
of the Fifth Palace. The Golem lifted huge slabs of broken walls and collapsed beams, clearing a path, until they found steps
leading underground to a sealed door. The Golem ripped the door off its hinges as if playing with a dollhouse. Rabbi Loew
stepped inside. Ahead of them lay a dark, damp tunnel. Rats crawled at their feet. Water dripped from the ceilings. Michael
saw it all, moving in the darkness of the tale.

Then Rabbi Loew lit two
havdalah
candles and he and the Golem eased into the tunnel. After a while, they came to a kind of crossroads, where other tunnels
led away in different directions. The Golem paused, sniffing the air. Then he indicated with a nod of his head that Rabbi
Loew was to follow him into
the tunnel to the right. There was a coppery stench in the air. Rabbi Loew looked as if he were entering the outskirts of
Hell.

Finally they came to a large room with glistening stone walls, filled with rotting tables, cobwebbed pots, beakers, tubes:
the abandoned workshop of an alchemist. Rabbi Loew felt a chill that would remain with him the rest of his life. Even now,
more than four hundred years later, it seeped into Michael.

And then the Golem became excited, growling, alert, his nose flaring. He made his way into a dark corner. He returned with
two baskets. They were not draped in cobwebs. In one of them, Rabbi Loew found almost thirty vials filled with fresh human
blood. Each was labeled with the name of a well-known Jew. In the other, wrapped in a Jewish prayer shawl called a
tallis
, was the body of a child.

“Right away,” Rabbi Hirsch whispered, “he knows the plot.”

It was obvious: just before Passover, Brother Thaddeus would have the body and the vials of blood moved through the tunnels
to the cellar of the Old-New Synagogue. From there, under cover of night, his henchmen would plant the vials throughout the
Jewish Quarter, and the child’s body in Rabbi Loew’s own house. Brother Thaddeus could then bring the police to discover them
and “prove” that the Jews were engaging in human sacrifice.

A blood libel!

Rabbi Loew acted quickly. He told the Golem to carry the child’s body back through the tunnels and hide it in the wine cellar
of Brother Thaddeus’s mansion. The Golem smiled and went away with the body, while Rabbi Loew prayed for the child’s soul.
When the Golem returned, Rabbi Loew ordered him to dig a deep hole in the earthen floor and bury the vials
of blood. The Golem did what he was told, covering the holes with dirt, stones, and smashed beams. Then they retraced their
steps. They noticed something new: the squealing of the rats had ended.