Body of Glass (28 page)

“Protect Yod, Nili and Riva with equal attention,” Malkah said firmly. She came downstairs in her plum-coloured robe, her slippers flapping on the tiles. “Simply disable any of them attempting to assault or injure any of the others. Why don’t we all sit down and have some wine? You’ve just stumbled on our biggest secret.”

Shira said to Malkah, Tm sorry you should find out about our affair in such a stupid way. I wanted to tell you, but you were working around the clock.”

“I knew,” Malkah said. “I heard Yod coming and going. I approve.”

“How can you have an affair with a machine?” Riva asked, following them to the table under the peach tree. “That’s like speaking of a relationship with a dildo.”

Shira was too angry to answer. Yod was accessing his base in an effort to understand. Malkah said, “That will be enough, Riva. You’ve had affairs with hairy objects far less human than Yod. I met some of them. For a woman who had a baby with the help of a machine, I think you should behave yourself and pass no knee-jerk judgements.” Malkah marched off to the kitchen and returned with a bottle of wine and glasses.

“I am not programmed primarily for sexual pleasure but for defence,” Yod said pleasantly. He had accessed ‘dildo’. “Given that I’m a machine, what are you?” He was addressing Nili. “Half and half?”

“For one thing, I’m as illegal as you are. So we’re even,” Nili said. The pistol had disappeared to whatever part of her black pyjamas she carried it in. Shira imagined that Nili slept with a knife and a gun always on her person. Did she take them off in the shower? “You’re really a cyborg? My eyes and my sensors contradict each other. You look human.”

“So do you,” Shira said. “But what are you? I asked Riva earlier, but she wouldn’t tell me.”

An electric jolt sped around the table; Shira realized she had used Riva’s own name. “Everything seems to be coming out of the can tonight,” Malkah said. “Yod, this woman is officially Dalia. And Nili is officially her entirely human nurse. Say nothing to Avram.”

“How can he lie?” Riva asked. “Can we remove that memory?”

“I can lie as well as you can,” Yod said. “I simply require a good reason for that behaviour as for any other. And my memory is as inaccessible to alteration as yours — perhaps better protected against chemical tampering.”

“I’m responsible for maybe a third of Yod’s programming, and frankly I view him as a friend and trust him completely.”

“Mother,” Riva said in high exasperation, “presumably whoever programmed the other two thirds can turn him inside out.”

“No.” Yod plunked his elbows on the table. “He doesn’t even know Shira and I are lovers. He doesn’t know I leave the lab many nights.”

“I notice nobody has answered my question. What is Nili? What exactly are you, and what are you doing here?” Shira was furious with herself for breaking their security, but she was equally angry at having her questions ignored while they all talked around and about and over Yod as if he were a piece of furniture.

“You can start by asking me where I’m from.” Nili sipped her wine.

“Where are you from?” Yod asked agreeably. He was watching them all, tightly coiled in his chair. Shira was sure he had noted where Nili had put away her pistol and what weapon Riva had carried as well as its current whereabouts. Having perfect recall, he could simply replay the scene until he was sure.

“Safed.”

Shira snorted in disbelief. “Safed? In Israel? No one lives in that whole interdicted sector. It has lethal levels of radiation and plague.”

“I can walk in the raw without protection. I can tolerate levels of bombardment that would kill you. We live in the hills - inside them, that is. We are a joint community of the descendants of Israeli and Palestinian women who survived. We each keep our religion, observe each other’s holidays and fast days. We have no men. We clone and engineer genes. After birth we undergo additional alteration. We have created ourselves to endure, to survive, to hold our land. Soon we will begin rebuilding Yerushalaim.”

Shira felt her mouth sagging open. She could not have been more shocked if Nili had announced herself a representative of whatever distant race had sent the message no one on earth could yet decode. Shira had grown up with a black patch on the maps for the destroyed area, the interdicted zone of the Middle East where the last great Two Week War had been fought, set off by a zealot with a nuclear device who had blown up Jerusalem. When it was over, all the countries involved were wastelands, and the very ground was uninhabitable. Most of the oilfields of the region were aflame and useless. No more oil would ever be pumped from them. It was truly no-man’s-land.

“Why are you here?” Malkah asked. What’s your mission?”

“We live in extreme isolation. We have a highly developed technology for our needs, but we don’t tie into the Net. I’m a spy and a scout ―”

“You said you were an assassin,” Shira interrupted. “You told me that.” Beside her, Yod was sitting silent. Together afterward they would go over every word Nili and Riva had uttered and analyse it. A companion with perfect recall has definite advantages in postmortems.

“That was my little joke. I could be ― I’m well-equipped. No, I am sent like the dove or maybe the raven from Noah’s ark to find out if the world is ready for us, and also if there’s anything out here we might want.”

“Been in contact with Nili’s group for years. I volunteered to escort her across Europa and take her someplace she could comfortably live over here, studying us.” Riva patted Nili’s hand. “Got to move on after Tuesday, but she’ll stay with you through fall if you’re willing. She could be useful in your state of semi-siege.”

“How do you read our present situation?” Malkah asked Riva, her fingers steepled before her.

Riva leaned back in her seat, looking at each of them in turn with narrowed eyes as if gauging their readiness or abilities. “Well, let’s put it this way: you’re not digested yet, but you’re between the teeth and they’ve had a few good chomps.”

“Y-S? Why? We don’t even do our primary business with them.”

“They’re moving on Olivacon. They think there are too many multis and the free towns are a nuisance. One world, one corp. That’s their line. Aramco-Ford is in this with them for starters. But as to why you’re a hot target, you’ll have to answer that.”

“Then these incursions into our Base are part of a larger strategy?”

“One that likely includes kidnapping, assassination, maybe invasion.”

Shira looked at Malkah, listening raptly. In Malkah’s uncharacteristic rumpled frown, Shira could see a resemblance to Riva. “How do you know all this?” Malkah asked slowly, her eyes narrowed.

“Contacts. Traces in their system.”

“What kind of contacts?”

“You don’t expect me to answer that, Malkah.”

Malkah and Riva were staring at each other, a certain distance and wariness in each. Shira turned to Yod. “What do you believe?” he asked her, his voice low.

“I don’t know. We’ll talk about it later.” Was Riva exaggerating their danger for some purpose of her own? It was even possible that the razor Zee Levine had been acting on some weird private motivations. Shira yawned suddenly, her fatigue rising in her like a soporific drug. “Is there any other place we can meet?” she asked him softly. By now she was just about too tired to make love, but still the idea drew her. His hands on the table had a precise chiselled shape she studied with pleasure. His eyes seemed more intense, more seeing than human eyes, fixed on her.

“I requested my own room, but Avram hasn’t obliged.” He replied in a murmur even softer than hers.

“Ask Gadi. He’s taken over the third floor,” she whispered back. “This house is too crowded.”

He nodded glumly. “If all else fails, maybe I can get away after dark and we can go outside, up on the dune.”

Nili turned towards them, obviously listening, so they both fell silent. Under the table Shira rested her hand gently on his thigh as a way of emphasizing their intimacy, reassuring him. He is as real a person as I am, she thought, anger hardening her against Riva. I’m supposed to think you’re better than Yod because you’re mostly flesh? I’d rather depend on him any day or night, and I feel far closer to him than to you, my supposed mother. You say you want us to be friends, but you prejudge me, dismiss me. If you wanted a daughter like Nili, you should have kept me with you and trained me yourself; but I’m glad you didn’t. I am Malkah’s daughter, not yours.

twenty-four

Malkah

“I don’t feel smart. I feel stupid.”

“Why, Joseph? That doesn’t make sense.”

“Whatever little I learn, there’s far more I don’t understand. Life is a foreign country to me.”

“Whatever upbringing you were given that didn’t include even reading and writing makes it hard for you. … That is, if you had parents?”

That is the closest Chava has come to asking a personal question of Joseph, and he sits mute. He does not want to lie to her. She knows the story the Maharal put out. Finally her eyes waiting on him make him answer something. “No parents.”

“An orphan?”

“No parents.”

“Yet I have heard you call my grandfather ‘Father’. He doesn’t like you to do that, but he doesn’t seem surprised either.”

“It’s just a term of respect.”

“Joseph, are you a man?”

“I’m not a woman, obviously.”

“I told you you were clever. Maybe you didn’t study your letters, but you sound to me like you’ve studied pilpul ― that awful quibbling they teach the boys, to split logic into splinters. Joseph, perhaps you’re an angel captured into a strong body.”

“Perhaps I’m a demon captured.”

“Is that what my grandfather thinks?”

“Who am I to ask him what he thinks about me?”

“Are you an angel or a demon, then?”

“I remember nothing before my birth, the same as you, Chava. Why are you playing games with me?”

“I’m interested in everything about you, Joseph. I’m trying to understand you. You’re my friend. We have to understand our friends.”

“Do I understand you? No. But you’re my friend. I would die for you.”

“You found the lost girl when no one else could. You never sleep.”

“I just don’t need much sleep; that’s why it seems that way.”

“Nonsense, Joseph.” She smiles at him. “Lesson done today. Study the verbs I gave you. I have to work on editing Grandfather’s new critique of the education system. His constant efforts to reform ghetto life have kept him in trouble since long before I was born. Were you born, Joseph?”

“I came into the world one night, as you did.”

“Not as I did, Joseph. Not as I did.”

David Gans, too, is interested in Joseph. He wants to measure his strength scientifically. He weighs barrels full of different substances — water, wine, earth ―and has Joseph lift them. They are working in the courtyard in the narrow space between David’s little house and the house of the Maharal and his family. Joseph is obediently straining and lifting the barrels, when he looks up and sees every window of the surrounding houses crowded with faces. Bubehs are muttering, young women are fascinated, men are exchanging bets. The Maharal is holding court, or he would have stopped this scene before now, Joseph realizes. Once again Joseph has gone too far.

When he comes to the keg of nails, he pretends to strain and then fall. He pretends he cannot lift the keg. When David has emptied half the nails, he lifts the keg, miming difficulty. A limit to his strength has been established. You must be the strongest man in Prague,” David says admiringly. “Perhaps in Bohemia.”

But still within the bounds of what a man can conceivably do. Joseph feels giddy with relief. He stopped in time. Barely in time. Chava has been watching too. Now she melts back into the door, returning to the rabbi’s study. Why does he think she knows exactly what he did?

He is the bull they all send for when they need brute strength. “You can’t move that chest? You need that bed carried up four flights? Joseph the Shamash will do it. He’s the strongest man in Bohemia!” Everybody repeats that now, as if it were written in stone. He is a source of local pride. They call him Samson. He runs to Chava to ask her who Samson was, and she gives him the story to read in a children’s version before she reads him the story from
Nevi’im
― Judges.

Joseph is insulted. “I am as strong as Samson, but I am a better man. A woman tempted me too, but I resisted her. My strength is not in my hair. My strength is in me.”

“Our strength is in each other and in the eternal one, Joseph.”

He kneels before her, resting his great head on her knee like a mastiff. “I spoke without thinking. My weakness is my ignorance. My weakness is my foolishness.”

“You’re not so foolish as all that. Get up and make yourself useful. Come, we’ll go help my mother scour the house and throw out the chometz ― what isn’t kosher for Passover. Tonight at twilight Pesach begins.”

Joseph is given a new shirt for Pesach, and he sits at the table with everyone else. During the reading of the Haggadah, the book is passed around the table. It is a handsome bound book published right here in Prague, full of fine illustrations. Some pictures come directly from the text, like the wicked child depicted as a soldier; others are simply illustrative of the life and feelings of the local Jews, such as the drawings of hares being pursued, hunted by large ravening hounds, hares forever running and hiding for their lives. Chava has coaxed him through the service three times, and when the book is handed to him, he reads his passage. The Maharal stares, seems about to speak; then lets the moment go. Chava beams at Joseph, who is brooding about the Exodus. They were slaves in Egypt, labouring under an overseer, making bricks from clay. He too is made from clay. He is a walking brick. He is a slave.

He does what he is told. He cleans and makes neat the Altneushul. He lays fires and trims the candles and carries in the wood. At night he patrols the ghetto. Day and night he works. He is created to serve, but must he serve always? Other men work their ten hours or so, and then they throw themselves down and rest. They sit in the street and kibitz their neighbours. They drink wine or beer and play cards. They sing, they saw on a violin. They throw sticks for a dog to chase. They whistle to a pet bird. They climb in bed with their wives. He obeys. He serves and obeys.

He has been given a room in the Maharal’s house, a small cubicle formerly used for birthing. He keeps his few clothes and books there. He studies, sitting on the bed he never sleeps in. He imagines living with Chava in just such a little room. How cosy it would be. Neither of them is demanding or expects much. If only he could be a man like other men, almost like other men, and enjoy those small pleasures that seem enough to fill life till it would spill over like a boiling pot, he would sing his joy all day like the birds that every day of April sing louder and longer and more intensely.

Chava takes the Haggadah in her turn, reading the Hebrew fluently. She is the only woman who does this, although all the Maharal’s daughters could. But she does it by a kind of quiet right. She takes the book, looking serious and radiant, and reads. No one says a word. Yakov Sassoon watches her through the evening. “Chava Bachrach bat Judah, you should be married,” he says at one point. “You are fit to be anyone’s wife.”

“You’re a flatterer. I’d give a husband fits. What suits me is my own life.”

“Marriage is not a joke, Chava.” Yakov rebukes her with his voice soft.

“Many of those I see are matter for laughing, Yakov. I am faithful to my husband’s memory.”

Joseph would like to pick up Yakov by his narrow shoulders and toss him out the window. Yakov sings louder than anyone at the long crowded table, because he sings better. Showoff. But Chava is not impressed, Joseph comforts himself. And she called him smart.

When the Maharal summons him after the second day of Pesach has ended, he is nervous. He immediately asks, “Father, are you angry because I have been learning to read?”

“Why should that anger me? I believe even the poorest child should learn to read and write, should learn Hebrew. The knowledge of the book can’t be hoarded by the children of the rich. Often the poorest pupil is the keenest. He who is both poor and bright takes nothing for granted but goes after learning with a hunger already sharpened by need. … Besides, you are more useful when you can read signs. Who’s been teaching you?”

He wonders whether to lie, but he suspects that Judah might know already. “Your granddaughter Chava.”

The Maharal tweaks and rolls his beard between his fingers as if he were pricing it. “Chava the compassionate. If she has the time, should I begrudge you? No, we have another problem.”

“Set me a task so I may please you, Father.”

“We must all please ha-Shem. Easter comes. It’s a violent time. A time of pogroms. I want you to go back into the city and see if you can find out what’s brewing.” The Maharal leaves the choices to Joseph. Joseph is already far more sophisticated in tavern habits and inn customs than the Maharal. He will start by finding his old friend the drayman and asking him for another day’s work. Joseph is already noted from his previous excursion as a heavy drinker. No one will be surprised that he disappeared, and no one will be surprised he should reappear, like a tomcat returning from the prowl.

He enjoys being recognized by men he was drinking with. The drayman is off transporting the furniture of a family moving from one side of the river to the other. He already hired a helper for the day, but the barflies are so impressed with Joseph’s strength, if Joseph will just stick around till the drayman is back, they are sure he will hire Joseph for tomorrow.

He hears the story of poor Maria, who was raped by Stefan and locked in a cellar to die of hunger and cold, but the priest Thaddeus heard and told her family. A cousin came and broke down the door and saved her. Charges of rape and abduction have been brought against Stefan, but it will likely just turn out to cost him in the pocket, money which they can try to collect, because he owes his very soul to the dirty Jew moneylenders.

Joseph expresses great admiration for Thaddeus and learns that some of the young men who hang around the fringes of his ministry frequent an inn about two thirds of the way up the steep hill to the castle. Making his excuses, Joseph climbs. How lucky, he thinks, that he was made impervious to alcohol, because all his detective work seems to run lubricated by vats of beer. The Maharal will worry that he is spending too much on low encounters and profligate pleasures, but he can truthfully assure the rabbi that beer is no more pleasant to him than water. He will not say that except for the remarks about Jews, he has enjoyed the company of the men in the tavern. Among them he does not feel stupid or cast out. They admire his strength. Half of them cannot read or write. He is an intellectual, a scholar by comparison, and he is comfortable with their jostling and joking.

He follows their directions: under the Black and White. That’s what locals call the fine palace of the Volkzrozmbewkas, all covered with the latest in decoration, sgraffito, every block of stone drawn upon in black and white to make it appear to jut out. At the intersection of two streets where the Black and White Palace appears high in the air, he looks to the left. On the ground floor of a tall narrow house is a small tavern called At the Golden Bear. This tavern feels different: cleaner, better appointed. The most striking difference is how the men look him over carefully when he comes in, how he has the sense of having stepped across some well-guarded border on sufferance. This looks public, but it is turf. He is permitted in under the surveillance of at least ten sets of eyes. He can imagine many retreating under that scrutiny, but his nerves are tuned low. He possesses the confidence of his brawn and his great strength. He orders a beer, drinks it and gazes around in a leisurely survey designed to show off his calm, his slight amusement.

If Joseph were our contemporary, he would see himself as a hero from a stimmie, perhaps a gunslinger, a fantasy based on a highly stylized version of a few western towns during a short period. Then again, he might see himself as a spacer entering a watering hole on some far planet. But the game is the same, whether we are talking about a male primate approaching an established group on their own territory or a dog meeting other dogs in the alley. Much posturing. Alpha Male, Alpha Male, says the newcomer, throwing back his shoulders, raising his muzzle and trying to look big and tough. I am dominant, you will submit. Cower before me. See how I snarl. Does not the style of my snarling and posturing make you want to show me your belly of submission and to offer your throat in a ritual display of humility?

Joseph is slightly shocked to realize he is enjoying himself. At home he is always more or less under the Maharal’s judgemental gaze. Here he is on orders but off premises, free to interpret those orders as the occasion, his survival and his whim dictate. It is a ritual dance. One at a time they approach, insult or question, retreat. He is as big as the biggest of them and far stronger, as he pleasantly knows. His strength is two-edged. His strength makes him a freak. His strength makes him fear hurting Chava if he should dare even to caress her hand with his. But here his strength crowns him king of the dung heap. He cannot take them all on at once, he supposes, but he could hurt, maim, kill more of them than they would believe possible. He is not impervious to their weapons, but he does not truly know if he can be killed. He can be wounded, but his wounds heal quickly. He does not give a moment’s damn whether they like him or not. He wants to seize them as a terrier seizes a rat and shakes it to death; he wants to shake their knowledge, their plans, out of them.

Jews and women are the targets of their jokes, their stories, their plots. They profess the desire to fuck women and kill Jews, but their tone of voice is indistinguishable. “We’re going to put it to them Friday,” the one who must be the leader says finally to the room at large, while watching Joseph carefully for his reaction. Joseph just nods and slaps his thigh. Karel is not the biggest, not the toughest. But he has presence, a medium-tall man in his middle twenties with two fingers of the left hand missing. Karel has a strong jutting jaw. If he were to lay his jaw against a piece of paper, any child could draw a straight line as easily as with a ruler. His features are all a little bigger than life-size. He has a naturally loud and carrying voice.

There are two groups of young men associated with Thaddeus. One is a group of knights and wealthy men of the town, who believe he is a good influence over the populace, who believe they would be richer if Jews did not exist, if Jews could be pushed out and Jewish buildings and businesses taken over. Prague seethes with discontent. The guilds feel their power eroding. The merchants want more respect. Many knights are land rich and money poor. They see themselves losing ground. Some want a war to fight. All seek an enemy. They are cut into sharp jagged factions, religious, economic, political, that bang against each other seeking a flaw. There are Roman Catholics, Hussites, Utraquists and lately some Lutherans, all enemies.