Snow in August (13 page)

“And the birds,” the rabbi said. “Thousands of birds, getting lunch in the river.”

The rabbi turned a page now and pointed beyond some small houses and told Michael that in the old days there had been a Jewish
cemetery there. Then it was dug up and replaced by buildings. Now it was lost to history, the graves and the names of the
dead long forgotten.

“The old people, they used to say that the spirits from the lost graves, all the souls, they floated up in the sky forever,
trying to get home,” he said. “Now they have plenty of company.”

Michael saw them now, hundreds of them, floating in the air, cartwheeling, swooping, men searching for women, and children
searching for parents, high above the spires of St.
Vitus, mixed in with Finn MacCool’s lost followers, the
fianna
, all of them careening like birds, like a lost flock of robins. And as he listened to the rabbi recall his own childhood
fears, he was standing in Kampa, watching as the spires detached themselves from the cathedral and slowly rose into the sky
and circled Prague, like knobby rockets reaming the air, scattering ghosts and angels and fianna, before driving hard and
ferociously through the flock of ghosts into the Jewish Quarter.

The rabbi’s eyes were drowsy with the past, his face loose. And then he was a young man, taking Michael with him into the
cellar cafés, the air blue with cigarette smoke, and Mucha posters on the walls full of women with thick coils of hair and
red lips, and all of them, Judah Hirsch and Michael Devlin and their friends, talking about naturalism and symbolism. Mallarme
and Nietzsche and Rilke. The names meant nothing to Michael as he listened hard, trying to shape the rabbi’s life in his own
mind, living it with him.

“This is a time, the first time I try to live without God,” the rabbi said, his eyes drifting to the door that led to the
sanctuary. “Is a surprise, a rabbi can try to live without God?”

“Yes,” the boy said.

“We are,
were
young,” the man said.

He kept talking, as much to himself as to Michael, trying to explain a time in the 1920s when he and his friends and most
other Czechs believed that culture would unite them all. Michael didn’t exactly understand the word
culture;
it made him think of pictures of rich people he’d seen in the
Daily Mirror
. But the rabbi spoke about a time, in those cellar cafés, when all of them thought that culture would be the cement of Prague,
strong enough to bind together Christians and Jews and atheists, men and women, old and young. Culture would
end the ancient quarrels of Europe, preventing bloodshed and bitterness and cruelty.

“God we didn’t need,” he said, “if we had Vermeer. Or Picasso. Or Mondrian. On every wall, we had their pictures pasted.”

None of this talk made pictures in Michael’s mind, nor carried him high above the distant city to share the sky with ghosts.
But he could see himself with young Judah Hirsch, sitting beside the first radio in a smoky corner of the Café Montmartre
on Celetna Street, smoking cigarettes, listening to words coming through the air in other languages. Michael could not tell
one language from another but knew that there were Germans speaking, and Slavs, and Austrians and Russians, and he wished
that Father Heaney was with them, because he had been to Europe and could help sort them out.

Then the rabbi talked about the arrival of the phonograph record in Prague, and Michael saw his friend Judah Hirsch winding
up a Victrola and putting the needle on the record and heard him telling his friends that in this new Czechoslovakia, this
new Europe, this place free of hatred and war, they would drown together in the music of Dvo
ák and Mahler and Smetana. Names
that Rabbi Hirsch pronounced as if they were saints. Names that Michael did not recognize, could not even imagine how to spell.
The rabbi made the boy long to hear their music. He wished his mother would save up and buy a phonograph, even a windup Victrola
from the St. Vincent DePaul Society, where things were cheap, so he could hear the music of these men, and
Don Giovanni
too. And suddenly he realized that the rabbi, who spoke about music as if it were played by God, lived here in the synagogue
without a radio, without even the company of Bing Crosby and Benny Goodman.

“Modern, we all were,” the rabbi said, with no music in his voice. “That was the new religion. Modernism.” He paused, and
glanced at Michael’s puzzled face. “Too modern for believing in God, we were.”

Such talk made Michael uneasy. He could not imagine how a man of God, a rabbi, could admit that once upon a time he did not
believe in God. The priests in Sacred Heart could have no such doubts. They seemed born to be priests, chosen by God himself.
Or if they had the doubts, they surely would not tell Michael. But when Rabbi Hirsch spoke of his doubting youth, Michael
felt even closer to him, for Michael had his own unspoken doubts, his own questions.

“Eh, you are a boy,” the rabbi said, as if understanding that he had wandered too far from the streets of Prague and the names
of buildings and streets and rivers. “I am saying too much of grown-up things.”

He returned to the pictures in the book, like a man examining a map, tracing paths into the New Town Square and showing Michael
the astrological clock on the walls of the church, with the apostles moving through two windows every hour, hour after hour,
so accurate that even the passing Jewish businessmen would look up and check their pocket watches. Then Michael and young
Judah Hirsch were gazing up at the lacy facade of the Palace of Industry. Its clock tower seemed to float in the air above
its roof, and the facade’s pattern of intricate iron grills and repeated circles turned yellow in the August sun. Stone flowers
sprouted from other buildings and curled around each other in stained-glass windows, and then Michael was on the steps of
the National Museum, standing with Judah Hirsch and his father as they looked out over Wenceslas Square and listened to the
great leader Masaryk speak about democracy and hope to half a million roaring Czechs.

“How can you remember all these things?” Michael said.

“A Jew, he must watch, and he must remember,” the rabbi said, and smiled in a detached way. “If he wants to live.”

“Like the Irish with the English,” Michael said, remembering the tales his mother told him of British soldiers on the streets
of Belfast in 1923, when she was a girl.

“Yes,” the rabbi said. “Like that.”

He turned a few more pages, and there, finally, among the drawings of Old Town and the Jewish Quarter, was the house where
he had lived with his father and mother. In a street called U Prasne. In his mind, Michael saw the father’s face: grave, severe,
with a trimmed gray beard and pince-nez glasses, checking his pocket watch as he passed the clock where the apostles appeared
every hour. Michael was beside Judah Hirsch when his father came home through the winter snows from the clothing store, to
slump gray-faced in a chair beside the fire, sitting in the same way that Michael’s mother sat in the living room chair with
her book by A. J. Cronin. Then Judah’s mother began to play Mozart on the piano, and the color slowly returned to his father’s
face.

“Perfect, it wasn’t,” the rabbi said. “But some nights always I remember it.”

“Do you have pictures of them?”

“All lost.”

“Your mother—”

“Home from school I corned,
came
, one day, and she is gone,” the rabbi said. “Clothes gone. Jewelry gone. To Vienna, they tell to me. My father that night…
he said never again her name is to be said in the house. Thirteen years old I am at this time. In bed, when I finished crying,
I heared him in his room, crying too. And never again we say her name.”

“I’m sorry, Rabbi. I didn’t mean to—”

“Is okay. In the life, worst things happen.”

That day, the rabbi told no more stories of Prague. He closed the book and returned it to its shelf and then asked Michael
for the latest news about Jackie Robinson.

But at home in the darkness of his room, Michael wondered what it must be like to have your mother disappear, her name erased
from all conversation. He could not conceive of his mother leaving his father and going off to Boston or Chicago or the Bronx,
never to return. He imagined himself as the rabbi when he was a boy, Judah Hirsch lying in his room in Prague, knowing he
would never see his mother again. And knew that Judah Hirsch must have felt the way Michael felt that night in early 1945,
after the two soldiers had come up the stairs to their door and talked to his mother, and she had wept without control for
the first and last time, and then had to tell the boy that his father wasn’t coming home.

That was only two years ago. It seemed like a hundred. He had bawled like a baby that night, and she had to console him, and
hug him, and tell him that someday he would see his father in Heaven. And she told him that he must pray for his father, Private
Tommy Devlin of the United States Army, God rest his soul, and offer up his own pain for the souls in Purgatory. But he had
prayed for his father every day during the war and still he had died, so Michael did not know why he must keep praying for
him. After all, he said to his mother, Daddy can’t be in Purgatory: he died for his country. But she said they must still
pray for him, and if Private Tommy Devlin of the United States Army didn’t need the prayers he would give them to someone
who had no prayers at all. There were orphans who died in the war, and babies who had never been baptized, and Jews and Chinese
and Russians. All sorts of people
are dying in this awful war, she said, and we must pray for all of them.

When he was finished crying, his mother dried his face and told him that now he must be the man in the family, that he must
not show his grief to strangers, that they must keep their feelings behind the door. And he had done that, refusing to ask
for pity from his friends, embarrassed when a teacher at school told the class that they must pray for Michael Devlin’s father,
who had died in the war.

But alone behind the door of his room, he would make his father come to life again, with his muscled arms, and his deep voice,
and his booming laugh. He would hear him sing. He would walk with him in the park and see a flock of robins. He would sit
with him in the balcony of the Grandview. And when he had remembered all the Sticky stories his father had told him, Michael
would invent others. He would hit a soft grounder past second base, and Sticky would appear and he would ride the great dog
around the bases. A bully would wrestle him to the ground in the schoolyard, and Sticky would seize the bully by the belt
and hurl him fifty feet. He would see his father as alone as Custer, surrounded by Germans in the whirling snows of Belgium,
and through the forest Sticky would come running, to snatch him away and take him home to Brooklyn.

Michael did not cry in front of others, and his mother was his strongest model: he had never seen her cry again. On this night
more than two years after she had last cried, as he thought about the somber voice of Rabbi Hirsch when he explained his own
mother’s departure, Michael was glad he had come to know this strange bearded man. The rabbi did not cry. The rabbi did not
ask for pity. At least not in front of others.

On a frigid Thursday a week later, the huge leather book
about Prague was back on the table, and the rabbi was showing him the routes he took each day to school when he was the boy’s
age, moving easily into the Jewish Quarter called Josefeva. Now the rabbi’s words were full of magical images, as if he had
remembered them during the week. Michael walked with the rabbi past black suns and black Madonnas, heading for Josefeva. In
Old Town Square, Michael pictured Jews tied to the stake among soaring flames in the fourteenth century, their screams filling
the air along with the odor of scorched flesh. Men in black robes piled on the wood. Children wept.

Then he was coming out of the house with Judah Hirsch, and the young man crossing the street was Franz Kafka, who was some
kind of a writer. Kafka’s father ran a haberdashery right there, around that corner, in a building called the Kinsky Palace,
and maybe that’s why Kafka always appeared in a black suit and a tight necktie and sometimes even a bowler hat. Then the boys
went to inspect the glories of Pariszka Street. The name meant Paris in Czech. A Paris it wasn’t, the rabbi said, but it was
pretty good anyway. They saw Kafka’s father, shouting, arguing with Judah’s father… what was the word?
Debating
. Michael heard Kafka’s father’s voice, high-pitched, angry, always right while everybody else was wrong, and his anger made
Michael laugh. Then they were playing beside a fountain, with Kafka’s sisters. Ottla, Valli, Elli. Younger than the man who
was some kind of a writer.

“All three die in the camps,” Rabbi Hirsch said, his eyes suddenly milky. “Kafka himself, he was lucky. Before Hitler he died,
of the TB. The girls, they went to the camps.”

There was a finality to the last sentence that made Michael feel clumsy, as if his own curiosity had led the rabbi somewhere
the man did not want to go. Maybe the spell had been broken. Maybe now the rabbi would close the book and leave Prague.
Michael didn’t know what to say, but he did not want the rabbi to stop talking. Finally he stammered a few words.