A Perfect Madness
A novel
By Frank H. Marsh
Print copies available at https://www.brandylanepublishers.com
Copyright 2012 by Frank H. Marsh.
This book is a work of historical fiction. References to real people, events, places, and establishments are done so to provide a sense of authenticity to the story. All other characters, and all incidents and dialogue, are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real.
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For my dear deceased friend,
Dr. David L. Dungan
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“There is a divinity that shapes our ends,
Rough hew them how we will.”
(Hamlet, V, ii, 10)
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ONE
Prague, 1992
It wasn’t Anna’s idea to take Julia’s ashes back to her beloved Prague. She would have sprinkled them up and down the banks of the Merrimack River running the rear property line on their small farm outside Franklin, New Hampshire. It was a God-given place to Julia for sure, as still and reverent as any cemetery except for the flowing sounds of the passing waters, which she loved. To have done so, though, meant betraying the only real promise she had ever made to her mother, a promise crammed full with the final chapters of a long odyssey her mother began years back, in 1939, when Prague found itself standing naked with all of Europe in a gathering storm of madness. So Julia’s ashes would be buried soon where they should be, next to Rabbi Loew’s grave in the Old Jewish Cemetery, even though no new soul had been allowed to rest there in over two hundred years.
The promise, strange as it was to become, came from Anna the year before Julia died. Following the Velvet Revolution, Prague had quickly beckoned all that was good to come home again to the old city. So they went there together, Anna and Julia—Anna out of curiosity, or better, perhaps, from the metaphysical tugging of ancient kin long dead and buried there, Julia to find the lost innocence of her youth buried along with her heart somewhere beneath a rubble of trampled dreams fifty-two years earlier. The dreams would still be there waiting, she would tell Anna during one of her many stories, scattered along the cobbled brick streets in the old Jewish quarters. But she was dying now at seventy-four. A doctor herself, Julia knew the end was near, so the promise given by Anna was all she really had left.
When their plane began circling the great city that day, waiting to land, the special moment came. At first Julia sat silent, looking down on the vast carpet of red-tiled roofs covering the city, wondering if distant memories of magical places and golden dreams would betray her. Stories she had told Anna many times were there waiting. It was then that the strange promise was pulled from Anna’s lips by Julia. When death came to her, wherever it might be, Anna was to somehow smuggle her remains into the Old Jewish Cemetery. There she was to dig a small, shallow hole alongside the great Maharal Rabbi Loew’s grave, where God stayed close, and bury her ashes. For Julia it was the necessary place, the place where many of her childhood dreams had played out. She would go there to talk with Rabbi Loew and his gentle golem, called Josef, about the struggles of her people and the madness in her own life. No one else would be there except those that danced and played in her imaginary world, and that was good enough for her. Rabbi Loew and his golem were legends then—and her friends. Sooner or later, she believed, they would come to her, stepping out of the misty stillness covering the graves, and listen to her cries.
One afternoon late, she decided to try and make another golem, one she could see and touch and of the female gender. Following the instructions in her father’s tomes on Jewish mysticism, she set out to complete the task. Carrying buckets of wet clay dug from the banks of the Vltava River to the cemetery, she fashioned the form of a woman alongside the rabbi’s grave, three cubits long, lying on her back, and then shaped a face and arms and legs. Then she walked around her golem six times, the days God took to create the world, reciting loudly various combinations of words she had pulled from the Book of Genesis. But the mud-shaped golem stayed still and quiet, like Josef. After chanting new combinations of words and walking around her golem many more times with no result, Julia decided that the secret to life was where it should be, with Rabbi Loew. And she was glad, because he was her friend.
After they had landed and were departing from the airport, Julia cried, “We must hurry to the cemetery now before the luggage is unpacked. The ringing of hand bells will start soon, telling everyone to leave.”
The skies over Prague had turned to a gray dusk by the time Anna and Julia arrived at the historical gate that separates one’s existence from eternity, a place where, for a brief moment, the ends of time come together and become one.
“Hurry,” Julia urged.
Anna stood still, though, trapped in a timeless zone, gazing through the open gate at the crowded graves squeezed together in the small plot, their headstones looking like so many crooked and jagged teeth. There were no clear rows before her, only confusion. Over 100,000 souls layered twelve deep in their graves, all yielding in turn their identity to the top tier of buried bodies. Yet the totality of each grave clung silently persistent to its own tiny share of a thousand years of the Jew in Prague.
“Which one is Rabbi Loew’s grave?” Anna asked, unable to distinguish any clearly marked headstone.
“Look closely, there towards the middle,” Julia responded excitedly.
Anna had missed it at first, but then she saw a blackened and weathered headstone with coins and pebbles strewn out before it, some resting on bits of folded paper.
“Rabbi Judah Loew ben Balazel. 1520-1609.”
“Yes! Yes!” Julia shouted, making her way slowly through an army of tall headstones circling the good rabbi’s grave like concrete sentinels.
“Why the rocks and paper?” Anna asked, reaching down to pick up a small yellow note faded by time.
“No, don’t! They are private prayers to Rabbi Loew asking for help or advice. It would be like listening in on someone’s confession.”
“I suppose some were answered?” Anna said, trying hard to share this special moment with her mother.
Julia knelt down and gently traced her fingers across the rabbi’s headstone.
“Maybe, but mine weren’t.”
“You left messages too?”
“Oh yes, many. The last two on the day before my brother Hiram and I left for England. The Nazis had begun closing all roads to the city then. I asked that Papa and Mama would soon follow. But they didn’t,” Julia murmured, her voice trailing off to a whisper.
“And the other note?”
“To my precious Erich, about whom I have told you many stories. I was sure we would meet again someday when the world came to its senses, and be married. It was very romantic.”
“Did Erich believe in the golem?
“I don’t know. I think maybe he believed because I did. I told him, if Rabbi Loew made the golem, then he had to have a direct line to God. That’s why so many people left their prayers and wishes with the good rabbi, and still do. He was seen as a Jewish savior by many. But Papa always got too intellectual when I talked about the golem, said he was like the good fairy. I know Erich agreed with him, because he said many Germans saw their ancient warriors as still alive, but he wouldn’t say he did.”
Anna looked tenderly at Julia and the tears forming in her eyes as she continued talking about Erich. How old she looked at seventy-four, stooped and wrinkled all over. Time had not been gentle to her. She often referred to herself as a lonely woman—she would call it that loneliness that is so hard on the young, but so sweet to the old—and in a sense that was true. Only an occasional twinkle in her eyes gave hint to the joy she once held for simply being alive. No one had danced
through life to so many different tunes as she had. She gave so much, it seemed like all of nature borrowed life from her. Blessed with an insatiable curiosity about the way the world worked, she would spend her Sundays around Old Town, simply watching life happen. So intimate and passionate was her love of life, she seemed a part of every living thing. There wasn’t one thing about living she didn’t like, because it was a one-time affair. She knew that when it was over, it was over. But now she had become obsessed with death and the journey her soul would take when it came.
“How often would you come here?” Anna asked, still mystified by the rabbi’s grave.
“Once a week, maybe. I tried to come every day, though, after the Sudetenland was annexed by Germany. It was one of the few places where Jews were not spit on.”
“With Erich?”
“Oh yes, with Erich. Many times we were here together. Especially when darkness came and the city was quiet.”
“You made love in a cemetery?” Anna asked, grinning, amazed at such a revelation from her mother.
“Certainly. It was funny, though, that when we first would come here and lay together, he was very shy, thinking for a long time we were being watched. But I told him the golem was asexual and cared little about what we were doing. What was important to him was that we were in love,” Julia said, laughing loudly before continuing.
“We came unashamedly at first, then secretly until I left and he was to return to Dresden. When the final hour came for separation, there were no more words to say. I left my prayer with the rabbi and walked home alone. We both vowed, though, that our love would stay here with Rabbi Loew’s grave until we were together again.”
“We should go to Dresden while we’re this close; perhaps he is still alive and living there. What a surprise that would be,” Anna said teasingly.
Julia frowned and turned away, yet Anna’s words had quickened her dying heart. She had left him here, standing alone by the gate after their last moments together. Now, fifty-two years later, all she could recall about him was the warmth of his body. Nothing more. Not even the outlines of his face.
Before she could respond to Anna’s jesting words, the caretaker began walking among the headstones ringing a hand bell like a town crier of old.
“You know now what you must do when I die, and where,” Julia said, quickly pointing once more to Rabbi Loew’s grave. “Now we must hurry into the Pinkas Synagogue before they close the doors. Papa and Mama will be there.”
Julia and Anna walked a few paces from the cemetery gate to a small courtyard fenced around a side entrance to the synagogue and stepped inside the door. Neither one was prepared for what followed. With each step they took, silent voices from thousands of faceless victims reached out to them from behind the countless rows of names spread across every inch of the synagogue’s stone walls. All that they were and ever would be was there, squeezed into each letter of their names. This was all any of us would ever know about them, Julia knew. Yet each name knew the others. They had all walked the same road to their deaths. Looking around, Julia believed there was no place on earth large enough to contain so much sorrow staring back at her from the eighty thousand names spread across the walls.
Turning to her right, she walked slowly along the side wall of the nave, occasionally touching a name or two as if she knew them. Suddenly, as if lifted from within the host of names by some mysterious force, two names she had long pretended would not be here were hurled into Julia’s searching eyes. Jiri Kaufmann and Anka Kaufmann, names she had not seen written in fifty-two years. Julia could not bring herself to touch her mother and father’s names, though Anna did. Later, on the return trip to America, Anna would hold Julia’s hand as they discussed the strangeness of love and its force after so many years of silence.
From the moment the Nazi atrocities at Auschwitz were revealed, Julia tried to believe her mother and father had died some other way, at some other place and time. Suicide at home maybe, as some Jews in Prague did. At least it would have been their choice. But truth has a way of hanging around long enough to keep reality from becoming fiction. For Julia, though, closure of her loss was finally there before her, two small names among the thousands huddled about them, all sharing the same horrific ending.
Julia could no longer hold back a lifetime of waiting tears as she and Anna moved upstairs in the synagogue. There the drawings and brightly colored paintings of children waiting on their deaths in the gas chambers were spread across the walls like a thousand rainbows. No fear or sadness. Only a radiant hope that danced and sang endlessly through their colors. There were so many of the truly innocent before her that Julia could only wonder where God was hiding then.
Julia stopped before two paintings that had caught her eye.
“Brehova Street, Anna! I recognize the row of houses and apartment buildings,” she beamed, wiping the rivers of tears from her face. Then she reached out and touched the name, Viktor Fischer, scribbled across the bottom of each painting, connecting the distant past with the present. His small round face appeared before her eyes as it was when she left Prague in 1939, frozen in the wonders and expectations that would come from a thousand tomorrows. Though several years younger than she, Julia would always stop for a few minutes to laugh and play games with him. As Julia moved along the thousands of paintings, she realized other childhood friends would be there waiting to say hello after fifty-two years of separation. She began to sob uncontrollably. The scene was something Anna could understand but neither feel nor share with her mother. She knew that such moments in history belonged only to those that were there and no one else.
Taking Julia in her arms, she said softly, “They are closing now, Mother. We will come back tomorrow if you like. But right now you must tell me more about Rabbi Loew’s golem on the way back to the hotel.”
“Yes, yes, the golem, my playmate. We must talk of him more.”
Before leaving, Julia turned back once more to gently touch her young friend’s paintings.
“I am sorry, Anna. I didn’t expect this to be so heavy after all these years. It shouldn’t be, I would think.”
“All your life has been heavy. I’m not sure you could have existed if it weren’t so,” Anna smiled, reaching out to take Julia’s hand.
Julia moved away from Anna and stood still for a moment looking at her.
“There were some wonderful, light years, too—my childhood and my moments with Erich. Those were good times, if one could say that, for Jews in Prague.”
“You’ve never lost your love for him, have you?”
“I don’t know, maybe. There were other times.”
“Even after all you suffered—our family erased from the face of the earth?”
“He was a doctor, not a German soldier, or the Gestapo. And everything that happened was so long ago.”
“But still he was your enemy.”
“That was then, but I never hated him. He was my lover, you know. We would have married had things been different,” Julia said softly.
Looking at her mother’s tired face, Anna could still see at times the faint shadows of a loveliness and grace that once captured the hearts and minds of all those she came in contact with. It was easy to imagine her raven hair, now white, tumbling across her face as she ran to meet each day with a precious joy known only to a few. The pain that had followed her through the years was there to be seen, though she would deny it.
“Was Erich my father?” Anna asked, surprising Julia.
At first, Julia appeared stunned by the question, but then gently smiled. “I don’t know. There were so many,” she said, laughing before quickly turning grim again. “Perhaps we should talk no further about him, or the Holocaust. I saw what I wanted to see. Anyway, we need to return to the hotel. The evening plenary session convenes at 7:30 and I would like to rest for a little while.”
Anna took Julia’s arm as they began the short walk back to the hotel. She had asked the question a thousand times throughout the years
about her phantom father, and always the answer, “I don’t know.” Perhaps Julia really didn’t know. Perhaps she had experienced many men. It was an extraordinary time then, a time when ancient rules were papered over and hidden from the eyes. Not even God could be found, save on the lips of those dying in the gas chambers. Anna decided then and there that she would no longer concern herself with Erich. He was too dear to her mother.
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