“The attic,” he gasped. “The golem.”
“I said nothing about the golem.”
This golem showed all his teeth.
“You don’t have to say. You don’t have to say. But you said it. You said it without saying it. When you say attic you say golem. And when you say golem you mean attic.”
Maybe I’ll nickname you Attic, I didn’t say.
Then the golem called, “Shamesh! Kum aher!”
I never expected the golem to speak Yiddish, although the original golem, the Maharal’s sixteenth-century creation, did understand Yiddish; the same golem whose remains presumably lie, untouched, in the dusty attic where no human being has ascended since the Rabbi of Prague, the Maharal, put an end to the golem by plucking the shem—the little parchment with God’s holy name on it — from the golem’s mouth. And yet this tall man with the big head and glass eye and ruddy face of an Irishman, this golem surprised me by using Yiddish.
Approached now the shamesh, a small thin old man with wispy white hair straggling over and around his black yarmulke, a sad old man, a survivor, I saw. I hadn’t noticed him before. He must have been standing directly in front of the bimah, out of view when I came in. And because the wooden poles on the bimah blocked my view of him, I hadn’t seen him — it was very likely he; who else besides a shamesh bangs for silence? — when he pounded on the table before. The shamesh had survived one them during World War II, only to fall after the war into the hands of another them. But the second them were gone now too, gone three years ago, and Prague breathed freely.
“Vos iz, Yossi?” the shamesh asked. What is it?
Aha. Finally. His name. Yossi. Of course. A diminutive of Joseph. I was right. It was a Biblical name. Yossi. Yosef. Joseph. Now I won’t forget it. Yossi.
“Shamesh…he wants…” and the golem, laughing, pointed, actually jabbed his index finger toward me, “…to see the attic. The golem.”
“I said nothing about the golem,” I repeated.
The shamesh too began laughing. Now both of them laughed together. They shook with laughter, these two, moving forward and back, the golem a bit jerkily, like an automaton, the shamesh more smoothly. They held their sides, their stomachs (each his own), tending to a quaking, laugh-shooken belly, adding titters to cackles, giggles to hysterics, until tears ran from their eyes, even the golem’s glass eye trickled a tear, and they gasped for breath.
A few of the other worshippers drew near, tentatively. For them the golem and the shamesh repeated my request. Then they too, without even looking at me, subjected me to a cacophony of laughter. They sounded like a synagogue choir for the High Holidays, a bass laugh, then a falsetto, then the entire chorus, then solo voices laughing in alternation until they all chanted their laughter together. They bent forward and leaned back in orchestrated laughter, dipping and rising in a laughter ballet.
I stood there dumbfounded, mingling feelings of anger, shame, and helplessness. I wanted to rush up to the bimah and shout for silence. But I was too old to cry, and too polite to berate them.
“Yoysher!” the shamesh suddenly cried out. He leaped up — what agility and speed for a man his age, up to the bimah, doing for me what I only dreamt of doing — grabbed the leather-coated wooden paddle and slammed it down hard on the thick red leather pad on the reading table. “Decency! Justice! What are you, citizens of Sodom? Not nice to laugh at the visitor. He just came. From thousands and thousands of miles. Not nice.” And he slammed the paddle again and again. “Shame on you. Foo! Feh! Not nice to humiliate a guest. A young man we see for the first time comes to shul and you laugh at him?”
The laughter suddenly ceased, a radio snapped off.
The shamesh called me out to the anteroom. We stood by the big arched wooden door. I regarded the ancient stone walls. This anteroom, as indeed the rest of this magnificent synagogue, was carefully built by hand, stone by stone, many hundreds of years ago and had withstood invasions, uprisings, wars, the Germans in the 1940s. We stepped outside into the little alley.
“Please accept my apologies for these boors. Bunch of fools. Congregation of idiots. Like King David says in the Psalms, ‘They have eyes but see not, ears but hear not.’ But, alas, they have big mouths. They are the real goylems, the nitwits, the numbskulls, the fools. The Psalms also says that God protects the fools — but He missed with them.” The shamesh dropped his voice, looked around. “This shul is a magnet for the mentally debilitated.” Now he brightened. “You know, don’t you, that goylem in Yiddish, just like in Hebrew, also means fool?”
I nodded.
“Do you want to see the goylem?” he asked softly, almost seductively.
I didn’t know what to say. Perhaps the shamesh had taken a liking to me and, seeing the disgraceful reception I had just gotten, pitied me. In compensation, he would show me the legendary attic that no one in modern times had seen. And then I could bring my camera and photograph the place where the golem had Iain. Wonderful! My Prague film was taking shape nicely. K’s son; the little museum; the golem; the attic.
“Well?” the shamesh said.
I didn’t want to answer too quickly. I pretended I was thinking it over. Even faked a thinking pose by holding my chin with thumb and forefinger.
“All right,” I said languidly, desultorily, as if bored, as if it were, if not the last thing I wanted to do, then at least next to last.
“You don’t sound very entuziastish,” the shamesh mingled English and Yiddish.
“How can one be enthusiastic about a legend? If, for instance, I asked you, Do you want to see Moses…?”
“Him I see all the time. Every time I read the Torah I see him…”
“All right, let me rephrase the question. If I asked you, do you want to see Sholom Aleichem, or, closer to home, K, would you jump up and down for joy?”
The shamesh — I wondered how old he was. Eighty? Ninety? — put his hands on his hips and regarded me. A clever look sparked in his rheumy eyes. He had to be clever, serving as a shamesh here for probably decades, under the communists who, besides their anti-Semitism and anti-Israel Soviet party-line stance, were also anti-religious.
“I see you’re a smart yungerman… But tourists always come up to me and ask me, privately, quietly…” Here he put his hand over his lips and said softly, “and they look this way and that way as if on the lookout for spies. Some even slip a folded five-dollar bill or ten-dollar bill into my hand or my pocket and say, ‘Take me to the attic. Please. It’s my life’s wish. My dream, ever since I read about the Maharal and the goylem he made. So, please, please, take me, I’ll pay anything.’ I look at the ten-dollar bill and say, ‘This is anything? Beh! This is nothing. Less than nothing.’ Embarrassed, they say: ‘I’ll add to it. Here.’ And they give me a twenty-dollar bill, which I give back. Because I don’t take bribes. ‘All right,’ I say. ‘I’ll show you the goylem.’ And they, their faces are in rapture, as if they’ve seen the Divine Presence at Sinai. And they don’t know the surprise that’s coming.”
“You actually show them the golem?” I say, astonished.
“I actually do. I tell them I show the golem and I show the golem. I promise and I keep my promise. I am the shamesh.”
He stopped. Took a breath.
“You want to know how? Sure you want to know how. Here is how.”