“I understand you’ve been through a lot,” he said. “I need you, please, to really try and think back. A voice, a hair color.”
She said, “Blotto.”
For a moment he thought she was mocking him — booze on his breath, left over from last night. He didn’t feel drunk. He didn’t think he was acting drunk. He’d never been the kind to leave the house with TP trailing from the seat of his pants.
She repeated, “Blotto.”
“Would you mind writing that down?”
She obliged.
Bláto.
“What is that?” he asked.
She started to sign an answer, but the manager then appeared, clapping his hands. “Okay, okay.” He thumbed out at the dining room.
Klaudia bent her head and vanished through the steam.
“Excuse me,” Jacob said. “Can you tell me what this means?”
The manager put on his reading glasses. “Bláto. Is... nnnnmm.” He took Jacob’s notepad and pen and sketched a half-inch tube, filling it in hazily with wavy lines — water.
“Vltava,” he said.
“The river.”
The manager added an arrow beside the tube, pointed. “Bláto.”
“Riverbank? Boat? Shore?”
“Nnn.” The manager made a squelching noise, then waved Jacob out back to the alleyway. From behind a reeking mound of trash bags he hauled out a plastic planter plugged with dry soil. He signed for Jacob to stay put.
“It’s okay,” Jacob said. “I can look it up on the Internet.”
But the manager was on a mission. He fetched a glass of water from the kitchen and poured it into the planter, kneading it into the soil. He scooped a dark, oozy handful and presented it to Jacob’s nose, giving him a whiff of cat piss and pesticides.
“Bláto,” the manager said.
Mud.
The ghetto was open for business.
Fanny-packed tourists orbited tour guides waving plastic paddles and shouting in a half-dozen different languages. Tchotchke vendors flogged golem T-shirts, golem water bottles, miniature ceramic golems. The chalkboard outside the U Synagogy restaurant advertised two daily specials: a Golem Tenderloin and the ill-conceived Leg of Turkey à la Rabbi Loew — said limb stuffed with bacon.
He bought a ticket for the Alt-Neu, along with an updated guidebook to Jewish Prague, skimming it as he joined the queue.
There are several explanations for the synagogue’s remarkable name. Some say that the Jews of Prague, while digging the foundation for a new house of worship, discovered the remnants of a much older structure. Others suggest that the building was erected on the condition that it would exist only until such time as the Messiah arrived. In this account, the name “Alt-Neu” is a pun on the Hebrew words “Al-Tenai” — “on condition.”
Regardless of its origins, the Alt-Neu has become forever associated with Rabbi Judah ben Bezalel Loew (c. 1520–c. 1609), spiritual leader and mystic, who according to legend created the golem in the synagogue garret. When the creature proved unmanageable, the Rabbi was forced to destroy it, sealing its remains in the garret and forbidding anyone to enter on pain of excommunication. Some have cited the golem legend as the origin for Mary Shelley’s classic novel Frankenstein, as well as Czech playwright Karel Čapek’s science-fiction play R.U.R., which introduced to the world the word “robot”...
Three steps down into a gloomy, dogleg antechamber scented of groundwater. The temperature plummeted. Street-level windows revealed bare shins and double-knotted sneakers. To his right ran a corridor that ended at an arched iron door, the verso of the one outside. In front of him lay the entrance to the synagogue sanctuary. A rope forbade access to the women’s section.
He asked the ticket taker where the garret was.
Her expression implied that she had answered this question roughly a hundred billion times. She pointed beyond the barrier rope. “Closed.”
“Is it ever open?”
“No.”
“What about the women’s section? Does that open?”
She gave him the stink-eye. “On Sabbath,” she said. “For women.”
The pressure of the line was mounting behind him, so he stepped toward the sanctuary, where a bulletin board outside the entrance listed the upcoming service, that evening’s Kabbalat Shabbat, scheduled to commence at six-thirty.
For the moment, it was guidebooks and baseball caps, not prayer books and yarmulkes. Jacob joined the current of humanity making a circuit around the dais. The northern wall had viewing portals at eye height, allowing him to peer into the women’s section on the other side. Not the most egalitarian setup: a stark hallway and folding chairs. At the far end, a tatty purple curtain, drawn. The entrance to the garret, he assumed.
He trailed his fingers along soft stone walls, waiting for the significance of the place to kick in. This was the Maharal’s shul; that was his chair. Yet the scene was too familiar — familial — to evoke anything but weariness. The Holy Ark. The curtain, velvet and brocade. The Eternal Flame. Know before Whom you stand.
Jacob loved it and hated it, needed it and rejected it, for the same reasons.
What did it say about him, he wondered, that he couldn’t stir himself to awe? An aversion to commercialism?
Or a symptom of his own numbness?
Was he a cop, examining a crime scene? A Jew in a house of worship?
His soul caught in a tug-of-war, he squeezed into a cramped wooden pew, its seat scalloped by thousands of backsides.
A young woman in a Hollister T-shirt passed, arm in arm with her boyfriend. Jacob overheard her say, “They totally filmed The Bachelorette here.”
Unable to stand the tension, he leapt up like a man on the verge of vomiting, hurrying to the exit, pausing to fish out his wallet and tug free one of the hundred-dollar bills. He folded it in quarters and reached to poke it in the slot of the communal donations box, olive wood engraved with a single word.
Tzedek.
Justice.
And he stared and stared, because that wasn’t right, and then his mind snickered at him and he looked again and it read, as it should—
Tzedakah.
Charity.
He’d seen it wrong, because the final letter, heh, was rubbed smooth.
Because the lighting was bad.
Because he was hungover.
His eyesight — that could be starting to go, too.
“Excuse me, please.”
“Sorry,” Jacob mumbled. He crammed the money in the pushke and backed away. He’d fulfilled half of his mitzvah obligation to his father. Now all he had to do was get back to L.A. safely.
At eleven o’clock, with still no word from Jan, Jacob decided to make good on another of Sam’s requests.
The old Jewish cemetery ran twelve layers deep. Whenever the community had run out of space, they’d simply piled on more dirt. Snaggletoothed stones rose from a lumpy swamp of leaves. A sagging chain restricted visitors to a perimeter path that wound past the major highlights. It was packed. Three times in twenty feet he stopped to answer kaddish.