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IN LATER YEARS, holding forth to an interviewer or to an audience of aging fans at a comic book convention, Sam Clay
sealed and hog-tied inside the airtight
vessel known as Brooklyn,
‘Metamorphosis.’ It was never just a question of escape. It was also a question of transformation.”
began in 1939, toward the end of October, on the night that Sammy’s mother burst into his bedroom, applied the ring and iron
knuckles of her left hand to the side of his cranium, and told him to move over and make room in the bed for his cousin from Prague.
The stale breath of the hospital was on her, but the open throat of her uniform gave off a faint whiff of the lavender water in which she bathed her tiny frame. The natural fragrance of her body was a spicy, angry smell like that of fresh pencil shavings.
the sickly steady light of insomnia itself,
But in his imaginings, Sammy found that, for the first time in years, he was able to avail himself of the help of a confederate.
A CATERPILLAR SCHEME—a
the German army occupied Prague, talk began, in certain quarters, of sending the city’s famous Golem, Rabbi Loew’s miraculous automaton,
into the safety of exile.
It seemed only a matter of time before the Golem was discovered, in its giant pine casket, in its dreamless sleep, and seized.
Those of a historical bent—who, like historians everywhere, prided themselves on a levelheaded sense of perspective—reasoned that the Golem had already survived many centuries of invasion, calamity, war, and pogrom without being exposed or dislodged, and they counseled against rash reaction to another momentary downturn in the fortunes of Bohemia’s Jews.
the vote went in favor of removing the Golem to a safe place,
Bernard Kornblum was an Ausbrecher, a performing illusionist who specialized in tricks with straitjackets and handcuffs—the sort of act made famous by Harry Houdini.
Vilna, the holy city of Jewish Europe, a place known, in spite of its reputation for hardheadedness, to harbor men who took a cordial and sympathetic view of golems.
that is often all but indistinguishable from clairvoyance. Kornblum knew at once that his unexpected visitor must be Josef Kavalier, and his heart sank. He had heard months ago that the boy was withdrawing from art school and emigrating to America; something must have gone wrong.
All to ensure that I, the lucky one, can be sitting on this train, you see? In the smoking car.” He blew a puff of imaginary smoke. “Hurtling through Germany on my way to the good old U.S.A.”
“Herr Kornblum said I should get used to it,” Josef explained. “He said that when Houdini died, he was found to have worn away two sizable pockets in his cheeks.”
Ausbrecher from the lips of one of its masters. At the
himself to a life of timely escape.
his diet consisted in large part of tinned fish—anchovies, smelts, sardines, tunny—his breath often carried a rank marine tang.
went to open the chest. For the first few sessions, Kornblum merely showed Josef different kinds of locks that he took out, one by one, from the chest; locks used to secure manacles, mailboxes, and ladies’ diaries; warded and pin-tumbler door locks; sturdy padlocks; and combination locks taken from strongboxes and safes.
he talked about the rudiments of breath control.
At last, in the final minutes of the lesson, he would unchain the boy, only to stuff him into a plain pine box.
“If you are a claustrophobe,” Kornblum explained, “we must detect this now, and not when you lie in chains at the bottom of the Moldau, strapped inside a postman’s bag, with all your family and neighbors waiting for you to swim out.”
Contrary to instructions, he had been working over the locks at home with
“To see inside the lock, you don’t use your eyes.”
He handed Josef a small black leather pouch. Unrolling it, Josef found the tiny torque wrench and a set of steel picks, some no longer than the wrench, some twice as long with smooth wooden handles. None was thicker than a broom straw. Their tips had been cut and bent into all manner of cunning moons, diamonds, and tildes.
Kornblum lit another Sobranie.
“The pins have voices,”
Prague’s city fathers had determined to “sanitize” the ancient ghetto.
into segregated neighborhoods, with two and three families often crowding into a single flat.
Orderly or chaotic, well inventoried and civil or jumbled and squabbling, the Jews of Prague were dust on the boots of the Germans, to be whisked off with an indiscriminate broom.
Stoicism and an eye for detail would avail them nothing.
the time it was a simpler matter. The hair stood up on the back of his neck with a prickling discharge of ions. His heart pulsed in the hollow of his throat as if someone had pressed there with a thumb.
And he felt, for an instant, that he was admiring the penmanship of someone who had died.
faded Jugendstil paper,
“People notice only what you tell them to notice,” he said. “And then only if you remind them.”
WHEN THE ALARM CLOCK went off at six-thirty that Friday, Sammy awoke to find that Sky City, a chromium cocktail tray stocked with moderne bottles, shakers, and swizzle sticks, was under massive attack. In the skies around the floating hometown of D’Artagnan Jones, the strapping blond hero of Sammy’s Pimpernel of the Planets comic strip, flapped five bat-winged demons, horns carefully
muscles feathered in with a fine brush. A giant, stubbly spider with the eyes of a woman dangled on a hairy thread from the gleaming underside of Sky City. Other demons with goat legs and baboon faces, brandishing sabers, clambered down ladders and swung in on ropes from the deck of a fantastic caravel with a painstakingly rendered rigging of aerials and vanes. In command of these sinister forces, hunched over the drawing table, wearing only black kneesocks clocked with red lozenges, and swaddled in a baggy pair of off-white Czechoslovakian underpants, sat Josef Kavalier, scratching away with
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Gossips, busybodies, and kibitzers were the fiends of her personal demonology. She was universally at odds with the neighbors, and suspicious, to the point of paranoia, of all visiting doctors, salesmen, municipal employees, synagogue committee-men, and tradespeople.
“You want to draw comic books?” she asked him.
What is a comic book?”
sound produced by Twenty-fifth Street itself, by a hundred sewing machines in a sweatshop overhead, exhaust grilles at the back of a warehouse, the trains rolling deep beneath the black surface of the street.
Joe gave up trying to think like, trust, or believe in his cousin and just walked, head abuzz, toward the Hudson River, stunned by the novelty of exile.
“No, he only dresses like a bat. He has no batlike qualities at all. He uses his fists.”
BRIGHTON GRAND HAMMAM.
had prepared him for the sight. His father glistened, massive, savagely furred. The muscles in his arms and shoulders were like dents and wheel ruts in an expanse of packed brown earth.
