End of the Jews Page 4

  What? Tristan thinks deliriously. My father would shake your hand, then go into his room and slam the door and scream at his wife about schwartzes and how she raised the kids wrong, until he keeled over on his face with a heart seizure.

  “My father,” he says in a low voice, filled with pride and shame, “wouldn’t do a thing.”

  Earl throws back his head and cackles. Two flecks of gin spittle jump out of the fat man’s maw and land on Tristan’s lip, and the pride of the Jews thinks, Enough. Taunting he can handle, but to be cat-and-moused, fucked with for sport, is something else again.

  “Your father—” Earl starts up, and when his hot breath hits Tristan, Tristan hits back: lifts both palms to Earl’s chest and shoves, hard. The fat man careens backward, unprepared, and stumbles against the vanity tray table, flipping it end over end. Lipsticks and compacts sail through the air.

  “Motherfucker!” He throws his saliva-soaked cigar to the ground and charges forward, right hand already cocked by his ear—a ridiculous posture, and a clear indication that Earl has not fought in years. He might as well send over a telegram detailing his plan of attack.

  The fat man’s arm uncoils with surprising speed, obvious power, but getting clear of the blow’s trajectory requires only the simplest of sidesteps, and before Earl can regain his balance, Tristan’s own fist is in motion and then a painful sting is surging through his hand as his knuckles slam into the hard bone of his antagonist’s blubbery cheek.

  Earl staggers. Dolores lets loose with a piercing scream, and Tristan glances over at her—foolishly, since another quick blow might have dropped Earl and now, instead, he’s ratcheted himself into a boxer’s pose, bent at the knees, protecting his face with his forearms, remembering whatever he once knew about scrapping or maybe just doing his best Joe Louis impression as blood pools beneath his nose.

  “Come on, boy.” Earl beckons with a fist. “You ain’t no Maxie Baer. I’ll—” But his agenda goes undivulged, interrupted by shouts of “Dolores!” and stampeding footsteps on the staircase, and then the room is filling up with men and Charles is pushing through them, striding straight for Tristan, seizing him by the shirt, pinning him against the wall. The back of Tristan’s skull thuds into the plaster, and exploding lights spangle his vision. He blinks himself toward clarity, each blink a stroke against a current that wants to pull him out to sea.

  As he comes within reach of the shore, Dolores’s screams sound in his ears like seagulls’ caws. She is flailing at her father’s rigid arm, his hand now clamped around the base of Tristan’s throat in a near chokehold. The mere anticipation of being strangled robs Tristan of breath. Charles begins to shake him back and forth. Again and again, Tristan’s head hammers the plaster. Flakes fall from the wall like snow, dusting the ground.

  Tristan stares back at his aggressor bug-eyed, wondering what the fuck Charles thinks is going on and whether he is mad enough to kill, snap Tristan’s skinny neck like one of those dangling shtetl-butchered chickens.

  “You just calm the hell down,” Charles growls, giving Tristan a final shake and then shoving him against the wall and letting go. “I don’t know where the hell you come from, but nobody fights in my house, understand?”

  Before Tristan can wheeze a breathless assent, Earl lurches into view behind the host, hand cupped to his nose. “He was tryna put the make on Dee, Charles. If I hadn’t got suspicious and come up, who knows what—”

  Charles’s eyes snap over to Earl, silencing him, then back to Tristan, who opens his mouth to defend himself and finds he cannot muster words. The looped internal protest of his innocence. I did nothing! I did nothing! pounds through his head, blending with a deeper, contrary, wholly unexpected rumble of understanding for Charles—sympathy even, because in some strange new crevice of his soul, Tristan understands that he can be guilty of everything and nothing all at once.

  Tristan’s guts, tormented with alcohol and terror, knot and rebel. He stares into Charles’s livid, searing eyes for an instant, and then Tristan buckles and a torrent of vomit gushes out of him and splashes onto Charles and the carpet.

  “Goddamn it!” Charles darts back too late, raises his hands to his shoulders, and grimaces down at his ruined trousers. Tristan peers up, doubled over, his hands on his knees, a tendril of drool still connecting him to the reeking puddle. He closes his eyes, takes a deep breath, waits for a blow to explode against his jaw and drop him to the floor.

  Instead, there’s a commotion, and a commanding male voice says, “Charles. Get ahold of yourself.” Tristan opens his eyes and sees feet, bodies, a man dragging Charles backward by the waist, and then Dolores’s stockings planted between himself and her father. Tristan stumbles; the wall catches him and he straightens against it, stomach clenched with nausea.

  There, sure enough, stands Dolores, her face streaked with tears. Behind her is Charles, wrapped up in a pair of suit-jacketed arms, violence glowing in his eyes.

  “Take it easy,” counsels the man behind him, working to lock his hands around Charles’s broad, heaving chest. Not for a second does it look like he is any match for Charles if Charles will not allow himself to be restrained. “Don’t do anything stupid.”

  Tristan knows the voice. He has been rescued by Peter Pendergast.

  “Get off me,” Charles says through his teeth. “This is none of your damn business. You’re in my house, Peter, and I’ll do what I want with this son of a bitch.” He twists at the waist, shakes free of the professor’s arms.

  Pendergast takes a step back. Tristan sees a flash of something like fear cross his face, and then the professor regains control.

  “I think you ought to let it go, old man.”

  “Let it go? Man, where the hell do you get off? He was trying to—” He glances at Dolores, who has turned toward him now to plead with her eyes, and Charles cannot utter the words. He looks the other way. “Trying to—”

  “No he wasn’t,” Pendergast says, edging forward. “Ask her yourself. They were only talking. You don’t have to like it, but it’s certainly no grounds for murder.”

  “Murder? What the hell you talkin’ ’bout, murder?” Charles stares at Pendergast as if the professor is crazy, but Peter doesn’t appear to notice.

  A tall man emerges from the shadow just outside the threshold. “All right,” he says, brushing past the others in the room until he reaches the host’s side. “Come on, Charles. Let’s get you into some new clothes, huh?”

  “Good idea,” says Pendergast. “And while you do that, I’ll get this son of a bitch out of here.”

  “You do that.” The tall man reaches for Charles’s elbow, and he allows himself to be led away.

  “I see you again, your sheeny ass is dead,” calls Earl by way of farewell as he, too, is escorted from the room, flanked by two more men.

  Dolores throws a final inscrutable look Tristan’s way, then follows the procession, pulling the door shut behind her. Only Tristan and Pendergast remain in the room, the moat of vomit between them.

  Pendergast spreads his legs, sweeps back his suit jacket, and drops his hands onto his belt.

  “I’m willing to let it go this time, Brodsky. But if you leave my class early again, I’ll have no choice but to mark you absent.”

  Tristan forces a smile. “Won’t happen again,” he promises, and swipes his sleeve across his mouth.

  “Good man. Now then. Let’s get you out of here, shall we?”

  “Shouldn’t we clean this up?” The smell of Tristan’s own breath makes his eyes water. He stares down at the floor. “We can’t just leave it here.”

  The professor’s forehead wrinkles. “How thoughtful of you. No. Come on. Someone will take care of it.”

  Reluctantly, Tristan high-steps the puddle. “Where’s Albert?” he asks. “I’d like to say good-bye.”

  “This is no time for pleasantries. And anyway, he was embarking on an errand when I arrived. Seems the party had run low on some of his favorite delicacies.” Pendergast
studies him. “You keep fast company, Brodsky. Hurry up.”

  A minute later, they are standing on the curb. The tonic water Tristan guzzles splashes cold into his empty stomach, powerless to wash the bitterness out of his mouth. Pendergast sucks down another fancy cigarette, blinking up at his smoke as it curls in the beam of the street-lamp, as if enchanted by every single thing that comes out of his mouth.

  As soon as he polishes off the drink the professor was thoughtful enough to grab on their way out, Tristan will have to look him in the eye and thank him. The bottle pops off his lips and Tristan takes a deep breath. “I want to—”

  “Don’t bother.” Pendergast glances out into the darkness from within his shaft of light. “Charles is my friend. I came upstairs to help him, Brodsky, not you.”

  Tristan mulls this over, wondering if Pendergast even knows how close Charles came to taking a pop at him, too. “Well, at least now I’ll have something to write about,” he offers.

  In one incredible motion, Pendergast flicks his cigarette into the shadows and spins on his heel to point the flicking finger at his student. “Quite right. If you want my advice, you’ll find someplace quiet and empty your mind into a notebook.”

  Tristan feels his chest swell up with hope again. His head throbs harder, not just from the pain but the fresh blood coursing to it.

  “Yes, sir. That’s just what I was thinking about doing.”

  “Good. Keep my name out of it.” Pendergast wags his haircut at the ground. “I am not wholly unimpressed with you, Brodsky. I hope tonight’s events have not soured you on…” He pauses, and Tristan hears the professor’s lighter, in his pocket, click open and closed. “On adventure.”

  Pendergast slides another cigarette from his pack, taps it. The sizzle of a cymbal escapes the house, and both of them look up at it. “I’d better head back in. You’ll find your way home, I trust?” Tristan nods. “Of course. Until Tuesday, then.” Pendergast cups his hands, lights his smoke, and strolls back toward the house, untouched by any of this.

  Tristan’s hand flutters and he remembers something.

  “Professor?” Pendergast stops but does not turn around.

  “Brodsky.”

  “I left my notebook upstairs. By Dolores’s bed.”

  “One moment.” He lopes up the steps. The building bulges with people, music, laughter, and Tristan thinks of Moses standing on the mountain overlooking the Promised Land, forbidden entry as punishment for his sins. A minute passes, and then a notebook and a pencil sail out of a top-floor window and fall to the ground, paces from Tristan’s feet. He picks them up, drifts toward the subway.

  For hours he rides, down through Brooklyn and back uptown again, with his pencil clutched and poised over the page. Tristan’s brain pulses in its sheath, and his entire throat is tender to the touch, beginning to bruise. It is an act of great willpower to avoid thinking about what his mother will do when she sees him, but Tristan manages. The darkness of the night grows dilute and he stumbles off the train, walks through the silent streets of the neighborhood until he reaches his building. He sits down atop the stoop, wedges himself against a wall, and finds his fatigue burned away, his mind clear, his frustration with himself acute.

  There is so much he wants to write, but Tristan does not know what any of it is. He feels as if ghosts or elves or angels are following him, flitting in and out of shadows, cackling, and every time he stops and whirls around, he’s too slow and they disappear. The world feels heavy with life, the air thunderstorm-electric with a potency that won’t last. He leans against the cold stone and feels the desire to capture everything overtake and erode all he has ever felt—his protector love for Benjamin at its strongest, the most intense, restless, disgusted claustrophobia that’s ever gripped him at his parents’ dinner table, the lift-and-crush-the-world-and-let-its-juice-gush-down-your-chin rush of elation he’s felt at the moments when his brain and body have best served him.

  The only thing that has the power to endow existence with meaning is the very game of trying to transcribe it, and nothing has ever sliced through Tristan like not being able to play. He blinks in the dawn light, rubs the goose pimples from his arms, and catches sight of a ghastly future: a lifetime of sitting here, incapable of filling these pages and unable to stop trying, until he is catatonic, frozen on the outside and still burning uselessly within.

  CHAPTER

  TWO

  The aria playing on Czechoslovak National Radio is turned up loud enough to dominate the kitchen, where Nina’s mother rolls fat sausages in a pan and her father tends to the sizzling eggs, an unlit pipe clamped in his teeth. It is the famous 1982 recording of José Carreras singing La Bohème in New York; Nina has heard it at least a dozen times since last year’s live broadcast and knows it is supposed to be great, but it doesn’t do much for her. Miklos catches his daughter padding into the room, spits the pipe into his palm, and belts a brutal, off-key accompaniment, throwing out his arms as if he’s hugging a barrel to his chest. Twelve-year-old Nina giggles.

  Her father is a stout, thick-handed man, with a trim brown beard she likes to rub her cheek against. People often say he’s full of life, but Nina has never understood the phrase. It makes more sense to say that life is full of him. Wherever he goes, Miklos presides. Even at dinner tables not his own, he is seated at the head. Nina watches him solicit opinions and conduct stories with jabs and sweeps of his fork, and waits to return the winks he throws her way.

  Her father is frequently furious, but his ire is directed only at phantoms, serves only to delineate the us of family and friends from the broad, dull them of government officials and corrupt policemen, closed-minded fools and blind lackeys and the majority of Miklos’s colleagues in the philosophy department at Univerzita Karlova. Most of the time, when he is angry, he is also very funny.

  Today is a day Nina has looked forward to for weeks. She is skipping school and coming to work with her parents. She and her father pass into the school’s gated cement courtyard and stop before the enormous fenced-off statue of the university’s founder, Emperor Charles IV. He is green with age, severe and bearded, and he stands bearing an outstretched scroll Miklos says symbolizes knowledge. The other hand hovers near the hilt of his sword, as if he’ll cut off the head of anyone who fails to accept the proffered wisdom.

  They bid the emperor farewell, and Miklos settles Nina at the back of a high-ceilinged classroom musty with the smell of books. From ten to twelve, she watches her father meander back and forth before nine graduate students, seven blanched young men and two mouse-faced women, none of whom ever look up from their gyrating pencils. Nina follows very little of her father’s speech, but she observes intently. Even in this austere place, he’s unafraid to shoot a few quick winks her way.

  Professor Hricek, as the kids call him, is more the man she recognizes during the final hour of class, which begins when he rocks back on his heels, folds his hands before his stomach, and says, “Well, then?” Hands flutter up on willowy arms and Miklos jokes with his brood, draws them into discussion like a set of dinner guests. Nina is sure he knows the answers to the questions they ask, but her father does not give them. Instead, so cleverly that she can hardly bear it, he hints and kneads until the class, and sometimes even the man who asked the question, arrives at an answer. It reminds Nina of playing charades, only with words.

  She and her father sit down to lunch in the drafty, spartan faculty mensa, its bronze chandeliers set so near to the ceiling that the light they cast loses its way before reaching the tables. Miklos leans over his tray, smiling in a way she has never seen.

  “You want to hear something funny?”

  Nina nods, knowing it will not be funny like a joke, but funny in that other way.

  “This is the only place in all of Prague where anybody cares about the things we talk about in my classroom.”

  She frowns. “Why?”

  Miklos shrugs as if it doesn’t much matter, but Nina is not fooled. “Most people, th
ey only want to bring home enough food for their families, perhaps a black-market video machine for Christmas. They have enough to think about without really thinking at all. And who can blame them, in an environment like this? Can you imagine, Nina, what it would be like to live in a place where—”

  She must look scared or lost or both, because her father waves his hand and drops the subject, whatever it is. He asks her if she wants dessert, gets up without waiting for an answer, and returns with two servings of chocolate pudding. “Sometimes I forget how young you are,” he says, handing her one. “We’ll talk about this later, as a family. Let’s get you to Abnormal Psych, shall we?”

  He hands Nina off to her mother at the lip of a cavernous, tiered lecture hall, so big that Rayna speaks into a microphone. Nina seats herself at the very top, amid students who squirm and whisper like kids at her own school. She understands a lot of what her mother says, follows along as Rayna points out parts of the brain on a slide screen projected behind her. The only questions here are asked by the professor, and they are answered through the consultation of a seating chart, the calling of a surname. Nina decides that when she’s old enough, she will choose courses like her father’s.

  That night, after they have cooked and eaten supper, Rayna brews a pot of tea and turns off the radio. They settle into the living room, three in a row on the overstuffed couch. Nina sits in the middle, hot mug cradled in her hands.

  “This is an in-the-house discussion, Nina,” her father says. “Okay?”

  She nods, solemn and thrilled. Nobody else she knows has a house in which to keep secrets. All her friends live in apartments or in houses shared between two families, even three—and if Nina understands correctly what she’s overheard, her father paid someone a lot of money to keep this house unparceled. It was his grandfather’s, and then his mother’s.

  The list of subjects that can be broached only at home is long, and sometimes confusing, but the main things Nina knows never to tell anyone else, or even mention to her parents in public, are that her father is trying to obtain a travel visa and that her mother, and thus Nina herself, are something called Jewish. Both facts she learned a year ago, when the in-the-house rule was instituted and life started to grow heavy with secrets.