Josef said, unable now to raise his voice, though there was no one to hear them, no one to alert or disturb.
“It’s a vile place. The Katzes are vile people.”
“The Katzes?” There were cousins of his mother, for whom she had never cared much, who went by this name. “Viktor and Renata?”
Thomas nodded. “And the Mucus Twins.” He gave a vast roll of his eyes. “And their vile parakeet. They taught it to say ‘Up your bum, Thomas.’” He sniffed, snickered when his brother did, and then, with another slow agglomeration of his eyebrows, began to discharge a series of coughing sobs, careful and choked, as if they were painful to let out. Josef took him into his arms, stiffly, and thought suddenly how long it had been since he had heard the sound of Thomas freely crying, a sound that had once been as common in the house as the teakettle whistle or the scratch of their father’s match. The weight of Thomas on his knee was unwieldy, his shape awkward and unembraceable; he seemed to have grown from a boy to a youth in just the last three days.
“There’s a beastly aunt,” Thomas said, “and a moronic brother-in-law due tomorrow from Frydlant. I wanted to come back here. Just for tonight. Only I couldn’t work the lock.”
“I understand,” Josef said, understanding only that, until now, until this moment, his heart had never been broken. “You were born in this flat.”
Thomas nodded.
“What a day that was,” Josef said, trying to cheer the boy. “I was never so disappointed in my life.”
Thomas smiled politely. “Almost the whole building moved,” he said, sliding off of Josef’s knee. “Only the Kravniks and the Policeks and the Zlatnys are allowed to stay.” He wiped at his cheek with a forearm.
“Don’t get snot on my sweater,” Josef said, knocking his brother’s arm to one side.
“You left it.”
“I might send for it.”
“Why aren’t you gone?” Thomas said. “What happened to your ship?”
“There have been difficulties. But I should be on my way tonight. You mustn’t tell Mother and Father that you saw me.”
“You aren’t going to see them?”
The question, the plaintive rasp in Thomas’s voice as he asked it, pained Josef. He shook his head. “I just had to dash back here to get something.”
“Dash back from where?”
Josef ignored the question. “Is everything still here?”
“Except for some clothes, and some kitchen things. And my tennis racket. And my butterflies. And your wireless.” This was a twenty-tube set, built into a kind of heavy valise of oiled pine, that Josef had constructed from parts, amateur radio having succeeded illusion and preceded modern art in the cycle of Josef’s passions, as Houdini and then Marconi had given way to Paul Klee and Josef’s enrollment at the Academy of Fine Arts. “Mother carried it on her lap in the tram. She said listening to it was like listening to your voice, and she would rather have your voice to remember you than your photograph, even.”
“And then she said that I never photograph well, anyway.”
“Yes, she did, as a matter of fact. The wagon is coming here tomorrow morning for the rest of our things. I’m going to ride with the driver. I’m going to hold the reins. What is it you need? What did you come back for?”
“Wait here,” Josef said. He had already revealed too much; Kornblum was going to be very displeased.
He went down the hall to their father’s study, checking to make sure that Thomas did not follow, and doing his best to ignore the piled crates, the open doors that ought at this hour to have been long shut, the rolled carpets, the forlorn knocking of his shoe heels along the bare wooden floors. In his father’s office, the desk and bookcases had been wrapped in quilted blankets and tied with leather straps, the pictures and curtains taken down. The boxes that contained the uncanny clothing of endocrine freaks had been dragged from the closet and stacked, conveniently, just by the door. Each bore a pasted-on label, carefully printed in his father’s strong, regular hand, that gave a precise accounting of the contents of the crate:
DRESSES (5)—MARTINKA
HAT (STRAW)—ROTHMAN
CHRISTENING GOWN—SROUBEK
For some reason, the sight of these labels touched Josef. The writing was as legible as if it had been typeset, each letter shod and gloved with serifs, the parentheses neatly crimped, the wavy hyphens like stylized bolts of lightning. The labels had been lettered lovingly; his father had always expressed that emotion best through troubling with details. In this fatherly taking of pains—in this stubbornness, persistence, orderliness, patience, and calm—Josef had always taken comfort. Here Dr. Kavalier seemed to have composed, on his crates of strange mementos, a series of messages in the very alphabet of imperturbability itself. The labels seemed evidence of all the qualities his father and family were going to require to survive the ordeal to which Josef was abandoning them. With his father in charge, the Kavaliers and the Katzes would doubtless manage to form one of those rare households in which decency and order prevailed. With patience and calm, persistence and stoicism, good handwriting and careful labeling, they would meet persecution, indignity, and hardship head-on.
But then, staring at the label on one crate, which read
SWORD-CANE—DLUBECK
SHOE TREE—HORA
SUITS (3)—HORA
ASSORTED HANDKERCHIEFS (6)—HORA
Josef felt a bloom of dread in his belly, and all at once he was certain that it was not going to matter one iota how his father and the others behaved. 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. In later years, when he remembered this moment, Josef would be tempted to think that he had suffered a premonition, looking at those mucilage-caked labels, of the horror to come. At 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.
“What’s that?” Thomas said, when Josef returned to the parlor with one of Hora’s extra-large garment bags slung over his shoulder. “What happened? What’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” said Josef. “Look, Thomas, I have to go. I’m sorry.”
“I know.” Thomas sounded almost irritated. He sat down cross-legged on the floor. “I’m going to spend the night.”
“No, Thomas, I don’t think—”
“You don’t get to say,” Thomas said. “You aren’t here anymore, remember?”
The words echoed Kornblum’s sound advice, but somehow they chilled Josef. He could not shake the feeling—reportedly common among ghosts—that it was not he but those he haunted whose lives were devoid of matter, sense, future.
