The Golem of Paris by Jonathan Kellerman, Jesse Kellerman Read Free Book Online Page A

not? Her parents wouldn’t approve of her real destination, either.
    For that matter, neither would Cindy.
    “I don’t know,” Barbara says.
    “I dig, baby. You’re feeling it out, right?”
    “Right.”
    “He’s your first, isn’t he?”
    “Mm.”
    Cindy sighs happily. “Nothing like your first.”
    The ground begins to tremble: the arriving train.
    “I have to go,” Barbara says.
    “Almost done.” Cindy steps back. “Voilà, baby. Jeepers creepers, look at them peepers. Before they were green. Now they’re
green
.”
    “Thanks,” Barbara says, and she runs down into the station, praying Cindy doesn’t forget to take the knapsack.
    •   •   •
    S HE RESURFACES AT B LEECKER S TREET into the same steam, here charged with urgent energy. Faces are younger, pants are tighter, the music trickling from the windows earth-shaking bass and fuzzy guitars.
    Hello, I love you, won’t you tell me your name?
    She’s still unhip, although not as obviously. For all anyone knows, she’s making a statement with her outfit, like those gals who don’t shave their legs as an expression of solidarity with the Vietnamese.
    Address in hand, she crosses the NYU campus, littered with fliers protesting the war; protesting the treatment of the people protesting the war outside the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. The news about Czechoslovakia is hours old, far too fresh to have permeated the collective consciousness. She can imagine the discomfort it will cause to those who like to talk about the humanity and beauty of the Soviet system.
    Her own view is hopelessly colored by her parents, which makes her hopelessly square. Sometimes she’ll disagree with her father about nuclear weapons or whatever, but without much heart. He gets so upset, turns red and pounds the table, spilling his drink, bellowing at her in Czech.
    Tys tam nebyla.
    You were not there.
    How can she argue with that? She can’t, that’s how.
    An American daughter cannot lay claim to suffering; her parents have gobbled up the entire supply, having endured the twin catastrophes of the Germans and the Russians. Věra was twelve whenher mother, father, and younger brother perished in Theresienstadt concentration camp. She escaped to the countryside with her older brother, Jakub, sheltering with a friend of his from the Communist Party. During the purges, the same friend would denounce Jakub as a Trotskyite and a Titoist and a Zionist, sending him to the gallows.
    Barbara has no memory of the event, which took place when she was an infant, after her parents had left Prague. Věra keeps her brother’s photo on the mantel, and she lights a candle on the anniversary of his death, a rare concession to tradition in their godless home.
    Her father’s story is less well understood. He claims not to know his exact age, insisting people didn’t keep track of things like that. Barbara guesses he’s Věra’s senior by fifteen years or more; his face is at once layered and eroded, like a fortress that has endured centuries of trial, centuries of repair.
    This much she knows: he had another family before the War.
    He never talks about them. But once, during a screaming match, Věra slipped up, demanding to know how she could compete with a ghost. He did not love her as much as Jitka, he could never love her as much as Jitka.
    Through two closed doors, Barbara heard the slap, then weeping in two registers.
    Later, much later, she asked her mother who Jitka was.
    A friend of your father’s.
    Did you know her?
    Věra shut her eyes.
Do your homework.
    The third girl in last spring’s anatomy class was Japanese, quiet and shy, with a blunt-cut bob and discount eyeglasses that gave her the same anxious gawp as the frogs they cut open. Right away Barbaraidentified her as another child of immigrants; the deliberation, the wait-and-see, the rounded shoulders bowed under expectation.
    When the instructor announced that it was time to pair up, the girl, whose