A Perfect Madness (3 page)

Anna gently touched and caressed the
burnished statue several times with both hands, trying to feel her
mother’s fantasies when she had stood before St. John as a child,
and then again as an adult swept up in the rapture of her love for
Erich. They would both come to the bridge together to listen to the
voices of the river below and then to touch the shiny brass face of
Nepomuk and make sacred wishes as they did at Rabbi Loew’s grave.
God would never distinguish between a Jew and a Christian where
love was involved, they knew. But as the cry against the Jews grew
louder in Prague with the approaching insanity, they stopped coming
for fear of being watched by the authorities.

With evening shadows falling, and not
wishing to navigate the winding streets leading to the hotel in the
dark, Anna started back across the bridge. Nearing the end, she
stopped for a brief moment in front of a statue of the Crucifixion.
She knew little about the Christian religion, and even less about
her own. She had not been to the synagogue in Franklin in over two
years, though the rabbi would drop by to visit. Julia had stopped
going altogether until she received the surprising letter from
Abram.

As Anna stood in front of the
Crucifixion studying the agony in Jesus’s face, she felt the
presence of someone standing near her and moved away
instinctively.

“
I’m sorry if I startled
you. But I was watching how gently you touched St. John’s face, and
for a minute I thought you were someone I knew, but I am
mistaken.”

Anna looked at the voice’s
author.

“
It is beautiful, isn’t
it—the art?” he said, looking carefully at Anna’s face.

“
Not really. I find it
sad.”

“
That is a strange thing
to say. Most people, I think, would find it a magnificent work of
art. It dates back to 1648, you know.”

“
The sadness is in his
death, not the art.”

“
That is even stranger.
Christians would say there is a glory in his death,” the stranger
said, puzzled by Anna’s words.

“
I wouldn’t know since I’m
not a Christian, and a glorious death doesn’t interest me. What
does, though, is the crazy idea that someone would take it upon
himself to die for all the bad things I’m responsible for. That
makes no sense at all,” Anna replied and started to turn away, not
wishing to talk further with the man.

“
You are an atheist
then?”

Anna studied the man’s face a second
before responding, wondering how she stumbled into such an insane
dialogue five thousand miles from home.

“
No, I am a Jew—an
agnostic Jew, if there is such a thing,” she said, turning her back
to him and walking away.

“
Are there many Jews like
you?” were the last words Anna heard as she quickened her pace,
leaving the stranger alone by the Crucifixion.

When she reached the end of the
bridge, Anna looked back and saw the man still standing beside the
statue looking at her. How she would describe the strange man to
Julia was her only conscious thought as she quickly started up
Karlova towards the Old Town square. There was nothing about him
that merited remembering except his eyes. Not his eyes, actually,
but the sockets where they should be. It was as if they had been
hollowed out and brushed over with a dull grayness that one only
sees in death. He wasn’t blind but he might as well have been. And
she was haunted by those eyes.

Back in the safety of her hotel room,
Anna sat down on the edge of the bed to gather her thoughts. More
angry than upset that she would stumble into such an unguarded
conversation with a total stranger, Anna took pen and paper from
her briefcase and wrote down, sentence by sentence, what had been
said. Sin and forgiveness were inseparable emotions private to the
soul. This much was true, she knew, whether you were a Jew or a
Christian. But having someone pick up the tab for the mess you’ve
made, made life too easy. It was like letting the neighbors pile
all their dirty dishes in your sink, if you’re the chosen one to
wash them. However, dying to get them clean made no sense at all.
And maybe, just maybe, your dirty dishes shouldn’t be washed at
all, but handed back to you.

Anna put down the pen, crumbled up the
paper and threw it in the wastebasket next to her bed. The episode
was too brief and silly to let it bother her as it had. She was a
cardiologist, not a theologian, and trying to heal a sick heart was
all she knew and cared about. Healing the soul belonged to God, and
He’d had thousands of years to get it done right, if He existed at
all. Tired and exhausted from the long trip to Prague, Anna lay
back on the bed, drifting off for what she had imagined would be a
short nap before taking a late supper. Five hours later she awoke,
startled by Julia knocking over a chair while trying to undress in
the dark.

“
Mother?”

“
Sorry, thought I could
make it without awakening you.”

“
I need to get up anyway.
I haven’t had dinner, and I am really quite hungry.”

“
Supper? You’re way into
the early morning. It’s after one.”

Anna looked at her mother, puzzled by
her long absence.

“
You’re too old to be a
night owl, especially with your cousin. Where have you
been?”

“
Warped in time, I think,
walking with Abram everywhere our youth had taken us. There wasn’t
much left to see, though. Mostly our imagination of what had
passed,” Julia said, her voice pitched in obvious
sadness.

Anna summoned her mother to sit by her
on the bed and began to gently massage her neck.

“
A stroll in one’s memory
is sometimes better than the real thing. It shuts out the ugly,”
she said.

“
I suppose. But the
passion is missed. There were distant feelings, though, and
anger.”

“
Anger?”

“
Yes, at what once was and
could have been, had things been different. Even fifty years is not
enough to heal a broken heart, Anna.”

“
Did Abram speak of
Erich?”

“
Not really. I listened
for hours to his stories about Auschwitz and the Russian prisons he
was lost in for years. He should write a book,” Julia replied,
getting up from Anna’s bed to check the safety latch on the hotel
door.

“
He told stories that I
didn’t want to hear anymore, that was all,” she said, walking back
to her bed instead of Anna’s.

“
About
Grandpapa?”

“
Yes, and more. We will
talk again in the morning, but now you must go to bed hungry,”
Julia said teasingly, as if she were punishing Anna for missing
dinner.

Then, turning the small bed lamp off,
she added in a hushed tone, “We should go home tomorrow, not
Friday, I am very tired. Abram will never leave Prague, even after
he dies, so we said our last goodbyes, just as we did fifty-two
years ago. We can make arrangements in the morning.” These were the
last words Anna heard before Julia closed her eyes to
sleep.

Shared stories would fill their time
on the long trip back to America, but the sudden cancellation of an
exciting trip and medical conference bothered Anna and made no
sense. She had traveled five thousand miles to see a graveyard
where her mother’s ashes were to be surreptitiously buried,
meandered halfway across the legendary Charles Bridge, only to
engage in a disquieting conversation with a total stranger over the
crucifixion of Jesus, and now she was to go home. Perhaps tomorrow
there will be answers, not stories, Anna mused as she found her own
precious sleep.

Morning came too soon for Anna and
Julia. Each would have been content to let the morning pass by
unnoticed. However, Julia’s abrupt altering of her long-awaited
return to Prague was fixed in stone the minute Anna suggested
giving the day to the old city and then taking an early morning
flight home the following day.

“
There is nothing more for
me here, nothing,” Julia said in an unusually sad voice, one that
Anna had seldom heard from her mother.

Julia tossed her small luggage piece
on the bed, which had remained unpacked, and began putting her
toiletries in a small case she had used for thirty years. Stopping,
she turned to Anna, who was still lying in bed. “You will have
mountains of time to take in Prague when you return with my ashes,
but we must hurry now. There is a train leaving for Rotterdam in
less than an hour.”

“
A train to Rotterdam? I
don’t understand. Our return flight doesn’t leave until six in the
evening,” Anna said, clearly puzzled by what was taking
place.

“
This train crosses
Germany over the same route that carried my brother and me and five
hundred young children to safety only a few days before Hitler
occupied Prague. That should be reason enough,” Julia responded,
showing impatience with Anna’s questions.

“
You are trying to reach
back over fifty years, Mother, and—”

“
Stop! You have no right
to judge me, not now, or ever. Only those who were there at that
moment can judge me, and they never will.”

With this outburst from Julia, Anna
quickly got out of bed, standing for a brief second looking at her
mother, stunned by the stinging discipline in her voice. She had
suddenly become a stranger to her.

Finishing packing, Julia said nothing,
and moved quickly to the door, looking at Anna as if she wanted to
apologize for her sudden outburst. All she could offer was a forced
smile, which to Anna was worse than no apology.

“
Coffee and pastries are
waiting for you in the lobby,” she mumbled, stepping into the
hallway, leaving Anna alone to her thoughts about what had taken
place.

Fifteen minutes later, they were on
their way to the train station, riding in polite silence like two
strangers forced to share the same taxicab. Once there, Anna’s
offer to carry her mother’s small luggage piece was quietly ignored
as they boarded the train and found their compartment. Even though
Julia still seemed angry, her stories would begin again in time,
Anna knew. They always did when traveling.

Julia leaned back against the
cushioned seat just as the train’s movements began to accelerate,
realizing she was leaving behind for the second time her beloved
Prague. One’s remembrance of suffering can invade the mind with
tiny flashes of fantasy, uncertain in their truths, yet bold and
absolute in their pronouncements. Some opt to pass through
unnoticed or ignored except by a few still-frightened souls. For
Julia in leaving Prague the first time, having the frightened soul
of a young woman was never an option, only the anguish of realizing
she probably would never see her family again. Like the present
moment, the train had pulled out slowly and then rapidly
accelerated away from the conquered city, carrying five hundred
children and young adults across Nazi Germany into another world
they had never known—but one that would let them live. From the
moment she and Hiram boarded the train, they were pushed into
service as caretakers for scores of hysterical children doubly
frightened by separation from family and the scowling brown-shirted
Nazi guards standing at both ends of the car. Patience and
compassion for crying and unruly children, an ancient virtue of the
German family, was absent. These were Jews, though, which required
no excuses from the guards. Twelve hours later, Julia and Hiram and
the trainload of children refugees from Prague crossed into the
Netherlands and safety.

Julia closed her eyes for a second,
listening to the monotonous clicking of the train’s wheels passing
over the connecting rails, keeping time like the rhythmical ticking
of her father’s treasured metronome. Though she was only five at
the time, Julia remembered now, faintly, her father’s madness one
day over her inability to keep time with even the simplest of
musical beats. Every day thereafter, except on the Sabbath, she was
required to sit alone in the parlor facing the ticking metronome
for one hour, nothing less, counting and tapping her feet in time
with it. For two months the torture ran unchecked until the
instrument somehow miraculously disappeared, never to be found
again, at least by her father. Julia believed the good Rabbi Loew
had sent his golem to steal it away when everyone was sleeping,
having visited his grave every day for a week with silent prayers
for deliverance. But her mother knew differently, and would only
smile at Julia’s golem stories. When the day came for Julia to
leave Prague, she had carefully wrapped the metronome, placing it
in the small suitcase Julia would be taking to England. Two days
later, as Julia settled into her temporary quarters outside London
with the other refugees, the sudden discovery of her childhood
metronome brought loud shrieks of tearful joy that would overshadow
her sadness for days to come. Later Julia would find the note from
her mother hidden beneath a pink sweater she had secretly knitted
for her coming birthday. It was then that Julia believed they would
all be together again soon—a belief that quickly shattered into a
thousand pieces five months later when German troops stormed into
Poland. World War II had begun, spinning the many roads Julia would
travel. The metronome would follow her wherever she went and, in
the end, come to rest on the mantle in her home in America, there
to teach Anna, as it had her, how to keep time in a crazy
world.