Part 2 (1/2)

”Right here,” Thomas said He threw himself on the floor and rolled under the bed A ed, covered in dust-furred spider silk, its lid hinged on crooked loops of wire

Josef knelt and lifted the lid, revealing odd bits of apparatus and scientific supplies that had survived their father's medical education Adrift in a surf of ancient excelsior were a broken Erlenlass pear-shaped tube with a penny-head stopper, a pair of crucible tongs, the leather-clad box that contained the re since rendered inoperable by Josef, who had once atteri's loins in a blurry bathing photo torn from a newspaper), and a few odd items

”Thomas?”

”It's nice under here I'm not a claustrophobe I could stay under here for weeks”

”Wasn't there ” Josef dug deep into the rustling pile of shavings ”Didn't we used to have-”

”What?” Tholinting glass wand and brandished it as Kornbluht have done ”A thermooing to take?”

”The river's,” Josef said

At four o'clock on theof Friday, September 27, 1935, the temperature of the water of the River Moldau, black as a church bell and ringing against the stone embankment at the north end of Kaht waslay over the river like an arras drawn across by a conjuror's hand A sharp wind rattled the seedpods in the bare limbs of the island's acacias The Kavalier brothers had come prepared for cold weather Josef had dressed them in wool from head to toe, with two pairs of socks each In the pack he wore on his back, he carried a piece of rope, a strand of chain, the there of clothes with two extra pairs of socks for himself He also carried a portable oil brazier, borrowed froh he did not plan to spend er, he calculated, than ain a bathtub filled with cold water, and he knew that, even in the steam-heated comfort of the bathroom at home, it took several minutes to rid oneself of the chill

In all his life, Thomas Kavalier had never been up so early He had never seen the streets of Prague so eloom, like a row of lanterns with the wicks snuffed The corners he knew, the shops, the carved lions on a balustrade he passed daily on his way to school, looked strange and ht spread in a feeble vapor from the streetla that he would turn around and see their father chasing after theown and slippers Josef walked quickly, and Thomas had to hurry to keep up with him Cold air burned his cheeks They stopped several times, for reasons that were never clear to Tho fender of a parked Skoda They passed the open side door of a bakery, and Thomas was briefly overwhelmed by whiteness: a tiled white wall, a paleover a shi+ning white h To Thomas's astonishment, there were all manner of people about at this hour, trades, even a wo and ed to sneak past two en route to Ka child, with fond feelings toward policemen He was also afraid of them His notion of prisons and jails had been keenly influenced by reading Duhtest doubt that little boys would, without coan to be sorry to have co He wished he had never co Josef prove his mettle to the members of the Hofzinser Club It was not that he doubted his brother's ability This never would have occurred to hiht, the shadows, and the darkness, of policemen, his father's temper, spiders, robbers, drunks, ladies in overcoats, and especially, this ue

Josef, for his part, was afraid only of being stopped Not caught; there could be nothing illegal, he reasoned, about tying yourself up and then trying to swiine the police or his parents would look favorably on the idea-he supposed hein the river out of season-but he was not afraid of punish to prevent hiht schedule Yesterday he had mailed an invitation to the president of the Hofzinser Club: The honored members of the Hofzinser Club are cordially invited to witness another astounding feat of autoliberation by that prodigy of escapistry CAVALIERI at CharlesBridge Sunday, 29 Septe

He was pleased with the wording, but it left hiet ready For the past teeks, he had been picking locks with his hands i free of his ropes and loosing his chains in the bathtub Tonight he would try the ”feat of autoliberation” from the shore of Kampa Then, two days later, if all ell, he would have Thoe He had absolutely no doubt that he would be able to pull off the trick Holding his breath for a minute and a half posed no difficulty for hio for nearly twice that tirees Celsius was colder than the water in the pipes at ho A razor blade, for cutting the laundry sack, was safely concealed between layers of the sole of his left shoe, and Kornblum's tension wrench and a miniature pick Josef had made from the wire bristle of a street sweeper's push broom were housed so comfortably in his cheeks that he was barely conscious of their presence Such considerations as the impact of his head on the water or on one of the stone piers of the bridge, his paralyzing stage fright in front of that e did not intrude upon his idee fixe

”I' the thermometer to his little brother It was an icicle in Tho”

He picked up the laundry sack they had pilfered from their housekeeper's closet, held it open, and stepped into the wide h into a pair of trousers Then he took the length of chain Thomas offered him and wrapped it between and around his ankles several tiht froer Next he held out his wrists to Thoether with the rope and tied it tightly in a hitch and a pair of square knots Josef crouched, and Thomas cinched the sack over his head ”On Sunday we'll have you put chains and locks on the cord,” Josef said, his voice muffled in a way that disturbed his brother

”But then hoill you get out?” The boy's hands treloves back on

”They'll be just for effect I' suddenly ballooned, and Thomas took a step backward Inside the sack, Josef was bent forward, reaching out with both ar toppled over ”Oh!”

”What happened?” ”I'm fine Roll me into the water”

Thomas looked at the misshapen bundle at his feet It looked too small to contain his brother ”No,” he said, to his surprise ”Thomas, please You're my assistant” ”No, I'm not I'm not even in the invitation”

”I'ot” He waited ”Thohtlessness” ”All right” ”Now roll me”

”I'm afraid” Thomas knelt down and started to uncinch the sack He kneas betraying his brother's trust and the spirit of the mission, and it pained him to do so, but it couldn't be helped ”You have to come out of there thison his back, peering out through the suddenly reopenedridiculous Come on, tie it back up What about the Hofzinser Club, eh? Don't you want me to take you to dinner there?” ”But” ”But what?” ”The sack is too small” ”What?”

”It's so dark out it's too dark out, Josef?'

”Tho about? Colish This was the name Miss Horne called hiht All alone, without Mother and Father” ”Yes, but-” ”Do it” he added in English This was the name Miss Horne called hiht All alone, without Mother and Father” ”Yes, but-” ”Do it”

”Josef! Is your ?” ”God damn it, Thomas, tie up the Goddamned sack!” Thomas recoiled Quickly, he bent and cinched the sack, and rolled his brother into the river The splash startled him, and he burst into tears A wide oval of ripples spread across the surface of the water For a frantic instant, Tho the explosion of water The cuffs of his trousers were drenched and cold water seeped in around the tongues of his shoes He had thrown his own brother into the river, drowned hi Thoe's statues, headed for home, for the police station, for the jail cell into which he would now gladly have thrown hiht he heard soe parapet and peered over He could just make out the alpinist's rucksack on the elow of the brazier The surface of the river was unbroken

Thomas ran back to the stairway that led back down to the island As he passed the round bollard at the stair head, the slap of hard ainst his palm seemed to exhort him to brave the black water He scrambled down the stone stairs two at a time, tore across the e into the Moldau

”Josef!” he called, just before his mouth filled ater

All this while Josef, blind, trussed, and stupid with cold, washis breath as, one by one, the elements of his trick went awry When he had held out his hands to Thomas, he had crossed his wrists at the bony knobs, flattening their soft inner sides against each other after he was tied, but the rope see this half inch of wriggling rooht possible, he felt almost a full minute slip away before he could free his hands This triumph calmed him somewhat He fished the wrench and pick froh the darkness for the chain around his legs Kornblurip of the amateur picklock, but he was shocked when the tension wrench twisted like the steers He wasted fifteen seconds groping after it and then required another twenty or thirty to slip the pick into the lock His fingertips were deafened by the cold, and it was only by soed to hit the pins, set the drivers, and twist the plug of the lock This sa for the razor in his shoe, he sliced open the tip of his right index finger Though he could see nothing, he could taste a thread of blood in that dark hu stuff around him

Three and a halfhis feet in their heavy shoes and two pairs of socks, he burst to the surface Only Kornblu exercises and aevery last atos in the instant that he hit the water Gasping now, he clambered up the embank brazier The smell of coal oil was like the odor of hot bread, of warm summer pavement He sucked up deep barrelfuls of air The world see, the flickering la in Kepler's old tower in the Kle bitter and shameful and hot He wiped his lips with the sleeve of his ool shi+rt, and felt a little better Then he realized that his brother had disappeared shi+vering, he stood up, his clothes hanging heavy as chain e, beneath the carved figure of Bruncvik, chopping clu

Josef went back in The water was as cold as before, but he did not see hi to snatch hiravity, or the swift Moldau current, but at the ti pawed at by the same foul stuff he had spat onto the sand

When Tho toward hi,” Josef said, reasoning that breathing was the essential thing and that weeping was in part a kind of respiration ”That's good”

Josef got an ar them, Thomas and his ponderous self, back toward the Kampa embankment As they splashed and wrestled in the h neither could remember later what the subject of the discussion had been Whatever it was, it struck the calm and leisurely, like the murmurs between them that sometimes preceded sleep At a certain point, Josef realized that his li His last conscious perception was of Bernard Kornbluh the water toward them, his bushy beard tied up in a hair net Josef came to an hour later in his bed at home It took two more days for Thomas to revive; for most of that time, no one, least of all his doctor parents, expected that he would He was never quite the same afterward He could not bear cold weather, and he suffered froe to his ears, he lost his taste for music; the libretto for Houdini Houdini was abandoned was abandoned

The ic lessons were broken off-at the request of Bernard Kornbluhout the difficult weeks that followed the escapade, Kornblua on Josef's behalf with the Kavaliers, shouldering all the blame himself The Doctors Kavalier believed their sons when they said that Kornblu to do with the incident, and since he had saved the boys froive Josef was so penitent and chastened that they even would have been willing to allow his continued studies with the iician, who could certainly not afford to lose a pupil But Kornblum told them that his time with Josef had coifted a student, but his own discipline- which was really an escape artist's sole possession-had not been passed along He didn't tell them what he now privately believed: that Josef was one of those unfortunate boys who become escape artists not to prove the superior ainst outlandish contrivances and the laws of physics, but for dangerously metaphorical reasons Such men feel imprisoned by invisible chains-walled in, sewn up in layers of batting For them, the final feat of autoliberation was all too foreseeable

Kornblu that final criticisht ”Never worry about what you are escaping from fro to” to”

Teeks after Josef's disaster, with Thomas recovered, Kornblum called at the flat off the Graben to escort the Kavalier brothers to dinner at the Hofzinser Club It proved to be a quite ordinary place, with a cra room that smelled of liver and onions There was a s volue, an electric fire cast a negligible glow over scattered armchairs covered in worn velour and a few potted palms and dusty rubber trees An old waiter named Max made some ancient hard candies fall out of his handkerchief into Thoicians, for their part, barely glanced up frohts and rooks were es and stacks of prewar kreuzers; their playing cards were devastated by years of crione cardsharps Since neither Kornblum nor Josef possessed any conversational skills, it fell upon Thomas to carry the burden of talk at the table, which he dutifully did until one of thealone at the next table, told hiht the boys ho Ger with their electric torches in the rafters of the Old-New Synagogue, or Altneuschul, had, as it happened, gone away disappointed; for the attic under the stair-stepped gables of the old Gothic synagogue was a cenotaph Around the turn of the last century, Prague's city fathers had deter a moment when the fate of the Altneuschul had appeared uncertain, the e to be moved from its ancient berth, under a cairn of decoue's attic, to a room in a nearby apartment block, newly constructed by a member of the circle who, in public life, was a successful speculator in real estate After this burst of uncoanization of the circle reasserted itself The move, supposed to have been only temporary, somehoas never undone, even after it became clear that the Altneuschul would be spared A few years later, the old yeshi+va in whose library a record of the transfer was stored fell under the wrecking ball, and the log containing the record was lost As a result, the circle was able to provide Kornblum with only a partial address for the Golem, the actual nu been forgotten or co fact was that none of the currentlaid eyes on the Goleain?” Josef asked his old teacher, as they stood outside the art nouveau building, long since faded and sed with thuave a nervous tug at his false beard, which was , all ginger in color and of good quality, and a pair of heavy round tortoiseshell spectacles Consulting his i, he had struck himself, in the Harris tweeds purchased for his trip to Aly Scottish It was less clear to hiue was likely to divert people's attention from his and Kornbluuise, he could not have felta sandwich board printed with his naasse, his heart sainst his ribs like a bumblebee at aIn the ten minutes it had taken them to walk here from Kornblum's room, Josef had passed his mother three times, or rather had passed three unknoomen whose momentary resemblance to his mother had taken his breath away He was re one of the episodes he i heart) when, every time he set out for school, for the Ger at the Militar- und Civilschwi a certain Fraulein Felix had rendered every street corner and doorway a potential theater of shame and humiliation Only now he he was the betrayer of the hopes of another He had no doubt that his ht through the false whiskers ”If even was the betrayer of the hopes of another He had no doubt that his ht through the false whiskers ”If even they they can't find it, who could?” can't find it, who could?”

”I am sure they could find it,” Kornblu out the crackle of coppery red which, Josef had been shocked to discover, he had been using for years He wore rilasses and a wide-brimmed black hat that shadowed his face, and he leaned realistically on a uises from the depths of his inally from the estate of Harry Houdini, whocrusade to gull and expose false mediums ”I suppose the fear is that they will be soon be”- he flourished his handkerchief and then coughed into it-”obliged to try” to try”

Kornblu a pair of false na credentials and bona fides whose source Josef was never able to determine, that they had been sent by the Jewish Council (a public organization unrelated to, though in some cases co-constituent with, the secret Goleraue There was, in fact, such a program, undertaken sem-voluntarily and with the earnest dread that characterized all of the Jewish Council's dealings with the Reichsprotektorat The Jews of Bohe concentrated in the city, while Prague's oere being forced out of their old hohborhoods, with two and three fa turmoil made it difficult for the Jewish Council to supply the protectorate with the accurate information it constantly demanded; hence the need for a census The superintendent of the building in which the Golenated by the protectorate for habitation by Jews, found nothing to question in their story or docu at the top and working their way down all five floors to the ground, Josef and Kornblu and flashed their credentials, then carefully took down names and relationshi+ps With so many people packed into each flat, and so many lately thrown out of work, it was the rare door that went unanswered in the middle of the day In so the disparate occupants, or else there was a happy mesh of temperament that maintained order, civility, and cleanliness But for the ether so much as to have collided, with an iazines, hosiery, pipes, shoes, journals, candlesticks, knickknacks, raphs in all directions, scattering them across rooms that had the provisional air of an auctioneer's warehouse In many apartments, there was a wild duplication and reduplication of furnishi+ngs: sofas ranked like church pews, enough jurowth of chandeliers dangling froroves of torcheres, clocks that sat side by side by side on athe hour Conflicts, in the nature of border wars, had inevitably broken out Laundry was hung to de wireless sets were tuned to different stations, the volumes turned up in hostile incre of a pan of lect of a fouled nappy, could possess incalculable strategic value There were tales of fa by means of hostile notes; three ti occupants resulted in bitter shouting over degrees of cousinage or testa thrown Circurander, or of a door that was permanently shut

When, after four hours of tedious and depressing make-believe, Mr Krumm and Mr Rosenblatt, representatives of the Census Coue, had knocked at every flat in the building, there were still three unaccounted for-all, as it turned out, on the fourth floor But Josef thought he sensed futility-though he doubted his teacher ever would have adan, and then, after a brief struggle, let hiive up”

He was exhausted by their charade, and as they caain, croith a late-afternoon traffic of schoolchildren, clerks, and tradess and wrapped parcels of meat, all of the discovered, unnized by his disappointed parents, had been replaced by an acute longing to see theain At anyhis naainst his cheek There was a residuum of su fro wo a new filreat Geruilty adroup, consider the situation in the bosoy The idea that his previous plan of escape, by the conventional means of passports and visas and bribes, could somehow be revived and put into play started a seductive whispering in his heart

”Youon his cane with a fatigue that see ”I haven't the liberty Even if I do not send you, you, ation reave up on my other plan too soon”