Michael Chabon

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay


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his legs and feet, the growling of his stomach, and the dread, wonder, and uncertainty of the voyage on which he had embarked. When they took the coffin from the train, he did not waken, though his dream took on an urgent but inconclusive tinge of peril. He did not come to his senses until a beautiful jet of cold fir-green air singed his nostrils, lighting his slumber with an intensity matched only by the pale shaft of sunlight that penetrated his prison when the “inspection panel” was abruptly thrown open.

      Once more it was Kornblum’s instruction that saved Josef from losing everything in the first instant. In the first dazzling panic that followed the opening of the panel, when Josef wanted to cry out in pain, rapture, and fear, the word “Oshmyany” seemed to lie cold and rational between his fingers, like a pick that was going, in the end, to free him. Kornblum, whose encyclopedic knowledge of the railroads of this part of Europe was in a few short years to receive a dreadful appendix, had coached him thoroughly, as they worked to gaff the coffin, on the stages and particulars of his journey. He felt the jostle of men’s arms, the sway of their hips as they carried the coffin, and this, together with the odor of northern forest and a susurrant snippet of Polish, resolved at the last possible instant into a consciousness of where he was and what must be happening to him. The porters themselves had opened the coffin as they carried it from the Polish train to the Lithuanian. He could hear, and vaguely understand, that they were marveling both at the deadness and giantness of their charge. Then Josef’s teeth came together with a sharp porcelain chiming as the coffin was dropped. Josef kept silent and prayed that the impact didn’t pop the gaffed nails and send him tumbling out. He hoped that he had been thrown thus into the new boxcar, but feared that it was only impact with the station floor that had filled his mouth with blood from his bitten tongue. The light shrank and winked out, and he exhaled, safe in the airless, eternal dark; then the light blazed again.

      “What is this? Who is this?” said a German voice.

      “A giant, Herr Lieutenant. A dead giant.”

      “A dead Lithuanian giant.” Josef heard a rattle of paper. The German officer was leafing through the sheaf of forged documents that Kornblum had affixed to the outside of the coffin. “Named Kervelis Hailonidas. Died in Prague the night before last. Ugly bastard.”

      “Giants are always ugly, Lieutenant,” said one of the porters in German. There was general agreement from the other porters, with some supporting cases offered into evidence.

      “Great God,” said the German officer, “but it’s a crime to bury a suit like that in a dirty old hole in the ground. Here, you. Get a crowbar. Open that coffin.”

      Kornblum had provided Josef with an empty Mosel bottle, into which he was, at rare intervals, to insert the tip of his penis and, sparingly, relieve his bladder. But there was no time to maneuver it into place as the porters began to kick and scrape at the seams of the giant coffin. The inseam of Josef’s trousers burned and then went instantly cold.

      “There is no crowbar, Herr Lieutenant,” one of the porters said. “We will chop it open with an ax.”

      Josef struggled against a wild panic that scratched like an animal at his rib cage.

      “Ah, no,” the German officer said with a laugh. “Forget it. I’m tall, all right, but I’m not that tall.” After a moment, the darkness of the coffin was restored. “Carry on, men.”

      There was a pause, and then, with a jerk, Josef and the Golem were lifted again.

      “And he’s ugly, too,” said one of the men, in a voice just audible to Josef, “but he’s not that ugly.”

      Some twenty-seven hours later, Josef staggered, dazed, blinking, limping, bent, asphyxiated, and smelling of stale urine, into the sun-tattered grayness of an autumn morning in Lithuania. He watched from behind a soot-blackened pillar of the Vilna station as the two dour-looking confederates of the secret circle claimed the curious, giant coffin from Prague. Then he hobbled around to the house of Kornblum’s brother-in-law, on Pylimo Street, where he was received kindly with food, a hot bath, and a narrow cot in the kitchen. It was while staying here, trying to arrange for passage to New York out of Priekule, that he first heard of a Dutch consul in Kovno who was madly issuing visas to Curaçao, in league with a Japanese official who would grant rights of transit via the Empire of Japan to any Jew bound for the Dutch colony. Two days later he was on the Trans-Siberian Express; a week later he reached Vladivostok, and thence sailed for Kobe. From Kobe he shipped to San Francisco, where he wired his aunt in Brooklyn for money for the bus to New York. It was on the steamer carrying him through the Golden Gate that he happened to reach down into the hole in the lining of the right pocket of his overcoat and discover the envelope that his brother had solemnly handed to him almost a month before. It contained a single piece of paper, which Thomas had hastily stuffed into it that morning as they all were leaving the house together for the last time, by way or in lieu of expressing the feelings of love, fear, and hopefulness that his brother’s escape inspired. It was the drawing of Harry Houdini, taking a calm cup of tea in the middle of the sky, that Thomas had made in his notebook during his abortive career as a librettist. Josef studied it, feeling as he sailed toward freedom as if he weighed nothing at all, as if every precious burden had been lifted from him.

PART II

       1

      WHEN THE ALARM CLOCK went off at six-thirty that Friday, Sammy awoke to find that Sky City, a chromium cocktail tray stocked with moderne bottles, shakers, and swizzle sticks, was under massive attack. In the skies around the floating hometown of D’Artagnan Jones, the strapping blond hero of Sammy’s Pimpernel of the Planets comic strip, flapped five bat-winged demons, horns carefully whorled like whelks, muscles feathered in with a fine brush. A giant, stubbly spider with the eyes of a woman dangled on a hairy thread from the gleaming underside of Sky City. Other demons with goat legs and baboon faces, brandishing sabers, clambered down ladders and swung in on ropes from the deck of a fantastic caravel with a painstakingly rendered rigging of aerials and vanes. In command of these sinister forces, hunched over the drawing table, wearing only black kneesocks clocked with red lozenges, and swaddled in a baggy pair of off-white Czechoslovakian underpants, sat Josef Kavalier, scratching away with one of Sammy’s best pens.

      Sammy slid down to the foot of his bed to peer over his cousin’s shoulder. “What the hell are you doing to my page?” he said.

      The captain of the demonic invasion force, absorbed in his deployment and tipped dangerously back on the tall stool, was caught by surprise. He jumped, and the stool tipped, but he caught hold of the table’s edge and neatly righted himself, then reached out just in time to catch the bottle of ink before it, too, could tip over. He was quick.

      “I am sorry,” Josef said. “I was very careful to don’t harm your drawings. See.” He lifted an overlaid sheet from the ambitious, Prince Valiant–style full-page panel Sammy had been working on, and the five noisome bat-demons disappeared. “I used separate papers for everything.” He peeled away the baboon-faced demon raiders and lifted the paper spider by the end of her thread. With a few quick motions of his long-fingered hands, the hellish siege of Sky City was lifted.

      “Holy cow!” said Sammy. He clapped his cousin on his freckled shoulder. “Christ, look at this! Let me see those things.” He took the kidney-shaped sheet that Josef Kavalier had filled with slavering coal-eyed horned demons and cut to overlay Sammy’s own drawing. The proportions of the muscular demons were perfect, their poses animated and plausible, the inkwork mannered but strong-lined. The style was far more sophisticated than Sammy’s, which, while confident and plain and occasionally bold, was never anything more than cartooning. “You really can draw.”

      “I was two years studying at the Academy of Fine Arts. In Prague.”

      “The Academy of Fine Arts.” Sammy’s boss, Sheldon Anapol, was impressed by men with fancy educations. The ravishing, impossible scheme that had been tormenting Sammy’s imagination for months seemed all at once to have a shot at getting