Heraclix and Pomp: A Novel of the Fabricated and the Fey (15 page)

“I don’t know.”

“What do you mean you don’t know? Did you take it from the apartment?”

Pomp became visible and visibly annoyed. “That man is dead. This is not his anymore. You say so!”

Heraclix sighed, then held the coin up in the colored glow of a stained-glass window.

“This coin looks old,” he said. He ran a finger over the obverse, studying the face of the noble stamped there. “Ferdinand III. This is an old coin, Pomp.” He flipped it to the reverse side, noting the coat of arms. “No date. This doesn’t get us any closer to finding Caspar.”

He looked at the coin’s edge and was surprised to see tiny letters engraved there. He squinted to read them, turning the coin in the light to get a better angle on the worn lettering. “Josefov,” he said. “Probably the location of the original owner . . .” He stopped suddenly.

“What?” Pomp asked.

“Josefov! The ghetto!” He stood up and left just as a parishioner, alerted by Heraclix’s loud voice, came out of Saint Wenceslaus’s Chapel and walked toward the source of the disturbance. The door had closed behind Heraclix and Pomp by the time he was halfway down the pews.

They went back to the bridge, Heraclix hoping that they wouldn’t run into any soldiers. Luck was on their side, and they crossed the river without incident. Desire drove Heraclix. He steered by instinct. He wasn’t quite sure how he was navigating his way from the Old Town to, then through, Josefov—he merely knew that he was. It felt natural to him, yet unnatural, like he knew exactly which course to take in order to reach his unknown destination, like he
had taken this route a thousand times before, though he had never even been to the city, so far as he could recall. A degree of unease entered his gut, spread through his chest and crawled up his back. He skulked and stumbled through dozens of winding streets and alleyways, oblivious to his destination, yet confident that he knew the way there, his every motion an act of frisson-building faith.

This sense of belonging, cast up against the knowledge of his very lack of knowledge, gave him pause.
How can I know this place that I have never before seen? What part of me is so attuned to this area, and why?
he thought. He felt nauseated when he dwelt on such questions:
What part of my unseen past causes the city to ring such a familiar chord? Who, really, am I?

The buildings leaned this way and that, with no particular dominant orientation, like God had played building blocks there as a child and never cleaned up his mess. The rooftops were steeper than the Alps, walls narrow and tall, but even more inaccessible. The lower windows were barred, the upper windows too high for potential burglars to reach except by way of the treacherous roofs. If one could see out the high windows, one would be rewarded with a view of yet another beige wall, which would be like no reward at all, save for those who enjoyed unending blandness. It was an open prison, a neighborhood-cum-jail. Eaves loomed, threatening to fall on the street below at the slightest disturbance. Still, Heraclix trusted that somehow he would reach and recognize his destination, though the thought did occur to him that he might prefer to be elsewhere when he finally found it.

And then, he was there. And he knew he was there, somehow, wherever “there” was.

“There” was a door off its hinges, a two-story beige flat with boarded-up windows snowing dust from between the splintered slats and a stairway on the side of the building that led nowhere. He softly pushed at the door, which teetered on one hinge for a moment, then slammed to the floor, blowing a wave of debris out in all directions. Dirt billowed out of the open doorway, causing Pomp to cough aloud in the cloud.

“I thought you had a companion with you,” an old man’s voice said from within the gloom. “Now I am certain of it.”

“Who are you?” Heraclix asked.

“Peek-a-boo!” the voice in the darkness said. “I see you! But not your friend. Do show yourself, little one. Show yourself to this harmless codger.”

From somewhere in the room, a spark erupted, followed by the light of a candle.

Pomp entered first, followed closely by Heraclix. She showed herself to the old man, who sat on a rickety chair in the center of the main room. He wore only a pair of trousers. It was the old man Heraclix had bumped into outside of Caspar’s apartment in Hradčany. His bare chest and feet were more like a skeleton than a living man.

“Fair enough. You’ve shown yourself. Now do come forward, my enormous friend.”

Heraclix walked further in. After his eyes adjusted to the low light, he scanned the room, but there was little to scan: the man, the chair, the candle, and an extremely large mirror, which was cracked and positioned on the wall behind the chair. The reflection showed the trio and the chair, but it was difficult for Heraclix to see either his own or Pomp’s features. Their faces appeared like dark smudges in the mirror. As he turned his eyes away from the muddled reflection, the squalor of the place came into sharper focus. The peeling walls were spotted black with mold. There was blood on the mirror’s frame.

“I had hoped you would come,” the old man said. “When I saw you outside Caspar’s apartment, I hoped that you would know to follow me. And now, here you are.”

“What do you have to offer us?” Heraclix asked. “And how do we know we can trust you?”

“You recall Caspar Melthazaar,” the old man said, ignoring Heraclix’s question, “the one whose coin you stole from the apartment?”

Heraclix nodded.

“I will tell you the truth about the man Caspar Melthazaar. I am old. My time in this world is nearly at an end, and I would tell my story before I die. It is a tale I think you will want to hear,” he said, pointing at Heraclix.

Heraclix sat on the floor. “Well, go ahead, then, old man,” he said. “Tell your tale. We will listen.”

The man laughed, “Ha, ha! It is well that you give ear, or what little ear you have left, to my story. I am an old man, very old. This tale comes from my childhood. It’s one of my earliest memories, though I suspect that my age is such that I have dragged my capacity to remember along with me. My earliest memories become later and later.”

Pomp looked at the man with utter confusion.

“Please get on with it,” Heraclix said.

“This memory,” the old man continued, “is likely from the time I was about six. Yes, six and poor. Very poor. So poor I couldn’t even afford a mother or father. I lived with my dear old grandmother. I wasn’t the only one. There were a few of us cousins living together in that little flat. My parents, you see, weren’t the only ones who had died from the plague—there were others. In all, I think grandma lost seven or eight children or children-in-law in a short period. She buried her grief in loving and taking care of her children’s children.”

“And one of these is Caspar,” Pomp said.

“Caspar was absolutely her favorite. I think it was because he was so stupid that she took pity on him. She always did like him better.” He scowled as he spit the words out.

He sat silent, brooding for a moment “Still, he was my cousin,” he sighed, “and we all love our cousins, right?”

Pomp couldn’t help smiling and clapping her hands. But she quickly realized that she must have looked ridiculous, so she stopped, embarrassed.

“We were proud of him—Caspar the imperial soldier, a terror to Turk and Prussian alike. It was said that he once wrestled an enemy officer’s horse to the ground and crushed the unfortunate rider with his own steed. Oh, he was a brute in both body and mind,” the old man said with a hint of pride in his voice.

“I knew he would never amount to much. So I wasn’t a bit surprised when I went to watch an execution only to see Caspar kneeling at the executioner’s block.”

“Chop, chop, chop!” he said, his eyes growing wider and redder with each repetition of the word. One eye began to twitch. Pomp shrank back.

Heraclix’s left hand tensed. He forcefully held it down on his thigh with the right hand. He looked away from the old man in an effort to calm himself. A strong sense of familiarity washed over him, as if he had been in this place before. The candlelight shimmered, and, in an instant, a vision opened up to Heraclix’s sight.

The walls were clothed in color, the warm glow of a fireplace on a winter’s night shimmering about the room. It was more fully furnished, with another chair, a table, and an enormous bed. Beside the bed knelt a child with a surprised look on his face, a towheaded boy whose eyes were wide with shock. In his hands was a box full of coins. He looked up at Heraclix with apparent guilt.

“What is happening here?” Heraclix-not-Heraclix asked the youth.

“Nothing!” the child said in a quavering voice.

“Something, I think.”

“You don’t think. You are an idiot. I am smarter than you. I deserve this more than you.”

“That is for grandmother.”

“What? Why?”

“She has taken care of us. She is good. She deserves better than what she has. Please put it back.”

“No!”

“Then, maybe you can take it to her?”

“Yes,” the child said with a smile. “Yes, I’ll take it to her.” He looked at Heraclix-not-Heraclix, hardly believing his luck or, perhaps, his interlocutor’s stupidity. He shut the box and put it under one arm. The contents jingled loudly.

The door opened behind Heraclix-not-Heraclix. The boy peeked around him.

Standing in the doorway was a beautiful woman. Simple in dress, but beautiful, tall, with soft features, raven black hair, and a pleasant smile.

“Well, Hello there, little Georg. What do you have there?”

“Something for grandma. Coz wants me to take it to her.”

“You’d better do it, then. Coz wants what is best for your grandmother.”

The child walked around the adults and out the door, but not before shooting a hateful look at the woman, followed by a mischievous smile.

As the door was closing, the wind gusted, blowing the door wide open and sending snow and cold into the room.

Through the open door, Heraclix-not-Heraclix could see the faintly moonlit face of Prague’s astronomical clock, the
Orloj,
on City Hall. The moon was in Scorpio. The clock struck midnight.

Heraclix blinked and the room darkened again. He saw the old man staring intently at him. A mischievous smile, not unlike the child’s, had spread across the old man’s face.

“Georg . . .” Heraclix said, cautiously.

“Caspar,” the old man said, with a hint of hopefulness in his voice. “But not Caspar,” he conceded, falling back into a more depressed tone.

Heraclix sat in stunned silence.

The old man picked up where he had left off: “Chop, chop, chop,” he said, this time slowly and methodically, making a chopping motion with one hand hitting the palm of the other three times.

“I stayed,” he continued. “After all the crowds had left and they had rolled his headless body into a casket, I approached the executioner. I told him that I was the next of kin.

“A stranger, who had been watching from a side street, unbeknownst to me, approached the executioner at the same time. We almost bumped into each other. We three conversed, haggled, bargained, and I sold the body to the stranger for thirty silver thalers.”

“The stranger had a group of assistants, all done up in Venetian masks, who carted Caspar’s body away. The stranger wanted the head, too, but the executioner said that I couldn’t sell it. The general, the man who had ordered Caspar’s execution, wanted the head for himself.”

“Opportunistic . . .” Heraclix said.

The old man shot him a cold glance. “I went home and told grandmother, who was starting to go a little senile anyway, that Caspar had fallen into a glacier in the Alps after his lover, Vatanya the whore, had sent him on a wild search for some trinket or other. It was partially the truth,” he said.

“She had to think a long time about that one, grandma did. She thought about Caspar’s unfortunate ‘accident’ in the Alps, his
association with people of ill-repute, his very enlistment in the army; all these things she . . . eventually . . . over the course of time, blamed on herself.”

The wicked grin spread again across the old man’s face.

“It drove her mad.”