Word Made Flesh

15

There was a young woman in our community, really a girl, but quite beautiful and very mature for her age. She was, in fact, only seventeen years old at the time of the July Sweep. She never knew her mother — the woman died of typhus when the daughter was still an infant. The child lived in the attic of Haus Levi with her widower father, who was a kind man but not the best of providers and, to be honest, he had a propensity for the drink. The creature, as he sometimes called it. Nevertheless, he loved his daughter with all of his being and he attempted to do his best by her.

The daughter was named Alicia. She learned to read at a very young age. Her father was both amazed and proud of her skill with words and he was known to bring the girl to the neighbors’ kitchens after supper and have her perform, reading from the storybooks, the cheap little fable pamphlets and tissue-paper parables that he would purchase with the meager wages he earned as a marginal performer in the Goldfaden Carnival Troupe. The child loved her fairy tales, came to memorize them, so that after a time, she did not even need the books to tell the story. The neighbors in Haus Simeon — Miss Svetla, Mr. and Mrs. Wasserman, the Brezina family — appeared to enjoy these visits and would remark that the child indeed seemed blessed with a natural gift for language and the architecture of the tale.

Alicia’s talents blossomed as she grew and her skills were noted and praised by Mrs. Gruen, the teacher at the unchartered and makeshift school that was operated, somewhat clandestinely, in the basement of Haus Zebulun. I have never seen anything like it, Mrs. Gruen would croon to the father; she has been given this blessing for a reason. And the widower would nod and smile at the honor lavished on his only child. But he could never completely understand the teacher’s point. If there were a way that Alicia’s talents could secure her escape from the poverty of the Schiller, he couldn’t imagine what it was. And if Mrs. Gruen knew of a method by which Alicia could utilize her gifts to flee the privation of her surroundings, then why not come out and announce it instead of hinting at some vague and hidden destiny?

By the time Alicia was a teenager, she was contributing as much to the household support as her father. She took in washing and mending and for a time she held a delivery route for Der Kehlkopf in the German Quarter of the city. But the papergirl job kept her out of the Schiller past dusk and with the pogroms increasing at this time, her worried father made her give up the position. Still, these were good years. They ate fairly well and, most important, there was enough money to prevent Alicia from having to take a violet passport, the term, at that time, given to the government license for sanctioned brothel whores. Many of the Schiller girls, upon turning fourteen, were brought to the so-called tailor shops of Kaprova Boulevard for a pitiful bounty that the madams liked to call a dowry. It had been the fate of Alicia’s closest friend. The father promised the daughter he would cut off his legs and beg as a cripple before he would allow his angel to dance with the perverts of Kaprova.

In fact, this small family made out comparatively well with daughter laundering and stitching for a growing list of happy customers and father working the circuit of cafes near the university and sometimes near the fountains in the Park of Love, bringing home each night a top hat full of tips which amounted to more than one might think. For a time it was a happy existence, and when they realized they had the resources to actually move out of the attic of the Levi and into more comfortable quarters, they decided that they’d grown to like their room too much to leave it, that it had, in fact, become their home and that it was unlikely they would ever desire another.

Alicia’s passion for words and stories and, ultimately, for books did not abate during this period. If anything, it increased. When most of her peers began babbling incessantly about boys and the mysteries of courtship, Alicia found her own interests tending toward the novels she was discovering in the bins of the Wednesday bazaar. On the afternoons that she managed to finish her cleaning early, she would haunt the book stalls near the Teachers’ College, searching sometimes an hour or more for the single secondhand, threadbare paperback that she could afford that month. The bane of her life was not the agonies of first-time romance and unrequited puppy love but the unimaginable fact that, due to her race and her sex, her creed and her status in this city, she could not gain entrance to the massive library that sat like a foreboding temple in the central square, holding in its belly half a million books which would never fall under the decoding gaze of her Schiller-born eyes.

Yes, the exclusionary policies of the Maisel Public Library were the wound of Alicia’s entire existence. It only hurt more when the father, in one of his periodic binges, would announce that as soon as he won the national lottery he would buy her more books than she could read in a lifetime. The fact that Schiller Jews could not buy lottery tickets seemed to be chronically forgotten when papa was in his cups. But Alicia was as clever as she was persistent, and one night as she finished darning a pair of Mr. Zottman’s stockings, it occurred to her that if the people of the Schiller were not allowed into the Maisel Library, perhaps what they needed, what they would learn that they wanted, was a library of their own.

It was the kind of idea that comes in an instant, not the gradual brand of notion that grows to its apogee in measured intervals, but the type of epiphany that lands without warning in the core of the thinker’s brain and then takes over like an invading warlord, a ruthless imperialist who will broach nothing but an unconditional surrender of the mind’s attention. In the second that Alicia let Mr. Zottman’s socks fall from her lap to the floor of the loft, she knew she had found her calling, she knew this idea would possess her until she turned it into a solid and working reality, that it would not leave her alone for a moment, would paw at her like an insatiable, overbearing lover. So she left Haus Levi that second over the slurred but ineffectual protests of her patriarch and began to go door to door up and down the block, attempting, breathlessly, to explain her plan to the community and to solicit donations.

She was somewhat less than successful that first evening. Many people could not comprehend her spiel and shook their heads at her spasmodic talk of turning an entire floor of precious lodging into a lending library. It is true that from this night forward, Alicia’s reputation developed from that of a cherished prodigy to an eccentric, possibly even dangerous, dreamer, a young lady who had spent too much time with her head hung over a book and would now bear the consequences of such obsessive behavior for the rest of her days. In the end, she agreed to swallow a spoonful of Mrs. Wenzel’s relaxation tonic and walked home more determined than dejected. She pulled her father into his cot to sleep off his day of excess and then she began to rearrange the attic loft, making a pile of expendables that could be trashed and relocating the remaining possessions into a single, crowded corner.

By the time father woke the next morning, Alicia was already out scavenging produce crates at the Hay Market and bargaining wildly in the book stalls of the Bazaar. She returned to the loft dragging her spoils behind her to find her father gesticulating to a small group of Schiller elders, including Babbi Gruen, in the middle of the near-empty attic, raving with the question of how he could have been robbed by his own people as he slept in the middle of the pilfering. It took a few minutes for Alicia to convince the old men that no robbery had taken place, that she had simply been cleaning and redecorating. It took much longer to explain her plans to her father. He proved less than enthused with the notion of turning his humble room into a public library and used all his energy to dissuade his daughter, even as he helped her carry the stained prune crates, overflowing with the dank aroma of old books, up to the top floor. He told her to use her God-given sense as Alicia stacked the crates one atop the other and attempted to tack them together using their one good saucepan as a makeshift hammer. He pleaded that the community had already spoken and rejected any need for a library as Alicia set to alphabetizing her meager collection of volumes. He warned of the resentment they could incur from this nonsensical venture as the daughter fashioned a piece of discarded plywood and two dented milk urns into an unlevel desk by the attic’s entrance that would serve both as checkout station and barrier between library and living quarters.

When Alicia finally stopped moving to survey her work, her father took her by her wrists, softly, not without love, and said, “I cannot let you do this, my child.”

Alicia pulled a hand free, stroked his face, and in the same calm but inflexible tone, replied, “You cannot stop me from doing this, Papa.”

The old man knew he was beaten, but struggled out of habit.

“They do not want a library, Alicia.”

“Yes, they do,” the daughter said, moving a soup can full of pencils to her new desk. “They just don’t know it yet.”

The comment proved more prescient than possibly even the girl herself could have known. She hand-printed a series of posters announcing the opening of the Ezzenes’ Free Lending Library, its location in the attic of Haus Levi and its hours of operation. In the beginning, her collection of books was meager and somewhat uniform. The German peddler she’d gotten most of them from seemed to specialize in either melodramatic love stories or questionable historical tracts. Alicia’s first visitors to the library were a trio of middle-aged ladies from Haus Issachar led by the midwife Rosina Waikby. They were cordial if a bit frosty until one of the group spotted a copy of Paul de Kock’s Georgette and remarked, with a bit more interest than condemnation, that she’d heard it was a very decadent tale, very Western in its morals and use of epithets. Alicia saw her opportunity and descended upon these potential readers like a hound on a lame hare. She scooped up a handful of like-minded Gothics and distributed them to the ladies, pointing out the flamboyant cover art, always a depiction of an alluring if distressed heroine, struggling, or succumbing, depending on your point of view, in the arms of some picaresque rogue whose pectoral muscles were bursting through his inexplicably shredded pirate blouse.

When Alicia penciled in the return date on the inside of the rear cover of Barber of Paris, Mrs. Waikby dropped a coin into the coffee can marked donations. The hollow metal echo was the noise of a launching, a departure into a world where books, ideas, and language held the value of currency.

“It was only a bloody half-kreuzer,” the father said that night, squeezed under the rafters in the new and more compact dining space.

“No,” Alicia said, maybe a bit smug in her delight, “it was more than that. It was the beginning of an endowment.”

“Endowment,” the father repeated, cutting up a sausage. “Well, just make sure the Zottman’s shirts are ready before your meeting with the investment counselor.”

Alicia began to find books everywhere. She seemed to develop a kind of instinct, a second sense that led her to uncover troves of stock for the library. The coffee can donations never amounted to very much, but when added to what she could spare from her laundering fees and combined with this knack for tracking down caches of unwanted and discarded and forgotten books, she managed to continually expand the holdings of the attic repository. She entered into negotiations with the barbers of Hahnpasse Row, offering a discount on the cleaning of their hair sheets and shaving towels in return for some of the lurid crime novels that sat in racks for waiting customers. She washed chalkboards down at the university in exchange for the right to pick discarded texts from a variety of disciplines. She even collected the refuse of tear sheets from the Dumpsters behind the city’s largest newspaper office, spent hours at a worktable clipping and collating the serialized stories of the rear pages, hardening them with a mixture of paste and soap flakes, and binding them in pressed boards that she made from a mash of fish scales, cinders, rag linen, and starch. These volumes proved more popular than she had expected and after a time the odor from them began to vanish.

As her archives grew, she divided her stacks of produce crates into sections. The wall adjoining the washtubs now housed an array of dog-eared philosophical treatises, while the shelving that ran from the bathroom door to the attic’s single window was host to collections of history, science, and mythology. And always, in the midst of the dwelling, swelling to the point of rupture, the wheels creaking under the burden of a weight it was never designed to support, the new-books bin, once a common laundry basket of dingy white canvas stretched over an aluminum frame, the bin was now the repository of each week’s new and as yet unsorted volumes. Coming into the attic at night and more than a touch inebriated, the father would inevitably collide with the bin, toppling the cribful of books and cursing Pandora’s box.

For every day that ended in disappointment — a trade agreement that fell through, a borrower who confessed to the loss of a long-overdue item — there were just as many delightful surprises. There was Mr. Hulbert of Haus Ephraim who labored nights at the rubberworks and once brought her a genuine, rotating date stamp and a felt ink pad. Old Man Klopstock, who still manned a shovel detail at the city dumping ground, dropped off, one dawn, a cardboard box filled with a Bible, a dictionary, a huge geographical atlas, and an assortment of children’s comic books. And the widow Tschamrda, who washed windows at Busson, Mirski & Moult, salvaged the treasure of a multivolume set of legal statutes—The Revised Criminal Code of Old Bohemia—when the firm demanded a fresh edition with bindings that matched the new office decor. The widow rescued the books from the back of a trash hauler and secreted them away in a supply closet, then carried one volume home each night, tucked under the rags in a mopping pail, until she’d reunited the entire set. For her bravery and efforts, Alicia labeled the shelf that housed the statutes the Tschamrda Memorial Law Library.

People started visiting the attic with increasing regularity. And if father groused about the lack of privacy, he was quietly impressed with his offspring’s ability to turn a lunatic daydream into a thriving reality. He adjusted to the change in his routine, was able to sit at the dinner table in his undershirt, suspenders hanging to the floor, savoring a pan-fried kidney while to his left a duo of smoke-engulfed old men prowled for a rumored American “cowboy” book and to his right a circle of, to his mind, overly serious young women filled their arms with out-of-date German economics texts. And in time he thought nothing of sitting in the bathtub, soaking behind the thin muslin curtain as the young bachelor Karp, from Haus Manasseh, continued to nervously interrupt a reading and sewing Alicia with made-up questions and inconsequential comments. The young man clearly had a smoldering and ill-disguised passion for the girl. But, as Alicia herself would put it when questioned by her father about settling down and starting a family, “I’m not interested in such things, Papa. I have a higher calling.”

“Don’t end up alone, like me,” the father warned, but he knew, in this area at least, his words held no sway over his daughter.

The library was closed on the night that Censor Meyrink came to visit. Because of the heat, the attic was close to unbearable and many people were doing their reading outside on their stoops. Alicia, however, ignored the airless oppression of the book room and went to work sorting out the latest acquisitions in the new-books bin. From her vantage point before the front window of the loft, she had a sky-view of the whole of the block, could see the convoy of trucks and scooters, could see the shredding machine as it formed a barricade between the Schiller and the outside world. It is not so much that she froze when she realized what was about to happen. It is more that it all happened faster than her ability to analyze and solve the problem. Or, rather, faster than her understanding, in the moments that Meyrink began to read from the Orders of Erasure and the Reapers began to kick open all the doors and haul her neighbors outside, that there was no solution to be found. She spotted three soldiers running toward Haus Levi and, rather than making a conscious choice, gave in to the instinct, born of terror and confusion, that was flooding through her body for the first time.

And she dove into the book-filled laundry bin, squirmed and flailed her way to the bottom, covered herself with books, curled up into the smallest fetal ringlet her body would allow and blanketed herself with a shroud of paper and ink.

Moments later the door to the loft room exploded off its hinges with the kick of a steel-toed boot. This, even though the door had been unlocked. Three barking soldiers, not long past puberty, stormed inside. They spread out like rabid and clumsy street dogs, shoving over shelf after shelf, throwing anything they passed to the floor.

Then one of them yelled, “Tell the Censor we found it,” and the three exited the library as quickly as they’d entered.

Alicia waited, unable to move, so far beyond anything she would have previously labeled horror, floating in a jellylike void of paralysis, already on the verge of thinking I should have let them find me.

The screaming from the street below came into the attic loft through its only window. And as the screaming grew, Alicia lifted herself, pushed up with her palms, books sliding away like heavy water. She brought her head just above the lip of the bin, looked out the window to see all of Schiller Avenue packed to bursting with its inhabitants. She had the finest view of anyone present that night. A vantage so clear and unobstructed that it combined with the nature of the event itself to create the sense that she was watching a movie. This was how it appeared to transpire — a staged performance crafted by the best in a profession dedicated to agonizingly brutal illusion.

She made herself watch. She forced the eyes to stay open through it all, willed the ears to record every scream. She would not look away. She listened to the man read the Orders of Erasure. She saw the impact of his words on the faces of her neighbors. She watched the cyclone fencing being pulled from the flatbed and unspooled up and down the street. Saw the fencing being connected to the winches of the obliterator and watched the machine roar into life. She watched the penned-in crowd instantly turn into an enormous, flailing beast, crazed with the latest and highest fear, turning against itself, rearing up and striking out and, finding nowhere to run, lashing back in at its own body. She saw the trampling begin. Saw the soldiers climbing up on top of their trucks to get a better position for picking off targets futilely trying to scramble up the metal netting. Watched the teeth and hooks and razors spin into a blur, salivating grease as the monster prepared for its banquet. And she saw the first bodies hauled inside the Pulpmeister.

She was a witness, ladies and gentlemen. She was an attestor. She stayed hidden, but she kept watch, her eyes always just above the rim of the book bin. Never sinking below. She did not allow herself. Would not give herself even this small reprieve as her whole world — the only world she had ever known since birth, the only people she had ever lived with — was summarily destroyed and, literally, shredded into pulp. She was just seventeen years old, ladies and gentlemen. Can you imagine this kind of will at this tender age? This kind of control? Making your eyes and ears bear witness to the slaughter of everything you hold dear? Knowing, instinctually, that this was all you could do and still doing it?

Zwack stares out at the crowd, head pivoting slowly on the neck as she squints through the spotlight trying to see faces. Her wooden lids are unblinking. Finally she asks, “Could any of you ever agree to submit yourself to this kind of test?”

But after a long silence, the only answer comes from Otto Langer. Blinking his eyes as if he’s just woken up, his voice now restored to its familiar timber, Otto pulls in a deep and trembling breath and replies, “I could not.”