Page 2 of The World That We Knew

She saw her mother pull out a pair of shears she had stabbed into the soldier’s back. His shirt was turning black with blood and his eyes had changed color. In stories, it is possible to tell who is human and who is not. But here, in their city, it was impossible to tell them apart. A demon could look like a man; a man could do unthinkable things.

Lea and her mother ran hand in hand, disappearing into the crowds of women who were so intent on finding food for their families they didn’t notice the blood on the hem of Hanni’s skirt or the slick black liquid on their shoes. They left footprints at first, but the blood grew thinner and more transparent, and then disappeared. When they reached their apartment building, they ducked inside, still trying to catch their breaths. There were families sleeping in the hallways, displaced from grander neighborhoods where their homes had been stolen by Germans. At night people knocked at their door to plead for food. Hanni made Hardship Soup once a week and left bowls out in the corridor for those in need, but there was never enough.

They went up three flights of stairs, stepping over strangers, hurrying as best they could. Once inside their apartment, Hanni locked the door, and the spell of the night was broken. She had murdered someone and her daughter had been a witness. She quickly slipped off her bloodied skirt, then took up the sharp scissors to cut the cloth into tiny pieces, which she burned in the stove. Lea couldn’t help but think of the way the soldier had grabbed her, so fiercely she thought her ribs would shatter. She hoped that somewhere in the alley her tooth would grow into a rosebush and that every man who tried to pick one of the flowers would be left with a handful of thorns.

Out of her mother’s sight, Lea took the scissors, then went along the hall to the linen closet. She sat on the floor in the dark as if she were hovering between worlds, her heart still aching. If she had died she would have been with her father, but instead she was here. It had felt so good to bite the demon. She wished she had torn him in two. She heard her mother call her name, but she didn’t answer. By now Lea was certain that everything that had happened was her fault. Her long blond hair had made him notice her. She held her hair in one hand and with the bloody scissors, she began to cut. She should have been invisible, she should have never been there, she should have called out to her mother, she should have murdered him herself, she should have recognized him as a demon.

Her mother was outside the closet.

“My darling girl,” she called, but Lea didn’t answer. By now her hair was uneven, as short as a boy’s. When Hanni opened the door to see what her daughter had done, she gasped. The floor was layered with strands of hair, brilliant in the dark.

Hanni came to sit beside her daughter.

“This is their doing, not ours,” she told Lea.

His eyes had been blue, then blood had filled them, then he was gone. Now he was among the demons who sat in the trees, waiting to scoop up the innocent and carry them away.

“He liked my hair.”

“That was not the reason it happened. It was because of who he was, not who you are.”

Lea didn’t answer, but she knew the truth. Who I used to be.

Hanni held her daughter’s hand, grateful that God had allowed her to enter the alley with the shears in her hand. But what would have happened if he hadn’t been so kind, and what would happen next time? Every day there were arrests, and by the following autumn men and women and children would be taken to the remote Grunewald freight station, where they would board the trains that would bring them to killing camps in the East.

Hanni collected the strands of hair littering the floor. Later she would place them on the windowsill for the birds to weave into their nests. But as it turned out, there were no birds in the trees. This was the day when they had all risen into the sky in a shining band of light, abandoning the city. There was nothing here for anyone anymore. Bobeshi could not leave her bed, let alone flee from Berlin, and Hanni intended to honor the fifth commandment. She could not leave her mother. The problem was time. There was so little of it. Each day groups of people were taken to Grosse Hamburger Strasse, where they were kept, without knowledge of their future, in a former old people’s home, and would soon be sent to their deaths on trains that were leaving to resettle Jews in the East.

All Hanni knew was that someone among them must be saved.

Then and there she decided to send her daughter away.

CHAPTER TWO

THE MAGICIAN’S ASSISTANT

BERLIN, SPRING 1941

TANTE RUTH HAD LIVED FOR over a hundred years. She was so old that everyone she had ever loved had died. Now she wished to join them. Every day she set out a cup of tea for the Angel of Death, but Azriel never appeared, even though sooner or later he must walk through her door. She could not live forever, despite her talents as a seer and a healer. People believed her wisdom was inherited. Her father had been a rabbi in Russia who was so learned he was called The Magician, and her husband, also a rabbi, had been named The Magician’s Assistant. These men studied the Zohar, The Book of Splendour, which delved into the holy mysteries. Since the time of Solomon, sorcery had been attributed to the Jews, although the Torah condemned sorcery, except for a certain type of magic, permitted from the start, which used the mystical names of God and the angels. Access to such studies was denied to women, but Ruth had managed to learn quite a bit as she’d sewn the men’s garments, and cooked their dinners, and listened to their debates.

Ruth covered her hair with a black scarf she had worn ever since she’d lost her husband. His ghost was beside her each night in her small bed, but every time she reached for him, he disappeared. This was how life was, tragic and unexplainable. When you were young you were afraid of ghosts, and when you were aged you called them to you. She knew it was impossible to completely understand the world God had created, but she had lived with two men who knew the seventy-two kinds of wisdom that were contained within God’s seventy-two names. Despite everything she had witnessed and all she had lost, she still believed in miracles.

Her father, The Magician, and her husband, his Assistant, had access to books from Spain that revealed the inner workings of the known world through sacred geometry. The circle, for instance, was a perfect shape that possessed the power to ward off evil. In the first century B.C.E. a miracle worker named Honi Ha-Me’agel stood in a circle to call down rain upon the parched earth. Even now, on a couple’s wedding day, a bride must circle a groom, as mourners must circle the graves of the pious with thread. Numbers and shapes revealed the mysteries of the universe and the sacred name of God, which numerically represented the divine, and was present in all of His creations, including the mathematical equation of pi. Therefore it was through the purity of numbers that the rabbis attempted to understand God’s miracles. It was believed that all creation came from thought, language, and mathematics.

When Hanni knocked on the door, Ruth drew her distraught neighbor into her tiny apartment and listened as Hanni wept, insisting she must send her daughter away. Ruth didn’t need magic to see the blood under her neighbor’s fingernails. It was indeed a terrible time.

As Ruth made tea she thought over Hanni’s predicament. Ruth knew what evil could befall a young girl traveling alone, especially now, when there were demons dressed in army uniforms on every corner. Ruth knew of them as mazikin, terrible creatures whose work was the misery of humankind. They had accomplished their work in Berlin. Her neighbors hadn’t listened to Ruth when Nazi policy first began to separate Jews from the rest of the population. She had seen children and their mothers standing in the snow, begging for food, while the newspapers printed captions beneath photographs of Jewish businessmen and lawyers and professors. Here are the animals. Do you know this Beast?

That was how evil spoke. It made its own corrupt sense; it swore that the good were evil, and that evil had come to save mankind. It brought up ancient fears and scattered them on the street like pearls. To fight what was wicked, magic and faith were needed. This was what one must turn to when there was no other option.

“My father once told me of a creature.” Ruth lowered her voice as she poured the tea. “The golem.”

She went on to explain that this monstrous entity was made of earth, but imbued with life by God’s allowance and man’s practice. A golem was created by use of the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet. First mentioned in the Book of Psalms, it had no soul, only ruach, the life and breath of animals. The Talmud stated that Adam himself was a golem until God gave him a soul, for a soul is said to be what divides us from all others.

“What good would such a thing be to me?” Hanni wanted to know.

“Have you no idea of what a golem can do? It can use the language of birds and of fish, tell time without a clock, and leap from a roof like a bat. It can see the future, commune with the dead, overcome demons. It can tell the day and hour of a person’s death. It can speak to angels and live among them. It cannot be stopped from any act unless it is held ten cubits above the ground, for at that height it is powerless. It continues to grow stronger each day, so much so that it can become too dangerous to keep. This creature has protected our people since the beginning of time. For one girl, it is likely this cannot be done. But one never knows what might be possible. With a golem beside her, your girl would be safe.”

Ruth gave Hanni the address of a rabbi who was famous for his knowledge of spirits and magic.