to hate him in return?
In a hundred years, the people of Ingolstadt had done their best to forget, or at least to pretend ignorance of, the history of their town. The ancient castle was gone, torn down stone by stone at the turn of the twentieth century. The old mill had burned long ago, then been rebuilt, only to be abandoned again. It was now an ancient wreck on the hill above the town.
I had traveled the world, gone to the frozen ends of the earth in pursuit of Victor, where I’d strangled him aboard a ship in an icy sea. It should have been my vengeance, my victory, after I’d leapt overboard to drift away on a detached ice floe, but I had learned much since then.
Now I had come back home to the small German city that was my birthplace. My Jewish neighbors accepted me without asking too many questions, sometimes looking at me with pity, sometimes with a hard swallow and dry throat, as they saw my scars, my lumpish features. But I have done nothing to make them fear me. I was no longer the vengeful clumsy monster, but rather just someone trying to fit in. For a while, I felt I had a chance … but then the polical situation had grown worse, the Nazis came to power on a wave of blame and fear, and I didn’t think they would let anyone live peaceably and unnoticed.
After the girl was gone, I took the rabbi’s jacket and used gentle strokes of a bristle brush to clean the mud; I blotted with chemicals to soak out the bloodstains. Then, with tiny perfect stitches, I began to repair the damage.
I toiled all night long by lantern light, and I had the rabbi’s jacket cleaned, repaired, and even pressed well before sunup. But I couldn’t allow myself to do things that were
Since the Nazis openly blame the Jews for every perceived crime, one would think the people here in the ghetto would not be so quick to cast suspicions themselves, but it is part of the way humans are made, scars they don’t even see inside themselves.
Because I don’t need sleep — one of the gifts that Victor forgot to include when he gave me my life, like a missed stitch — I sat up and read the newspapers until dawn, when I would be able to venture into the streets again without looking like a fearsome, hulking shadow.
I had one paper from Berlin, one from Salzburg, and even a weekly Yiddish edition (though my grasp of the language was still uncertain). The date was November 9, 1938, and the political situation in Germany was grim. By reading the slanted stories, I could sense a brewing storm on the horizon — a storm that would not bring the spark of life, like the one that had reanimated me, but rather destruction. All of Germany — maybe even all of Europe — seemed to be full of peasants carrying torches, looking for a target ….
When the ghetto began to bustle in the morning, I helped an old silversmith across the street rehang a splintered door that the Nazis had damaged during their previous escapade, and he was grateful for my help. I had little else to do, a pair of trousers to alter, a few buttons to reattach. I walked the length of the ghetto, without any particular aim. A dark cloud seemed to hang over the people, as if they knew something terrible was about to happen, but they pretended it was just another day.
That evening I brought the repaired jacket to the rabbi’s house, which was adjacent to the synagogue, and also carried a sack with four apples I had purchased from the cart on the corner. Rachel was delighted to see me, and the rabbi thanked me for my help. He tried on his repaired jacket, pronounced it perfect.
His face looked as battered and discolored as mine had once appeared, the purple bruises from his recent beating now turning yellow at the edges. When he caught me looking at them, he said, “They will heal. We must give thanks that no greater harm was done. They have had their fun. Staffelfuhrer Schein and his men are like angry unruly children.”
The rabbi’s wife was furious on his behalf. “And you think because you let them beat you that they’ll be satisfied now?”
“What would you have me do?” the rabbi said in frustration.
Rachel quickly held up her doll, smiling at me. “Could you make me another one, Franck? You’re so good at stitching.”
“Rachel, that’s not a polite request to make,” her father admonished.
My dark lips formed a smile. “But a perfectly reasonable one, Rabbi. I may have some scraps of old cloth left and a few rags. Would you like me to make a husband for your stitched-together woman?”
“Yes, please.”
She had no idea how much that thought hurt me. If Victor had done that one thing for me, we would never have needed to become enemies. But Victor Frankenstein was a terrible man. And the peasants called
Frau Schulmann had made a fine meal with whatever was available. She even simmered the apples I had brought with a pinch of cinnamon and some sugar.
After we ate, the rabbi invited me to smoke a pipe with him as we listened to the world news on the radio. After the tubes had warmed up, he tuned to the strongest radio station, which was playing Wagner. The rabbi sat back contentedly, puffing smoke.
I felt relaxed, remembering another old man, a blind man alone in a cottage who had befriended me and taught me many things, showing me the kind side of the human heart for the first time. I missed that blind old man; I’d seen too few people like him in all of my years.
When the radio announcer read the news in a terse voice, the rabbi and I both listened. Tensions in Germany were already strained. Many Jews, feeling displaced and victimized, had already fled the country if they had the means to do so. They lost their homes, their wealth. They tried to find someplace to hide.
But today the situation grew much worse. In Paris, a German diplomat had been assassinated by a Polish Jew, a young man incensed by how the Nazis were persecuting his people. The assassin had been driven to violence out of despair and helplessness, but as I listened to the angry news announcer, I knew that the young man’s actions would only aggravate the situation for the Jews. In fact, I was certain things would rapidly get worse. The announcer added at the end, as if it were a foregone conclusion: “Investigators are certain this is part of a much larger Jewish plot to overthrow the government.”
Rabbi Schulmann turned gray and shook his head. “Oh, no.” He uttered a quick prayer. “This is just the excuse the Nazis have wanted for a long time.”
From the kitchen where she washed the dishes, his wife looked at him with wide eyes, frightened by the news. Rachel played with her doll in the room, and she surprised us again with her perceptiveness. “Are we in danger, Papa? Will the bad men come hurt you again?”
Rabbi Schulmann heaved a long sigh, pained by what he had to admit to his daughter. “We must pray it won’t happen, my dear.”
The girl was grim and serious. “We should have a golem to protect us, just like in Prague. Then we can be safe.”
“That’s just a story, child,” Rabbi Schulmann said.
But the girl was indignant. “You said it was a
The rabbi looked up at me with weary eyes, explaining, “It is a frightening tale, my friend — a good tale, but I can’t guarantee its veracity. In Prague in 1580, Rabbi Loew fashioned a large and powerful being out of clay, a
“I still think we need our own golem,” said Rachel. “But without the last part of the story.”
Outside, we heard growling engines, screams, gunfire … then laughter accompanied by the sounds of shattering glass.
Fires began to start. Staffelfuhrer Schein rode imperiously in his staff car with two of his men, flanked by two more Staffeln on motorcycles. His men threw rocks and bricks, smashing every intact window on the street. When some of the shopkeepers and families ran out, begging them to stop, the Nazis threw rocks at them instead.
The old silversmith whom I had helped flailed his hands and stood in front of the door we had just repaired.
