The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (with bonus content) Read Online Free PDF Page A

locomotives, the German soldiers in their elegant coats, than of the members of his own family. He kissed his grandfather’s scratchy cheek, withstood his mother’s long embrace, shook hands with his fatherand with his younger brother, Thomas, who handed Josef an envelope. Josef stuck it in a coat pocket with a studied absentmindedness, ignoring the trembling of Thomas’s lower lip as the envelope vanished. Then, as Josef was climbing into the train, his father had taken hold of his son’s coattails and pulled him back down to the platform. He reached around from behind Josef to accost him with a sloppy hug. The shock of his father’s tear-damp mustache against Josef’s cheek was mortifying. Josef had pulled away.
    “See you in the funny papers,”
he said. Jaunty, he reminded himself; always jaunty.In my panache is their hope of salvation.
    As soon as the train pulled away from the platform, however, and Josef had settled back in the second-class compartment seat, he felt, like a blow to the stomach, how beastly his conduct had been. He seemed at once to swell, to pulse and burn with shame, as if his entire body were in rebellion against his behavior, as if shame could induce the same catastrophic reaction in him as a bee’s sting. This very seat had cost, with the addition of departure imposts and the recent “transfer excise,” precisely what Josef’s mother had been able to raise from the pawning of an emerald brooch, her husband’s gift to her on their tenth anniversary. Shortly before that triste anniversary, Frau Dr. Kavalier had miscarried in her fourth month of pregnancy, and abruptly the image of this unborn sibling—it would have been a sister—arose in Josef’s mind, a curl of glinting vapor, and fixed him with a reproachful emerald gaze. When the emigration officers came on at Eger to take him off the train—his name was one of several on their list—they found him between two cars, snot-nosed, bawling into the crook of his elbow.
    The shame of Josef’s departure, however, was nothing compared to the unbearable ignominy of his return. On the journey back to Prague, crowded now into a third-class car of an airless local, with a group of strapping, loud Sudeten farm families headed to the capital for some kind of religious rally, he spent the first hour relishing a sense of just punishment for his hard-heartedness, his ingratitude, for having abandoned his family at all. But as the train passed through Kladno, the inevitable homecoming began to loom. Far from offering him the opportunity to make up for his unpardonable behavior, it seemed to him, his surprise return would be an occasion only to bring his family furthersorrow. For the six months since the start of occupation, the focus of the Kavaliers’ efforts, of their collective existence, had been the work of sending Josef to America. This effort had, in fact, come to represent a necessary counterbalance to the daily trial of mere coping, a hopeful inoculation against its wasting effects. Once the Kavaliers had determined that Josef, having been born during a brief family sojourn in the Ukraine in 1920, was, by a quirk of politics, eligible to emigrate to the United States, the elaborate and costly process of getting him there had restored a measure of order and meaning to their lives. How it would crush them to see him turn up on their doorstep not eleven hours after he had left! No, he thought, he could not possibly disappoint them by coming home. When the train at last crawled back into the Prague station early that evening, Josef remained in his seat, unable to move, until a passing conductor suggested, not unkindly, that the young gentleman had better get off.
    Josef wandered into the station bar, swallowed a liter and a half of beer, and promptly fell asleep in a booth at the back. After an indefinite period, a waiter came over to shake him, and Josef woke up, drunk. He wrestled his valise out into the streets of the city that he had,