Les extraordinaires aventures de Kavalier & Clay

In the autumn of 1939, when the world was holding its breath, a young man named Josef Kavalier appeared in a Brooklyn bedroom like a figure summoned from a dream. He was slumped in the doorway, a refugee from Prague, bearing an odor of armpit, damp wool, and distant, impossible places like Japan. For seventeen-year-old Sam Klayman, a boy sealed inside the airtight vessel of his neighborhood, whose dreams of escape were as elaborate as they were unworkable, the arrival of his cousin was a miracle. That first night, huddled on the fire escape, they shared a cigarette fashioned from scavenged butts and discovered a common language not of blood, but of ambition. Joe was an artist, trained at the Academy in Prague. Sammy was a purveyor of schemes, a student of the pulps, with an instinct for the appetites of American boys. “My professional name is Clay,” Sammy confessed, and in the chilly October air, a partnership was forged.

It was a caterpillar scheme - a dream of fabulous escape - that had carried Josef Kavalier across the world. Trained in the rigorous art of the *Ausbrecher* by the old magician Bernard Kornblum, Joe was a student of locks, chains, and boxes. When the Nazis marched into Prague, this esoteric knowledge became his only hope. A grand plan to smuggle the city's mythical Golem to safety in a giant coffin was hatched, but when Joe's own legal exit visa was denied at the last moment, the plan was altered. It was Joe, not the creature of clay, who was nailed into the immense pine box. He lay beside the ancient, naked, and surprisingly light automaton as it was shipped by rail across a continent sliding into darkness. From Lithuania, he made his way across Siberia to Japan, and finally to San Francisco, carrying with him the unshakable guilt of having left his family behind.

Back in New York, this guilt, mingled with Joe's artistic genius and Sammy's narrative flair, gave birth to a hero. In the cramped offices of Empire Novelty, Inc., a purveyor of farting pillows and X-ray spectacles, they pitched their creation to the perpetually nervous Sheldon Anapol. The American comic book was a new and clumsy art form, a mongrel of newspaper strips and pulp magazines, but it was a world waiting for a champion. While Superman, the Midwestern golem, had shown the way, Kavalier and Clay offered something different. Their hero was a master of liberation, a phantom of the night dedicated to freeing those who “languish in tyranny's chains.” Armed with a golden key and a crack team of assistants, he was a mortal man who had perfected the art of slipping free. He was the Escapist.

The success of *Radio Comics* was immediate and immense. As the money began to pour in, Joe Kavalier waged a furious, ink-splattered war on the Axis powers. Month after month, the Escapist stormed German fortresses, sank U-boats with his bare hands, and, in one memorable issue, landed a haymaker on the jaw of Adolf Hitler himself. But this imaginary war only deepened Joe's real-world despair. He funneled his earnings into the Transatlantic Rescue Agency, a shoestring operation working to bring Jewish children out of Europe. It was there he met Rosa Saks, the bohemian daughter of a surrealist impresario. She was a painter of startling, beautiful still lifes of vegetables and canned goods, a woman whose wild hair and brassy voice concealed a profound tenderness. As Joe fell in love with Rosa, his art bloomed, but his heart remained tethered to the family he was trying desperately to save.

Meanwhile, Sammy Clay, no longer a boy but not quite a man, discovered his own complicated freedoms. The Escapist's leap to a national radio show brought Tracy Bacon into their lives, the golden-haired, honey-voiced actor who gave the hero his voice. Tracy was a man of magnificent physique and questionable biography, a brigadier general's son who claimed to have broken horses in Hawaii and swabbed decks on a freighter. In the actor's company, Sammy found himself venturing into a secret, nocturnal New York, a world of quiet bars and men who danced with other men, and for a brief, reckless season, he allowed himself to imagine a life and a love he had never thought possible, a future in the warm, forgiving light of California.

The world of make-believe and the world of headlines collided on a December weekend in 1941. As the first reports of the attack on Pearl Harbor crackled over the radio, a telegram arrived with the news that the *Ark of Miriam*, the ship carrying Joe's younger brother, Thomas, and three hundred other children, had been sunk by a German U-boat. In the face of this ultimate, unanswerable tragedy, Joe's comic-book war felt like a blasphemy. He walked out of Rosa's life, out of Sammy's, and into a navy recruitment office, leaving behind the fortune he had amassed and the heroes he had brought to life. The partnership of Kavalier & Clay was broken.

Joe's war was not one of glory, but of profound and terrible isolation. As a radioman, he was posted to a remote naval station in Antarctica, a cluster of huts and tunnels buried under the ice. When a faulty stove filled the barracks with carbon monoxide, Joe was the sole survivor of a crew of twenty-two men. For an entire winter, he remained there, his only companions a half-blind sled dog and a pilot slowly going mad. He became a ghost, a disembodied ear, spending his days and endless nights listening to the war on his shortwave radio, a phantom voice from the bottom of the world, haunted by the silence from a family he now knew was lost to him forever.

In New York, Sammy and Rosa, bound by shared loss and an impossible secret, married and moved to a small house in a new suburban development on Long Island. They had a son, whom they named Thomas. Sammy, after a series of failed ventures, returned to the comic book industry, a king in a kingdom of pulp. Rosa, under the pseudonym Rose Saxon, became a star in her own right, creating a line of romance comics that captured the lonely, thwarted desires of a generation of American girls. They built a life together, a careful architecture of affection, habit, and unspoken truths, shadowed always by the ghost of the man they had both loved.

Years passed. The Golden Age of comics gave way to a time of public bonfires and Senate investigations. Then, one spring afternoon in 1954, a letter appeared in the *New York Herald-Tribune*. A man claiming to be the Escapist threatened to leap from the observation deck of the Empire State Building, protesting the "unfair robberies and poor mistreatments" of his creators. A crowd gathered. Sammy and his son Tommy were there, watching as a figure in a faded blue-and-gold costume stepped onto the parapet. It was Joe Kavalier, returned from the ice, having spent years living in secret in an office in the very building from which he now threatened to jump, working on a vast, silent, 2,200-page comic-book masterpiece about the Golem of Prague.

The jump was a stunt, a last, desperate feat of escapistry designed not to kill himself but to find a way back into the world he had abandoned. In the aftermath, in the quiet of a Long Island kitchen, the broken pieces of their lives were laid bare. The Escapist was gone, a casualty of a lawsuit and changing tastes. But Joe Kavalier had a fortune sitting in a bank, money that had been meant to ransom a family but could now, perhaps, rescue a dream. He used it to buy Empire Comics, the company that had cheated them. In a small office, surrounded by the ghosts of their past and the blueprints for a new future, the partnership was renewed. The sign on the door, in a neat black rectangle, once again read KAVALIER & CLAY.