and the sheer size of the rooms. The main hall of the old palace was big enough to hold a jousting contest with mounted knights in full armed regalia. Rabbi Gans told me that they did in fact hold jousts here until the 1570s, and that the huge entranceway on the far side of the hall had been purposely built with wide, flat steps so the knights could ride into the hall on horse back.
Next to the Riders’ Steps was the entrance to the Supreme Council chamber, whose four-columned portal, with twin columns on either side connected by a round arch over the doorway, looked exactly like the title pages of the Talmud and other rabbinic writings, which were themselves modeled on traditional descriptions of the main entrance of Solomon’s Temple. This resemblance to our ancient symbols of wisdom and justice gave me some hope.
A lackey dressed in the Italian style, with bright red velvet with gold accents, nodded curtly and told us, “The Obersthofmeister will be with you shortly.”
What the heck is an Obersthofmeister? I wondered. Somebody big, I guessed.
We shuffled around, stamping our feet and trying to keep warm, while the lackey reminded us for the third time not to be put off by Kaiser Rudolf’s manner, which many of his subjects perceived as cold and distant. And all I could think of was that it must be pretty bad when a German thinks you’re cold.
Eventually Obersthofmeister Wilhelm von Stein Tafelfrung Gruber appeared wearing a tight-fitting black doublet with matching hose and a silver badge of office pinned over his left breast, and graciously led us from the old hall through a string of galleries whose regal placidity was being turned upside-down by new construction projects. He swept us past an open balcony that provided a splendid vista of the royal city, spreading toward the horizon in every direction, and filled with the roughly 60,000 Christian subjects who outnumbered the inhabitants of the ghetto by at least twenty to one. We passed through the Wunderkammern, whose cabinets contained such oddities as a unicorn’s horn, a set of rusty nails from Noah’s Ark (though the Torah makes no mention of iron nails), and, from the collection of Emperor Charles IV, a couple of drops of the Virgin Mary’s breast milk (clearly another miraculous occurrence), and some spines from the original crown of thorns. I was disappointed that they didn’t have the original wine-stained tablecloth from the Last Supper, although the King of Hungary is said to have possessed a piece of it.
The curator of Emperor Rudolf’s collection was an Italian Jew named Strada, who was too busy admiring himself in a full-length mirror to acknowledge us as we passed through the art gallery. Rabbi Gans told me that the emperor had sired at least three children by Strada’s daughter Katharina, though he had yet to legitimize them.
The largest paintings in the Kunstkammer were pastoral landscapes crowded with fleshy gods and goddesses bearing trumpets, shields, and plumed helmets, when they were wearing anything at all, but I thought the most interesting works were the small-scale portrait of the emperor as a bowl of fruit and some pen-and-ink drawings of costumes for some kind of celebratory parade, illustrating the diverse ways of dressing up a man as a demon or disguising a horse as a three-headed dragon.
That gave me an idea about how we could transform an ordinary-looking creature into a frightful one, but we had to keep moving, for the clock was already striking. This particular clock featured a Turkish soldier with an oversized head who shifted his eyes from side to side and raised his curved scimitar every time the little bells chimed.
Then an odd chattering came spilling out of an adjoining gallery. It sounded like a group of men were fighting in there, but the Obersthofmeister informed me that it was only a troupe of English comedians rehearsing a play.
“Does the keyser speak English, too?” I asked.
The Obersthofmeister replied, “His Majesty has mastered five languages, in addition to Czech, with some knowledge of English as well.”
Since English is a cousin to German, which is itself a sister to Yiddish, I was able to recognize some of the words, and I wasn’t terribly reassured by what I heard. One of the main actors appeared to be representing a Jew, complete with a false nose and beard, who was bragging about how he liked to go about poisoning wells, double-crossing friends, and filling the jails with Christians bankrupted by his