The Golem and the Jinni

  “This is your palace,” she said, realizing. “It’s beautiful.”

  “Thank you.”

  “But why bring me here? I thought that the jinn feared humans.”

  He smiled. “We do, but only because we’re taught to.”

  “We’re taught to fear you as well,” said Fadwa. “We aren’t supposed to whistle after dark, because it might attract you. We pin iron amulets on our clothes, and tie iron beads painted blue around babies’ necks, for protection.”

  “Why blue?” he asked, puzzled.

  She thought. “I’m not sure. Are you afraid of blue?”

  He laughed. “No. It’s a good enough color. Iron, though”—and he bowed to her, a dip of the head—“that I do fear.”

  She smiled, amused at his double meaning, for the word for iron was hadid.

  Her host—her guest?—was watching her. “Tell me about yourself,” he said. “What is your life like? How do you spend your days?”

  The intensity of his gaze flustered her. “You should ask my father, or one of my uncles,” she said. “Their lives are much more interesting.”

  “Perhaps someday I will,” he said. “But now, everything is interesting to me. All is new. So, please. Tell me.”

  He seemed sincere. The soothing glow of moonlight, the delicious warmth of her other, sleeping body, a handsome man’s gratifying attention—all conspired to put her at ease. She relaxed onto her cushion and said, “I wake early in the morning, before the sunrise. The men leave to tend the sheep, and my aunts and I milk the goats. With the milk we make cheese, and yogurt. I spend the day weaving, and mending clothing, and baking bread. I fetch water and collect firewood. I watch out for my brothers and my cousins, and bathe and dress them, and make sure they don’t get into trouble. I help my mother cook the evening meal, and serve it when the men return.”

  “So much activity! And how often do you do these things?”

  “Every day,” she said.

  “Every day? Then you never simply go about, and see the desert?”

  “Of course not!” she said, surprised by his ignorance. “The women must take care of the home, while the men are busy with the sheep and the goats. Although,” she said with a hint of pride, “my father does let me tend a few goats, from time to time, when the weather is good. And sometimes we women must do men’s work as well as our own. If a tent collapses in the wind, a woman’s arms will lift it the same as a man’s. And when we move our encampment, then all must work together.”

  She paused. Far away, that other body, her sleeping self, was stirring. In the distance she heard the sounds of the morning: a child’s yawn, footsteps, a baby mewling with hunger. The glass walls of the palace were growing dim and distant.

  “It seems I must go,” the man said. “But will you speak to me again?”

  “Yes,” she said, without hesitation. “When?”

  “Soon,” he said. “Now, wake.”

  He bent over her, and his lips brushed her forehead. She felt it, somehow, in both waking and sleeping selves; and a thrill ran through her, down to her bones.

  Then she was awake, staring up at the familiar walls of her tent, which were billowing in a breeze that felt strangely warm for a spring morning.

  The details of the dream soon faded, as all dreams must. But certain things remained clear. Her father’s face as he glimpsed the impossible palace. The way the moonlight had picked out the angles and hollows of the man’s face. The searing touch of his lips on her skin. And his promise, that he would come again.

  If, that day, Fadwa smiled to herself more than usual—the way a girl might if she were thinking on a secret—then her mother did not notice.

  10.

  Damp winds blew through the forest outside the city of Konin. In his dilapidated shack, Yehudah Schaalman sat in a half-rotted armchair, an old blanket about his shoulders. Dead leaves and scraps of paper skittered across the dirt floor. The fire in the hearth guttered and spat, and Schaalman found himself wondering: what was the weather like in New York? Were Otto Rotfeld and his golem sitting by their own fire, blissfully whiling away the hours? Or had the furniture maker already tired of his clay wife and destroyed her?

  He caught himself, and scowled. Why this unending preoccupation with Rotfeld? Usually he spared no second thought for his customers and their illicit acts. He took their money, gave them what they wanted, and slammed the door in their faces. What made this one so different?

  Perhaps it was the golem. He’d worked hard on that creature, much harder than he usually did for someone else’s benefit. It had been a pleasing puzzle, to bring Rotfeld’s disparate requests together in one creation, and he’d regretted that he wouldn’t see it brought to life. Though likely that was for the best, given the unpredictable nature of golems in general. Far safer to be on the other side of the ocean, and not with Rotfeld when he reached New York and woke his bride.

  Scowling again, he resisted the urge to shake his head like a dog. He had no time for this. Rotfeld’s money was nearly gone, and even with all his studies he was still no closer to his quarry, the secret of unending life.

  Beneath the straw-stuffed bed in one corner of the shack was a locked chest, and inside that chest was the sheaf of papers he’d taken from a burnt synagogue, long ago. The brittle fragments were now interleaved with fresh pages on which Schaalman had written formulas, diagrams, observations, trying to fill in the gaps in his knowledge. It was both a chronicle of his studies and a diary of his travels. After that day in the synagogue, he’d wandered from town to town, shtetl to shtetl, through the Kingdom of Prussia to the Austrian Empire to Russia and back, searching for the missing pieces. In Kraków he had sought out a woman rumored to be a witch, stolen her knowledge, and turned her mute to keep her from cursing him. One spring he’d been chased from a Russian village after every pregnant ewe within three leagues gave birth to a two-headed lamb. Someone had thought to accuse the strange Jew of witchcraft—rightly, as it happened, though in their zeal they’d also chased out a harmless old midwife and the village idiot. In Lvov he’d visited an old rabbi on his deathbed, and taken on the guise of one of the shedim, the demon-children of Lilith, escaped from Gehenna to torture him. In this way he forced the terrified rabbi to reveal that he’d once seen a formula for something called the Water of Life. But when Schaalman pressed him for more, the old rabbi’s heart had burst. Schaalman watched the rabbi’s soul pass beyond his reach, and he’d howled with anger and frustration, looking even more like a demon from Gehenna than before.

  After that he’d mostly ceased his wanderings, and settled close to Konin. He was growing too old; the roads were full of dangers, and he couldn’t dodge them all. But always, always, every day, he drew closer to the death he was desperate to avoid.

  Staring into the fire, he made his decision. He couldn’t afford to spend the winter brooding over an ill-mannered furniture maker. Best to scratch the itch, and be done with it.

  He stood and put on an ancient overcoat, wincing as his bones creaked. From his workbench he fetched a wide basin and went outside. An unseasonable snow had fallen in the night. Kneeling, he scraped heaping handfuls of snow into the basin. Returning to his shack, Schaalman placed the basin near the hearth and watched as the snow slumped and melted. He wished it hadn’t come to this. When the last crystals disappeared, Schaalman pulled the water-filled basin from the hearth. He fetched the broken book from its chest and leafed through the relevant pages, checking that he had remembered the formula correctly. From a leather purse he took one of the coins with which Rotfeld had paid him. Then he sat cross-legged on the dirt floor, in front of the basin of water. Gripping the coin tightly in his left hand, he muttered a long incantation. With his right hand he carefully picked up the basin. Another incantation, a deep breath—and then he leaned back and tipped the basin over his head.

  The shock of frigid water on his face—

  And then he was gone, he was elsewhere.

  There was an immense
weight on his chest. An eternity of water lay above him, pushing down, breaking his body and grinding his bones. He had never been so cold. He felt the nibblings of a thousand tiny teeth. A sucking blackness stretched in every direction.

  The corner of his mind that was still Schaalman realized that Rotfeld had never even made it to America. All that toil, and for nothing. Unwoken, the Golem would have fallen apart by now, an unclaimed wooden crate filled with moldering earth and a soiled dress. A pity.

  And then, unexpectedly, the scene changed.

  The weight above him was gone. He was no longer buried beneath the ocean but flying above it, moving low and fast, faster than any bird. Shifting water disappeared behind him, mile after mile. The wind roared in his ears.

  In the distance a city grew.

  He rose higher as he approached until he was floating far above it. The city was spread across a hemmed-in island. Towers and church spires pointed up at him like lances.

  He stared down at the narrow streets and saw that this city was also a labyrinth. And like all labyrinths, it hid something precious at its heart. What did it hide?

  A voiceless voice whispered the answer.

  Life unending.

  Schaalman surfaced, coughing. The basin lay upside down on the floor. Freezing water dripped from his face and clothes. His left fist burned: the coin had turned colder than ice.

  For the rest of the day he lay huddled and shivering on his bed, wrapped in every blanket and rug he owned. His joints ached and his frostbitten palm sent jolts of fire up his arm. But he was calm, and his mind was clear.

  The next morning he rose from his bed, ran his fingers through his beard, and went into town to buy a steamship ticket for New York.

  On a cold and wet autumn morning, Michael Levy arrived at the Sheltering House to find the stoop plastered with flyers printed in Yiddish from a group calling itself the “Jewish Members of the Republican State Committee.” The fliers urged all self-respecting Jews to cast their lot with Colonel Roosevelt for governor. After all, Roosevelt had recently trounced the Spanish at San Juan Hill—and had not the Jews once been robbed and cast out by Spain, and hounded by its Inquisitors? Vote to express your approval of Spain’s defeat! the flyer cried. Michael peeled them from the rough stone as he passed, and squeezed out the water before tossing them in his office wastebasket. Synagogue advertisements he could abide, but not shameless vote-mongering from Republican elites.

  It had been a difficult autumn for Michael. He’d stretched the Sheltering House budget to its breaking point and still did not know how they would make it through the year. The price of coal climbed ever higher; the roof was leaking, and the top-floor ceiling was damp with mold. Worst of all, a young Russian man named Gribov had recently gone to sleep in a second-floor bed and failed to wake up. Michael had called in the Health Department, and the Sheltering House was threatened with two weeks of quarantine. In the end, the inspector, who’d glanced over the immigrant’s body with clinical distaste, decided against it—there were no signs of typhus or cholera, and no one could recall the man complaining of anything. But for the next week the House’s mood was tense and somber, and Michael barely slept for worry. It seemed to him that the entire enterprise was hanging by a thread.

  His friends took in the new hollows under his eyes and told him he was working himself into an early grave. His uncle might have counseled him similarly, but Michael hadn’t seen him in some time, not since he’d visited with the woman named Chava. He wondered vaguely if he should be worried. Was his uncle ill? Or was it something else? Michael’s thoughts trailed back to the tall woman and her box of pastries, and the fond and protective way his uncle had looked at her. Could she . . . ? And he . . . ? But no, it seemed too ridiculous. He shook his head and resolved to check in on his uncle soon.

  But one thing led to another, and the top-floor ceiling threatened to crumble, and Michael’s attention was pulled elsewhere. And then, one morning, the Sheltering House cook came into Michael’s office and placed a box of almond macaroons on his desk.

  “The new girl at the bakery said to give these to you,” she said, plainly amused. “For free, if you can believe. She found out I was from the Sheltering House and insisted.”

  The new girl? After a moment he realized, and smiled. The cook’s eyebrow went up.

  “A tall woman?” he asked, and the cook nodded. “She’s a friend of my uncle’s. I was the one who suggested she go to Radzin for a job. Most likely she meant these as a thank-you.”

  “Oh, most likely,” she replied airily.

  “Dora, I only met her once. And she’s a widow. A recent one.”

  The cook shook her head at his naïveté, and plucked a cookie from the box as she left.

  He lifted a macaroon in his palm. It was thick and slightly domed, but felt light as air. The top was decorated with almond slivers, arranged in a circle like flower petals. He popped it in his mouth, and felt happy for the first time in weeks.

  Slowly the Golem grew more accustomed to the bakery and its rhythms. Her turns at the register were no longer so frightening. She was beginning to learn which customers bought the same thing every day, and which of them appreciated it when she made up their order in advance. She smiled at all of them, even when she didn’t feel like it. Led by a hundred little prompts, she very carefully tried to give each of them exactly what they wanted from her. And when she was successful, they would step away from the register with a lighter heart, glad that at least one thing, this one simple errand, had gone right that day.

  There were still problems to solve. She tended to work too quickly, and the customers would grow anxious or irritated, thinking that she was rushing them: and so she trained herself to slow down, and ask after their health and their families, even when the line was long. She even learned to deal with those customers who were perpetually indecisive, who stood at the counter debating the merits of this or that. The breakthrough came when one day, a woman told her to simply choose for her, from what she herself liked best. But the Golem had no particular favorites: she had tried all the pastries, and could distinguish one from another, but for her there was no like or dislike. Each was merely a different experience. She thought of choosing at random—but then, in a moment of inspiration, she did what she rarely allowed herself to do. She focused on the woman, and sifted through the tangle of her conflicting desires. Something economical would be best, but she also wanted something sweet . . . she had been feeling so low this week, what with the landlord raising the rent and then that awful argument with her Sammy, so didn’t she deserve something nice for herself? But then it would be gone, and she would feel no better, only poorer . . .

  “I like the raisin challah on days like this,” the Golem said. “It’s sweet, but it’s filling. And one challah lasts a long time.”

  At once the woman beamed. “That’s it,” she said. “That’s exactly what I wanted.” And she paid for the challah and left, her spirits lifted.

  Happy with her success, the Golem tried this technique on other indecisive customers. She was right more often than not, and tried not to take her failures personally. She was coming to realize that some people, for whatever reason, would never be satisfied.

  She still made mistakes on occasion, especially at the end of the day when a mental fatigue would set in, and her thoughts would drift. She’d reach for the wrong thing, or call someone by the wrong name, or make some other silly little error. Once in a while a customer would walk out with the wrong order, and then come back to complain. She would apologize profusely, horrified by her poor performance—but it was just as well, for otherwise her employers might have thought her too good to be true. Mr. Radzin was a meticulous accountant, and he had been over the figures repeatedly. There was no question: sales were up, and for no good reason, while on the other side of the ledger his costs were shrinking. Intuition told him it had to do with the new girl. She might make a mistake or two at the register, but she never misread a recipe, or added t
he salt twice by accident, or left a sheet of cookies too long in the oven. She was never sick, never slow, never late. She was a miracle of productivity.

  Though there were also times when she acted as though she was from another world. One morning Mrs. Radzin caught her peering oddly at an egg. “What’s wrong with it, Chavaleh? Is it bad?”

  Still staring at the egg, the girl had absentmindedly replied, “Nothing—it’s only, how do they make them the exact same size and shape, every time?”

  Mrs. Radzin frowned. “How do who, dear? The chickens?”

  At her table, Anna gave a snort of laughter.

  The girl carefully put down the egg and said, “Excuse me,” and disappeared into the back.

  “Don’t tease, Anna,” scolded Mrs. Radzin.

  “But what an odd question!”

  “Have some compassion, she’s a widow in mourning. It does strange things to the mind.”

  Ignoring the women, Radzin went into the back for more flour. The door to the water closet was closed. He listened for the sounds of crying—but what he heard instead was her voice, in a whisper: “You must be more careful. You must be more careful.” He fetched the flour and left. A few minutes later she emerged from the back as though nothing had happened, and went to her silent work, ignoring Anna’s periodic giggles.

  “What do you suppose is wrong with her?” Radzin asked his wife that night.

  “There’s nothing the matter with Chava,” she snapped.

  “I have eyes, Thea, and so do you. She’s different, somehow.”

  They were in bed together. Next to the wall, Abie and Selma lay curled on their pallets, sunk in the bone-deep sleep of the young.

  “I knew a boy, growing up,” Thea said. “He couldn’t stop counting things. Blades of grass, bricks on a wall. The other boys would gather round and yell numbers at him, because if he lost his place he had to start all over again. He would just stand there counting, with tears rolling down his face. It made me so angry. I asked my father why he couldn’t stop, and he told me there was a demon in the boy’s mind. He said I should stay away, in case he did something dangerous.”