The Golem and the Jinni

  Someone’s hands were on her shoulders, someone’s voice was in her ear. Other cries, now, not her own.

  Footsteps ran out into the hallway and down the stairs. She allowed herself to be pulled from his side and led to a chair. Someone had put a glass of water in her hand. And now neighbor women were walking in and out with quiet purpose, wiping away their tears and talking quietly, nodding and parting again. A man hurried in with a doctor’s leather bag; his dinner napkin was still tucked into his belt. He bent over the Rabbi, peeled back one eyelid, put his ear to the Rabbi’s chest. Then he shook his head. He sat back on his heels, all sense of urgency gone.

  A woman placed a sheet over the Rabbi. It billowed, catching the air, and then settled over his body. With another, she draped the mirror in the parlor.

  More murmuring. And now the women were casting glances at the Golem, their curiosity plain. Who was she? What had she been doing in the home of a widowed old rabbi? The Golem knew that soon they would work up the nerve to ask who she was. And she wouldn’t be able to lie to them. Not with the Rabbi lying there, underneath the sheet. She had to go. She felt their stares as she passed, imagined the whispers that would follow her. But she didn’t care. The dark thing was still rising inside her; she had to get home.

  Outside it was pitch-black, and the wind had picked up. It fought at her clothing and threatened to pull the hat from her head. She took it off, and carried it in one hand. Others paused to stare as she went by, a tall, pale woman in a dark dress and cloak who moved as if driven by some terrible force. One inebriated man saw a lone woman out for a nighttime stroll, and decided to ask after her company. The Golem saw him coming, noted the intent in his eyes and his mind, and thought about how easy it would be to knock him to the ground. She wouldn’t even have to break stride. But as she came closer, the man got a good look at her face, and stepped back, crossing himself. Later he’d tell his friends he’d seen the Angel of Death on Orchard Street, out collecting souls.

  Her room at the boardinghouse seemed even smaller than usual. She sat on the edge of her bed. She looked down, and saw her hands were full of dark shreds of felt and ribbon. What were they? Then she realized: it was her hat. She’d pulled it to pieces without noticing.

  She tossed the shreds of her hat on the floor, and took off her cloak. If she went through the motions of a usual night, perhaps it would calm her.

  She took her dress from the armoire, pulled her chair next to the window, and began to pick apart the stitches. But the passersby kept distracting her. They were the usual motley assortment of drunkards and giggling girls and workingmen, young couples out for secret strolls, the same fears and desires as ever; but now it struck her as obscene. They walked about as though nothing had happened! Didn’t they know that the Rabbi was dead? Had no one told them?

  Her hands were moving too quickly, and the scissors slipped. One blade tore the fabric, making a gash as long as her finger.

  The Golem cried out, and threw the dress to the floor. Her hands flew to her face. Moaning, she began to rock herself back and forth. The walls seemed to be drawing closer. She couldn’t stay there any longer. She needed to get out. She needed to move. Or else she’d lose control.

  Without hat or cloak or destination, the Golem fled from the boardinghouse. She walked without aim, paying little attention to her surroundings. The evening was chill now, with frost in the air. A near-full moon shone high above the gas lamps, turning their light yellow and sickly.

  She walked from street to street. The neighborhoods dissolved into each other, the languages changing on the storefronts. Oblivious she walked through Chinatown, barely noticing the red banners that flapped in the wind above her. The signs changed again, to yet another language, and still she kept on, walking her grief into submission.

  It was a long while before she began to feel calmer, before her thoughts became smoother, less fractured. She slowed, and then stopped, and looked around. A tenement street stretched out before her, with its walls of buildings to either side. The brick facades were dilapidated and filthy, and the air stank. She turned about: there was no familiar landmark, no river or bridge she could use to orient herself. She was, she realized, utterly lost.

  Cautiously she walked on. The following street seemed even less promising and ended in a small park, little more than a stretch of dead grass. She walked to its middle, trying to get her bearings. No fewer than six different streets intersected at the park’s edge. Should she go back the way she came? How would she ever get home?

  And then, down one of the streets, a strange light appeared, seeming to float in midair. She paused, alarmed. The light was coming her way. It grew closer, and she saw that it was not a light, but a face; and the face belonged to a man. He was tall, taller than she, and bareheaded. His dark hair was cropped close to his skull. His face—and his hands as well, she saw now—shone with that warm light, like a lamp shaded with gauze.

  She watched him come nearer, unable to take her eyes away. She saw him glance at her, and then look again. Then he too stopped. At that distance she could not feel his curiosity, but his expression made it plain. What, he was thinking, is she?

  The shock of it rooted her to the spot. Only the Rabbi had ever been able to see her as something different.

  She knew she should turn and run. Get away from this man, who by seeing her, truly seeing her, already knew too much. But she couldn’t. The rest of the world had fallen away. She had to know who he was. What he was.

  And so, as the man started his cautious approach, the Golem stood her ground, and waited.

  Until now, the Jinni’s evening had been rather disappointing.

  He’d taken advantage of the clear skies and gone out, but without much enthusiasm. Feeling uninspired, he’d planned to visit the aquarium again but found himself instead at City Hall Park, an unremarkable patchwork of lawn, broken to pieces by wide, intersecting concrete paths. From there, he’d made his way to the Park Row terminal shed, a long low building that stood on thick girders. He walked beneath it and looked up at the trains sleeping on their tracks, waiting to ferry the morning’s passengers across the Brooklyn Bridge.

  He hadn’t been to Brooklyn, and he didn’t want to go, not yet. He felt he needed to parcel out these new experiences carefully, to keep from running out. He had a fleeting image of himself, ten, twenty, thirty years hence, wandering in ever-widening circles, exhausting every source of distraction. He rubbed at the iron at his wrist, then noticed what he was doing and stopped. He would not, would not, succumb to self-pity.

  He wandered northeast along Park Row and realized he was nearing the Bowery. He had no wish to go back again so soon, so he took a random turning, and landed on a street lined with squalid-looking tenements. This, he thought, was no better.

  The buildings on either side narrowed to wedges ahead of a large intersection, a cracked wasteland of pavement. Beyond lay a narrow, hemmed-in park. There was a woman standing alone at its center.

  At first he only saw that she was a respectable-looking woman, out by herself in the dead of the night. Such a thing was odd, if explainable. But she wore no hat or cloak, merely a shirtwaist and skirt. And why was she staring at him, tracking his every move? Was she deranged, or merely lost?

  He reached the middle of the intersection, and glanced at her again, unsettled; and saw that she was not human, but a living piece of earth.

  He stopped cold. What was she?

  Now he, too, was staring. Hesitantly he walked forward onto the grass. When he was a few feet from her she stiffened, and made to draw back. Immediately he stopped. The air around her held a breath of mist, and the scent of something dark and rich.

  “What are you?” he asked.

  She said nothing, gave no indication she’d understood. He tried again: “You’re not human. You’re made of earth.”

  At last she spoke. “And you’re made of fire,” she said.

  The shock of it hit him square in the chest, and on its heels an int
ense fear. He took a step backward. “How,” he said, “did you know that?”

  “Your face glows. As if lit from within. Can no one else see it?”

  “No,” he said. “No one else.”

  “But you can see me as well,” she said.

  “Yes.” He tilted his head, trying to puzzle it out. Looked at in one way, she was merely a woman, tall and dark-haired. And then his vision shifted somehow, and he saw her features carved in clay. He said, “My kind can see all creatures’ true natures, it’s how we know each other when we meet, in whatever shape we may be wearing. But I’ve never seen . . .”

  He reached out, unthinking, to touch her face. She nearly leapt backward.

  “I shouldn’t be here,” she gasped. She glanced wildly around, as if seeing where she was for the first time.

  “Wait! What’s your name?” he asked; but she shook her head and began to back away like a frightened animal.

  “If you won’t tell me your name, then I will tell you mine!” Good: that had stopped her, at least for the moment. “I’m called Ahmad, though that’s not my true name. I am a jinni. I was born a thousand years ago, in a desert halfway across the world. I came here by accident, trapped in an oil flask. I live on Washington Street, west of here, near a tinsmith’s shop. Until this moment, only one other person in New York knew my true nature.”

  It was as though he’d opened a floodgate. He had not realized until that moment how much he’d been longing to tell someone, anyone.

  Her face was the portrait of a struggle, some inner war. Finally she said, “My name is Chava.”

  “Chava,” he repeated. “Chava, what are you?”

  “A golem,” she whispered. And then her eyes widened, and her hand flew to her mouth, as if she’d told the most dangerous secret in the world. She stumbled backward, turned to run; and he saw in her movements her enormous physical power, knew that she could easily bend one of Arbeely’s best plates in half.

  “Wait!” But she was running now, not looking back. She darted around a corner, and was gone.

  He stood alone on the grass, for a minute or two, waiting. And then he followed after her.

  She wasn’t very difficult to track. As he’d guessed, she was lost. She hesitated at corners, glancing up at the buildings and street signs. The neighborhood was a warren of slums, and more than once she crossed the street to avoid a man stumbling her way. The Jinni kept a good amount of distance between them but often had to duck quickly around a building when her confused path doubled back on itself.

  At last she found her bearings and began to walk with more certainty. She crossed the Bowery, and he followed her into a somewhat cleaner and more respectable-looking neighborhood. From behind a corner he watched her disappear into a thin house crammed between two enormous buildings. A light came on in one of the windows.

  Before she could look out and see him, he was walking away west, memorizing the streets as he went, the turnings and landmarks. He felt strangely buoyant, and more cheerful than he’d been in weeks. This woman, this—golem?—was a puzzle waiting to be solved, a mystery better than any mere distraction. He would not leave their next meeting to chance.

  In his dank cellar room, Mahmoud Saleh tossed and turned. This insomnia was a recent development. In summer, Saleh had been so exhausted at the end of each day that he’d barely had the strength to stagger back home. But now it was late autumn and the children had long since stopped buying ice cream. For weeks after the weather turned he’d churned the ice cream each morning and plodded the rainy streets, regardless of the lack of customers. He’d made no plan for survival, for he had no intention of living through the winter.

  But then the universe intervened again, in the form of Maryam Faddoul. She’d stopped him one morning in front of her coffeehouse to say that all the Syrian café and restaurant-owners, Maronite and Orthodox both, had decided to purchase ice cream from Saleh during the winter months, and then sell it to their own patrons.

  “It’ll be a novelty,” she said. “A taste of summer, to remind us it’ll come again.”

  Surely, he thought, they would rather eat something warm when it’s cold? But he knew logic would be useless, for it was clear that Maryam had organized the entire scheme. Most idealists lived in their own impossible worlds, sealed away from reality; Maryam, it seemed, effortlessly reached out from hers and drew others inside. Her unstudied goodness affected their judgment, even to the point of buying large quantities of ice cream in winter.

  Leave me alone, he felt like saying. Let me die in peace. But there was nothing he could do. She’d simply decided that an indigent, half-mad peddler would survive a killing winter if she wished it. He wanted to resent her, but all he felt was an irritated bemusement.

  Under this new scheme, Saleh spent much less time on his feet. He traveled from restaurant to restaurant, churning ice cream in exchange for handfuls of coins. And there was more charity as well: his neighbors had begun leaving him their own castoff clothing, folded in neat, anonymous stacks on the cellar stairs. He accepted it in the same half-resentful spirit as Maryam’s generosity. Some he wore, layer upon layer; others he stitched together haphazardly with a thick needle and twine, creating a sort of many-limbed blanket.

  But his body, used to punishing work, rebelled at this new warmth and ease. He would fall asleep at his usual hour and then wake in the dead of night, watching verminous shadows move in the corners. To keep them away from his pallet, he’d surrounded it with concentric circles of mousetraps and lines of powdered carbolic. The tiny room now looked like an infidel altar, with himself as the sacrifice.

  He shifted underneath his blanket, trying to find a more comfortable position. It was a particularly bad night. He’d lain there for hours, counting each beat of his stubborn heart. Finally he could stand it no longer. He rose, donned a torn overcoat, wrapped a scarf about his head, and went up to the street.

  The evening was crisp and clear, with a touch of frost on the windows. Even to his broken eyes, it was eerily beautiful. He inhaled the bracing air and blew out great clouds of steam. Perhaps he’d walk for a while, until he was tired.

  A glowing light appeared in the corner of Saleh’s eye. He squinted against it, trying to make it out. A man was walking down the street toward him. His face was made of fire.

  Saleh gaped. It was impossible! Why didn’t the man burn away? Wasn’t he in pain? He certainly didn’t look it: he wore a nonchalant look in his glowing eye, a half-smile on his lips.

  His eyes. His lips.

  Mahmoud Saleh’s knees nearly buckled with the realization that he was staring at the man’s face.

  The man passed within feet of him, taking him in with a quick distasteful glance. Half a block farther on, the man vaulted the steps of an unremarkable building—a building that Saleh passed every day!—and was gone.

  Shaking, Saleh crept back down to his cellar. Sleep wouldn’t come again to him that night. He had looked into a man’s face, and not suffered for it. A man, tall, with Arab features that glowed as though lit from within. He’d been the only real thing on a street full of shadows, and now the world seemed even more spectral for his absence.

  It was nearly dawn by the time the Golem returned to her boardinghouse. Her dress still lay on the floor, the torn fabric gaping like a scolding mouth.

  How, how could she have been so careless? She shouldn’t have been alone on the street! She shouldn’t have wandered so far from home! And when she saw the glowing man, she should have run away! She certainly shouldn’t have spoken to him, let alone told him her nature!

  It was the Rabbi’s death; it had made her weak. The glowing man had found her at the worst possible moment. And the force of his curiosity, his desire to know more about her, had overwhelmed what little self-possession she’d had left.

  She’d have to be stronger than that now. She could afford few mistakes. The Rabbi was gone. She had no one left to watch over her.

  The force of the loss hit her again. What
would she do? She had no one to talk to, nowhere to turn! What did people do when the ones they needed died? She lay curled on her bed, feeling as though part of her chest had been roughly scooped out, left raw and exposed.

  Finally she drew herself together and stood. It was time to leave for the bakery. The world hadn’t stopped, no matter how much she might wish it, and she couldn’t hide in her room. Feeling leaden, she put on her cloak, and heard something crackle in the pocket.

  It was the envelope. COMMANDS FOR THE GOLEM. She’d forgotten.

  She opened the flap, drew out a square of thick paper, torn roughly at its edges and folded twice. She opened the first fold. There a shaking hand had written:

  The first Command brings Life. The second Destroys.

  The second fold gaped open slightly, as though it could not wait to divulge its secrets. Through the gap she saw the shadow of Hebrew characters.

  Temptation roiled inside her like a fog.

  Quickly she folded the paper back up again, and stuffed it in the envelope. Then she put it in the drawer of her tiny desk. She paced for a few minutes, then grabbed it out of the desk, stuffed it between her mattress and the bed frame, and sat on top of it.

  Why had the Rabbi given her this? And what was she supposed to do with it?

  The docks at Danzig were thronged with travelers and their loved ones. The Baltika sat at the end of its dock, an immense, towering solidity ready to disappear into the morning haze.

  For Yehudah Schaalman, after so long in his hermit’s shack, the noise of the docks was unbearable. Gripping his small, battered suitcase, he tried to shoulder his way through the crowd. A warning blast from the ship’s horn made Schaalman jump nearly out of his skin. It was the largest thing he’d ever seen; he realized he was gaping at it like an imbecile.

  The crowds thinned, and he shuffled up the gangplank with the others. On deck, he watched the land pull away. The relatives waving farewell on the docks dwindled and disappeared. The haze thickened, and the shoreline of Europe became a thin smudge of brown. Soon even the smudge vanished, swallowed by mist and ocean. And Schaalman found he could not account for the tears that ran in rivers down his face.