The Golem and the Jinni
“Here,” the girl said, and handed her another square of folded paper, one whose dimensions the Golem knew by heart. He’d stolen it from her? And he’d crossed paths with Joseph Schall, as well? She had the disorienting sense of important events happening elsewhere while her back was turned.
She replaced the square of folded paper in her locket, and then read the Jinni’s message again, trying to make sense of it. This time she saw what she’d missed in her confusion: the underlying notes of desperation and resolve. He was not simply leaving town. “Oh God,” she said, aghast. “Anna, did he say what he was planning?”
“He wouldn’t tell me. But, Chava, he looked terrible. Like he was going to do something awful.”
To himself? she wanted to ask, but didn’t need to; Anna’s mind had provided the answer, in fearful visions of ropes and guns and bottles of laudanum. No, she couldn’t believe he would do such a thing—but was that why he’d returned the paper, because he’d chosen an action he’d once denied her? A breath of panic touched her. The Jinni’s veiled mind would’ve told her no more than the note—but could she not guess? It would not be poison, or a rope or a gun. It would be water.
“Which direction did he go? Was it east, toward the river?” But Anna just shook her head, baffled. It might already be too late—
The burnt pages were calling to her from inside their flour sack. Hadn’t there been a formula titled To Locate a Person’s Whereabouts? Surely she could risk using Schall’s magic, just this once! She grabbed the flour sack, was about to spill its contents onto the floor—and then stopped. Wait, she told herself. Think. The Jinni would never choose the East River docks, or the oil-stained waters of the bay, or anywhere else so inelegant. She didn’t need forbidden diagrams or formulae to tell her his destination. She knew; she knew him.
But what about the pages? She couldn’t leave them at the bakery; she needed to hide them from Schall, somewhere he’d never go. Pressing the sack into Anna’s arms, she said, “Take this, and hide it somewhere no one would think to look. A place only you know about. No, don’t tell me where, don’t even think it.”
“What? Chava, do you know how hard it is not to think about something—”
“Just don’t! Don’t look at it, and don’t tell a soul, do you understand?”
“I don’t understand any of this,” the girl said, plaintive.
“Promise me!”
“All right, I promise, if it’s that important.”
“It is,” the Golem said, relieved. “Thank you, Anna.” And then she ran: out the back door and up the fire escape to the roof, chasing after the Jinni as fast as she could.
The Jinni caught Saleh as he fell and carried him to a nearby bench: merely another vagrant, sleeping away the morning. He made certain the man was still breathing and then walked on, descending the stairway to the arched and columned darkness of the arcade. His steps echoed off the tiled walls, and then he was out in the sunlight again, crossing the terrace’s broad expanse of red brick, coming to the fountain’s rim.
The Angel of the Waters gazed down at him, patient, waiting.
The terrace was all but deserted; only a few men could be seen hurrying home after their dubious nighttime activities, using the Park as a shortcut. Hat brims low over their faces, they walked with that hunched defiance against sleep that the Golem had once remarked on. They would not pose a problem.
The fountain stood quiet, its dancing jets silenced. There was little noise at all save for the lapping of the water. He had the strange impulse to take off his shoes, and so he did, lining them up next to the fountain’s edge. For a moment he thought to run back to Saleh and wake him, to tell him that yes, there were many people who deserved apologies—Arbeely for one, and young Matthew, and Sam Hosseini for not finishing his necklaces. But time was passing, and it would be one indulgence too many. Besides, he’d taken care of the most important apology when he’d knocked on Anna’s door.
He looked up at the Angel again, at her face full of compassionate concern. There was a resemblance, he decided: the plain yet pleasing features, the set of her lips, the wave of her hair. It gave some comfort, at least.
He stepped over the rim’s edge into the low pool, shivering at the water’s touch, at the numb languor that crept up his legs. Then, without further thought or gesture, he bent and slipped himself beneath the surface, to lie in the shallows of the fountain, his body cradled in its bowl.
The Golem ran.
More than sixty city blocks lay between her and her destination, and already the sun was crowning over the East River. A few hours earlier, she could’ve raced in the dark, silent and anonymous. In daylight she would be noticed, remarked upon.
The Golem found she did not care.
She ran, rooftop to rooftop, through the old Germantown tenements, the East River hard on her right. Waking men squinted at her approach; she heard their cries of surprise as she ignored the narrow plank bridges and vaulted over the alleyways below. She dodged chimneys, clotheslines, and water towers, and counted the blocks. Nine, ten, eleven, twelve.
Time slowed as she pushed herself. Twenty, twenty-one, twenty-two. Union Square fell behind her, then Madison Square Park. Where would he be by now? Fifty-ninth Street? On the carriage path? Was it already too late? She ran faster, trying to keep focus: one misstep at this speed would spell ruin. The wind was a high thin cry in her ears. Children stared from upper windows, and would later tell their friends they’d seen a lady outrun the Elevated. Thirty-eight blocks. Thirty-nine. Forty.
At last she could see the park, a distant square of green flashing between the buildings. She clattered down a fire escape, startling sleepers on the landings. And then she was running across the avenues, a plain-dressed woman who dodged the morning traffic like a fish navigating a shoal. A trolley rushed around a corner, and at the last moment she darted past it, ignoring the incredulous fears of the riders who’d seen her coming at them like a cannonball.
She was across Fifty-ninth; she was inside the park. She raced up the carriage drive and then the broad, tree-lined path, feeling the growing things all around her, adding their energy to her speed. Ahead of her, a man in threadbare clothes staggered upright from one of the benches, pressing a careful hand to his head. He straightened, blinking a newly bruised eye, and gaped as she ran past.
Down the stairs, through the arcade, and across the terrace: and even before she was at the fountain she could see him there, curled like a sleeping child beneath the water.
“Ahmad!” She jumped the edge of the fountain and plunged in, hooked her arms about him and dragged him back over the side. Water sluiced from his clothing as she laid him on the brick. He was cold, and pale as smoke, and so horribly light in her arms, as though his substance had evaporated. Frantically she tried to dry him, but there was nothing to hand—only her own clothes, already sopping wet.
“Ahmad! You have to wake up!”
There was a man at her side, gripping her arm.
“Leave me alone!” she cried, shrugging him away.
“I’m trying to help you!” came the shouted reply, in Arabic.
Saleh’s head was pounding.
He winced, scolding himself for not realizing the Jinni would try something like this. Had he thought to simply talk him out of whatever plan he’d concocted? And why, for heaven’s sake, was he helping a strange woman save the creature, instead of simply turning around and going home?
Surprisingly, the woman seemed to understand Arabic. She’d moved aside and was now watching with obvious panic as Saleh cupped the Jinni’s chin in his hand, turning his head this way and that. He wondered who she was, how she’d known where to find them. Leave it, his mind whispered as he examined the too-pale face, felt the chest for a hint of warmth. Just let the troublesome creature die.
“Who are you?” asked the woman.
“Doctor Mahmoud Saleh,” he muttered and pried open one of the Jinni’s eyes. There: a spark. Bare and faltering, but undeniable.
“He’s still alive,” he said. The woman cried out in relief. “Not just yet,” he told her. “He’s nearly gone.”
“He needs warmth,” the woman said. “A fire.” She began a frenzied search of the horizon, as though she might find a handy blaze nearby.
Warmth, fire. A memory came to Saleh, tinged with ghostly colors. He saw a frost-covered garden, a gigantic mansion of stone set with innumerable gables—and, resting above them, four chimneys that puffed gray-white smoke into the winter sky.
I’d appreciate it if you called on Sophia Winston and conveyed my apologies.
“I know a place,” he said. “But we’d have to carry him.”
At this the woman scooped the Jinni into her arms, so easily he might have been a sheaf of wheat—and Saleh began to suspect that he was dealing with not one troublesome creature, but two.
“Doctor Saleh,” she said. “How quickly can you run?”
27.
On the edge of Chinatown, in a holding cell of the city’s Fifth Precinct House, an old man lay motionless, sprawled on the soiled floor.
The officer on duty squinted through the bars as he made his rounds. The old man had been brought in unconscious a few hours before, and he still hadn’t stirred. Tiny glass shards powdered his face; his beard and pate were scabbed with blood. Filthy anarchist, the lieutenant who’d dragged him in had said, planting a boot in his ribs. But he didn’t look like an anarchist. He looked like someone’s grandfather.
Various cell mates had come and gone over the hours. A few had tried to pick the old man’s pockets but found nothing worth the trouble. Now he lay alone, the last loose end of the overnight shift.
The officer unlocked the cell door and opened it, leaning on the hinges to make them sing. Still the old man didn’t move. The light was dim, but as he approached, the officer could make out the rapid rolling of his lidded eyes, the clench of his jaw. His fingers were twitching in rhythmic spasms. Was he having a seizure? The officer took the nightstick from his belt, leaned down, and prodded one shoulder.
A hand shot up and grabbed his wrist.
The human mind is not meant to house a thousand years of memories.
At the moment of contact with the Jinni, the man who’d known himself as Yehudah Schaalman had burst apart at the seams. He became a miniature Babel, his skull crowding with his many lifetimes’ worth of thoughts, in dozens of warring languages. Faces flashed before him: a hundred different divinities, male and female, animal gods and forest spirits, their features a blurred jumble. He saw precious gilded icons and crude carved busts, holy names written in ink, in blood, in stones and colored sand. He looked down, saw that he was clothed in velvet robes and carried a silver censer; he wore nothing but chalk, and his hands were clutching chicken bones.
The facts of Schaalman’s life began to break apart. His yeshiva friends came to class in silks and soft slippers, mixed their inks in bowls of jade. A prison guard stood above him in a monk’s robe and hood, wielding a knotted scourge. The baker’s daughter turned dusky and black-eyed, her cries like the rolling of an unseen ocean.
His father lifted him from a wooden cradle. On the man’s wrist was an iron cuff, tightly fitted. His mother took him in her arms, put him to a breast of clay.
Yehudah Schaalman thrashed in the current, choked, and went under.
In a moment it would be over, but still he fought. Blindly he reached out—and his fingers closed on a memory that was his and his alone.
He was nineteen again, and dreaming. There was a path, a door, a sunny meadow, a grove of trees in the distance. He took a step, was seized, and held. A voice spoke.
You do not belong here.
The old rage and grief rekindled, as fresh and painful as they had ever been, and turned to a burning lifeline in his fist. He broke the surface, and gasped.
Inch by agonizing inch he battled the current, setting his memories to rights. The silks and slippers fell from his classmates, the robes from the prison guard. The baker’s daughter regained her sallow skin and hazel eyes. He reached his own first memory and kept going—back to the self before him, and then the one before that. He traveled each life from death to birth, watching himself worship gods and idols of every stripe. In each life his terror of judgment was all-consuming, and his belief absolute. For how could it be otherwise when each faith gave him such powers, allowing him to conjure illusions, scry futures, hurl curses? His own singed and stolen book, the source of all his wonders and horrors: never once had he doubted that it was the knowledge of the Almighty, the One before whom all others were mere graven images. Did its efficacy not prove that the Almighty was the supreme truth, the only truth? But now he saw that truths were as innumerable as falsehoods—that for sheer teeming chaos, the world of man could only be matched by the world of the divine. And as he traveled backward the Almighty shrank smaller and smaller, until He was merely another desert deity, and His commandments seemed no more than the fearful demands of a jealous lover. And yet Schaalman had spent his entire life in terror of Him, dreading His judgment in the World to Come—a world that he would never see!
The further back he went, the greater his anger grew, as he watched all his previous selves toiling in their frightened and fervent delusions. Faster and faster his lives rewound—until at last he reached the source, the mouth of the torrent, where there sat an ancient, filthy pagan named Wahab ibn Malik al-Hadid.
The two men regarded each other across the centuries.
I know you, said ibn Malik. I’ve seen your face.
You dreamed of me, said Schaalman. You saw me in a shining city that rose from the water’s edge.
Who are you?
I am Yehudah Schaalman, the last of your lives. I am the one who will set things right for all my lives to come.
Your lives?
Yes, mine. You were merely the beginning. You bound yourself to the Jinni without realizing the consequences, and your selves died time and again, never the wiser. I was the one to learn the secret.
Much good it will do, ibn Malik said, when you die in your turn and the secret is lost.
I will find a way, said Schaalman.
Perhaps, perhaps not. And the Jinni, what of him? His kind are long-lived, but not immortal. When he dies, we die as well.
Then he must refrain from dying.
So you think to recapture him? Be certain this is not beyond your limits.
As it was yours?
The dead eyes narrowed. And what are you but myself, dressed in strange clothing and speaking another tongue?
I am the sum total of a thousand years of misery and striving! You may have given us this broken immortality, but I will be the first to die without fear!
Ibn Malik snarled in anger; but Schaalman was faster. A hand lashed out and caught ibn Malik around the throat.
You cost me any chance at happiness, Schaalman said.
Ibn Malik writhed around his fist. I gave you boundless knowledge instead.
A poor second, said Yehudah Schaalman, and squeezed.
The slop-bucket stench of the cell greeted Schaalman as he woke. His ribs felt bruised, and his face burned with tiny cuts. He tried to get up, but a man in a police uniform was collapsed on top of him. Black blood ran from the man’s ears; wisps of smoke rose from his torso. Schaalman realized he was holding the man’s wrist. He dropped it, and wrestled free.
The door to the cell stood open. Beyond it was a dank corridor, and then the precinct house. He whispered a few words and walked unseen past the handful of officers yawning at their posts. In a moment he was out the open door.
Quickly he walked toward Chinatown’s eastern border, and the Sheltering House beyond. His mind still ached with the press of memory, but the threat of dissolution had receded. For the moment his former selves lay quiet, as though waiting to see what he would do next.
It was only five-thirty, but already Sophia Winston was sitting alone at her family’s long dining table, finishing her tea and toast. For her first ninete
en years, Sophia had never been an early riser, preferring to languish in bed until her mother sent the maid in to wake and dress her. Now, however, she was awake and shivering before dawn. The poor maid was forced to wake even earlier, to build the fire in the dining room and ready her mistress’s breakfast. Then the fire had to be lit in her rooms as well—she would retire there after she ate—before the maid could finally return downstairs and fall back into bed.
Sophia had discovered she liked being awake this early, before the rest of the household. She preferred to be alone, reading her father’s travel journals, sipping her tea by the dining room’s roaring fireplace. The only unwelcome company was the portrait of herself as a Turkish princess, Charles’s engagement gift to her. The portrait had been something of a disaster. On the canvas she stood not stately but pensive in her costume, even melancholy, her gaze lowered. She looked less like a princess than an odalisque, captured and resigned. Poor Charles had looked stricken at its unveiling. He’d said little at the supper afterward, only watched her hand shake as she ate her soup. Her mother had ordered the portrait hung in the dining room, instead of the main hall, as though punishing it for failing to meet expectations.
She sipped her tea, and glanced at the clock. Her father liked to wake at six; he would be down soon after for the papers, and then her mother would follow him, to discuss the day’s schedule. Little George would evade his governess and run in, demanding morning kisses. As much as she liked her solitude, she appreciated the morning commotion. It was a brief but necessary reminder that they were actually a family.
She had almost finished her tea when she heard hurried footsteps in the front hall. She’d just had time to think that it was early for visitors, and that she had not heard the bell, when she heard a raised voice—it was one of the footmen—and then a woman’s answer, forceful and urgent. A shout; and then the dining room door burst open. An apparition filled the doorway. It was one of the tallest women Sophia had ever seen. In her arms she carried, somehow, a full-grown man.