The Golem and the Jinni

  “Nothing is wrong,” he snapped and turned away. In truth, he was in some difficulty. His past lives were beginning to stir. It was the fault of that Arabic phrase he’d spoken: to retrieve it, he’d rifled too hastily through ibn Malik’s memories, and the disturbance had reverberated through all the lives in between. He would need to settle them again, after the Jinni was safely bottled. He looked around. Where was the flask?

  There was the noise of running footsteps. He turned, startled, to see a familiar man grab the flask from the floor. But before Schaalman could even speak, the Golem had leapt past him. A single blow, and the man crumpled.

  It was the vagrant from the Jinni’s building. “Idiot,” Schaalman snarled. The Golem grabbed the man by the neck, and Schaalman flinched to see that her eyes were lit once more with joy. He cared little if the man died, but she was on the verge of running amok. Would he have to destroy her?

  He closed his eyes, trying to concentrate against the din in his head. The bindings between himself and his two servants were tangling with each other, weaving in and out of his loosed lives. The Golem paused in her assault, confused. The Jinni spasmed on the floor as Schaalman’s control wavered.

  The memories surged, pulling Schaalman under, dragging him back and back—

  In the glass palace, ibn Malik kneeled above him, blood pumping from the wound in his stomach. Schaalman looked down at himself, and saw the same wound tear itself across his own body, opening like a mouth.

  Take your immortality, ibn Malik said, with my blessing. He bared his teeth, a red-stained grin.

  And then Schaalman was in the dance hall, grasping for the shreds of his control. The Jinni had wrestled the Golem to the ground, pinned her arms. Schaalman reeled and saw Saleh crouched on the floor, saw the flask shining in his hands. He tried to shout to his servants—no, stop him—but his voice was drowned away as every one of his former selves rose up in a jeering chorus, saying, you have been undone as we were, conquered by your own folly.

  Saleh faced Schaalman and spoke the words.

  With a searing light, the metal came alive. Saleh staggered and fell, his hands still clamped about the flask, feeling it draw the life from him as Schaalman’s form began to diminish and disappear. He gave it every ounce that he could, only hoping it would be enough. And as the last of Saleh’s strength drained away, he thought he could hear a long and agonized shriek, the sound of a thousand years of thwarted anger, as the copper prison embraced its new inmate.

  Epilogue

  On a crisp and blue-skied September morning, the French steamship Gallia left New York Harbor bound for Marseille, with twelve hundred passengers crowded into steerage. At Marseille many of them would disperse to smaller ships, bound for the ports of Europe and beyond—to Genoa and Lisbon, Cape Town, Cairo and Tangiers. Their reasons for the journey were as varied as their destinations: to conduct business, to bid farewell to a dying parent, to bring back a new bride to the New World. They were nervous for the homecoming ahead, anticipating the changes in their loved ones’ faces, and the changes they’d see mirrored there in themselves.

  In one of the steerage bunks lay a man listed on the manifest as one Ahmad al-Hadid. He had boarded with little luggage of his own, only a small valise. He was accompanied by a child of perhaps seven or eight years. Something about the duo suggested that they were not father and son—perhaps it was the formal, gingerly way the man talked with the boy, as though he was not yet certain of his role. But the boy seemed happy enough by his side, and took the man’s hand as they approached the gangplank.

  The man would not be parted from his valise, nor let anyone else touch it, and once aboard kept it beneath his bunk. On the rare occasions when he opened it, to fetch a clean shirt or to check the steamship schedule to Beirut, one could glimpse a sheaf of old papers, and the round, copper belly of what looked like an ordinary oil flask.

  It was a cold, storm-wracked voyage. The man stayed in the cramped bunk night and day, wrapped in blankets against the damp, trying not to think about the endless water beyond the hull. The boy slept in the bunk next to his. In the daytime the boy sat by the man, and played with the collection of small metal figurines, cleverly made, that had gained him the envy of every other child in steerage. Eventually he would put the figurines away, and bring out a small faded photograph of an elderly woman in a dark dress, whose gray hair hung in tight curls. It was his grandmother, whom he was going to live with; she’d sent the photograph so that he’d recognize her at the dock. “You have her eyes,” the man said, looking over the boy’s shoulder. Then he smiled. “And her hair.”

  The boy returned the smile, but then went back to staring doubtfully at the woman’s face. The man reached up from the blankets and placed a hand on his thin shoulder.

  The man only went up on deck once, on the fifth day out from New York, during a break in the weather. For a few minutes he sat on a bench, holding the valise in his lap, and looked out over the churning, white-capped steel of the ocean. The ship rocked into a swell, and spray drenched the guardrail nearby. The man shuddered and went back down again.

  The ship from Marseille to Beirut was small and cramped, but the route was quicker, the weather warmer. At Beirut they disembarked, and he watched the boy’s grandmother give the boy a piece of chocolate before kneeling down to clasp him in her thin, dark-robed arms.

  Then it was time for him to leave. The boy clung to him, eyes welling.

  “Good-bye, Matthew,” the Jinni whispered. “Don’t forget me.”

  From Beirut he rode the train over the mountains to bustling Damascus, then paid a camel driver to take him out beyond the Ghouta’s green border. The driver, who’d thought the man only wanted to sightsee, was horrified when his customer insisted on being left alone at the desert’s edge with nothing but his small suitcase. The Jinni doubled his pay and reassured him that all would be well. Finally the camel driver left. When, an hour later, he thought better of it and went to fetch the man back again, he found no trace of him. The desert had swallowed him whole.

  In Central Park the leaves had begun to fall, littering the paths with thin blades of russet and gold. It was a Saturday afternoon, and the park was full of families and courting couples, all determined to enjoy the last of the good weather.

  Two women, one noticeably tall, the other pushing a perambulator, walked together on the carriage path bordering the meadow, past the dozen or so sheep that milled nearby chewing placidly on the grass. The women kept some distance from each other, and so far they had spoken little; but now the tall one said, “How have you been, Anna?”

  “As well as can be, I suppose,” the young mother replied. “The weather’s cooling, at least. And Toby’s colic is better.”

  A pause. “I’m very glad to hear it, but I was thinking more of your situation.”

  Anna sighed. “I know.” They walked on for a while. “It’s difficult,” she said. “I take as much washing and sewing as I can, but Toby takes up so much time! I do get by, though. At least I haven’t gone to the streets yet.” She tried to say it lightly, but the Golem felt her fear of it, the dread that someday, with nowhere else to go, she would turn to selling herself.

  Knowing it was futile, she said, “Anna, if you need anything—”

  “That’s all right,” Anna said crisply, and the Golem nodded. The girl had so far refused all attempts. “We’re making do,” Anna said, in a softer voice. Then she glanced over at the Golem. “And you? How are you?”

  The Golem was silent for a while. “Like you, I suppose,” she said at last. “Managing, as best I can.”

  When it became clear that she would not elaborate further, Anna said, “I hear you’re still working at Radzin’s.”

  “Mrs. Radzin would not hear of my leaving,” the Golem said. Go and grieve, the woman had said. And then come back. You’ll always have a place here, Chavaleh. We’re your family now.

  They’d buried Michael in Brooklyn, and this time she’d defied convention and go
ne to the funeral, braving the stares from his old friends, all of them waiting for her to break down and sob. There had been no shivah; she thought he would not have wanted it. The police had made inquiries—had interviewed her as well, an excruciating experience—and then, as they’d done with Irving Wasserman, relegated the case to the drawer marked UNSOLVED, and turned their attention to greater matters.

  It wasn’t your fault, Anna had said, but she’d sounded less than certain.

  They walked on, Anna cooing at little Toby, who lay fussing in the pram. It wasn’t clear how much Anna understood of what had happened that day. One minute I was hiding that sack you gave me, she’d told the Golem, and the next you were telling me to run. The Golem had given brief, vague answers to her questions. To describe her addled helplessness would only frighten her—and the Golem did not want to feel the girl’s terror.

  At least that horrible old man is gone, Anna had said; and the Golem had agreed: yes, he’s gone. Not entirely the truth, of course. Schaalman may have been trapped in the flask, but he was still her master, and they were still bound. In moments of quiet, when the city had gone to sleep—or else here, in the park, with so few minds nearby to distract her—she could hear him: an eternal pinprick of anger, howling on the edge of her senses. At first it had driven her to distraction, but she was growing to accept it as the price of her survival.

  Over Bow Bridge’s arched ribbon of iron they walked, and down into the dappled hush of the Ramble. Leaves skittered at their feet. The late-summer sun shone down on a ground already turning cool and sleepy. The Golem shivered. It would be a long, difficult winter: the park knew it, and so did she.

  There were more courting couples here than on the carriage road, taking advantage of the Ramble’s relative privacy. A few had come for more than courting, and she could sense them concealed among the deeply winding paths and dense woods, behind the mossy boulders and rough stone bridges: the forbidden couples, some tentative and others defiant, the illicit and the ill matched, the joyful and the desperate. Their desires rose like sap from the hidden groves.

  Anna asked, “Have you heard from him?”

  “What?” the Golem said, startled. “Oh. Yes, he sent a telegram from Marseille. And then from Beirut, last week, to say he’d arrived. Nothing else.”

  “He’ll be all right.”

  The Golem nodded—the reassurance was well meant, if a touch breezy. But she knew better than Anna what the Jinni faced.

  “And when he gets back,” Anna said, “what will you do about him?”

  Despite everything, the Golem had to smile. Most people would refrain from asking a widow twice over such a question, but not Anna. “I thought you didn’t like him.”

  “I don’t. But you do. And you should do something about it.”

  “It’s more complicated than that,” the Golem muttered.

  Anna rolled her eyes. “It always is.”

  Yes, but was it ever this complicated? She’d seen the Jinni only once before he left for Marseille, and at first it had felt akin to their earliest encounters: each of them careful of the other, unsure of what to say. They’d walked to the Hudson River docklands, where the stevedores were hauling cargo back and forth under the electric lights. How much do you remember? the Jinni had finally asked, and the Golem replied, All of it. His face told her it would’ve been kinder to lie, to pretend not to remember his attempt at destroying her; but she had been down that road with Michael, and she would never go there again. If I hadn’t remembered, she said, would you have told me? And he had watched the stevedores for a while before saying, I don’t know. An honest answer, at least.

  And then slowly, by fits and starts, they’d begun to talk again. He told her more about Saleh, the man’s damaged mind, his improbable healing at Schaalman’s hands. Did you know him well? the Golem asked, and the Jinni said, his regret plain, no. Not well at all.

  The Golem said, If I hadn’t injured him, then maybe . . .

  The end would have been the same.

  You can’t know that.

  Chava, stop it. Saleh’s death wasn’t your fault.

  But wasn’t it, at least in part? Certainly she’d intended to kill him, had attacked him with jubilant, intoxicating abandon. It would’ve been so much easier to forgive herself, to believe it was all Schaalman’s fault, if not for her memory of that joy. And what of Michael? She’d felt such guilt and sorrow at his graveside—but how could she reconcile that with her gladness when she’d learned that her master had killed him? Try as she might, she could not disown the self she’d been in those moments—nor the brief sense that she’d been asleep since Rotfeld died, and had finally woken to her true existence.

  At last they’d left the docklands and walked to Little Syria, to an unassuming tenement building, and stood below a wondrous ceiling made of tin. He’d pointed out to her his favorite places, the discoveries of his childhood, the valley where he’d built his palace; and she’d heard his trepidation at the thought of going home. At last he’d said, tentatively, If my kin are still there, they might know how to free me.

  She’d stood there, absorbing this. And then she said, in a small voice, I would be very glad for you.

  He’d placed a hand on her arm, said her name; and she had turned into his embrace, his warm shoulder, his lips at her forehead. This isn’t good-bye, he said. Whatever happens, I’m coming back. I promise. A comfort, to hear it—but what sort of resentment would result, if only a promise kept him at her side? She couldn’t help thinking that once freed, he would come to regard his life in New York as a dream, the sort a man might wake from with a shudder and a sigh of relief.

  In the park, the breeze was strengthening, but the afternoon sun shone on, setting the tops of the trees ablaze. Voices from Bethesda Terrace carried across the water to the Ramble, ghostly conversations in a myriad of languages. In the pram, Toby was drifting off to sleep, his hands curled like shells atop the blanket. He furrowed his brow, small red lips puckering, dreaming of his mother’s breast.

  They left the Ramble and turned down the park’s eastern drive, Anna chattering all the while, mostly gossip about her employers and the sorts of secrets one could learn from a person’s laundry. Her cheer was wearing thin, though: the Golem felt her rising discomfort, her longing to be elsewhere, in safer company.

  “I think we’ll head home,” the young woman said at length. “This one will need his supper soon.”

  “It was good to see you, Anna.”

  “And you,” Anna said. Then she paused. “I meant what I said earlier about Ahmad. You should try to be happy, if you can.” And the girl wheeled the pram away, the wind tugging at her thin cloak.

  Into the desert the Jinni walked.

  He walked for a full day, carrying the valise. Occasionally some creature would spy him at a distance, a ghul or an imp, and come to investigate, gleeful at the prospect of a man gone so far astray—but then they’d see what he was, and draw back in fear and confusion, and let him pass. He’d expected no better. Even so, it pained him.

  Taken as a whole, the desert had changed little since he’d been gone. He passed the same jagged peaks and valleys he had once roamed, the same caves and cliffs and hiding places. But in its particulars the landscape was entirely transformed. It was as though a millennium of wind and sun and seasons had unfolded all at once, filling in streambeds and eroding hillsides, cracking great boulders into fields of pebbles. He thought of the tin ceiling in New York, and how it was no longer a map but an artifact, the portrait of an ancient memory.

  Evening was falling when he neared the outskirts of the jinn habitations, the land of his kin. He slowed his walk, hoping to be spotted. At the border he stopped, waiting. Soon enough he saw them: a contingent of nearly a dozen jinn, flying insubstantial toward him.

  A rush of relief: they still lived. That, at least, had not changed.

  They came to rest before him, and he saw they were the elders, though none he recognized. The oldest—a female,
a jinniyeh—spoke, addressing him in the language he’d thought never to hear again.

  What are you?

  “A jinni,” he told her. “And your kin. I would tell you my name, if I could.”

  You are kin to us? How is that possible?

  “I was trapped in this form a thousand years ago, by a wizard named ibn Malik.” He lifted his arm, pulled his dusty shirtsleeve away from the iron cuff—and they recoiled, the nearest ones scattering.

  Unnatural! How can you wear that, without pain?

  “It is part of the binding,” he said. “Please, tell me—can you undo it? Have we gained that knowledge, in a thousand years?”

  They regrouped, conferred, their voices a windstorm. He closed his eyes, drank in the sound.

  No. We do not have that knowledge.

  He nodded, feeling he’d already known the answer.

  But can you tell us—need we fear this wizard? Does he still live, to trap and bind us?

  “He lives, but you need not fear him.” He opened the valise, removed the flask. “He is here, captured as he once captured me. But we are still bound. If the seal is broken in my lifetime, he’ll return, to be born again and again.”

  And after your death?

  “Then he may be released, and his soul will go on to whatever awaits him.”

  A mutter among them. The jinniyeh said, It is suggested that we kill you, to destroy the wizard. You are already crippled—would it not be a mercy?

  He had half-expected this. “If you are offering me a choice,” he said, “then I respectfully decline. I made a promise that I would return, and I would not break that promise.”

  Once more they conferred, a more heated discussion this time. He looked among them and wondered which were his closest relations. But to ask would be futile, with no way to even tell them his own lineage. And what would the answer signify, when they must remain strangers?

  We have decided, the jinniyeh said at last. Your life will be spared. We will guard the wizard’s soul, and ensure its safe protection. It shall be our task, and that of our offspring, until you pass from this earth.