The long stretch of rainy nights had grown nearly unbearable, and so the Jinni broke down and did something he’d vowed he wouldn’t: he bought an umbrella.
It was Arbeely who’d first suggested it, more to preserve his own sanity than anything else. After three weeks of damp weather, the Jinni was a terrible workmate, sullen and distracted, and liable to leave smoldering irons lying about. “You look like you’re about to crawl out of your skin,” Arbeely said. “Why not just buy an umbrella, instead of sitting every night in your room?”
“I thought you didn’t like my going about at night,” the Jinni said.
“I don’t. But it’s better than you burning the shop down, or one of us murdering the other. Get an umbrella.”
“I don’t need one,” the Jinni said.
Arbeely laughed. “I think it’s clear you do.”
Still, he was rather shocked a few days later when the Jinni strolled out of the morning drizzle, shaking out a large midnight-silk umbrella more suited to a West Side dandy than a Syrian immigrant.
“Where,” Arbeely said, “did you get that?”
“A pawnshop in the Bowery,” said the Jinni.
Arbeely sighed. “I might have guessed. Did they wash the blood off it?”
The Jinni ignored this and reversed the umbrella, holding it out. “Look,” he said. “What do you think?”
The handle was made of a dark, fine-grained hardwood. The last six inches were wrapped with filigreed silver, in a spiraling lattice of leaves and vines.
“It’s beautiful,” said Arbeely, holding it to the light. “You did this? How long did it take you?”
The Jinni smiled. “Two nights. I saw one like it in a shop window. Simpler than this, but it gave me the idea.”
Arbeely shook his head. “It’s far too fine. People will think you’re taking on airs.”
The Jinni stiffened. “Let them,” he said. He took the umbrella back from Arbeely, and leaned it in a corner—careful, Arbeely saw, not to muss the silk.
That night, the Jinni went back to the Bowery. It was a fascinating place, both intriguing and repellent: a vast, cacophonous labyrinth that snaked up the south end of the city. He had a feeling he’d tire of it soon; but meanwhile, it was good for a few evenings’ entertainment.
He was still getting used to the umbrella. Walking under it, he felt hemmed in, surrounded. The rain pattered against the taut silk, making it buzz like a swarm of flies.
The rain subsided to a light drizzle. Carefully he closed the umbrella—the mechanism tended to stick—and furled it, to protect the silk against stray embers from the Elevated. He had an errand to run.
The shop where he bought his gold and silver was halfway up the Bowery, near Bond Street. To all casual appearances it was an undistinguished storefront tobacconist’s, set above a saloon and below a brothel. The distant overhead rhythm of thumping furniture punctuated most of the transactions. It was run by a fence named Conroy, a small, neat Irishman. Conroy’s eyes were sharp and intelligent behind his round spectacles, and he carried an air of quiet precision. He seemed to be in charge of a collection of heavily muscled men. Sometimes one of them would appear at Conroy’s side, and whisper in his ear. Conroy would think a moment, and either nod or shake his head, always with the same expression of mild regret. Then the tough would disappear, off to run some baleful errand.
Two drunken men were buying tobacco and papers when the Jinni entered the shop. Conroy smiled to see him. The two men left, and Conroy drew the shop door closed, and flipped the sign in the window. Then he reached below the counter and began pulling out an assortment of fine silver objects: cutlery, pendants, necklaces, even a small candlestick.
The Jinni picked up the candlestick, examined it. “Solid silver?”
“All the way through.”
There were no nicks or scratches to indicate that Conroy had checked, but the man hadn’t been wrong yet. “How much?”
Conroy named a price. The Jinni halved it, and they went back and forth in this way, ending at a number that the Jinni guessed was only slightly extortionate. He paid, and Conroy wrapped the candlestick in paper and tied it with string, like a cut of meat. “If you’d like to go upstairs,” he said neutrally, “it’d be at no cost.”
“Thank you, but no,” said the Jinni. He nodded farewell, and left.
Outside, the candlestick tucked into his coat pocket, the Jinni rolled a cigarette and glanced up at the windows of the brothel. That, he’d decided, was one thing he wouldn’t pay for. The only pleasure in the encounter would be purely physical, and what would be the point?
His errand over, he decided to walk the Bowery’s length. He passed tattoo parlors, mortuaries, shuttered theaters, filthy cafés. A gaming house threw harsh and tinny music onto the street. Rats scurried at the edges of the gutters and darted off below the Elevated, into the murk. Women with overpainted faces scanned the streets for marks and saw him, a solitary, handsome, clean-looking man. They beckoned to him from their doorways, and scowled when he walked past without stopping.
All at once the Jinni’s tolerance for the Bowery evaporated. It was as though they’d taken everything good about desire and turned it ugly.
He found a fire escape and climbed it, the umbrella held awkwardly under one arm. The silver handle knocked against a rung, and he nearly dropped it. He cursed the rung, cursed the umbrella, cursed his circumstances that he should be in need of either.
On the roof, he rolled another cigarette and smoked it, looking down on the street. It irritated him that he’d grown tired of the Bowery so quickly. The sun would be coming up soon; he would take himself back to Washington Street.
Footsteps crunched behind him on the tar paper, and for an unexamined moment he was glad of the company.
“That’s a nice umbrella, sir.”
It was a young woman—barely more than a girl. She wore a shabby, dirt-stained dress that had once been of good quality. She was holding her head at an odd angle, as though it had grown too heavy for her neck. Her hair was dark and long, and fell in a curtain over her eyes, but from underneath it she was watching him.
She raised one languid hand, to push back the hair from her eyes; and the gesture tugged at something in the Jinni’s mind. For a long moment he was certain that he knew her, and that as soon as he saw her face he would remember her.
But she was merely an unremarkable girl, a stranger. She smiled dreamily at him. “Looking for company, sir?” she asked.
“Not really,” he said.
“A nice-looking gentleman like you shouldn’t be alone.” She said the words as if by rote. Her eyes were drifting closed. Was something wrong with her? And why had he thought he’d known her? He peered into her face. She took the attention as encouragement, and pressed herself up against him. Her arms snaked around his waist. He could feel her heart beating against him, a high fast fluttering in her chest. She sighed, as if settling in for the night. He looked down at the top of her head, strangely unsure. Lifting a hand, he watched his own fingers as they ran through her hair.
She whispered, “Twenty cents gets you whatever you want.”
No. He pushed her away, and she stumbled. A small bottle fell between them. He reached down and picked it up. It was a stoppered glass, half-full of an oily liquid. TINCTURE OF OPIUM, read the label.
A sudden squawk from the girl. She reached out and snatched the bottle from his hand. “That’s mine,” she spat. Then she turned and walked unsteadily away.
He watched her go, then climbed down from the roof and headed home. There was no reason for the girl to have rattled him like this. But something in the motion of her hand, as she pushed back the dark veil of her hair, had seemed so very familiar.
In her father’s goat pen, Fadwa al-Hadid straightened up from her crouch on the milking stool and pushed her curtain of dark hair back from her eyes. She had tied it at her neck, but it always came loose when she milked the goats. Something to do with the rhythm.
The goat bleated and turned to look at her, barred pupils rolling. She stroked its back and whispered soothing words into its leather-soft ear. The goats had been skittish all morning, refusing to stand still, shifting their weight about and threatening to overturn the pail. Perhaps they sensed the summer coming. It was only midmorning, and already the sun was beating down on them, turning the air thick and the sky brassy. She took a drink from the pail, then undid her hair completely.
From his spot a little ways away, the Jinni watched her retie her hair at the nape of her neck. It was a becoming gesture, unselfconscious and private.
For days now, he’d been watching the girl and her family, trying to learn their ways. They seemed to live in a constant hum of comings and goings, all within a carefully circumscribed world that had the encampment at its center. The men ventured out farther than the women, but they too had their boundaries. They hadn’t even journeyed out again within sight of his palace, and he wondered now if that had been a special occasion of some sort.
He watched as Fadwa released the goat and moved on to the next one. Her life truly was as she had described it: an endless repetition of tasks. The caravan men at least had a destination ahead of them, a purpose beyond the horizon. Fadwa’s existence, as far as he could tell, was nothing but milking and cleaning and cooking and weaving. He wondered how she could stand it.
The milking finished, Fadwa untied the final goat and checked the water in their trough. Then she carefully lifted the brimming pail of milk and brought it to the fire pit.
“You’re spilling,” said her mother. She was busy at the grindstone, her arm going around and around. Wheat dust trickled from between the flat stones. Fadwa made no reply, only poured the milk into a beaten bowl and placed it above the embers. Sweat ran into her eyes, and she flicked it away with distant irritation.
“You haven’t said three words together all morning,” her mother said. “Is your flow coming on?”
“I’m all right, Mama,” she said absently. “I didn’t sleep well, that’s all.”
The milk began to bubble, and she removed the bowl from the fire and stirred in a few spoonfuls of yogurt, held back from the morning meal. She covered it with a cloth, and left it to thicken.
“Take the girls to the cave for more water,” her mother said. “We’ll need it today.”
The walk to the cave seemed interminable. The empty water jar sat heavy on her head. Her cousins laughed and dodged ahead of her, playing a game where they tried to step on each other’s shadows without dropping their jars. It was true, what she had told her mother: she hadn’t been sleeping very well. Her strange visitor had not returned the next night, or the night after; and now, nearly a week later, she was beginning to wonder if she had imagined the whole thing. It had seemed so vivid, so real; but within a few days it had begun to blur around the edges, like an ordinary dream.
Would this be the night he kept his promise, and returned to her? Or was there no him, no promise to be kept? How would she know if he truly visited her, or if she were merely dreaming such a thing? It sent her mind in circles. She would fall half-asleep, only to startle awake again with excitement, then chide herself for waking. And when she did manage to sleep, her dreams were only full of ordinary nonsense.
The spring where the Hadid clan fetched their water flowed into a cave that a long-ago people had fashioned into a temple. Its entrance was a flat, square doorway cut into the sloping hillside. To Fadwa, it looked as though a giant had sliced off the edge of the hill with a knife. Words in an unknown, angular alphabet were carved into the flat lintel above the cave’s mouth. Sand and wind had worked on them until they were barely visible. Her father had told her that the temple’s builders were from the world far beyond the desert. They pass through in every age, he’d said. They try to conquer the desert. They make their marks in it, as though to claim it, but then they disappear. And all the while we Bedu endure, unchanging.
Inside, the air was cool and damp. A sloping pool was carved into the rock floor; a crack at its bottom connected it to the underground spring. At the height of the rains, the pool had overflowed its edge, spilling out the door and down the path. Now it was barely halfway full. Soon, Fadwa knew, it would be reduced to a trickle, and then run dry completely. They would live on the milk of their animals until the water returned.
Her cousins were at the pool’s edge, filling their jars. She waded in and watched the dark water spill over the jar’s lip. In a niche above the pool, the face and figure of a woman had been carved into the rock. A water goddess, her father had said, a woman with a hundred names. The ones who’d built the temple had thought that they brought her to the desert, when in fact she’d been there from the very beginning. Her hair flowed about her lightly, in waves. She stared out of the wall with blankly serene eyes, the years having robbed her of any expression.
Do you think she really exists? Fadwa had asked her father. And he had smiled, and said, When so many others believe in her, who am I to say otherwise?
Her cousins began to splash each other. Fadwa frowned, and moved her water jar farther away.
Tonight, she told herself. If he did not come to her tonight, then she would try to resign herself to the truth: it had all been in her mind.
Please let him come, she pleaded silently to the stone woman in the niche. Or I might start to think that I’m going mad.
The Jinni watched Fadwa leave the temple, the water-jar balanced expertly on her head. To compensate for its weight, she took slower steps, her hips swinging from side to side. One hand rested lightly on the jar, to steady it. All in all, a most appealing picture. The water even added a touch of danger.
He smiled. He hadn’t forgotten his promise. Perhaps, he thought, he would visit her that night.
Early on a Friday morning, the Rabbi discovered the formula to bind a golem to a new master.
It had been a long and terrible week. He’d had a growing, unshakable sense that it was time to finish and be done with it, that circumstances and his own health would not stand for much more. And so he’d sent messages to all of his students’ families, telling them that he was taking a week-long sabbatical, for prayer and fasting. (He couldn’t simply say he was ill; their mothers would come to his door armed with bowls of soup.) As it happened, the lie became truth: the entire divination grew to resemble one long, drawn-out prayer, and around Wednesday he simply forgot to keep eating.
Books and papers covered the parlor floor in a pattern that felt more intuitive than reasoned. He snatched sleep an hour at a time, curled on the couch. His dreams were a twilight of prayers and diagrams and names of God. Among them floated faces known and unknown: his wife, speaking gibberish; an ancient, twisted man; his nephew Michael, frightened of something unseen; and the Golem, smiling, her eyes full of a terrible fire. He would cough himself awake from these dreams and stumble back to work, still half in their grasp.
He suspected he was harming his soul. But he put the thought away. He had started this; he would see it to its end.
That end, when it came, was not a burst of fevered inspiration, but a quiet and thorough adding-up, like a bookkeeper reconciling the year’s accounts. He looked at the brief lines he’d written at the bottom of the page, watching the ink soak into the paper. A part of him wished he could take pride in this accomplishment, for its own sake. For despite the formula’s brevity, it was an elegant and complex masterwork. Simply to bind a golem to a new master, without destroying it—this alone was an unheard-of accomplishment. But the Rabbi had gone a step further. For the formula to work, the Golem would have to consent freely to the removal of her will. This was his compromise with himself, the deal he’d struck with his conscience. He would not steal her life, like a murderer in an alley. He would leave the final decision to her.
She might refuse, of course. Or the question itself might be too much for her nature to bear. Could he subdue her, if necessary? His fatigued mind recoiled from the thought of coming this far, only to be forced to destroy her.
He glanced around, blinking, and winced: his parlor looked like the grotto of a mad mystic. He stood on weak legs and collected the papers and books from the floor. The books he put in his satchel, to return to their owners after the Sabbath, with his apologies. The papers he ordered in a neat pile, save for the final page, which he put to one side. He needed a wash; he felt filthy. Outside it was a rare cloudless morning. The sky beyond the parlor’s soot-streaked windows was turning a rich sapphire.
He lit the stove and put a pot of water on, watching himself as if from a distance, almost amused. He remembered this boneless, floating detachment from his yeshiva days, the all-night study sessions in which he’d seemed to dive into the Talmud itself and become one with it. He watched the bubbles form in the bottom of the pot, his vision blurring with fatigue and, he realized now, insistent hunger. He searched the cupboards but found only fossilized bread-heels and a questionable jar of schmaltz. He’d have to go out, after he washed and prayed, and buy food for Sabbath dinner. And then he’d set the rooms to rights, before the Golem arrived.
Finally the water was heated. He stripped in the cold kitchen and dabbed at himself with a washcloth, shivering and trying not to cough. For the first time, he allowed himself to consider the issue of potential masters. Meltzer? A good rabbi, but too old now, too set in his comfortable life. The same went for Teitelbaum, which was a shame. Kaplan was a possibility: younger, but still a child of the old country, not so likely to scoff at the very idea. But perhaps Kaplan had too much learning, and not enough compassion.
Any one of them would need a careful approach. First he’d have to convince them that old age and solitude hadn’t driven him mad. Even then there would be resistance. Why not just destroy her? they would ask. Why ruin your own life, and ask me to ruin mine, and let this danger exist?
Would he reply that he’d grown exceedingly fond of her? That in her eagerness to learn, her determined forbearance, she’d made him as proud as a father? Was it her future he was arranging, or her funeral?
Tears sprang to his eyes and clotted his throat, making him cough.
He went to the bedroom to look for clean clothes. In the bottom drawer of his dresser, something else caught his eye: a leather drawstring pouch. With shaking hands—he must get something to eat—he opened the pouch and removed the small oilskin envelope, labeled COMMANDS FOR THE GOLEM. It belonged with the other papers, he decided. He would give the watch and the billfold to the Golem and apologize for keeping them so long. But this, he would pass on, or else burn. Once he decided what to do.
He was carrying the envelope to the table in the parlor when the attack hit him. He doubled over, coughing; and then his breath left him entirely. It was as though someone had wrapped a steel girder around his chest, and was twisting it tighter and tighter. He gasped for air; a thin wheezing reached his ears. His arm went numb.
The parlor elongated, turned gray at the edges, tilted and spun. He felt the old wool rug under his cheek. He tried to stand, but only rolled onto his back. A distant crackling sensation: the oilskin envelope, still in his hand.
In the last moments left to him, Rabbi Meyer realized he never could have done it. The smaller murder of his new formula, or the utter destruction of the spell in the envelope: either would have been beyond his power while she was still his Chava, still innocent, still the newborn woman he’d first spied holding a sparrow in the palm of her hand.
He tried to hurl the envelope away from himself, below the table. Had he done so? He couldn’t tell. She would need to make her way alone, he had done all he could. The feeling was leaving his body, draining away from his limbs toward his center. It occurred to him to say the viddui, the prayer before death. He struggled to remember it. Blessed are You, who has bestowed me with many blessings. May my death atone for all I have done . . . and may I shelter in the shadow of Your wings in the World to Come.
He stared up into the sky beyond the parlor window. The vivid blueness stretched so high that it seemed to draw him up inside it, pure and wide and all-encompassing.
The Golem went to the Rabbi’s that night carrying an apple strudel, carefully wrapped. She walked with long strides, stretching her legs, feeling the cold night air settle into her body. Lamps glowed in the windows as she passed.
There was no answer to her knock at the Rabbi’s door.
She knocked again, waited. Likely he had fallen asleep. She imagined him on the other side of the door, dozing in a parlor chair. She smiled. He’d chide himself for falling asleep, and making her wait.
She knocked again, louder. Still nothing. She stood there for a few uneasy minutes, unsure of what to do. She wondered what the Rabbi himself would advise, and the answer came as clearly as if he’d spoken in her ear: You know I don’t lock my door during the day. This is your home as well as mine. Come in!
She opened the door.
The Rabbi’s rooms were dark, the lamps unlit. She peered into the bedroom. The twilight sky threw shadows onto a neatly made bed. She went to the kitchen, set down the strudel, and lit a lamp, her anxiety growing. The fire in the grate had gone out. The air was cold and had a stale smell, like dirty clothes.
She went into the parlor, and there she found him. His legs were twisted to one side. His eyes stared blindly up at the windows behind him.
At first there was no horror, no shock, only a pure, clear disbelief. This was not real. This was a painted picture, an illusion. She would reach out and sweep it away with her fingers.
Trembling, she crouched down and touched his face. It was cold and hard.
Distantly—almost disinterestedly—she sensed something building inside her, and knew that when it reached the surface and broke free it would have the strength to tear down buildings.
His hair had mussed from his fall, and his skullcap had gone askew. He wouldn’t like that. She smoothed it all back into place, taking care to use the lightest of touches. One of his arms was bent at an odd angle from his body. An envelope had slipped from his hand, one edge still balanced on his fingertips. She saw there was something written on it. She bent closer, and read:
Commands for the golem
She reached down and lifted the envelope away. The slick material crackled in her grip; in the silence of the room it was as loud as a firework. She tucked it into the pocket of her cloak.
Still he didn’t move. But now she could hear something, a ragged high keening sound, thin but growing louder. And then louder. There was a knocking at the door, and she realized the sound was coming from herself, and that she was rocking back and forth, hands over her mouth, crying out, and now there were words. Rabbi, Rabbi!
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 intense 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.