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 nineteen 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.
“I’m sorry to intrude,” the woman said in an accented voice. “But we need your fireplace.”
She strode into the room. Behind her appeared a man in ragged clothing. A footman lunged for the woman, but she was moving too quickly—how was it possible, with the man in her arms? She brushed past Sophia, who’d stood in surprise, and Sophia caught a glimpse of her improbable burden. He was tall, and thin, and soaking wet. His face was hidden in the woman’s shoulder. A thick metal cuff circled one wrist; it caught the firelight and flashed like a beacon.
Shock coursed through her, stronger than any chill. She stood, mesmerized, as the woman knelt before the giant fireplace, swept the screen aside, and threw the man into the fire.
The footman shouted in fright, but now the ill-dressed man grabbed him and tried to wrestle him out of the room, saying something in a language Sophia couldn’t place. The woman stared intently into the blaze, as though waiting for a sign. The fire had banked at the man’s weight, but now it was crackling merrily again, surrounding him with flames like a Viking on his pyre. As Sophia watched, his clothing began to smolder and burn away, leaving his skin whole and untouched.
He’d told her a story once, hadn’t he, while she lay half-asleep in his arms? A story about the jinn, fantastic creatures made of fire. And then, in Paris, that all-consuming heat, as though a burning spark had lodged inside her body. It made no sense at all—and yet something whispered to her, yes, of course. You have always known this.
Clouds of smoke filled the room, and the stench of burning cotton. The footman broke from his wrestling match and ran into the hall, presumably to raise the alarm. The ill-dressed foreigner scowled in resignation and went to the tall woman’s side. He spoke to her in that other language, and she nodded. “Ahmad,” she called.
The figure on the fire stirred.
“There!” the woman shouted, joy in her voice. The ragged man said something in reply, hand shielding his eyes.
A commotion from outside; and then the butler strode in shouting, tailed by three footmen and, Sophia’s heart sank to see, her father. The woman turned at their approach, her back to the fireplace, as though to shield the man inside. She was bracing for a fight, Sophia realized. Her father was calling for the police. The room was about to break into pandemonium.
“Everyone please be quiet,” Sophia shouted.
And indeed the room quieted, in surprise as much as anything. Sophia crossed to the fireplace and bent to see more clearly. “Sophia,” her father called, a frightened warning.
“It’s all right, Father,” she said. “I know this man.”
“What?”
The man on the fire moved again, convulsing as though in pain. The logs beneath him shifted, and Sophia and the woman jumped backward as he tumbled out of the fireplace in a cloud of smoke and ash. He came to rest curled on the flagstones, his body streaked with soot and embers. The air around him shimmered, and for a moment Sophia thought she saw him glowing like a coal.
Swiftly the tall woman bent over him. The ragged man said something in warning, and she pulled her hands back at the last moment. “Ahmad?” she said.
The man whispered something.
“Yes, it’s me,” the woman said, and her voice was choked with emotion, though her eyes were dry. “I’m here.” She touched his arm quickly, like a cook testing a pan for heat. Apparently finding him cool enough, she rested her hand on his shoulder. His eyes didn’t open, but one hand reached up to cover hers.
Sophia looked about the room and might have laughed at the tableau: the most prominent household in New York, reduced to gawking open-mouthed at a naked man on their dining room floor. The servants all hung back, some crossing themselves. Someone whispered to her father, “Sir, the police are in the hall.” The woman’s head came up at this, her look one of fierce protection.
“No,” Sophia said. She moved to stand in front of the three intruders. “Father, send the police away. They aren’t needed.”
“Sophia, go upstairs. We’ll speak later.”
“I told you, I know this man. I’ll vouch for him, and his friends.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. How could you possibly—”
“They’re my guests,” she said firmly. “Send the police away. And someone please fetch this man a blanket.” She turned away from them and bent over the familiar figure, who still had barely moved. The tall woman was watching her strangely, as though trying to see inside her. “You know him,” the woman said.
She nodded, took the man’s other hand in hers. “Ahmad?”
His eyes did not open, but his forehead creased in a frown. “Sophia?” he murmured; and she heard her father draw a shocked breath.
“Yes, it’s me,” she said, aware of the eyes on her, the too-accurate conclusions they were all drawing. Her cheeks would have burned were she warm enough. “You’re in my home. You’re safe here.” She cast a challenging glance at her father, but he only stood pale and stricken. “What happened to him?” she asked the woman.
“He tried to end his own life.”
“My God! But why?”
The woman looked like she would have said more but then glanced about the room, at the frightened and attentive faces. Sophia said, “Perhaps we should discuss this in private. We’ll take him to my bedroom. There should be a fire lit already.”
A maid entered with a heavy wool blanket; she handed it to Sophia and backed away, clearly terrified. Together the tall woman and the ragged man covered their half-conscious charge and lifted him to his feet, supporting him from either side. Sophia placed a protective hand on the woman’s arm, and together, under watchful eyes, the group walked from the dining room. “Father, I’ll speak with you soon,” she said as they left.
They bundled him into Sophia’s bed, and placed a copper foot-warmer under the covers. The ragged man—one Dr. Saleh, it seemed, who spoke only Arabic—set about strengthening the fire, and soon the room was warm enough even for Sophia’s comfort. Then Dr. Saleh and the woman, whose name was apparently Chava, talked quietly together for some minutes, with frequent glances at Sophia.
“I apologize for involving you in this,” the woman said to her at length, “but we had no choice, Ahmad’s life was at stake.” A pause. “I take it that you know what he is?”
“I think so,” Sophia said. “And you are the same?”
The woman glanced away, suddenly self-conscious. “No,” she said. “I’m . . . something else. A golem.”
Sophia had no idea what that meant but was unsure how to say this, so she merely nodded. “Please tell me what happened.”
And so the Golem related the story. Sophia had a feeling that a number of details were being omitted, but only listened as the Golem described finding the Jinni in Bethesda Fountain. “But that’s where I first met him,” Sophia said, confused. “And I still don’t understand—why would he do this?”
“You may stop talking about me as though I’m not here,” a voice muttered from the bed.
The Golem was first to his side—she moved so impossibly fast! “Hello, Ahmad,” she said quietly.
“Chava,” he said. “You shouldn’t have rescued me.”
“Don’t be foolish. Too much has been lost already.”
A harsh laugh. “You say more than you know.”
“Hush.” She took his hand and squeezed it, as though making certain he was truly there; and suddenly Sophia felt like an interloper in her own bedroom.
The Jinni noticed Dr. Saleh, and said something to him in Arabic, his tone affronted. The doctor responded in kind, gruff and sarcastic, then wiped a hand across his brow. He had, Sophia noticed, gone rather sickly-looking. The Golem asked a question, and he replied dismissively; but it was clear that the heat of the room disagreed with him.
“I’m afraid Dr. Saleh has had a strenuous morning, and little to eat,” the Golem told her.
“Of course. I’ll take him downstairs, and make certain he’s seen to.”
A faraway look had come into the Golem’s eye. She said, “You might also assure everyone at the foot of the stairs that we’re not in fact murdering you, and there’s no need to break down the door.”
Sophia stared at her. “What, truly?”
“I’m afraid so.”
“In that case, I thank you for the warning,” she said and resolved to find out what a golem was as soon as possible.
She took Dr. Saleh down to the kitchen, and told the staff in no uncertain terms to feed him, and see to his needs. They stared at her as though she’d grown horns, but nodded and bobbed all the same. Whispers trailed her as she left.
Upstairs she was told that her parents were in the library, waiting to speak with her. She decided she would take this as an opportunity. The servants, she’d tell her parents, were bound to gossip, and her reputation would most certainly be damaged. Why not break the engagement now, before it could end in ignominy? And perhaps it would be best if she traveled for a while, while the rumors ran their course. India, South America, Asia. The warmer climates.
She tried to hide her smile as she opened the library door.
The morning service was already under way when Michael Levy reached his uncle’s old synagogue. He’d been wandering the Lower East Side, trying to comprehend the ruin of his life, when he’d realized where his path was taking him. He had no strength left to change his course. He could not stomach the thought of going home. But neither could he go back to the Sheltering House, for fear that she would still be there. He supposed he should be grateful that she’d managed to warn him, that he’d escaped with his life; but at the moment, gratitude lay far beyond his reach.
His uncle’s old synagogue had originally been a Methodist church. It was a blandly anonymous worship hall of rough-hewn gray stone, neither imposing nor welcoming, the sort of building that might change hands a dozen times with the neighbors none the wiser. Inside, twenty or so men gathered at the front of the wooden pews. Most were nearing his uncle’s age. Michael hesitated just outside the sanctuary, suddenly resistant. He dreaded being recognized by his uncle’s old cohorts. They would whisper praises to God on his behalf, claim him as proof that one always returns to faith in times of difficulty.
Well, would they be wrong? He had accepted as truth that his wife was a clay creature brought to life by—what? The will of God? Must he believe in God now, if he was to make sense of this? The thought made him feel petulant, as though he were a child again, being dragged to school against his will. But neither could he unlearn what he’d discovered.
The service began, the men’s voices surging and falling. You have turned my lament into dancing, You loosened my sackcloth and girded me with joy. They chanted the psalms and praises, and as always the rhythm fastened itself to his heartbeat. It seemed unfair that the prayers could affect him this way, against his will; that he could scoff at the sentiments, yet find himself mouthing along. He imagined himself at ninety, toothless and doddering, unable to remember anything except for the morning prayers. They were his deepest memories, his first music.
He didn’t know when, exactly, he’d stopped believing. It had not come on suddenly, nor had he argued himself into unbelief, no matter what his uncle had thought. No, he’d simply noticed one day that God had disappeared. Perhaps he’d never truly believed in the first place. Or else he’d simply swapped one belief for another, loving neither God nor atheism but ideology for its own sake—as he’d fallen in love not with a woman, but the image of one.
Chava Levy, he thought, you are a hard fact to live with.
All at once his throat filled with tears. Holding back a sob, he left his spot at the sanctuary door and returned to the street. He could no longer hear the chanting, but his mind took up the thread, leading him unwillingly through the rest of the service as he walked back to the Sheltering House. It was his only true home now, and he supposed if he had a religion, the House was its temple, dedicated not to gods or ideas but living, fallible men. If his wife was there, he would face her.
The House was just waking up when he arrived. The smell of coffee wafted down the hallway; he could hear the ancient pipes creaking in the walls. He braced himself, but his office was empty, the door ajar.
He sat down at his desk and, despite everything, was contemplating starting the ordinary business of the day when he realized that Joseph Schall’s sheaf of burnt papers was missing. In his alcoholic fog of the night before, he’d forgotten all about it—had, in fact, forgotten about Joseph.
Frantically he searched his desk. His uncle’s notes were still inside the drawer where Michael had shoved them, but Joseph’s burned pages were nowhere to be seen. Had Joseph returned from wherever he’d disappeared to and found them in his office? Or had his wife taken them? If he could just locate them and return them to their spot under Joseph’s cot, and keep him none the wiser. . . .
A shadow fell across his open door.
“It’s strange,” Joseph said mildly. “I was just looking for something myself. I think we might have a thief among us.” He regarded Michael. “Or perhaps you already knew that.”
An icy sweat broke out on Michael’s brow. He stood there trapped, painfully aware of his visible guilt and terror.
“I see,” Joseph said. He closed the door behind him with a quiet click. His face, Michael saw, was bruised and cut, and his clothing glinted with what looked like tiny pieces of glass. “So. How shall we proceed, you and I?”
“I don’t have your papers,” Michael said. “They’re gone. They disappeared.”
Joseph raised an eyebrow. “And did you read them, before they disappeared?”
“Yes.”
“Ah, but did you understand?”
“Enough.”
Joseph nodded. “Don’t think too harshly of your wife,” he said. “She was only following her nature, as best she could. A golem is lost without a master.”
“I wanted to be her husband, not her master.”
“How enlightened of you,” Joseph said. His voice had turned flat, its usual drollness gone. “Now. Where is my property?”
“I don’t know.”
“Hazard a guess.”
Michael said nothing.
Joseph sighed. “Perhaps you don’t understand after all. I was being kind. I have no need to ask.”
An absurd laugh bubbled up in Michael’s throat.
Joseph, annoyed, said, “Is something amusing you?”
“I was just realizing that this is who you’ve been, all this time.”
“And what of it?”
“Oh, nothing. Only you really did help them, you know.”
“Who?”
“All the men who’ve come through this House. You helped them find their cots, and gave them good advice, and cleaned up after them. You were a friendly face in a strange city. It must have been torture for you.”
“You have no idea.”
Michael smiled. “Good. I’m glad it hurt. Though I pity you, I really do. All that power doesn’t seem to have gotten you very far.”
Joseph’s eyes had turned to slits. Michael swallowed and said, “In fact, if you think about it, all those men, the ones you hated helping—they’ve all moved on from here, to bigger and better things. You’re the one who’s been left behind.”
“Spare me your pity,” Joseph said—and then lunged forward and grabbed Michael by the head.
Michael never lost consciousness as his memories were torn apart. His assailant proceeded in haphazard fashion, grabbing fistfuls of moments in his rage, so that as he died, Michael was bombarded with recollections. He was playing stickball in the street with his friends; he was fleeing down a hallway, running for his life. His aunt cried while he tore up a letter, unread, from his father. A nurse at Swinburne pressed a cool hand to his forehead. He’d skipped school, and now his uncle was bending him over his knee, the half-hesitant slaps betraying discomfort at the task. He was standing in a parlor, watching a tall woman descend a staircase, his heart a joyous, painful weight.
At last, Joseph let go, and Michael collapsed unseeing to the floor.
Schaalman stood a moment, considering what he’d gleaned. Then he stepped to the desk and opened a drawer. There, stuffed in at the top, were Rabbi Meyer’s notes on the Golem, right where Michael had left them.
Schaalman leafed through the notes with growing excitement, following the Rabbi’s painstaking progress, his discoveries and setbacks. At last he understood why Meyer had stolen those precious volumes from his own colleagues. He’d thought the man to be his nemesis, when in truth Meyer had been building a precious gift for him to find. He had to acknowledge its subtle artistry, so much calmer and more practicable than his own frenzied divinations. The formula’s requirement that it be used only with the Golem’s permission, for example—that was something he never could have constructed. Though in truth, he would never have thought to try.
An odd irony, to ask that the Golem part freely with her own free will. No doubt Meyer had envisioned a heartfelt conversation with his charge, a solemn and reasoned decision. Schaalman folded the formula and placed it in his pocket, and reflected that in this instance, his own methods would trump Meyer’s. After all, a choice made under coercion was still a choice.