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 gone 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.
“Thank you,” he said, relieved.
They led him to a clearing within the habitations, and there he buried the flask, the elders watching as he dug into the gritty, hard-packed soil with his hands. He added the sheaf of papers and replaced the soil, and then built a mound of stones, fitting them as tightly as he could. By the time he was finished the entire habitation had gathered to watch. He was painfully aware that he was trusting the care of ibn Malik’s soul to the capricious attentions of his own kind. But better this than New York, where sooner or later the flask and the spells would be unearthed, no matter how deeply they were buried, to make way for a new building or bridge or monument. Whereas it seemed that humanity still hadn’t conquered the desert.
But how will you live, bound and chained as you are? the eldest jinniyeh asked him as he stood, wiping his hands. What will you do, where will you go?
“I’ll go home,” he told her. And he left the habitation, a thousand eyes watching as he passed.
His palace was still there, shining in the valley.
There was damage, to be sure. The outer walls were deeply weathered, etched by the sand to a milky opacity. The taller towers had crumbled, littering the valley floor with smooth blue-white shards. In some places the glass was thin as paper. In others it had worn away entirely, leaving curved windows like portholes, open to the elements. He went inside, stepping over rubble. Sand lay in drifts in the corners; the roof was a honeycomb. He saw bird nests, the bones of animal meals.
In the great hall, he found the remains of Fadwa and Abu Yusuf.
The walls of the hall were thick, and the man and his daughter had lain there in peace until the desert air had dried them past the interest of the animals. He sat before them, cross-legged on the dusty floor. He thought of Saleh’s funeral, a few weeks earlier. Maryam had reached out to Little Syria’s small Muslim population and found a man willing to serve as imam. Arbeely and Sayeed Faddoul and the Jinni had all helped to wash Saleh and wrap him in white sheets; and then the Jinni had stood inside the grave to receive the shrouded body. Afterward they had all gone back to the Faddouls’ coffeehouse, and he’d listened as they talked about Saleh, sharing what little they knew. He was a healer, Maryam had said, and the others had looked at her quizzically; but the Jinni had said, it’s true, he was. He wished there was someone with him now, so he could tell them about this young woman and her father, the lives they’d led, the loved ones they’d left behind. He thought of Sophia Winston, who was soon to arrive in Istanbul, a relatively short distance away. But he’d only be intruding, and burdening her with sorrows, at the start of her own long-awaited journey.
He wanted to bury Fadwa and her father, as Saleh had been buried, but their remains were too delicate to move. So instead he gathered the shards that had fallen from his palace, and built a tomb around them. He melted the pieces and smoothed them together, shaping first the walls and then a domed cover. It was hard, draining work. More than once he had to go out into the sun, to regain his strength.
At last it was done. He debated whether to carve their names into the glass, but in the end he left the tomb quiet and unmarked. He knew who they were, and why they were there. That, he decided, would suffice.
The sun was setting by the time the Golem returned home, to her new boardinghouse on Eldridge Street. Her room there was no larger than the one the Rabbi had found for her, but the house itself was double the size, and catered to a much more sociable clientele. The landlady was a former actress, and most of her lodgers were drawn from that world: traveling thespians who would stop in New York for a season or two before departing for stints elsewhere. The Golem found she liked her fellow tenants. Their thoughts could be trying, even exhausting; but their enthusiasms were genuine, and they grew to like her as well. She was a spot of stillness in their midst, and a fresh audience for their stories. At some point her skill in sewing had come out, and soon they were all asking her to mend their costumes, even make them new ones: the troupe’s seamstress is just awful, she can’t hold a candle to your work. They paid her if they could, and brought her flowers and petits fours and front-row tickets, and distracted her with cheerful noise. And unlike at her old boardinghouse, they gave no thought at all to lights burning at all hours, or a late-night step upon the stair.
She went up to her room and paused, dismayed. A wedding dress of cheap satin was hanging from her door handle, a gash across its train. Attached was a note from one of her neighbors, thanking her in advance for mending her costume, and promising a bag of chocolate drops or whatever else she might fancy.
She carried the dress inside, lit the lamp, and drew the sewing basket nearer to her chair. Her own wedding dress was folded away in the room’s small wardrobe, below her workaday clothes. She hadn’t yet been able to part with it.
The mend was an easy one, and soon it was finished. Absently she straightened the sleeves and smoothed the bodice, looking for any small rips she might repair, and thinking all the while of Anna’s exhortation that she do something about the Jinni. For Anna, that would likely mean a torrid love affair, full of melodrama and broken promises. Perhaps the Jinni could do such a thing—whatever had passed between him and Sophia seemed to be in this vein—but herself? Ridiculous, to picture herself so drunk on passion, so absurdly self-involved, that she could set aside all reason and hang the consequences.
But then, what other option was there? A quiet courtship, then marriage and the domestic life? Almost as hard to imagine. He would go mad with the constraint: the burdens of faithfulness and constancy, of returning home to a tiny room day after day. He would come to blame her, and she would lose him. And even if by some miracle he were willing, would she want to marry again, after Michael? Perhaps it would be better to spend a few years sewing alone in her room. You should try to be happy, if you can, Anna had said—but the Golem could not see a way toward it.
A knock came at the door: her landlady was holding a telegram. “Chava? This just came for you.” The woman handed it over and closed the door, her curiosity held painfully at bay.
BEIRUT SYRIA 29 SEP
CHAVA LEVY
67 ELDRIDGE ST NY
ALL ACCOMPLISHED EXCEPT STILL BOUND—
She stopped reading and closed her eyes. He’d held out little hope, she knew. And undoubtedly she would have lost him, as wanderlust rose to overtake affection. Even so, she felt a surge of sorrow on his behalf.
She began again:
ALL ACCOMPLISHED EXCEPT STILL BOUND TELL ARBEELY WOULD LIKE JOB BACK—
At this she smiled.
—WILL RETURN VIA MARSEILLE EXPECT ME 19 OCT BENEATH YOUR WINDOW.
AHMAD AL-HADID
Maybe, she thought as she fastened her cloak, there was some middle ground to be had, a resting place between passion and practicality. She had no idea how they would find it: in all likelihood they’d have to carve it for themselves out of thin air. And any path they chose would not be an easy one. But perhaps she could allow herself to hope.
She stepped out into the clear, windy night, walked to the telegram office on Broadway, and let him know that he needn’t come to her window—she would meet him at the dock.