Slowly, over days and weeks, the Golem and Rabbi Meyer learned how to live with each other.
It wasn’t easy. The Rabbi’s rooms were small and cramped, and the Rabbi had grown used to his solitude. Not that living cheek by jowl with a stranger was a new experience—when he’d first come to America he’d boarded with a family of five. But he’d been younger then, more adaptable. In recent years, solitude had become his one indulgence.
As he’d predicted, the Golem quickly sensed his discomfort. Soon she developed the habit of positioning herself as far from him as possible, as though trying to leave without leaving. Finally he sat her down and explained that she shouldn’t go elsewhere simply because he was in the room.
“But you want me to,” she said.
“Yes, but against my own will. My better self knows that you may sit or stand wherever you wish. You must learn how to act according to what people say and do, not what they wish or fear. You have an extraordinary window into people’s souls, and you’ll see many ugly and uncomfortable things, much worse than my wishing you to stand somewhere else. You must be prepared for them, and learn when to discount them.”
She listened, and nodded, but it was more difficult for her than he realized. To be in the same room with him, knowing he wanted her elsewhere, was a small torture. Her instinct to be of use tugged at her to leave, to get out of his way. To ignore it was akin to standing in the path of an oncoming streetcar, trying not to move. She would start to fidget, or would break things by accident—the handle of a drawer ripping away as she grasped it, the hem of her skirt tearing as she pulled at the fabric. She’d apologize profusely, and he would tell her it meant little; but his dismay was hard to suppress, and it only made matters worse.
“It would be better if I had something to do,” she said finally.
At once the Rabbi saw his mistake. Without thinking, he’d given the Golem the worst life possible: that of idleness. And so he relented and allowed her to take over the cleaning of the rooms, which until then he’d insisted on doing himself.
The change—both in the Golem, and in the Rabbi’s abode—was instantaneous. With a task to perform, the Golem could lose herself inside it and begin to ignore the distractions. Each morning she would scrub the dishes from breakfast and tea, and then take up the rag and attack the stove, removing a few more layers of the persistent grime that had built up in the years since the Rabbi’s wife had died. Then she’d make the Rabbi’s bed, folding the corners of the sheet tight against the sagging frame. Any dirty clothes in the hamper—save for his undergarments, which he steadfastly refused to let her clean—were carried to the kitchen sink and washed, then hung to dry. The clothes from the day before were taken down and ironed, folded, and put away.
“I can’t help but feel I’m taking advantage of you,” said the chagrined Rabbi, watching her stack his dishes in the cupboard. “And my students will think I’ve hired a maid.”
“But I like doing the work. It makes me feel better. And this way I can repay you for your generosity.”
“I wasn’t looking for payment when I offered to take you in.”
“But I want to give it,” she said, and went on stacking dishes. Eventually the Rabbi decided to reconcile himself to the situation, defeated by necessity and the lure of freshly ironed trousers.
When they spoke to each other, they spoke quietly. The tenement was noisy, even at night, but the walls were thin, and the Rabbi’s neighbors would be all too intrigued by the sound of a young woman’s voice. Fortunately, she had no need to visit the shared water closet in the hall. Once a day she washed herself in the kitchen while the Rabbi sat in his bedroom or at the table in the front room, occupying his mind with study and prayer.
It was hardest when one of the Rabbi’s students would come over for his lesson. A few minutes beforehand, the Golem would go to the bedroom and crawl underneath the Rabbi’s bed. Soon would come the knock at the door, the scrape of the parlor chairs against the floorboards, and the Rabbi’s voice: so, have you studied your portion?
There was barely enough room under the bed for the Golem. It was narrow and hung so low that the brass springs almost brushed her nose. To lie still and silent in such an enclosed space was no easy task. Her fingers and legs would begin to twitch, regardless of how much she tried to relax. Meanwhile, a small army of wants and needs would make their way to her mind: from the boy and the Rabbi, both of whom would give anything for the clock to go faster; from the woman in the room below, who lived in a constant torment of pain from her hip; from the three young children next door, who were forced to share their few toys, and always coveted whatever they didn’t have—and, at a more distant remove, from the rest of the tenement, a small city of strivings and lusts and heartaches. And at its center lay the Golem, listening to it all.
The Rabbi had advised her to concentrate on her other senses to drown out the noise; and so the Golem would press her ear to the floor and listen to water gurgling through the pipes, mothers scolding their children in blistering Yiddish, the banging of pots and pans, arguments, prayers, the whirr of sewing machines. Above it all, she heard the Rabbi teaching the boy to chant his portion, his hoarse voice alternating with the boy’s young, piping one. Sometimes she would chant silently along, mouthing the words, until the boy left and she could come out again.
The nights were almost as difficult. The Rabbi went to bed at ten and did not wake until six, and so for eight hours the Golem was alone with the vague, dreaming thoughts of others. The Rabbi suggested reading to pass the time; and so, one night, she pulled a volume from the Rabbi’s shelves, opened it at random, and read:
. . . Cooked victuals may be put on a stove that was heated with straw or stubble. If the stove was heated with the pulp of poppy-seed or with wood, cooked victuals may not be put upon it, unless the coals were taken out or covered with ashes. The students of Shammai say: victuals may be taken off the stove, but not put back upon it. The students of Hillel permit it.
The schoolmen propounded a question: “As for the expression ‘shall not be put,’ does it mean ‘one shall not put it back,’ but if it has not been taken off, it may be left there?”
There are two parts to our answer . . .
She closed the book and stared at the leather cover. Were all books like this? Daunted and a bit irritated, she spent the rest of the night looking out the window, watching the men and women walk by.
In the morning she told the Rabbi of her attempt at reading. Later that day he went out to run errands, and brought her back a flat, thin package. Inside was a slender book, with a gaily illustrated cover. A large ship, populated with animals, floated at the crest of a gigantic wave. Behind the ship, a band of colors curved a half circle, its apex brushing the clouds above.
“This is a better start for you, I think,” the Rabbi said.
That night, the Golem was introduced to Adam and Eve, and Cain and Abel. She learned about Noah and his Ark, and the rainbow that was the sign of God’s covenant. She read of Abraham and Isaac on the mountain, the near sacrifice and its aftermath. She thought it all very strange. The stories themselves were easy to follow; but she wasn’t sure what she was supposed to think of these people. Had they actually existed, or had they been invented? The tales of Adam and Noah said they lived to be many hundreds of years old—but wasn’t this impossible? The Rabbi was the oldest person she’d met in her brief life, and he was far short of a century. Did this mean that the book told lies? But the Rabbi was always so careful to say only the truth! If these were lies, then why had the Rabbi asked her to read them?
She read the book three times through, trying to understand these long-ago people. Their motives, needs, and fears were always at the surface, as easy for her to grasp as those of a man passing by. And Adam and Eve were ashamed, and hid to cover their nakedness. And Cain grew jealous of his brother, and rose up and slew him. How different from the lives of the people around her, who hid their desires away. She recalled what the Rabbi had said: to judge a man by his actions, not his thoughts. And judging by the actions of the people in this book, to act on one’s wishes and desires led, more often than not, to misdeed and misfortune.
But were all desires wrong? What about the hungry boy for whom she’d stolen the knish? Could a desire for food be wrong if one were starving? A woman down the hall had a son who was a peddler, in a place called Wyoming. She lived in wait of a letter from him, some sign to let her know that he was alive and safe. This too seemed right and natural. But then, how was she to know?
In the morning, when the Rabbi asked her what she’d thought of the book, she hesitated, searching for the right words. “Were these real people?”
He raised an eyebrow. “Would my answer change your understanding of them?”
“I’m not sure. It’s just that they seem too simple to be real. As soon as a desire arose, they acted on it. And not small things, like ‘I need a new hat’ or ‘I want to buy a loaf of bread.’ Large things, like Adam and Eve and the apple. Or Cain killing Abel.” She frowned. “I know I haven’t lived very long, but this seems unusual.”
“You’ve watched children playing in the street, haven’t you? Do they often ignore their desires?”
“I see what you mean,” she said, “but these aren’t stories about children.”
“I believe they are, in a way,” said the Rabbi. “These were the world’s first people. Everything they did, every action and decision, was entirely new, without precedent. They had no larger society to turn to, no examples of how to behave. They only had the Almighty to tell them right from wrong. And like all children, if His commands ran counter to their desires, sometimes they chose not to listen. And then they learned that there are consequences to one’s actions. But tell me, now—I don’t think you found reading an enjoyable way to pass the time.”
“I tried to enjoy it!” she protested. “But it’s hard to sit still for so long!”
The Rabbi sighed inwardly. He’d hoped that reading would be a good solution, even a permanent one. But he saw now it was too much to ask of her. Her nature wouldn’t allow it.
“If only I could walk outside at night.” Her voice was a quiet plea.
He shook his head. “That isn’t possible, I’m afraid. Women out alone at night are assumed to be of poor moral character. You’d find yourself prey to unwanted advances, even violent behavior. I wish it were otherwise. But perhaps it is time,” he said, “for us to venture outside during the day. We could take a walk together, after I’ve seen my students. Would that help?”
The Golem’s face lit with anticipation, and she spent the morning cleaning the already spotless kitchen with renewed focus and zeal.
After the last student had come and gone, the Rabbi outlined his plan for their walk. He would leave the tenement alone, and she would follow five minutes later. They’d meet a few blocks away, on a particular corner. He gave her an old shawl of his wife’s, and a straw hat, and a parcel to carry, a few books he’d wrapped in paper and tied with string. “Walk as though you have an errand and a purpose,” he said. “But not too quickly. Look to the women around you for example, if need be. I’ll be waiting.” He smiled encouragingly, and left.
The Golem waited, watching the clock on the mantel. Three minutes passed. Four. Five. Books in hand, she stepped into the hall, closed the door, and walked out onto the noon-bright street. It was the first she’d left the Rabbi’s rooms since coming to live with him.
This time she was more prepared for the assault of wants and wishes, but their intensity still took her aback. For a wild moment she wanted to flee back into the building. But no—the Rabbi was waiting for her. She eyed the incessant traffic, the streams of pedestrians and hawkers and horses all moving past one another. Gripping the parcel as if it were a talisman, she took a last quick glance up and down the street, and set off.
Meanwhile the Rabbi stood on his corner, waiting nervously. He too was having difficulty mastering his thoughts. He’d considered tailing the Golem, to make certain she didn’t fall into trouble—but it would be far too easy for her to discover his mind, focused on her as it was, and he couldn’t risk, or bear, to lose her trust. And so he’d done what he’d said he would, and went to the corner and waited. It was a test for himself as well, he decided—to see if he could let her go, and live with the knowledge that she was out there in the world, beyond his control.
Fervently he hoped they both would pass the test, for their current arrangement was growing hard to bear. His guest was undemanding, but nevertheless she was a constant and uncanny presence. He longed for the unabashed luxury of sitting alone at his table in his undershirt and shorts, drinking tea and reading the newspaper.
And there were other, more urgent considerations. In the bottom drawer of his dresser, hidden beneath his winter clothing, lay a drawstring bag that he’d found in the pocket of her coat. Inside the bag was a man’s billfold with a few notes, an elegant silver pocket watch—its works now hopelessly corroded—and a small oilskin envelope. The words COMMANDS FOR THE GOLEM were written on the envelope in spindly and uneven Hebrew. It held a roughly folded square of paper that, happily or not, had survived the journey to shore. He’d read the paper; he knew what it contained.
In the tumult of her arrival in New York, the bag’s existence had evidently fallen from her mind. But it was her property, and all that was left of her erstwhile master; he felt obscurely wrong in keeping it hidden. But then, if a child had landed at Ellis Island carrying a pistol in his pocket, would it not be right to confiscate it? For now, at least, he was resolved to keep the envelope safely out of her sight.
In the meantime, though, it had set his mind working. He’d assumed that there were only two solutions to the predicament of the Golem: either destroy her, or do his best to educate her and protect her. But what if there was a third way? What if he could, in essence, discover how to bind a living golem to a new master?
As far as he knew, this had never been done before. And most of the books—and the minds—that might once have helped him were long gone. But he was loath to discount the possibility. For now, he would see to the Golem’s education as best he could until she could live on her own. And then, he would set to work.
But now he put those thoughts aside—for he’d spied a familiar figure coming toward him, tall and straight, walking carefully with the crowd. She’d seen him too, and was smiling, her eyes alight. And now he was smiling back, a bit dazed by the surge of pride he’d felt at the sight of her, like a bittersweet weight on his heart.
Far across the Atlantic, the city of Konin in the German Empire bustled on as usual, barely altered by the departure of Otto Rotfeld. The only real change came when the old furniture shop was leased by a Lithuanian and turned into a fashionable café; all agreed that it improved the neighborhood immensely. In truth, the only resident of Konin who gave much thought to Rotfeld was Yehudah Schaalman, the reviled hermit who had built the man a golem. As the weeks turned to months, and Rotfeld’s submerged body gave itself over to the currents and sea creatures, Schaalman would sit evenings at his table, drinking glasses of schnapps and wondering about the unpleasant young man. Had he found success in America? Had he woken his clay bride?
Yehudah Schaalman was ninety-three years old. This fact was not common knowledge, for he had the features and bearing of a man of seventy and, if he wished, could make himself appear younger still. He had survived to this old age through forbidden and dangerous arts, his considerable wits, and a horror of death that drove all else before it. One day, he knew, the Angel of Death would at last come for him, and take him to stand before the Books of Life and Death, there to listen to the recitation of his transgressions. Then the gate would open, and he would be cast into the fires of Gehenna, there to be punished in a length and manner to fit his misdeeds. And his misdeeds had been many, and varied.
When he was not selling love charms to foolish village girls or untraceable poisons to hollow-eyed wives, Schaalman bent every scrap of his will to his dilemma: how to indefinitely postpone the day of the Angel’s arrival. And so he was not, as a rule, a man given to idle reverie. He did not waste his time speculating about every customer who sought his services. But then why, he asked himself, had this hapless furniture maker captured his attention?
Yehudah Schaalman’s life had not always been this way.
As a boy, Yehudah had been the most promising student that the rabbis had ever seen. He had taken to study as though born for no other purpose. By his fifteenth year it had become common for Yehudah to argue his teachers to a standstill, weaving such supple nets of Talmudic argument that they found themselves advocating positions exactly opposite to the ones they’d believed. This agility of mind was matched only by a piety and devotion to God so strong that he made the other students seem like brazen heretics. Once or twice, late at night, his teachers murmured to one another that perhaps the wait for the Messiah would not be as long as they had expected.
They groomed him to become a rabbi, as quickly as they could. Yehudah’s parents were delighted: poor, barely more than peasants, they had gone without to provide for his education. The rabbinate began to debate where to send the boy. Would he do the most good at the head of a congregation? Or should they send him on to university, where he could begin to teach the next generation?
A few weeks before his ordainment, Yehudah Schaalman had a dream.
He was walking on a path of broken stones through a gray wilderness. Far ahead of him, a featureless wall stretched across the horizon and reached high into the heavens. He was exhausted and footsore; but after much walking Yehudah was able to discern a small door, little more than a man-shaped hole, where the path met the wall. Suddenly full of a strange, fearful joy, he ran the rest of the way.
At the door he paused, and peered inside. Whatever lay beyond was shrouded in mist. He touched the wall: it was painfully cold. He turned around and found that the mist had swallowed the path, even up to his own feet. In the whole of Creation, there was only himself, the wall, and the door.
Yehudah stepped through.
Mist and wall disappeared. He was standing in a meadow of grasses. The sun shone down and bathed him in warmth. The air was thick with scents of earth and vegetation. He was filled with a great peace unlike any he had ever known.
There was a grove of trees past the meadow, golden-green with sunlight. He knew there was someone standing inside the grove, just beyond his sight, waiting for him to arrive. Eagerly he took a step forward.
In an instant the sky darkened to storm-black. Yehudah felt himself seized and held. A voice spoke in his head:
You do not belong here.
Meadow and grove disappeared. He was released—he was falling—
And then he was on the path again, on his hands and knees, surrounded by broken stones. This time, there was no wall, or any other landmark to travel toward, only the stones leading through the blasted landscape to the horizon, with no hint of respite.
Yehudah Schaalman awoke to darkness and the certain knowledge that he was somehow damned.
When he told his teachers he was leaving and would not become a rabbi, they wept as though for the dead. They pleaded with him to explain why such an upright student would forsake his own purpose. But he gave no answer, and told no one of the dream, for fear that they would try to reason with him, explain it all away, tell him tales of demons who tormented the righteous with false visions. He knew the truth of what he’d dreamed; what he didn’t understand was why.
And so Yehudah Schaalman left his studies behind. He spent sleepless nights combing through his memories, trying to determine which of his sins had damned him. He hadn’t led a spotless life—he knew he could be proud and overeager, and when young he had fought bitterly with his sister and often pulled her hair—but he had followed the Commandments to the best of his ability. And were not his lapses more than compensated by his good deeds? He was a devoted son, a dutiful scholar! The wisest rabbis of the age thought him a miracle of God! If Yehudah Schaalman was not worthy of God’s love, then who on earth was?
Tormented by these thoughts, Yehudah packed a few books and provisions, said farewell to his weeping parents, and struck out on his own. He was nineteen years old.
It was a poor time to be traveling. Dimly Yehudah knew that his little shtetl lay inside the Grand Duchy of Posen, and that the duchy was a part of the Kingdom of Prussia; but to his teachers these were mundane matters, of little consequence to a spiritual prodigy such as Yehudah, and had not been dwelled upon. Now he learned a new truth: that he was a naive, penniless Jew who spoke little Polish and no German, and that all his studies were useless. Traveling the open roads, he was beset by thieves, who spied his thin back and delicate looks and took him for a merchant’s son. When they discovered that he had nothing to steal, they beat him and cursed him for their troubles. One night he made the mistake of asking for supper at a well-to-do German settlement; the burghers cuffed him and threw him to the road. He took to loitering on the outskirts of the peasant villages, where at least he had a chance of understanding what was said. He longed to speak Yiddish again, but he avoided the shtetls entirely, afraid of being drawn back into the world he had fled.
He became a laborer, tilling fields and tending sheep, but the work didn’t suit him. He made no friends among his fellows, being a thin and ragged Jew who spoke Polish as though it dirtied his mouth. Often he could be seen leaning on his spade or letting the bull walk away with the plow as he ruminated once more on his past sins. The more he reflected, the more it seemed to him that his entire life was a catalog of misdeeds. Sins of pride and laziness, of anger, arrogance, lust—he’d been guilty of them all, and no counterweight could balance the scale. His soul was like a stone shot through with brittle minerals, sound in appearance but worthless at heart. The rabbis had all been deceived; only the Almighty had known the truth of it.
One hot afternoon, while he reflected in this way, another field-worker scolded him for laziness; and Yehudah, in the depths of his gloom and forgetting his Polish, responded with a more insulting answer than he’d intended. The man was upon Yehudah in an instant. The others gathered around, glad to finally see the arrogant boy receive his comeuppance. Flat on his back, nose gushing with blood, Yehudah saw his adversary crouched above him, one fist pulled back to strike again. Behind him rose a circle of jeering heads, like a council of demons sitting in raucous judgment. In that moment, all the heartache, resentment, and self-loathing of his exile contracted to a hard point of rage. He sprang up and barreled into his attacker, knocking him to the ground. As the others watched in horror, Yehudah proceeded to pummel him remorselessly about the head and was on the verge of gouging out one of his eyes when finally someone grabbed him in a bear hug and pulled him away. In a frenzy, Yehudah twisted and bit until the man let him go. And then Yehudah ran. The local constables stopped chasing him at the edge of town, but Yehudah kept on running. He had nothing now but the clothes on his back. It was even less than he’d started with.
He ceased pondering his roster of sins. It was clear now that the corruption of his soul was an elemental fact. That he had avoided capture and jail did not console him: for now he began to dwell on the greater judgment, the one that lay beyond.
He left off fieldwork and instead wandered from town to town, searching out odd jobs. He stocked shelves, swept floors, cut cloth. The pay was meager at best. He began to pilfer for survival, and then to steal outright. Soon he was stealing even when there was no need. In one village he worked at a mill, filling the flour sacks and taking them into town to be sold. The local baker had a daughter with bright green eyes and a shapely figure, and she liked to linger while he unloaded the sacks of flour in her father’s storeroom. One day he dared to brush his fingers across her shoulder. She said nothing, only smiled at him. The next time, emboldened and inflamed, he beckoned her into a corner and grabbed clumsily at her. She laughed at him, and he ran from the storeroom. But the time after that, she did not laugh. They copulated atop the shifting sacks, their mouths thick with flour dust. When it was over, he climbed off her, neatened himself with shaking hands, called her a whore, and walked away. At the next delivery she did not respond to his advances, and he slapped her across the face. When he returned to the mill, her father was waiting for him, along with the police.
For the crimes of rape and molestation, Yehudah Schaalman was sentenced to fifteen years in prison. Two years had passed since his dream; he was now twenty-one years old.
And so the third phase of his education began. In prison, Schaalman hardened and turned clever. He learned to be always on his guard, and to size up each man in a room as a possible opponent. The last traces of his old gentleness vanished, but he couldn’t disguise his intellect. The other inmates thought him a laughingstock—a skinny book-learned Jew, locked up with murderers! They called him “Rabbi,” at first jeeringly; but soon they were asking him to settle disputes. He accepted, and handed down pronouncements that married Talmudic precision with the strict moral code of the prison yard. The inmates respected his judgments, and eventually even the wardens were deferring to him.
Still he kept to himself, holding himself apart from the hierarchy of the prison and its gangs. He had no toadies, kept no corrupt guard in his pocket. The others thought him squeamish, afraid to dirty his hands, but he could see who held the real power, and it was himself. He was the definitive arbiter of justice, fairer than the courts. The inmates hated him for it, but they left him alone. In this manner Schaalman survived for fifteen long years, unharmed and untouched, nursing his bitterness and anger while the prison seethed around him.
At thirty-five he finally emerged and discovered that he would’ve been safer if he’d stayed behind bars. The countryside was aflame. Tired of the theft of their lands and their culture, the Poles of the duchy had risen up against their Prussian occupiers, only to be drawn into a military battle they had no hope of winning. Prussian soldiers roamed from village to village, stamping out the last of the resistance, looting the synagogues and Catholic churches. It was impossible to travel unnoticed. A group of Prussian soldiers came upon Schaalman on the road and beat him for sport; and then, even before his wounds had closed, a gang of Polish conscripts did the same. He tried to find work in the villages, but he bore the invisible mark of the prison now, in his hard features and his calculating eye, and no one would have him. He stole food from storehouses and stable feed-buckets, slept in fields, and tried to stay out of sight.
And so it was that one night, in a filthy camp at the edge of a field, starving and nearly mad with fear of death, Schaalman awoke from a gray dreamless sleep to see a strange light on the horizon, a pulsing, red-orange glow that grew as he watched. Still in that realm between sleep and waking, Schaalman stood and, taking no notice of his few belongings on the ground, began to walk toward it.
A furrow had been plowed down the middle of the field, making a highway that pointed straight at the light. He stumbled over clods of earth, barely conscious and dizzy with hunger. It was a warm, windy night, and the grain rippled in the breeze, a million small voices whispering his secrets.
The glow brightened, and stretched higher into the sky. Above the whispering of the field he heard voices: men shouting to one another, women crying out in anguish. The scent of woodsmoke reached his nose.
The field fell away behind him, and the ground began to slope upward. The glow now stretched across his vision. The smoke had turned acrid, the screams louder. The slope steepened until Schaalman was on his hands and knees, dragging himself upward, at the edge of his strength and beyond the boundaries of reason. His eyes were shut against the effort, but the red-orange light still floated before him, compelling him to keep moving. After what seemed an unutterable distance, the hill began to level, until Schaalman, sobbing with exhaustion, perceived that he had reached the crest. With no strength left even to lift his head, he collapsed into a fugue deeper than sleep.
He woke to a clear sky, a gentle breeze, and a strange clarity of mind. His hunger was extreme, but he felt it at a remove, as though someone else were starving and he merely observed. He sat up and looked around. He was in the middle of a clearing. There was no sign of the hill; the ground was flat in every direction. There was nothing to tell him which direction he had come, or how to return.
Before him lay the charred ruins of a synagogue.
The grass around the structure had singed along with it, carving a black circle into the ground. The fire had burnt the walls down to the foundation, leaving the sanctuary open to the elements. Inside, fallen beams jutted from twin columns of blackened pews.
Carefully he stood and crossed into the burnt circle of grass. He paused at the place where the door would have been, then stepped across the threshold. It was the first time in seventeen years that he’d entered a house of worship.
Not a living thing stirred inside. An eerie quiet hung over all, as though even the sounds of the outside world, the rustlings of bird and grass and insect, had been muffled. In the aisle, Schaalman picked up a handful of woody ash and sifted it between his fingers—and realized that the synagogue couldn’t have burned only the night before, for these ashes were as cold as stone. Had it all been a dream? Then what had led him here?
Carefully he walked the rest of the way up the aisle. A few spars from the ceiling blocked his path. He put his hands to them, and they crumbled to splinters.
The lectern was singed but still whole. There was no sign of the ark or its scroll; presumably they had been either saved or destroyed. The remains of prayer books lay scattered near the dais. He lifted from the ground a browned half-page, and read a fragment of the Kaddish.
Behind the dais was a space that had once been a small room, likely the rabbi’s study. He stepped over the half-wall that remained. Burnt papers littered the floor in drifts. The rabbi’s desk was a seared oblong hulk of wood in the middle of the room. A drawer was set into its front. Schaalman grasped the handle, and the fitting came away in his hand, lock and all. He wormed his fingernails into the crack that lay between the drawer and the desk, and broke the face to smithereens. He reached inside the exposed drawer, and withdrew the remains of a book.
Carefully he placed it atop the desk. The book’s spine had peeled away from the body, so that it could not properly be said to be a book any longer, but rather a sheaf of singed papers. Scraps of leather clung to the cover. He lifted the cover away, and placed it aside.
The book had darkened from the edges inward, leaving only an island of undamaged writing on each page. The paper itself was as thick as rag, and the writing was of a spidery hand that held forth in an old-fashioned, declamatory Yiddish. With growing wonder he lifted each page, his fingers cold and trembling. Broken snippets of text ran together before his eyes:
. . . a sure charm against fever is the recitation of the formula discovered by Galen and augmented by . . .
. . . should be repeated forty-one times for highest efficacy . . .
. . . aid in good health after a fast, collect nine branches from a nut-tree, each branch bearing nine leaves . . .
. . . to make one’s voice sweet to others, direct this exhortation to the Angel of . . .
. . . increase of virility, mix these six herbs and eat at midnight, while reciting the following Name of God . . .
. . . speak this Psalm to ward away demonic influence . . .
. . . of a golem is permissible only in times of deepest danger, and care must be taken to ensure . . .
. . . repeat the demon’s name, removing one letter with each iteration, until the name has dwindled to one letter, and the demon will dwindle likewise . . .
. . . to negate the ill effect that results from a woman passing between two men . . .
. . . this sixty-lettered Name of God is especially useful, though it is not to be uttered during the month of Adar . . .
Page after page, the secrets of long-dead mystics laid themselves before him. Many were irredeemably lost save for a few brief words, but some were whole and undamaged, and others were tantalizingly close to complete. This was the knowledge forbidden to all but the most pious and learned. His teachers had once hinted that wonders such as these would someday be his; but they’d denied him even the briefest glimpse, saying he was still far too young. To utter a charm or an exorcism or a Name of God without purity of heart and intention, they’d said, would be to risk one’s soul to the fires of Gehenna.
But for Schaalman, the fires of Gehenna had long been a foregone conclusion. If that was to be his end, then he would make the most of the meantime. Some influence, divine or demonic, had led him to this place, and had placed unutterable mysteries in his hands. He would take that power, and he would use it to his own ends.
The papers lay crisped and quietly crackling beneath his fingers. In the distant dizziness of his hunger, he could swear he felt them vibrate like a plucked string.