With the arrival of October, the summer weather departed for good. The leaves in Central Park barely had a chance to turn before they fell, to be raked by the gardeners into sodden heaps and carted away. A gray sky filled the gutters with cold, unending drizzle.
The busy corner of Allen and Delancey Streets, where Radzin’s Bakery stood, was a moving patchwork of grays and browns. Pedestrians in shawls and overcoats trampled piles of garbage, their backs rounded against the wind. Greasy smoke rose from barrels on the edge of the street, where ragpickers and errand boys warmed their hands before moving on. But inside Radzin’s the atmosphere was altogether different. The cold wind ended at the door, held back by a constant heat from the two enormous ovens at the rear of the shop. While their customers arrived stamping their feet and shivering, Moe Radzin worked the ovens in shirtsleeves and an apron, perspiration darkening his broad back. In the middle of the shop stood two large wooden tables perpetually coated with flour, where Thea Radzin and her assistants rolled and braided and kneaded and mixed. The display counter at the front of the bakery stretched nearly the width of the shop and was packed with ryes and wheat loaves and dinner rolls, sweet pastries and macaroons, and honey-sweet strudels stuffed with raisins. General opinion held that Radzin’s bread was good enough for the price, but that their pastries were the best in the neighborhood.
The bakery lived by its daily rhythm. At five o’clock each morning, Moe Radzin unlocked the front door and swept the ashes from the ovens, laid new coals, and coaxed them to life. Thea arrived at five-thirty, along with their children, Selma and little Abie, who stumbled about, half-asleep. They uncovered the dough that had been rising overnight, punched it down, and set about shaping the day’s first loaves. At six the assistants arrived: young Anna Blumberg, and Chava, the new girl.
Anna Blumberg was a source of some consternation to her employers. A tailor’s daughter, she had left Cincinnati at sixteen and traveled alone to New York. She’d had vague plans of joining the Yiddish theater and becoming the next Sara Adler, but the city itself had been the real draw; and after two unsuccessful auditions she’d shrugged, given up, and looked about for a job. The Radzins had taken her on, and she’d become fast friends with the other two assistants. It was a major blow for Anna when the young women had left, one so soon after the other.
As far as Moe Radzin was concerned, the departures were a mixed blessing: it left him shorthanded, but he no longer had to endure the girls’ constant gossip and flirtations. So when Radzin’s old rabbi had come to see him soon after, along with a tall, solemn-looking greenhorn girl carrying a plate of homemade pastries, he wasn’t sure whether to count this new development as blessing or curse.
Radzin was a man not given to the benefit of the doubt. He looked from the girl to the Rabbi, and decided that Meyer’s story was at least partly a lie. The girl did seem to be in financial straits—her clothing was cheap and ill fitting, and she wore no jewelry at all—but the dead husband, he decided, was a fiction, or else beside the point. Most likely this was the Rabbi’s impoverished mistress. But then, what did it matter? Men had their needs, even holy men. More to the point, if he hired her, the Rabbi would owe him a favor. And besides, her pastries were excellent.
Soon it became clear that the girl was quite a find. She was a dedicated worker and seemed never to tire. At first they had to remind her to take the occasional break. “We aren’t slave drivers, dear,” Thea Radzin told her on the first day, after the girl had worked for six hours without pause. The girl had smiled, embarrassed, and said, “I’m sorry. It’s only that I enjoy the work so much, I don’t want to stop.”
Mrs. Radzin, usually so quick to find fault with her husband’s hires, adored her from the start. Thea was a tough-skinned woman with a sentimental core, and the young widow’s story played strongly to her sensibilities. One night Moe Radzin made the mistake of voicing his suspicions regarding the girl’s relationship with the Rabbi, and in response his wife had blistered his ears with her opinion of his cynicism, his distrust, and, from there, his character in general. After that, Radzin kept his theories to himself. But even he had to admire the girl’s unflagging energy. At times her hands seemed to move impossibly quickly, shaping rolls and twisting pretzels with uncanny precision, so that each was a mirror image of its neighbors. He’d had plans to fill the other empty position, but within days of the new girl’s appearance the bakery was turning out its usual complement of goods. One less worker meant there was more space to move around, and they were saving nearly eleven dollars a week in salary. Radzin decided that his former assistants had been wasting even more time than he’d thought.
Only Anna refused to be won over. She’d been thrown into depression when her confidantes had left, and now this new girl seemed to think she was good enough to replace both of them. Of course the girl’s story was wonderfully tragic, but even that dimmed in the face of her awkward silence and ostentatious diligence. Anna watched her work and knew that she herself was now the one who didn’t measure up.
Anna would’ve been pleased to know that the Golem wasn’t nearly so certain of herself as she appeared. Passing as human was a constant strain. After only a few weeks she looked back on that first day, when she’d worked six hours without stopping, and wondered how she could have been so careless, so naive. It was all too easy for her to be caught up in the rhythm of the bakery, the thumps of fists on dough and the ringing of the bell over the door. Too easy to match it, and let it run away with her. She learned to make a deliberate mistake once in a while, and space the pastries a bit more haphazardly.
And then there were the customers, who kept their own rhythms and added their own complications. Each morning at six-thirty a small crowd would already be waiting for the bakery to open. Their thoughts pulled at the Golem as she worked: longings for the beds they had just vacated, and the warm arms of sleeping lovers; dread of the day before them, the bosses’ orders and the back-breaking labor. And running below it all, the simple anticipation of a nice warm bun or a bagel, and maybe a sugar cookie for later. At lunchtime came the patrons in search of onion-studded bialys or thick slices of bread. Kerchiefed women with babies in tow would pause at the window outside, wondering what to buy for supper. Errand boys came in clutching hard-earned pennies, and left with macaroons and slices of honey cake. Young men and women courted each other slyly in line, casually mentioning a dance that a union group or landsmanschaft was putting on: if you aren’t doing anything maybe you can stop by; well, I’m awfully busy tonight, Frankie, but then maybe I will.
The Golem heard all of it, their words and needs and desires and fears, simple and complex, helpless and easily solved. The impatient customers were the worst, the harried mothers who wanted only a loaf of bread and a quick escape before the children began howling for cookies. A few times the Golem even stepped away from her table toward these women, drawn to fetch whatever they wanted so they would leave. But then she’d catch herself, and stretch her fingers out and draw them in again—in the way that another woman might take a deep breath—and remind herself to be more careful.
Anna and Mrs. Radzin took turns seeing to the customers. Mrs. Radzin in particular was a model of efficiency at the counter, chatting quickly with them—hello Mrs. Leib, is it challah for you today, and your mother, is she better, oh the poor dear, do you want with poppy seeds or without? She filled orders almost without looking, monitoring the glass case as its contents dwindled, and anticipating what would need resupplying in the afternoon. After ten years at the bakery, the woman had a near-perfect sense of what would be popular on a given day and what wouldn’t.
Anna, on the other hand, could barely remember what was on offer, let alone which items were running low. Her talents lay in a completely different direction. She’d discovered that standing behind a counter was, in its own way, as satisfying as being onstage. She had a smile for everyone, and complimented the women and admired the men, and made funny faces at the children. The Golem noticed how the customers’ moods improved when Anna was at the till, and felt her own burst of envy. How did the girl do it? Was it a learned skill, or did it come to her naturally? She tried to imagine herself chatting and laughing with a roomful of strangers, completely at her ease. It seemed an impossible fantasy, like a child wishing for wings.
Thea Radzin had decreed that before the Golem could work at the counter she must learn the baking itself, and so for the first few weeks she was spared a turn at the register. But inevitably the afternoon came when Mrs. Radzin was out on an unexpected errand, and Anna had to visit the water closet; and Mr. Radzin turned from the ovens, gesturing at her with his chin. Go on.
She approached the register gingerly. She knew, in theory, what to do. The prices were all clearly posted, and there was no question of whether she could handle the numbers: she’d discovered she could tell at a glance how many cookies were on a baking sheet, or the value of a random handful of coins. It was the talking that frightened her. She imagined making some terrible, unforgivable mistake, and running away to hide under the Rabbi’s bed.
At the front of the line was a stout woman in a knitted shawl, who stood scanning the rows of loaves. Over a dozen people were clustered behind her, their faces all turned toward the Golem. For a moment she quailed; but then, with an effort, she pulled her attention away to focus on the woman in the shawl. Immediately she knew the order as if the woman had said it out loud: a rye bread, and a slice of strudel.
“What would you like?” she asked the woman, feeling faintly ridiculous, since the answer was so plain.
“A loaf of rye,” the woman said.
The Golem hesitated, waiting for the second half of the order. But the woman said nothing. “And perhaps some strudel?” she asked finally.
The woman laughed. “You caught me looking, did you? No, I have to watch my figure. I’m not the slip of a thing I used to be.”
A few of the other customers were smiling now. Embarrassed, the Golem fetched the rye. Apparently she could assume nothing—even a desire as simple as a bakery order.
She gave the woman the rye, and made change for her nickel. The woman said, “You’re new here, aren’t you? I’ve seen you working in the back. What’s your name?”
“Chava,” said the Golem.
“Green as grass, aren’t you? Don’t worry, you’ll be an American soon enough. Don’t work this one too hard, Moe,” she called to Mr. Radzin. “She doesn’t look it, but she’s delicate. I can tell these things.”
Radzin snorted. “Delicate my foot. She can braid a dozen challahs in five minutes.”
“Really?” The woman’s eyebrows raised. “Then you’d better treat her well, hadn’t you?”
He snorted again but made no other reply.
The woman smiled kindly. “Take care, Chavaleh.” And she left, carrying her rye.
A heavy satchel slung across his back, Rabbi Meyer walked slowly up Hester Street toward his home, ignoring the dirty puddles that threatened to drown his shoes. It was late afternoon, and the cold and damp had taken on a wintry edge. He’d developed a cough when the weather turned, and now it nagged at him as he climbed his staircase. More troubling, he’d begun to experience strange moments of vertigo, when it seemed as though the ground had disappeared beneath him and he was spinning through the air. It would last only a few seconds, but it left him trembling and exhausted. His strength was ebbing away exactly when he needed it most.
His rooms were empty and chill, the sink stacked with dishes. Now that the Golem was living at a boardinghouse a few blocks away, all had returned to its former neglect. How quickly he’d grown used to a woman’s presence. He felt oddly bereft now, going to bed each night without seeing her at her solitary post on the couch, gazing out the window at the passersby.
And yet. Time and again he wondered if he’d made a terrible error in judgment. Lately he’d spent nights lying awake and imagining what might happen, if through his carelessness the Golem harmed someone or was discovered. He pictured a mob descending on the Lower East Side and turning Jewish families out onto the street, looting synagogues and pulling old men about by their beards. It would be the very sort of pogrom they’d thought they’d left behind.
In these moments, submerged in his terrible thoughts, he was tempted to go to her boardinghouse and destroy her.
It would be easy to do: a single phrase, spoken aloud. Few still had the knowledge, and it was only by sheerest chance that he’d learned it. His yeshiva had been home to an ancient Kabbalist, half-mad and steeped in lore. The old man had taken a liking to sixteen-year-old Avram and adopted him as a sort of secret pupil, showing him mysteries that the other rabbis would occasionally hint at but dared not touch. Young Avram had been too excited by his special status to consider whether the knowledge might come to be a burden, instead of a gift.
In one of his final lessons, the old man gave Avram a lump of brownish red clay and bade him construct a golem. Avram shaped the clay into an approximation of a man six inches tall, with sausage-shaped arms and legs, and a round dull head with pinprick eyes and a shallow slash for a mouth. The old rabbi gave Avram a scrap of paper on which was written a brief phrase. Avram said the words, his heart pounding. Instantly the dark little thing sat up, looked around, and then stood and began to walk briskly about the tabletop. Its limbs bent oddly, without benefit of joints. Avram had made one leg too long, and the little golem moved with a lurching swagger, like a sailor newly ashore. It gave off a not-unpleasant whiff of freshly turned earth.
“Command it,” the old rabbi said.
“Golem!” said Avram, and the doll-like thing pulled instantly to attention. “Jump up and down three times,” Avram said. The golem executed three small hops, reaching about an inch off the table. Avram grinned with excitement. “Touch your head with your left hand,” he said, and the golem did so, a toy soldier saluting its commander.
Avram cast about for something else for the golem to do. In a corner near the desk, a brown spider sat lazily spinning a web between two discarded bottles. “Kill that spider,” he said, pointing.
The golem leapt off the desk and fell to the floor. It picked itself up and scampered to the corner. Avram followed it, holding a candle aloft. The spider, sensing the golem’s approach, tried to scramble away; but the golem was on top of it in a dark blur, scattering the bottles and smashing the spider with its crude fist. Avram watched his creation attack the spider again and again until it was little more than a damp mark on the yeshiva floor. And still the golem went on attacking.
“Golem, stop,” Avram said in a thin voice. The golem glanced up briefly, but then resumed smearing the spider’s remains into the ground. “Stop,” he repeated in a louder voice, but now the golem didn’t even look at him. Avram felt a rising panic.
Silently the old rabbi passed him another slip of paper, with another phrase. Gratefully he took it and read it aloud.
The little golem burst apart in midswing. A small shower of dirt rained down among the bottles and the dead spider. Then, blessed silence.
“Once a golem develops a taste for destruction,” the old rabbi said, “little can stop it save the words that destroy it. Not all golems are as crude or stupid as this one, but all share the same essential nature. They are tools of man, and they are dangerous. Once they have disposed of their enemies they will turn on their masters. They are creatures of last resort. Remember that.”
He’d thought about his crude golem for a long time afterward, haunted by the image of the small creature in its frenzy of violence. Had he done wrong to animate it in the first place? How much did a spider’s life count for in the eyes of God? He’d trod on spiders all his life; why did this death feel so different? He had atoned for both golem and spider at Yom Kippur that year, and for years afterward. Gradually, his everyday slights toward kin and colleagues had crowded the incident from his prayers, but he’d never been able to dismiss it entirely. In that room, he had commanded life and death, and later he’d wondered why the Almighty had allowed him to do so. But the purpose of the lesson became clear on the day when the Rabbi spied, walking through Orchard Street’s riotous crowd, a tall woman in a wool coat and a dirty dress, who carried in her wake the scent of freshly turned earth.
No matter how much he was tempted, he knew that he couldn’t destroy her. She was an innocent, and not to blame for her own existence. He still believed this, no matter how much his fear tried to convince him otherwise. It was the real reason why he had named her Chava: from chai, meaning life. To remind himself.
No, he could not destroy her. But perhaps there was another way.
He sat at the parlor table, opened the leather satchel, and withdrew a stack of books and loose papers. The books were old and time-eaten, their spines and bindings cracking. The loose papers were covered with notes in the Rabbi’s own hand, copied from those books that had been too fragile to move. He’d spent the morning—had spent weeks of mornings, now—walking from synagogue to synagogue, making excuses to drop in on old friends, fellow rabbis he hadn’t seen in years. He took tea, inquired after their families, listened to stories of fading health and congregational scandals. And then, he asked for a small favor. Would he be able to spend a few minutes in his friend’s private library? No, there was no particular book he was looking for—just a question of interpretation, a particularly thorny issue that he meant to solve for a former congregant. A matter of some delicacy.
It raised their suspicions, of course. As rabbis they’d all seen every sort of conundrum that a congregation could throw at them, and there were few problems that couldn’t be discussed in confidence, as a hypothetical if nothing else. Rabbi Meyer’s request suggested something else, something disturbing.
But they acquiesced and left their offices to give their friend some time alone; and when they returned, he was gone. A note left folded on a desk or chair would inform them that he’d remembered an appointment, and must apologize for leaving so suddenly. Also, he’d found an interesting book that shed some light on his situation, and had been so bold as to borrow it. He would return it, the note assured them, within a few weeks. And when the rabbis searched their bookcases for the missing book, invariably—and to little surprise—they found that he’d taken the most dangerous volume they owned, the one they’d always meant to destroy but never quite could. Often the book had been hidden, but the Rabbi had managed to find it anyway.
It made them all deeply uneasy. What could Meyer possibly want with that knowledge? But they said nothing, to a man. There was desperation in Meyer’s evasions and near-thefts, and they began to feel a guilty relief that he hadn’t brought them into his confidence. If the book could help, so be it. They could only pray that whatever problem Meyer was facing would be taken care of as soon as possible.
The Rabbi put water on to boil for his tea, and prepared a meager supper: challah and schmaltz, a bit of herring, a few half-sour pickles, a drop of schnapps for later. He was not particularly hungry, but he would need the strength. He ate slowly, clearing his mind, preparing himself. And then he set the dishes aside, opened the first book, and began to work.
At six o’clock Thea Radzin turned the sign in the bakery window from OPEN to CLOSED. The dough for the next morning’s loaves was set out to rise, the tables wiped down, the floor swept clean. The leftover goods were put aside, to be sold at cut rate the next day. At last the Radzins, Anna, and the Golem all filed out the back door and went their separate ways.
The Golem’s boardinghouse was a creaking clapboard building that had somehow evaded demolition. It sat incongruously among Broome Street’s modern tenements, an old lady sandwiched between hulking toughs. The Golem opened the front door quietly, went past the damp and faded parlor, and headed upstairs. Her room was on the second floor, facing the street. It was no larger than the Rabbi’s parlor, but it was her own, a fact that made her excited, proud, and lonely all at once. There was a narrow bed, a small writing desk, a cane-bottomed chair, and a tiny armoire. She would have preferred to do without the bed, since she had no need of it, but a room without a bed would certainly raise questions.
For the room she paid seven dollars per week. To any other working girl with her salary, this would have been near impossible. But the Golem had no other expenses. She bought no food, and never went out, except to the bakery, and to visit the Rabbi once a week. Her only other expenditure had been to fill out her wardrobe. She now owned a few changes of shirtwaist and skirt, along with a dress of plain gray wool. She’d also bought a full complement of ladies’ undergarments, and, when the weather turned cold, a woolen cloak. For these expenses, as well as the burden of washing them that fell to her landlady, she felt obscurely guilty. She had no real need for any of it. The cloak especially was for show. She felt the October cold and damp, but it didn’t bother her; it was merely another sensation. The cloak, on the other hand, scratched at her neck and trapped her arms. She would have been happier to walk down the street in only her shirtwaist and skirt.
All of the boardinghouse tenants received a small breakfast each morning, left outside their door: a cup of tea, two slices of toast, and a boiled egg. The tea she poured into the water-closet sink when no one was around. The toast and boiled egg she wrapped in a piece of waxed paper and gave to the first hungry child she passed on her way to the bakery. She didn’t have to do this; she had discovered that she could, in fact, eat. On one of her last nights at the Rabbi’s, curiosity and boredom had overcome her lingering trepidation, and she decided to ingest a small piece of bread. She’d sat at the table staring at it, building courage, and then carefully placed it in her mouth. It sat on her tongue, strangely heavy. Moisture welled up around it. It tasted like it smelled, only more so. She opened and closed her mouth, and the bread grew damp and broke into smaller pieces. It seemed to be working, but how could she be sure? She chewed until there was nothing left but a paste, then gathered it all to the back of her mouth and worked her throat to swallow. The bread slid down her throat, encountering no resistance. She stayed at the table for hours, slightly nervous with the anticipation of something. But to her slight disappointment, the night passed without incident. The next afternoon, however, she felt a strange cramp in her lower abdomen. Hesitant to leave—the halls were crowded with neighbors, and the Rabbi was out on an errand—she fetched a large bowl from the kitchen, then bunched up her skirts, pulled down her underclothes, and expelled into the bowl a small amount of mashed bread, seemingly unaltered by its journey. When the Golem later excitedly described to the Rabbi what had happened, he turned a bit red and congratulated her on her discovery, and then asked her not to do it again.
The act of eating proved useful at the bakery, as she learned to make adjustments based on taste, and to eat a pastry occasionally as the others did. But it was hard not to feel each prop—the cloak and the toast and the quickly eaten pastries—as a small pang, a constant reminder of her otherness.
It was early evening still. An entire night stretched before her. She opened her armoire, and removed her gray dress. From beneath her bed she withdrew her small sewing box and scissors. Settling herself in the cane chair, she began to pick the dress apart at the seams. Within minutes it had become a small heap of fabrics. The buttons she laid carefully on the desk, to save for last. She had devised this occupation soon after coming to the boardinghouse, when she’d spent an evening so dull that she’d resorted to counting things to pass the time. She’d counted the tassels on her lamp shade (eighteen) and the number of boards in the floor (two hundred forty-seven), and had opened the armoire in search of more things to count, when her gaze fell on the dress. She removed it from the armoire and studied how it was made. It seemed simple enough: the large panels that connected at the seams, the darts that shaped the bosom. Her sharp eyes took in each element, and then she set to work, uncreating and then creating it again.
It was a pleasant occupation, sewing. She reconstructed the dress slowly, making it last, her stitches as short and even as a machine’s. When she finished it was almost four in the morning. She stripped to her underclothes and slipped the dress over her head, buttoning it with quick fingers. She smoothed down the front of the dress and eyed her reflection in the window. It was not an entirely flattering dress—it hung loosely from her shoulders, as though made for a larger woman—but it had cost little and seemed to cover her appropriately. She took it off and hung it back in the armoire, and put on a fresh shirtwaist and skirt. Then she blew out the lamp, lay down on the bed, closed her eyes, and waited for the day to begin.