The Golem and the Jinni (10 page)

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.