The Golem and the Jinni (21 page)

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.

9.

I
t took the Jinni nearly a week to recover from his run through the rain. He spent the time working in the shop as though nothing had happened, but he was paler than usual, and moved more slowly, and stayed close to the heat of the forge. He declared that his adventure had been worth the ordeal. Arbeely, however, was furious.

“You could have been caught!” yelled the tinsmith. “The girl’s servants could have found you, or worse, her family! What if they’d trapped you there and called the police?”

“I would’ve escaped,” the Jinni said.

“Yes, I suppose you’d think little of handcuffs, or a prison cell. But think of me, if not yourself. What if the police had chased you here, to my shop? I would have been dragged to prison as well. And I can’t melt through iron bars, my friend.”

The Jinni frowned. “Why would
you
be arrested?”

“Don’t you understand? The police would round up everyone in Little Syria, if the Winstons demanded it.” He covered his face with his hands. “My God, Sophia Winston! You’ll bring the whole city down upon us.” A thought occurred to him. “You aren’t thinking of going
back
, are you?”

The Jinni smiled. “Perhaps. I haven’t decided.” Arbeely only groaned.

But there was no denying that the Jinni’s mood was vastly improved. He began to work more quickly, and with enthusiasm. The encounter—and perhaps the danger—had returned something of him to himself. Soon the shelves of the back room were cleared of dented pitchers and scorched pots. With his apprentice handling the repair work, Arbeely was free to take on larger orders for new cookware. The weather turned colder, the nights longer; and one day, while entering October’s orders and expenses on his ledger, Arbeely realized to his great shock that he was no longer poor.

“Here,” he said, giving the Jinni a number of bills. “This belongs to you.”

The Jinni stared at the handful of paper. “But this goes beyond our agreement.”

“Take it. This is your success as well as mine.”

“What should I do with it?” the Jinni asked, nonplussed.

“It’s long past time you found yourself somewhere to stay. Nothing too ostentatious—no glass palaces, if you please.”

The Jinni followed Arbeely’s advice and took a room in a nearby tenement. It was larger than Arbeely’s—though not by much—and on the top floor, so that at least he could see over the rooftops. He outfitted the room with a number of large cushions, which he scattered about the floor. On the walls he hung a profusion of small mirrors and candle sconces, so that at night the candlelight would reflect from wall to wall, and make the room seem larger than it was. But he could not quite trick himself; even if his eyes were deceived, he felt the closeness of the room like an itch on his skin.

He took to spending more of his nights out on the streets, exploring. When the streets felt too confining he would travel the rooftops, which were like a city unto themselves, populated with groups of men who huddled together around fire-barrels, sharing cigarettes and whiskey. He tended to avoid conversation, only nodding at their greetings; but one evening, curiosity overcame his reserve, and he asked an Irish laborer if he could try his cigarette. The man shrugged and handed it over. The Jinni placed the cigarette in his mouth and drew in a gust of air. The cigarette disappeared into ash. The men around them goggled, then burst out laughing. The Irishman rolled another, and asked the Jinni to show how he had accomplished the trick; but the Jinni only shrugged and then inhaled more gently, and the new cigarette burned as theirs did. All agreed that the first cigarette must have been faulty somehow.

After that, the Jinni was rarely without tobacco and rolling papers. He appreciated the taste of the tobacco, and the warmth of the smoke in his body. But to the puzzlement of all who stopped him on the street to ask, he never carried matches.

One night he returned to the park at Castle Garden, where he had stood at the railing with Arbeely that first afternoon, and discovered the aquarium. It was an otherworldly place, both fascinating and unnerving. After melting the front-door padlock off its hasp, he stood for hours in front of the gigantic water-tanks, staring at the long, dark shapes that glided inside. He’d never seen fish before, and he wandered from tank to tank, enthralled by the variety—this one large and gray and sleek finned, that one flat as a coin and gaily striped. He studied the rippling gills and tried to guess at their purpose. He placed his hands on the smooth glass of the tank and felt the weight of the water behind it. If he heated the glass enough to shatter it, the water would kill him in an instant; and a thrill coursed through him, the same a man might feel if he stood on the edge of a high cliff and half-dared himself to jump. He returned again and again, nearly every night for a week, until the staff posted a guard. Their strange burglar never seemed to steal anything, but they’d grown sick of replacing the locks.

He was becoming a familiar figure among the nocturnal population of southern Manhattan: a tall, handsome man who wore no hat or overcoat, and who surveyed his surroundings with a detached, bemused air, like a visiting dignitary. The policemen found him particularly puzzling. In their experience, a man roaming the streets at night was generally looking for a drink, a fight, or a woman, but he seemed interested in none of these. They might have thought him an uptown gent slumming in costume, which happened sometimes; but when he spoke to them, which was rare, it was in an accented English far from that of the New York swell. Someone suggested he might be a high-class gigolo, but then why would he be trawling the streets like a two-penny whore? Finally, their speculations exhausted, they categorized him as a miscellaneous oddity. One of them took to calling him the Sultan, and the nickname stuck.

On rainy nights, the Jinni stayed in his tenement room and occupied himself by practicing his metalwork. He was now making regular trips to the Bowery storefront where he purchased gold and silver, and fashioned them into small birds of every kind. He made a kestrel, with its wings outspread, building the sculpture from the base upward to distribute the weight evenly. He sculpted a silver peacock and decorated its tail feathers with melted gold, painting it onto the cooled silver with a straw from Arbeely’s broom. Soon he had amassed a half-dozen of these sculptures, all in various states of completion.

The month lengthened, and it began to rain nearly every night. Sick of his sculptures, the Jinni took to working all night in the forge, or else merely pacing his room, waiting for sunlight. What, he wondered, was the point of emerging from the flask, if he was only to be caged again?

Finally, on a night in early November, the rain ended and the sky cleared, revealing a few weary stars hanging above the gas lamps. The Jinni walked through the streets with swift relief. He traveled north and east, choosing his turns at random, enjoying the cold air on his face. The restlessness of his pent-up nights had turned him lonely; and now, without quite consciously willing it, he found himself heading for the Winston mansion.

It was early enough that the Elevated was still running. The Jinni purchased his ticket and waited with the crowd; but when the train came, instead of boarding he stepped between two cars, onto the metal platform above the coupling. He braced himself and held on as the train lurched away. It was a wild, giddy ride. The noise was deafening, a rattle and screech that penetrated his entire body. Sparks from the track leapt past, blown by a violent wind. Lamp-lit windows flashed by in bright, elongated squares. At Fifty-ninth Street he jumped out from between the cars, his body still shaking.

It was past midnight now, and the genteel thoroughfare of Fifth Avenue was nearly deserted. He reached the Winston mansion and found that the hole he had created in the fence had been repaired. He wondered what they had made of that, and smiled to think of their consternation.

He removed the same two bars, and stepped through. The garden was dark and silent, the windows on the upper stories unlit. Climbing to Sophia’s room was even easier, now that he knew the route. In a matter of minutes he was standing on her balcony, gazing through the beveled glass.

Sophia lay in her bed, asleep. He watched her chest rise and fall beneath the covers, piled deeply against the night’s chill. He placed a hand on the door handle. To his surprise the door moved under his hand. She had left it open—only a crack, but open.

The hinges were well oiled, and silent. Slowly he opened the door just wide enough to pass through, and then closed it again. His eyes adjusted to the dark of the room. Sophia’s face was turned toward him, her hair tangled across her pillow. He felt an unexpected pang of guilt at the thought of waking her.