The Golem and the Jinni (26 page)

But she was merely an unremarkable girl, a stranger. She smiled dreamily at him. “Looking for company, sir?” she asked.

“Not really,” he said.

“A nice-looking gentleman like you shouldn’t be alone.” She said the words as if by rote. Her eyes were drifting closed. Was something wrong with her? And why had he thought he’d known her? He peered into her face. She took the attention as encouragement, and pressed herself up against him. Her arms snaked around his waist. He could feel her heart beating against him, a high fast fluttering in her chest. She sighed, as if settling in for the night. He looked down at the top of her head, strangely unsure. Lifting a hand, he watched his own fingers as they ran through her hair.

She whispered, “Twenty cents gets you whatever you want.”

No
. He pushed her away, and she stumbled. A small bottle fell between them. He reached down and picked it up. It was a stoppered glass, half-full of an oily liquid.
TINCTURE OF OPIUM
, read the label.

A sudden squawk from the girl. She reached out and snatched the bottle from his hand. “That’s mine,” she spat. Then she turned and walked unsteadily away.

He watched her go, then climbed down from the roof and headed home. There was no reason for the girl to have rattled him like this. But something in the motion of her hand, as she pushed back the dark veil of her hair, had seemed so very familiar.

In her father’s goat pen, Fadwa al-Hadid straightened up from her crouch on the milking stool and pushed her curtain of dark hair back from her eyes. She had tied it at her neck, but it always came loose when she milked the goats. Something to do with the rhythm.

The goat bleated and turned to look at her, barred pupils rolling. She stroked its back and whispered soothing words into its leather-soft ear. The goats had been skittish all morning, refusing to stand still, shifting their weight about and threatening to overturn the pail. Perhaps they sensed the summer coming. It was only midmorning, and already the sun was beating down on them, turning the air thick and the sky brassy. She took a drink from the pail, then undid her hair completely.

From his spot a little ways away, the Jinni watched her retie her hair at the nape of her neck. It was a becoming gesture, unselfconscious and private.

For days now, he’d been watching the girl and her family, trying to learn their ways. They seemed to live in a constant hum of comings and goings, all within a carefully circumscribed world that had the encampment at its center. The men ventured out farther than the women, but they too had their boundaries. They hadn’t even journeyed out again within sight of his palace, and he wondered now if that had been a special occasion of some sort.

He watched as Fadwa released the goat and moved on to the next one. Her life truly was as she had described it: an endless repetition of tasks. The caravan men at least had a destination ahead of them, a purpose beyond the horizon. Fadwa’s existence, as far as he could tell, was nothing but milking and cleaning and cooking and weaving. He wondered how she could stand it.

The milking finished, Fadwa untied the final goat and checked the water in their trough. Then she carefully lifted the brimming pail of milk and brought it to the fire pit.

“You’re spilling,” said her mother. She was busy at the grindstone, her arm going around and around. Wheat dust trickled from between the flat stones. Fadwa made no reply, only poured the milk into a beaten bowl and placed it above the embers. Sweat ran into her eyes, and she flicked it away with distant irritation.

“You haven’t said three words together all morning,” her mother said. “Is your flow coming on?”

“I’m all right, Mama,” she said absently. “I didn’t sleep well, that’s all.”

The milk began to bubble, and she removed the bowl from the fire and stirred in a few spoonfuls of yogurt, held back from the morning meal. She covered it with a cloth, and left it to thicken.

“Take the girls to the cave for more water,” her mother said. “We’ll need it today.”

The walk to the cave seemed interminable. The empty water jar sat heavy on her head. Her cousins laughed and dodged ahead of her, playing a game where they tried to step on each other’s shadows without dropping their jars. It was true, what she had told her mother: she hadn’t been sleeping very well. Her strange visitor had not returned the next night, or the night after; and now, nearly a week later, she was beginning to wonder if she had imagined the whole thing. It had seemed so vivid, so real; but within a few days it had begun to blur around the edges, like an ordinary dream.

Would this be the night he kept his promise, and returned to her? Or was there no
him
, no promise to be kept? How would she know if he truly visited her, or if she were merely dreaming such a thing? It sent her mind in circles. She would fall half-asleep, only to startle awake again with excitement, then chide herself for waking. And when she did manage to sleep, her dreams were only full of ordinary nonsense.

The spring where the Hadid clan fetched their water flowed into a cave that a long-ago people had fashioned into a temple. Its entrance was a flat, square doorway cut into the sloping hillside. To Fadwa, it looked as though a giant had sliced off the edge of the hill with a knife. Words in an unknown, angular alphabet were carved into the flat lintel above the cave’s mouth. Sand and wind had worked on them until they were barely visible. Her father had told her that the temple’s builders were from the world far beyond the desert.
They pass through in every age
, he’d said.
They try to conquer the desert. They make their marks in it, as though to claim it, but then they disappear. And all the while we Bedu endure, unchanging.

Inside, the air was cool and damp. A sloping pool was carved into the rock floor; a crack at its bottom connected it to the underground spring. At the height of the rains, the pool had overflowed its edge, spilling out the door and down the path. Now it was barely halfway full. Soon, Fadwa knew, it would be reduced to a trickle, and then run dry completely. They would live on the milk of their animals until the water returned.

Her cousins were at the pool’s edge, filling their jars. She waded in and watched the dark water spill over the jar’s lip. In a niche above the pool, the face and figure of a woman had been carved into the rock. A water goddess, her father had said, a woman with a hundred names. The ones who’d built the temple had thought that they brought her to the desert, when in fact she’d been there from the very beginning. Her hair flowed about her lightly, in waves. She stared out of the wall with blankly serene eyes, the years having robbed her of any expression.

Do you think she really exists?
Fadwa had asked her father. And he had smiled, and said,
When so many others believe in her, who am I to say otherwise?

Her cousins began to splash each other. Fadwa frowned, and moved her water jar farther away.

Tonight, she told herself. If he did not come to her tonight, then she would try to resign herself to the truth: it had all been in her mind.

Please let him come
, she pleaded silently to the stone woman in the niche.
Or I might start to think that I’m going mad.

The Jinni watched Fadwa leave the temple, the water-jar balanced expertly on her head. To compensate for its weight, she took slower steps, her hips swinging from side to side. One hand rested lightly on the jar, to steady it. All in all, a most appealing picture. The water even added a touch of danger.

He smiled. He hadn’t forgotten his promise. Perhaps, he thought, he would visit her that night.

Early on a Friday morning, the Rabbi discovered the formula to bind a golem to a new master.

It had been a long and terrible week. He’d had a growing, unshakable sense that it was time to finish and be done with it, that circumstances and his own health would not stand for much more. And so he’d sent messages to all of his students’ families, telling them that he was taking a week-long sabbatical, for prayer and fasting. (He couldn’t simply say he was ill; their mothers would come to his door armed with bowls of soup.) As it happened, the lie became truth: the entire divination grew to resemble one long, drawn-out prayer, and around Wednesday he simply forgot to keep eating.

Books and papers covered the parlor floor in a pattern that felt more intuitive than reasoned. He snatched sleep an hour at a time, curled on the couch. His dreams were a twilight of prayers and diagrams and names of God. Among them floated faces known and unknown: his wife, speaking gibberish; an ancient, twisted man; his nephew Michael, frightened of something unseen; and the Golem, smiling, her eyes full of a terrible fire. He would cough himself awake from these dreams and stumble back to work, still half in their grasp.

He suspected he was harming his soul. But he put the thought away. He had started this; he would see it to its end.

That end, when it came, was not a burst of fevered inspiration, but a quiet and thorough adding-up, like a bookkeeper reconciling the year’s accounts. He looked at the brief lines he’d written at the bottom of the page, watching the ink soak into the paper. A part of him wished he could take pride in this accomplishment, for its own sake. For despite the formula’s brevity, it was an elegant and complex masterwork. Simply to bind a golem to a new master, without destroying it—this alone was an unheard-of accomplishment. But the Rabbi had gone a step further. For the formula to work, the Golem would have to consent freely to the removal of her will. This was his compromise with himself, the deal he’d struck with his conscience. He would not steal her life, like a murderer in an alley. He would leave the final decision to her.

She might refuse, of course. Or the question itself might be too much for her nature to bear. Could he subdue her, if necessary? His fatigued mind recoiled from the thought of coming this far, only to be forced to destroy her.

He glanced around, blinking, and winced: his parlor looked like the grotto of a mad mystic. He stood on weak legs and collected the papers and books from the floor. The books he put in his satchel, to return to their owners after the Sabbath, with his apologies. The papers he ordered in a neat pile, save for the final page, which he put to one side. He needed a wash; he felt filthy. Outside it was a rare cloudless morning. The sky beyond the parlor’s soot-streaked windows was turning a rich sapphire.

He lit the stove and put a pot of water on, watching himself as if from a distance, almost amused. He remembered this boneless, floating detachment from his yeshiva days, the all-night study sessions in which he’d seemed to dive into the Talmud itself and become one with it. He watched the bubbles form in the bottom of the pot, his vision blurring with fatigue and, he realized now, insistent hunger. He searched the cupboards but found only fossilized bread-heels and a questionable jar of schmaltz. He’d have to go out, after he washed and prayed, and buy food for Sabbath dinner. And then he’d set the rooms to rights, before the Golem arrived.

Finally the water was heated. He stripped in the cold kitchen and dabbed at himself with a washcloth, shivering and trying not to cough. For the first time, he allowed himself to consider the issue of potential masters. Meltzer? A good rabbi, but too old now, too set in his comfortable life. The same went for Teitelbaum, which was a shame. Kaplan was a possibility: younger, but still a child of the old country, not so likely to scoff at the very idea. But perhaps Kaplan had too much learning, and not enough compassion.

Any one of them would need a careful approach. First he’d have to convince them that old age and solitude hadn’t driven him mad. Even then there would be resistance.
Why not just destroy her?
they would ask.
Why ruin your own life, and ask me to ruin mine, and let this danger exist?

Would he reply that he’d grown exceedingly fond of her? That in her eagerness to learn, her determined forbearance, she’d made him as proud as a father? Was it her future he was arranging, or her funeral?