The Golem and the Jinni (29 page)

12.

E
arly on the morning after Rabbi Meyer died, one of Michael Levy’s roommates woke him, gently shaking his shoulder. There was a rabbinical-looking man at the door, asking for him. Michael went to the door and recognized one of his uncle’s old associates. He saw the sorrow in the man’s face, and the discomfort at his task, and began to cry, without needing to be told.

We aren’t sure when it happened
, the rabbi said.
A woman found him. We don’t know who she was. The neighbors didn’t recognize her
. A pause, and a message in the man’s silence: his uncle should not have been alone with a strange woman, but this would be kept between them. Michael thought of his uncle’s friend Chava but said nothing.

He spent the morning weeping, awash in guilt. He should have visited, like he’d told himself he would. Made an effort, apologized, patched up their differences.
Helped
him. Hadn’t he sensed that there was something wrong?

That afternoon he went to his uncle’s tenement. Someone had already hung black crepe about the hallway door. In the bedroom, a young man with sidelocks, wearing a dark hat, sat in a chair next to the bed, where his uncle lay. Michael glanced at the unmoving figure, and then away again. His uncle looked stiff, shrunken. Not as Michael wanted to remember him.

The young man nodded distantly at Michael, and then went back to his silent watching: the
shmira
, the vigil over the body. Were it any other day of the week, there would be a flurry of activity, of men praying together, washing his uncle’s body, sewing it into the shroud. But it was the Sabbath, the day of rest. Funeral arrangements were forbidden.

He wanted to ask how he could help, but it was out of the question. He was an apostate. He wouldn’t be allowed. Perhaps if he were a son, not merely a nephew, his uncle’s colleagues would’ve taken pity on him, allowed him to play some role. As it was, he was surprised he was even allowed inside.

A soft knock at the door. The young man went to answer it. A woman’s voice in the hallway: the young man stepped back, shaking his head quickly. Here, at least, was something Michael could do. “Let me,” he said, and went out into the hallway. His uncle’s friend stood there, a picture of misery.

“Michael,” she said. “I’m so glad you’re here. I should’ve known I wouldn’t be let in, I should have realized . . .”

“It’s all right,” he said.

But she was shaking her head, her arms wrapped around herself. “I wish I could see him,” she said.

“I know,” he said. Beneath Michael’s grief, he felt the familiar ire building against the religious restrictions. How well did the man in the bedroom know his uncle, anyhow? What made him more worthy than Michael to sit the vigil? “You’re the one who found him,” he said, and she nodded. “I’m sorry,” he said, hating himself but needing to know, “it’s none of my business, but were you and he—”

“No, no, nothing like that,” she said quickly. “Only . . . good friends. He was very kind to me. We had dinner together, on Fridays.”

“I shouldn’t have asked.”

“It’s all right,” she said quietly. “Everyone else thinks it too.”

They stood there together in the doorway beneath the crepe, a pair of outcasts.

“I never thanked you,” he said. “For the macaroons.”

A hint of a smile. “I’m glad you liked them.”

“Then you’re doing well at the bakery?”

“Yes. Very well.”

A silence.

“When is the funeral?” she asked.

“Tomorrow.”

“I won’t be allowed,” she said, as if to confirm it.

“No.” He sighed. “No women. I wish it were otherwise.”

“Then please say good-bye for me,” she murmured, and turned to leave.

“Chava,” he said. She paused, one foot on the stair, and Michael realized he was about to ask her if she would have coffee with him. A hot wave of shame washed over him: his uncle lay dead, only a few feet away. They were both in mourning. It would be indecent by any reckoning.

“May God comfort you among the mourners of Zion and Jerusalem,” he said, the old formula rising unbidden to his lips.

“And you as well,” she said; and then she left him alone with his thoughts in the dark of the hallway.

“I met an interesting woman last night,” the Jinni told Arbeely.

“I don’t want to know,” Arbeely said. Together they were forging a batch of skillets. Arbeely shaped each one, and then the Jinni smoothed it and applied the finishing touches. It was repetitive, bland work, but they were developing a rhythm.

“It wasn’t like that,” the Jinni said. He paused, and then asked, “What’s a golem?”

“A what?”

“A golem. That’s what she called herself. She said, ‘I am a golem.’ ”

“I have no idea,” Arbeely said. “You’re certain she didn’t say
German
?”

“No, golem.”

“I can’t help you there.”

They worked in silence for a minute. Then the Jinni said, “She was made of clay.”

“I beg your pardon.”

“I said, she was made of clay.”

“Then I did hear correctly.”

“This is strange? You haven’t heard of this before?”

Arbeely snorted. “Strange? It’s impossible!”

Raising an eyebrow, the Jinni picked up the wrong end of Arbeely’s burning-hot iron with his bare hand.

Arbeely sighed, conceding the point. “But you’re certain? What did she look like?”

“Light-skinned. Dark hair. About your height, dressed plainly.”

“Then she didn’t look like a clay woman?”

“No. You wouldn’t have noticed anything out of the ordinary.”

Arbeely drew breath to challenge this, but the Jinni said, “Enough, Arbeely, she was made of clay. I know it as surely as I know I am fire and you are flesh and bone.”

“All right, but such a thing isn’t easy to believe. What else did she tell you, this clay woman?”

“She said her name was Chava.”

Arbeely frowned. “Well, it’s not a Syrian name. Where did you meet her?”

“A slum near the Bowery. Our paths crossed.”

“What were you doing—never mind, I don’t want to know. She was alone?”

“Yes.”

“Then she isn’t a very careful woman. Or perhaps she has no reason to be.”

“She wasn’t a prostitute, if that’s your meaning.”

“Perhaps you should tell me the whole story.”

And so the Jinni related the entirety of his encounter with the strange woman made of clay. Arbeely listened with a rising feeling of unease. “And she recognized you as—well, different?”

“Yes, but she didn’t know what a jinni was.”

“And you
told
her? Why?”

“To keep her from running away. But she did anyway.”

“And when you followed her home, where did she live?”

“East of the Bowery.”

“Yes, but what
neighborhood
? What nationality was she?”

“I have no idea. The language on most of the signs looked like this.” The Jinni took up a pencil and found a scrap of paper, and drew out a few of the characters he remembered from the awnings and windows.

“Those are Hebrew letters,” Arbeely said. “You were in a Jewish neighborhood.”

“I suppose.”

“I don’t like this,” muttered Arbeely. He was not a politically minded man, and what prejudices he harbored were mostly mild and abstract; but the thought of the Jinni causing trouble in a Jewish neighborhood made him fearful. Mount Lebanon’s Turkish overlords had long made a game of pitting its Christian and Jewish populations against each other, forcing them to compete for Muslim favor. The disagreements had at times turned bloody and edged into riot, fanned by accusations of Christian blood in Jewish bread—a claim that always struck Arbeely as ridiculous on its face, though he knew many were willing to believe it. Of course the Jews of the Lower East Side were European, not Syrian; but here they were by far the larger community, and it seemed more than plausible that they’d bear a grudge on their brethren’s behalf.

“You told her too much,” Arbeely said.

“And if she repeats it, no one will believe her.”

“That doesn’t mean that she can’t cause trouble. What if she comes here, and starts spreading rumors? Or worse, what if she tells the Jews of the Lower East Side that she’s discovered a dangerous and terrible creature that’s living with the Syrians on Washington Street?”

“Then we’ll laugh at her and say she’s mad.”

“Will you laugh at an entire mob? Will you laugh when they loot Sam’s store, or set fire to the Faddouls’ coffeehouse?”

“But why would they—”

“They’d need no reason!” shouted Arbeely. “Why can’t you understand? Men need no reason to cause mischief, only an excuse! You live among good, hardworking people, and your carelessness puts them in danger. For God’s sake, don’t destroy their lives to suit your whims!”

The Jinni was startled by the man’s vehemence. He’d never seen Arbeely so angry. “All right,” he said. “I apologize. I won’t go back there again.”

“Good,” said Arbeely, in surprise—he’d been expecting a fight. “That’s good. Thank you.” And together they resumed their work.

A few nights later, the city was hit with the first real snowfall of the season. The Jinni stood at his window and watched the city silently disappear. He’d seen snow before, drifting dry and white across the desert floor, and shining from the high peaks. But this snow softened all it touched, rounding the sharp edges of buildings and rooftops. He watched until it stopped falling, and then he went down to the street.

He walked to the docks through the unbroken white, feeling the flakes crumple beneath his feet. Tethered boats bobbed in the black water, their decks and rigging lined with snow. Somewhere nearby there was a saloon; the men’s voices and laughter carried in the still air.

It was a tranquility unlike any he’d experienced in this city, but it felt fragile, a moment he’d managed to steal. In the morning he’d be back to making skillets, playing the Bedouin apprentice. Living in secret. He remembered the rush of gladness he’d felt when he told the woman what he was. As though, for a moment, he’d been freed.

Occasionally a small voice spoke up inside him, saying,
you’re a fool for not going home.
But he could barely consider the thought before crushing it beneath a thousand fears and objections. Even if he survived the ocean crossing, he could not return to his glass palace, his earlier life, bound as he was. He’d be forced to seek refuge in the jinn habitations, among his kind but utterly apart, pitied and feared, pointed out as a cautionary example to the wayward young.
Avoid humankind, little one, or this will be your end
.

No, if he must live estranged from his own kind, then let it be in New York. He would find a way to free himself. And if he couldn’t? Well, then, he supposed he would die here.

The Golem sat in her window, and watched the snow fall. The cold seeped in around the window frame, and she pulled her cloak tighter against it. She’d discovered that although the chill itself did not bother her, it stiffened the clay of her body, turning her restless and irritated. She’d taken to wearing her cloak even in her room, but it didn’t help much. Already her legs ached, and it was only two in the morning.

The snow was beautiful, though. She wished she could go out in it, and feel what it was like while it was still pristine and fresh. She imagined the Rabbi’s new grave across the river in Brooklyn, lying beneath a growing white blanket. She would visit him soon, she thought, but first she’d have to figure out how. She had never been to Brooklyn; she’d barely been out of the Lower East Side. And were women permitted in a cemetery? How could she ask anyone, and not reveal her ignorance?

The Rabbi’s death had revealed how little she knew of the culture in which she lived. Within moments of her terrible discovery, the neighbors had begun to play their roles, following the script they all knew by heart: the fetching of the doctor, the covering of the mirror. When she’d encountered the young man sitting the vigil the next day, she’d been appalled by the force of his distaste, the wrongness of her presence. She’d appreciated Michael’s anger on her behalf; but he at least understood what he trespassed against, while she merely blundered in the dark.