The Golem and the Jinni (30 page)

Michael. She suspected that even without her ability, she would have known what it was he wanted to ask her in the hallway. She was thankful that he hadn’t.
Judge a man by his actions, not his thoughts
. The Rabbi was right: Michael was a good person, and she was glad to have met him again. Perhaps they would encounter each other occasionally, on the street or in the bakery. They might be acquaintances, friends. She hoped he would accept that.

Meanwhile her life, it seemed, went on. At work, Mrs. Radzin offered her condolences, and mentioned that Mr. Radzin would be paying their respects at shivah at the Rabbi’s tenement. (The Golem wondered, did Mrs. Radzin stay home because women weren’t allowed, or simply to take care of the children? How was she to
know
these things?) Anna and Mrs. Radzin both offered to take the Golem’s shifts at the register, so that she could work quietly in the back. It was a kindness, and she accepted thankfully.

The solitude allowed her to think hard about the events of the previous days, and register that they’d truly happened. The encounter with the glowing man, in particular, seemed like something she might have imagined. He’d left no real mark or trace of his existence, save in her memory.

She winced, thinking of how she’d revealed her secret to him. But it had been almost beyond her control. He’d told her his own so easily that for a moment her caution had seemed excessive, even silly. And then, he’d asked
What are you
?; and the frank, eager curiosity of the question had broken her open.

At least she’d run from him before she could do any more damage. It had been a chance encounter, an aberration. It wouldn’t be repeated.

But in unguarded moments, mixing dough or counting stitches, her thoughts came back to him, pondering what he’d said. He was a jinni—but what was that? Why did his face glow the way it did? How had he come here
by accident
?

Sometimes she even imagined searching him out, going to Washington Street and asking him her questions. Then she would catch hold of her thoughts, and turn them to something else. It was too dangerous a fantasy to entertain.

There was one more loose end from that night that still needed her attention. She’d thought long and hard about the envelope she’d taken from the Rabbi’s hand, with its small square of folded paper. She hadn’t opened it again, hadn’t trusted herself not to unfold the paper all the way. She wondered now if the Rabbi had even meant to give it to her. Wouldn’t he at least have put her name on the envelope, or disguised its contents somehow? But all this speculation was useless; she would never know for certain. Briefly she considered burning it, but the thought only made her clutch at it more tightly. Whatever the Rabbi’s intentions, the envelope had come to her, and she couldn’t destroy it.

The question then became where to put it. She couldn’t keep it at the boardinghouse: her landlady might find it, or the house might burn down. The bakery was even riskier. It seemed best to keep it with her. And so, taking some of the money from the cookie tin beneath her bed, she went to a jeweler’s and bought a large brass locket that hung from a sturdy chain. The locket was plain and oblong, with rounded corners. There was just enough room inside for the square of paper, folded tightly. She closed the clasp, hung the chain about her neck, and tucked the locket inside her shirtwaist. The collar was high enough to hide most of the chain; one would have to look hard to see its glint at the nape of her neck. Now, as she stared out at the snow, the locket rested against her skin, cool and secret. It was an odd sensation, but already she was growing used to it. Soon, she supposed, she would hardly notice.

On the last night of shivah, Michael Levy stood in the corner of his uncle’s parlor and listened to the Mourner’s Kaddish as it was read yet again. Its sad, swaying rhythm had pulled at him ever since the funeral service. He felt ill. He passed a hand over his forehead; he was sweating, even in the cold air of the room. The men in the parlor were a wall of black coats, their yarmulkes bobbing up and down as they chanted in deep, froggy voices.

At the cemetery in Brooklyn he’d stood next to the open grave and gathered a handful of frozen dirt, then extended his arm and opened his hand. The frozen clumps had struck the plain pine coffin with a flat and hollow sound. The coffin had seemed too small, too far away, like something at the bottom of a well.

May God comfort you among the mourners of Zion and Jerusalem.
The prescribed words of mourning, the words that had come to his lips in the hallway with his uncle’s friend: he’d heard them dozens of times in those few short days, and they were starting to grate on his nerves. Why “among the mourners of Zion and Jerusalem?” Why not “among the mourners of the world”? So parochial, so small-minded. As though the only loss that mattered was the ancient loss of the Temple, and all other losses merely reflected it. He knew that it was meant to remind the mourner that he was still part of a community, and among the living. But Michael had his community: his friends from school, his colleagues at the Sheltering House, his brothers and sisters in the Socialist Labor Party. He didn’t need these pious strangers. He’d seen their sidewise glances at him, taking in the apostate nephew.
Let them judge
, he thought. It was the last night. They’d all be rid of each other soon enough.

The black-hatted men came and went. They stood by the parlor table eating hard-boiled eggs and slices of bread, talking quietly. A few times Michael saw older rabbis, men he vaguely remembered as friends of his uncle’s, scanning the bookshelves, looking for something. Each one would come to the end of the shelves and frown, disappointed, and then glance about guiltily and move on. Were they browsing for valuable volumes they might appropriate? Professional covetousness, even at a shivah? He smirked without mirth. So much for the purity of mourning.

Well, they could have it all. He was the designated heir to what little there was, but he planned to donate most of it. He had nowhere to put the furniture, no use for the religious items. After everyone was gone he roamed about the rooms with a box, setting aside the few things he would keep. The silver-plated tea set, of which his aunt had been so proud. Her shawls and jewelry, which he’d discovered in a wardrobe drawer. In the same drawer, a pouch containing a water-stained billfold and a broken watch. The watch had once been fine; he’d never seen his uncle carry it. In the billfold was both American and what looked like German currency. He added both to the box, wondering if they were relics of his uncle’s crossing. Personal correspondence, the few family daguerreotypes in frames, including—hidden in a drawer—his own parents’ wedding portrait. His mother a round-cheeked girl, peeking out from beneath a lace veil spangled with flowers. His father, tall and thin in a silk hat, staring not at the camera or his new wife but off to one side, as if already planning his escape. The old anger at his father rose briefly before dissolving back into sorrow. Under the bed he found a satchel half-full of dilapidated old books. These he added to their brethren on the bookshelves. He knew of a charity that sent books to new Jewish congregations in the Middle West—no doubt they would be interested.

Under the cloth on the parlor table he found a slim sheaf of papers covered with his uncle’s handwriting. In their haste to right the parlor and make it ready for mourners, his uncle’s associates hadn’t noticed it. One paper was set to the side, as if more important than the others. On it was written two lines in strange, indecipherable Hebrew. It all looked very arcane, and he considered handing the whole stack over to the first rabbi he saw; but his uncle’s handwriting exerted a visceral pull on him. He couldn’t, not yet. It was all too fresh. Wearily he tossed the papers into the empty leather satchel. He would sort through them later, once he had regained his sense of perspective.

He lugged the box and the satchel back to his own tenement rooms, and shoved them beneath a table. He was still sweating, and nauseated, though he’d eaten barely anything for days. He vomited in the water closet and then collapsed onto his pallet.

In the morning, one of his roommates found him soaked and shaking. A doctor was brought in. Perhaps a mild influenza, the doctor said; and within hours the entire building was quarantined, its doors impassable.

They took Michael to the Swinburne Island hospital, where he lay among the terrified and heartbroken immigrants turned away at Ellis Island, the dying and the misdiagnosed. His fever swelled. He hallucinated a fire on the ceiling, and then a writhing, dripping nest of snakes. He struggled to get away from them, and realized he was tied into his bed. He cried out, and a cool impartial hand came to rest on his forehead. Someone brought a glass of water to his lips. He drank what he could, then descended back into his terrible visions.

Michael’s were not the only cries of delirium in the ward. In a nearby bed lay a Prussian man in his forties, who’d been hale and sound when he boarded the
Baltika
at its stop in Hamburg. He’d made it to Ellis Island without incident, and had been at the front of the line for the doctor’s examination when he’d felt a tap on his shoulder. The man turned around, and saw behind him a small, wizened old man in a too-large overcoat. The old man beckoned to him, obviously wishing to speak. He bent down closer to hear in the crowded hall, whereupon the old man whispered a string of meaningless, harshly babbling words in his ear.

The man shook his head, trying to get across that he hadn’t understood—but then he was shaking his head more violently, because the muttered syllables had taken up residence inside his head. They grew louder, ricocheting from one side of his skull to the other, buzzing like wasps. He put his fingers in his ears.
Please help me
, he tried to say, but he couldn’t hear his own voice over the din. The old man’s face was all innocent puzzlement. Others in the line were beginning to stare. He clutched his head—the noise was impossible, he was drowning in it—and then he was falling to his knees, shouting incoherently. A froth began to form on his lips. Doctors and men in uniform were grabbing at him now, prying back his eyelids, shoving a leather belt in his mouth. The last thing he saw, before they wrapped him in a straitjacket and took him to Swinburne, was the old man pausing at the unattended desk to stamp his own papers before disappearing into the crowd on the other side.

The Bureau of Immigration officer looked over the papers in his hand, and then scrutinized the man in front of him. He looked older than sixty-four, to be sure, but he had that weathered peasant’s look that meant he could be anywhere under a hundred.

“What year were you born?” On the other side of the desk, the Yiddish translator bent and murmured in the old man’s ear.
Eighteen hundred and thirty-five
, the answer came back. Well, if he said so. The man’s back was straight and his eyes were clear, and the health stamp was still drying on his papers. He’d already shown his wallet, which held twenty American dollars and a few coins. Enough to keep from being a nuisance. There was no reason not to let him in.

That name, though. “Let’s call you something more American,” he said. “It’s for the best.” And as the old man watched, confusion gathering in his eyes, the officer struck out
Yehudah Schaalman
and above it wrote
Joseph Schall
in a dark, square hand.

13.

T
he Christmas season descended on Little Syria, with all its attendant decorations and feasts. Suddenly it seemed to the Jinni that Arbeely was always at church.
For Novena
, the man would say, or
to celebrate the Immaculate Conception
, or
for the Revelation to Saint Joseph
. “But what does any of that
mean
?” the Jinni asked. And so, with a feeling of dread, Arbeely found himself giving the Jinni a potted history of the life of Christ and the founding of His Church. This was followed by a long, convoluted, and at times quite bitter argument.

“Let me see if I understand correctly now,” the Jinni said at one point. “You and your relations believe that a ghost living in the sky can grant you wishes.”

“That is a gross oversimplification, and you know it.”

“And yet, according to men, we jinn are nothing but children’s tales?”

“This is different. This is about religion and faith.”

“And where exactly is the difference?”

“Are you honestly asking, or being deliberately insulting?”

“I’m honestly asking.”

Arbeely sank a finished skillet into a tub of water—by now both of them were heartily sick of skillets—and waited for the steam to clear. “Faith is believing in something even without proof, because you know it in your heart to be true.”

“I see. And before you released me from the flask, would you have said that you
knew in your heart
that jinn do not exist?”

Arbeely frowned. “I would have put it at a very low probability.”