The Golem and the Jinni (38 page)

He quoted from memory: “ ‘
Let us raise a standard to which the wise and the honest can repair. The event is in the hand of God
.’ Said by someone named Washington.”

“I thought Washington was a place,” she said, dubious.

“Never mind that, what does it
mean
?”

She didn’t answer, only continued gazing at the letters she couldn’t see. Then she asked, “Do you believe in God?”

“No,” he said, unhesitating. “God is a human invention. My kind have no such belief. And nothing I’ve experienced suggests that there’s an all-powerful ghost in the sky, answering wishes.” He smiled, warming to the subject. “Long ago, during the reign of Sulayman, the most powerful of the jinn could grant wishes. There are stories from that time, of jinn captured by human wizards. A jinni would offer his captor three wishes, in exchange for his release. The wizard would spend his wishes on more wishes, and force the jinni into perpetual slavery. Until finally the wizard would wish for something poorly worded, which would allow his captive to trap him. And then the jinni would be freed.” She was still studying the arch; but she was listening. “So perhaps this God of the humans is just a jinni like myself, stuck in the heavens, forced to answer wishes. Or maybe he freed himself long ago, only no one told them.”

Silence. “What do
you
think?” he pressed. “Do you believe in their God?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “The Rabbi did. And he was the wisest person I’ve ever met. So yes, maybe I do.”

“A man tells you to believe, and you believe?”

“It depends on the man. Besides, you believe the stories that
you
were told. Have you met a jinni who could grant wishes?”

“No, but that ability has all but disappeared.”

“So, it’s just stories now. And perhaps the humans did create their God. But does that make him less real? Take this arch. They created it. Now it exists.”

“Yes, but it doesn’t grant wishes,” he said. “It doesn’t do
anything
.”

“True,” she said. “But I look at it, and I feel a certain way. Maybe that’s its purpose.”

He wanted to ask, what good was a God that only existed to make you
feel
a certain way? But he left off. Already they were treading the edge of an argument.

They left the arch and walked farther into the park. Sleigh tracks carved long arcs along the ground, around the islands of snow-covered lawn. The oval fountain, shut off for the season, was a shallow bowl of ice. Sleeping men dotted the benches here and there, barely visible under their layers of blankets. The Golem glanced at them and then quickly away, a sorrowful look on her face.

“They need so much,” she murmured. “And I just walk by.”

“Yes, but what would you do? Feed them all, take them home with you? You aren’t responsible for them.”

“Easy to say, when you can’t hear them.”

“It’s still true. You’re generous to a fault, Chava. I think you’d give your own self away, if only someone wished for it.”

She hugged herself, clearly unhappy. The wind had pushed the hood back from her face. Snowflakes clung unmelting to her cheeks and the sides of her nose. She looked like a living statue, her features white and glittering.

He reached out and brushed away the snow from her cheek. The crystals disappeared at once under his hand. She startled, surprised, then realized the problem. Ruefully she wiped a gloved hand across her face.

He said, “If you were to lie down on one of those benches, you’d be buried under snow and pigeons by morning.” She laughed at the image. It was gratifying, to hear that rare laugh. He felt as though he’d earned it.

As they neared the far end of the park, they heard a distant jingling behind them. A sleigh carriage was entering from beneath the arch, the hitched pair trotting handsomely. The reins were held not by a coachman but by one of the passengers, a man in evening dress and silk hat. A blond woman in a fashionable cloak sat next to him, laughing as he took the sleigh in a tight figure eight beside the fountain. The sleigh leaned threateningly to the side, and the woman buried her face in her muffler and shrieked, obviously enjoying herself.

The Golem smiled, watching them. The Jinni stepped back onto the grass as the sleigh neared, mindful of the horses. The couple in the sleigh saw them, and the man raised his hand in a jaunty salute. It was clear they were glad for the audience, glad that someone would see them as they wanted to be seen: young and daring, thrilled to be alive and playing at love.

The team, obviously well trained, joggled only once as they passed the Jinni. For a moment the two couples were gazing at each other as though in a mirror; and then the Jinni saw the beginning of something startled, even frightened, in the woman’s eyes. The same budding uncertainty rose in the man’s face—his hand tightened on the reins—and then they flew by, the horses drawing them away from their own eldritch reflection, the too-handsome man and the strangely glittering woman.

The Golem’s smile was gone.

The new century was proving to be a prosperous one for Boutros Arbeely. Since the Jinni’s arrival, business had more than doubled. Word of Arbeely’s fine and speedy work had spread beyond the Syrian community, and in recent weeks the tinsmith had entertained a number of unusual visitors. The first was an Irish saloon-owner looking to replace his old growlers, which had the tendency to split from their handles—not helped by his patrons’ habit of using them as cudgels. An Italian owner of a stable had come as well, looking for horseshoes. Arbeely’s limited English would have made communication difficult—and the Jinni could not help, not without the neighbors wondering at his fluency—but all the customers had to do was find the nearest Syrian boy, drop a few pennies in his hand, and ask him to translate.

The strangest visit came late in February from a fellow Syrian, a landlord named Thomas Maloof. The son of wealthy Eastern Orthodox landowners, Maloof had come to America not in steerage but in a furnished cabin, and had brought along a sizeable bankroll and a line of credit. After landing in New York and watching wave after wave of immigrants spill onto the ferry, he’d decided that any man with an ounce of sense would do well to purchase property in Manhattan as soon as possible. Accordingly he had snatched up the deed for a tenement on Park Street. He himself rarely set foot in the building, preferring to live in a suite of rooms at a genteel boardinghouse to the north. When he did speak to his fellow countrymen, it was with a hearty condescension, which he directed at Orthodox as well as Maronite. Relations between the two communities were cool at best, but egalitarian Maloof held himself above both.

Maloof considered himself a connoisseur and a patron of the arts, and after a brief survey of his new building, he decided its most urgent defect was not the poor plumbing nor the dark closeness of the rooms, but the deplorable quality of the pressed-tin ceiling in the entryway. He decided to have a new ceiling installed, to commemorate the change in ownership. He’d traveled to the pressed-tin factories in Brooklyn and the Bronx, but to his disappointment they could only show him workaday flowers and medallions and fleurs-de-lis, all missing that spark of true artistic value. His tenants were good, hardworking people, he told Arbeely, and they deserved a true Work of Art in their downstairs hallway, one that a factory could not provide.

Arbeely listened to this proposal with dubious politeness. Unlike Maloof, he knew why the tinplate panels were only made by factories: they required expensive equipment to produce, and the profit was so small that one had to sell to a neighborhood’s worth of tenements to make it worthwhile. Moreover, when Arbeely asked Maloof what sort of Art he had in mind, he discovered that the landlord had no idea whatsoever. “You’re the artisan, not I!” Maloof exclaimed. “I ask only that you give me something that sets my mind aflame!” And he left, having sworn to return in a week to view whatever samples Arbeely could produce.

“My God,” groaned Arbeely to the Jinni, “the man is insane! We’re supposed to make an entryway’s worth of tin panels, just you and I, and they must be extraordinary. We can’t halt all business for a month while we turn out a ceiling! When he comes back—
if
he comes back—we’ll simply explain that it’s beyond our capabilities, and that’s that.”

The weather had turned to a near-constant deluge of sleet and snow, and when the Jinni left that night he reconciled himself to an evening indoors. Returning to his tenement, he paused for a moment in the downstairs hallway, and looked up. Sure enough, the ceiling was pressed tin, and the panels were as unremarkable as Maloof had described: roughly fifteen inches across and embossed with a plain medallion of concentric circles. Dust and soot grimed each square; rust cankered their edges. The longer the Jinni gazed, the more he wished he hadn’t bothered.

He shut himself in his room and worked on his figurines, but he was too distracted to make real progress. He glanced up from his work and checked the window. It was still sleeting, worse than before.

He needed something new, something different, more interesting than models of falcons and owls. Something he hadn’t attempted before.

He walked down to the lobby again and squinted at the medallions in the dim light. If he allowed his eyes to lose focus, he could almost pretend he was flying above them, looking down onto a series of circular hills, ominously regular . . .

A spark of an idea caught in his mind. What rule said that a pressed-tin ceiling must be constructed from square tiles? Why not simply create one enormous tile that covered the entire ceiling? And perhaps even the walls as well?

As though it had been sitting there all along, waiting for this moment, the image of the finished ceiling came to him in an exhilarating rush. He ran up to his room to fetch his coat, and then dashed across the street to Arbeely’s shop. He lit the fire in the forge, and threw himself into his work.

Arbeely did not go straight to the shop the next morning, for he had errands to run: an order to place with a supplier, and then to the tool shop to look at their new catalogs. He made time for a quick pastry and glass of tea at a café. On his way back, he paused before a haberdasher’s window to stare with longing at a smart-looking black derby with a feather in its band. He took off his own hat and examined its thin felt, the fraying ribbon and slumping dome. Business
had
been very good. Couldn’t he allow himself this one indulgence?

It was past noon when finally he arrived at the shop, cringing at the lateness of the hour. The door was unlocked, but the Jinni didn’t seem to be there. Perhaps he was in the back?

Coming around the workbench, he nearly tripped over his unseen apprentice. The Jinni was perched on his hands and knees before what looked, at first glance, to be an enormous carpet made of tin.

The Jinni glanced up. “Arbeely! I was wondering where you were.”

Arbeely stared at the strange shining carpet. It was at least eight feet long, and five wide. Much of it was dominated by an undulating wave that broke into smaller waves, swirling around one another as they spread across the tin. There were places where the Jinni had bent and buckled the plate into ragged peaks. Other sections were almost perfectly flat, but stippled here and there to create illusions of shadow.

“It’s only half finished,” the Jinni said. “Arbeely, did you order more tinplate? We’ve run out, and I still need to make the panels for the wall. I couldn’t remember if Maloof gave you the measurements, so I used my lobby as a model.”

Arbeely stared. “This is—you’re making this for Maloof?”

“Of course,” the Jinni replied, in a tone that suggested Arbeely was being rather slow. “It’ll take me at least two days to finish. I have ideas about how to connect the side panels to the ceiling, but they’ll need to be tested. I want it to be seamless. A seam would ruin the effect.” He peered at Arbeely more closely. “Is that a new hat?”

Arbeely barely heard the Jinni’s words; something else he’d said was tugging at him, trying to attract his attention. “You used
all
the tinplate?”

“Well, a ceiling is very large. And I’ll need more. This afternoon, if possible.”

“All the tinplate,” Arbeely said, numb. He found a stool and sat on it.

Finally the Jinni registered the man’s distress. “Is there a problem?”

“Do you have any idea,” Arbeely said with rising heat, “how much money you’ve cost me? You used up four months’ worth of plate! And we have no guarantee that Maloof will even return! Even if he does, surely he won’t want this—he asked for tiles, not one gigantic piece! How could—” Words failed him, and for a moment he simply stared at the tin carpet. “Four months of plate,” he mumbled. “This could ruin me.”

The Jinni frowned. “But it’ll work perfectly. Arbeely, you haven’t even
looked
at it properly.”

The numb shock was wearing away to despair. “I should have known,” Arbeely said. “You don’t understand the realities of running a business. I’m sorry, in the end it’s my fault. But I’ll have to rethink our agreement. I may no longer be able to pay you. The loss of the tin alone.”