The Golem and the Jinni by Helene Wecker
A heavy satchel slung across his back, Rabbi Meyer walked slowly up Hester Street toward his home, ignoring the dirty puddles that threatened to drown his shoes. It was late afternoon, and the cold and damp had taken on a wintry edge. He’d developed a cough when the weather turned, and now it nagged at him as he climbed his staircase. More troubling, he’d begun to experience strange moments of vertigo, when it seemed as though the ground had disappeared beneath him and he was spinning through the air. It would last only a few seconds, but it left him trembling and exhausted. His strength was ebbing away exactly when he needed it most.
His rooms were empty and chill, the sink stacked with dishes. Now that the Golem was living at a boardinghouse a few blocks away, all had returned to its former neglect. How quickly he’d grown used to a woman’s presence. He felt oddly bereft now, going to bed each night without seeing her at her solitary post on the couch, gazing out the window at the passersby.
And yet. Time and again he wondered if he’d made a terrible error in judgment. Lately he’d spent nights lying awake and imagining what might happen, if through his carelessness the Golem harmed someone or was discovered. He pictured a mob descending on the Lower East Side and turning Jewish families out onto the street, looting synagogues and pulling old men about by their beards. It would be the very sort of pogrom they’d thought they’d left behind.
In these moments, submerged in his terrible thoughts, he was tempted to go to her boardinghouse and destroy her.
It would be easy to do: a single phrase, spoken aloud. Few still had the knowledge, and it was only by sheerest chance that he’d learned it. His yeshiva had been home to an ancient Kabbalist, half-mad and steeped in lore. The old man had taken a liking to sixteen-year-old Avram and adopted him as a sort of secret pupil, showing him mysteries that the other rabbis would occasionally hint at but dared not touch. Young Avram had been too excited by his special status to consider whether the knowledge might come to be a burden, instead of a gift.
In one of his final lessons, the old man gave Avram a lump of brownish red clay and bade him construct a golem. Avram shaped the clay into an approximation of a man six inches tall, with sausage-shaped arms and legs, and a round dull head with pinprick eyes and a shallow slash for a mouth. The old rabbi gave Avram a scrap of paper on which was written a brief phrase. Avram said the words, his heart pounding. Instantly the dark little thing sat up, looked around, and then stood and began to walk briskly about the tabletop. Its limbs bent oddly, without benefit of joints. Avram had made one leg too long, and the little golem moved with a lurching swagger, like a sailor newly ashore. It gave off a not-unpleasant whiff of freshly turned earth.
“Command it,” the old rabbi said.
“Golem!” said Avram, and the doll-like thing pulled instantly to attention. “Jump up and down three times,” Avram said. The golem executed three small hops, reaching about an inch off the table. Avram grinned with excitement. “Touch your head with your left hand,” he said, and the golem did so, a toy soldier saluting its commander.
Avram cast about for something else for the golem to do. In a corner near the desk, a brown spider sat lazily spinning a web between two discarded bottles. “Kill that spider,” he said, pointing.
The golem leapt off the desk and fell to the floor. It picked itself up and scampered to the corner. Avram followed it, holding a candle aloft. The spider, sensing the golem’s approach, tried to scramble away; but the golem was on top of it in a dark blur, scattering the bottles and smashing the spider with its crude fist. Avram watched his creation attack the spider again and again until it was little more than a damp mark on the yeshiva floor. And still the golem went on attacking.
“Golem, stop,” Avram said in a thin voice. The golem glanced up briefly, but then resumed smearing the spider’s remains into the ground. “Stop,” he repeated in a louder voice, but now the golem didn’t even look at him. Avram felt a rising panic.
Silently the old rabbi passed him another slip of paper, with another phrase. Gratefully he took it and read it aloud.
The little golem burst apart in midswing. A small shower of dirt rained down among the bottles and the dead spider. Then, blessed silence.
“Once a golem develops a taste for destruction,” the old rabbi said, “little can stop it save the words that destroy it. Not all golems are as crude or stupid as this one, but all share the same essential nature. They are tools of man, and they are dangerous. Once they have disposed of their enemies they will turn on their masters. They are creatures of last resort. Remember that.”
He’d thought about his crude golem for a long time afterward, haunted by the image of the small creature in its frenzy of violence. Had he done wrong to animate it in the first place? How much did a spider’s life count for in the eyes of God? He’d trod on spiders all his life; why did this death feel so different? He had atoned for both golem and spider at Yom Kippur that year, and for years afterward. Gradually, his everyday slights toward kin and colleagues had crowded the incident from his prayers, but he’d never been able to dismiss it entirely. In that room, he had commanded life and death, and later he’d wondered why the Almighty had allowed him to do so. But the purpose of the lesson became clear on the day when the Rabbi spied, walking through Orchard Street’s riotous crowd, a tall woman in a wool coat and a dirty dress, who carried in her wake the scent of freshly turned earth.
No matter how much he was tempted, he knew that he couldn’t destroy her. She was an innocent, and not to blame for her own existence. He still believed this, no matter how much his fear tried to convince him otherwise. It was the real reason why he had named her Chava: from chai, meaning life. To remind himself.
No, he could not destroy her. But perhaps there was another way.
He sat at the parlor table, opened the leather satchel, and withdrew a stack of books and loose papers. The books were old and time-eaten, their spines and bindings cracking. The loose papers were covered with notes in the Rabbi’s own hand, copied from those books that had been too fragile to move. He’d spent the morning—had spent weeks of mornings, now—walking from synagogue to synagogue, making excuses to drop in on old friends, fellow rabbis he hadn’t seen in years. He took tea, inquired after their families, listened to stories of fading health and congregational scandals. And then, he asked for a small favor. Would he be able to spend a few minutes in his friend’s private library? No, there was no particular book he was looking for—just a question of interpretation, a particularly thorny issue that he meant to solve for a former congregant. A matter of some delicacy.
It raised their suspicions, of course. As rabbis they’d all seen every sort of conundrum that a congregation could throw at them, and there were few problems that couldn’t be discussed in confidence, as a hypothetical if nothing else. Rabbi Meyer’s request suggested something else, something disturbing.
But they acquiesced and left their offices to give their friend some time alone; and when they returned, he was gone. A note left folded on a desk or chair would inform them that he’d remembered an appointment, and must apologize for leaving so suddenly. Also, he’d found an interesting book that shed some light on his situation, and had been so bold as to borrow it. He would return it, the note assured them, within a few weeks. And when the rabbis searched their bookcases for the missing book, invariably—and to little surprise—they found that he’d taken the most dangerous volume they owned, the one they’d always meant to destroy but never quite could. Often the book had been hidden, but the Rabbi had managed to find it anyway.
It made them all deeply uneasy. What could Meyer possibly want with that knowledge? But they said nothing, to a man. There was desperation in Meyer’s evasions and near-thefts, and they began to feel a guilty relief that he hadn’t brought them into his confidence. If the book could help, so be it. They could only pray that whatever problem Meyer was facing would be taken care of as soon as possible.
The Rabbi put water on to boil for his tea, and
At six o’clock Thea Radzin turned the sign in the bakery window from OPEN to CLOSED. The dough for the next morning’s loaves was set out to rise, the tables wiped down, the floor swept clean. The leftover goods were put aside, to be sold at cut rate the next day. At last the Radzins, Anna, and the Golem all filed out the back door and went their separate ways.
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.
It 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 teneme
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.