The Golem and the Jinni by Helene Wecker
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.
The 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.”
“And yet, look at me. Here I stand, making skillets. Does that not call your faith into question?”
“Yes! Look at you! You yourself are proof that labeling something as superstition doesn’t necessarily make it so!”
“But I’ve always existed. Jinn may not choose to be seen, but that doesn’t mean we’re imaginary. And we certainly don’t ask to be worshiped. In any case,” he said with relish—he had been saving this salvo for its proper moment—“you told me yourself that sometimes you aren’t certain there is a God.”
“I never should have said that,” muttered Arbeely. “I was drunk.”
On a recent night, buoyed by their growing commercial success, Arbeely had decided to introduce his apprentice to araq. The anise-flavored alcohol had no effect on the Jinni, only a pleasant taste and a sudden warmth as it burned away inside him. He’d been fascinated by the araq’s transformation as Arbeely added water to the small glass, the liquor going from clear to cloudy white. He’d insisted on trying it over and over, diluting the araq drop by drop and watching the hazy, opaque tendrils extend themselves through the glass.
But how does it work? he’d asked Arbeely.
&
“Because you were drunk, does that make it less true?” the Jinni asked.
“Yes. Liquor is an evil influence. And besides, even if I didn’t believe, what would that change? You existed without the benefit of my belief. So does God, without yours.”
But the truth was that Arbeely’s faith rested on uncertain ground. Worse, the argument was forcing him to scrutinize his own shaky beliefs when all he wanted was the comfort of the familiar. At night, alone in his bed, doubt and homesickness weighted his heart and made him feel like weeping.
Nevertheless, on Christmas eve he went to Mass. In the candle-lit hall he took Communion with his neighbors, the wine-soaked bread heavy on his tongue, and strove to feel something of the miracle of the Christ Child’s birth. Afterward, at a dinner organized by the ladies of the church, he sat at a long table among the other unmarried men, and ate tabouleh and flatbread and kibbeh that tasted nothing like his mother’s. A couple of the men produced an oud and a drum, and they all danced a dabke. Arbeely joined in, less from real enthusiasm than because it would hurt too much not to.
He left the dinner and walked back toward his tenement room. It was a bracing, frost-bitten night; the air knifed at his lungs. Perhaps, he thought, he would have a glass of araq—just one this time—and retire early. Then he saw that the lamp was still burning in the shop. Strange—usually at this hour the Jinni was out roaming the city, bedding young heiresses and doing whatever else it was he did.
Arbeely entered to find the shop empty. He frowned. Didn’t the Jinni know better than to leave the lamp burning? Irritated, he went to extinguish it.
On the worktable, inside the circle of lamplight, sat a small silver owl.
Arbeely picked up the figurine and turned it over in his hands. The owl was perched on the stump of a tree, staring at him with enormous, wide-set eyes. The Jinni had used a tiny blade to carve out a ruff of startled feathers and a thin, pointed beak. In all, he’d contrived to make it the most indignant-looking owl Arbeely had ever seen.
He laughed aloud, delighted. Not a Christmas present, surely! Was it meant for an apology, or merely a whim? A bit of both, perhaps? Smiling, he pocketed the figurine and took himself to bed.
The owl was indeed meant as an apology, but for more than Arbeely knew.
The bickering about religion had taken its toll on the Jinni as well. Never before had humans seemed so foreign to him. Distantly he understood that the subject was difficult for Arbeely to explain, tied as it was to the man’s feelings for home and family. But then Arbeely would say something ridiculous, like when he had tried to explain how this God of theirs was somehow three gods and one at the same time. It left the Jinni drowning in a sea of exasperation.
Certainly the man meant well, but the Jinni wanted to talk to someone else, someone who might understand his frustrations, even share them. Someone who, like him, was forced to hide away her strengths.
He had no idea if she would even consent to speak with him. But he needed to know who she was. And so, as Arbeely entered his shop and discovered the waiting figurine, the Jinni was already retracing the route he had memorized, in search of the woman made of clay.
Over the weeks the cold had deepened, and with it the Golem’s nighttime restlessness. At the end of each workday she’d contrive to spend one or two more minutes in front of the fading ovens, soaking up the last of their heat. The walk home had become an unhappy march to an endless-seeming incarceration. One night she tried getting into her bed, beneath the eiderdown, thinking it might warm her, but her restless limbs wouldn’t allow it. She nearly tore the bedclothes apart in her rush to get out again.
On Saturdays, her day off, she fought off the stiffness by walking the bounds of her neighborhood, up and down the overfamiliar streets. Rivington, Delancey, Broome, Grand, Hester. Forsyth, Allen, Eldridge, Orchard, Ludlow. Fir wreaths and red velvet bows had appeared in a few of the tenement windows; vaguely she was aware that it was for a holiday, but that it was a gentile affair, and she wasn’t supposed to take notice. She passed the innumerable synagogues, from humble storefront congregations to the soaring structures on Eldridge and Rivington. At each one she felt the same outpouring of prayer, like a deep river with powerful currents. Sometimes it was so strong that she had to cross the street, or risk being pulled under. She began to realize why the Rabbi had never taken her to a service. It would be like stepping into a hurricane.
On the western boundary of her walks, she would always pause and look down the block toward the Bowery. To her, the street was a sort of borderland, a gateway to the vast, dangerous expanse of the city. She’d only crossed it once, on the night she’d met the glowing man.
She wondered where he was. Did he feel the cold like she did? Or did he drive it away, by burning more brightly?
Back and forth she’d walk, willing the sun not to set. But the earth insisted on turning, and before long she was home again, steeling herself for the night. Bored with sewing her one dress, she’d begun to take in clothes that needed mending or alterations. Most of her clients were her fellow boarders in the house, the clerks and accountants who’d never learned to thread a needle. They thought her awkward and spinsterish, if they thought of her at all; but even they noticed the precision of her stitches, the almost invisible mends. They recommended her to their friends and colleagues, and soon the Golem had more than enough piecework to occupy her fingers, if not her mind.
One particularly cold night, she was repairing a rip in a pair of trousers when the needle fell from her stiff fingers. She tried to grab it, but fumbled, and the needle vanished. She searched the trousers, her own clothing, the floor, but couldn’t find it. At last a glint from the candlelight caught her eye: and there it was, sticking out of her right forearm. It had sunk in nearly half its length.
She peered closer, dumbfounded. How had it happened? She’d driven it in by accident, and not even noticed!
Carefully she plucked the needle from her arm and pulled back her sleeve. There was a tiny dark hole, its edge slightly raised where the needle had pushed the clay aside. She pressed the spot with her thumb, and felt a twinge of discomfort. But already the puncture was sealing itself over, the clay spreading back into place; and when she removed her thumb the mark was nearly gone.
The Golem was fascinated. She’d grown used to thinking of her body as never changing. She didn’t bruise when she bumped into the worktable, and never twisted her ankle on the ice, as Mrs. Radzin had done. Her hair didn’t even grow. This was something new, and unexplored.
Her gaze fell on her satin pincushion and its dozens of long, silver pins.
Within minutes she’d stuck them all in her arm to varying depths, a few nearly down to the head. It took a good deal of force. The clay that formed her was strong and thick, and didn’t give way easily. After denting her thumb on the pinheads, she took off her boot and used it as a hammer.
Finally she examined her work, touching each pin in turn. She’d laid them out in a neat grid along her left forearm, from the wrist to the elbow. All were held fast. She flexed and opened her hand, feeling the clay gather and pull around the pins near her wrist. There seemed to be no underlying structure, no bone or muscle or nerve: she was clay through and through.
She removed a pin, prising it out with her fingernails. Soon the hole had closed of its own accord. She pulled out another one, and checked the clock: only three minutes until there was nothing left but a dark spot. What if the hole was bigger? She took the pin and inserted it directly next to another one, making the hole twice as wide. The discomfort grew, but she ignored it. Then she removed both pins, and watched. Eight minutes passed before the hole had closed over completely.
How interesting! But what if she stuck three pins together, or four? Or she could use something other than pins, something wider—the embroidery scissors! She snatched them from the sewing basket, closed her fist around t
Then, slowly, as though not to startle herself, she put the scissors down. What in the world was she doing? She had no idea how much her body could endure, how far it could be pushed. What if she’d permanently maimed herself? And if the hole had indeed closed, then what next? Would she slice off her own arm out of boredom? No need to worry herself with thoughts of others discovering and destroying her. She would destroy herself soon enough, piece by piece.
She pulled each pin from her arm and replaced them in the pincushion. Soon the only damage was a faint grid of blemishes. She checked the clock. Only two in the morning. There were still hours left to fill. And already her fingers were beginning to twitch.
How long could she keep on like this? Years, months, weeks? Days? You will go mad before long, said a voice in her mind, and put all in danger.
Her hand came up to touch the locket, and then faltered. She shook her head distractedly. Then she wrapped her cloak tighter about herself, and glanced out at the street below.
The glowing man was strolling up the sidewalk toward her boardinghouse.
She stared, shocked. What was he doing on her street? Had he followed her home that night? No; perhaps it was a coincidence. He might be headed anywhere.
Warily she watched his approach. He wore a dark coat, but no hat, even though it was freezing cold. Near the boardinghouse, he slowed, and then stopped. He glanced about, as if checking for onlookers. And then he raised his head and looked directly at her window.
Their eyes met.
She flew back from the window, nearly stumbling against her bed. She’d been discovered, hunted down! She clutched at the locket, waiting for the pounding on the door, the angry mob.