The Golem and the Jinni by Helene Wecker
Arbeely had expected Sam to display the necklaces in his largest glass case, but Sam had a better plan. Lately it had become fashionable for Manhattan’s society women to pose for portraits while dressed in a fanciful “Oriental” style, such as they imagined a Near Eastern princess or courtesan might have worn. Sam’s shop was a popular destination for these ladies, who often sent their maids or even came themselves to buy props and costume pieces. Most of them viewed bargaining as gauche, which meant that Sam was turning a tidy profit in curl-toed slippers, billowing silk trousers, and faux Egyptian armbands. The new necklaces would certainly appeal to them; and Sam knew they would like them even better if they came with a story.
It was only a few days before the first likely customer arrived. A sleek, expensive brougham pulled up in front of Sam’s shop—causing a good deal of gawking from the passersby—and a dark-haired young woman emerged. The afternoon heat was baking the sidewalks, but the young woman wore a heavy, dark dress and a thick shawl. She looked about with polite curiosity until an older woman, dressed just as finely in black, stepped from the carriage. The older woman eyed their surroundings with distaste, then took hold of her companion’s elbow and led her swiftly into Sam’s shop.
They were, indeed, there for a portrait. “My fiancé’s idea,” the young woman said. “He commissioned it, as a wedding present.” Sam ushered them to his best chairs, poured them tea, and spent the next hour bringing them bolts of fabric, beaded scarves, veils hung with coins, and whatever other bric-a-brac he thought they might fancy. Surprisingly, the young woman had a good eye for authenticity and avoided the gaudiest offerings. Soon she’d put together an outfit that truly resembled what an Ottoman woman of means might once have worn.
The sun slanted through the shop’s large windows, and the old woman dabbed at her brow with her handkerchief. But the young woman made no move to unwrap her shawl, and Sam noticed that her teacup shook slightly in her hand. Some sort of illness or palsy, perhaps. A shame, in one so young and lovely.
Eventually, as Sam had predicted, they arrived at the subject of a proper necklace. He went into the storeroom and emerged with an old leather box, battered and worn, and blew imaginary dust from its top. “This,” he said, “I rarely show.”
He opened the box, and the young woman gasped as he took out necklace after necklace. “How gorgeous! Are they antiques?”
“Yes, very old. They belong to my jaddah—excuse me, how do you say, mother of mother?”
“Grandmother.”
“Thank you, yes, my grandmother. She was Bedouin. You know this? A traveler in the desert.”
“Yes, I’ve heard of the Bedouin,” said the young woman.
“My grandfather gives them to her, at their wedding. As part of her . . . hmm. Price?”
“Her dowry?”
“Yes, dowry. When she dies, she leaves me the necklaces, to sell. For a beautiful necklace must have a beautiful woman to wear, or else it is worth nothing at all.”
“You wouldn’t rather keep them for your own wife, or your children?”
“For them,” and he gestured to the shop around them, “I make a business. Much more valuable, in America.”
She chuckled. “You’re a wise man, Mr. Hosseini.” Next to her the old woman sniffed, as though to express her opinion of Mr. Hosseini’s wisdom, or perhaps the entire conversation.
“May I see this one?” And the young woman pointed to the necklace with the discs of blue-green glass.
He fetched a hand mirror and held it up while her older companion fastened the clasp. She gazed at herself, and Sam smiled: the necklace fit as though made for her throat. “Beautiful,” he said. “Like a queen of the desert.”
With her shaking fingers she reached up and touched the necklace. The glass disks shifted, chiming softly against each other. “A queen of the desert,” she echoed. And then, a deep and startling sadness crept over her face. Tears began to spill from her eyes; she covered them with a hand and drew her breath in a hitching sob.
“My dear, what’s the matter?” cried the old woman. But her young companion just shook her head, trying to smile, obviously embarrassed at herself. Sam fetched her a handkerchief, which she took gratefully and dabbed at her eyes. Chagrined, he could not refrain from blurting out, “You don’t like it?”
“Oh, no! I like it very much! I’m so sorry, Mr. Hosseini, I’m just not myself at the moment.”
“It’s the wedding,” said the older woman consolingly. “Your mother makes such a fuss of everything, I wonder how you can bear it.”
Sam nodded at this, thinking of his own quiet Lulu, her lingering homesickness. “A wedding is a strange time,” he said. “Much happiness, but many changes also.”
“There certainly are.” The young woman took a deep breath, and then smiled at her reflection. “It’s beautiful. What will you take for it?”
Sam named a number he thought slightly less than ludicrous, and she readily agreed. The old woman’s eyes widened with alarm, and she looked as though she would’ve given her charge a stern chiding if they’d been alone. Sensing that the shopping was now concluded, Sam poured them more tea and brought out small cakes dusted with crushed pistachios—“My wife makes these,” he announced proudly—and busied himself with wrapping their parcels and carrying them to the waiting carriage. The footman gave him an address on Fifth Avenue where he could send the bill.
When the women finally rose to leave, Sam placed his hand on his heart and bowed to both of them. “Your visit honors me,” he said. “If you need anything else, please come again.”
“I will,” the young woman said warmly, and clasped his hand; he felt the odd tremor in her fingers. She glanced at her companion, who was already making her way toward the door, and lowered her voice. “Mr. Hosseini, do you know many of your Syrian neighbors?”
“Yes,” he said, surprised. “I am here a long time, I know everyone.”
“Then could you tell me—do you know a man—” But then she looked again to the woman waiting nearby at the door, and whatever question she meant to ask died on her lips. She smiled again, a bit sadly, and said, “It’s no matter. Thank you, Mr. Hosseini. For everything.” The bells on the door jangled as she passed.
The footman helped Sophia into the carriage. She settled herself next to her aunt, and pulled her shawl a bit tighter. The trip had been a success; she only wished she had not cried like that, and made a spectacle of herself. She supposed she ought to thank her aunt for providing an excuse for her tears, when their true cause had been far different. A queen of the desert: that was what she’d imagined herself, in her bed, in his arms. Suffice to say, the irony of her engagement portrait had not been lost on her.
Her perspiring aunt fanned herself with her gloves. She turned to Sophia, as though to say something—this terrible heat—but then caught herself, and only gave her a strained smile. Sophia’s illness had this benefit, at least: her acquaintances’ newfound awkwardness meant a reprieve from all sorts of chitchat.
The footman nudged the brougham away from the curb, and threaded slowly through the morass of carts. “Shall we go to Central Park?” her aunt said. “I’m sure your mother wouldn’t mind.”
“That’s all right, Auntie. I’d rather just go home.” She smiled, to soften the refusal. Her aunt was worried about her; they all were. Sophia had never been an energetic girl, but at least she had gone for walks, and visited friends, and done the things a wealthy young woman was supposed to do. Now she merely sat by the fire for hours at a stretch. She knew they all pitied her, but she’d found a real comfort in her protracted convalescence. Her mother had excused her from all social functions—which were few in any case, as the Winstons were the only family of note who still lingered in the city. Her father, indulgent in his concern, had opened his library to her, and at last she could read to her heart’s content. In all, these last few weeks had been some of the most peaceable of her life. She had the sense of existing inside a fragile pause, a moment
But that would soon be over. Her mother was determined to forge ahead with the wedding plans. She’d even told her fiancé’s parents that Sophia’s tremor was improving, which was certainly not the case. Sophia had merely learned to disguise it more effectively. As for Charles himself, so far he’d taken care to appear undeterred by the sight of his shivering fiancée. At each meeting he asked once after her health—always she struggled to find an answer that was neither a falsehood nor a complaint—and then embarked on a rapid stream of pleasantries. It was exactly the sort of conversation she’d hoped never to have with her husband, and she doubted he relished it either. She feared their married life would be like some dreadful novel: the dissatisfied young husband, the sickly heiress.
She watched the men and women going about their business outside the hansom window, and wondered what it would be like to lose herself among them, the warm press of people carrying her somewhere else, somewhere far away.
And then, she saw him.
The tinsmiths’ shop had felt especially stifling that morning. Each thud of Arbeely’s hammer, each dull ring of metal on metal, seemed pitched and calculated to be as annoying as possible. So when Arbeely grumbled that the hammer’s rawhide was wearing thin, the Jinni declared he would go to the tack and harness shop on Clarkson, and buy him a piece. It was a long walk for a minor errand, but Arbeely had given him no argument. Apparently both of them wanted him gone.
They’d fought again, bitterly, over Matthew this time. Arbeely had learned that the boy had no father to speak of, and seemed to think the Jinni should be concerned about the boy’s welfare. The ensuing argument had included phrases such as moral guidance and appropriate father figure, and other impenetrables that the Jinni suspected were tinged with insult. What business was it of Arbeely’s if Matthew chose to spend the afternoons with him? The truth, the Jinni sensed, was that Arbeely was jealous. Matthew paid him hardly any attention, though he obeyed without protest whenever Arbeely pointed out the lateness of the hour, saying, Your mother will be worried. But it was on the Jinni’s bench that the boy silently materialized every afternoon. And no wonder. Who’d want to spend their afternoons with Arbeely, if they could avoid it? With each day, the tinsmith became more of a misery, his brow furrowing with worry and disapproval, his eyes sunken from lack of sleep. You look terrible, the Jinni told him one morning, and in return the man shot him a look of surprising hostility.
He left the shop, his thoughts in their now-usual stew, and crossed the street, navigating with irritation the carts and horses. Many of them had been held up behind a hansom that was trying to pull away from the curb. The hansom inched forward, and the Jinni glanced into the window as he passed.
It was, unmistakably, Sophia—and yet he had to look again. Pallid, black-wrapped, she had clearly undergone some terrible change. Again he remembered her dark and shrouded room. What had happened to her? Was the girl ill?
She looked up, and saw him. Surprise, dismay, anger all passed across her features—but she did not flush or glance away, as once she would have. Instead she held his gaze, and gave him a look of such naked, vulnerable sadness that it was he who glanced away first.
In the next moment the cab passed. Confused, shaken, the Jinni continued on his way. He told himself she was a girl of means, and that her problem, whatever it was, was not his to solve. But he could not let go of the feeling that, in that moment, she had been calling him to account for something.
Abu Yusuf sat on the floor of the sick-tent, holding his daughter’s hand.
Three days had passed since Fadwa had taken ill, and in that time he had barely moved from her side. He watched Fadwa’s dreaming fingers grasp at air, listened to her moan and mutter nonsense. At first they’d coaxed her to open her eyes, but the girl had taken one look at Abu Yusuf, screamed in terror, and begun to choke. After that, they’d blindfolded her tightly with a dark rag.
The word possessed hung in the close air of the sick-tent, was exchanged in every glance, but not a tongue uttered it.
Abu Yusuf’s brothers shouldered his duties without a word. Fatim stuck to her work, muttering that someone had to keep them fed, it would do Fadwa no good if they all starved. Every few hours she took a bowl of thinned yogurt into the sick-tent and spooned as much of it as she could into her daughter’s mouth. Her eyes were red-rimmed as she worked, and she said little, only glanced at her husband as he sat there, silently blaming himself. He should have raised an alarm, he’d decided, when he’d glimpsed that impossible palace. He should’ve taken his daughter and ridden far, far away.
By the end of the second day, Fatim’s glances had a touch of accusation about them. How long, she seemed to be saying, will you sit here, doing nothing? Why do you let her suffer, when you know the remedy? And an unspoken name rose to float between them: Wahab ibn Malik.
He wanted to argue with her, to tell her that prudence dictated he wait and see if Fadwa improved before he traveled that path. That he had no idea if ibn Malik was even still alive. But on the morning of the third day he had to admit that she was right. Fadwa was not improving, and his prudence was beginning to seem like cowardice.
“Enough,” he said, standing. “Tell my brothers to ready a horse and a pony. And bring me one of the ewes.” She nodded, grimly satisfied, and left the tent.
He packed a week’s worth of provisions, then placed Fadwa on the pony, bound her hands, and tied her into the saddle. Her blindfolded head dipped and jerked, like a man falling asleep on watch. He tethered the ewe to Fadwa’s pony, giving it plenty of lead. Then he mounted his horse and took the pony’s reins, and led them out of the encampment: a pitiful, half-blind procession. No one gathered to see them off. Instead the clan peered out from tent corners and door flaps, and mouthed silent prayers for their safe return, and for protection against the very man they sought. Only Fatim stood in the open, watching until her husband and daughter disappeared.
Ibn Malik’s cave lay in the western hills, on a rocky, wind-buffeted slope. Few of the clan ever ventured that way, for there was no grazing, no place for an encampment. Already when Abu Yusuf was a boy—and not yet called Abu Yusuf, only Jalal ibn Karim—to travel west had become a euphemism among the clan for seeking out Wahab ibn Malik. Parents traveled west with children who were gravely ill, or in need of exorcisms; barren wives traveled west with their husbands and soon quickened with child. But always ibn Malik took something in return, either from the healed or from the ones who’d brought them—not just a sheep or two, but something intangible and necessary. The father of the exorcised child never spoke again. The pregnant woman was struck blind during the birth. No one exclaimed at the losses, for these were debts paid to ibn Malik, and everyone knew it.
Abu Yusuf’s own cousin Aziz had once paid such a debt. Aziz was nine years older than young Jalal, and tall and strong and handsome. All the men of the clan could sit a horse as though born in the saddle, but Aziz rode like a god, and Jalal worshiped him for it. Jalal had been out tending his father’s sheep when Aziz’s horse stumbled in a hole and threw his rider, breaking the young man’s back and neck. Aziz lingered between life and death for a day before his father decided to travel west. There was no way to drag a litter up the rocky hillsides, so he made the trip alone, and returned carrying a sack of poultices. At their touch Aziz’s bones healed, and his fever disappeared. Within a week he was up and walking. But from then on, every horse he approached shied at the sight of him. The few he managed to touch would scream in terror and foam at the mouth. Aziz al-Hadid, master of horses, never rode again. He became a shadow of his former self—but still, at least he had lived.
Slowly they made their way west. Every few hours Abu Yusuf would tilt a waterskin to Fadwa’s lips or feed her a few mouthfuls of yogurt. Sometimes she spat it out; sometimes she gulped it down as though starving. Soon the flat terrain of the steppes gave way to angled hills and low, jagged peaks. It was hard going, and the ewe started to struggle. When it became clear she co
It was almost evening when ibn Malik’s cave came into sight. Squinting against the last of the sun, Abu Yusuf spied a small, thin figure sitting cross-legged on the flat apron of rock just outside its entrance. He was alive. And he’d known they were coming. Of course he’d known.
Wahab ibn Malik had been already in his thirties when Abu Yusuf’s cousin was injured; but even so, as they drew closer, Abu Yusuf found himself shocked at the state of the man who waited for them. He seemed no more than a leathered, yellow-eyed skeleton. He stood as they approached, a spiderlike unfolding, and Abu Yusuf saw he was naked save for a torn loincloth. He glanced back at Fadwa; but of course the girl was blindfolded, and could see nothing.
He dismounted and untied the dead ewe from Fadwa’s horse. Cradling it in his arms, he approached ibn Malik and laid it at his feet. The man grinned at Abu Yusuf, revealing dark, broken teeth, and looked over at Fadwa, still tied to her pony.
“You want an exorcism,” ibn Malik said. His voice was startling: deep and full, it seemed to come from somewhere other than his body.
“Yes,” said Abu Yusuf, uneasily. “If you think there’s hope.”