Kitabı oku: «The Golem and the Djinni», sayfa 5

They groomed him to become a rabbi, as quickly as they could. Yehudah’s parents were delighted: poor, barely more than peasants, they had gone without to provide for his education. The rabbinate began to debate where to send the boy. Would he do the most good at the head of a congregation? Or should they send him on to university, where he could begin to teach the next generation?

A few weeks before his ordainment, Yehudah Schaalman had a dream.

He was walking on a path of broken stones through a gray wilderness. Far ahead of him, a featureless wall stretched across the horizon and reached high into the heavens. He was exhausted and footsore; but after much walking Yehudah was able to discern a small door, little more than a man-shaped hole, where the path met the wall. Suddenly full of a strange, fearful joy, he ran the rest of the way.

At the door he paused, and peered inside. Whatever lay beyond was shrouded in mist. He touched the wall: it was painfully cold. He turned around and found that the mist had swallowed the path, even up to his own feet. In the whole of Creation, there was only himself, the wall, and the door.

Yehudah stepped through.

Mist and wall disappeared. He was standing in a meadow of grasses. The sun shone down and bathed him in warmth. The air was thick with scents of earth and vegetation. He was filled with a great peace unlike any he had ever known.

There was a grove of trees past the meadow, golden-green with sunlight. He knew there was someone standing inside the grove, just beyond his sight, waiting for him to arrive. Eagerly he took a step forward.

In an instant the sky darkened to storm-black. Yehudah felt himself seized and held. A voice spoke in his head:

You do not belong here.

Meadow and grove disappeared. He was released—he was falling—

And then he was on the path again, on his hands and knees, surrounded by broken stones. This time, there was no wall, or any other landmark to travel toward, only the stones leading through the blasted landscape to the horizon, with no hint of respite.

Yehudah Schaalman awoke to darkness and the certain knowledge that he was somehow damned.

When he told his teachers he was leaving and would not become a rabbi, they wept as though for the dead. They pleaded with him to explain why such an upright student would forsake his own purpose. But he gave no answer, and told no one of the dream, for fear that they would try to reason with him, explain it all away, tell him tales of demons who tormented the righteous with false visions. He knew the truth of what he’d dreamed; what he didn’t understand was why.

And so Yehudah Schaalman left his studies behind. He spent sleepless nights combing through his memories, trying to determine which of his sins had damned him. He hadn’t led a spotless life—he knew he could be proud and overeager, and when young he had fought bitterly with his sister and often pulled her hair—but he had followed the Commandments to the best of his ability. And were not his lapses more than compensated by his good deeds? He was a devoted son, a dutiful scholar! The wisest rabbis of the age thought him a miracle of God! If Yehudah Schaalman was not worthy of God’s love, then who on earth was?

Tormented by these thoughts, Yehudah packed a few books and provisions, said farewell to his weeping parents, and struck out on his own. He was nineteen years old.

It was a poor time to be traveling. Dimly Yehudah knew that his little shtetl lay inside the Grand Duchy of Posen, and that the duchy was a part of the Kingdom of Prussia; but to his teachers these were mundane matters, of little consequence to a spiritual prodigy such as Yehudah, and had not been dwelled upon. Now he learned a new truth: that he was a naive, penniless Jew who spoke little Polish and no German, and that all his studies were useless. Traveling the open roads, he was beset by thieves, who spied his thin back and delicate looks and took him for a merchant’s son. When they discovered that he had nothing to steal, they beat him and cursed him for their troubles. One night he made the mistake of asking for supper at a well-to-do German settlement; the burghers cuffed him and threw him to the road. He took to loitering on the outskirts of the peasant villages, where at least he had a chance of understanding what was said. He longed to speak Yiddish again, but he avoided the shtetls entirely, afraid of being drawn back into the world he had fled.

He became a laborer, tilling fields and tending sheep, but the work didn’t suit him. He made no friends among his fellows, being a thin and ragged Jew who spoke Polish as though it dirtied his mouth. Often he could be seen leaning on his spade or letting the bull walk away with the plow as he ruminated once more on his past sins. The more he reflected, the more it seemed to him that his entire life was a catalog of misdeeds. Sins of pride and laziness, of anger, arrogance, lust—he’d been guilty of them all, and no counterweight could balance the scale. His soul was like a stone shot through with brittle minerals, sound in appearance but worthless at heart. The rabbis had all been deceived; only the Almighty had known the truth of it.

One hot afternoon, while he reflected in this way, another fieldworker scolded him for laziness; and Yehudah, in the depths of his gloom and forgetting his Polish, responded with a more insulting answer than he’d intended. The man was upon Yehudah in an instant. The others gathered around, glad to finally see the arrogant boy receive his comeuppance. Flat on his back, nose gushing with blood, Yehudah saw his adversary crouched above him, one fist pulled back to strike again. Behind him rose a circle of jeering heads, like a council of demons sitting in raucous judgment. In that moment, all the heartache, resentment, and self-loathing of his exile contracted to a hard point of rage. He sprang up and barreled into his attacker, knocking him to the ground. As the others watched in horror, Yehudah proceeded to pummel him remorselessly about the head and was on the verge of gouging out one of his eyes when finally someone grabbed him in a bear hug and pulled him away. In a frenzy, Yehudah twisted and bit until the man let him go. And then Yehudah ran. The local constables stopped chasing him at the edge of town, but Yehudah kept on running. He had nothing now but the clothes on his back. It was even less than he’d started with.

He ceased pondering his roster of sins. It was clear now that the corruption of his soul was an elemental fact. That he had avoided capture and jail did not console him: for now he began to dwell on the greater judgment, the one that lay beyond.

He left off fieldwork and instead wandered from town to town, searching out odd jobs. He stocked shelves, swept floors, cut cloth. The pay was meager at best. He began to pilfer for survival, and then to steal outright. Soon he was stealing even when there was no need. In one village he worked at a mill, filling the flour sacks and taking them into town to be sold. The local baker had a daughter with bright green eyes and a shapely figure, and she liked to linger while he unloaded the sacks of flour in her father’s storeroom. One day he dared to brush his fingers across her shoulder. She said nothing, only smiled at him. The next time, emboldened and inflamed, he beckoned her into a corner and grabbed clumsily at her. She laughed at him, and he ran from the storeroom. But the time after that, she did not laugh. They copulated atop the shifting sacks, their mouths thick with flour dust. When it was over, he climbed off her, neatened himself with shaking hands, called her a whore, and walked away. At the next delivery she did not respond to his advances, and he slapped her across the face. When he returned to the mill, her father was waiting for him, along with the police.

For the crimes of rape and molestation, Yehudah Schaalman was sentenced to fifteen years in prison. Two years had passed since his dream; he was now twenty-one years old.

And so the third phase of his education began. In prison, Schaalman hardened and turned clever. He learned to be always on his guard, and to size up each man in a room as a possible opponent. The last traces of his old gentleness vanished, but he couldn’t disguise his intellect. The other inmates thought him a laughingstock—a skinny book-learned Jew, locked up with murderers! They called him “Rabbi,” at first jeeringly; but soon they were asking him to settle disputes. He accepted, and handed down pronouncements that married Talmudic precision with the strict moral code of the prison yard. The inmates respected his judgments, and eventually even the wardens were deferring to him.

Still he kept to himself, holding himself apart from the hierarchy of the prison and its gangs. He had no toadies, kept no corrupt guard in his pocket. The others thought him squeamish, afraid to dirty his hands, but he could see who held the real power, and it was himself. He was the definitive arbiter of justice, fairer than the courts. The inmates hated him for it, but they left him alone. In this manner Schaalman survived for fifteen long years, unharmed and untouched, nursing his bitterness and anger while the prison seethed around him.

At thirty-five he finally emerged and discovered that he would’ve been safer if he’d stayed behind bars. The countryside was aflame. Tired of the theft of their lands and their culture, the Poles of the duchy had risen up against their Prussian occupiers, only to be drawn into a military battle they had no hope of winning. Prussian soldiers roamed from village to village, stamping out the last of the resistance, looting the synagogues and Catholic churches. It was impossible to travel unnoticed. A group of Prussian soldiers came upon Schaalman on the road and beat him for sport; and then, even before his wounds had closed, a gang of Polish conscripts did the same. He tried to find work in the villages, but he bore the invisible mark of the prison now, in his hard features and his calculating eye, and no one would have him. He stole food from storehouses and stable feed-buckets, slept in fields, and tried to stay out of sight.

And so it was that one night, in a filthy camp at the edge of a field, starving and nearly mad with fear of death, Schaalman awoke from a gray dreamless sleep to see a strange light on the horizon, a pulsing, red-orange glow that grew as he watched. Still in that realm between sleep and waking, Schaalman stood and, taking no notice of his few belongings on the ground, began to walk toward it.

A furrow had been plowed down the middle of the field, making a highway that pointed straight at the light. He stumbled over clods of earth, barely conscious and dizzy with hunger. It was a warm, windy night, and the grain rippled in the breeze, a million small voices whispering his secrets.

The glow brightened, and stretched higher into the sky. Above the whispering of the field he heard voices: men shouting to one another, women crying out in anguish. The scent of woodsmoke reached his nose.

The field fell away behind him, and the ground began to slope upward. The glow now stretched across his vision. The smoke had turned acrid, the screams louder. The slope steepened until Schaalman was on his hands and knees, dragging himself upward, at the edge of his strength and beyond the boundaries of reason. His eyes were shut against the effort, but the red-orange light still floated before him, compelling him to keep moving. After what seemed an unutterable distance, the hill began to level, until Schaalman, sobbing with exhaustion, perceived that he had reached the crest. With no strength left even to lift his head, he collapsed into a fugue deeper than sleep.

He woke to a clear sky, a gentle breeze, and a strange clarity of mind. His hunger was extreme, but he felt it at a remove, as though someone else were starving and he merely observed. He sat up and looked around. He was in the middle of a clearing. There was no sign of the hill; the ground was flat in every direction. There was nothing to tell him which direction he had come, or how to return.

Before him lay the charred ruins of a synagogue.

The grass around the structure had singed along with it, carving a black circle into the ground. The fire had burnt the walls down to the foundation, leaving the sanctuary open to the elements. Inside, fallen beams jutted from twin columns of blackened pews.

Carefully he stood and crossed into the burnt circle of grass. He paused at the place where the door would have been, then stepped across the threshold. It was the first time in seventeen years that he’d entered a house of worship.

Not a living thing stirred inside. An eerie quiet hung over all, as though even the sounds of the outside world, the rustlings of bird and grass and insect, had been muffled. In the aisle, Schaalman picked up a handful of woody ash and sifted it between his fingers—and realized that the synagogue couldn’t have burned only the night before, for these ashes were as cold as stone. Had it all been a dream? Then what had led him here?

Carefully he walked the rest of the way up the aisle. A few spars from the ceiling blocked his path. He put his hands to them, and they crumbled to splinters.

The lectern was singed but still whole. There was no sign of the ark or its scroll; presumably they had been either saved or destroyed. The remains of prayer books lay scattered near the dais. He lifted from the ground a browned half-page, and read a fragment of the Kaddish.

Behind the dais was a space that had once been a small room, likely the rabbi’s study. He stepped over the half-wall that remained. Burnt papers littered the floor in drifts. The rabbi’s desk was a seared oblong hulk of wood in the middle of the room. A drawer was set into its front. Schaalman grasped the handle, and the fitting came away in his hand, lock and all. He wormed his fingernails into the crack that lay between the drawer and the desk, and broke the face to smithereens. He reached inside the exposed drawer, and withdrew the remains of a book.

Carefully he placed it atop the desk. The book’s spine had peeled away from the body, so that it could not properly be said to be a book any longer, but rather a sheaf of singed papers. Scraps of leather clung to the cover. He lifted the cover away, and placed it aside.

The book had darkened from the edges inward, leaving only an island of undamaged writing on each page. The paper itself was as thick as rag, and the writing was of a spidery hand that held forth in an old-fashioned, declamatory Yiddish. With growing wonder he lifted each page, his fingers cold and trembling. Broken snippets of text ran together before his eyes:

… a sure charm against fever is the recitation of the formula discovered by Galen and augmented by …

… should be repeated forty-one times for highest efficacy …

… aid in good health after a fast, collect nine branches from a nut-tree, each branch bearing nine leaves …

… to make one’s voice sweet to others, direct this exhortation to the Angel of …

… increase of virility, mix these six herbs and eat at midnight, while reciting the following Name of God …

… speak this Psalm to ward away demonic influence …

… of a golem is permissible only in times of deepest danger, and care must be taken to ensure …

… repeat the demon’s name, removing one letter with each iteration, until the name has dwindled to one letter, and the demon will dwindle likewise …

… to negate the ill effect that results from a woman passing between two men …

… this sixty-lettered Name of God is especially useful, though it is not to be uttered during the month of Adar …

Page after page, the secrets of long-dead mystics laid themselves before him. Many were irredeemably lost save for a few brief words, but some were whole and undamaged, and others were tantalizingly close to complete. This was the knowledge forbidden to all but the most pious and learned. His teachers had once hinted that wonders such as these would someday be his; but they’d denied him even the briefest glimpse, saying he was still far too young. To utter a charm or an exorcism or a Name of God without purity of heart and intention, they’d said, would be to risk one’s soul to the fires of Gehenna.

But for Schaalman, the fires of Gehenna had long been a foregone conclusion. If that was to be his end, then he would make the most of the meantime. Some influence, divine or demonic, had led him to this place, and had placed unutterable mysteries in his hands. He would take that power, and he would use it to his own ends.

The papers lay crisped and quietly crackling beneath his fingers. In the distant dizziness of his hunger, he could swear he felt them vibrate like a plucked string.

5.

After a few more days of nervous coaching, Arbeely decided that the time had come to introduce the Djinni to the rest of Little Syria. The plan he’d devised to do so relied on the very woman who was, in a sense, responsible for the Djinni’s new life in Manhattan: Maryam Faddoul, the coffeehouse proprietress, who’d brought Arbeely a copper flask in need of repairing.

The Faddouls’ coffeehouse was famous for having the best gossip in the neighborhood, a distinction due entirely to the female half of its management. Maryam Faddoul’s great gifts in life were a pair of guileless brown eyes and an earnest desire for the happiness and success of all her acquaintances. Her sympathetic nature made her a popular audience for the airing of grievances; she agreed wholeheartedly with every opinion and saw the wisdom in every argument. “That poor Saleem,” she might say, “it’s so obvious how much he loves Nadia Haddad! Even a blind goat could see it. It’s such a shame that her parents don’t approve.”

And then a customer might protest, “But, Maryam, only yesterday her father was here, and you agreed with him that Saleem was still too young, and not yet ready to be a good provider. How can both be right?”

“If all our parents had waited until they were ready to marry,” she’d reply, “then how many of us would be here?”

Maryam was a master at the beneficial application of gossip. If a businessman was drinking coffee and smoking a narghile, and bemoaning the smallness of his shop—business was booming, if only he had space for larger orders!—Maryam would appear at his side, refill his cup with an easy tilt of her wrist, and say, “You should ask George Shalhoub if you can take over his lease when he moves away.”

“But George Shalhoub isn’t moving.”

“Is that so? Then it must have been some other Sarah Shalhoub I talked to yesterday. Now that her son is going to work in Albany she can’t stand the thought of being away from him, so she is trying to convince George that they must go as well. If someone hinted they were willing to take the lease off his hands, then George might find himself much more willing.” And the man would hurriedly settle the bill and head out the door in search of George Shalhoub.

All the while, Sayeed Faddoul would be watching from the small kitchen, a smile in his eyes. Another man might grow jealous of his wife’s attentions, but not him. Sayeed was a quiet man—not awkward, as Arbeely could be, but possessed of a calm and steady nature that complemented his wife’s heartfelt vivacity. He knew that it was his presence that let Maryam be so free; an unmarried woman, or one whose husband was less visible, would be forced to rein in her exuberance, or else risk the sorts of insinuations that might damage her name. But everyone could see that Sayeed was proud of his wife and was more than content to remain the unobtrusive partner, allowing her to shine.

At last Arbeely set his plan into motion. A message boy was dispatched to the Faddouls, alerting Maryam that her flask had been repaired. Accordingly she arrived that afternoon, still dressed in her apron and bringing with her the dark smell of roasted coffee. As always, Arbeely’s heart squeezed at the sight of her, a not unpleasant ache, as if to say, Ah well. Like many of the men of the neighborhood, he was a little bit in love with Maryam Faddoul. What luck to be that Sayeed, her admirers thought, to live always in the light of her bright eyes and understanding smile! But none would dream of approaching her, even those who regarded the conventions of propriety as obstacles to be overcome. It was clear that Maryam’s smile shone from her belief in the better nature of those around her. To demand more of that smile for themselves would only serve to extinguish it.

“My dear Boutros!” she said. “Why don’t I see you at the coffeehouse more often? Please tell me business has doubled and you must work night and day, because that is the only excuse I’ll accept.”

Arbeely blushed and smiled, and wished he were not so nervous. “Business has been good, actually, and I have more work than I can handle alone. In fact, I must introduce you to my new assistant. He arrived a week ago. Ahmad!” he called toward the back room. “Come meet Maryam Faddoul!”

The Djinni emerged from the storeroom, ducking his head to clear the threshold. In his hands he held the flask. He smiled. “Good day, madam,” he said, and offered the flask to her. “I’m very pleased to meet you.”

The woman was plainly astounded. She stared at the Djinni. For a moment, his eyes darting between them, Arbeely’s fears were lost in a sudden flush of envy. Was it only the Djinni’s good looks that caused her to stare like that? No, there was something else, and Arbeely had felt it too, at their calamitous first encounter: an instant and compelling magnetism, almost instinctual, the human animal confronting something new, and not yet knowing whether to count it as friend or foe.

Then Maryam turned to Arbeely and swatted him across the shoulder.

“Ow!”

“Boutros, you’re horrible! Hiding him from everyone, and not saying a word! No announcement, no welcome—he must think us all terribly rude! Or are you ashamed of us?”

“Please, Mrs. Faddoul, it was at my request,” the Djinni said. “I fell ill during the crossing, and was bedridden until a few days ago.”

In an instant the woman’s indignation turned to concern. “Oh, you poor man,” she said. “Did you cross from Beirut?”

“No, Cairo,” he said. “In a freighter. I paid a man to hide me on board, and it was there I became ill. We docked in New Jersey, and I was able to sneak away.” He spoke the learned story easily.

“But we could have helped you! It must have been so frightening, to be sick in a strange country, with only Boutros for a nursemaid!”

The Djinni smiled. “He was an excellent nursemaid. And I had no wish to be a burden.”

Maryam shook her head. “You mustn’t let pride get the better of you. We all turn to each other here, it’s how we make our way.”

“You are right, of course,” the Djinni said smoothly.

Her eyebrows arched. “And our secretive Mister Arbeely, how did you meet him?”

“Last year I passed through Zahleh, and met the smith who taught him. He saw that I was interested in the craft, and told me about his apprentice who had gone to America.”

“And imagine my surprise,” interjected Arbeely, “when this half-dead man knocks on my door and asks if I am the tinsmith from Zahleh!”

“This world works in strange ways,” Maryam said, shaking her head.

Arbeely studied her for signs of skepticism. Did she really believe this concocted story? Many Syrians had traveled odd and winding paths to New York—on foot through the forests of Canada, or fording box-laden barges out of New Orleans. But hearing their tale spoken aloud, Arbeely felt it was too remarkable for its own good. And the Djinni had none of the pallor or weakness of one who had been seriously ill. In fact, he looked like he could swim the East River. Too late to change it now, though. Arbeely smiled at Maryam, and hoped the smile looked natural.

“And are you from near Zahleh?” Maryam asked.

“No, I am Bedouin,” the Djinni replied. “I was in Zahleh to deliver my sheepskins to market.”

“Is that so?” She seemed to look him over again. “How astonishing you are. A Bedu stowaway in New York. You must come to my coffeehouse, everyone will want to meet you.”

“I would be honored,” the Djinni said. He bowed to Maryam and returned to the back room.

“Such a story,” Maryam murmured to Arbeely as he saw her to the door. “Obviously he has the endurance of his people, to have made it here. But still, I’m surprised at you, Boutros. You might have had better sense. What if he’d died in your care?”

Arbeely squirmed in very real embarrassment. “He was adamant,” Arbeely said. “I didn’t want to go against his wishes.”

“Then he placed you in a very difficult position. But then, the Bedouin are certainly proud.” She shot a glance at him. “Truly, he is Bedu?”

“I believe so,” Arbeely said. “He knows very little of the cities.”

“How odd,” she said, almost to herself. “He doesn’t seem …” She trailed off, her face clouding; but then she came back to herself. Smiling at Arbeely, she thanked him for the repair. Indeed, the flask was much improved; Arbeely had smoothed away the dents, restored the polish, and then reproduced the patterned band down to the tiniest awl-mark. She paid and left, saying, “By all means, you must bring Ahmad to the coffeehouse. No one will speak of anything else for weeks.”

But going by the immediate flood of visitors to Arbeely’s shop, it grew clear that Maryam had not waited for their visit; rather, in her enthusiastic manner, she had spread the story of the tinsmith’s new Bedouin apprentice far and wide. Arbeely’s own little coffeepot bubbled constantly on the brazier as the entire neighborhood filed in and out, eager to meet the newcomer.

Thankfully, the Djinni performed his part well. He entertained the visitors with tales of his supposed crossing and ensuing illness, but never spoke so long that he risked tangling himself in his story. Instead he painted in broad strokes the picture of a wanderer who one day decided, on little more than a whim, to steal away to America. The visitors left Arbeely’s shop shaking their heads over their strange new neighbor, who seemed protected by the accidental good fortune that God granted to fools and small children. Many wondered that Arbeely would take on an apprentice with such meager credentials. But then, Arbeely was considered a bit strange himself, so perhaps it was a case of like attracting like.

“Besides,” said a man at the coffeehouse, rolling a backgammon piece between his fingers, “it sounds like Arbeely saved his life, or close to it. The Bedouin have rules about repaying such debts.”

His opponent chuckled. “Let’s hope for Arbeely’s sake that the man can actually work a smith!”

Arbeely was heartily glad when the flood of visitors lowered to a trickle. Besides the pressure of maintaining their story, he’d spent so much time entertaining his neighbors that he’d fallen far behind on business. And it seemed that each visitor had brought along something that needed mending, until the shop was crammed full of dented lamps and burned pots. Many of the repairs were strictly cosmetic, and it was clear that their owners had been moved more by a sense of neighborly support than actual need. Arbeely felt grateful and a little bit guilty. To look at the rows of damaged items, one would think Little Syria had been struck by a plague of clumsiness.

The Djinni found the attention amusing. It wasn’t hard to keep his story consistent; most of the visitors were too polite to press him overmuch for details. According to Arbeely, there was a certain glamour to the Bedu that would work in his favor. “Be a bit hazy,” Arbeely had told him as they prepared their plan and rehearsed their stories. “Talk about the desert. It’ll go over well.” Then he’d been struck by a thought: “You’ll need a name.”

“What would you suggest?”

“Something common, I would think. Oh, let’s see—there is Bashir, Ibrahim, Ahmad, Haroun, Hussein—”

The Djinni frowned. “Ahmad?”

“You like it? It’s a good name.”

It was not so much that he liked it, as that he found it the least objectionable. In the repeated a’s he heard the sound of wind, the distant echo of his former life. “If you think I need a name, then I suppose it’s as good as any.”

“Well, you’ll definitely need a name, so Ahmad it shall be. Only please, remember to answer to it.”

The Djinni did indeed remember, but it was the only aspect of Arbeely’s plan that made him uncomfortable. To him the new name suggested that the changes he’d undergone were so drastic, so pervasive, that he was no longer the same being at all. He tried not to dwell on such dark thoughts, and instead concentrated on speaking politely, and maintaining his story—but every so often, as he listened to the chatter of yet more visitors, he spoke his true name to himself in the back of his mind, and took comfort in the sound.

Of all the people whom Maryam Faddoul told about the newcomer, only one man refused to take interest: Mahmoud Saleh, the ice cream maker of Washington Street. “Have you heard?” she told him. “Boutros Arbeely has taken a new apprentice.”

Saleh made a noise like “hmm” and scooped ice cream from his churn into a small dish. They were standing on the sidewalk in front of Maryam’s coffeehouse. Children waited before him, clutching coins. Saleh reached out a hand, and a child placed a coin in his palm. He pocketed the coin and held out the ice cream dish, careful to avoid looking at the child’s face, or Maryam’s, or indeed at anything other than his churn or the sidewalk. “Thank you, Mister Mahmoud,” the child said—a courtesy due, he knew, only to the presence of Maryam. There was a rattle as the child took a spoon from the cup tied to the side of his tiny cart.