by Bari Wood
It pounded through boulevards and side streets, killing as it went. It broke down the walls of houses to get to the people cowering inside. It broke lamps and upended stoves and soon the city was burning.
The cardinal, who had instigated the raid on the ghetto, stayed in his palace. His advisers pleaded with him to make peace with the rabbi. At first he was proud and resisted; then he saw the light of the fires, and he went out on his balcony and saw the cobbles of the streets of Prague covered with blood. He dressed himself in the red robe of his office and rode through the streets of the city toward the ghetto. What he saw on the way appalled and humbled him, and by the time he reached the Altneushul where Rabbi Loew prayed alone in the dark, he was a shaken man, and even though he’d hated the Jews and been their chief enemy for years, he swore to the rabbi that the Jews of Prague would be safe forever if the rabbi would stop the golem. In spite of everything he had done, Rabbi Loew felt sorry for the cardinal. He explained as gently as he could that he would have stopped the golem hours ago, but if he set foot outside the ghetto, the citizens of Prague would kill him on sight. The old cardinal looked crafty. “Would the golem die with you, rabbi?” he asked. “Aren’t you, after all, the spirit of the thing?”
Loew looked into the man’s eyes and, still in a gentle voice, said to the prince of the Church, “I don’t know. But if I die and the golem doesn’t, it might, since it has gone mad, destroy the world.” Then the rabbi told the cardinal that if he couldn’t stop the golem the cardinal should order his guards to kill him in the hope that the monster would die with him. The cardinal wept when he realized what a good man the rabbi was.
“I’ll go with you,” he told the rabbi. “You’ll be safe with me.”
The two men, one in black, one in red, left the ghetto together to look for the golem. They passed the bodies of the people, even children, who’d been smashed against and walls by the creature. Some of them were still alive . . .
Rachel looked at the picture of them, covered with blood, arms and legs at crazy angles.
. . . and they reached out to the rabbi and cardinal as they passed. They followed the trail of corpses and dying through the city to the river, and there at dawn, Rabbi Loew found his creation.
The monster held the body of a child over his head to throw it in the water. The baby wailed and the rabbi cried at the golem to stop. The golem paused, still holding the child in the air, and the rabbi was afraid he’d lost his power over it. But then the golem put the child down without hurting it and followed the rabbi meekly back into the ghetto and up the stairs to the shul attic. The rabbi commanded the golem to lie down, and when it did, he covered the clay man with prayer books, then spent the rest of the day alone with it in the attic. At sundown, the Kohen and the Levite came to the attic. The three men reversed the process of creation, and the golem was turned back into lifeless clay.
And forever after that, the Jews of Prague lived in peace.
Rachel turned to the front of the book and looked at the date. The book had been copyrighted in 1932 and reprinted in 1940. Where were the Jews of Prague now, she wondered. She turned the pages back to the golem story, ignoring the others. She sat in the dusty sunlight surrounded by boxes of her old books and notes, and Adam’s things, and looked at the pictures again. They were vivid and gruesome, and she wasn’t surprised that they’d stayed with her in some corner of her mind all these years and had come back when Ableson said clay. There was something especially frightening and unwholesome about the illustrations. About the whole story. She shut the book and carried it downstairs. The weather was still mild and she put Leah in her stroller and, carrying the book, walked the two blocks to the little house the men had bought and converted into a shul. The sun was bright, the vestibule of the shul dim, and she was blinded. She saw the box of books and clothes the congregation collected every month for the children’s hospital in Tel Aviv, but she didn’t see Isaac Luria sitting in the corner of the lobby at a table. She put the book in the box and left. When the door closed, he put down the silver spice box he’d been polishing and went to the box.
By January Rachel still hadn’t agreed to a wedding date, and Allan lost patience with her.
“Rachel, what do you want? Tell me what you want.” She didn’t answer. Allan stood in front of her and held his arms away from his nude body.
“I’m young . . . youngish.” He looked down at himself. “Handsome, rich; look at that gut.” He hit himself, trying to be funny, but she wanted to cry, and he came back to her and sat on the bed next to her and took her in his arms. “What do you want, baby, try to tell me. I want to understand . . .”
“Adam’s only been dead . . .”
“Long enough, Rachel. Even the Talmud says it’s been long enough . . .”
He stood up again and crossed the room, keeping his back to her.
“I’m lonely, Rachel. I work hard and come home to this mess every night too tired to clean or to even call someone to clean. I don’t like it. I love you, but I want a wife; if it can’t be you, then at least tell me and I’ll . . .”
“Marry Barbara Michaels?”
He turned around. “Maybe,” he said very seriously. “Maybe I will.” She ran across the room to him, so scared she could barely breathe. She led him back to the bed, kissed him, did everything to him; but she didn’t feel anything except fear. Even so, she couldn’t say she’d marry him on May fifth or June first or any particular day. After they were finished, he fell asleep, and she got out of the messy bed, got dressed, and went downstairs through the abandoned-looking foyer and out into the empty road.
The snow stopped, the wind died, and snow covered the houses and hedges. Branches creaked, then stopped, and in the sharp cold air she thought she heard music coming from a block or so down toward town. Her boots squeaked in the snow and she stopped walking to listen again. It was like the music her father used to play when her mother was out playing bridge, Eastern music with a sighing kind of rhythm that she remembered from weddings and bar mitzvahs. It didn’t belong with snow and fake gaslight streetlamps or the ersatz New England architecture. It sounded like it came from the little shul and she walked toward it.
The first floor of the shul was dark, and the path up through the hedges was forbidding, but the music was coming from there, and Rachel saw a bar of light on the snow from the basement window.
She’d gone to service here once; she’d sat behind the drape that separated the men from the women; and in the middle of the service, as Reuben Alldmann had lifted the Torah from the ark to carry it around the shul, she had an attack of claustrophobia so intense it turned to asthma. She gasped for air she couldn’t get and, clutching Golda, she’d staggered out onto the porch into the open air where she could breathe again. She hadn’t been back since. Now she went up the spooky path to the light, squatted down in front of the basement window, and looked in.
The basement was finished, with track lights on a celotex ceiling. But the room was lit by candles, twenty or thirty of them, and in their light, the Sutter Lane elders of Laurel danced; they hopped and swirled, sashayed and skipped, the candle flames jumped in the draft of their bodies and cast wild, leaping shadows on the walls. Their jackets were off, their fringed shawls and their shirts shone in the candlelight. Luria was the biggest and handsomest; his shirt and shawl were wet with sweat and clung to him, outlining his muscles. The music climaxed, the circle broke, and the men danced in couples, singing, holding each other’s arms, circling each other; then Luria danced to the center of the room and stretched his arms and body. The others stopped to watch and he closed his eyes, let his head drop back, and he began a slow heavy dance that should have shook the little house but didn’t because he was so graceful. The light caught his hair, his beard; his feet came down without a sound and he danced faster. The music followed him; his white silk shawl came out of his belt and whirled around him, the fringes catching the light.
He whirled, singing; the light caught the edges of his teeth and his voice was moaning but full of joy at the same time. Rachel held on to the sides of the window as Luria’s song reached a sobbing climax and he froze for an instant; very tall and heavy, his body stretched as high as it would go; then he broke the pose and ran across the room to Leah’s crib and picked the little girl up. Rachel held her breath; he hugged her against his chest and kissed her. Leah laughed, squealed, then reached for her grandfather who was standing next to him, and hugged him, too. Leah could be there when they danced, but Rachel couldn’t. They wouldn’t let Leah in either once she’d reached puberty. Rachel watched her little girl and knew she’d be hurt then, and wouldn’t understand, and Rachel wouldn’t be able to explain because she didn’t understand either.
Luria leaned over, because he was so tall, and Jacob was so short, and he kissed Jacob. Everyone, including Leah, watched them. Then the men broke apart, and Luria said to Jacob, “Shabuoth tov.” Then the other men kissed and hugged each other, all wishing a good week.
Someone put on a record of slower, sadder music, and the men began to sing. Rachel left the window and, walking as quietly as she could, went up the temple steps and inside. The sanctuary was right over the men in the basement, the floor was wooden, and she took off her boots so they wouldn’t hear her. The celotex ceiling soaked up most of the singing, and the music was faint. She stood at the aisle, in front of the altar lit by the suspended lantern meant to symbolize the eternal light. The Torah was hidden by a panel. She went to it, slid the panel open, and there were the scrolls, covered in velvet that was embroidered with gold thread. A hammered silver plate hung from the scroll’s handles by a silver chain. On it, a crowned lion held up stone tablets. She knew that if a woman touched the scrolls, they were considered defiled and had to be destroyed. She stood in front of the scrolls in the glow of the eternal light and thought about her father who was dead; and her brother, who was a podiatrist on East Ninety-second Street and bragged about fucking his patients. She thought about her mother who’d sold the handbag business, had bought bigger diamonds and a wardrobe of tight silk jersey dresses and had moved to Fort Lauderdale. Rachel had taken Leah there in the fall. But her mother played cards or mah-jongg every day they were there, and the afternoon Rachel insisted on going to the beach, her mother stayed in a hotel lobby reading the National Star because the ocean wind gave her sinus. Rachel gazed at her reflection in the beautiful silver plate over the Torah. She had meant to stay with her mother for two weeks, but she’d left after one. She was sure the old lady was glad to be rid of her with her tourist’s plans and her baby’s needs. But at the last minute, as the cab pulled away from the patio of the condominium, Rachel saw a stricken look on her mother’s face, as if she had just realized that instant that she would never see her daughter or granddaughter again.
Rachel wanted to touch the scrolls. She even reached out to them, but she couldn’t bring herself to do it. She stood still in the dim light for a minute, then she slid the ark closed and left the shul.
It was snowing again, the air was silent and freezing. The street was dark and empty and she walked fast. The houses looked strange in the snow, and she was suddenly terribly lonely.
Her father was dead, Adam was dead. Her mother played cards and her brother was a fool. That left Levy, and the old men downstairs, because they were mishpochah. There was Golda, too, and Sam, and Allan. She couldn’t count Willa or Tom. They were still strangers.
Rachel took a hot shower and went right to sleep. She dreamed she was back at the basement window watching Luria dance. Levy was dead and she was alone. She saw the muscles in Luria’s arms and back straining his shirt. He was handsome, big, and sexy, the dance was suggestive, and she got excited in her sleep, but his features had softened and spread. She was scared and tried to wake up but couldn’t; clay covered his face and ran into his beard. It covered his body, and as he danced, faster and faster, clay spun off the ends of his hands and feet in ribbons that smacked against the basement walls until the composition paneling and vinyl floor were covered with it. Suddenly he stopped dancing and he pointed at the window, at her. Clay dripped from his arm and finger. She was sick with terror because he was coming for her, trailing clay like a snail, only now he was huge and lumbering and the clay ran at last into his eyes so he should have been blind but he wasn’t, because he was coming right for her, and all at once the window was gone, and the wall, and there was nothing between her and Luria’s clay-drenched hands reaching for her. . . .
It was a nightmare, not just a bad dream, and she woke up covered with sweat, and still terrified. She forced herself to sit up and turn on the light. The room was empty, the snow was still falling. She got up, picked up the afghan which she must have kicked off the bed, and rushed to Levy’s room to be sure he was all right. He was in his bed, sound asleep. Without him, she and Leah would be alone . . . except for Allan. She went downstairs, ate one of the butter cookies she and Willa had baked, and she looked at the calendar. Then she called Allan.
“Rachel . . . what’s wrong?” he asked sleepily.
She held the calendar.
“I’ll marry you on the twenty-first of June, Allan. If you still want me to.”
“Yes,” he yelled. “Shit yes . . . oh baby . . .” She listened to his voice, but not the words, and when he paused, she hung up without saying any more. She marked the date on the calendar; June twenty-first—the summer solstice—the longest day of the year. The million-year-long day, she thought.
Chapter 5
She ordered invitations, and bought a copy of Bride’s magazine, but it was so insipid she lost her temper, tore it to pieces, and shoved the pieces into the dispose-all. It wasn’t used to slick paper and it jammed and she had to dismantle it and pull the pieces out again. The sky and the Sound lost their gray look; the air was warmer, but damp and still sharp.
The invitations came, and she felt as if everything was settled. Her life, the neighborhood, the town. She thought of mammoths in ice, of insects in amber, of any creature trapped, settled, done for.
Everyone else seemed to like the settling.
Golda brought Rachel vacation brochures to plan her honeymoon, but all Rachel could think of was Labrador, some place cold and silent that would make her happy to come home to Laurel. Willa said she’d never been as comfortable any place as she was in Laurel, except for the busing issue in Claremont. Stupid, Rachel thought, because the kids were bused anyway, but the parents painted placards and carried them. A cross was burned on a black family’s lawn in Port Jefferson, and fistfights broke out at the high school. Willa said it was nothing. But Tom Jr. was upset, and the Saturday after the fight, he wouldn’t come to Rachel’s house. Leah waited for him. When he didn’t come, she carried her stuffed seal from room to room like a little ghost. She wouldn’t eat dinner, wouldn’t watch TV.
Rachel called Willa. “What are we, Honkies now?”
“Sure, sugar . . .” Then Willa said, “Let it alone, Rache. He misses her, too . . .”
She was too busy to think much about it. Passover was coming and this year Rachel vowed to do everything right. Two weeks before the first Seder, she unpacked the special dishes and even though it was far too early, she went to the cabinets and separated the containers of cereal, flour, and all the starches so she wouldn’t miss any when the time came. The market in Port Jefferson had a whole section of Passover foods, and she and Golda filled four shopping bags. When she got home, Allan was waiting; he’d just finished preparing a big case, and he was so tired his skin looked gray. She made him lie down on the couch and he fell asleep. His eyes rolled under the lids, his pale eyelashes looked golden in the lamplight, and she wondered if he was dreaming; she stood back and looked at his body, then came close to him, leaned down, and kissed his neck. He didn’t move and she left him alone to sleep.
Their Seder plate was chi
pped and she bought a new one; she washed the windows, waxed all the floors, and took the flour and barley and the rest over to Willa’s. She scoured the stove, and she cleaned the refrigerator to be sure there were no crumbs left behind. She washed the cabinets, put the regular dishes away, and stacked the Passover dishes in their place. Utensils, pots, and pans were put through the dishwasher twice. Golda said that satisfied Dworkin, it should satisfy Levy. She made gefilte fish from scratch for the first time in her life, trying not to gag while she cleaned carp and pike. Golda supervised and after it was boiled and the broth strained, Golda tasted it and said it was delicious.
She hid two bits of bread for Levy and Allan to find on the ritual hunt for leavened bread the night before Passover. She saw and bought an antique silver cup for Elijah which cost eighty dollars, but was so beautiful she couldn’t resist. She knew Levy would love it. Besides, she told her reflection in the window of the antique store in Port Jefferson, you are going to marry a rich man. She stopped feeling frozen, she stopped dreaming about Luria or thinking about her father, and when she made love to Allan she thought about him, not Roger Hawkins. She even forgot about the clay. She was young . . . more or less . . . pretty, and getting prettier. And she was actually, for the first time, falling in love with Allan Siegal.
