The Tribe

by Bari Wood

  She heard his footsteps cross the foyer and her heart started to pound. He opened the door and his face lit up when he saw her. He was wearing pajamas and a robe. The pajamas were wrinkled, the robe was frayed. She thought Barbara Michaels would take care of it. She’d furnish this house, hire a housekeeper, and make him very happy.

  He took her hand. “Get lonely?” he asked softly.

  They went into the foyer and she meant to tell him there, without taking off her raincoat. But she couldn’t talk and he took her coat and led her into the living room. She sat on the dirty velvet couch and watched him pour drinks. It hit her that this wasn’t golems and demons, this was real, and the scared feeling she’d had on and off since Willa died came back. She told herself she belonged here. Life would be good for her and her daughter. Wasn’t her daughter her first concern, after all? She was tired and she wasn’t young anymore. There was work here for her. This house, Allan, Levy, Leah. She might have more children.

  Most of all, she wasn’t ready to “take them on”— Luria’s phrase.

  She wasn’t ready to say anything to Allan either, but almost without meaning to she stood up, put her drink down untasted, and said, with a firmness that surprised her, “I can’t marry you, Allan.”

  He looked like she’d slapped him, but she kept talking in that same thoughtless, will-­less way. She tried to explain that she cared for him but didn’t love him, that she didn’t belong here, no matter how it might seem that she did. He’d be better off with someone else, someone who was . . . she searched for the word . . . dedicated. But it sounded like gibberish, and she stopped talking. She was shocked at the pain in his face. Their affair had been a kind of bargain to her and she’d thought it was the same to him. But now she saw that it wasn’t. He’d really wanted her, not just someone to make the house livable, to wear the nice clothes he’d buy, to have children. He was a better man than she’d thought, and she started to miss him already. She thought of Hegel’s view of humanity. Adam had thought it was shallow, silly.

  “Everyone’s not part of everyone,” Adam had said. “We’re bound in our own skins, we’re not syntheses of what’s happened to us, of people and ideas around us. We’re ourselves,” he’d told the class gravely, “it is possible to cut ourselves off. . . .”

  The tribe had cut itself off; she was doing it, too, and she wasn’t ready for that either. Allan walked blindly out of the glass porch. She started to follow him, but he said, “Leave me alone, Rachel, just leave me alone.”

  She went back into the living room, took the ring off, and left it on the table next to the couch. She went to the door and looked back at it. She’d worn that ring for a long time, and on top of the sadness, fear, and everything else that she was feeling, she knew she’d miss the way clerks in the supermarket and women who came into the shop looked at it. It glittered in the dim light, threw points of perfect color on the ceiling. She nodded to it as if it were a person, then she left the house.

  Tepel made a list of everyone he knew who claimed to be a cabalist, read Zohar, or talked intelligently about Cabala, or even mysticism. Then he looked at the list and crossed out names. Six were left and he called them all. Four of the men said they’d be glad to see him for lunch, tea, whatever he wanted; the fifth wouldn’t think of it until he knew what it was about, and Tepel couldn’t bring himself to say the word golem on the phone. When he called the sixth he got a tinny female voice intoning, “The number you have reached is not a working number. The number you have reached is not a working number.” There was no forwarding number, and as the refrain went on and on he remembered Buchenwald more clearly than he had in years, and he slammed the phone down, opened his desk drawer, took out a fresh bottle of brandy, and took a long swallow. He looked at the name of his old friend from Forest Hills that no one would ever see again, and he thought that once he died no one would know who Tepel was after a few years either. He drank more and thought about oblivion; then he told himself that thinking about oblivion was bullshit and he put the bottle away and went downstairs across the big crowded floor to the tiny locked men’s room. No one greeted him as he went, no one waved as he came back. He had entered oblivion without even knowing it. The camps were nothing compared to Forty-­seventh Street for making people disappear.

  He called Garfield.

  “Moshe Benzer’ll see us at noon, so you better get your ass here; Marty Erent’s meeting us at three, and Sol Weiser at five.”

  They met Benzer at the upstairs luncheonette of the big exchange. It was dairy so they could have cream in their coffee and butter on their rolls. Benzer had sturgeon and eggs, the most expensive thing on the menu, and he ate all of it before Garfield even tasted one grape. Garfield decided he didn’t like Benzer and he found himself hoping, as he listened to the short fat man bitch about gas, diamond floor prices, taxes, the goyim, the shvartzes, that he didn’t have the answer they were looking for. Any ritual this man recounted would be tainted. He didn’t have to worry. Tepel couldn’t bring himself to tell Benzer what they wanted, so Garfield had to do it and as soon as he said the word golem, Benzer laughed and called him Dr. Frankenstein. Then he switched it to Dr. Finkelstein, which he thought was hysterical, and he laughed and spit all the time Garfield was trying to finish his fruit salad and pay the check.

  Erent didn’t laugh at them. His listened politely but at the end of Garfield’s story he smiled sadly. “You can’t tell me who ‘built’ it or where it is?”

  “Does it matter?”

  Erent shook his head. “No. Because even if I believed you, which I don’t, I couldn’t help you. I read about the golem in a fairy tale book and I saw monster movies when I was a kid. That’s all I know about golems.”

  “But it was done. . . .”

  “Obviously you think so.”

  “Then it can be undone!”

  Erent stood up. “I’m a serious man,” he said. “I follow Cabala seriously, with the hope of ecstasy”—ecstasy again, Garfield thought—“and of union with the Almighty. I’ve always respected you, Rabbi, and you should respect me.”

  “I do. . . .” Garfield stood up, and a few of the people in the restaurant looked at him.

  “If you did,” Erent said, “you wouldn’t have brought me all the way from the Bronx to listen to a lot of . . . science fiction.”

  Erent left without saying good-­bye, and Garfield’s heart started beating with an odd jumping rhythm that frightened him whenever it happened. He pushed his coffee away. “Next?” he said.

  “Sol Weiser, at five . . .”

  Garfield looked at the clock.

  “It’s only three.”

  “Have some coffee.”

  “It’ll kill me,” Garfield said.

  “Then take a walk. . . .”

  Tepel went back to his cubbyhole and Garfield walked east on Forty-­seventh, then up Sixth; at Fifty-­third he saw the Museum of Modern Art banner, and he walked the half-­block slowly, trying to think his heart into a better rhythm. He paid, went into the building, and sat in the gray-­lit rotunda, watching other visitors and thinking how beautiful the young women were now. Young girls passed him, wearing high-­heeled boots, their jeans pulled into their crotches. He grinned at them; little asses, he thought, so tight they looked pinched. The girls walked away from him down the long halls to look at beautifully colored paintings he didn’t understand. His heart beat in better time, and he leaned back on the bench, against the wall, and thought he dozed for a second, because he suddenly sat up, startled, his heart going fast, but evenly, and remembered that in the basement they were supposed to have movies. He walked fast down the stairs and pushed open the door. The room was hushed, like a library. A young man leaned over the desk when he came in.

  “Can I help?”

  “I don’t know. There was a play called The Golem. Do you remember it?”

  The young man shook his head.
<
br />   “And a movie. I’m sure there was a movie.”

  “What’s golem mean?”

  Garfield quoted Psalms: “A yet-­unformed thing,” he said.

  The boy went to the catalogue and Garfield waited.

  “Here it is,” the boy held up a card, “The Golem, French, 1936 . . .”

  “A movie!” Garfield cried. “Can we see it . . . can we see it now?”

  The young man looked down. “I’m sorry. It’s difficult to arrange a showing.”

  “I couldn’t bribe you?” Garfield asked, half-­serious.

  “You could, but it wouldn’t do any good.” The boy started to put the card back, then thought for a minute. “Would stills help?” he asked.

  “They might,” Garfield said.

  “Wait a minute.”

  The boy left and Garfield wandered back into the hall where black and white photographs hung on the walls. They showed men dressed up like women, old ladies with crooked, painful-­looking legs wearing paper sack masks, a giant of a man in a living room with his mother and father, who were normal-­sized but looked like dwarves compared to their son. The texture of the photos was fine, but the demarcation of light and dark was harsh, and the people should have looked ugly, but didn’t. They didn’t look sad either, or resigned. They looked . . . ready, Garfield thought. Good and ready. They looked . . . distinct, too. Separate, absolutely themselves. Garfield thought he would love them for that, or in spite of it, and he smiled at the photo of a transvestite who stared defiantly out at him through beaded lashes.

  “Sir . . . sir . . .”

  The boy was looking for him, and he had a bunch of pictures with him. Back in the library, he spread them out on a counter for Garfield, and there, shot through a gauze-­covered lens, coming up an alley, led by a man with a beard who could have been him or Tepel or Jacob Levy or Moses himself, was the golem.

  Weiser pushed his chopped liver sandwich to the side and held the photograph to the light; the golem was huge, gray, menacing. The man who led him was sad and wise-­looking.

  “Joseph Golem,” Weiser said softly.

  Garfield’s skin prickled.

  “I think Loew loved him,” Weiser said. “The love of a father for a retarded son . . . Loew never had a son.”

  “But he killed it.”

  “Maybe. Maybe not. People thought for centuries that it was still there in the ghetto; in the tower of the synagogue, waiting for the rabbi to wake it up again, so it could finish what it had started.”

  “What had it started?”

  “Depends on who you ask. The Prague Jews said it rescued them. The Prague Gentiles said it murdered them.”

  “Did Loew kill it?”

  “Some say he did.”

  “How?”

  “I told you I’m not sure he did. I’m not sure he ever even built the thing.”

  “He did,” Garfield said.

  “You were there?” Weiser’s voice was full of sarcasm.

  “I just know he did.”

  “So he built it, he killed it, he put it in the freezer. So what?”

  “I want to know how.”

  “Why?”

  “I can’t tell you.”

  Weiser laughed. “You want to make the sequel, Return of the Golem?”

  “Please,” Garfield said softly, “we need your help.”

  Weiser pushed his water glass toward Tepel for brandy, which he gulped. “You don’t really,” he said kindly. “It’s all written down. There’s some information in the Sanhedrin—I don’t know the exact reference—and in Genesis Rabba . . . and most of all in the Sefer Yezirah.”

  Waiters went up and down the aisle; in the front of the restaurant, someone was fighting with the cashier. Weiser and Tepel were the only people not listening, but Garfield had a sense of the lives of the people around them, eating lonely dinners in a delicatessen on Seventy-second Street, then going home to their TVs, or, if they were lucky, to a friend’s for tea, or to wait for a son or daughter to call. But as soon as Weiser said Sefer Yezirah, Garfield thought of magic, and had the feeling that for a minute, the three of them were separated from everyone else in the world. Men who knew . . . and were about to know . . . secret words. Men with a mission. Mission made him think again of old movies, and spies; the war room at Fine and Schapiro’s, he thought, and he smiled at Weiser, who smiled back.

  “But understand,” Weiser said, “Sefer Yezirah is not a recipe book for making and demolishing golems. It is a guide to the mysterious knowledge of the inwardness of creation. We create with our thoughts, our substance, our spirit.” Weiser looked up at the pressed tin ceiling and painted pipes. “Let me remember all of it,” he prayed, then he looked back at the men with him. “I’m seventy-­eight,” he said, “I forget everything.” He finished his brandy and turned to Tepel who half filled the soda glass. Weiser drank and went on talking.

  “Sefer Yezirah reveals the mysteries of the cosmos. If you know them, you can create life. Not to walk or talk . . . but as a symbol of your understanding and love . . . like a diploma almost. If you could give life to clay, you were one with the universe. . . .”

  Garfield said, “Some men have made a clay man that kills. We have to stop it, Reb Weiser. We don’t have time to find the reference in the Sanhedrin, or to profoundly understand the construction of the cosmos. We have to stop it tomorrow or next week, before someone else dies. Do you understand?”

  The old man stared at them. “You mean right now, today? Someone made a golem?”

  Garfield nodded, and Weiser stared at the movie stills.

  “I can’t believe you.”

  Tepel and Garfield looked at each other. Tepel, who’d already had a lot to drink, said to Weiser, “Look, Sol, you’re an old man, you said it yourself. Nu? Believe us. What difference does it make?”

  “But why would they do it?”

  “Because they’re all crazy,” Garfield said.

  “There’s lots of them?” Weiser asked.

  “Eight,” Garfield said.

  “How do eight people get so crazy all of a sudden?”

  “They were sorely tried,” Garfield answered.

  Weiser thought for a minute, then asked, “Who built it?”

  “I can’t tell you that.”

  “Who’s the shtarker§§§§ who’s going to kill it?”

  “Me,” Garfield said.

  Weiser drank; his eyes were soft and kind, and he said gently, “That might not be so easy, Rabbi.”

  Garfield didn’t say anything, and Weiser picked up the movie still and held it up, facing Garfield. The golem was a mass in the shape of a man. Weiser tapped the picture. “Sefer Yezirah creations are gentle symbols,” Weiser told him; “a breath of distrust, of disbelief or disaffection, and they’re gone. But this is a monster, Rabbi, it’s not going to just stand there and let you kill it. . . .”

  Garfield’s heart beat normally. Ada was asleep, with the windows open and cold wind blowing into the room off the river, bringing some fog with it. He closed the windows, pulled the covers up over her shoulders, undressed, and went into the hallway in his shorts. He closed the bedroom door, turned on the hall light, and confronted himself in the full-­length mirror on the back of the hall closet door. Everything about him, his body hair, muscles under his flesh, the flesh itself, even his bones, seemed sparse. He looked critically. He wasn’t ugly. What there was of him was firm and smooth, but he was slight, insubstantial-­looking. He leaned close and looked at his sternum, behind which his heart beat. A skinny man, not old, not ugly, but not young either, with a bad heart. Not the stuff of golem killers.

  “To kill a golem,” Weiser had said, “you need three people. They represent air, fire, water.”

  “What about earth?” Tepel grinned.

  “Look, don’t laugh at me. You want someth
ing grand, go get a priest. Do an exorcism. We’re talking Cabala, which is old, disorganized, and maybe a little silly. But they built the thing with it, and it’s unsilly enough to scare the shit out of you.” Garfield and Tepel fidgeted.

  “So,” Weiser said, “you need three people to represent air, fire, and water . . . the golem is earth.”

  The golem is earth, Garfield thought, like Adam was, and Lilith.

  “The three of you confront the golem,” Weiser said. “And you must join the spirit as much as possible, give yourself to it, try to be one with it.” Then he asked, “Will you be in a house or a field?”

  “In a basement.”

  Weiser shook his head. “Meshugah.” Then he said, “Okay, okay. Now, pick a point in the basement, a window or post at the farthest point from the golem, and think of it as spirit . . . the top of a five-­pointed star.”

  Weiser drew a diagram of a five-­pointed star on his napkin and Garfield said they should have charts and flags, like a battle plan. “If there’s no battle,” Weiser said, “then this thing is harmless, and you’re a couple of putzes. So think of it as a battle plan. It wouldn’t hurt. Okay, here’s the star and all its points . . . twelve o’clock is spirit, three o’clock is water, five is fire, seven is earth, and nine is air. Okay, now spirit can’t be just a reference point to you . . . spirit must be spirit . . . Ain Soph Aur.”

  “Say it again,” Garfield said softly.

  “Ain Soph Aur.”

  Ain Soph Aur, Garfield thought. The Aunt Sophie that Hawkins had asked about. The hardest of all concepts to grasp. Ain, nothing; Soph, limitlessness; Aur, light. Nothing limitlessness light. Absolute nothingness, unbeing, infinite emptiness. That was Aunt Sophie. Not death, not prelife, but the state before life ever was. Dear Aunt Sophie. The Infinite. And as the limitless light thickens . . . thickens? Garfield shook his head. It becomes extended into Kether . . . the crown of the tree of life of Cabala. Reach for Kether, reach for Aunt Sophie, and find ecstasy. Tante Sophie, source of ecstasy.