“This creature is no woman, Solomon ibn Gabirol,” says one. “Do you take us for fools?”
“She's nothing more than a housemaid,” Solomon says calmly. “Her name is Qasmūna, and she came from Saragossa. I brought her here to tidy my house and care for me. You know that I've been ill.”
The loneliness of capture, the loneliness of guilt, a single intruder caught and tied, burned at the stake. The loneliness of fire touching feet, the loneliness of stones flying toward a target. All he wanted was a wife.
This is no sin, he thinks. This is not a sin. She's a housemaid, and Solomon has a house that needs cleaning. He has a heart that needs polishing. He has a body that needs a companion. He cannot see the problem. There is a map inside his mind of all the sins, and he doesn't believe in most of them. This one? To build a woman out of wood? How could it be wrong? To use her as a wife? She has no heart and she has no soul. She's an instrument and he has played her properly. That's what he'll say. That's how he'll argue.
One of the men nearly touches the golem and then stops, his fingers inches from her hand. He leans forward and shakes his head.
“This is not a maid,” he insists, then lifts a metal cup and raps it against her wrist. It makes the sound of an ax meeting a tree. “No. We know what this is.”
The golem opens her mouth hinge, slightly, to show her teeth. In her mouth, the nub of tongue rattles, and she makes a tiny noise, a cry. A string within her body vibrates and makes a sighing tone.
“We do not know fully,” another man protests. He looks at the golem, skeptical. “Solomon ibn Gabirol isn't holy enough to make a golem. He's not held in grace. Perhaps she's simply ugly. Open your mouth wider, girl, show us what you have,” he says.
She shows her teeth a little more, and her sound grows louder, a humming rattle, a clicking. Her eyelid hinges blink, quickly, a leathery brush against the green glass.
One of the men leans forward and taps her eye with a spoon. She flinches. It rings like a bell calling for prayers.
“She's a living woman,” says Solomon, fearful of punishment, but angry too. His fingers curl around the tabletop.
“She is not,” one of the men says, and looks at Solomon with something approaching kindness. “Shelomo ben Yehuda ibn Gabirol, you are too lonely. You are fortunate we've come to help. No one knows you've done this, not yet, and we will save you from this sin for the sake of your father.”
14.
The golem trembles, bound to protect Solomon. She feels his rage like a windstorm bending her trunk. She is a newborn woman and she is a rabāb full of the songs of an entire country of travelers. She is a tree with hundreds of years of history.
She removes the bow from the cabinet in her thigh and starts to play the strings in her abdomen. The song is not a hymn. The song is a wild high flight from some other shore, the song of a woman shouting in a ship across the sea. The song of the strings bends and weeps, and she plays, her head bowed, while the bow in her hand moves quickly. Tongueless, she is telling them what will happen, but they don't listen.
“Speak,” says one of the men.
“She can't,” says Solomon. “She doesn't speak our language.”
I am speaking, Qasmūna plays. I am warning you. You should leave.
“This is a sin. More than a sin. To fornicate with this. Speak in Spanish, you serving maid. Speak in Arabic. Speak in Hebrew. Speak any language at all.”
Qasmūna plays harder, her wooden fingernails stopping the strings, the bow calling forth the sound of women seizing a ship's crew and tearing them apart. The loneliness of the shore with no one landing on it in a year. The loneliness of hunger. She is an orange tree clinging to a cliffside, oranges falling into the sea. She is a forgotten wife clinging to a village full of forgotten children. She is called to war while the men are at another war. She and her sisters march over the Atlas Mountains. She and her sisters sing war cries, play their instruments, light signal fires.
“SPEAK!” a man shouts. “Or we will know what you are.”
I am speaking, the golem plays. Hear me. Leave before you can't leave.
Qasmūna can see veins bulging in Solomon's neck. Her hinges flutter. The secret door inside her shakes loudly enough that the men can hear it. It is unsealing. It is opening. She can't help it.
“This is not a sin,” argues another holy man. “She doesn't need to be cleansed after menstruation, for she doesn't menstruate. She can't procreate. She can't speak, nor has she any intelligence. She's less than an animal. It can't be fornication if she isn't a woman.”
“Her lack of speech reflects the flaw in her creator,” the first man says. “He's not holy enough.”
The golem listens to them argue over whether she is holy or only wooden. She plays. They look at her in annoyance. She is an instrument and she plays the music she is filled with. She bends and draws the bow over the strings, playing an attack on a tent, playing a moon rising over bloodied sand. They don't understand her. She attempts to give them a final warning, but they are too busy with their debate.
15.
Solomon rages, but doesn't dare do it with his voice. The golem is playing some tilting tune, and he can't get her to stop. Her music is nothing he'd have chosen. Why did he not kill her last night? She could be in the fireplace, heating the house. She could be rising through the chimney, her smoke a small cloud in the sky.
This was a mistake, but now that they are trying to take her from him, he wants her back. Who are they to deny him a wife?
“You must destroy this golem, Solomon ibn Gabirol,” concludes the man most in charge. “For though it may not be a sin in the eyes of the law, you're a poet, not a holy man, and you have made a monstrosity for yourself, not for any city. This is forbidden.”
“She's not a monstrosity,” pleads Solomon. “She's my housemaid. She cleans the dust.” His wounds are bleeding. He coughs, wet and red.
The loneliness of seeing one's own blood on a white cloth. The loneliness of a disease impervious to magic, to knowledge, to weather. He is dying, and there is no one to take care of him. He is dying, and soon he will be like an infant, helpless and howling. Soon he will be a body in a bed, bones like kindling.
The thousandth form of loneliness is the loneliness of the dead, rotting just beneath the ground. There will be worms and insects, there will be birds pecking at the earth, but there will be nothing to love any man underneath the world. The thousandth loneliness is a grave with fresh shovel marks, the noise of the dirt being packed down above. He will be, he realizes, down where the orange tree roots snake in the dark, white wooden bones hard as stones.
“You'll remove the name from her mouth. You'll destroy her, and you'll burn her materials.” The men nod. “You'll do it now, for these witnesses, or you yourself will be put to death. Take her apart now. We will watch.”
Solomon sways. He's still living, he thinks. His prick pulses. He must retaliate. He must fight.
There's a creak in the room, and a muffled pounding.
“Defender,” Solomon whispers to his golem. “Defend.”
The golem is already standing, staring at the old man before her. She raises a hand, and looks at it. Slowly she brings her fist down on the man's skull, a neat rapping. He cries out and falls. The holy men scream.
Solomon watches her push her fingers into one of the men's mouths, her fist pressing deeper, deeper, until she finds the root of his tongue. She tears out the meat of his voice and crushes it, a splattering gore beneath her foot. Solomon makes a sound, whether of vengeance or of protest, he can't say. He looks at the holy tongue for a moment, watching it bleed, then doubles over, vomiting.
The sound of something breaking open. He turns to see the golem and the last of the holy men, his skull vised in her two hands. She looks at Solomon, her face blank, and there is a grievous crack, sending blood spraying. Her mouth rattles and she breaks the man's neck for good measure, as though he is a hen.
16.
The loneliness o
f being the last man alive in a room filled with the dead is the nine-hundred-ninety-ninth loneliness.
They're all murdered in his house, the holy men of Málaga. Solomon won't die of illness as he'd imagined. He'll be executed. He has to flee the city, but he can't flee with her. He gathers himself. She has saved him and damned him at once. It can't be his fault. No one would think it was. He would never order his golem to kill for him.
“Open your mouth,” Solomon orders his golem. “Give me the name. Take it out and give it to me.”
Slowly the golem's jaw hinges open, showing the poet the name of God. One of her hands reaches up to remove it.
There is the sound of a sealed door opening. Something changes in the room.
Solomon looks down at the golem's chair. There's a creature in it, small and black, made of ash. It stands, its arms outstretched, a tiny thing, and it shakes the room with a high, wild song, a song like the rabāb and like a singer too, a song of loneliness beyond number. It sings a horde of women in open space, raging across a landscape, swords raised.
Solomon clenches all over. Can he smash it? With a dish, perhaps, or a text. It's small enough. It's no animal or insect he's seen. A rough black creature, the size of a closed fist. The song is something . . . Solomon tilts his head. His ears feel penetrated.
“What's that?” Solomon manages. “Where did it come from?”
Qasmūna picks the creature up and cradles it. The ash looks at Solomon, its eyes glittering. In its fist it holds a splinter of orange wood.
A splinter held by a tiny thing. That's nothing. No sword, no matter the feelings roused in him by its song. Whatever those feelings were, they are falsehoods, defenses without teeth. Women running over sand, bloodied swords. This is only a small aberration. He'll consider it later, when this is all done.
What it is, Solomon doesn't know, but it doesn't matter. He'll dismantle the golem and it'll die with her. There will be a heap of wood, leather, metal, and string. There'll be some metal hinges, some green oranges. He'll toss it all over the cliff edge. He feels a little stronger suddenly, purposeful. He'll dress and put his books in a sack. He'll hire a cart.
The loneliness of the fleeing poet. The road before him, the dust, the cart rattling, the bones pained. The loneliness he is well accustomed to, traveling by himself, wandering bookstalls at night, reading texts he procures from the darkest, dustiest stacks. He will write two hundred verses in mourning for the golem, he decides. He'll write of her smooth skin and fragrant hair, her green eyes and sharp teeth.
He hears the golem moving, and turns to find her quite close to him. She hasn't listened to his request. Why has she not given him the name? Is the magic flawed?
Solomon clasps his golem's wrist, groping for her jaw hinge, but the golem's golem is there, standing on his arm. It stabs the splinter into the poet's hand, deep into the vein at the top.
“You are my thing!” Solomon shouts at her. “My wife!”
She says nothing. There's only that high song from the ash, and the golem, moving the bow across the strings in her stomach. Red threads. A web, Solomon thinks. A spider.
Solomon runs for the door, but almost instantly he's too ill to run, too ill to walk. He falls, shaking and vomiting, feeling his body dismantling itself from the inside out. He's made of hinges and all of them are bending, all the doors inside his body too far open, his heart dropping through staircases, his kidneys swollen, his eyes watering and blasting agony. His skin is shedding and he is a snake. His hinges are rusting and he's alone on a rainy road, floodwater rising. The loneliness of the poet muted. His hands are claws. His mouth feels thick and his throat is closing.
17.
Qasmūna goes to him. She is built to serve, to defend, to protect, and her protections include the cessation of misery. She gives Solomon the juice of bitter oranges in a green glass cup, gently, a drop at a time from her finger. This is all there is left to do. She knows that much.
His heart thunders, but after a time he's quiet.
She picks him up from the floor and carries him, not gently. Now he's only a body, not a master. She ferries him from the house, and with her hands she digs a grave in the garden beneath the roots of a fig tree.
This not-loneliness in this garden. The company of trees, the conversation of birds, the discussions between wasps and fruit. The pollen of flowers and the high pallor of clouds. She looks up and breathes in. She spits out the inadequate nutshell and takes a twig from the tree. She works the twig into the space in her mouth, behind the name of God.
The tiny golem watches her, prepared to defend her city, prepared to do what it is golems do. As she pushes her new tongue into place, a door opens in her chest.
The golem's golem places itself inside the compartment there, a compartment that has previously been perfectly empty, and the hinges close.
Qasmūna's heart beats. The strings of her instrument vibrate.
She speaks a word.
18.
A season passes, and the walled garden grows wild.
The fig tree bears fruit, and the carpenter's mother crosses over the wall and onto the poet's land to pick before the birds and bats can eat them. She can see slender yellow bones bending up from the soil beneath the tree, fingers, and a jaw, long since picked clean by animals. The earth is especially dark here, a bright russet soil, and the bones are beautiful, like jewelry lost after a night's dancing. The carpenter's mother steps barefoot on the dirt and packs it down, leaving it smooth.
She reaches up and plucks figs, dropping them into her smock. The figs are heavy and green, their centers scarlet. The carpenter's mother eats one as she stands in the garden, looking out toward the country that was hers before this one.
She hums a song about marching through sand, a song about homecoming after war. The song can only be played on the rabāb, and the tune runs counter to the music, a twisting blade sung at night while the washing's being wrung. When she was a girl, all the women sang this song at once, and when the men returned from wherever men went, they were nervous at the patterns the women's feet had made in the dust, the way they'd danced together beneath the moon.
Months have passed. The carpenter's mother knows nothing of where Solomon ibn Gabirol has gone. He walked in one day, and surely he walked away the same. His kitchen was full of coins for a time after he disappeared. Then the coins went into the carpenter's mother's apron as payment for a cabinet.
She knows nothing of where the holy men have gone, either. She saw nothing late in the night all those months ago, beneath a moon like a blossom. She heard no music playing, no mournful joyful strings, no echoing resonance and thrum. Those songs were unfamiliar to her. They sounded nothing like wandering fountains in the desert, nothing like shining things made of metal and silk.
The carpenter's mother never saw a woman walking out from the house of Solomon ibn Gabirol, her feet clattering across the stones of the street. A stranger to Málaga! She didn't see that woman lifting five men and throwing them tenderly, one by one, from the cliff, nor did she see her digging here, beneath the fig tree.
She didn't see the woman step off the rock path and walk down to the harbor. Nor did she see her open a door in her abdomen and remove a thousand pages of words, sections from poems, scribbled lines and wishes. She didn't see her tear these until each word was left lonely and then begin to rearrange them.
She didn't see this, the carpenter's wife would swear, if anyone asked her. No one will ask her. She's an old woman, and must know little of the world. She's been here too long to read and too long to write. Too long to know anything of the world of magic.
But how quickly that wooden woman went, arranging poem after poem, the words of the poet who called her from the trees taken and changed. She took all the poet's words and made new things with them, a line on the sand.
When she was finished, she looked up at the old woman standing on the cliff.
The old woman, of course, saw nothing.
She didn't
watch the wooden woman place herself in a boat, take the oars in her strong hands, and begin to row.
Surely no mother of Málaga would let a murderess of so many men, all the intellectuals of this part of the coast, all of the holy, and a philosopher-poet too, surely no carpenter's wife would let a murderess go free.
19.
On the night the golem left Spain, after it was fully dark, the carpenter's mother climbed down the rocks to the shore. This much was true. She would say it, if she were asked.
The poem on the sand was written in a language she could read, and she thought for a moment about the market stalls in her homeland, the words scrolling over her fingertips, the things made by her father and brothers, brought to life by her own blood and spit.
In dreams she inlaid a mother-of-pearl woman with coral, camel bones, ebony eyes. In dreams she breathed into the woman's lips and sent her to kill those who would sell a talented daughter to wed a lowly carpenter on the southern coast of Spain. Her life is no horror, but it is no glory either, and who would imagine that a carpenter's wife would be full of poetry, full of spells, a maker of women? She could cause a fountain to spring from the desert, and here she is, sold, sold and spelled, daughter to a magician long dead. She'll never go home again, because the water will refuse her.
She read the poems Qasmūna left for her. Some had already caught the wind and blown out into the salt by the time she'd made it down the cliff, but two remained.
O gazelle, tasting leaves,
here in the green of my garden.
Look at my eyes. Dark and lonely,
just as yours are.
How distant we are from our beloveds, and how forgotten
Standing in the night,
Waiting for fate to find us.
The carpenter's mother looked up, listening to the song coming over the water. She ate a fig and tasted the wasp that had pollinated it, the bones of the poet that had fed it. The second poem was shorter.
The Girlfriend's Guide to Gods Page 68
