He, She and It

by Marge Piercy

  Why does he suspect that Chava will see the creation of the golem, supposing he really were to risk it, as usurping not only the power of the Eternal but the power of women, to give birth, to give life. No, to discuss something this holy with a woman, he cannot do it.

  The Maharal and his family live on the second floor, the third daughter, Yentel, and her husband and children upstairs, and downstairs, Samuel, a tailor who also deals in secondhand clothing. The three-story house was built with a doorway leading through to the courtyard and another house, the way things are slammed together in the ghetto, in any slot that stands empty, narrow houses craning toward the sky like saplings growing up starved from insufficient light. In the courtyard lives the astronomer and historian David Gans, in his brother’s narrow house. From the window of the Maharal’s parlor, Perl can speak across the few feet between the buildings. “Come and share our little supper tonight, Duvey.” She addresses him as a son although he is in his fifties; he seems younger than he is because he is spry and curious.

  David is bright but pragmatic and dislikes conflict. He has modern ideas about astronomy. He is welcome in the observatory Tycho Brahe built under Rudolf’s patronage, the finest and most accurate observatory in all Europe. His work popularizing new discoveries in geography includes the best maps anybody has put together of the New World. But David Gans is no kabbalist. About matters of the spirit he is timid. He loves to discuss ideas, but those concerning what he considers the real world, that of matter.

  Shall Judah consult his ex-secretary and son-in-law, Itzak Cohen? Itzak is a good man, a bright man, but he follows the Maharal’s lead. What he would strive to understand if the proposition were set to him is what Judah wants him to say. He is doubly precious to Judah because he married first Leah, then, after her death, Vogele, and because he fathered Chava, dearest of all to Judah, but to consult Itzak’s opinions is to look into a watery mirror.

  Itzak Cohen is in his early fifties, with his beard bushy and white. Out in the world, he is a famous scholar, a man other people consult, considered both wise and also able in his business matters, a rare combination. As soon as he is with the Maharal, however, his awe for his teacher takes over. His voice rises slightly. He seems smaller. He is a boy again.

  Perhaps he might fill the role of surrogate son had his own father been less in evidence. With his real father, Itzak is firm, generous, forgiving: he fathers his own hapless sire, whom he has taken into his house to support. The elder Cohen is a born mark, fleeced by one confidence man after another.

  How about Judah’s brightest disciple, Yakov Sassoon ha-Levi? Yakov is twenty years younger than Itzak; he has come to brighten the rabbi’s old age with his first-rate mind. He is undisciplined; in him the Maharal recognizes his own love of verbal combat. Judah seeks to temper that fire with wisdom and judgment. No, Yakov would immediately want to create a golem simply because it’s dangerous and on the verge of blasphemy. He has still a great need to prove himself, does Yakov Sassoon.

  Yakov Sassoon is a lean leathery tall man, recently widowed. He has been left with three children, all sons, and he is looking for a wife. He has already indicated his interest in Chava, who declined politely but fervently. Yakov is stubborn, sure he can persuade her. He wants to marry into the Maharal’s family more than he wants to marry Chava, but she is attractive and bright. Yakov walks with a slight limp from a street brawl with a Christian gang in his adolescence. He has a fine strong deep voice, and he often sings for company, not only religious songs but Yiddish songs about wonder-working rabbis and lovesick adolescents and marriages and deaths. Music transports him till his eyes shine in his long thin face. Judah is fond of him, would not mind too much if Chava chose him, but his judgment needs tempering with experience and more wisdom.

  Yakov lives nearby, in a house owned by Chaim the Silversmith, who has been doing very well and who is making for the Altneushul a beautiful silver crown for the Torah scroll, to be ready by Rosh Hashanah. It is his own gift. The various synagogues already have lavers and candelabra Chaim made, but they have been paid for by rich patrons like Mordecai Maisl. This is the first time Chaim has felt he could make such a contribution himself, out of his own workshops and his own pockets. The Maharal has spent several nights with Chaim working on the design of the crown, which is to apply to silver a method often used in calligraphic drawings, of using many small Hebrew letters to make up objects such as flowers and leaves.

  Events decide for Judah. What makes up his mind is the arrest of Chaim the Silversmith, accused of consorting with the Turks and passing military secrets but in trouble for having quietly begun making fine candelabra and ceremonial objects of an original and striking design, competing with the Christian silversmiths. He is being tortured in the prison, and no amount of bribery on the part of his wife or his family seems able to get him free short of death. The Maharal goes on foot to the town hall, to the emperor’s representative. He goes to see Father Jiri, with whom he is guardedly friendly. All the intercessions run into a wall of iron.

  That the silversmith had been seized on such a trumped-up charge is a clear warning to the Maharal that he is reading the weather signs accurately and a blood storm is gathering. On the day bailiffs come into the ghetto with pikemen to seize the assets of the silversmith and turn his family out into the street, the Maharal tells Itzak and Yakov to come to him quietly, secretly and without speaking to anyone. “Begin a fast. Go to the baths tonight and purify yourselves. Then come at midnight to the Altneushul. I will be there.” It is Rosh Hodesh, the new moon.

  He has decided to take only Itzak and Yakov with him. He thought of taking David also, then speedily discarded him. David would be wanting to ask questions constantly and take notes. Further, the Maharal suspects that it would be hard for David not to view the evening’s planned activities as a physics experiment and impossible to keep him from writing up that experiment in copious notes with proffered explanations. No, only Itzak and Yakov may accompany him.

  At midnight he stands in the doorway to the Altneushul, where I myself have stood, although never at midnight. It is a small but powerful Gothic building, with the front wall shaped like a jagged menorah. The oldest synagogue in Europe, it is at the farthest end of ostentation from a cathedral, being small, narrow and yet of a penetrating simple grandeur. You step down into it, and then your eyes rise to the narrow windows slitting the tall white walls. From the Altneushul the Maharal removes a Torah, wrapping it carefully in a cloak and then in another, larger cloak over that one, against the damp wind of March that slithers between buildings, down the twisted filthy streets, and then unfurls in the cemetery beyond the synagogue. The Maharal leads his helpers into the cemetery, seeing the glances of apprehension they exchange. What is he doing in the cemetery in the middle of the night? Has a dybbuk seized one of their own, or does a ghost rise because of some impropriety in the burial?

  “Take each a shovel.” He opens the caretaker’s little shed.

  Every night in Prague, the gates of the ghetto are locked, the Jews penned up inside for the night, the Christians supposedly fenced out: just as we are hidden behind our electronic walls, our surveillance devices, our amateur guards, seeking to survive. But a wall can be climbed over or tunneled under, or a few strategic stones can be quietly loosened. The Maharal knows the ghetto’s every brick. It’s tight living, everyone smelling everybody else’s supper and hearing everybody’s quarrels. Privacy, are you joking? In Prague in the Jewish cemetery, even the dead are crowded, buried on top of each other, the stones rammed crazily together like crooked teeth. The dead cannot be moved, it would be lacking in respect, but Jews are not allowed to bury their dead outside the ghetto. Therefore a fresh layer of soil is shoveled over the graves periodically, the tombstones are moved up to the new surface, a new grave dug in and one more tombstone added to the crowd, like rush hour on the tubes leaving a corporate enclave.

  The Maharal walks in the lead with the Torah and a dark lantern swinging. Behind
, Itzak trots, short and heavyset, with his white beard shining against the darkness of his cloak, and on his left side Yakov, tall as the Maharal, skinny, taking one slightly lopsided stride to every two of Itzak’s, both of them with shovels over their shoulders like pikemen going into battle and Yakov carrying also a large but light wooden frame, which the Maharal gave him.

  They are frightened, but they trust him and they obey him. At the end of the street of the willows, where no trees at all grow but tradition says there once flowed a stream that still wanders through cellars, Judah knows of a weak spot in the ghetto wall. The same stream that creeps like a ghost through the earth of the ghetto flows out to the Vltava. Here one can crawl out of the ghetto under the cover of darkness. They flit through the forbidden Christian streets, keeping silent, and into open country.

  In the woods on the banks of the river, it is a cold clammy night with no light but that of the dark lantern, its feeble rays glimmering, and the river beyond like black shot silk mumbling over its stones. The leaves have not even begun to split their buds. The bare branches of winter rub together in the brisk wind. Somewhere an owl is calling as it hunts.

  They set to work digging clay from the bank while the Maharal chants in a low singsong, praying all the while he, an old, old man, is working furiously, taking the shovel from first Itzak and then Yakov, digging faster than they can. They stare at him in great fear, fear he will suddenly die, because how can an eighty-one-year-old man stoop and lift, stoop and lift and haul like an eighteen-year-old? Fear because what are they doing, what vast grave are they excavating?

  At last the Maharal is satisfied they have dug enough clay, and he lays down the wooden form. They see it is shaped like a man. They begin to pack the clay over the shape, to mold it into a body. Again, over the head of the muttering rabbi, Itzak and Yakov exchange glances of wonder and fear. Has the Maharal gone crazy? Is he suddenly senile? The death of his only son cast him into a deep depression, but this is madness. What are they doing, illegally out of the ghetto, prancing around the riverbank at the new moon, making a huge mud pie in the shape of a man?

  The form the Maharal has laid down on the soil is larger than a normal man, as tall and broad as the strongest soldier. The Maharal stoops and works on the features of the clay doll. He molds the hair, the face, the organs. The huge clay doll lies there naked and ominous. Then the Maharal begins to pray, with his arms raised over his head. The wind has slithered away, and mist is rising from the silvered blackness of the river. His arms outspread, he begins to pray louder, rocking, davening, chanting. The hair rises on the nape of Itzak, and he turns to Yakov for comfort, but Yakov’s mouth has fallen open and he, too, is praying strange words that seem to coalesce in the air between the men like a cloud of oily smoke.

  The face of the Maharal is pale with ecstasy. He feels the power coming through him. It is the power of creation. It is always dangerous, it is lightning striking the tower and the world set on end. It is always the entrance of the Word into Matter and everything is born again. He feels the energy of something strange and new and terrible and focused to a spear piercing through him and into the clay before him. He sees his own hands shining with a blue-white radiance. His hands are crackling. His hair stands up with electricity.

  All the combinations of letters and vowels he chants, and the hidden names of G-d he speaks, and the sacred numbers that built the atoms of the universe. He has become transparent with power that is pouring through him. His flesh is blackened like glass that has stood in a fire. His eyes are silver as the moon, without pupils or iris. He knows in that moment more than he has ever known in his life and more than he will know in five minutes.

  Blue fire crackles over the clay doll as if rivulets of mercury ran over the surface and then sank inside. The clay begins to smoke and to heat dull red and then brighter and brighter. It is red as a heart ripped open when arterial blood spurts out; now it is orange and now burning yellow and now a white they cannot stare at. Itzak and Yakov shrink back. They are blinded. When their eyes stop tearing and they rub at their lids and then hope they can see again, the doll is cooling from orange to red and then dulling to almost the color of their skin. It is no longer clay but flesh at which they stare.

  Now from the raised arms of the Maharal rises a fresh cold wind bearing rain. Right on their heads a small storm descends, the wind whipping at their garments and their hair and beards, rattling then breaking off the bare branches of the trees. For a moment the rain is everything, a solid wall of water, a drenching in which they almost cannot breathe. Then the rain subsides, the wind falls and the doll lies there, a man of flesh who now sprouts hair of a dull reddish color and reddish pubic hair about the flaccid organ that lolls against a massive thigh, who has new nails and eyelashes and ruddy lips, who is, although huge, as perfectly formed as any of them.

  Itzak looks at Yakov, and Yakov looks back at him. Itzak mouths, “A golem?” and Yakov nods, his mouth still open. They are soaked to the skin and shivering with fear. They clutch hands, and each knows the other, too, would like to bolt.

  Now the Maharal turns to Yakov and whispers in his ear what he is to chant and sends him marching seven times left to right around the body. He whispers to Itzak and compels him also, chanting and circling, a solemn dance round and round. Then he begins chanting, his beard and head hairs all bristling and bright, his eyes silvery, round and round, chanting in a voice as sonorous and uncanny as the howling of a wolf. As the Maharal circles, the chest of the Golem begins to heave slowly. His lips part. A breath that is a deep long groan issues from him and then another, and the man of clay begins to stir. The eyes flick open, but they are glazed, unseeing. The Maharal seizes the Torah scroll he has brought, and seven times he circles, dancing as if it were Simchat Torah. Breath shudders faster through the frame of the Golem. He moans loudly. He blinks his gray eyes and now he sees, he looks and sees them. He stares all around, lifting his head and looking from side to side like a big snapping turtle putting its head out of the river. He is alive, he is a living man, and yet there is something massive, inert, prehistoric in him. He is a lizard-man, Itzak thinks, he is a man of shale.

  Itzak and Yakov instinctively draw back from him, frightened. The Maharal flinches back also, but then he gathers himself and comes forward to stand over the man who had been clay, the man he has made.

  I lie in my high antique bed hearing the unfamiliar sounds of Shira in her room, finally, finally back with me. It is a precious ingathering. She suffers the loss of her son and perhaps even the loss of her useless husband, but she is returned to me. She used to object at this point in the story: how could a man of clay come alive? She has always been on the literal side in her thinking. Like you, in fact, my dear Yod. You should communicate well on that level. She will learn quickly to reach you, wait and see.

  I remember that I spoke to her about the power of naming. What we cannot name, I said, we cannot talk about. When we give a name to something in our lives, we may empower that something, as when we call an itch love, or when we call our envy righteousness; or we may empower ourselves because now we can think about and talk about what is hurting us, we may come together with others who have felt this same pain, and thus we can begin to try to do something about it.

  But I was talking in that partial way one does to children. That stage of life is full of little truths that do not quite fit together. I know what the Maharal felt, for in all creation, in science and in art, and in the fields like mine where science and art meet and blend, in the creating of chimeras of pseudodata, interior worlds of fantasy and disinformation, there is a real making new. We partake in creation with ha-Shem, the Name, the Word that speaks us, the breath that sings life through us. We are tool and vessel and will. We connect with powers beyond our own fractional consciousness to the rest of the living being we all make up together. The power flows through us just as it does through the tiger and through the oak and through the river breaking over its rocks, and we know in our cor
e the fire that fuels the sun.

  I understand what Avram, my old lover, felt when he created a person in his laboratory as truly as when he put his prick into Sara and they made Gadi together. As truly as when I gave birth to Riva and she lay beside me real and red and screaming. Every life is new. Every word is constantly speaking itself for the first time: birth, love, pain, want, loss. Every mother shapes clay into Caesar or Madame Curie or Jack the Ripper, unknowing, in blind hope. But every artist creates with open eyes what she sees in her dream.

  I have stood on Rosh Hodesh in the darkness of the wood by the whispering river, and I have called powers through me to blast into life what has never before been. That is what I should honestly have told Gadi and Shira when they sat at my feet in the courtyard by the blooming peach with its pink blossoms and I told them this story. I should have said I am the Maharal and I make the Golem with my whole life’s best and most potent moments, and so does Avram, and so, perhaps, my darlings, may you. Creation is always perilous, for it gives true life to what has been inchoate and voice to what has been dumb. It makes known what has been unknown, that perhaps we were more comfortable not knowing. The new is necessarily dangerous. You, too, must come to accept that of your nature, Yod, for you are truly new under the sun.

  EIGHT

  How Shall I Address You?

  As Shira was admitted to Avram’s old laboratory on the second floor of the former hotel, she wanted to know: Is Gadi still around? She wished she could just walk in and ask Avram outright, for she would concentrate ever so much more freely with that taken care of. The building disquieted her. Her stomach clenched on itself as her hands balled into damp fists at her sides. She felt as if she were seventeen again, ignorant, fearful, a creature all gusty emotions and pain.

  A standard service robot, walking upright but with a face plate and four metallic hands, let her in. “I am Gimel. Follow, please.” The voice was affectless as an elevator or a food dispenser. Gimel was the dim-witted robot Avram had built her last year home. His face and hands were no longer covered in artificial skin. Perhaps Avram had given up building illegal cyborgs that resembled people. She was kept waiting in the outer lab while Gimel communicated with the locked inner lab.