The Golem of Hollywood

Gilgul

Crushed by an unimaginable pressure, consciousness quilting together.

“Arise.”

The command is gentle and loving and irresistible.

She rises.

Sensations run together like children playing a game without rules. She grabs at their elbows, forces them apart. Behave.

A drippy canopy, scrawly claws, forlorn screech and howl. In dazzling firelight, darkness engraves shapes: a giant’s grave, a pile of mud, shovels, bootprints ringing a patch of forest floor baked bone-dry, crackling as it cools.

Before her stands a regal man, old and splendid, elongated like an iris, his shoulders broad beneath a sashed black robe, a tight round cap of black velvet on his polished scalp. Moonlight glazes kind brown eyes and shines a beard of filigreed silver. The awed set of his mouth cannot hide the delight pushing up at its corners.

“David,” he calls. “Isaac. You can come back.”

Long moments later, two younger men approach, stop a ways off, crouch in the foliage.

“He won’t hurt you. Will you...” The kind-eyed man gives in to his smile. “Yankele.”

That’s not my name.

“Yes,” he says. “I think that will be fine. Yankele.”

I have a name.

“You won’t hurt them, will you?”

She shakes her head.

The two men come timidly forth. Their beards are black, their garments humble and limp with rain. One of them has lost his hat. The other tremblingly clutches a shovel and mouths silent prayers.

The hatless man says, “Rebbe is all right?”

“Yes, yes,” the kind-eyed man says. “Come. We have much to do and far to go.”

The two men swarm over her, grunting as they stuff her, sausage-sleeved, into a blouse far too small. But the indignity of being dressed in doll’s clothing is as nothing compared to the wave of sick surprise that rises when she beholds herself.

Gnarled chair hands.

A cabinet for a chest.

Blood-starved flesh lumpily thumbed.

She is monstrous.

And the pinnacle of this comic insult, dangling between wine-cask thighs like a dead rodent, foreign and grotesque, a man’s organ.

She would shriek. She would tear it off.

She cannot. She remains dumb, pliant, deboned by confusion, tongue knotted, throat hollow, while the men force her misshapen feet into boots.

David squats, raises Isaac on his shoulders; Isaac pulls a hood over her face.

“Ah, yes,” Rebbe says. “I’m sure nobody’ll notice a thing, now.”

When they are done with her, they stand back, perspiring, to await a verdict.

Before Rebbe can speak, her left sleeve splits loudly.

He shrugs. “We’ll have something more suitable made.”

Out of the woods, they tramp across boggy fields. Chill mist hovers over the surface of waist-high grass, the tips of which kiss her knees. To avoid dirtying their robes, the men walk with their hems raised; Isaac the Hatless has drawn his own collar up over his bare head.

Farmhouses break the monotony of the countryside until they come to a muddy highway, hissing dung piles beneath dreary cloud pack.

Rebbe talks in a soothing voice. He speaks of the confusion Yankele is experiencing. It’s natural, he reassures her, a misalignment between body and soul. It will pass. Soon he will feel good as new. They have called him down to discharge an important duty.

Down from where? Up, she supposes. But really she hasn’t the faintest idea what he’s talking about. Nor can she understand why he keeps referring to her as him, and she as he, or who is Yankele, or where this body has come from, or why it moves the way it does.

She cannot say where she was before; cannot speak to ask; cannot do anything but obey.

The road rises slightly and breaks open onto a valley. There, along the banks of a scaly river, lies a sleeping town, a black curtain embroidered with firelight.

Rebbe says, “Welcome to Prague.”

Her first night she spends standing in a box, silent, unmoving, wondering, wounded.

Dawn wedges raw fingers between the planks and the door swings open on a woman. A tight wimple frames a pure pale face, luminous green eyes that flash disbelief.

“Yudl,” she sighs.

Yudl?

Who’s Yudl?

What about Yankele?

What happened to him?

Make up your mind.

“Come on,” the woman says, beckoning her out. “Let me have a look at you.”

She stands in the center of a courtyard, while the woman walks around her, clucking her tongue. “What are these rags? Oy. Yudl. You’ve really done it this time, haven’t you? What were you thinking... Hang on, I’ll be back in a minute.”

She waits. She has, it seems, no choice.

The woman returns carrying a stool and a length of string, hitches up her skirts.

“Hold out your arm, please. The left one.”

She obeys automatically.

“No, to the side. Yes. Thank you. Other arm, please...”

The woman scurries around her, using the string to measure her, re-tucking coils of black hair that sneak free. “He certainly didn’t skimp on you, did he? He’s a saint, of course, my husband, but a head in Heaven pulls a man’s feet off the ground. He might’ve warned me. Stand up straight, please. You gave me quite a fright, you know. Although I suppose that’s the point, isn’t it... Oh look at this, look at what he’s done. Your legs don’t line up.”

I am a freak. I am an abomination.

“Something like this, I can’t tell if he’s done it on purpose or because he’s rushing, or... I don’t know. It doesn’t make it hard for you to walk, I hope.”

A crime. A pillar of disgrace.

“This is going to take me a few hours. Let’s get you covered properly. The rest we can worry about later. In the meantime you don’t have to go back in that terrible box. Is that all right? What am I saying, of course it’s all right. I’m Perel, by the way. Wait here, please.”

Hours later, sun high overhead, Perel returns with a blanket folded over her shoulder.

“What are you still doing there? I didn’t mean you had to stand in one spot all day... All right, never mind, let’s try this on.”

The cloak is coarse burlap, several dozen motley pieces hastily sewn together.

“I’m sorry. It’s the best I could manage on short notice. I’ll see if Gershom has something nicer in stock, a nice piece of wool. He gives a discount if he knows it’s for me. We’ll have to pick a color. Something dark, it’s slimming—”

A man’s voice: “Perel?”

“Back here.”

Rebbe appears at the back of the house.

Beholds the scene.

Pales.

“Eh. Perele. I can explain—”

“You’re going to explain why there’s a giant in my woodshed?”

“This — eh...” Rebbe hurries forward. “This is Yankele.”

“Is that his name?” Perel says. “He didn’t mention it.”

“Well, eh,” Rebbe says. “Yes.”

No.

“Yankele.”

That’s not my name.

Rebbe says, “He’s an orphan.”

“An orphan.”

“Yes. I was — David came across him wandering in the forest, you see, and, and, it seems he can’t speak.” Rebbe pauses. “I’m afraid he’s simpleminded.”

I am not.

“A simpleminded orphan,” Perel says.

“Yes, and I thought it can’t be safe for him, wandering alone like that.”

Perel stares up at her immense head. “Yes, I can see he’d be vulnerable to attack.”

“Well, at least I thought it would be inhospitable to abandon him. I have to set an example for the community.”

“So you locked him in the shed.”

“I didn’t want to disturb you,” Rebbe says. “It was late.”

“Let me see if I’ve got this right, Yudl. David Ganz, who leaves the house of study so infrequently that his mother has to bring him fresh socks, happened to be out in the forest at night, alone, and he happened to come across a simpleminded mute giant wandering, alone, and he happened to bring him here to you, and you decided to have him spend the night outside, in the courtyard, in a shed.”

A pause.

“I suppose that’s more or less the size of it, yes.”

“If he’s mute,” Perel says, “how do you know his name?”

“Well... that’s what I’ve been calling him. But I suppose it could be something else—”

It is.

“How do you know he’s an orphan?”

Another pause.

“Did you make this cloak?” Rebbe says. “What a marvelous piece of work. Yankele, look at you, you’re a regular gentleman.”

“Don’t change the subject, please,” Perel says.

“Darling. I was going to tell you as soon as I got home. I was held up, I had to adjudicate a case, extremely complex, you see—”

Perel waves a shapely hand. “Never mind. It’s all right.”

“It is?”

“But he can’t stay in the shed. To begin with, that’s my space. I need it. More important, it’s not right. It’s worse than inhospitable. It’s inhuman. I wouldn’t put a dog in there. Would you put a person there?”

“But, you see, Perel—”

“Yudl. Listen to me. To my words. Carefully. Would you put a human being in the shed?”

“... no.”

“Of course not. Be sensible, Yudl. People will ask questions. Who lives in a shed? Nobody. Especially nobody that size. They’ll say, ‘That’s no man, living there. Who lives in a shed?’” She clucks her tongue. “Besides, it’s shameful. ‘This is where the Rebbe puts his guests?’ I won’t allow it. He can have Bezalel’s room.”

“Eh. Do you really think that’s the best place for — wouldn’t it be better, I mean to say, if he were to — Yankele, I apologize that I’m speaking about you like you’re not here.”

That’s not my name.

“He can help around the house,” Perel says.

“I’m not sure he has the... the intelligence.”

I do.

“He does. You can see it in his eyes. You understand me, don’t you, Yankele?”

She nods.

“See? That was the light of comprehension, Yudl. I could use the extra hands. Do me a favor, Yankele,” Perel says, pointing to the well in the corner of the courtyard. “Draw water.”

“Perele...”

While they continue to argue about where to house her, and what to tell people, she lumbers dumbly to the well. The rapture of being able to move is dulled by the knowledge that she isn’t moving of her own volition. Draw water.

“It’s not that it’s a bad story,” Perel is saying.

Draw water: she pulls up the rope, takes the sloshing bucket in hand.

“It’s just that you’re a bad liar, Yudl.”

Tips it out on the ground.

Wait a minute. Wait. That’s not what she meant.

Draw water: her body begins lowering the bucket again.

“Truth shall sprout from the earth,” Rebbe declares.

“And righteousness shall be reflected from the heavens,” Perel replies. “Wonderful. Until then, let me do the talking, please.”

The second bucket she also dumps out.

Fool. That’s not what she meant.

But her body keeps going, heedless of the howling objections of her mind; it has one directive — draw water — and it fulfills it with perfect obedience, bucket after bucket, and each time she bends to lower the rope, the reflection that greets her repels her. It is a face like the knot of an oak tree — lumpy and lopsided, furred unevenly like lichen; a huge, cruel, stupid face, devoid of emotion. Is this how she is to exist? She would rather drown herself in the well. She cannot choose to do that any more than she can choose to stop, and she raises the bucket and pours it out and raises the bucket and pours it out until Perel yelps: the courtyard has flooded, ankle-deep.

“Yankele, stop!” Rebbe shouts.

She stops. She cannot understand why she has done something so plainly absurd, and she burns with hatred for her own idiocy.

“You have to be very careful how you phrase things,” Rebbe says.

“Apparently,” Perel says. Then she bursts into helpless laughter.

Rebbe smiles. “It’s all right, Yankele. It’s only water. It’ll dry.”

She appreciates their attempts to console her.

But that’s not her name. She has a name.

She cannot remember what it is.