The Golem of Hollywood

The Garret

Blanketed in night, she patrols a warren of alleyways bent sinister.

Even at that lonely hour, quiet fails to gain a foothold in the ghetto. Snatches of song undermine midnight lamentation. Shutters snap. Glass breaks. Opposing rooflines teeter forward, chins dripping, like drunks coming in for a kiss. Rain falls upward and downward and slantward, filling her boots; rain drums every surface, producing a spectrum of characteristic sounds; rotting timber and corroding tin; quicklime and leather; excrement and feathers and trash.

Prague.

Her home.

There are no secrets here, grubby swaybacked houses stacked close enough for neighbors to answer each other’s questions. A day after being awakened, the worst of her disorientation had passed, and everyone from the biggest macher to the humblest kitchen maid knew about the simpleminded mute found wandering in the forest.

At first she resented this description, but as weeks went by, she realized the protection it afforded her. She has taken her place in the ghetto’s tender pantheon of the grotesque, alongside Hindel, the junk dealer’s daughter, with her shriveled left arm; Sender, who repeats back whatever one says to him; Aaron, the cobbler’s apprentice, whose hair grows red on one side and black on the other.

Nowadays, if people remark at all, it is to praise the generosity of Rebbe and Rebbetzin, taking in an orphan at their age.

With his unchanging face, his treadling gait, Yankele the Giant has become something of a local mascot, popular especially with the children, who run before him in teasing circles.

Can’t catch me! Can’t catch me!

She feigns sluggishness, swiping at them with her tree stump fists while they giggle and scream; pretending to lose her balance and land on her rear; then springing up like a jack-in-the-box to show her true agility, snatching, gingerly, so gingerly, one child in each hand, their tiny hot bodies quivering with terror and delight.

Put me down!

At such moments the curtain around her memory draws back, triggered by a voice or a face or by an idle moment, teasing her with a shining fragment. In those brief intervals she recognizes that this is not the first turn of the wheel. There have been other times, other people, other places.

Names drift up, haunting her with their meaninglessness. Dalal. Leucos. Wangdue. Philippus. Bei-Niántu. Names no better or worse than Yankele.

Men’s names, to match her man’s body.

More telling than any one memory is the negative impression it leaves. She knows that she is hideous, abased, and helpless. Which means that once she must have been beautiful, and proud, and free.

While much about her present existence dissatisfies her, she knows she could do far worse than to live with Rebbe and Perel. They have made her a fixture of their lives, and indeed, it sometimes seems that the house on Heligasse would cease to function without her. But of course this isn’t true. They got along fine before she arrived, and if she were to leave, they would get along fine once more. They allow themselves to depend on her as a kindness to her; everyone needs to feel needed.

Very different people, they relate to her differently. Perel is a maker of things: clothing, challah, you name it. The demands of a rebbetzin are myriad, and her demands on Yankele are practical. A heavy load of laundry. A basket out of reach. Draw water — one bucket only, please.

Whereas Rebbe has been known to have trouble cutting up his food. On several occasions he has sent her to the house of study to fetch a book already sitting open on his lap.

It is the interchange between the couple that elevates them both, their marriage an embodiment of one of Rebbe’s favorite themes: erasing the barrier between the material universe and the spiritual one.

Every afternoon they convene in Rebbe’s study to pore over the Talmud together. This time is sacrosanct, and they have assigned Yankele the duty of ensuring their privacy for thirty minutes. She stands outside the house, guarding the door, listening to them spar with Godly words. The love they share overflows the threshold, spreading out along Heligasse to lap warmly at her deadened feet.

A jangle of keys; an off-key whistle; Chayim Wichs, the sexton, hurries home from locking up the shul.

“Shalom aleichem, Yankele.”

Expecting no answer, he ducks into the wind and carries on, keen to get himself in front of a fire. She likewise pulls her cloak close in imitation of a man feeling cold. To let him know that his discomfort is reasonable.

Such gestures require constant practice. She has become a collector of mannerisms, wrapping her fringes around the ends of her pinkies to signal preoccupation; cultivating the asymmetry of exhausted shoulders. It is of course the Loews’ habits she knows best: the sentimental vibrato beneath Rebbe’s beard when he refers to her as my son, the green slant of Perel’s eyes at the mention of her dead daughter, Leah.

A repertoire performed for her own benefit, it makes her feel something like human. Perhaps in time, her heart — if she has one, if inside the cabinet of her chest there is more than empty space — will follow upon the actions. For her own body remains a fearsome thing, and despite having regained partial control over it, she still suffers maddening spasms of literalism.

Just the other day, Perel asked her to go to the riverbank and bring back some clay, and instead of taking a bucket or a box, as a sensible creature would, she ferried as much as she could in her bare arms, depositing it in the middle of the courtyard, a colossal heap bristling with wet roots. Black-shelled beetles wriggled up to the surface and, confronted with an abyss of open air, frantically burrowed back down.

Oy gevalt. Yankele. I said clay from the riverbank, not the entire riverbank. I’ll have enough to last me a year... Never mind. Put it in the shed, please.

Lately, she’s noticed something disturbing. She has ceased to correct people in her mind. On occasion she has even caught herself thinking of herself as Yankele, and upon realizing it she has felt a mixture of disgust and relief.

What a pleasure it would be — what a burden lifted — to have a self. To relinquish her threadbare memory, agonizingly transient hints of beauty, and accept that she is in fact what others perceive.

Then she reminds herself of her previous selves. They didn’t last. Why should this one be any different?

One night last spring, the week before Passover, she spotted a gummy gray glow spilling from the mouth of the alley behind Zschyk’s bakery. She assumed the baker was forgoing sleep, toiling overtime to make enough matzah to serve the community all holiday long.

Then she heard the mumble of gutter language, and a stirring, and mice began to pour from the alley, as well.

The light had a cold quality to it: rather than illuminate, it smothered. The fleeing mice avoided it, skirting its edges.

Mesmerized, she came forward until she stood just beyond the light, leaning in to behold its source.

A man.

Dressed in peasant’s garb, he was crouched down, carefully arranging the body of a dead infant — its tiny belly slit — in the trash heap.

Gray leaked from his margins, a watery, shaky ribbon that moved with him, eroding whatever it touched.

He did not notice her, watching him. Odd but true: her size helps her disappear. She becomes part of the architecture, a lie too brazen to see through.

Besides, he was hard at work, tucking the infant’s legs under a shard of broken crockery, reconsidering and covering the face instead. Throughout this process of perfecting the scene, the aura changed. He grabbed the child’s body roughly and the color deepened, a flood of sludge. When he let go, it reverted to the pale ribbon that seemed to be its natural state.

He propped one tiny dimpled arm so that it stood up like a candle. No doubt by sunrise the flesh would be chewed to strings. No doubt it would appear that someone had attempted to hide the body, but that it had been dragged free by rats. No doubt a passerby would spot it, and no doubt that passerby would happen to be a gentile; no doubt the baker would be questioned — what did he do in there, all night long? — and no doubt his answers would not matter to the authorities, who would have found him guilty well in advance.

Within her, an ancient rage began to gather.

Pleased at last, the man stood up, using the collar of his shirt to mop the sweat from his neck. He turned to go and walked smack into her, emitting a choked scream as he flattened himself against the wall of the alley like a jagged vein in marble.

She waited, unmoving as a pillar of stone.

The man goggled up at her; swiveled to look at the infant’s body, as though hopeful that it had disappeared. But the tiny arm was still jutting up.

It wanted to be found.

He had seen to that.

He said, “They made me do it.”

She believed him. He was not the true villain. The aura wasn’t strong enough.

Who were they?

She couldn’t ask, of course.

Of course, he ran.

Her hands closed around the soft lower half of his midsection. She lifted him so their faces were nearly touching, and squeezed gently, forcing the blood out of his midsection. He vomited and made a broken-bellows wheeze; his limbs shot out rigid as broomsticks; his hands inflated like the stomach of a diseased animal; his forehead glowed scarlet except for a jagged scar at his hairline, the sight of which triggered a cascade of images running in reverse.

A patch of burning sand, flying away from her;

a rush of demon wind;

a tower a city a boy a dog

faster still:

valley earth ice garden

The man had by then turned a deep purple, his neck swollen wider than his head, his eyeballs distending, the blood vessels in them bursting open like thousands of poppies. He wept blood. Blood streamed from his ears and from his nostrils. His midsection charred and smoked where she gripped it.

Joyously the rage flowed through her.

Her lips split and cracked.

She was smiling.

She smiled wider and gave a last, lazy squeeze, separating his upper and lower halves, which tumbled into the muck, each half pinched shut like a wineskin.

The aura around him died, and with it went the pictures in her mind.

She fumbled for the halves of the corpse, squeezing at them, desperate to revive the warm rush of life-giving hatred.

But it was too late. He was dead, and she succeeded only in making a mess of him, innards oozing through her fingers.

She bundled both bodies in her cloak and walked down to the river. The child she buried in a clean patch of bank, reciting in her head the kaddish prayer she has heard Rebbe intone. The pieces of the murderer she hurled into the water. They bobbed and floated away, leaving her alone to contemplate a truth as piercing as it was vague, as exhilarating as it was terrifying.

For one glorious instant she had hovered close to revelation, her real name on the tip of her useless tongue.

For one moment she became marvelous, essential, natural.

She was, for that moment, herself — what she was and always had been.

A savior.

A killer.

That was one year ago, almost to the day.

Now, standing in the doorway to Petschek’s butcher shop, she observes with interest the hooded figure rushing down Langegasse, a bundle under its arm.

She allows a comfortable gap, then sets out to follow.

It is an art, following someone through the ghetto. Passageways appear from nowhere. Stairwells plunge. Distractions abound. She steps over handcarts mounded with moldy potatoes. The storm heaves, eliciting from the loose roofing a slow, sarcastic round of applause. Long after the ghetto’s human residents have grown accustomed to and then fond of her, their animals continue to herald her appearance with panic. Even before she has rounded the corner, the horses are stamping and snorting in their stalls; the chickens hysterical; the dogs puling; cats and rats in exodus, hostilities momentarily suspended.

They see her. They know her.

Whoever the figure is, he’s moving fast, taking turns without a second thought. Someone from the neighborhood? Not in this weather. Not at midnight. In the interest of public safety, Rebbe has decreed that everyone except the sexton, the doctor, and Yankele must remain indoors after dark. Wichs she already saw, repairing to his quarters. The doctor it cannot be. He goes nowhere without his satchel, and he wears a bell around his neck to warn her of his approach.

Just because the figure is dressed as a Jew does not mean anything, either.

So was the man with the dead infant.

Down Ziegengasse, across the Grosse Ring, riverbound.

Someone else wishing to dispose of a dirty secret?

The bundle is the right size to hide a child’s corpse.

Or, more charitably, a loaf of bread — a householder getting a jump on cleaning out the pantry for Passover.

In the dead of night?

A northward turn at double-wide Rabinergasse forces her to hang back. Thirty seconds later she steps out, and the figure has vanished.

Bootprints dwindle in the pounding rain. They arc toward the Alt-Neu and culminate in a series of muddy smears on the stone: feet wiped before entry.

The door to the synagogue remains closed, no violence done to it, although she supposes any competent thief could make short work of it. Before she arrived, vandalism was a perpetual plague. Torah scrolls shredded, ritual objects looted or destroyed.

She tries the handle.

The door swings open, unlocked.

Only Rebbe and the sexton have a key, and they are both in bed, or ought to be. Perhaps Rebbe has come seeking an hour or two alone? No. The figure she saw was too short. Besides, he wouldn’t disregard his own edict. He leads by example.

She shakes the rain off her cloak and steps inside.

In the sanctuary proper, Wichs has pursued his duties with especial vigor, not a tassel astray. The holiday of Passover, Rebbe says, stands for cleansing and rebirth. Every craftsman in the ghetto has come through in recent days, sawing and sanding and polishing. The Ark has been inspected for mouse holes, its curtain laundered free of smoke. Perel took it upon herself to re-embroider the fraying bimah cover, adding a personal touch, decorative floral motifs.

There’s another aspect to Passover. It is also the time of year when those who hate the Jews come seeking revenge for imaginary crimes.

She stands, listening to the storm beat down.

The stone walls smolder with the light of the Eternal Flame, filled to burn all night.

Then: a gray throb bulges through the viewing portals to the women’s section.

It sickens and excites her.

She knows that color.

She squats down to look through the portals. The light is coming from the far eastern end of the room, radiating through the crack beneath a wooden door. She feels slightly foolish to realize that she has never noticed that door and does not know where it leads. Although she attends services three times a day — standing with inert lips, her arms and head wrapped in specially made tefillin, the work of Yosie the Scribe, who complained to Rebbe that he would need a whole calfskin to make them — she’s never been inside the women’s section. Why would she? She’s a man. She belongs with the other men.

If they knew who she really was—

There’s a sound, too, a distant grinding drone, punctuated by a chunk, like a lame wagon.

Its rhythm matches the pulse of the light.

She leaves the sanctuary and rounds the corridor, entering the women’s section and pausing to watch the light. Each peak shines brighter than its predecessor, each trough correspondingly vacant. She can see now that it possesses its own unique shade, more silver than gray, cool and annihilating and beautiful.

sssssssTHUMPsssssssTHUMPsssssssTHUMPsssssssTHUMP

She can’t remember the last time she felt afraid.

It’s strangely satisfying.

She crosses to the unknown door and pulls it open.

Silver swells out, clinging to her like wet wool.

An antechamber, no bigger than four cubits on a side and swirling with dust. It is half her size and yet it yawns to admit her, and she places her foot on the bottom rung of the ladder that stretches up through a hole in the ceiling.

sssssssTHUMPsssssssTHUMPsssssssTHUMPsssssssTHUMP

She lays partial weight on the rung, expecting it to splinter. It holds, as does the next, and she commences to climb, covering the distance to the top in three reaches.

She surfaces through a trapdoor into a sloped room awash in silver light: a human figure, bent over with busy hands, barely visible at the center of a raging gray inferno, burning cold and glossy and charging the air so that it snaps and seethes.

sssssssTHUMPsssssssTHUMPsssssssTHUMPsssssssTHUMP

The rhythm stokes her desire to kill, her need building to a full-body thrum.

Whoever it is — whatever is happening — she must stop it.

She takes a step forward.

Tries to.

The light pushes her back.

She is unused to this. She has not known any physical limitations. She gathers her strength and steps forward again, and the light warps, groaning, shoving her into the wall with a heavy crash.

Startled, the figure looks up, and its aura immediately dims, revealing surroundings previously drowned out: a low, three-legged stool; the undone bundle, consisting of a piece of burlap and its dirty secret, a small pile of riverbank mud.

Lastly, the source of the noise, a spinning wooden wheel set atop a table, a half-formed lump at its center.

The wheel begins to slow.

The aura to fade further.

Her bloodlust subsides.

In half a minute all is still, and the only light is that of a small lantern, and the figure is fully visible.

She wears a long woolen skirt. Her wimple pulled free, a corona of frizzy black hair. The sleeves of her cloak are rolled up to her elbows. Muddy water streaks smooth, slender forearms. Delicate hands are gloved in clay, swollen to twice normal size. Wry green eyes regard her with resignation.

Perel says, “It’s a good thing you can’t talk.”