At last he reached the front of the line and handed the uniformed agent his ticket.
“Name?” said the agent.
“Ahmad al-Hadid.” Not his true name, of course, but his nonetheless. He’d chosen it himself: hadid meaning “iron,” and Ahmad simply because he liked how it sounded.
The agent waved him through, and he started up the gangplank—just as a boy from the telegram office ran up to him, bowed quickly, and handed him a folded cable.
The Jinni read it, and smiled.
* * *
A tall woman in a dark cloak walked a tree-lined path in a Brooklyn cemetery, a small stone nestled in the palm of her hand.
It was October now, a crisp and beautiful day. The trees had long since turned, and their burnished leaves lay so thick upon the ground that they obscured the path. The woman turned at the correct spot regardless, walking between the rows of headstones to a grave whose sod had barely taken root. Michael Levy, Beloved Husband and Nephew. Rabbi Avram Meyer, his uncle, lay only a row away.
Beloved Husband: it was a well-meaning fiction. Not the marriage itself; she had every right to call herself Chava Levy, though she’d been married and widowed in the space of a season. But love? She’d kept her nature a secret, had built their union upon her husband’s ignorance, and it had been a failure from the start. And then, at last, he’d learned the truth—not from her own lips, but through the workings of Yehudah Schaalman, a villainous man. It was Schaalman himself who’d created her, a clay bride for a businessman named Otto Rotfeld who’d wanted a new life in America and a wife to go with it. But Rotfeld had died halfway across the Atlantic, leaving her confused and adrift, utterly ignorant of humanity—knowing only that she must keep her nature hidden at all costs. Then Schaalman, too, had come to New York, and learned his own hidden truth: that he was the deathless reincarnation of a desert wizard who, a thousand years ago, had captured a powerful jinni, bound him with iron, and sealed him away in a flask. In the end, Schaalman had been defeated—but not before he’d murdered Michael, a tragedy that she couldn’t help feeling was on her own account.
She crouched down, plucked the stray leaves from the headstone. “Hello, Michael,” she murmured. She’d spent the streetcar ride to the cemetery considering her words, but now they felt self-conscious, inadequate. She went on anyway. “I’m so sorry I lied to you,” she said. “Your uncle told me once that I’d have to lie for the rest of my life, and that I’d find it hard to bear. He was right, of course. He usually was.” She smiled sadly, then sobered. “I’m not asking for your permission, or your blessing. I just want you to understand. If you’d survived, I would’ve been a true and faithful wife, without any lies between us. But I don’t think it would’ve lasted.”
Was she only telling herself what she wanted to hear? Would he have been willing, even happy, to stay with her? She would never bear children, never age, never change. She gazed down at the stone she’d brought, cupped inside a hand formed from the clay of a Prussian riverbank. If she wanted to, she could close her fist and squeeze until rock dust sifted from her fingers. No, Michael wouldn’t have wanted her for a wife. Not once he knew.
She couldn’t stay long. She had an appointment at a Manhattan pier, a promise to keep. She placed the stone atop the smooth-carved granite: a token of her visit, like she’d seen on other Jewish graves, more sober and lasting than flowers.
“I hope you’re at peace,” the Golem told him.
* * *
The Gallia approached the Hudson docklands.
The pier was crowded with men in autumn hats and overcoats, and here and there a few women, cloaked like herself. They were waiting for fathers and mothers, wives and children, distant cousins, business partners; for those whose faces they knew by heart, and those they knew not at all. The crowd stirred around her, filling her mind with their fears and desires:
Is that Mother at the rail?—
Please, God, don’t let him find out what happened while he was gone—
If he didn’t make that sale, then we’re sunk—
It was a strange and dubious gift of Rotfeld’s passing, this power of hers. Without the wishes and commands of a true master to follow, her seeking mind instead found those of everyone else. At first the compulsion to obey them had been overwhelming; but time, and training, had weakened their pull. They still harried her on occasion—when she was anxious or upset, or simply at the limits of her mind’s endurance. But for the most part they were only whispers, dimly overheard.
And threading through those overheard fears and desires, neither louder nor softer: a simple sound, an elongated note, the frozen scream of Yehudah Schaalman, who lay trapped in a flask on the other side of the earth. He’d be with her always now. A small price to pay when she’d
