But even those who most distrusted the man they called “the Bedouin” had to admit that his talent was a boon to the neighborhood. Once, Arbeely’s shop had turned out pots and pans and peddlers’ wares, all of good quality but unexceptional. Now, every object that emerged was a work of art. The pots and pans had acquired elegant proportions, and etched designs upon their handles; the trivets they rested upon were woven iron lattices, strong yet delicate-looking. There were necklaces, too, of silver and stone, and even an astonishing tin ceiling that hung in a nearby tenement lobby, sculpted to look like a desert landscape. That achievement had been the talk of the neighborhood, and had even been mentioned in a few of the English-language city papers, which had in turn brought a new type of visitor to Little Syria: the well-dressed, well-heeled admirers of the arts.
“They stare up at the ceiling for a few minutes, and then they go away again,” said a customer at the Faddouls’ coffee-house, a Washington Street mainstay. “The children like to beg nickels from them. It’s all harmless, I suppose. And it can only mean good things for the tinshop.”
Another man at the table snorted. “Don’t be so sure. I’ve seen success ruin more than one business. Arbeely is a man of good sense, but that Bedouin confounds me. He’s so . . .”
“Strange,” said the men, in unison.
“Who is strange?” said a woman’s voice. It was Maryam Faddoul, proprietress, arriving among them with her brass coffee-pot. There were few in Little Syria who weren’t friends with Maryam. The woman was known for her generous kind-heartedness, her ability to see the best in even the most trying of her neighbors. Even strangers felt a near-involuntary desire to unburden themselves to her, relating their woes and their fears, their most intractable dilemmas. Maryam would then store and dispense this gossip with an apothecary’s precision, matching ailment to remedy, need to need. A girl whose fiancé was in need of work might know nothing of the butcher looking for a new assistant, until Maryam suggested the butcher’s kibbeh for the bridal banquet. The girl whose younger brothers gave her no peace in the afternoons, the elderly woman who wanted only a few hours of quiet company: these, too, managed to find each other, once Maryam sat the girl’s father at a table next to the woman’s son. Now she replenished the men’s cups with a practiced hand and gave them her most encouraging smile.
“Oh, we only meant the Bedouin,” they told her. “He’s come back, you know.”
“Has he?” said Maryam.
“Yes, and alone, just like when he arrived. No mother, no wife, no new hires for the business. Who knows why he went in the first place?”
Maryam tilted her head, as though considering the answer. In reality, Maryam knew exactly why the man had gone. The copper flask, now buried, had once sat on a shelf in her own kitchen: a gift from her mother, whose own mother had once owned it, and so on back through the generations, each woman unaware of its true contents. Maryam had taken that flask to her friend Boutros Arbeely, to see if he might repair a few of its scuffs and dents—and its invisible prisoner had at last been freed.
“Perhaps he was homesick,” she said to the men.
The men raised their eyebrows at each other: Homesick? Of course they were all homesick at one time or another; but to make the voyage for no other reason . . .
“Well,” one of them said, “I suppose it’s possible.”
“The Bedu are different,” another allowed.
Maryam smiled at them, and moved on to the next table, as gracious as ever. But her husband, Sayeed, at his usual spot in the steam-wreathed kitchen, spied the new line of tension in her back, and guessed at its meaning: for out of all their many neighbors in Little Syria, the Jinni was the only one she’d ever distrusted at first sight.
The Golem and the Jinni went back to Central Park again and again.
They explored the various landscapes, admiring their autumn aspect: the frost-edged Meadow, the bare stalks of the cattails in the Pond, the narrow Gill a swift and crystalline flow. Then, when they’d seen their fill, they’d walk south to 14th Street and climb a fire escape to the city’s rooftops: a world in itself, a place of fire-barrels and plank bridges, wayward children and petty thieves. The two were a familiar sight there, but they never failed to draw the eye: a tall, hatless man and a tall, prim woman. An odd pair of characters, if only a pair among many.
Along the rooftops they’d walk to Little Syria, and find a high corner or a water tower rail. There they’d watch the first stirrings of the day: the oyster-boats casting off from the West Street piers, the milkmen and icemen trudging toward their stables, the tavern-keepers sweeping the night’s sawdust out their doors. Only when the city seemed about to wake in earnest would they stroll back along the rooftops to Canal Street. There they’d bid each other farewell; and she would descend to join the growing traffic on the sidewalk, arriving at Radzin’s Bakery in time to mix the morning dough. And he would return to the tinshop, and stoke the forge, while a yawning Arbeely reviewed the day’s
