They were discreet, in the main, and so managed to dodge the worst of the gossip. The Golem’s landlady was not the type to notice every coming and going; most of her boardinghouse tenants were theater folk, and kept odd hours as a rule. And as for the Jinni, if his neighbors happened to see him in the street at sunrise, looking as though he was returning from a night abroad, they were content to ignore it—so long as he kept his scandals elsewhere.
But the children of Little Syria noticed.
They’d wake in the night, roused by a snoring parent or a restless sibling, and look out the window in time to spy the couple on a nearby rooftop. Or, they’d sit blanket-wrapped on the fire escape and overhear an argument conducted in the pair’s telltale blend of languages, which changed so quickly between Arabic, English, and Yiddish that the children were left to grasp at half sentences, formless bursts of rhetoric. They mean well, but . . . Their bizarre insistence upon . . . You give them too little . . . Who, the children wondered, were the they the pair spoke of? And who was she, the tall woman in the cloak, who could draw so many words from their silent Mister Ahmad? They would watch, and listen; and on morning walks to school they’d trade their information, and speculate about where the couple went every night, with suggestions ranging from the prosaic to the salacious.
They go to Central Park, said one boy who had a habit of waking early to search the rooftops for lost jacks and marbles, and so had seen the pair more often than most.
The others frowned at this answer, given with the air of common knowledge. How d’you know?
The boy shrugged. Because when they come back, he said, their boots are all muddy.
* * *
At last the first true freeze of winter arrived, and Central Park gave itself to the cold and snow. The vining roses were pruned back to a handful of canes; the elms on the Mall grasped the sky with empty fingers.
“I’m sorry,” the Golem said one night as they neared the Harlem Meer. “This will be a long walk back. And it’s starting to snow again.”
“Stop worrying about me,” said the Jinni. “And stop apologizing.”
“I can’t help it, I feel like I’m putting you at risk.”
“You aren’t asking me to jump in a river, Chava. I can manage a little snow.”
She sighed. “It’s just . . . louder now. Or it feels louder. Oh, it’s hard to explain.” She hugged herself as she walked, clearly miserable. With the onset of winter, her clay body had grown stiff and uncomfortable: an expected effect, and manageable as long as she walked often enough. But now, like arthritic joints that ached with the rain, the scream in her mind—her trapped creator, in his endless anger—had grown sharper, more distracting. She’d begun to make careless mistakes at the bakery, such as forgetting the raisins in the challah dough, or doubling the baking powder in the cookies so that they swelled as large as biscuits. Thea Radzin thought it a lingering effect of her widowhood; with each mishap she cast a pitying look at her favorite employee, thinking, And who could blame the girl if she came unhinged?
“Do you think I’m coming unhinged?” the Golem asked suddenly.
“Do I think what?”
“That I’m coming unhinged. It’s what Thea thinks, though of course she doesn’t say it. And no, she doesn’t understand—but you do. So you must tell me. Please.”
He blew out an impatient and unnecessary breath. “Chava, you aren’t ‘coming unhinged,’ whatever that means. The winters are difficult for you, we knew this. It’s all of a piece. And you’re handling it far better than I would, were I to hear that man screaming in my head all the time.”
“You make it sound like he’s hurling curses at me,” she muttered. “It’s simpler than that. Like . . . a tinnitus, I suppose. Just louder lately.”
“Better here, though?”
She gazed about at the dark tableau of the park, felt with her distant senses the earth below them, its warmth banked and waiting. The seasons would turn, she reminded herself; her body would lose its stiffness and unease, and her mind would quiet once more.
“Yes,” she said. “Better here.”
* * *
Spring arrived as promised. The rains began, forcing them apart and indoors: she sewing in her room each night, he working in the shop. Without him, she grew restless. Her mind strayed toward the couples who hurried by outside, laughing beneath their umbrellas, their thoughts full of what might happen when they reached their warm apartments, their inviting beds. He, too, became tense and distractible, full of unsettled longings, uncertain of their welcome. He, who’d once sauntered up Fifth Avenue so confidently in search of Sophia Winston’s mansion! And she, meanwhile, reviewed every conversation they’d ever had upon the subject of faithfulness, his opinions ringing in her mind like a punishment. Humans and their ridiculous rules.
But she also recalled something that had happened before the rains had separated them: a night when they’d passed a Lower East Side synagogue just as two women, clear at a glance as mother and daughter, emerged from its basement stairwell. The daughter’s hair had hung down her back in damp coils; she’d shivered in the night air, nervous and excited, her pale face glowing. The older woman had put a comforting arm around her, and they’d hurried down the street together, mother whispering to daughter, the daughter nodding.
It’s late for a bath, isn’t it? the Jinni had said as they disappeared.
It’s a mikveh, a ritual bath, she’d told him. And then, at his confusion: By Jewish law, a woman mustn’t lie with her husband during her menses. Once it’s ended, she immerses herself in the mikveh and recites a blessing. Brides do it, too, before the wedding ceremony.
Ah. And the younger one . . . ?
She marries in the morning.
She’d waited for him to call it absurd, or superstitious, or any of his other usual complaints. But he’d only nodded as though half listening, his
