The anger surged afresh, as though she’d called it forth. “Allow me,” he said, “the same consideration that you demand for yourself. I can’t help it, it’s who I am. Yes, you could not help running after her, and in that moment I meant nothing to you. I know this, I try to accept it, but I cannot understand, and that is what angers me. Tonight might have been the end of you, Chava. Who would I remember you with tomorrow if you were to die tonight? Arbeely? Anna Blumberg? I couldn’t even go to your bakery and cry with the Radzins.”
“You don’t cry.” A whisper, from the depths of the cloak.
“Allow me the hyperbole, please. My point, Chava, is that if someday—”
He stopped talking. She’d moved suddenly beneath the cloak, and was now sitting up, patting herself with stiff motions. “What is it?” he asked.
“I can’t find the locket.” The cloak slipped open—and he saw the fissures that covered her body, the dark and ugly stripes where he’d held her. Remnants of her cotton shirtwaist were seared to her skin. Her hands were skeletal, the knuckles swollen. He felt dizzy, but couldn’t look away.
“It’s not there,” she said in rising fear. “No, wait—is this . . .”
Her fingers had found something inside one of the fissures. He shuddered as she prized it from her own body: an oblong of flat and blackened brass.
“Look,” she said, and held it out in one shriveled hand.
He took it gingerly and held it to the lamplight. The halves of the locket had fused together. He picked up her scissors, wedged the tip of the stork’s beak into the thin seam that remained, and twisted. The locket cracked open and fell apart. Where the folded command had once been, there was now a teaspoon’s worth of ash.
“It’s gone,” she said, her voice hollow.
Good riddance, the Jinni thought.
“Ahmad, what will I do? What if I—” She paused, then turned suddenly to face him. “But you know it,” she said. “You read it once, you must remember it.”
He wanted to tell her that he’d forgotten the command, ripped it deliberately from his memory, after that awful day when he’d come so close to destroying her. But it would be a lie. He couldn’t forget it, any more than he could forget his own true name.
“You do,” she whispered. “I know you do.”
“Chava, no. Don’t ask this of me.”
“Please, Ahmad. Please, just write it down, and I’ll buy a new locket—” She reached out a clawlike hand, giant eyes beseeching.
“No!” He recoiled, rose from the chair, upending the sewing basket.
Startled, she pulled back, then raised the hood again and turned away slightly. “May I ask why?” she said in a clipped tone.
“Haven’t you heard a word I’ve said? I have no wish to be your accomplice in your destruction!”
“And if I should lose myself, and turn violent? How many others might die without that locket to protect them?”
“Enough!”
The word rang between them. Her face was a shadow beneath the hood, her lips an angry line.
“I tell you now, Chava, I won’t give you what you ask. Find someone else to murder you. I refuse.” And with that he left her room and her boardinghouse, and walked back to Washington Street, barefoot in his stolen clothes.
On Forsyth, the fire was out at last, though the gutted tenement still steamed from the pit in its middle. The crowd dispersed, the neighbors returning to their beds, grateful that they’d been spared.
The Forsyth Street Synagogue opened its doors, despite the lateness of the hour, to take in the newly homeless. Many of the survivors were members of the synagogue—but neither Rabbi Altschul nor young Kreindel were among them. No one could remember seeing them, either in the fire or its aftermath. And so the congregants drew the only conclusion they could. Their mourning, though, was tinged with guilty relief. The death of a child could only be a tragedy—but there had been something dark and unsavory, even sinister, about their rabbi at the end.
Meanwhile, the girl they mourned lay asleep in a bed at Saint Vincent’s, dreaming that she was lost in a maze of smoke-filled hallways. At last she found the door to her father’s bedroom, and turned the knob. A body lay on the bed: not Yossele, but the tall man from the street, the one whose friend had run into the fire after her. He lay motionless, staring at her with eyes full of grief, the woman’s cloak bunched between his hands. She took it from him and shook it out, and covered him with it, like a shroud.
In the morning, kind-faced women would come to her bedside and ask questions in English. My name is Kreindel Altschul, she would tell them in Yiddish. And her age, they’d ask, holding up their fingers: Eight? Nine? Elf, she would say, eleven; but they’d mishear, and write it in her file as eight, an error that no one would ever correct. More people would come, asking questions, jotting down her answers—until at last they would bathe and dress her and take her to a nearby courthouse, where a black-robed judge would sigh in irritation at her lack of living relations and declare her a ward of the state.
The Golem lay on her bed and stared at the ceiling, wishing she could blink.
At last she sat up. Her lamp still glowed upon the desk, surrounded by the scattered boxes, the stork scissors, the spools of thread. Nearby was the hand mirror, with its newly splintered handle.
She steeled herself and picked it up.
In some ways, her face was better than she’d feared; in others, it was worse. Her hair and eyebrows were still intact—protected, it seemed, by the magic that had made her. But the dark and hollow cheeks, the parched lips and staring eyes,
