No one was about. These docklands were sleepier than their southern counterparts; here even the stevedores went home at a reasonable hour. He sidled between the coal-heaps, his joints tightening in the cold air. Nearby was a stack of crates, a canvas tarpaulin lashed atop it. He pulled the tarpaulin free and wrapped it around himself, marble eyes peering from beneath the makeshift hood.
He moved inland, slow and silent, past ice warehouses and saw-mills. Then the industrial yards turned to tenements, and he walked between the stoops, from shadow to shadow. At Saint Nicholas Avenue he crossed into a slice of parkland, up a rocky hill and down the other side, nearly stumbling from his stiffness. His frozen hands clutched the tarpaulin; his neck creaked as he turned his head to survey the way forward. He began, in his wordless way, to grow anxious.
Kreindel woke shivering on her cot, knowing somehow that he was near.
She crept out of the dormitory and down to the arched window at the end of the hallway. From here, she could see all the way to the iron fence with its padlocked gate, the thin path to the basement stairwell. A pair of apartment buildings sat across from the gate on 136th, an alley entrance between them.
There, Yossele, she thought. Go there.
Yossele saw it all in her thoughts: the alley, the gate, the path, the door. But first he must cross Amsterdam, and even at four in the morning that meant navigating the produce trucks and milk-wagons that had begun their daily rounds. He couldn’t hide and wait, couldn’t stop moving—so he clutched at the tarpaulin, sped up as best he could, and lumbered through the intersection like a drunkard.
Men shouted—horses whinnied and reared—and then he was across, stumbling into the alley behind the apartments. But he was moving too quickly now, he couldn’t slow down—
He tripped, fell against a garbage bin, and toppled over.
The noise was immense. Shouts rang down from the apartments above, from men and women startled out of sleep. He pulled himself onto his knees and elbows and crawled to the end of the alley, turned the corner, reached the sidewalk, and heaved himself to standing.
Kreindel stifled a gasp as he appeared between the buildings, huge and bent. Quickly she surveyed the street. At one end of the block, a wagon was turning onto Amsterdam; at the other, a man walking along Broadway crossed to the south and disappeared. There was no one else.
She thought, Now!
Across the street he ran, nearly crashing into the gate. One frozen hand lifted the padlock; the other clubbed it apart.
Open the gate slowly, it squeaks!
He did so, sidled through the gate, shut it again, and went on.
Kreindel clambered down from the window and padded to the stairwell. She couldn’t afford to run to him, she’d be caught and then so would he—but oh, how she wanted to!
Doggedly he heaved himself along the cobbles, rocking from side to side. The basement stairwell was before him; he could see the door through his own eyes and now Kreindel’s, too, as she hurried toward it.
He reached the stairwell, leaned against the wall, and slid slowly down the steps. In the warmth of the threshold, he sank to his knees and wrenched his arms outward to catch his master as she opened the door and fell upon him, weeping at long last.
* * *
The jinniyeh who feared no iron might’ve kept her secret indefinitely, bearing the strain year after year, had it not been for her new lover.
He was a jinni from the western reaches, come to the habitation’s center to seek refuge from the skirmishes at the border. Their attraction was mutual and immediate; he became her new favorite, and she sought him out often. Together they flew to the foothills, changing form to whatever shape pleased them that day: a pair of rutting jackals, or falcons falling together through the air.
Then one day he said to her,—I have an idea. Come with me, and we’ll play a trick on the humans.
Nervous, intrigued, she followed him west, skirting the battles and their telltale windstorms. At last they reached the desert’s edge north of Homs. They flew along the border, her lover searching the ground below.
—There, he said at last.
She peered down. A team of men had gathered at a roadside, and were now occupied in digging a trench across it. A clay-walled pipe, longer than the road was wide, sat waiting in the scrub nearby.
—They’ll put that thing beneath the road, her lover said. Water will travel through it to the fields, and the humans will reach a little farther into the desert. I’ve seen it before.
The jinniyeh watched the sweat drip from the men’s faces, saw the steel flash of their shovels and pickaxes. Already they had dug halfway across.—What do we do? she said.
—Just watch, he replied, smiling.
The breeze began a moment later. Soon the men were hunched over, clutching the ends of their head-scarves across their faces as the grit from the roadway assailed them. At last they dropped their tools, and took shelter behind the scrub.
—You see? her lover said, allowing the wind to drop. It’s easy, so long as you avoid the iron.
He was like one of the tales, she thought: the clever jinni who bests the humans, and makes them look like fools. Admiration and desire swelled in her, and the urge to show him that she could do the same.—My turn, she said, and gathered the winds again; and the men who’d begun to emerge from their shelter were forced once again to retreat.
Soon the pair was the scourge of the farmland. They scattered chickens, knocked down fences, ripped the grains of wheat from their stalks. A man might return to his plow only to find the harness missing, or the donkey gone lame with fright. It was dangerous work, for water was hidden
