At last the orphanage settled into a deeper quiet, and Kreindel slipped out of her bed and down the wide staircase to the basement, the route familiar in the dark. Then, the warmth of the boiler, and the doorknob beneath her hand.
Yossele felt her grow closer, and heard the doorknob turn.
To Kreindel, the storage room was like her father’s synagogue: the same smell of paper and wood and dust, the same welcome stillness of a holy place. She crept her way through the maze of stacks to the narrow corridor, knowing that he was there, that they were only a few steps apart.
He made no noise, moved not an inch. This was their ritual, and he cherished it just as she did.
Foot by foot she entered the alcove, and at last reached out, unseeing in the dark—
He reached out for her, in the dark—
—and felt his cool, solid hand grip hers, to guide her the rest of the way.
For near to an hour she sat in his arms, her tears soaking the velvet at his shoulder while his square-fingered hands stroked her hair. Hide, her father had said, and sometimes she wondered: Why was she still hiding? It would be easy to leave under cover of night, the iron gates being no match for a golem. But as much as she hated the Asylum, she couldn’t make herself run away. She was only fourteen. Her father wouldn’t have wanted her to live on the streets, or work for pennies at a factory that might go up in flames. Here, at least, she was fed, and clothed, and sheltered. Here, she could keep Yossele safe.
She kissed his cheek—this, too, was part of the ritual—and whispered, Good night, Yossele, and retreated again through the maze and up to the dormitory, at last to sleep.
* * *
Toby Blumberg had no reason to think that anything was wrong with his mother.
After all, it wasn’t the first time that she’d dragged herself home past supper and fallen asleep on the couch. He made her comfortable, as usual, placing a pillow beneath her head and covering her with a blanket. She flinched, but didn’t wake. He wondered, did she know about the factory that had burned? It was close to her laundry, it seemed impossible she hadn’t heard—but it was the sort of thing she would’ve mentioned, even in her fatigue. A horrible thing, boychik, just horrible.
“Mama,” he called softly, “I’m going out for a chop suey. Do you want anything?” There was no answer, only the rise and fall of her chest. Well, if she woke up starving, it wouldn’t be on his head.
He carried his bicycle down to the street. He was still in his uniform, though he wasn’t supposed to wear it off duty. He was proud to be one of the youngest messengers in Midtown, and one of the fastest, too. He loved his job, loved imagining the Morse operators in faraway lands sending their signals down wires and across oceans and into his hands so he might speed them the final mile. His mother, of course, lived in terror of him ending up beneath a streetcar. He took a guilty satisfaction in that fear, as revenge for her ongoing silence. I’ll tell you when you’re older—but how old did he have to be before she’d tell him the first thing about his father? Even just his name?
He rode to his favorite chop suey restaurant on Pell Street. The proprietor seemed more subdued than usual, his wife red-eyed. Toby found a spot at a table and ate, and no one glanced his way. He’d noticed that the uniform gave him a sort of invisibility, as though it turned him into a part of the city’s workings, something you’d walk past without noticing, like a statue or a bench.
It was growing late by the time he finished, but he didn’t want to go home, not yet. He wasn’t tired enough; he’d only lie on his pallet and stare at the ceiling, waiting for the nightmare to come. So he got on his bike and rode up and down the avenues until his legs ached and his lungs burned, pretending all the while that he wasn’t avoiding the corner where the Asch Building stood. At last, surrendering to his curiosity, he turned onto Greene Street, and nearly rode straight into the silent crowd.
Immediately he dismounted. Hundreds of women and men stood together in a crescent-moon sweep, all facing the building on the northwest corner. He craned his neck upward and saw the lights creeping about in the topmost floors, beyond the broken windows. Below, the sidewalks shone with puddles of water, as though recently washed.
Movement, at the base of the building. Two firemen emerged, carrying a stretcher between them. Upon the stretcher, draped carefully with a blanket, was something not quite large enough to be a person. The crowd exhaled as one at the sight; a woman’s sob rose into the air like the call of a bird.
Toby wheeled his bicycle away.
His mother was still on the parlor couch, her breath whistling thinly as she slept. She looked sallow in the lamplight, her cheeks slack with exhaustion. He made certain she was covered, and then unrolled his pallet at last, hoping that he’d tired himself enough to sleep without dreaming.
* * *
The Golem sat in her room, desolate.
The walk to Eldridge Street from the subway had been an unspeakable battle, each step a fight against the grief and horror that pulled at her from every direction. Dreadful knowledge had poured into her from each mind that she passed: images of the fire, and the falling women; the sight of the bodies arriving at the Bellevue morgue, more and more of them, so many that the attendants had begun to lay them out along the nearby pier. Occasionally someone had gone past her at a run, someone who’d only just heard and was now frantic for
