At 72nd Street the doors opened to admit a dark-haired man in a brown suit, carrying a leather briefcase. He took a seat across from the woman, his briefcase upon his lap.
The woman glanced up at him and smiled shyly.
He smiled shyly back.
Stop after stop went by, he pretending to read a newspaper, she pretending to read her novel. In their months of riding the subway together, they’d never spoken a word. He was a clerk, she’d decided, judging by his briefcase and the ink on his fingers. She, he was certain, was a teacher of some sort. He’d once spied a copy of The Settlement Cook Book in her bag; she, an issue of The American Hebrew & Jewish Messenger in his. By these favorable signs their hopes had been raised. But decency demanded they have a good reason to speak to each other, and neither could ever find the proper entrée, both being rather timid in these matters. And so they rode on silently beneath the river to Brooklyn, where he departed at Borough Hall, and she at Atlantic Avenue.
The Golem took the subway back to the Spring Street station, berating herself for her voyeurism. That was going too far, she told herself as she walked along Lafayette with the crowd. You all but followed that poor woman home, just to distract yourself from thinking about Ahmad—
And suddenly, as though she’d conjured him, she spied him across the street.
He was standing in the middle of the sidewalk, staring up at an ordinary loft building, a strange look upon his face. He must have come from the shop, for he still wore his leather apron, and hadn’t bothered to put on a jacket.
She crossed Lafayette as quickly as she could without drawing attention. The passersby were giving him a wide and startled berth, and when she neared, she saw why. He was radiating heat, as though he’d bathed in fire. His collar was singed, and his sleeves, too, though he’d rolled them nearly to his elbows.
“Ahmad?” she said, alarmed. “What’s happened?”
“Chava, look at this,” he said, gesturing to the building. He hadn’t so much as glanced at her yet. From his tone it was as though he’d fully expected her to find him there.
“Look at . . . the building?”
“The iron.”
She remembered, then: the cast-iron facades, the ones he’d scoffed at. “I thought you didn’t like them,” she said cautiously.
“I don’t. They’re ridiculous. Why make an iron building and give it columns, and capitals, and pediments? Why not let the iron be itself? And for that matter”—he turned to her now, and she nearly recoiled from the heat—“Why must a building be square?” He gestured all around. “Square plots, square buildings, boxes upon boxes. Why?”
“Ahmad,” she said, “are you all right? Why are you so warm?”
He reached into the pocket of his apron and pulled out a fist-sized object. “Look,” he said, and handed it to her.
Whatever it was, it was nearly too hot to touch. She joggled it a moment, then peered at it: a rounded lump of steel like a river rock, its bottom flattened as though he’d poured it on a table to cool. Along one raised side was a thick band of opaque blue-green glass. The glass, she saw, had come first; the metal had then draped itself over and around it—as though to form a low, curved house, and the glass a long and tapered bank of windows, set beneath smooth steel eaves.
He nodded, watching her. “You see it, too, don’t you? Arbeely told me once, ‘We’re tinsmiths, not an engineering firm.’ But Chava, what if we were?”
He didn’t wait for an answer, but grabbed the steel-and-glass lump from her—she flinched, but he didn’t notice—and started south at such a pace that she had to run a few steps to keep up. “Slow down,” she urged as others stared. But he was lost inside his inspiration, talking to the air, switching languages too quickly for sense. She heard the word or half a dozen times before she realized it was ore, that he was speaking of rocks; and what, in her bewilderment, she’d taken for schlag, whipped cream, was—“Ahmad, what is ‘slag’?”
“The glass,” he said, impatient. “It forms during the smelting, it’s the oxides, the impurities. I’ll have to experiment with it, but I’ll need a hoard’s worth, more than a—”
The word that emerged next was an unformed sound, a breath of air. He startled; his step faltered. A cloud of confused anger passed across his face—and the Golem realized that, for the first time in her presence, he’d tried to speak his own language.
He glanced at her, then away again. “But that won’t be a problem,” he muttered, walking on. “Hibbing sells it by the train-car.”
They were nearing Little Syria now, and she realized she had a choice: abandon him to his mania, or be seen walking with him in broad daylight, perhaps even up to his apartment. She gritted her teeth and stayed with him. They’d have words about this later. “Where are we going?”
“To Arbeely’s,” he said, as though it were perfectly obvious. “I have to tell him, it’s his, too.”
“What’s his?”
“Our new business.”
“Your—Wait. Ahmad, wait.” She hurried ahead, turned and placed herself before him, as though to stop a moving train. For a moment she thought he’d walk around her, or cross the street—but at last he halted, and folded his arms with annoyance.
“Please, calm yourself,” she said, “and think of Arbeely. He’s in delicate health, you can’t go turning his world upside down for a—a piece of metal and glass—”
“You don’t think I can build it,” he said.
She gaped at him. “I know you can! That’s the problem! You can make such beautiful, astonishing things, but—”
“But only at night,” he said, cutting her off. “Behind curtains, in the dark. When and where I’m allowed.”
She sighed. “I understand how frustrating it is. You must know that.”
“No, Chava, I think you’re perfectly glad to hold yourself to
