The Golem and the Jinni (4 page)

“I don’t have a ticket,” she said, and smiled, hoping that would help.

The officer sighed wearily and placed a hand around the Golem’s arm, as though to prevent her from running away. “You’ll have to come with me, ma’am.”

“Where are we going?”

“You’re going to sit in the brig until we get the passengers sorted, and then we’ll ask you a few questions.”

What should she do? There was no way to answer their questions without exposing herself. Already everyone was staring. Alarmed, she turned in the man’s insistent grip, looking for some sort of escape. They were still under way, fording the middle of the river, smaller ships gliding to either side. Beyond the busy piers, the city gleamed invitingly.

The officer gripped her arm harder. “Ma’am. Don’t make me force you.”

But he didn’t want to force her, she saw. He didn’t want to deal with her at all. More than anything, the officer wished she would just disappear.

The edge of a smile lifted the Golem’s mouth. Here, finally, was a desire she could gratify.

With a flick of her elbow, she broke from the startled officer and ran to the railing. Before anyone could even shout out, she vaulted the edge, arced out into the shimmering Hudson, and sank like a stone.

A few hours later, a stevedore smoking a cigarette on the corner of West and Gansevoort saw a woman walk past from the direction of the river. She was soaking wet. She wore a man’s woolen jacket and a brown dress that clung immodestly to her body. Her hair was plastered to her neck. Most astonishing was the thick, brackish mud that covered her skirt and shoes.

“Hey, miss,” he called out to her, “you go for a swim?”

The woman gave him a strange smile as she went by. “No,” she said. “I walked.”

2.

I
n the neighborhood of Lower Manhattan called Little Syria, not far from where the Golem came ashore, there lived a tinsmith by the name of Boutros Arbeely. Arbeely was a Maronite Catholic who’d grown up in the bustling village of Zahleh, which lay in the valley below Mount Lebanon. He had come to adulthood at a time when it seemed every man under the age of thirty was leaving Greater Syria to seek his fortune in America. Some were spurred on by missionaries’ tales, or by relatives who’d made the journey and whose letters home now arrived thick with banknotes. Others saw a chance to elude the army conscription and punishing taxes demanded by their Turkish rulers. In all, so many left that in some villages the markets fell silent, and the grapes on the hillsides were left to burst on the vines.

Arbeely’s late father had come from a family of five brothers, and over the generations their land had been divided and redivided until each brother’s parcel was so small it was hardly worth the effort of planting. Arbeely himself made barely a pittance as a tinsmith’s apprentice. His mother and sisters kept silkworms to bring in extra money, but still it wasn’t enough. In the general rush to America, Arbeely saw his chance. He bid his family farewell and boarded a steamship bound for New York, and soon had rented a small smithing shop on Washington Street, at the heart of the growing Syrian neighborhood.

Arbeely was a good and conscientious worker, and even in New York’s crowded marketplace his goods stood out as quality for the price. He made cups and plates, pots and pans, household tools, thimbles, candlesticks. Occasionally a neighbor would bring him something to repair, a damaged pot or a twisted door hinge, and he would return it in better shape than when it was new.

That summer Arbeely received an interesting request. A woman named Maryam Faddoul came to the shop with an old, battered, yet rather lovely copper flask. The flask had been in Maryam’s family as long as she could remember; her mother, who’d used it for olive oil, had given it to Maryam when she’d sailed to America. “So you’ll always have a piece of home with you,” her mother had said.

With her husband Sayeed, Maryam had opened a coffeehouse on Washington Street, which quickly became a thriving hub of the neighborhood. One afternoon, while surveying her bustling kitchen, Maryam decided that the flask, while still beloved, had grown a bit too pockmarked and worn. Would it be possible, she asked Arbeely, to repair a few of the dents? And perhaps restore the polish?

Alone in his shop, Arbeely examined the flask. It was about nine inches high, with a round, bulbous body that tapered to a thin neck. Its maker had decorated it with a very precise and detailed band of scrollwork. Instead of the usual repeating pattern, the loops and whorls threaded through their neighbors seemingly at random, before joining up with themselves again.

Arbeely turned the flask around in his hands, fascinated. Clearly it was old, older perhaps than Maryam or her mother knew. Copper was rarely used on its own anymore, owing to its softness; brass and tin were much more durable and easier to work. In fact, given its likely age, the flask didn’t seem as battered as perhaps it should have been. There was no way to determine its provenance, for it had no forger’s stamp on its bottom, no identifying mark of any kind.

He examined the deep dents in the scrollwork, and realized that correcting them would lead to visible seams between the new work and the old. Better, he decided, to smooth out the copper, repair the flask, and then rework the entire design.

He wrapped a sheet of thin vellum around the base, found a stick of charcoal, and took a rubbing of the scrollwork, careful to catch every mark of the maker’s awl. Then he secured the flask in a vise, and fetched his smallest soldering iron from the fire.

As he stood there, his iron poised above the flask, a strange feeling of foreboding stole over him. His arms and back turned to gooseflesh. Shivering, he put down the iron, and took a deep breath. What could possibly be bothering him? It was a warm day, and he’d eaten a hearty breakfast. He was healthy, and business was good. He shook his head, took up the iron again, and touched it to the scrollwork, erasing one of the loops.

A powerful jolt blasted him off his feet, as though he’d been struck by lightning. He flew through the air and landed in a heap beside a worktable. Stunned, ears ringing, he turned over and looked around.

There was a naked man lying on the floor of his shop.

As Arbeely stared in amazement, the man drew himself to sitting and pressed his hands to his face. Then he dropped his hands and gazed around, eyes wide and burning. He looked as though he’d been chained for years in the world’s deepest, darkest dungeon, and then hauled roughly into the light.

The man staggered to his feet. He was tall and well built, with handsome features. Too handsome, in fact—his face had an eerie flawlessness, like a painting come to life. His dark hair was cropped short. He seemed unconscious of his nakedness.

On the man’s right wrist was a wide metal cuff. The man appeared to notice it at the same time as Arbeely. He held up his arm and stared at it, horrified. “Iron,” he said. And then, “But that’s impossible.”

Finally the man’s glance caught Arbeely, who still crouched next to the table, not even daring to breathe.

With a sudden terrible grace, the man swooped down upon Arbeely, grabbed him around the neck, and lifted him clean off the floor. A dark red haze filled Arbeely’s sight. He felt his head brush the ceiling.

“Where is he?” the man shouted.

“Who?” wheezed Arbeely.

“The wizard!”

Arbeely tried to speak but could only gargle. Snarling, the naked man threw him back to the ground. Arbeely gasped for air. He looked around for a weapon, anything, and saw the soldering iron lying in a pile of rags, gently smoldering. He grabbed its handle, and lunged.

A blur of movement—and then Arbeely was stretched out on the floor again, this time with the iron’s curved handle pressed at the hollow of his throat. The man knelt over him, holding the iron by its red-hot tip. There was no smell of burning flesh. The man didn’t so much as flinch. And as Arbeely stared aghast into that too-perfect face, he could feel the cool handle at his throat turn warm, and then hot, and then hotter still—as though the man were heating it somehow.

This
, Arbeely thought,
is very, very impossible.

“Tell me where the wizard is,” the man said, “so I can kill him.”

Arbeely gaped at him.

“
He trapped me in human form! Tell me where he is!
”

The tinsmith’s mind began to race. He looked down at the soldering iron, and remembered that strange foreboding he’d felt before he touched it to the flask. He recalled his grandmother’s stories of flasks and oil lamps, all with creatures trapped inside.

No. It was ludicrous. Such things were only stories. But then, the only alternative was to conclude that he’d gone mad.

“Sir,” he whispered, “are you a jinni?”

The man’s mouth tightened, and his gaze turned wary. But he didn’t laugh at Arbeely, or call him insane.

“You are,” Arbeely said. “Dear God, you
are.
” He swallowed, wincing against the touch of the soldering iron. “Please. I don’t know this wizard, whoever he is. In fact, I’m not sure there are any wizards left at all.” He paused. “You may have been inside that flask for a very long time.”

The man seemed to take this in. Slowly the metal moved away from the tinsmith’s neck. The man stood and turned about, as though seeing the workshop for the first time. Through the high window came the noises of the street: of horse-drawn carts, and the shouts of the paperboys. On the Hudson, a steamship horn sounded long and low.

“Where am I?” the man asked.

“You’re in my shop,” Arbeely said. “In New York City.” He was trying to speak calmly. “In a place called America.”

The man walked over to Arbeely’s workbench and picked up one of the tinsmith’s long, thin irons. He gripped it with a look of horrified fascination.

“It’s real,” the man said. “This is all real.”

“Yes,” Arbeely said. “I’m afraid it is.”

The man put down the iron. Muscles in his jaw spasmed. He seemed to be readying himself for the worst.

“Show me,” he said finally.

Barefoot, clad only in an old work shirt of Arbeely’s and a pair of dungarees, the Jinni stood at the railing at Castle Gardens, at the southern tip of Manhattan, and stared out across the bay. Arbeely stood nearby, perhaps afraid to draw too close. The shirt and dungarees had come from a pile of old rags in the corner of Arbeely’s workshop. The dungarees were solder-stained, and there were holes burned into the shirtsleeves. Arbeely had had to show him how to do up the buttons.

The Jinni leaned against the railing, transfixed by the view. He was a creature of the desert, and never in his life had he come so close to this much water. It lapped at the stone below his feet, reaching now higher, now lower. Muted colors floated on its surface, the afternoon sunlight reflecting in the ever-changing dips of the waves. Still it was hard to believe that this was not some expert illusion, intended to befuddle him. At any moment he expected the city and water to dissolve, to be replaced by the familiar steppes and plateaus of the Syrian Desert, his home for close to two hundred years. And yet the moments ticked away, and New York Harbor remained stubbornly intact.

How, he wondered, had he come to this place?

The Syrian Desert is neither the harshest nor the most barren of the Arabian deserts, but it is nevertheless a forbidding place for those who do not know its secrets. It was here that the Jinni was born, in what men would later call the seventh century.

Of the many types of jinn—they are a highly diverse race, with many different forms and abilities—he was one of the most powerful and intelligent. His true form was insubstantial as a wisp of air, and invisible to the human eye. When in this form, he could summon winds, and ride them across the desert. But he could also take on the shape of any animal, and become as solid as if he were made of muscle and bone. He would see with that animal’s eyes, feel with that animal’s skin—but his true nature was always that of the jinn, who were creatures of fire, in the same manner that humans are said to be creatures of earth. And like all his brethren jinn, from the loathsome, flesh-eating
ghuls
to the tricksterish
ifrits
, he never stayed in any one shape for very long.

The jinn tend to be solitary creatures, and this one was more so than most. In his younger years, he’d participated in the haphazard rituals and airborne skirmishes of what could loosely be called jinn society. Some minor slight or squabble would be seized upon, and hundreds of jinn would summon the winds and ride them into battle, clan against clan. The gigantic whirlwinds they caused would fill the air with sand, and the other denizens of the desert would take shelter in caves and the shadows of boulders, waiting for the storm to pass.

But as he matured, the Jinni grew dissatisfied with these diversions, and took to wandering the desert alone. He was inquisitive by nature—though no one thing could hold his attention for long—and rode the winds as far west as the Libyan Desert, and east to the plains of Isfahan. In doing so, he took more of a risk than was sensible. Even in the driest desert a rainstorm could strike with little warning, and a jinni caught in the rain was in mortal danger. For no matter what shape a jinni might assume, be it human or animal or its own true shape of no shape at all, it was still a living spark of fire, and could easily be extinguished.