The Golem and the Jinni (8 page)

In a nondescript tenement hallway, Boutros Arbeely opened a door and stepped back to allow his guest admittance. “Here it is. My palace. I know it’s not much, but you’re welcome to stay here until you find a place of your own.”

The Jinni gazed inside with alarm. Arbeely’s “palace” was a tiny, dim room barely large enough for a bed, a miniature armoire, and a half-moon table pushed up against a dingy sink. The wallpaper was pulling away from the wall in thick ripples. The floor, at least, was clean, though this was something of a novelty. In honor of his guest, Arbeely had kicked all his laundry into the armoire and leaned against the door until it shut.

Eyeing the room, the Jinni felt a claustrophobia so strong he could barely bring himself to enter. “Arbeely, this room isn’t fit for two inhabitants. It’s barely fit for one.”

They’d been acquainted for little more than a week, but already Arbeely had realized that if their arrangement was to work, he’d have to curb his irritation at the Jinni’s offhand slights. “What more do I need?” he said. “I spend all my time at the forge. When I’m here, I’m asleep.” Gesturing to the walls, he said, “We could string a sheet across, and bring in a cot. So you don’t have to sleep in the shop anymore.”

The Jinni looked at Arbeely as though he’d suggested something insulting. “But I don’t sleep in the shop.”

“Then where have you been sleeping?”

“Arbeely. I don’t
sleep.
”

Arbeely gaped; for he hadn’t realized. Every evening when he left the shop, the Jinni would still be there, learning to work the delicate tinplate. And each morning, on returning, he’d find the Jinni hard at work again. Arbeely kept a pallet in the back room, for the nights when he was too tired to drag himself to his bed; he’d simply assumed that the Jinni was using it. He said, “You don’t sleep? You mean, not at
all
?”

“No, and I’m glad of it. Sleep seems like an enormous waste of time.”

“I like sleeping,” Arbeely protested.

“Only because you tire.”

“And you don’t?”

“Not in the way you do.”

“If I didn’t sleep,” Arbeely mused, “I think I’d miss the dreams.” He frowned. “You do know what dreams are, don’t you?”

“Yes, I know what dreams are,” the Jinni said. “I can enter them.”

Arbeely paled. “You
can
?”

“It’s a rare ability. Only a few clans of the highest jinn possess it.” Again Arbeely noted that casual, matter-of-fact arrogance. “But I can only do so in my true form. So there’s no need to worry, your dreams are safe from me.”

“Well, even so, you’re more than welcome—”

Irritated, the Jinni cut him off. “Arbeely, I don’t want to live here, awake or asleep. For now, I’ll stay in the shop.”

“But you said—” Arbeely paused, not wanting to go on.
I’ll go mad if you keep me caged here for much longer
, the Jinni had said, and it had stung. Their plan required that the Jinni be kept out of sight until Arbeely had taught him enough to pass as a new apprentice; but this meant that the Jinni was forced to stay hidden in the back of the shop during the day—a space nearly as small as Arbeely’s bedroom. Arbeely understood that the Jinni chafed at the restriction, but he’d been hurt by the implication that he was the Jinni’s jailor.

“I suppose I would feel odd if I had to stay in a room all night and watch a man sleep,” Arbeely conceded.

“Exactly.” The Jinni sat down on the edge of the bed, and looked around once more. “And really, Arbeely, this place is terrible!”

His tone was so plaintive that Arbeely started laughing. “I don’t mind it, really,” he said. “But it isn’t what you’re used to.”

The Jinni shook his head. “None of this is.” Absentmindedly he rubbed the cuff on his wrist. “Imagine,” he said to Arbeely, “that you are asleep, dreaming your human dreams. And then, when you wake, you find yourself in an unknown place. Your hands are bound, and your feet hobbled, and you’re leashed to a stake in the ground. You have no idea who has done this to you, or how. You don’t know if you’ll ever escape. You are an unimaginable distance from home. And then, a strange creature finds you and says, ‘An Arbeely! But I thought Arbeelys were only tales told to children! Quick, you must hide, and pretend to be one of us, for the people here would be frightened of you if they knew.’ ”

Arbeely frowned. “You think I’m a strange creature?”

“You miss my point entirely.” He lay back on the bed and stared at the ceiling. “But yes. I find humans strange creatures.”

“You pity us. In your eyes, we’re bound and hobbled.”

The Jinni thought for a moment. “You move so slowly,” he said.

Silence hung between them; and then the Jinni sighed. “Arbeely, I promised I wouldn’t leave the shop until you felt the time was right, and I’ve kept that promise. But I meant what I said before. If I don’t find some way to regain my freedom, even a degree of it, I believe I’ll go mad.”

“Please,” Arbeely said. “Just a few more days. If this is going to work—”

“Yes,” the Jinni said, “yes, I know.” He stood and walked to the window. “But in all of this, my one consolation is that I’ve landed in a city the likes of which I never could have imagined. And I intend to make the most of it.”

Warnings flooded Arbeely’s mind: the inadvisability of wandering strange streets at night, the gangs and cutthroats, the bawdy houses and stews and opium dens. But the Jinni was looking out the window with an air of hungry longing, across the rooftops to the north. He thought again of the Jinni’s image of himself, bound and hobbled.

“Please,” he only said. “Be careful.”

After the stifling confines of Arbeely’s bedroom, the tinsmith’s shop seemed almost cavernous in comparison. Alone, the Jinni sat at the workbench, measuring out solder and flux. He had to be careful with the solder; his hands were warm enough that it tended to melt if he held it too long. Arbeely had patiently demonstrated how to spread the solder along a joint, but when it came time for the Jinni to try, the solder had run from the plate in a river of droplets. After a few more tries he’d begun to improve, but it strained every ounce of his patience. He longed to simply meld the seams with his fingers, but that would ruin the point of the exercise.

It galled him, though, to curtail the one ability he had left. Never before had he truly appreciated how many of his powers were lost to him outside his native form. If he’d known, he might’ve spent more time exploring them, instead of simply chasing after caravans. The ability to enter dreams, for example, was something he’d barely ever used.

Like all their other attributes, this ability varied wildly among different types of jinn. In the lesser
ghuls
and the
ifrits
, it manifested as a crude possession, performed mostly for amusement, trickery, or petty revenge. The possessed human would become little more than a poorly handled puppet until the jinni grew tired and abandoned the game. Many of the possessed were permanently damaged; some even perished from the shock. In the worst cases, the jinni would become trapped in the human’s mind. When this happened, it was almost a certainty that both human and jinni would go insane. If the human was very lucky, a shaman or minor magician might be on hand to drive the possessor from its prey. Once, the Jinni had encountered one of his lesser brethren soon after it had been forced from a human in this way. The burning, twisted thing had been perched on a stunted tree, babbling and howling as the branches smoldered around it. The Jinni had observed it with a mixture of pity and distaste, and avoided the tree by a wide distance.

The Jinni’s own abilities were nothing so blunt as wholesale possession. In his native form he could insinuate himself into a mind painlessly, and observe it without being noticed. But he could only do so when the subject lay in the realm of sleep, its mind open and unguarded. He’d tested this ability only a few times, and only on lesser animals. Snakes, he learned, dreamed in smells and vibrations, their tongues darting to sample the air, their long bodies pressed close to the dirt. Jackals dreamed in yellows and ochers and fragrant reds, reliving their kills as they slept, their limbs and paws churning at the air. After a few such experiments, he’d mostly left off the practice: it was mildly amusing, but it tended to leave him confused and disoriented as he readjusted to his own formless form and regained his sense of self.

He’d never tried to enter a human’s mind. The dreams of men were said to be slippery and dangerous, full of shifting landscapes that could trap a jinni and hold him fast. A wizard, the elders warned, could snare a jinni in his mind, trick it into a dream-labyrinth and force it into servitude. They’d made it seem like a reckless folly even to consider it. Likely they’d overstated the danger, but still he’d refrained, even when the caravan men had collapsed in sleep at the end of a day’s journey.

Would he have risked it, if he’d known the ability would be taken from him? Perhaps; but he doubted he would’ve gained much from the experience. And in a sense, he reflected as he measured out yet more solder, the loss mattered little. He was now spending more than enough time with humans to account for the difference.

In the Syrian Desert, the last of the spring rains soaked into the hillsides. Delicate blossoms unfurled among the rocks and thistles, dotting the valleys with yellow and white.

The Jinni floated above the valley, enjoying the view. The rain had rinsed the dust from his palace, and now every inch sparkled. Had he thought to leave this behind, to go back to the jinn habitations? Whatever for? This was where he belonged: with his palace and his valley, the warm spring sun and the fleeting wildflowers.

But already his mind was racing ahead to his next encounter with humans. There was, he knew, a small encampment of Bedouin nearby. He’d spied their sheep-flocks and their fires from a distance, their men traveling on horseback, but until now he’d avoided them. He wondered, how did their lives differ from those of the caravan-men? Perhaps, instead of finding another caravan to follow, he would turn his wanderings toward their encampment. But should he remain content with observing them from a distance, when a much more intimate option lay available to him?

Movement below him caught his eye. As though drawn by his musings, a young Bedouin girl had appeared on the ridge at the valley’s edge. Alone save for her small flock of goats, she walked the ridge with a sprightly energy to match the freshness of the day.

An impulse struck him. Descending to the parapets of his palace, he reached out and touched the blue-white glass.

The girl on the ridge froze in amazement as, for a moment, the Jinni’s palace appeared sparkling before her eyes.

The Jinni watched the girl sprint excitedly back the way she’d come, driving her goats before her. He smiled, and wondered what a girl such as she might dream about.

4.

S
lowly, over days and weeks, the Golem and Rabbi Meyer learned how to live with each other.

It wasn’t easy. The Rabbi’s rooms were small and cramped, and the Rabbi had grown used to his solitude. Not that living cheek by jowl with a stranger was a new experience—when he’d first come to America he’d boarded with a family of five. But he’d been younger then, more adaptable. In recent years, solitude had become his one indulgence.

As he’d predicted, the Golem quickly sensed his discomfort. Soon she developed the habit of positioning herself as far from him as possible, as though trying to leave without leaving. Finally he sat her down and explained that she shouldn’t go elsewhere simply because he was in the room.

“But you want me to,” she said.

“Yes, but against my own will. My better self knows that you may sit or stand wherever you wish. You must learn how to act according to what people say and do, not what they wish or fear. You have an extraordinary window into people’s souls, and you’ll see many ugly and uncomfortable things, much worse than my wishing you to stand somewhere else. You must be prepared for them, and learn when to discount them.”

She listened, and nodded, but it was more difficult for her than he realized. To be in the same room with him, knowing he wanted her elsewhere, was a small torture. Her instinct to
be of use
tugged at her to leave, to get out of his way. To ignore it was akin to standing in the path of an oncoming streetcar, trying not to move. She would start to fidget, or would break things by accident—the handle of a drawer ripping away as she grasped it, the hem of her skirt tearing as she pulled at the fabric. She’d apologize profusely, and he would tell her it meant little; but his dismay was hard to suppress, and it only made matters worse.

“It would be better if I had something to
do
,” she said finally.

At once the Rabbi saw his mistake. Without thinking, he’d given the Golem the worst life possible: that of idleness. And so he relented and allowed her to take over the cleaning of the rooms, which until then he’d insisted on doing himself.

The change—both in the Golem, and in the Rabbi’s abode—was instantaneous. With a task to perform, the Golem could lose herself inside it and begin to ignore the distractions. Each morning she would scrub the dishes from breakfast and tea, and then take up the rag and attack the stove, removing a few more layers of the persistent grime that had built up in the years since the Rabbi’s wife had died. Then she’d make the Rabbi’s bed, folding the corners of the sheet tight against the sagging frame. Any dirty clothes in the hamper—save for his undergarments, which he steadfastly refused to let her clean—were carried to the kitchen sink and washed, then hung to dry. The clothes from the day before were taken down and ironed, folded, and put away.