The Golem of Paris Read online

They stepped onto the abraded concrete patio fronting Sam’s apartment. While his father felt for his keys, Jacob stashed the last two beers behind a dead potted plant. For later.

  • • •

  THE INTERIOR WAS CLOSE AS EVER, dust saturating the air between the boxes of books that defined his father’s world. It gave Jacob a pang to see the dining table preset for a meager Sabbath lunch. Challah rolls like the ones Jacob brought his mother, tap water and grape juice in foam cups, a solitary paper napkin folded into a decorative triangle. The plastic place setting included a coffee spoon that would go unused.

  A mistake, coming here. Jacob could feel his resolve weakening.

  He begged himself to remember: his father had lied.

  Sam said, “Can I offer you something to eat?”

  “No, thanks. You go ahead, though.”

  Sam recited the kiddush. Jacob resisted the reflex to answer amen.

  As his father hobbled to the kitchen to wash his hands, Jacob took his customary seat at the table. His heart was threatening to explode.

  He said, “I’m sorry to barge in on you like this.”

  You’re not sorry. You’ve done nothing wrong.

  Sam reappeared with a tub of tuna fish. He made the blessing on the challah, tore off a chunk, and dipped it in salt and ate. “I’m just happy to be near you.”

  “Don’t do that,” Jacob said.

  Sam appeared genuinely perplexed. “What did I do?”

  Ignoring him, Jacob said, “I’ve been to see Ima.”

  “I know. It means a lot to—”

  “Stop.”

  Sam flinched.

  Jacob exhaled in a tight stream. He stood up. “It’s stifling in here.”

  In the kitchen, he pried up the window sash and stuck his head out. He’d consumed enough alcohol to feel edgy, not nearly enough to round that edge off.

  He checked the refrigerator for wine.

  The damn thing was bare.

  “When was the last time Nigel brought you food?” he called.

  “Wednesday, I think.”

  Jacob puckered with resentment, reading his father’s poor condition as an act, orchestrated to pluck at a son’s conscience.

  That wasn’t fair. Sam hadn’t known he was coming.

  Fuck fair.

  He came back to the dining room, putting a seat between them.

  “How do you know Divya Das?” he said.

  “I don’t,” Sam said.

  “Bullshit. When she visited me in the hospital, you recognized her. I saw it.”

  “I’ve never spoken to her, other than that day,” Sam said.

  “Please, please don’t bullshit me. Please.”

  “I’m not,” Sam said. “I don’t know her, specifically.”

  “What’s that mean, specifically?”

  Sam got up from the table.

  “Where are you going?”

  “One second.”

  Sam bushwhacked to the far corner of the living room. Jacob heard him shifting boxes. Upon return, Sam had swapped his dark glasses for his magnifying spectacles, and he took advantage of the moment to get closer, sitting next to Jacob and sliding him a decaying hardcover.

  “Bear in mind that this is an old copy,” Sam said.

  The book was thick as a dictionary, its cover unmarked.

  Jacob flipped to the title page.

  Dorot shel Beinonim.

  The Generations of the Middle Ones.

  If it was a sacred text, it was unlike any he had seen.

  No scripture. No commentary. Just spiderwebbed diagrams, inked by hand on thick vellum. Alien characters filled the first twenty or thirty pages before giving way to Sanskrit, Hebrew, Greek, Arabic, Latin, Cyrillic, pictographs.

  Jacob pointed to an unfamiliar script. “What is that?”

  “Ge’ez. From Ethiopia.”

  “Abba.”

  Sam looked up, his eyes ludicrously enlarged. “What?”

  “You can see.”

  “Enough.”

  “You’re walking around with a cane.”

  “Drivers pay better attention when they think you’re blind.”

  Jacob shook his head, went back to reading.

  There was a system. That much he could tell. He jumped ahead ten pages at a time, groping at comprehension. Dotted lines, wavy lines, broken lines, lines that ran to nowhere: he was looking at the relationships between husbands and wives, parents and children, siblings. Where a line touched the margins, a number appeared. He could turn to the corresponding page and find its continuation.

  It would be possible, he realized, to tear out all the pages and piece them together.

  Creating a single, enormous family tree.

  The final entry, before the pages went blank, was in his father’s handwriting.

  “For your mother’s sake, I tried to keep track of them,” Sam said.

  Jacob shut the book. He felt the beginnings of a migraine. “Keep track of who?”

  “You won’t believe me. It’s just a theory, anyway.”

  “Humor me.”

  Sam sighed. He went back into the stacks, returning with several more books.

  The first was familiar enough to Jacob: the Bible.

  Sam opened to the sixth chapter of Genesis, reading aloud in the original Hebrew.

  “‘And it was when men began to multiply on the face of the earth, and daughters were born to them, the sons of Elohim saw the daughters of men, that they were good, and they took them as wives. And God said, “My spirit will not judge in man forever, for that he is also flesh. His days will be a hundred and twenty years.” The fallen ones were on the earth in those days, and also after that, when the sons of Elohim came to the daughters of men, and they bore to them.’”

  He stopped reading and looked up.

  “That’s it?” Jacob asked.

  “‘The sons of Elohim.’ ‘The fallen ones.’ Surely you’ve wondered what those things mean.”

  “I’ve wondered.”

  “And? What’s your interpretation?”

  “My interpretation,” Jacob said, “is that it’s a myth, written a long time ago by guys sitting around a campfire who smelled like sheep and believed in magic.”

  Sam shrugged. “Fine.”

  “You were the one who told me that.”

  “I said it was a myth?”

  “You said—I can’t believe you don’t remember this. I came to you and asked how it was possible that God had a hand. For smiting. You remember what you said?”

  “That it was a metaphor, I assume.”

  “Yeah. A metaphor. Which is a very hard concept for a six-year-old to grasp, by the way. You got me in a shitload of trouble at school.”

  For the first time, Sam smiled.

  “‘Elohim’ means ‘judges,’” Jacob said. “It’s saying there were powerful men and they took the best women for themselves. It’s no different nowadays.”

  “You know very well that’s not the primary meaning.”

  “If you’re going to tell me it means ‘gods’—”

  “I’m telling you that you have to look at the context,” Sam said. “Not Elohim. ‘Sons of Elohim.’ As a phrase that has its own distinct definition. It’s like what Mark Twain said about the difference between ‘lightning’ and ‘lightning bug.’”

  “You don’t think you’re being kind of literal?”

  “Quite the opposite,” Sam said. “You know who the sons of Elohim are. I know you know. We learned it, together.”

  Jacob knew.

  Angels.

  “If you’ll bear with me,” Sam said, reaching for a second book, “I’d like to show you some other sources—”

  Jacob held up a hand to stop him.

  “That’
s fine,” Sam said. “We can look at it later.”

  “I don’t need to look at it.”

  “I don’t know why you’re getting upset at me, Jacob. You asked me a question. I’m attempting to answer comprehensively. I told you you weren’t going to believe me.”

  “What’s upsetting to me is that you believe it.”

  Sam said nothing.

  “Divya Das is a doctor,” Jacob said.

  “And so she is.”

  “She works for the Coroner.”

  “Yes, she does.”

  “Mike Mallick is a cop.”

  “Yes, he is.”

  That Sam had not asked who’s Mike Mallick unsettled Jacob.

  He plowed on: “Mel Subach is a cop. Paul Schott is a cop. These are people with jobs. They have houses and cars and kids.”

  “People can be more than one thing,” Sam said.

  “They’re still people.”

  “I’m not disputing that,” Sam said. “In a sense.” His voice was hypnotic, indifferent: he didn’t care if Jacob believed him. “That’s what the ‘Beinonim’ in Dorot shel Beinonim refers to: they’re not exclusively one or the other. They’re both.”

  “Angel-human hybrids.” Jacob heard himself laughing, trying far too hard.

  Sam was unfazed. “The verse itself says it. ‘The sons of Elohim came to the daughters of men, and they bore to them.’ Listen. Listen to this.”

  He was reaching for another book, The Dead Sea Scrolls of Qumran.

  “You can read me quotes all day long,” Jacob said. “That doesn’t make it true.”

  Sam cleared his throat, took a sip of water. “Part of the problem is that these topics, by their very nature, tend to attract a certain kind of person, given to superstition and speculation. The literature is cluttered with misinformation.”

  “But you know better.”

  “My ideas have been cobbled together over years. But I’ve noticed patterns, yes.”

  “Such as.”

  “Obviously, they’re extremely tall,” Sam said. “A common alternative translation for ‘fallen ones’ is ‘giants.’”

  “Obviously.”

  “They don’t eat, or very sparingly.”

  “Giant anorexics. Gotcha. Anything else?”

  “They’re goal-oriented, but they have limited power over the affairs of men. Mostly they work through pressure and intimidation.”

  “So, giant, anorexic middle management,” Jacob said.

  “They refuse to enter a synagogue.”

  “Hey, maybe I’m one of them.”

  “Not possible. I’m not, and neither is your mother.”

  “That’s, that’s, wow, a really huge weight off my shoulders. Thanks.”

  “You would know better than I do,” Sam said. “You’ve witnessed firsthand.”

  That spiraled Jacob back to hideous recollection.

  The greenhouse.

  Mai contracting to a black point.

  Mallick and Subach and Schott, three tall men, advancing on him, expanding into a shrieking legion. Accusing.

  You have done a great wrong.

  Then as now, Jacob felt his mind yawning open and he clenched his eyes and pressed the chasm shut.

  When he looked again, he felt tired and dry. The light on the wall had mellowed. His father sat quiet as a well.

  Jacob said, “They call themselves Special Projects.”

  “Fitting.”

  “What do you call them?”

  Sam opened a third book—The Books of Enoch. The margins were heavily annotated, one word in particular underlined whenever it appeared.

  Irim.

  The Wakeful.

  “They want to kill her,” Jacob said. “Mai.”

  “Again, you’d know better than I would. But I don’t think they do. The way I understand it, she’s like a subcontractor.” Sam paused. “Perhaps that’s the wrong word.”

  “She’s a hit woman,” Jacob said.

  “Well, yes, I assume that’s part of the job description. The form she takes, the task, depends on time and place. I suppose you could say they loan her out. What is a golem but a vessel? Her spirit—that is eternal. That’s what they’re afraid of, Jacob. Ultimately, they’re responsible if she gets loose.”

  Silence.

  “In Prague,” Jacob said. “I saw a clay figure. In the attic of the Alt-Neu Synagogue. The caretaker said it was the Maharal. But it looked like you. Exactly like you.”

  “I’ve told you,” Sam said. “I’m not the important link.”

  Jacob remembered the tombstone of the Maharal’s wife, whose name was Bina’s middle name. A disquieting thought struck him.

  “I’m descended on both sides,” he said.

  He stared at his father. “You and Ima. You’re cousins.”

  Sam hesitated. “Not close.”

  “How close is not close?”

  “There’s nothing to worry about,” Sam said. “Royalty did it all the time.”

  “You’re not royalty.”

  “I should also point out that it was not unusual among first-generation immigrants. Couples often met at family circles.”

  “You’re not a first-generation immigrant.”

  “What I’m getting at, son, is that plenty of these unions have taken place—”

  “In Alabama.”

  “I intended to tell you. I wanted to. We haven’t been speaking.”

  “Don’t even,” Jacob said.

  Sam studied him with concern. “Are you all right?”

  “You mean other than the fact that I’m inbred?”

  “Don’t denigrate yourself,” Sam said. “You’re an heir. Twice over.”

  “Which makes me a magnet for her. And them. And here I thought it was my good looks. Anything else you’d like to share?”

  Sam got up from the table again, bypassing the library and continuing on into his bedroom, returning soon with a small object that he set on the table.

  A clay bird.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA

  AUGUST 1982

  Bina sorts the mail.

  Bills, bills, junk, and then a surprise: the familiar flimsy blue-green paper of an Israeli aerogram, nearly impossible to open without damaging its contents.

  She lights the stovetop, fills a kettle, waits for the water to boil.

  Jacob, strapped in his high chair, his face plastered with marinara sauce, says, “Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeee.”

  It’s an eerily accurate impression of the kettle’s whistle, good enough to draw a call from the living room:

  “Bean? Are you making tea?”

  Sam enters, a book in each hand.

  “Eeeeeeeeeee,” Jacob says.

  He stops squealing and grins. Sam and Bina break into laughter.

  “Very good,” Sam says. He kisses Jacob on the head.

  Meanwhile the real kettle has begun to pipe. Bina waves the aerogram through the steam to loosen the glue. “You can have the water when I’m done.”

  “Who’s it from?”

  She shakes her head. No return address. For the first few months following their departure from Israel, she and Sam kept up a lively correspondence with their friends. It abated as everyone accepted that the Levs weren’t coming back.

  These days it’s rare to find anything but bills in the mail. The irony is that they came to Los Angeles hoping to ease the financial strain.

  The old joke had it: how do you wind up with a million dollars in Israel?

  Start with two million.

  After Sam got the job offer—pulpit position, two-year contract, option for a third—they weighed the spiritual loss against the gain in security. If they saved diligently, they could return to Jerusalem with a
nest egg. Enough, perhaps, to buy an apartment.

  Eight years later, they’re still in L.A., living in a rented duplex without air-conditioning, scraping by. Bina looks at her son, drumming the tabletop with his rubber-coated spoon, and she’s amazed to realize how naïve they were.

  In L.A., you need a car. Gas. Maintenance and repairs. Then there are doctors’ bills. Rent. The mind-boggling American cost of living.

  Bina works open the aerogram’s curling flap—a delicate operation, with her nails cut painfully short. In a perfect world, she’d prefer to leave a little length. But clay gets trapped underneath, making her look like some unwashed orphan out of a nineteenth-century novel. No amount of digging with the nail file gets it out. It dries, shrinks, and falls out on its own, shedding everywhere—tiny moons, immune to vacuuming, forcing her to crawl around the apartment, picking them out of the carpet fibers.

  Who has time for glamour? She has a toddler to care for. And her husband—her kind sweet husband, with his head jammed in the clouds—he thinks she’s beautiful, perfect, just as she is. He tells her so, often.

  Sometimes she wishes he would stop.

  Bina manages to open the aerogram without shredding it.

  “It’s from Frayda,” she says. “She’s coming to visit.”

  “Wonderful.” Sam decants the boiled water into a mug. “When?”

  “She gets in on Monday.” Bina folds the damp paper in half. “She could have given us a bit more notice.”

  “You know how long those things take to arrive,” Sam says. “She probably mailed it a month ago.” He sits at the breakfast table, dunking a tea bag with one hand and petting a happily babbling Jacob with the other. “What’s the occasion?”

  “Fund-raising for Sulam.”

  “Ah,” Sam says, blowing on his tea. “I should introduce her to Abe.”

  “You don’t have to do that. She’s staying with us, that’s more than enough.”

  “Whatever you want,” he says.

  What does she want? She wants him to be more annoyed. He can’t help being decent. She loves him because he is so decent.

  Still, it’s not always fun, living with a saint.

  She says, “I have no idea what I’m going to say to her.”

  “I’m sure it’ll be easier than you think,” he says.

  He takes a single sip of tea, checks his watch. “Oops, gotta run. Study time with Dr. Prero.” He kisses Jacob. “Bye, bubba.”