The Golem and the Jinni (69 page)

“I know a place,” he said. “But we’d have to carry him.”

At this the woman scooped the Jinni into her arms, so easily he might have been a sheaf of wheat—and Saleh began to suspect that he was dealing with not one troublesome creature, but two.

“Doctor Saleh,” she said. “How quickly can you run?”

27.

O
n the edge of Chinatown, in a holding cell of the city’s Fifth Precinct House, an old man lay motionless, sprawled on the soiled floor.

The officer on duty squinted through the bars as he made his rounds. The old man had been brought in unconscious a few hours before, and he still hadn’t stirred. Tiny glass shards powdered his face; his beard and pate were scabbed with blood.
Filthy anarchist
, the lieutenant who’d dragged him in had said, planting a boot in his ribs. But he didn’t look like an anarchist. He looked like someone’s grandfather.

Various cell mates had come and gone over the hours. A few had tried to pick the old man’s pockets but found nothing worth the trouble. Now he lay alone, the last loose end of the overnight shift.

The officer unlocked the cell door and opened it, leaning on the hinges to make them sing. Still the old man didn’t move. The light was dim, but as he approached, the officer could make out the rapid rolling of his lidded eyes, the clench of his jaw. His fingers were twitching in rhythmic spasms. Was he having a seizure? The officer took the nightstick from his belt, leaned down, and prodded one shoulder.

A hand shot up and grabbed his wrist.

The human mind is not meant to house a thousand years of memories.

At the moment of contact with the Jinni, the man who’d known himself as Yehudah Schaalman had burst apart at the seams. He became a miniature Babel, his skull crowding with his many lifetimes’ worth of thoughts, in dozens of warring languages. Faces flashed before him: a hundred different divinities, male and female, animal gods and forest spirits, their features a blurred jumble. He saw precious gilded icons and crude carved busts, holy names written in ink, in blood, in stones and colored sand. He looked down, saw that he was clothed in velvet robes and carried a silver censer; he wore nothing but chalk, and his hands were clutching chicken bones.

The facts of Schaalman’s life began to break apart. His yeshiva friends came to class in silks and soft slippers, mixed their inks in bowls of jade. A prison guard stood above him in a monk’s robe and hood, wielding a knotted scourge. The baker’s daughter turned dusky and black-eyed, her cries like the rolling of an unseen ocean.

His father lifted him from a wooden cradle. On the man’s wrist was an iron cuff, tightly fitted. His mother took him in her arms, put him to a breast of clay.

Yehudah Schaalman thrashed in the current, choked, and went under.

In a moment it would be over, but still he fought. Blindly he reached out—and his fingers closed on a memory that was his and his alone.

He was nineteen again, and dreaming. There was a path, a door, a sunny meadow, a grove of trees in the distance. He took a step, was seized, and held. A voice spoke.

You do not belong here
.

The old rage and grief rekindled, as fresh and painful as they had ever been, and turned to a burning lifeline in his fist. He broke the surface, and gasped.

Inch by agonizing inch he battled the current, setting his memories to rights. The silks and slippers fell from his classmates, the robes from the prison guard. The baker’s daughter regained her sallow skin and hazel eyes. He reached his own first memory and kept going—back to the self before him, and then the one before that. He traveled each life from death to birth, watching himself worship gods and idols of every stripe. In each life his terror of judgment was all-consuming, and his belief absolute. For how could it be otherwise when each faith gave him such powers, allowing him to conjure illusions, scry futures, hurl curses? His own singed and stolen book, the source of all his wonders and horrors: never once had he doubted that it was the knowledge of the Almighty, the One before whom all others were mere graven images. Did its efficacy not prove that the Almighty was the supreme truth, the
only
truth? But now he saw that truths were as innumerable as falsehoods—that for sheer teeming chaos, the world of man could only be matched by the world of the divine. And as he traveled backward the Almighty shrank smaller and smaller, until He was merely another desert deity, and His commandments seemed no more than the fearful demands of a jealous lover. And yet Schaalman had spent his entire life in terror of Him, dreading His judgment in the World to Come—a world that he would never see!

The further back he went, the greater his anger grew, as he watched all his previous selves toiling in their frightened and fervent delusions. Faster and faster his lives rewound—until at last he reached the source, the mouth of the torrent, where there sat an ancient, filthy pagan named Wahab ibn Malik al-Hadid.

The two men regarded each other across the centuries.

I know you
, said ibn Malik
. I’ve seen your face
.

You dreamed of me,
said Schaalman.
You saw me in a shining city that rose from the water’s edge.

Who are you?

I am Yehudah Schaalman, the last of your lives. I am the one who will set things right for all my lives to come.

Your
lives
?

Yes, mine. You were merely the beginning. You bound yourself to the Jinni without realizing the consequences, and your selves died time and again, never the wiser. I was the one to learn the secret.

Much good it will do,
ibn Malik said,
when you die in your turn and the secret is lost.

I will find a way
, said Schaalman.

Perhaps, perhaps not. And the Jinni, what of him? His kind are long-lived, but not immortal. When he dies, we die as well.

Then he must refrain from dying
.

So you think to recapture him? Be certain this is not beyond your limits.

As it was yours?

The dead eyes narrowed.
And what are you but myself, dressed in strange clothing and speaking another tongue?

I am the sum total of a thousand years of misery and striving! You may have given us this broken immortality, but I will be the first to die without fear!

Ibn Malik snarled in anger; but Schaalman was faster. A hand lashed out and caught ibn Malik around the throat.

You cost me any chance at happiness
, Schaalman said.

Ibn Malik writhed around his fist.
I gave you boundless knowledge instead.

A poor second
, said Yehudah Schaalman, and squeezed.

The slop-bucket stench of the cell greeted Schaalman as he woke. His ribs felt bruised, and his face burned with tiny cuts. He tried to get up, but a man in a police uniform was collapsed on top of him. Black blood ran from the man’s ears; wisps of smoke rose from his torso. Schaalman realized he was holding the man’s wrist. He dropped it, and wrestled free.

The door to the cell stood open. Beyond it was a dank corridor, and then the precinct house. He whispered a few words and walked unseen past the handful of officers yawning at their posts. In a moment he was out the open door.

Quickly he walked toward Chinatown’s eastern border, and the Sheltering House beyond. His mind still ached with the press of memory, but the threat of dissolution had receded. For the moment his former selves lay quiet, as though waiting to see what he would do next.

It was only five-thirty, but already Sophia Winston was sitting alone at her family’s long dining table, finishing her tea and toast. For her first nineteen years, Sophia had never been an early riser, preferring to languish in bed until her mother sent the maid in to wake and dress her. Now, however, she was awake and shivering before dawn. The poor maid was forced to wake even earlier, to build the fire in the dining room and ready her mistress’s breakfast. Then the fire had to be lit in her rooms as well—she would retire there after she ate—before the maid could finally return downstairs and fall back into bed.

Sophia had discovered she liked being awake this early, before the rest of the household. She preferred to be alone, reading her father’s travel journals, sipping her tea by the dining room’s roaring fireplace. The only unwelcome company was the portrait of herself as a Turkish princess, Charles’s engagement gift to her. The portrait had been something of a disaster. On the canvas she stood not stately but pensive in her costume, even melancholy, her gaze lowered. She looked less like a princess than an odalisque, captured and resigned. Poor Charles had looked stricken at its unveiling. He’d said little at the supper afterward, only watched her hand shake as she ate her soup. Her mother had ordered the portrait hung in the dining room, instead of the main hall, as though punishing it for failing to meet expectations.

She sipped her tea, and glanced at the clock. Her father liked to wake at six; he would be down soon after for the papers, and then her mother would follow him, to discuss the day’s schedule. Little George would evade his governess and run in, demanding morning kisses. As much as she liked her solitude, she appreciated the morning commotion. It was a brief but necessary reminder that they were actually a family.

She had almost finished her tea when she heard hurried footsteps in the front hall. She’d just had time to think that it was early for visitors, and that she had not heard the bell, when she heard a raised voice—it was one of the footmen—and then a woman’s answer, forceful and urgent. A shout; and then the dining room door burst open. An apparition filled the doorway. It was one of the tallest women Sophia had ever seen. In her arms she carried, somehow, a full-grown man.

“I’m sorry to intrude,” the woman said in an accented voice. “But we need your fireplace.”

She strode into the room. Behind her appeared a man in ragged clothing. A footman lunged for the woman, but she was moving too quickly—how was it possible, with the man in her arms? She brushed past Sophia, who’d stood in surprise, and Sophia caught a glimpse of her improbable burden. He was tall, and thin, and soaking wet. His face was hidden in the woman’s shoulder. A thick metal cuff circled one wrist; it caught the firelight and flashed like a beacon.

Shock coursed through her, stronger than any chill. She stood, mesmerized, as the woman knelt before the giant fireplace, swept the screen aside, and threw the man into the fire.

The footman shouted in fright, but now the ill-dressed man grabbed him and tried to wrestle him out of the room, saying something in a language Sophia couldn’t place. The woman stared intently into the blaze, as though waiting for a sign. The fire had banked at the man’s weight, but now it was crackling merrily again, surrounding him with flames like a Viking on his pyre. As Sophia watched, his clothing began to smolder and burn away, leaving his skin whole and untouched.

He’d told her a story once, hadn’t he, while she lay half-asleep in his arms? A story about the jinn, fantastic creatures made of fire. And then, in Paris, that all-consuming heat, as though a burning spark had lodged inside her body. It made no sense at all—and yet something whispered to her,
yes, of course. You have always known this.

Clouds of smoke filled the room, and the stench of burning cotton. The footman broke from his wrestling match and ran into the hall, presumably to raise the alarm. The ill-dressed foreigner scowled in resignation and went to the tall woman’s side. He spoke to her in that other language, and she nodded. “Ahmad,” she called.

The figure on the fire stirred.

“There!” the woman shouted, joy in her voice. The ragged man said something in reply, hand shielding his eyes.

A commotion from outside; and then the butler strode in shouting, tailed by three footmen and, Sophia’s heart sank to see, her father. The woman turned at their approach, her back to the fireplace, as though to shield the man inside. She was bracing for a fight, Sophia realized. Her father was calling for the police. The room was about to break into pandemonium.

“Everyone please be quiet,”
Sophia shouted.

And indeed the room quieted, in surprise as much as anything. Sophia crossed to the fireplace and bent to see more clearly. “Sophia,” her father called, a frightened warning.

“It’s all right, Father,” she said. “I know this man.”

“What?”

The man on the fire moved again, convulsing as though in pain. The logs beneath him shifted, and Sophia and the woman jumped backward as he tumbled out of the fireplace in a cloud of smoke and ash. He came to rest curled on the flagstones, his body streaked with soot and embers. The air around him shimmered, and for a moment Sophia thought she saw him glowing like a coal.

Swiftly the tall woman bent over him. The ragged man said something in warning, and she pulled her hands back at the last moment. “Ahmad?” she said.