In the east the sky turned a dull shade of red. The wind blew harder, and she shivered in her damp clothes. The golem lay uselessly on the riverbank, sprawled like an unconcerned sleeper. In fairy tales, chants from the Caballah would bring a golem to life. Magical formulas written on parchment would be placed in its mouth and a rabbi would inscribe the word of life across its forehead: Truth, written in Hebrew, Emet, three letters, right to left—aleph, mem, tav. She didn’t know the chants or formulas, but she knew the word.
With one numb finger she traced into the soft clay across its brow.
Aleph. Mem. Tav.
The wind changed direction and the smell of ash drifted in from the burnt ruins of the shtetl.
This is man’s work.
Judith caught her breath, her fingers over the motionless lips.
Only G-d can make clay come to life, old woman. Not you.
The words seemed to come up from inside herself, disembodied from the dirt on her hands, under her nails.
You have no business creating life from mud when you could have done it the way G-d intended, with your body.
“But I couldn’t,” she whispered. “Not after Reva died.”
Then you’ve failed as a wife and a mother. All you have to show for yourself is a pile of dirt.
Judith stared down at the clay face, the marks of her thumbs on its cheeks and chin. In the pale light of morning there was hardly anything to it. Her night’s work had melted to a mound of clods and pebbles. She crouched on the riverbank, caught in the slow morning, suffused, finally, with doubt. Tears dripped down her face to seep into the clay. She tore at her hair until blood came, and mixed with her tears and the dirt, and the truth.
In broad daylight Judith opened her eyes.
She sat up, stiff from lying on the ground. The fire, all the killing and being abandoned by Nekomeh and Moireh, seemed more like a nightmare — too horrible for her to have come up with on her own, so it must have been real. Even the golem? Judith looked up and down the clay beach, but her mound had shrunk to a vague heap, and that was a relief. The thin, leggy thing had too much of her own weakness in it, and none of Motle’s strength. She stood up and brushed off as much of the clay as she could, wondering how far away Nekomeh and Moireh were. A brisk walk into the afternoon and she would probably be able to find them. Judith squinted up the river just to be sure no one else was around, and saw someone sitting on the bank.
It was a girl. A naked girl with her legs boyishly crossed, dirt smeared over her white skin, staring out over the river.
Judith felt her heart shudder. At first she thought it was someone from the gentile town making herself at home. But her profile was familiar — long dark hair and a determined mouth. One of the shtetl girls, stripped and abused no doubt, but still, another survivor.
Judith got to her feet and hurried toward her. “Are you hurt?” she said. “Come, we’ll find some clothes. …”
The girl turned and blinked, expressionless. Her face was smeared with mud. Her body was covered in it, red handprints everywhere.
Judith stopped. Her eyes darted to the shrunken mound of clay and back to the girl.
The girl smoothed dark hair away from her forehead with filthy fingers. The word, written in scarlet clay, red as blood, gleamed against her skin.
Emet.
Judith turned and fled.
Without hesitation, the golem followed.
It—She—followed until Judith stopped under the stone pillars of the bridge where the river made its first bend. Judith was too winded to go any further, but the golem, despite its immodest dirtiness, seemed ready to run all day long.
“Go away!” Judith shouted at it, but it didn’t. It just stood there, watching her intently, its dirty face unnervingly familiar. “What do you want?” cried Judith, her voice echoing under the bridge, but the golem didn’t say anything.
Could it speak? Judith wasn’t sure. In the fairy tales, she couldn’t recall golems doing much but following the orders of the rabbis who made them, protecting Jewish villages from the murderous rabble, or in peaceful times, sweeping out the Temple. She slumped in the shadows of the bridge’s stone buttress. What should she tell it to do? Fight for her? Protect her? Go back and kill gentiles until she felt avenged? Judith eyed the golem, but was almost afraid to look at it. If making a thing like this was such a straightforward act — if even a woman could do it — why hadn’t Motle made one? He’d been an intelligent, educated man. He could have set a golem at the gates of the shtetl, where it would have stood, invincible to clubs and guns, untouched by hatred. Instead, he’d been brave.
Overhead, wagons rumbled across the river, invisible and threatening. The golem stood, alert, slender as some young animal and just as unselfconscious. A beautiful girl, thought Judith, except it wasn’t a girl. Still, it looked like a girl. A naked one.
Judith fumbled with her clothes until she could slip out of her linen underdress without taking off anything else. She tossed the underdress nervously into the space between her and the muddy creature. “Put this on,” she said to the golem.
The golem squatted to obey, shoving its arms into the fabric, ducking its head into the skirt, tangling in the fabric, biting at it.
Judith picked her way across the damp stones and pulled the underdress away before the golem tore it to bits. “Put up your arms,” she said, and it obeyed, eyes watchfully sharp. Judith pulled the skirt over its head, then the bodice and sleeves. Dried red clay flaked off its dark hair and caught in the rough linen. Judith brushed the dirt from its shoulders, warm and firm with girlish muscle. It frowned up at her, and Judith realized what made its face so familiar.
It looked like her first and only child, Reva, who had died so young of fever. The child Motle said was as much like her mother as a mirror.
Judith jerked her hands away, not sure whose image she had pressed into the dirt — her daughter’s, or her own. “Get up,” she said. “Let’s go.”
The road to Leva was known for its bandits. Judith and the golem kept to the river, where the bank was rough with stones. By late afternoon Judith’s feet ached. She wondered if Nekomeh and Moireh had chosen the quicker, if more hazardous route and gone up the hill to follow the road. The more she thought about it, the more she doubted it.
“If you’d turned out as a man, the way you were supposed to,” she muttered to the golem, “we’d be halfway to Leva by now.” She limped between the rocks, wondering if that was true. If Motle had survived and had been traveling with her instead of this thing, they would still be picking their way along the river.
She tried hard to imagine what combination of faith and gender might make for safe passage in daylight, or alone in the night, and found it hard to come up with anything.
As the afternoon darkened into early evening, her sore feet, her grief held at arm’s length, and the nauseating hunger in her stomach became such a weight that she almost fell to her knees. Nekomeh’s shout from a thicket of trees brought her to a halt, blinking in the dusk.
Nekomeh stumbled across the beach, grabbed Judith’s arm and froze when she saw the muddy girl dressed in Judith’s underclothes.
“Who is that?”
Judith wearily pushed the golem’s dark hair aside to show her the word on its forehead.
Nekomeh let out a wail of despair. “How could you?” she cried. “How could you have made another woman?”