The officer frowned at her. People on the road had stopped and were beginning to point. Judith clutched the golem’s arm, searching the crowd for Moireh. Finally she found her, hunched under an egg-laden tree at the side of the road, knuckles up against her teeth, eyes wide.
Nekomeh spun around between Judith and the soldier, jabbing her finger at the curious crowd. “You’re nothing but murderers! None of you will survive, not a man or woman—none of you!” Nekomeh turned to the horse again and pounded on it with her fists. She punched its flank, its neck, and then she hit the officer’s leg.
He swung his riding crop with careless precision. The end of it whistled past Nekomeh’s face and cut her.
A bright line of red across her cheek.
Everything went quiet.
In the silence, Nekomeh turned to Judith and said very clearly, so everyone could hear, “Protect us.”
Judith’s heart boomed in her ears. Her hand tightened on the golem’s arm. All she had to do was speak and the golem would drag this man from his horse. It would shove his face into the dirt, break his teeth and skull with its bare hands, and wave the bloody corpse like a flag for every Levan Jew to see.
She stared at the faces in crowd. Two words and this mob would descend on them. It would crush them, golem or not, and then it would turn on Leva without a second thought. She looked up at the officer and met his eyes.
“Protect us,” she whispered.
“You?” He blinked. He rubbed his leg and let out a disbelieving laugh. Someone in the crowd snickered. Two big men nearby elbowed each other and burst into drunken guffaws. Abruptly it was noisy again.
Judith hooked her arm through Nekomeh’s as the officer wiped the crop along the leg of his trousers, turned his horse and spurred it away.
Nekomeh let herself be led to the trees where Moireh was, but her body was stiff with anger. “You could have killed him.”
“And they would have torn us to pieces.” Judith turned and beckoned to the golem, still standing in the crowd, expressionless as ice. “Come!” she called, and it followed them, under the brightly colored eggs and down the slope to the river.
From where she stood on the soft clay bank, Judith could see chimney smoke settling over Leva’s gray stone houses and drifting in the empty streets. Shabbes would begin at sunset, but even now, before the sun touched the horizon, the shtetl seemed dark and lifeless, as though the whole town had sunk into a static nonexistence, waiting for the end of the Easter holiday.
Moireh was further ahead, tugging at her shawl as if she expected a troop of mounted soldiers at any moment. Her terror lay over the beach like the smoke lay over Leva, suffocating and too dense to think beyond.
The golem squatted at Judith’s feet, ankle-deep at the water’s edge, trailing slender fingers in the river. Nekomeh stood beside Judith, dabbing at the cut on her face with a corner of her dress.
“You can’t get rid of it,” said Nekomeh. “You have to keep it, at least for a while.”
Judith sank to her knees beside the oblivious creature. If Nekomeh had her way, the golem would be sent out to patrol the streets of Cracow. One golem to stand between Leva and centuries of hate. It might work once. But then how long would Leva last? She would have to create an army of golems. It would never end, and she would never win.
“I can’t,” she said.
“You’ll never be able to avenge your husband, Judith. None of us will ever be able to have our revenge. Things will go on the way they always have. Is that what you want?”
Judith didn’t answer. Nekomeh let out a hiss of disgust, turned in the soft mud and headed down the bank to where Moireh was waiting.
Judith touched the golem’s shoulder. It felt softer now, like damp earth, not so firm and wiry. “Reva,” she said, but she couldn’t go on pretending the golem was some aspect of her dead child. It was an unearthed piece of herself, a hidden vein of personality which knew instinctively how to hurt and kill.
She touched her own arm with muddy fingers and wrote across the inside of her wrist. Met. Just to see how it would look on human skin.
Red stains. Pounding hoofbeats. Screams in the darkness.
She reached over to turn the golem’s delicate chin toward her. It stared back, resolute in its eyes, firm across its mouth. Knowing or not knowing what she was about to do, it was fearless either way.
“I’m sorry.” She touched its cheek, its hair. She smoothed out the aleph with her thumb.
The eyes blinked. The forehead crumpled in a frown, and then there was only the clay slipping through her fingers. Red clay against the red beach, red in the litter of black stones. What had been its arm dissolved in the water. Hair, mouth, eyes, all blew away as dust.
Judith stood up unsteadily. At the far end of the beach Nekomeh and Moireh were gone. She looked down at her hands, still dark with mud and saw the word for death on the inside of her arm.
With her thumb Judith drew a trembling diagonal next to the Met and added short vertical strokes at the top and bottom.
Aleph. Mem. Tav.
She took a step and stumbled where the bank went soft. She fell to her hands and knees where the golem had vanished, tried to get up and stopped.
Spring flowers burst from the fertile dirt between her fingers. They pressed themselves up in green buds from under her knees. They sprouted around her feet, blooming in the sunset, dense and fragrant, trembling in the evening breeze.
Judith made herself stand. If the very earth had risen for her against its will, perhaps there was a place in the shadow of Cracow’s walls where an old woman could seed the ground with new things. Not revenge. Not fear. Maybe not even peace, but she could do something.
And this time, she could not find it in herself to be afraid.
“The Golem stories I’ve read all strike me as desperate magic invoked by people without further recourse. They are ancient solutions remembered from a time when G-d wasn’t all that dependable. In Jewish mythology, ancient prophetesses, like Ruth and Deborah, are hailed as heroes, but their original roles as goddesses and matriarchs have been obscured. In ‘The Golem,’ I wanted to parallel the alienation of Jewish women within their own culture with the alienation of the Jews in general. As hard as it is to be an Orthodox Jew in the world today (or at almost any time in history), it is even harder for a Jewish woman to embrace her own heritage of matriarchy, while at the same time observing the boundaries of her faith.”
Our Mortal Span
HOWARD WALDROP
Howard Waldrop, born in Mississippi and now living in Washington State, is one of the most delightfully iconoclastic writers working today. His highly original books include the novels Them Bones, A Dozen Tough Jobs, and the collections Howard Who? All About Strange Monsters of the Recent Past, and Going Home Again. He has won the Nebula and World Fantasy Awards for his novelette “The Ugly Chickens.”
Trip-trap! Trip-trap!
“Who’s that on MY—” skeezwhirr — govva grome — fibonacci curve — ships that parse in the night — yes I said yes I will yes — first with the most men — these foolish things — taking the edge of the knife slowly peel the mesenterum and any fatty tissue — a Declaration no less than the Rights of Man — an Iron Curtain has descended — If — platyrhincocephalian — TM 1341 Mask M17A1 Protective Chemical and Biological — Mother, where are you Mother? Mother?—