He, She and It (69 page)

“Joseph, lie down!” The Maharal’s voice could crack glass.

Joseph slowly sits on the floor. He does not lie as bidden. “What are you going to do to me?” He stares at the Maharal, then at each of the men in turn, trying to read their eyes. Yakov cannot look him in the eyes. Itzak, too, breaks his gaze and looks away. Only the Maharal looks at him—implacable, unflinching.

“Joseph, lie down.” The Maharal’s voice is quiet but not soft. It is hard and slick and dark. It scares Joseph.

Joseph folds his arms in protest. “What are you going to do to me? I haven’t done anything bad. I carried out what you wanted. I did it all.”

“Joseph, you have fulfilled your function. Now you can return to your previous existence. Whatever you are really, you can once again become.” The Maharal extends his arms and begins to chant.

“No! I want to live. I want to be a man!” Joseph tries to rise, but he cannot. The Maharal dances around and around him like a strange black crane stepping in the darkness, bearing the Torah. Inside the circle the Maharal has drawn, Joseph thrashes but cannot move. Slowly he slides back, until he is lying on the floor. He lies with his eyes open. His lips keep saying, “No, no,” chanting the refusal. He looks again at each of them. “Don’t let him do this to me! I deserve to live!” He struggles and struggles to sit up. His tremendous strength has left him. He is caught like Samson in Delilah’s hair; he is bound like the shorn Samson. “I fought for you! I saved you! I am a man too, I have my life as you have yours. My life is sweet to me.”

The Maharal goes on chanting, all the gates of the holy name and the alphabet running backwards now, a wheel of sound spinning around Joseph, tu tu tu tu tu, toh toh toh toh toh, from the end of the alphabet backward spiraling.

Now Joseph can no longer speak, but still his lips form the words. “No! No!” he mouths at them. His gaze will not leave
them. His eyes will not stop pleading. Yakov feels sick, and his own eyes burn with pity.

“You must go backward, in the reverse order,” Judah tells Yakov and Itzak. The syllables they chanted three months before, they now must reverse. They must go backward and speak backward. Gradually Joseph’s mouth stops moving. His lips fall slack. His eyes glaze over. His head lolls. His features begin to blur. His hair begins to sink into his scalp. His nails recede. He looks as if he is melting. Gradually his face becomes smooth as a rock that has lain on a river bottom. His fingers become one lump. But there the process stops.

The Maharal draws a sheet over Joseph’s figure. “We will tell everyone Joseph was refused by Chava and has gone home to his mother.”

Yakov says, “But suppose someone comes up here and finds him?”

“We’ll announce there is a danger of fire if people go upstairs. We will lock and padlock the door. But you will know, and you will tell your children that the Golem sleeps here.”

Itzak says, “What do you mean, sleeps? Can he wake now?”

“Never by itself. But if knowledge and fearful need are joined, it can be roused to life.”

The men turn, gazing at the huge body shrouded under the sheet. It indeed looks as if it could rise and walk again. Then they lock and padlock the door and make their way down the narrow staircase.

“I am so very tired,” the Maharal says, leaning on Yakov. “It is time for the Jews of Prague to think who shall replace me. The angel is growing impatient.”

They know which angel he means.

Soon afterward, the Maharal died. Chava continued to edit his papers. In the meantime, Isaac Horowitz waited for her in Eretz Israel and perished there still waiting. Perl did not live the year and was buried side by side with Judah in the old cemetery under the same monument, where I used to leave a stone, sometimes on her side of the grave bed, sometimes on his.

Chava was considered too picky by the shadchens of the ghetto. What did she want anyway? She had turned down Isaac Horowitz, one of the finest scholars of his time. She had turned down the strongest man in all of Prague. She had turned down Yakov, who had fathered three sons with his first wife, may her memory be blessed, and then three more with his second. So who would be good enough for the Maharal’s granddaughter,
if she didn’t want strength and she didn’t want brains and she didn’t want virility?

Chava delivered all the babies of the ghetto. She was an honorary aunt to everyone, a woman who liked middle age better than she had liked being young, who felt a sense of relief as wrinkles fissured her face and her brown hair streaked with gray. She liked to read, she liked to eat, and she did not mind caring for her elderly mother, Vogele. She carried on an elaborate correspondence with scholars on two continents, some of whom had no idea she was a woman. If she ever thought of Joseph, we have no record; but then she left as a memorial her grandfather’s books and her own scholarly correspondence, not a diary or personal missives. It is reported only that on Joseph’s yahrtzeit, the anniversary of his disappearance, every year she lit a candle for him as for a dear relative. Outside the locked door of the attic, there used to be visible the dried remains of flowers.

Finally Chava set forth, making her aliyah to Eretz Israel. It was a long and hard journey for a woman alone, one she never completed. Chava died in Sofia, of food poisoning from a tainted meal. Her life was a learning and a journeying, but Chava never arrived. Unlike her grandfather, she did not hear the angel stopping for her. Dying filled her with brief vivid surprise.

Stories are still related about the attic of the Altneushul. Students told them to each other at the university there when I was young. There are surely times, when the Jews of Prague were being packed off to die of slow poison under the gas nozzles or even more slowly of being worked to death for the German corporations, eighteen hours starving, the ideal factory workers of all time, we could have used Joseph. But no one has known how to wake him. The need has risen, but the knowledge had been lost. Till now. Thus, Yod, ends the story of Joseph the Golem, which I promised to tell you. Close file. Computer off.

Now Avram and I share with the Maharal the glory and the guilt of having raised the Golem to walk on the earth with men and women, to resemble, but never to be, human. That last sentence I speak only to myself. My story for Yod is complete. I await his response.

FORTY-SIX

The Task of Samson

Even though Y-S had promised to wait for the meeting and sent the terms through promptly at nine Monday morning, Yod intercepted an attack by two assassins in the Base late Monday afternoon. A gesture designed to emphasize Tikva’s vulnerability and the extent of Y-S resources and savagery? Yod was flying at supper. “I dispatched the first at once.” He snapped his fingers, a trick he had learned from Nili just that week. “The second was a shape-shifter. Surprising in a human. I’m convinced he was the actor who played Shira’s ex-husband. There’s an electronic pattern, almost a flavor minds have.” He smiled at Shira. “Apt use of metaphor? He eluded me twice and once laid an ambush. A truly exciting duel. His mind was supple—a worthy opponent makes a good game.”

In the Council room, this time Shira sat in the first row between Malkah and Yod, so that she had to spend half her time twisted around in her seat to look at whoever was talking. Today the Council must rule whether Yod was the property of Avram or of the town, or whether he was a citizen. By now people were yelling instead of speaking normally. The temperature in the room had risen alarmingly, both actually and emotionally. The committee set up to make a recommendation on Yod’s status had split down the middle, unable to agree. Half considered him no different except in degree from their office computer; the other half felt that a conscious being had rights no matter whether that entity was made of flesh or circuits or ectoplasm. Thus the ground had been set for the kind of brouhaha that had occupied the town every few months since Shira was old enough to notice. There was nothing people liked so much as a good political fight about principles or ecological correctness or the constant nurturing of true equality. Partners and siblings could scream at each other. Everybody could take sides, persuade, entreat, scheme, manipulate, all in the name of some higher goal. Eventually some dim consensus would be
patted together and the peace of utter fatigue would descend. It was one of the major sports of the free town.

Here politics was still a participatory rather than a spectator sport. Every last voter expected to voice her or his opinion at some length and to be courted or denounced. The right to stand up and make a speech for the guaranteed three minutes on any point was a birthright of all: the right to bore your neighbors, the right to spout utter nonsense while all around you openly groaned, the right to hiss and boo other speakers, to get red in the face and mutter, to demand a recount on any voice vote, to pull out obscure rules and execute fancy maneuvers while everyone glared.

Tonight the town voters were frustrated, because no sooner had they really launched into a wonderfully polemical discussion of Yod’s status, which promised to pull in everybody to one or another faction, than Avram got the floor and announced the Y-S ultimatum. It took people a few minutes to react fully, because speakers had already quoted the Mishnah, Rabbi Loew, Marx and the Marx Brothers, Freud, Robert Burns, Schopenhauer, Plato, Ben Rah, Gertrude Stein, Krazy Kat and Rabbi Nachman. The discussion was so acrimonious and delicious, no one wanted to accept that Y-S was threatening them. But gradually the room cooled with a sense of mutual sadness, as of a tryst interrupted.

Shira thought that Yod would finally win if the discussion continued, for the foundation of Tikva was libertarian socialism with a strong admixture of anarcho-feminism, reconstructionist Judaism (although there were six temples, each representing a different Jewishness) and greeners. They would almost always choose the option that seemed to offer the largest degree of freedom. Yod had prepared a speech, but Zipporah ruled he could not deliver it until the committee appointed to study him had made its report, on which it could not yet agree. No report from the committee, no vote, no ringing defense of himself by Yod.

Y-S was a hierarchy with a head. Tikva was a town meeting, a full and active democracy. They were accustomed to deciding every detail of town policy and budget openly and at whatever length it took to reach agreement. The threat from Y-S slid through the collective consciousness of the town, leaving a strong disquiet, but no outside danger could abort the process of political discussion already engaged.

Finally Zipporah gaveled the meeting to quiet and called for the town to meet again the next night. They would continue
every night till they reached agreement. That was how town meetings ran every spring, and that was how this decision would be reached. The motion was passed by close to unanimous voice vote, as Avram shouted his opposition with perhaps fifteen others who thought the Y-S threat was not being taken seriously enough.

Zipporah announced the meeting would reconvene the next night at nineteen-thirty. They were all to try to think hard about the issue of Yod’s citizenship. Now a circle formed around Yod. The speech he had prepared so carefully was undelivered, and he was looking downcast. Nonetheless he attempted to answer clearly all the questions thrown at him. After last Monday’s meeting, people had hung back from him, shocked at the revelation. By tonight, many of them had worked up considerable curiosity.

“Can you tell if I touch your hand?”

“What does your skin feel like? Oh …”

“Does your hair grow?”

“How fast is your processing speed?”

“Do you remember being created?”

“Do you like people?”

“What do you want from us?”

“Can you die?”

“Do you consider yourself a Jew?”

When Yod answered this last question in the affirmative, Zipporah decided that she had to set up a second committee, of all six of the local rabbis, to reach a decision as to whether a machine could be a Jew. The rabbis all brightened considerably and went off together, two men and four women ranging in age from twenty-nine to eighty-three, arguing, gesticulating, quoting. Zipporah had just made six people extremely happy.

Shira was hopeful. Rabbi Patar would be in Yod’s corner because he had been attending her services for weeks whenever he was free. No rabbi was going to rule that one of her congregation isn’t a Jew.

“Why do you want to be a Jew?” Sam persisted.

“I was created as a Jew,” Yod said. “I was programmed for halacha, with the need to carry out mitzvot. As with yourself, I want to fulfill my nature.”

“I’ve had the impression,” Hannah said to Shira but also to everyone in earshot, “that you and he or it or whatever had a relationship. But that can’t be. Why did you give that impression?”

Yod stopped talking and turned to hear her answer. Shira
had a very interested audience. She had agonized beforehand; but since the proceedings in the Council had never approached her personal life, she had begun to think her worries frivolous.