The Book of the Unknown: Tales of the Thirty-six (20 page)

For hours, folks watched the three sleeping burghers, elderly men, well bearded and full-bellied. In their slumber, the men began to snore. They sounded like pigs at a trough. Fearful of what was happening—that their dreams were corrupting them—their wives shook them awake. For a moment, the men looked lost. Then they were talking, all three at once, to establish who owned what.

Nobody listened to their haggling. While the burghers quibbled through the night, beneath the chiming carillon, the town went to sleep.

Over the next three months, a little each night, the town was rebuilt under Tet’s watch. Shops were enclosed and occupied by craftsmen, who began to ply their trades as they did while awake. Fields flourished under horse and plow. Most dramatic, though, was the effect of this dual citizenship on the populace: Because neither wakefulness nor sleep was absolute, each put the other into perspective. Each could accommodate idleness as well as work. Each was a refuge from the other, and a respite.

Tet didn’t take credit for that, though admiration for his enlightened stewardship naturally netted many marriage offers. In one dream, there was even a call to make him mayor. He declined the honor: His job was in the bell tower, ensuring that it rang on the hour, neither less often nor more.

His father refused to follow such a sensible plan. Sol would not sleep in the bed that Tet made for him, nor would he permit any adjustment to his clockwork. He didn’t believe in dreams, no matter what folks told him. He alone stood awake at night, chiming perpetual noon for no one.

Only in that respect was Tet’s vow unfulfilled, and the town not yet suitable for his betrothed. He argued and begged, but still the old man would not relent.

At last he set out to fetch his fiancée anyway. In his dream, he roamed from farm to farm. He found her barn. She was inside, just where he’d left her, only much rounder than he’d remembered.

She motioned him close. She lifted her dress and brought his face to her belly. She ran her hands through his beard, and murmured,
Our baby.

Then she let Tet kiss her, and hire a carriage to take her away. With help from the coachman, he carried her down from the hayloft and up into the covered hack.

All the way home, Tet told her about his town, introducing her by description to everyone. Finally he got to his father.

— He won’t sleep, my papa. He tends to the carillon all night long. It rings and rings and rings, and he believes nothing.

— You haven’t told him about me?

— He calls you my hallucination.

— As the months went by, I was beginning to think that you were mine.

They kissed again, more deeply, emerging from their embrace to find themselves in the middle of his town. Tet emerged from the carriage. The square was abandoned. He began to stammer that the people must be elsewhere.

The girl laughed at him. She pointed at the clock tower.

— Don’t be ridiculous. It’s time to wake up, Tet.

— But we just got here.

— Open your eyes. You can’t dream forever.

For several minutes, Tet struggled to stay asleep, to remain with her. He fought ground and sky into a blur. He went blind.

As he opened his eyes, he saw the carriage riding away. He tried to chase after it. The square was too crowded. Crowded with people gazing in his direction. Behind him, he heard ringing. Was it the carillon? It was a voice, singing out his name.

He turned. First he saw the burghers. Then he saw his father, come down from the bell tower, struck, at last, by tangible truth: Old Sol stood with the other elders behind the girl, whose dress, stretched taut against her swollen belly, shone white in the morning light. She was laughing. She was calling to Tet. She was calling him to their wedding.

YOD THE INHUMAN

When the scholar Meir lost his wife of twenty years, he did not hire the town matchmaker to find him another. Instead he collected mud from the bed of a river, hauled it home, and sculpted it into a girl on the floor of his cellar.

Meir had studied anatomy, and worked every muscle and sinew into the cold clay more accurately than had ever been achieved in a statue. He’d also studied art, and slimmed the girl’s waist narrower, and opened her eyes wider, than had ever been accomplished by nature. Into each empty socket, he set a star sapphire. Then he pricked his finger, and drew with his blood the cipher for life that he’d once seen inscribed in an ancient holy book.

The figure began to breathe. In the candlelight, he saw that her skin was tawny like the clay, and her hair was darkest umber, yet, when he beckoned her, he felt nothing loamy to her touch. By morning, she was his mistress.

Meir gave her his wife’s old clothes to wear, and the dead woman’s wooden brush, so that the girl might keep the sign on her forehead—that enchanting birthmark—always hidden beneath her hairline. He also gave his mistress a name, by which to obey him. He called her Yod.

In almost every respect, Yod was an improvement over Meir’s wife, with whom he’d fought constantly since the day their marriage was arranged. Henye had come from a family with servants, and she’d had no wish to become one herself, but her husband hadn’t accepted a position in her father’s business, as expected: He’d kept to his scholarship rather than becoming a shipping clerk, and, her whole dowry spent on inexplicable books, she’d been left to cook the meals and mop the floors. That, at least, had been her point of view.

In Meir’s opinion, his wife had performed every task inadequately, squandering the pennies he made as a scribe and translator—money earned at the expense of his studies—on flour she could have milled or meat she could have butchered or wood she could have timbered, with her own two hands. When she’d reminded him that she was a cripple, clubfooted since birth, he’d retorted that she’d hidden that well enough while she was in the market for a husband, so it couldn’t be too serious an affliction.

Naturally there were no such faults with Yod, who did what Meir asked of her instantly, without thinking to quibble. Because she hadn’t any needs of her own, all work was the same, and she’d tirelessly keep at it until told to stop. In his house, his rule was absolute, and, within those four walls, he faced the predicament of princes: The totality of Yod’s subservience demanded that he know exactly what he wanted.

With practice, he got good at that. And his satisfaction with her would have been complete, were it not for the least expected of flaws: Meir had trouble taking pleasure in his mistress.

With her clubfoot and hairy chin, his wife had not especially attracted him, nor had his bowlegged scholar’s body and urine-blond froth of beard particularly moved her erotically, yet when they’d gotten down to it, shared hatred had enflamed them, and they’d fought their way to ecstasy. Meir had none of that with Yod. In bed she let him do to her whatever he wished. She consented without comment to acts he’d never have contemplated with Henye, and granted without complaint every favor he asked of her. She was as selfless at copulation as she was at cooking and mopping. But the more of his expectations she met, the less satisfied he felt. Every night before he put her to rest by rubbing the mark of life from her forehead, he gazed at her wide sapphire eyes and tight tawny waist, and wondered what could possibly be wanting. And, every morning, when he pricked his finger and reinscribed the vital sign on her still, clay figure, he pondered how she could conceivably not fulfill his desires.

Because Meir no longer took work as a scribe or translator, and Yod fetched his wood and water, he seldom spoke to other people anymore. But he did have one old acquaintance: He and the village rabbi, Selig, had once been schoolmates.

They were as different as two men could be. Plump and gregarious, the rabbi had a biblically large family that crowded his home, and defined his life, as fully as Meir’s was informed by his library. That Selig had no books didn’t concern folks. At school he would have flunked without Meir’s Talmudic expertise, yet here he was town maggid—while Meir was ignored—because Selig was blessed with common sense.

He received Meir with a ripe kiss on each cheek and a deracinating embrace, while unwashed grandchildren clutched at the fringes of the scholar’s gown. He offered Meir tea, and, when his guest demurred, proposed a walk along the river. He ushered the scholar through a thicket of untended garden, out into the open. They traveled in silence along the river, through croft and meadow, until at last the rabbi asked whether Meir intended to marry the golem he’d made.

— What makes you call Yod a golem?

— Because she is one. A girl like that doesn’t just appear on her own. In town, they’re calling you a sorcerer.

— Then others also know about her? Did you tell them?

— They told me, Meir. They saw a stranger with star sapphire eyes and tawny skin draw water from the well, half her weight to the bucket, and watched where she brought it. If you ever left your books for a minute, you’d hear them talking. The men are hoarse with envy.

— They shouldn’t be. She works hard, and you see how she looks, but that isn’t all a man wants.

— She isn’t a good lover. What did you expect, Meir? The girl is made of mud.

— She follows all of my orders.

— A golem will. The point is, she can’t feel.

Meir hadn’t considered that, for psychology was one field that he had not studied. The rabbi wrapped a hand around the scholar’s stooped shoulders, content to have solved his problem. He didn’t mind that Meir was quiet again as they walked back to town. He took it to mean that this whole vexing golem business had been laid to rest.

Yet Meir’s silence was not calm: Selig hadn’t cured his affliction, but merely diagnosed it for him. He declined the rabbi’s supper invitation. He extracted himself from Selig’s farewell embrace. As the sun went down, he scurried home to Yod, for he knew what had to be done.

That was the night of Yod’s first lesson. Meir began by showing her pain, because it seemed less ambiguous than pleasure, more fundamental. In bed, he pinched her flesh.
Hurt,
he said.

Hurt,
she repeated, expressionless.

He pinched her harder, on the neck.
Hurt,
he said, louder.

Hurt,
she mimicked, and smiled.

He slapped Yod hard across the mouth. He cursed her stupidity. He flipped her onto her belly, pulled her dress up over her rump, and relieved himself inside her numb slot. As he clutched her head to rub her out, she murmured. The word she exhaled, in a voice he’d never before heard, was
hurt.

For several days after that, he ravaged her body with every form of torture he could conjure
—bruise, blister, burn—
to foster the broadest possible understanding of pain. Then he sought to show her pleasure.

At first, she was too tender. She could speak only of hurt, no matter how Meir handled her. But every hour that he stroked her hair, whispering
calm
in her ear, she trembled less with terror.

She began coming to him between chores, laying her head on his lap, and burbling
calm
in her contralto singsong. He gave her kisses, which she learned to
yearn.
From that came naturally the urge that, in her fervid clutch, he told her was
lust,
but which she pronounced
love.

Pleasure changed Yod more than pain. She wasn’t always obedient anymore. She had her own cravings. When Meir didn’t give her the affection she expected, she sat in a chair and pouted, and, if he threatened punishment, she struck first and hit hardest. Every night, he was exhausted by her. Her passion bruised and blistered and burned. In pain, he began to question the wisdom of teaching a golem to feel. But Meir was too weary to see the rabbi or even to look up the matter in his books. And then one evening, after she’d extracted from him every dribble of desire, he fell asleep without blotting her forehead cipher.

Yod had never seen a man dormant. Her master wasn’t at all pleasurable like that. After waiting an eternity, perhaps several minutes in duration, for Meir to revive, she climbed out of bed, and opened the door. Outside, the moon was full. Its glow felt like a cool slip over her bare skin. Yod shivered. Whispering her words—
hurt
and
calm
and
love—
and gathering them under her tongue again for safekeeping, she stepped into the night, seeking feeling.

In Meir’s dreams, he couldn’t move because his flesh was mud. When he awoke, his whole body was frigid. Through the predawn dim, he saw that his door was open. Then a deeper chill beset him: His girl was gone.

Dashing into the street, his shabby robes still open, he tried to determine who’d broken into his home: What man in his town would attempt such a bold theft? Then he rephrased the question: To possess his Yod, who wouldn’t?

He accosted the first folks he met, a clutch of drunken farmhands stumbling down the steps of the village tavern. He stood in front of them, blocking their path.

— Did any of you steal my girl?

— Steal her? She gave herself to us.

— She wouldn’t. You have her, then?

— We sent her away when we were done. We banged your girl good, Meir, but she wanted more men.