Black Heart, Ivory Bones

The Golem SEVERNA PARK

Severna Park, a Lambda Literary Award nominee, is the author of three novels: Speaking Dreams, Hand of Prophecy, and The Annunciate. Her short stories have been published in Realms of Fantasy and in the online magazine, Event Horizon: Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror. She lectures for the women’s Studies Department at the University of Maryland, and has contributed articles to the program’s Science Fiction and Fantasy Feminist Newsletter. Park also reviews short fiction for Tangent, and for the Lambda Book Report. She lives with her partner in Frederick, Maryland, where she is at work on the sequel to The Annunciate.

The sound of shooting at Easter should not have surprised her, but this year it was early, a week before Good Friday. Crack. Judith’s withered fingers slipped on the brown earthen water jar. Crack. The spring air echoed with gunshots, then thin screams and hoofbeats. Judith clapped her hands over her ears and the water jar fell, splitting over the black river stones. Crack. The ground trembled under galloping horses, and the smell of smoke drifted through the line of dense trees between Judith and her village, the shtetl called Zebbe.

She crouched on the riverbank, skirt bunched in cold fists. Sprigs of new flowers quivered at the edge of the woods, and tufts of green grass. Beyond the trees, fire licked up into the gray spring sky.

Judith made herself stand on unsteady legs, her mouth dry as dust. Nothing would protect her in the season of renewal — not her frail body or her gray hair. At this very moment her husband, Motle, would be rushing to the shtetl gates, like last year, like every year, his black rabbi’s coat flapping in the cold air, his fists raised against the onslaught. Last year he’d been spattered with mud, struck in the face, and trampled nearly to death. This year it would be no different, Motle stepping into the path of the horses and their righteous riders, Motle with his arms flung out, shouting in his thunderous voice for them to stop.

This time Judith knew in her heart that he would not be spared. It was her duty to be at his side, no matter that her courage was no match for his. She took a stumbling step, and another, and began to run, gasping over the iron taste of fear, terror bursting her old woman’s lungs. Fear made the air in front of her eyes swarm with black specks, like a cloud of flies, and her knees shook so much that she thought she would have to crawl through the trees to where thatched roofs burned under folds of smoke. She fell under bare branches, grabbing at last season’s thorns and dry weeds until she found herself at the edge of her tiny village, transformed from the place she had grown up into a choking nightmare of fire.

Riders plunged between burning houses, half real in the wavering heat. They galloped after women with long dresses and covered heads. They tore through freshly turned gardens to overtake men in dark coats who fell in the dirt, torn by hooves and clubs and bullets.

“Motle!” The cry wrenched out of Judith’s mouth. A horse shoved past, riderless. The reins slapped Judith’s face and her strength left her legs. She fell in the mud, only to find Motle there, blood in his white beard, his hat and yarmulke ground into dead grass, hands flung out in his final gesture. Stop!

That night she hid by the river until she heard the sounds of weeping in the reeds. She crept out into the moonlit dark and found Nekomeh, a friend since childhood, and her own cousin, Moireh. Judith hardly recognized them, hunched and thin in their black dresses, eyes red in their swollen faces, whispering the names of their children and husbands. Judith huddled with them, weighted down by her old grief and now this new one. First her daughter, Reva, taken years ago by the comparative mercy of fever. Now Motle, gone in an eye blink.

“Who’s going to say the Kaddish for the dead?” whispered Moireh. “All the men … we can’t say Kaddish without the men.”

“You’re the rabbi’s wife,” Nekomeh said to Judith. “You should know. What can we do?”

Moireh trembled in her shawl. “We have to get away. My cousins live in Leva Tefla, down the river.”

“That’s fifty miles,” said Nekomeh.

Moireh nodded, put her hands over her face and began to sob.

Judith stared at the river. Mist lay over the water, as insubstantial as she felt. If the wind were to blow, just a little, she thought her body would drift away, a shred at a time.

They gathered the bodies as well as they could in the dark and buried them in a narrow, seeping ditch. It was the best three old women could do, and as the moon rose, they went back to the river to lie down, exhausted, in the reeds.

In Judith’s dream Motle’s bloodless face stared up from his shallow grave and his lips began to speak.

Old wife, you will never make it to Leva Tefla, not the three of you women alone. You must have some kind of protection.

What can I do? she asked, crouched at the edge of the miserable rut she had left him in. What can I do? You were the strong one. You were the one who blocked the gates.

You must do what women do. You must make a new life.

The sides of the grave crumbled inward. Dirt slid over him in gentle runnels until his features were covered with a fine layer of silt, but not obscured. Judith watched her husband turn from a man made of flesh to a man made of earth.

She opened her eyes and sat up in the light of the moon. She reached over to touch Nekomeh’s hand.

“Wake up,” said Judith. “I know what to do.”

“Why are you doing this?” Nekomeh asked again.

Judith sat back on her heels, more covered with dirt than the thing she was building. “I told you why.” Arms and legs were slowly taking shape under the wan moon. Mud pressed into mud. Clay smoothed against clay. She was no sculptor, and it bothered her that the shoulders were too narrow and the legs too long. She’d wanted to give it Motle’s wide-set eyes, broad brow and beard, but the shape of the face was too vague — a dent where the mouth would go, pebbles to mark the eyes. Now she pushed away the pebbles and hesitated over the empty sockets.

“You’re wasting time,” said Nekomeh, sounding exhausted. “If we start now, we can get to Tefla in five days. It isn’t going to work, anyway. It was just a dream.”

Moireh rubbed her eyes. “My mother, may she rest in peace, used to speak to me in my dreams. She would give me advice about my marriage. Most of it didn’t help.” She touched her arm where it had been broken, years before, not by any gentile but by her husband in a drunken fury.

“My husband always said dreams were misleading without a proper interpretation,” said Nekomeh. “Are you sure Motle didn’t mean it was time to leave?”

“I’m sure.” Judith separated clay fingers. The mud thing lay on its back, gripping at the ground, either reluctant to emerge or holding itself back. Judith smoothed mud along the length of one arm. The moon came out from behind a cloud and the faceless form seemed to solidify.

“It’s too thin,” said Moireh.

There was a long silence and finally Nekomeh said, “A golem is just a fairy tale.”

“This is what he told me to do,” said Judith. “He told me we would never make it to Leva without protection.”

“It’s no safer to stay here,” said Nekomeh. “You think the Goyim are going to wait for the ashes to cool before they go looking through our houses? You think they won’t be curious about who was left to dig the graves?” She touched Judith’s arm. “You can’t wait for it to come to life. We have to go, Judith. Right now.”

Clay stared eyelessly upward, expressionless dirt made white by the moon.

“I can’t,” said Judith.

“You’re afraid to go,” Nekomeh said gently. “We understand. Motle was the strong one. He always took care of you, but this time you have to take care of yourself. You have to come with us, Judeleh. Don’t you understand? If you stay here, you’ll be killed.”

Judith didn’t answer. She patted mud into the thing’s unformed face, smoothing and scraping and rearranging, pushing at the eyes, now wider than she thought they should be, now too narrow. The nose had turned out soft, not hawkish, like Motle’s. The chin was too delicate. She started to ask for Nekomeh’s opinion, but when she looked around, she was alone.

The only sound was the low surge of the river and the wind. Cold had settled into her joints. The night was too chill for the comforting voices of frogs or crickets, and she could almost hear her bones creak. Judith wiped her hands on her skirt. All she had to do was get up and move on, but to dismiss the dream was too much, a betrayal.

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?”

Nekomeh scowled at the golem, half lit by the moon. “Strange that it turned out female,” she said when Judith finished explaining. “I’ve never heard of that before.”

“It looks like you, Judith,” said Moireh.

Judith was too tired to analyze her bizarre handiwork. “I think she looks like Reva.”

The three of them sat together in the thicket in the freezing dark, too frightened of being seen to build a fire. The golem sat by itself, arms across its knees, unaffected by the night or the temperature.

“How far to Leva?” Judith asked after a while.

“Four days.” Nekomeh shifted next to her. “On the road it’s four days, anyway. It could take a week if we stay by the river.” She put a foot over one knee and rubbed her ankle.

“We’ll starve before we get there,” said Moireh.

Judith stared into the night and found herself looking into the golem’s dark eyes. Did the golem have to eat, too? Who could they beg — or steal — a potato from? Or a turnip? She was too tired to think through all the answers and her head was swimming. She would fall asleep between Nekomeh and Moireh, and for all their fears and nighttime terrors, the two of them would hold her up until morning. She let her eyes close. Perhaps Motle would come in a dream and give her an answer. In the density she thought was the beginning of sleep, she heard a crashing in the dried leaves of the thicket and then a man’s voice.

“Down here.”

Nekomeh’s fingers dug into Judith’s arm hard enough to make her gasp. On the other side, Moireh held her breath.

The golem turned its head toward the sound, wakeful and dangerously alert in the moonlight.

The crashing in the underbrush came closer.

“Hey,” said a second voice. “are you sure you saw—”

The first man told him to shut up.

Judith took a breath. It came out again as a thin trail of steam. “You,” she hissed at the golem, and the creature turned its glittering, animal eyes on her. What did the rabbis say to their earthen servants in every unlikely story?

“Protect us,” whispered Judith.

The golem rose to its feet. The noise stopped and for a hopeful second Judith thought the men would go somewhere else. Perhaps they were on their way to the river for a particularly wily, nocturnal fish. But that was wrong and she knew it. A twig snapped under a heavy foot, close enough for her to touch.

“I see ’em—”

Two men in coarse, ragged clothing came out of the scrub trees. One had a rifle. The other had a club.

The man with the gun stared at the golem, its black hair flowing over its shoulders, its head uncovered. He took a step toward it and touched its arm as if to make sure it was really there.

Judith’s heart pounded high up in her throat. “Now!”

The golem drove its fingers into the man’s eyes without a cry or warning, or any change in its face. The man reeled backward, howling. His companion raised his club and swung it against the golem’s hip with a sound like a stone hitting packed dirt. The golem didn’t flinch. It lunged at him, wrapping slender fingers around his neck, shaking him until his spine snapped. It dropped him and turned to the blinded man who was trying to crawl away, whimpering in the dirt.

“Stop!” shrieked Judith, and the golem obeyed.

In the blackness there was a huge silence. Then Nekomeh opened her mouth, dry lips over dry teeth, a rasp of understanding rushing out of her. “Let it,” she said. “Let it kill them. Let’s take it home and let it kill them all.”

“Stop,” said Judith, the way Motle might have, stop with his arms flung out to stop the murder and the murderers, now and forever.

They traveled on the road for the rest of the night and into the morning, too tired to be afraid. When daylight came, they walked along the edge of the dirt highway, passed now and then by non-Jews in donkey carts, or on foot. No one paid them any attention. Judith stared after every passing wagon, feeling alternately lucky and then invisible. Years of violence and hatred were somehow blocked off by something so entirely new she couldn’t find a name for it.

“Look at it,” said Moireh, and she nodded at the golem. “Why does it walk like that?”

“What do you mean?” said Nekomeh.

“I mean it just …” Moireh held her arms out from her body and made wider steps until she was swaggering. “What kind of woman walks like that?” She pulled her arms in again, hunching in the cold sun.

Nekomeh bent herself over and hobbled, imitating Moireh. “You’re ten years younger than me or Judith, and you walk like some old crone.”

“It’s my bones,” replied Moireh. “You know he broke my arm. And my knee hasn’t been right since …” She shrugged, but she sounded almost proud of the things her husband had done in his nights of drunken fury. Because she had survived them, Judith thought.

“If you’d had a golem in your house,” said Nekomeh, “your husband would never have hurt you.”

“Maybe you should have had one,” Moireh snapped back. “In all the stories I’ve ever heard, the rabbis make the golem clean until there’s trouble. You could have used one.” She turned to Judith. “Do you think it can do chores?”

Judith tried to picture the golem, trapped in the shtetl with a mop and a bucket, its back bent by housework. “No,” she said. “I don’t think it can.”

Moireh studied the creature. “It’s supposed to be a servant.” Her mouth twisted in confused disgust. “Not a … a wild animal. Or whatever it is.”

“It isn’t wild,” said Nekomeh. “It just doesn’t know how to be afraid.”

“I don’t understand where that came from,” said Judith. “Since I’m the one who made it.”

Moireh glanced at her. “What do you mean?”

Judith shrugged. “I was down by the river when the shooting started. I was too afraid to go back, even when I knew what was happening.” She made a weak gesture at the golem. “It would have dashed in and killed everyone. I could hardly move.”

“The golem is invulnerable,” said Nekomeh. “It’s made of mud and can’t be hurt.” She studied the creature as it walked along. “We should have made one years ago.”

“You could have been killed,” said Moireh. “Why wouldn’t you be afraid?”

“Motle wasn’t.”

Moireh took Judith’s hand. “Motle is dead,” she said. “All of them are dead, afraid or not.”

By nightfall the road was deserted. Along the hillsides campfires flickered among the leafless trees where other travelers had retreated for the night. Cooking smells drifted in the cold air.

Judith huddled next to the fire. The golem had gathered the wood and she had lit it, but the blaze warmed only one side of her, leaving her back and her shoulders as cold as ever. Moireh and Nekomeh had curled up together on a pile of damp leaves and had fallen asleep even before the fire was much more than smoke. Now their faces were caught in the warm light, slack and pale.

Judith looked past the golem where it squatted on the opposite side of the fire. Down the hill, just visible through the leafless woods, she could see the next campsite. There was a wagon, a mule in silhouette against another fire and a woman crouched next to it with a pan. The smell of frying meat wafted in the night.

Judith’s stomach clenched, either in hunger or fear. She stood up on stiff legs, brushing off her dress, shuffling her feet to get the blood moving, not being too quiet in the rustling leaves, but Nekomeh and Moireh didn’t stir. Judith patted at her hair. She found herself wanting to wake Nekomeh and tell her what she was about to do, but she knew Nekomeh’s face would tighten with doubts, and that would be the end of this spurt of courage. The breeze brushed her cheek. This time it carried the scent of bread.

She beckoned to the golem, and without waiting for common sense to stop her, started down the hill.

She was as loud as she could be, kicking in leaves, snapping twigs until the mule jerked its head up and the woman shot to her feet. Judith slid to a halt at the edge of the clearing and stood there for a moment, awkwardly listening for the golem behind her. She didn’t hear a thing. It must have stopped when she had, but she didn’t want to look back and make this woman think she wasn’t alone. Instead she made a wide, friendly wave.

“Hello!” she cried, trying to keep the tremor out of her voice. “Good evening!”

“What do you want?” demanded the woman. She was holding a cast-iron skillet in one hand, letting it hang down against her knee. She was short and bulky, and Judith decided she’d used the skillet for more than just cooking, more than once.

“I’m so sorry to bother you,” said Judith, “but my friends and I are traveling to—” She gulped back the shtetl’s name, Leva, and waved vaguely toward the river. “To Cracow,” which was the nearest city. “We were robbed the other night. They took all our food — everything.” Which wasn’t so far from the truth. Her heart was pounding and she had to stop for breath. “Do you have a potato, or a piece of bread or something you can spare?”

The woman eyed the dark trees, and Judith strained to hear, but the golem was silent as the moon. The woman turned to the wagon. “Stephan,” she said. “Come out here.”

So she wasn’t alone. Judith took a step back as a tall man clambered out, thin dark hair falling into his eyes.

He frowned at Judith. “Yeah?”

“See if there isn’t a ham hock in there we can give this lady.”

Judith blinked. Pork. Was it a test? Or honest generosity? “No, please,” she said. “Nothing like that. Just bread. Or a potato.”

“Potatoes?” The man bent into the wagon again and jerked out a burlap sack. “You can have this bagful if you want. Some of ’em are a little soft.”

Judith’s knees almost buckled with relief as he gave her the bag. She clutched the heavy lumps to her chest. “Thank you. Thank you so much.”

“Well now, wait,” said the woman as Judith turned to flee.

Judith turned to see her raising the iron skillet and almost screamed.

The woman gave her a strange look. “You said they stole everything. Won’t you need something to cook in?”

Judith reached out with a trembling hand and took it. Turning down pork was one thing. Refusing a skillet because it wasn’t kosher would be harder. She would bake the potatoes in the fire and return the skillet in the morning. “Thank you,” she said again.

“Bless you,” said the woman, and Judith could feel their eyes on her as she scrambled through the leaves and low branches, into the concealing dark.

Nekomeh met her halfway back up the hill. “What on earth are you doing? Who are those people? What did they want?”

“They gave me food,” Judith panted, and pushed the skillet at her.

Nekomeh grabbed the heavy pan. “Food?” she echoed, as though it was a foreign concept.

“Where’s the golem?” whispered Judith. She turned unsteadily on the rough slope, squinting between trees. “It was right behind me.”

Nekomeh pointed to the campsite. “It’s up there.”

“No, it came with me.” Hadn’t it? Hadn’t she told it to?

“It hasn’t moved, Judith.” Nekomeh caught her arm. “Come on. Come on.”

At the top of the hill the golem squatted implacably by the fire. It had been up here the whole time. She hadn’t spoken to it, and it was a literal thing. Beckoning and expecting it to understand was too much for a brain of clay.

Judith pushed potatoes into the hot coals and dabbed at her forehead. She was sweating, panting, but she also felt wildly invigorated. She had done a thing that Motle would have forbidden her to do. It was dangerous. She had done it anyway. And, she realized, she could do it again.

Moireh sat up and scrubbed at her eyes with the heels of her hands. “You went down there by yourself?” she mumbled, half awake. “How brave.”

On Friday they reached the hilltop overlooking the city of Cracow. Leva Trevla was just beyond, a grimy river village in the shadow of grand stone buildings. Church bells echoed against the hillside.

Moireh shaded her eyes in the bright afternoon. “We’ll be there by sundown,” she said with obvious relief, and turned to the golem, which was carrying the potato sack. “What are you going to do with it, Judith? You can’t take it into town.”

“How do you get rid of it?” asked Nekomeh.

Judith pushed the golem’s dark hair to one side and covered the aleph with her thumb, careful not to smudge the letter. Instead of Emet — truth—the word had changed to Met — death.

“All you do is erase?” said Moireh. “You take away the truth and you’re left with death. That’s all?”

“But what happens to it?” asked Nekomeh.

“It turns back into mud,” said Moireh. “Isn’t that right, Judith?”

Judith took her thumb away and felt her heart ball up with misery. She’d thought about naming the golem Reva, and telling the people in Leva that it was her daughter, but her cousins were there, too. Even once or twice removed, enough of them would know Reva had died years ago. She’d thought about swearing Nekomeh and Moireh to secrecy and coming up with some story about how they had found this simple, mute Jewish girl begging along the road, and taken her in as an act of charity, but even a story like that would evaporate the first time someone saw the inscription on its forehead. And then what? Questions? Accusations? They would destroy the golem and chase Judith out of town. They might banish Nekomeh and Moireh as well.

“You should get rid of it now,” said Moireh, “before anyone sees it.” She scuffed the ground with her shoes and wound her fingers in the sleeves of her long dress, eager to get to the safety of Leva.

Judith touched the creature’s shoulder, but the golem seemed not to be paying attention, holding the potato sack, concentrating on the peal of bells from the valley below. It would never notice, thought Judith, its own letter being erased. It would just stand there and fall to pieces, like a broken clay pot.

“I want to wait until we get to the river,” she said. “That’s where it came from.”

It was Good Friday. Dry hanks of palm from the Sunday before hung across Cracow’s ramparts. Colored eggs dangled from the half-budded trees lining the road between the city walls and the slope that led down to the river. Donkey carts, vendors, and soldiers all shoved along in a jostling crowd. Judith clung to the golem’s arm as Nekomeh and Moireh shuffled along behind. The cool spring air had thickened under the walls of the city, warmer, dense with close bodies and accusing looks. A military officer on horseback pushed in front of Judith and the golem, his uniform glittering in the sunlight. He flicked his riding crop in Judith’s face.

“Run home, Juden,” he said, and laughed. “Run home to Leva and lock up your daughter.” He leaned over to touch the golem’s dark hair, and Judith tried to yank the creature away. She bumped against someone too close behind her, turned and found Nekomeh, her face twisted into a furious mask.

“Goyim!” Nekomeh shoved past Judith and the golem until her face was level with the officer’s knee. “Bastard! Goyim bastard!” Judith reached for her but Nekomeh shook her off. “The very earth will rise against you!” She arched a finger at the impassive golem. “The mud will tear your city down, wall by wall, brick by brick.”

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.”