The Golem of Paris

Chapter nineteen

LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA

AUGUST 1982

Bina sorts the mail.

Bills, bills, junk, and then a surprise: the familiar flimsy blue-green paper of an Israeli aerogram, nearly impossible to open without damaging its contents.

She lights the stovetop, fills a kettle, waits for the water to boil.

Jacob, strapped in his high chair, his face plastered with marinara sauce, says, “Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeee.”

It’s an eerily accurate impression of the kettle’s whistle, good enough to draw a call from the living room:

“Bean? Are you making tea?”

Sam enters, a book in each hand.

“Eeeeeeeeeee,” Jacob says.

He stops squealing and grins. Sam and Bina break into laughter.

“Very good,” Sam says. He kisses Jacob on the head.

Meanwhile the real kettle has begun to pipe. Bina waves the aerogram through the steam to loosen the glue. “You can have the water when I’m done.”

“Who’s it from?”

She shakes her head. No return address. For the first few months following their departure from Israel, she and Sam kept up a lively correspondence with their friends. It abated as everyone accepted that the Levs weren’t coming back.

These days it’s rare to find anything but bills in the mail. The irony is that they came to Los Angeles hoping to ease the financial strain.

The old joke had it: how do you wind up with a million dollars in Israel?

Start with two million.

After Sam got the job offer — pulpit position, two-year contract, option for a third — they weighed the spiritual loss against the gain in security. If they saved diligently, they could return to Jerusalem with a nest egg. Enough, perhaps, to buy an apartment.

Eight years later, they’re still in L.A., living in a rented duplex without air-conditioning, scraping by. Bina looks at her son, drumming the tabletop with his rubber-coated spoon, and she’s amazed to realize how naïve they were.

In L.A., you need a car. Gas. Maintenance and repairs. Then there are doctors’ bills. Rent. The mind-boggling American cost of living.

Bina works open the aerogram’s curling flap — a delicate operation, with her nails cut painfully short. In a perfect world, she’d prefer to leave a little length. But clay gets trapped underneath, making her look like some unwashed orphan out of a nineteenth-century novel. No amount of digging with the nail file gets it out. It dries, shrinks, and falls out on its own, shedding everywhere — tiny moons, immune to vacuuming, forcing her to crawl around the apartment, picking them out of the carpet fibers.

Who has time for glamour? She has a toddler to care for. And her husband — her kind sweet husband, with his head jammed in the clouds — he thinks she’s beautiful, perfect, just as she is. He tells her so, often.

Sometimes she wishes he would stop.

Bina manages to open the aerogram without shredding it.

“It’s from Frayda,” she says. “She’s coming to visit.”

“Wonderful.” Sam decants the boiled water into a mug. “When?”

“She gets in on Monday.” Bina folds the damp paper in half. “She could have given us a bit more notice.”

“You know how long those things take to arrive,” Sam says. “She probably mailed it a month ago.” He sits at the breakfast table, dunking a tea bag with one hand and petting a happily babbling Jacob with the other. “What’s the occasion?”

“Fund-raising for Sulam.”

“Ah,” Sam says, blowing on his tea. “I should introduce her to Abe.”

“You don’t have to do that. She’s staying with us, that’s more than enough.”

“Whatever you want,” he says.

What does she want? She wants him to be more annoyed. He can’t help being decent. She loves him because he is so decent.

Still, it’s not always fun, living with a saint.

She says, “I have no idea what I’m going to say to her.”

“I’m sure it’ll be easier than you think,” he says.

He takes a single sip of tea, checks his watch. “Oops, gotta run. Study time with Dr. Prero.” He kisses Jacob. “Bye, bubba.”

“Bah, Abba.”

Once he has gone, Bina moves the mug to the fridge, setting the tea bag on the windowsill to dry out for a second use.

Frayda kneels in the center of the living room, her hands plastered to the sides of her face in astonishment. “Look... at... you.”

Jacob hides behind Bina’s legs. She gently pries him loose. “He’s not usually so shy.”

“Oh, please.” Frayda smiles. “I’d be scared of me, too.”

She stands, stretching like a tree. “So much space, you have.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Tch. You’ve forgotten what it’s like. For Jerusalem, this is a mansion.”

Coming from anyone else, it might sound petty, but Frayda is truly happy for her.

“Where do you do your art?”

“On the roof.”

“No. Really?”

“There’s a small deck.”

“What about when it rains?”

“It doesn’t rain in Los Angeles.”

Frayda laughs. “I told Sari Wasserman I was going to stay by you, and she asked me to bring her back an autograph.”

“Whose?”

“Anyone, as long as they’re famous.”

“One of Sam’s congregants invented a new kind of dental floss.”

Jacob has scuttled behind the arm of the sofa, his blond head poking up, observing them in that somber way of his. It reminds Bina of no one so much as Věra.

“So,” Frayda says, “here we are.”

Their second embrace is longer, silent, warm, ending as Sam struggles through the front door with a plaid suitcase.

Frayda says, “I know, I overpacked. If it’s any consolation, I brought presents.”

A knitted yarmulke for Sam, silver jewelry for Bina, Hebrew books for the both of them to share. To Jacob go the greatest spoils: handmade wooden toys, chocolate, children’s books, a T-shirt with the Sesame Street characters in Hebrew.

The display of generosity overwhelms Bina. The Cohens aren’t rich. She recalls her peevish reaction to the news of Frayda’s visit and blinks back guilty tears. Forcing brightness into her voice: “You must be starving.”

• • •

HovězÍ guláš, heavy and brown, totally inappropriate for the summer heat.

Chuck roast was on sale.

It’s official: she has become her mother.

Frayda passes around a photograph of her children, who range in age from eleven years to fourteen months.

“Dov, Shlomo, Tamar, Reuven, Hadassah, Aliza.”

“Beautiful,” Sam says.

“It’s not hard for you to leave them?” Bina asks.

“Are you kidding?” Frayda says. She points to the gray, now spread beyond her temples. “The hard part is going to be convincing myself to go back.”

In the photo her children are posed at the edge of the Mitzpeh Ramon crater, an Israeli version of Our Gang.

Bina squints at the youngest boy. “He’s six? He looks like he’s twelve.”

“He takes after me,” Frayda says.

Los Angeles is the last stop on her U.S. tour. She has been to New York, Miami, and Chicago, scaring up funds for the seminary’s proposed dormitory expansion. Over the last thirteen years, Sulam has blossomed, with fifty-one girls in three classes. Yonatan runs day-to-day operations, while Frayda teaches Talmud. Perhaps the greatest testament to the institution are the dozen other women’s yeshivas that have sprung up in its image.

“And Rav Kalman?” Bina asks. “How is he?”

Frayda presses her lips together. She looks down at her plate.

“Oh, Fraydie,” Bina says. “When?”

“Right after Pesach.”

“We had no idea,” Sam says.

“I should’ve told you sooner. I didn’t want to burden you.”

Bina touches her friend’s arm and recites the traditional palliation: “May the Omnipresent comfort you among the mourners of Zion and Jerusalem.”

“He spoke about you often,” Frayda says. Her smile is small, askew. “You always were his favorite.”

Embarrassed, Bina laughs and reaches for the serving spoon. “More?”

“No, thanks,” Frayda says. “It’s delicious.”

Her plate is untouched, though. As usual. When does she nourish herself?

“And you,” Bina says, “always were a horrible liar.”

“I was sorry to hear about your parents.”

Midnight, they sit together on the living room floor, talking by candlelight. Sam was right. It was easy to reconnect. However much Bina has changed — and she has, in every way — Frayda remains essentially the person she was at nineteen: quick to laugh and to praise, alternately flippant and pious, optimistic despite the stress of life in Israel.

“Honestly,” Bina says, “it was a relief. They suffered.”

“Still. It’s not easy.”

Bina nods. Somehow she knew exactly how they would go: Věra first, swiftly, diagnosis to funeral inside of three months; Jozef stubborn, dissatisfied, swearing in Czech at the staff of the Hebrew Home for the Aged.

Another irony: her father finishing out his days surrounded by trappings of the religion he detested. There was no choice. He qualified for a special survivor’s rate. Otherwise it would have been a Kings County facility.

The end, when it came, was apt. At the communal Passover Seder, a well-meaning volunteer tried to put a skullcap on Jozef’s head. He lashed out to swat it off, fell out of his chair, hit his head. Bina didn’t know whether to be amused or appalled when she learned that the last earthly thing he’d heard was the Four Questions, sung by Mrs. Gerber, at seventy-nine the baby of the bunch.

At the time, Bina was three months along. On the flight back from JFK following the funeral, Sam asked if she wanted to name the baby for her father, if it was a boy.

She didn’t want to talk about it. Talking about it was bad luck. They didn’t need any more bad luck.

And sure enough, she lost that pregnancy, too, and the pain and disappointment dragged her over the edge. She did something — she’s ashamed to think of it, now — she screamed at Sam that it was his fault, that he had done this to her.

What was the this that he had done, though? Drawn her to religion? Married her? Taken her to Los Angeles? Gotten her pregnant, again and again?

What else could she blame him for?

It never was a fair fight between them. Her anger would foam over, and he would stand there and take it, waiting for her to come to her senses, which infuriated her further. In her unhappiest moments, she came to believe that his calm was actually a form of character flaw, proving that, on some level, he did not love her as much as she loved him.

His unwavering faith drove her batty.

It will happen when God wills it.

Shut up, shut up.

Like it or not, he would always be her teacher; she would always crave his approval. She read and reread the sources. Sarah, Rachel, Hannah, Ruth — the Bible offered no shortage of barren women. They were heroines. Women of valor. Each had her prayers answered, eventually.

But by then Bina had studied enough to know that you couldn’t lean on easy interpretations. No character felt as familiar to her as Michal, volatile daughter of mad King Saul, first wife of King David.

She had died childless.

It wasn’t merely Bina’s body in revolt. Her mind, too, began to betray her. Concentration faltered. Sound arrived on a half-second delay. Food became dull; sex a cruel joke; an expanding cavity displacing desire. Anything could and did set her off. The tagline of a pet food ad (Take care of them like they take care of you). The sad truth of a soap droplet, pirouetting in a dirty cereal bowl; the world’s infinite, unrealized shapes.

She got so accustomed to crying for no reason that she was glad to have the hormone treatments as an excuse.

Waking before dawn, dread stomped her chest like a paper bag, and she slipped from the room, hauling her supplies in a citrus crate up to the roof. She spread her drop cloth on the tarpaper, took clay in hand, kneaded it gently to avoid disturbing her husband, snoring righteously below.

The community supported her as best they could, commissions trickling in. Wedding gifts, bar mitzvah gifts, cups and platters and bowls. Sam tried to buck her up. See? People appreciated her talent.

Bina saw the orders for what they were: pity.

She worked on them during the day.

But at night, in the jaw of melancholy, she created figures meant for no one else, rendering in three dimensions the citizenry of her nightmares, blackened bodies. She pinched out the smug faces of the ravens that strung the telephone wires like a firing squad. She smoothed the innocent necks of the pigeons that roosted in the eaves.

Invariably she did not fire these pieces to completion. She threw them off the roof to explode in the street. She left them to crumble in the merciless sun.

Those days are behind her. Now she has no time to brood, nothing to complain about. She has a son. A beautiful boy, named not for her father, but for her mother’s brother, a young man ripped from the world before he could start a family of his own. She wields her contentment as a shield against the sadness that turns up in the small hours, soliciting at the door of her mind. She has what she wanted: she is no longer alone, never, not for one instant. How wicked of her, to miss it so much.

Three in the morning, they’re still talking, and Bina is starting to feel the weight of the approaching day, chasing Jacob around on no sleep.

Frayda says, “You know what I was thinking about? That class where we met. With the hippies.”

Bina laughs. “Sri Sri.”

“I remember the first time I saw you create something,” Frayda says. “A tiny bowl. Like a thimble. Do you remember?”

“Of course.”

“Do you still have it?”

“The — bowl? No. No, it’s long gone.”

“What a shame.”

“It was just a silly little thing,” Bina says.

“Mine was silly,” Frayda says. “Yours was perfect.”

“I’d like to think I’ve improved since then.”

“You’re not listening,” Frayda says.

Her vehemence catches Bina off guard. “All right.”

“You need to face up to the nature of your gift,” Frayda says. “It’s irresponsible not to. There are things only you can do.”

Bina lets out a short laugh. “It’s not hard to make a bowl. I bet even you could learn.”

But Frayda isn’t smiling. She has drawn up tall, and when she leans in, it is with a frightening momentum, so that Bina shrinks back, crazily afraid of being crushed.

“I saw God that day,” Frayda says.

She seizes Bina’s hands and raises them like an offering. “Here. In your hands. That was what I saw.”

The candle has burned down to a nub, changing Frayda’s face.

“We need you to do something,” she says.

The oddness of that sentence, its plural subject and directionless verb, leads Bina to make assumptions. We are Frayda and Yonatan; they want her to do something, which is to say, make a piece for them — a kiddush cup, maybe, to auction off, raise money.

“Of course,” Bina says. “Anything.”

Frayda remains clutching Bina’s hands. “Two months from now, a group of Jewish artists will be traveling to Czechoslovakia as part of a cultural exchange.”

“Okay.”

“We need you to go with them.”

Bina blurts another laugh. “Pardon?”

“Your grant application has already been approved. You’ll still need to write to the Czechoslovakian consulate for a visa. That I can’t do for you.”

“... Frayda—”

“Request expedited processing. We’ll cover the fee.”

“Frayda. Frayda.” Bina smiles. “What in the world are you talking about?”

“If it were up to me, I’d go, too. I tried. They won’t permit it. They said I have no role to play.”

“Who won’t per — you’re not making any sense.”

“I’m telling you so you won’t think I’ve abandoned you,” Frayda says, and she finally lets go of Bina’s hands and begins digging in her bag. “I need you to understand how deeply I care about you. For me, it’s never been about this moment. You’ve always meant more to me than that. I am your friend. We all are. We always will be. You must believe that. Here. Look.”

She produces a snapshot of a tree with silvery leaves. After a moment, Bina recognizes it as the old olive in the garden outside Sulam — the one that has never fruited.

Its branches sag beneath the weight of a bumper crop of fat black orbs.

What a day that will be.

“Turn it over,” Frayda says.

On the back of the photograph is a note, written in Hebrew.

Frayda points to the date in the upper left corner. “He wrote it the night before he passed. He said you’d understand, once you saw.”

Bina says nothing. She wants so badly to fit this conversation into a rational framework. She knows the horror of feeling her own mind slipping; to watch it happening to her best friend is worse still.

“Don’t worry about packing your tools,” Frayda says. “You’ll get everything you need on site.”

Bina sets the photograph aside, fighting to keep her voice even. “If you want me to... I mean, I can make you whatever you want. Just tell me and I’ll get started.”

“No. We need you to be physically present.”

Bina doesn’t know how to respond, except to play along. “What about Jacob?”

“You’ll only be gone a couple of weeks. He’ll be fine.”

“A couple of — Frayda. He’s two.”

Why is she arguing? It makes her sound as if she’s considering accepting, which of course she isn’t, because the whole situation is preposterous. She will tell Frayda, flat-out: you need to get help.

But then Frayda leans in once more, her shadow rearing up, madly out of proportion in the damaged candlelight.

“All those years,” she says, seizing Bina’s hands again, “when you could not conceive. When you were in pain. When you thought you were alone.”

The shadow spreads like a canopy, menacing, inhuman, advancing beyond physical limits, so that Bina must suddenly wonder if in fact she’s the one going mad.

“You were not alone,” Frayda says.

Words of comfort, they boil like a threat.

Kindness has an inverse.

What is given can be taken away.

“You were never alone,” Frayda says, squeezing Bina’s hands tighter still. “We did not forget you.”

“Frayda. Please.”

“We did not cease to pray, not for one instant. We prayed for you, Bina Reich.”

“You’re hurting me.”

“We have acted with kindness, and now you will show kindness in return.”

The pain grows — her hands, they mean so much to her — but Bina can’t pull away, and the shadow continues to loom, sopping up light, gobbling the oxygen until the candle snuffs itself out and darkness clamps down. She hardly knows her own, feeble voice.

“What will I tell Sam?”

At once Frayda releases her. Bina draws her arms into her body, like a wounded bird.

“Tell him what every young mother says,” Frayda says. “You need a vacation.”