The Tribe

by Bari Wood

  She and Golda faced each other in the big paneled family room. Sam was asleep in front of the TV with the game on. Men ran and tackled each other and fans screamed. Sam sweated in his sleep; his face looked relaxed and young. A glass of diluted liquor and melting ice sat on the table next to him.

  Golda shut off the set and the women waited to see if he’d wake up. He didn’t and Golda lifted Leah in her arms.

  “I’ve got lamb chops for her dinner,” Golda said.

  “That’s fine. She loves lamb chops,” Rachel said, and she started to weep. Leah hated anyone crying and she started, too, and Sam woke up.

  “Who turned the goddam game off,” he yelled. Then he saw the tears on Rachel’s face.

  “You okay, Rache?” he asked gently.

  Golda said, “Leave us alone, Sam.”

  He looked helplessly at the two women, then took his glass and went out of the room. Golda jiggled Leah gently and she stopped crying.

  “What goes, Rachel? You off for a little fancy fucking with your shvartzt?”

  Rachel was too shocked to answer.

  “And feeling guilty,” Golda concluded. Then she said, “Miriam Relkin told Estelle Fineberg that you took him to her house. She said she was terrified of him, that he was so big, so black, so . . . handsome was her final judgment. So I knew it was Roger Hawkins. The pretty black inspector of police. Nu? What were you doing with him, I asked myself. Fucking him, was my answer. That explains what you did to Allan.” She sounded like she hated Rachel, but her eyes were full of concern.

  Rachel smiled defiantly at her. “Everyone’s got to have a little fun,” she said.

  Golda wanted to be horrified, but she thought Rachel looked younger and prettier than ever. Excited, Golda thought. Her eyes glowed and she was having trouble standing still. Golda didn’t know what to say and Rachel kissed her friend. “I’ll tell you all about it afterward,” she said. She stopped at the door and forced herself not to start crying again. “Leah hates soft-­boiled eggs,” she said. Then she left the house and Golda ran to the window to watch her. Rachel walked quickly to the end of the block, then she turned, and Golda jumped back because she didn’t want Rachel to see her watching. But Rachel smiled and waved at her.

  Tepel locked himself in the car. “I’m laying chickie,” he said. Garfield stared at him. “Keeping guard,” Tepel explained, grinning, and he rolled up the window.

  Hawkins went up the front steps and pushed slowly at the door. “I don’t think it’s bolted,” he whispered. He bent down and looked at the lock with his flashlight, then took a ring of keys out of his pocket. He chose one and slid it into the lock. It turned and clicked.

  “Wonderful,” Garfield whispered.

  They opened the door as quietly as they could and went inside. The vestibule was dark but there was a small light in the sanctuary and music played softly through the door. It was dance music, nineteen-­forties Glenn Miller swing. They went into the sanctuary and stood in the aisle made by folding chairs. It was early in the week, there were no women expected, and the curtain that separated them from the men was pulled back.

  The eternal light hung above the closed arc, and the tensor light was on in the front. Mr. Walinsky sat on one of the chairs reading a magazine. Rachel walked down the aisle, but the others stopped at the entrance. He heard her and whirled around. The radio almost fell, but he grabbed it in time.

  Then he saw Hawkins and Garfield. He didn’t recognize Hawkins in the dim light and he didn’t know Garfield. He looked back at Rachel. “What goes?” he asked. He didn’t sound frightened.

  Very calmly, Rachel said, “We’re here to kill the golem, Mr. Walinsky.”

  Without moving, Walinsky started yelling, “Help . . . help me . . . Jacob!” His voice wasn’t very strong, the walls of the old house were thick, and they all knew his voice wouldn’t carry outside. Garfield came up to him and touched his shoulder. He stopped yelling.

  “Please, Mr. Walinsky. We don’t want to hurt you. We’re going to tie you up, just for a short time.”

  He stared at Garfield. “You’re a Jew!” he said.

  “A rabbi,” Garfield said. “Chaim Garfield from Riverdale.”

  “There’s no golem. It’s a fairy story. You’re meshugah,” Walinsky said.

  “Then it won’t matter anyway, will it, Mr. Walinsky? The important thing is that no one gets hurt,” Garfield said.

  Hawkins came into the light and Walinsky saw him. “Roger?”

  “Yes, Mr. Walinsky.” He took the circle of rope off his shoulder and Walinsky started yelling again. His face got red and in a minute he was out of breath and he stopped.

  “Sit down, Mr. Walinsky,” Hawkins said.

  Walinsky didn’t move and Hawkins put his hand on his shoulder and forced him into the chair. When he was sitting, Hawkins held him down while Rachel uncoiled the rope.

  He looked into Hawkins’s face. “I always said you were the gilgul††††† of a hyena. Jacob wouldn’t listen. No one could talk to him about you. But he’ll see what you are now, won’t he?”

  Hawkins didn’t answer. He held Walinsky’s ankles, took the end of the rope from Rachel, wrapped it around the old man’s ankles, and tied it. Then he stretched the rope up, pulled Walinsky’s arms around the back of the chair, and tied his wrists with the same length of rope so Walinsky was trussed up and bound to the chair. Hawkins looked around the room for a post, but there wasn’t one, so he picked up the chair, with Walinsky in it, and carried it to a door at the side of the altar. He opened the door and tied the legs of the chair to the bottom hinge. Then he checked the knots and stood back.

  Walinsky looked at him. “There’s no such thing as a golem, Roger. They’re making a schmuck of you—not that they have to work very hard.”

  Hawkins took a wide roll of adhesive tape out of his pocket and started unrolling it.

  “For my mouth?” Walinsky asked.

  Hawkins kept pulling the tape.

  Then Walinsky said, softly, “Don’t put that stuff on my mouth, Roger. Please.” Hawkins stopped. “I’m not young. I could choke or spit up, or anything. Please, Roger.”

  Hawkins hesitated. The radio played softly in the background. Then a voice came on with the news. It was eight o’clock.

  Hawkins rewound the tape and put it away. “Okay, Sam,” he said, “no tape.”

  They left him tied to the door hinge, with his radio still playing, and they started back up the aisle. But halfway to the door Rachel stopped. If she was ever going to do it, she thought, it had to be now. “I’ll be a minute,” she said, and she went back down the aisle toward the ark.

  “Where are you going?” Garfield whispered.

  “It’s all right,” she said, and she went up onto the platform and pulled open the ark.

  Walinsky yelled at her to stop, but she reached into the recess and took the scrolls out of the ark. They were heavier than she expected and she almost dropped them.

  Walinsky gasped, but Garfield watched her from the front of the sanctuary quietly. She balanced the scrolls on the reading table and took off the plaque and velvet cover. Then she lay them flat and unrolled them a little. The ink was faded, the lines of the Hebrew script were fine. She put her hand flat against the parchment.

  “You shouldn’t have done that, Rachel,” Walinsky called. Garfield didn’t say anything.

  She pressed her palm down, felt ridges in the parchment and tried to think about the women whose stories were on the scroll . . . Eve, Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel, Miriam, Deborah, Esther, and poor Hagar. But they didn’t mean anything to her and all she could think of was Lilith and her snake. She redressed the scroll in its cover and plaque. Then she put it back into the ark and closed it.

  “We have no more time,” Garfield called.

  She came down from the platform and went up the aisle.

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nbsp; “It’s defiled now,” Walinsky said to her back. “We can never use it again. What a waste.”

  She didn’t answer.

  “A waste!” he called after them as they left the sanctuary and went to the top of the basement stairs. Then the old man went back to yelling, “Help, help—Jacob, help!” The news was over and the dance music came back on the radio. They went down the stairs single file; Hawkins held the flashlight. At the bottom, they paused in the entryway, looked at each other, then went into the basement.

  It was deep and the ceiling was high. There was paneling on the walls and linoleum on the floor, but Rachel knew the house was old and she was sure that behind the paneling there’d be a stone foundation that had been laid a hundred years ago. She expected the room to be damp, but it was warm and dry and the floor was clean. There were six support posts painted brown to match the paneling, and between them, at the far end of the room away from the door, was the long wooden box covered with fabric hung from cafe-­curtain rings. The little pig night light was on a step stool next to the box. When Rachel saw the light, she thought Walinsky was right. Why would a clay man need a night light? Then she realized that the light wasn’t for whatever was in the box, but for anyone who had to come down there, because no one would want to be alone in the dark with it, even for a second. Hawkins started to cross the basement to the box, but Garfield said, “Don’t pull the curtain yet. Don’t make it any harder.”

  Rachel looked at the curtain. It didn’t move and she had the same feeling she knew Hawkins had now—that when they pulled that curtain, they’d find the prayer books, paper plates, and some bottles of wine after all.

  Garfield watched them. They were supposed to be passionate, angry, but they didn’t look it, and his heart sank. Hawkins looked determined, and Rachel looked distant, but very pretty, for some reason. Excited, as if she were on her way to a dance. He wanted to shake her and tell her that if this didn’t work, there’d be no dancing, or anything, for any of them. He didn’t know how he looked, but he felt seasick and he hoped it didn’t show.

  The box was in a corner away from the window and he pointed to the post diagonally across the room from it.

  “That post will be spirit,” he said, blushing at how ridiculous it sounded. “Look at it, try to feel it.”

  Spirit, Rachel thought.

  “Really try,” Garfield whispered, and she did. But all she saw was a post painted brown. She tried to think of Ain Soph Aur; she even said the words to herself, but it didn’t help, because she didn’t know how to conceive of nothing-­limitlessness-­light and after a moment she gave up. The post would have to stay a post, and Ain Soph Aur an ungraspable idea. She knew she should have been frightened, but she wasn’t. Garfield was, and maybe Hawkins, too. He was standing very straight and his dark skin was starting to shine with sweat.

  They made the star shape and Rachel came to the center of the room and made the first circle in front of the curtain. She said the name of the angel she was supposed to be—Michael—and suddenly remembered an afternoon at Habonim where she’d met a student with a thick beard that covered his chin, cheeks, and part of his neck. He’d asked her to have coffee with him and he sat across from her eating potato chips out of a bowl in the middle of the table and looking at her breasts. He was a mystic, he said, and he was studying Cabala. She could almost hear his voice telling her how Judaism was full of mysticism and even had an angelology. Oh, yes, there were angels in Judaism. Metatron and Michael, for instance. She started the second circle. Everything was quiet. If Mr. Walinsky was still yelling and Glenn Miller still playing upstairs, the celotex ceiling soaked up the sound. She finished the second circle and said, “ICHAEL,” and could hear the student saying, They aren’t just names. The angels have personalities and qualities. She finished the third circle and said, “CHAEL.” It came out with a rhythm, like a chant.

  Michael wore a robe of fire, the student had said. He was trying to look down her blouse, and she leaned forward so he could. And he carries a spear.

  Rachel was already through the fifth circle. “AEL,” she chanted.

  The student had begun to rock on his side of the booth. Michael is the archangel Tiphereth, he told her. And Tiphereth is the sixth circle emanating down the tree of life . . .

  Rachel finished the sixth circle.

  The sun is Michael’s planet. The student rocked and closed his eyes. A child is his magic image.

  “EL,” she was almost singing. Her voice was clear and strong and everything the student had told her about the archangel Michael came back to her at once. His symbol was the hexagram, his flower the rose. She passed the curtain for the last time. A damp breeze came through the one open window under the ceiling and she smelled mud, but she concentrated on Michael. His season was summer, his color was gold. Dear Michael, she thought, beloved Michael. She went back to her place in the star.

  The other two made their seven circles in front of the flowered curtain. Then they bowed, first to the south, because everything was supposed to be backwards, then to the north, the west, and were turning to the east: when they heard steps on the stairs and, one after the other, Levy, Luria, and Dworkin came into the basement.

  Hawkins and Garfield froze, but Rachel finished the ritual. She bowed low to the east and straightened up. She and Luria faced each other. He looked excited and young. Levy was standing next to him with his eyes half closed, and for the first time in years, Hawkins saw Levy.

  He wanted to run to Jacob, hug him, talk to him. But Jacob didn’t seem to see him, or if he did, he didn’t recognize him. He was a man in a trance, and all he did was stare with something like longing at the box in the corner. Hawkins tried to rouse him.

  “Jacob,” he said softly. “Jake.”

  Levy didn’t even blink. Hawkins followed his eyes to the unmoving curtain over the box, and for the first time, he thought there was something behind it.

  Luria was watching him. “Abe found poor Walinsky,” he said, “and he came to get us . . .” Luria looked from Hawkins to the box, then back to Hawkins, and he smiled. “So here we are,” he said softly, and then he crossed the room and tugged at the curtain. Hawkins wanted to shut his eyes, but he couldn’t. Even from across the room, he could feel Jacob’s body tense with expectation. Luria pulled the curtain, but it wouldn’t slide. Then he yanked it, and rod, curtain, everything, came loose, fell, and hit the night light. The night light crashed on the floor, and the basement went dark.

  Rachel jumped at the sound of the night light breaking, and then she started to shake. But she wasn’t frightened; she thought she didn’t have any feelings at all. She stared into the darker rectangle of the black box in the dark basement and saw nothing. There was nothing to see, she told herself; it was empty, and they were the biggest fools in the world. Then, smoothly, silently, something black detached itself from the black inside the box and stood in front of them.

  Rachel wanted to grovel, to flatten herself against the floor. She was shaking so badly now, she thought she couldn’t stay on her feet, but she made herself stand where she was and look at what they’d made. Rabbi Levy’s golem.

  It was huge, bigger than the box it came out of, which was impossible, she knew. But it was. There was light from the door, and some from the window—moonlight or streetlights—and in it, she saw a smooth, featureless, empty face; an oval of scraped clay. The arms and legs were tree trunks, rough and jointless, and the hands were lumps without fingers. It took a step, the walls shook, and Garfield moaned.

  It turned toward the sound and took another step. Garfield fell to his knees, holding his chest, and cried out, “Rabbi, Rabbi Levy, I’m a rabbi like you are. My name is Chaim Garfield from Riverdale.” But the shape kept coming for him and he mashed himself against the wall. His lips were dark and he was gasping for breath. The mass lifted him up and tilted him, his hat fell off, his beard hung to the side.

 
“No!” Rachel screamed. “Jacob!”

  Hawkins leaped on it. He looked small on its back, then their bodies blended and they were one huge shape without any form. It threw Garfield and he hit the wall and the house shook. Garfield fell and rolled and the thing twisted and Hawkins flew off its back and hit the post next to her. He lay still and she thought he was dead.

  She stopped shaking, and she felt empty like a shell. She looked at Jacob and Luria. Luria was watching intently, like a man at the best scene in a play, and Jacob looked like he was dreaming. Feelings came back to her, but this time there was no excitement or elation. Nothing like she’d felt in the mikveh or any other time. She felt rage that was so cold and deadly she could barely breathe. They said she needed passion. She had it. But it had nothing to do with Michael and his roses and children. He was vague, silly, weak. The passion belonged to Lilith and Rachel could see her, wrapped in her snake and staring out of the page of that book with blank, slanted eyes. Rachel knew she could tear those two at the door apart with her bare hands and she wanted to do it.

  Then Hawkins groaned and the thing came for him. Rachel ran to him and stood in front of him so it would have to kill her first.

  Levy yelled something in Hebrew. Held out his hand to her to come to him where she’d be safe and she knew that if she took that hand they’d lock the monster up when it finished with Hawkins and Garfield and they’d go home together. She’d get Leah, marry Allan, and have a son and be a grandmother. Levy would be a great-­grandfather and die in his sleep in his nineties.

  She was lost for a second, and then Adam’s voice came to her: Think, Rachel. You know what to do, you know everything.

  What did she know?

  The golem was close enough for her to see letters scratched on its forehead. She knew that the ritual was useless, and the word didn’t matter. Levy moved the monster. Rabbi Loew he didn’t know, but Rachel knew; the golem was the rabbi—the golem was Levy.

  She turned her back on it and knelt in front of Hawkins. He was alive, almost unconscious; she opened his jacket and grabbed the strap of the holster. The snap was hard and she pulled at it. She looked up, the shadow of the monster was touching her shadow on the wall. She tore at the strap until her nails ripped away from their beds. It came free and she pulled the gun, and, still on her knees, she turned to Levy. His face was twisted with grief, as if he was already mourning her death. That was the last thing she knew. Levy would kill her for the tribe.