“What nonsense are you bleating?” Jacob Korczak made as if to cuff his son. But he was just, as well as stern, and looked before he struck. Friedman looked, too. He’d taken the brown patches above the stranger’s eyes for a birthmark, about which any comment or even apparent notice would have been rude. Now, though, he saw David was right. The marks did spell out the Hebrew word for truth.
For a moment, he accepted that as a freak of nature. Then he remembered the Talmudic teaching that the word emes was the Seal of God, which had also adorned Adam’s forehead when he and the world were newly created things.
Since Adam, no man had borne that sign. It was instead the mark of a thing newly created, though not by God: the mark, in short, of the golem. Fear all but froze Friedman’s heart. There were other terrors than Germans loose in the world—and he had just invited one of them into his house!
A low choking noise from Jacob Korczak said he’d come to the same dreadful realization. Isaac Geller hadn’t, but Isaac Geller, while a good man and a good Jew, was not overly burdened with brains.
What to do? What to do? Friedman didn’t dare even moan, for fear of angering the undead creature. He wanted to command it to leave, but feared its wrath since he knew he had no authority over it. Besides, having accepted it as a guest, he could not turn it out when it had done no wrong without incurring sin himself.
That left him no choice but to treat the thing as if it were a man like any other. He waved to the table. When it sat, he said, “Will you honor us by leading prayers this evening?”
The golem shook its head, pointed to its throat with a massive index finger, shook its head again. Of course, Friedman thought: it can’t speak—only true divine creations can do that. He racked his fear-frozen wits for other bits of lore, but it was as if he were trying to get money from a bank that had failed.
As if with a magic of her own, Emma had set an extra place for the golem, shifted her husband’s chair to it, and found him an old splintery stool, all without being noticed. Now, red-faced and beaming, she placed a big tray of latkes on the table. With her spatula, she filled the golem’s plate. Berel poured slivovitz into its glass.
Since the golem had declined, Isaac Geller led the prayers. After the final omayn, he lifted his snifter of brandy and made the usual toast: “L’chayim—to life!”
Friedman was more convinced than ever that his friend had rocks in his head. Of all the things that might enrage a golem, he couldn’t think of one more likely to infuriate than praise for something it would never have.
But the golem only raised its glass along with the rest of the adults. It let the potent plum brandy moisten its lips, but whatever passed them did not lower the level of the slivovitz by a hair’s breadth. It used its fork to cut a tiny crumb from one latke, then put the rest of that potato pancake and all the others back on the platter.
That was too much for Emma. She could extend hospitality to a golem with aplomb, but to see the hospitality refused roused her ire. “You’re not eating,” she said sharply, as if in the one accusation she condemned the creature for crimes uncounted.
The golem obediently dipped its head to her, then lifted the scrap of fried potato to its mouth. It chewed but, Friedman saw, did not swallow. What need has a thing of clay for nourishment? he asked himself, and found no answer. Politely nodding once more to Emma, the golem put both hands on its belly, as if to show it was stuffed to overflowing. She let out a loud, unimpressed sniff but otherwise held her peace.
With the golem so abstemious, the latkes were enough to feed everyone. Friedman had trouble remembering the last time he’d been so pleasantly full—not since the Germans came, that was certain. He sipped his brandy, savored the heat spreading from his middle. Even that heat, though, was not enough to keep him from wondering when he’d enjoy a fully belly again.
After the last pancake had vanished, Emma started carrying dishes back into the kitchen. She let Yetta Korczak and Bertha Geller help, but when the golem started to do likewise, she stopped in her tracks and looked so scandalized that even the undead creature got the message. It sat back down; Berel’s chair creaked under its weight.
He didn’t let that worry him. He’d had food and drink; now he lit his pipe and blew a happy cloud toward the ceiling. Then, emboldened and perhaps a trifle shikker from the slivovitz, he turned to the golem and said expansively, “What shall we call you, my friend?”
The moment the words were out of his mouth, he felt a fool for forgetting the thing of clay was mute. But it answered him even so: it pointed with one finger to the letter written on its forehead.
“Emes?” Friedman said. The golem nodded. Friedman raised his own forefinger, something he did only when he’d had a bit to drink. “All right then, Emes, show us some of the truth you are.”
“Berel—” Jacob Korczak began. He stopped there, but Friedman could fill in what he’d meant: Berel, shut up, you damned fool, before you ruin us all. It was good advice; he wished he could have taken it.
Too late for that—the golem was nodding again. Friedman’s vision suddenly blurred, or rather doubled strangely. He could still see the room in which he sat, the golem next to him, Korczak and Geller across the table, the children back to playing with dreidels.
But set side by side with the familiar, homely scene, he also saw other things, the golem’s truth he had so rashly requested. He saw Jews jammed insanely tight into a tiny corner of a great city he somehow knew to be Warsaw. He saw Germans smirking as they clipped Jews’ beards, more Germans holding their sides and howling laughter as they dipped other beards into oil and set them ablaze. He saw twelve-year-old girls selling their bodies for half a crust of bread. He saw the starved corpses of others who perhaps had not sold themselves enough, leaning dismally against battered buildings. He saw Jews walk by the corpses without so much as glancing at them, as though they’d grown numb even to death.
As if at the cinema, the scene shifted. He saw a big pit gouged out of the ground. Under German guns, a line of naked people walked up to the edge of the pit. All the men and boys among them were circumcised. The Germans shot them from behind. They tumbled into their ready-made mass grave. The Germans led up another line.
The scene shifted again. He saw a wrought-iron gate, and above it, in letters of iron, the words arbeit macht frei. He saw more naked people, these mostly women and children, slowly walking toward a low, squat building. Signs in Yiddish, Polish, and German said to the showers. He saw endless piles of bodies fed into what looked like enormous bake ovens. He saw black, greasy smoke rise from the stacks above those ovens.
Slowly, slowly, the other seeing faded. He was altogether back in his own warm room in his own little house. But a chill remained, a chill in his heart no fireplace could touch. He looked across the table to his friends. Both men were pale and stunned and looking at him. They’d shared the vision, then.
He looked at the golem, hating it. If it had given him the truth, how much more comforting a lie, any lie, would have been! He’d looked into the open grave of his people. What man could do that and then go on as if he’d seen nothing? He hated himself, too, for asking the undead creature into his home.
While he berated himself, simple, practical Isaac Geller said, “If that’s how it’s going to be, what do we do about it?” Having less imagination than either Friedman or Korczak, he yielded less readily to horror.
“Dear God, what can we do?” Korczak said. But Geller had not asked him; he’d spoken to the golem.
That second sight returned, this time blurrily, as if the thing of clay presented not truth but only possibility. In fragmented visions, Friedman saw the Jews of Puck walking down the main street of town, saw them approaching a fishing boat, saw them in the boat with sea all around. The compass showed they were sailing northwest.
Again he was back only at his own table. “That’s meshuggeh!” he cried. “The Germans would shoot us for breaking curfew. Nobody among us knows how to run a fishing boat, and the boa
ts have almost no fuel anyhow. The fishermen spend more time complaining than they do fishing.”
As usual, though, Isaac Geller looked at things differently. He asked the golem, “What happens if we don’t try, Emes?”
Friedman saw that wrought-iron gate again. He shuddered, though the vision lasted but a split second. Set against what lay beyond that gate, any risk at all seemed worth trying. He found his own question for the golem: “You’ll help us?”
The undead creature nodded. That was enough to satisfy Friedman. He twisted in his chair, called into the kitchen. “Emma!”
“What is it?” She stood in the doorway, the sleeves of her dress rolled up past her elbows, soapy water dripping from her fingers onto the floor. “What is it that won’t wait till I finish washing?”
Our lives, he thought. But that would have taken explanation and argument. He just said, “Get coats for the children and for yourself, too. We’re going out.”
“What?” Her eyes went wide. “The curfew, the Nazis—”
“I don’t care,” he said, and her eyes went wider still. He turned to the golem. “Show her, too, Emes. She needs to see.”
He never figured out precisely what the thing of clay showed his wife, but she gasped and put a hand to her mouth. Without a word, she walked over to the closet and pulled out coats. “Come here this instant, Rachel, Aaron! This instant, do you hear me? We need to dress warmly.”
Bertha Korczak and Yetta Geller came out of the kitchen to find out what was going on. Like Emma, they started to protest when they learned they’d be out and about in the night. Then the golem looked at each of them in turn, mud-colored eyes somber in his great ugly face. Argument was cut off as abruptly as a chicken’s head when the shochet wielded his cleaver. Friedman wondered if he could learn that trick himself. But no, it was probably supernatural.
A few minutes later, he stood outside his home. Even wrapped in his coat, he was cold. The golem started down the street, toward the docks. The three families of Jews followed. Friedman looked back at the house where he’d lived his whole life. To abandon it suddenly seemed insane. But even more insane were the visions Emes had granted him. Life away from everything he’d known would be strange and hard, but it would be life, for him and his children. Even without the golem’s power, he saw again in his mind’s eye naked Jews standing at the mouth of their ready-dug grave.
The main street was almost eerily quiet. Nothing moved—no cars, no bicycles, no people on foot. The town of Puck might have been cast headlong into the strange space from which the golem drew its visions. Berel Friedman shook his head. The Germans had powers of their own, chief among them fear.
Every step he took seemed to echo from the houses, from the solid stone front of the Catholic church that was much the biggest building in town. Every time one of the children coughed or stumbled or complained, he expected a division of panzer troops to burst from an alley, engines bellowing, cannon and machine guns all pointed straight at him and his. But the silence held.
Puck was anything but a big city; even the main street, the one straight street it boasted, was only a couple of hundred meters long. Soon most of the houses were behind the Jews, the dockside fish market straight ahead. Hope rose in Friedman. The golem, after all, was a creature of might. No doubt its spell lay on the Germans, lulling them into taking no notice of the families it was spiriting away.
He had no doubt—until the German patrol came out of the market, heading back toward town. Then fear flooded into him, all the more fiercely for having been held at bay. His legs turned to jelly, his bowels to water. He started to gasp out the Shma yisroayl so he would not die with the prayer unsaid: “Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one!”
Even as the harsh cry “Halt!” rang in the air, the golem ran straight for the Germans. They were not first-quality troops: who would waste such on a fleabag town like Puck? They were not expecting trouble, so their reactions were slower than they might have been. But they were soldiers, and they did carry guns. Before the golem reached them, a couple flung Mausers to their shoulders and started shooting.
Amidst screams from women and children, Friedman’s head filled with a sudden urgent vision: the Pilsudski, Tadeusz Czuma’s fishing boat. As usual, it was the one moored farthest north in the little harbor. “This way!” he shouted, and the rest of the Jews followed—incidentally, he thought some time later, taking themselves out of the line of fire.
Muzzle flashes from the Germans’ rifles gave them flickering light, like small lightning bolts, as they ran. Bullets slapped into the golem, one, two, three. The impacts were shockingly loud. A man would have been down and dead, maybe cut in two, with such wounds in him. But the thing of clay had never been alive, so how could rifle fire kill it?
All the Germans were shouting, in terror now, as their prey refused to fall. Then the golem was among them. It might not have been alive, but it was immensely strong. Its great fists smashed ribs, caved in steel helmets and the skulls beneath them. The Germans’ shouts turned to screams that shut off one by one.
Friedman leaped from the pier down into the Pilsudski, then whirled to catch his wife and children as they sprang after him. Korczak and Geller were doing the same for their families. Faster than he could have imagined, everyone was on board. Only then did he remember he hadn’t the faintest idea how to sail the fishing boat.
Isaac Geller was already in the cabin. “Cast off the lines, you two,” he called to Friedman and Korczak. Friedman dashed to the bow, Korczak to the stern. By the time they’d obeyed, Geller had the noisy old engine going.
Booted footsteps pounded toward the fishing boat—the last German soldier, running for his life. Behind him came the golem, gaining with every enormous stride. The German whirled round in desperation, dropped to one knee, and fired at point-blank range straight into the golem’s face.
Maybe he’d intended to hit it between the eyes. Friedman knew even less about matters military than he did about sailing, but he had a vague idea that was what you were supposed to do. If it was what the German had in mind, he didn’t quite succeed. The muzzle flash showed that his bullet smashed into the golem’s forehead just above its left eye.
In so doing, it destroyed the letter aleph, the first letter of the word emes. Mes was also a word in Hebrew; it meant death. Just as a man would have, the golem ceased when that bullet struck it. But its heavy body smashed into the kneeling German just the same. Friedman heard bones snap, the soldier’s last cry abruptly cut off. Two corpses lay unmoving a few meters from the Pilsudski.
The racket from the fishing boat’s engine got louder. The boat pulled away from the dock. Friedman had hardly ever been on the water despite a lifetime by the sea, and wondered if he’d be seasick. For now, he didn’t think so. The motion wasn’t that unpleasant; it reminded him of bouncing up and down on the back of a mule.
He went into the cabin to see if he could do anything to help Isaac Geller. Geller didn’t seem to need help. Despite his long black coat and big black hat, he looked surprisingly nautical. Maybe it was the cigar he’d stuck in the corner of his mouth.
“I didn’t know you could handle a boat,” Friedman said.
The cigar twitched. Geller grunted. “I may not be much for pilpul about the Talmud, Berel my friend, but give me something with a motor in it and I will make it work.”
“This is also a mitzvah,” Friedman said, adding, “especially now.” He looked around the cabin. Once he’d seen it, he couldn’t imagine what sort of help he’d thought to give Geller. For all he could make of the instruments, they might have been printed in Chinese. The only thing he recognized was the compass. He studied that for a while, then said hesitantly, “Excuse me, Isaac, but are we not sailing south and east?”
“Yes,” Geller said. “Nu?”
“In the vision Emes granted us, were we not supposed to go northwest?”
Geller laughed so hard, the cigar jerked up and down in his mouth. “Berel, not even the
help of a golem will make this boat sail across the dry land of the Hela Peninsula.”
“Oh,” Friedman said in a very small voice.
“Let me get around the peninsula before I make for Sweden,” Geller went on, “not that we have much real chance of getting there.”
“What? Why not?”
Geller poked a finger at one of the incomprehensible gauges. “You see how much fuel we have there. It isn’t enough. It isn’t nearly enough. God only knows what will happen when it’s gone. I’m sure of only one thing: whatever it is, it will be better than what the golem showed us.”
“Yes,” Friedman said. “Oh, yes.”
He went out on deck. Emma came rushing up to him. “Will it be all right, Berel?” she demanded fiercely. “Will the children get away from—that?”
He still didn’t know what the golem had showed her. He didn’t want to know; Emes had shown him too much for him to want to find out more. He shook his head, blew out a long sigh. “I just don’t know, Emma,” he answered, thinking first of the fuel gauge Geller showed him and then of what his friend had just said. “But whatever we find on the sea, how can it be worse?”
His wife nodded. “This is true enough.”
Friedman walked over to Jacob Korczak, who was watching the low, flat coast of the Hela Peninsula flow by. Every few kilometers, lights defined the land: though there was a war on, no British or French planes could reach Poland, and as for Russia—Russia had helped Hitler carve up his neighbor. So the lights kept burning.
Korczak might have been reading Friedman’s mind: “With the kind of pilot Isaac is liable to be, he’ll need all the help he can get.”
“He’s better than either of us,” Friedman answered, to which Korczak replied with a cough. After a moment, Berel went on, “I had thought—I had hoped—the golem might save more of our people before it met its fate. For a moment, I had even hoped it might save all our people. For what other purpose could it have been made?”
“I asked myself this very question.” By his slightly smug tone, Korczak had come up with an answer, too. “My thinking is this: the golem is a power in the world, not so?”
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