He, She and It

by Marge Piercy

  “Whose pants were these?” the Golem asks Samuel. His voice is very deep, Judah thinks: the bass befits a creature of his size, as the longer organ pipes have the deeper pitch.

  Samuel scratches his head. “They were the pants of Chaim the Silversmith, may he rest in peace.”

  “And this shirt?”

  “The widow of Gershom brought that in.”

  “I’m a walking cemetery of clothes,” the Golem says to the Maharal as they cross the narrow street with the houses leaning over it. “Today the widows of the constables are gathering up their old clothes. I have been thinking about murder. I still think what I did was correct. I am to protect.” Then Joseph stops stark in his tracks, his mouth falling open, to watch a pigeon beat from roof to roof on whistling wings.

  The Maharal must take Joseph’s elbow and hustle him along, as every object in the street fascinates him. He peers at everyone. He is so big and impassive, he frightens some. Judah gives him a brief lecture on the rudeness of staring.

  “But how can I see if I don’t look?”

  “You don’t need to look at people so hard. It frightens them.”

  “But you don’t want me to be stupid. I’m trying to learn, Teacher. Teach me.”

  “I’m going to teach you how to be shamash at the synagogue. That should occupy you and keep you out of trouble.”

  The Altneushul is a building that has never ceased to move the Maharal, from the day he arrived in Prague when he was forty, as it never ceased to awe me when I was studying at the university. I have never seen a small building with greater dignity. It has a presence of holiness and of concentrated history. It is not tall outside. Instead, when you enter the Altneushul you step down, for the height of the interior was gotten by going down as well as up. It has a sharply pitched A of roof, with a single row of crenellations like teeth in the shape of a menorah to decorate its simplicity. It looks strong, ancient, of and from the earth. Inside, while there are individual splendors of decoration—the Torah curtain, the metal screens—the overall effect is austere. It is a place to lift your eyes, pray from your spine.

  Now the Maharal shows the Golem his duties. “Avoid gossip. Avoid chattering with the old men and the old women who will come pestering you. Keep your mouth shut and work hard.”

  Joseph obeys, for he wants to please Judah; perhaps this was the source of the tradition that the Golem was mute. As shamash of the synagogue, Joseph works hard and cheerfully. He takes his meals at the rabbi’s table. At first he lowers his face into the soup and begins to lap it up like a dog he saw eating in the courtyard. When he finishes the soup, he bites into the bowl. He has ground a large mouthful of china between his powerful teeth before the Maharal can stop him. But he does not choke. Instead he chews the china and swallows it just as if it were a piece of challeh.

  Judah says hastily, into the stunned faces of his family, “He’s an orphan. We must teach him manners. He has been living among beggars and lunatics.”

  By the end of the week, Joseph has learned to eat with utensils, although sometimes he still mistakes what to eat. Given a chicken for the first time, he seizes a drumstick and eats it entire, bones and all. Once, in the courtyard, the Maharal sees Joseph pick up a brick, bite off the end and chew it thoughtfully. Judah groans and covers his face. How to explain to the Golem what is edible and what is not? It is all one to him. Whatever is inside him processes it all. A brick is the same as a potato. Perhaps he finds it tastier like a man eating meat, the stuff of which he is made, the Maharal wonders in despair.

  Now that Joseph has learned at least minimally how to comport himself so that others will think him simple but not—usually—dangerous, the Maharal decides it is time for the Golem to take on the duties for which he was created. As the weather slowly turns mild, danger grows. Young men of the town like to break into the ghetto and commit mayhem. It gives them something to do on a fine spring night. There is a rising whine of violence barely suppressed in the city. The Turk has won some recent victories; the price of bread is up; more peasants have been forced off their land. Thaddeus is preaching to big enthusiastic crowds. He has started a young men’s society of knights and ambitious guildsmen dedicated to driving out infidels, heretics, Jews, to cleansing the city and reestablishing the clean simple living each generation likes to imagine characterized their grandparents.

  “Every night, Joseph, I want you to go out and patrol the ghetto for danger.” The Maharal has learned that Joseph eats but does not sleep.

  “What should I watch for? What should I do?”

  Everything must be explained. For instance, the Maharal tells Joseph to seize anyone he finds suspicious and take him to the watch or bring him directly to the Maharal. On one of his patrols he seizes an old scholar who sleeps little and walks while he ponders, perhaps falsely secure in the belief that he is so obviously a poor old man, nobody would bother to rob him. Why does he seize this harmless old man? Because when he asks the old scholar what he is doing out, the man replies, “What are you doing? I have a suspicious nature myself.” Therefore Joseph seizes him and drags him before the Maharal on the charge of being suspicious.

  Joseph is obedient but more literal than any child. He does exactly to the letter what he is told, rather than what the Maharal may have meant. Judah finds himself thinking a great deal about the need for precision in language. Still, Joseph learns quickly. He asks as many questions as Judah remembers his children asking, perhaps more. They are not the same questions. Where did I come from? Why is grass green? Where does the sun go when it goes down? Judah can hear Bezalel’s reedy childhood voice. Joseph asks none of these. Once he has begun to learn to distinguish between the natural world and the artificial world of human artifacts, he loses interest in birds and trees. His questions concern people and their doings.

  Why do parents love their children? How does a man pick a wife? Why do people laugh? How does someone know what work to do in the world? What do the blind see? Why do men get drunk? Why do men play with cards and dice when they lose more than they win? Why do people call each other momser—bastard—when they are angry and then again when they are loving? You little momser. Why do people say one thing and do another? Why do people make promises and then break them? What does it mean to mourn?

  Sometimes Judah feels as if he has acquired an immense five-year-old who wants nothing more than to follow him around and ask him questions. He must turn on Joseph again and again and tell him to go and sweep the floor, to polish the silver in the Altneushul, to trim the candles and the lamps. He is always having to deny his attention to Joseph, who would gladly absorb all of his time as a tutor in human behavior and general learning.

  Every night Joseph trots tirelessly through the narrow dark ill-smelling streets with sewers running down the middle, runs fearlessly through the shadows. He lifts the drunkard on his shoulders and deposits him inside the door of his home. If Jews are quarreling in the streets, he separates them, gently but inexorably. He is learning how to use his strength, but sometimes he forgets. He has become the unofficial policeman of the night, a solitary patrol of peace. This task he carries out cheerfully, quietly. Now when he has an errand to run for the Maharal, people greet him. The wife whose husband he lugged home, the man whose purse he saved, they address him respectfully. Although Joseph cannot smile, he can nod, and his voice in answer shows his pleasure at the friendly greetings. Sometimes the Maharal notices him lingering in the street to enjoy the pleasantries. Then the Maharal frowns and steps out to call Joseph to his duties in the synagogue.

  But Passover is coming, and close on its heels will arrive Easter, the holiday always feared by the Jews of Prague. Thaddeus is preaching they are murderers of God. Rocks, garbage, excrement are tossed at the gates of the ghetto, and any Jew returning close to dark is apt to be set upon. In the mild nights of April, with the scent of narcissus in the air and the willows already chartreuse along the river, gangs of youth climb over the wall and look for trouble.

&nbs
p; One overcast April night with the feel of rain in the air, voices and scents magnified by a light fog, an expectant mother calls for Chava to deliver her. The messenger is the ten-year-old son, and together they start back. But a party of rowdy knights from the town has broken into the ghetto and accosts Chava at the corner of two streets. They throw her down on the damp pavement, two of them pinning her head and shoulders into the dirty stones of the street while she bucks and bites at the hand that is clapped across her mouth and covers her nostrils so that she is choking and cannot draw breath. Two of them are prying her legs apart as she tries to fight the crowd of them, futilely. The ten-year-old lies bleeding from his skull. Then Joseph on his rounds comes running. He tears their swords from their hands. One by one he casts the men into the buildings like a dog tossing water from his coat. Their blows are feathers tickling his shoulders. They break their knuckles against him. One dagger scratches him and he bleeds, blood that in the darkness looks black.

  Chava picks herself up, grabs a fallen sword, pulls her skirt and petticoat down. The sword is heavy for her and she grasps it in both hands, hilt against her belly for support. One of the knights is about to skewer the Golem from the back when she runs him through instead. Finally Joseph stands panting among the dead. Joseph and Chava look at each other. “I must take you home,” he says.

  “Let me see that cut. It’s already stopped bleeding. You heal quickly.”

  “They can’t hurt me.” Joseph snorts his contempt.

  “Oh?” Chava smiles sarcastically, but the hand she rests on his arm is kindly. “You aren’t mortal, maybe?”

  “Go home now. I’ll take you.”

  “Simcha Roth is still in need. Babies wait for nobody. You can walk with me, quickly. Then take that poor boy to the doctor and throw these bodies over the wall.”

  “All of that I will do…You killed a man, too, tonight.” Joseph matches his pace to hers. “Does that bother you?”

  “Let’s never speak of it to anyone. Particularly, Joseph, don’t mention this to my grandfather or my father, Itzak. I deal with life and death every time a baby must come from its mother. Those men meant to shame me first and then to kill me. I’m grateful to you, Joseph.”

  The next morning a storm blows, and there are only nine men at prayers. “Joseph, make a minyon with us,” Samuel the tailor begs him.

  Joseph takes his place with them. When the Maharal sees what has happened, he glares at Joseph, but he can say nothing till afterward. Then he scolds him. “You are not a man. You cannot make a minyon.”

  “I am not a man, but I am a Jew. Thus you made me. It takes ten Jews. If I was an angel, would you tell me I could not make up a minyon?”

  After the rabbi has gone off to hold his court, to work as a judge, another of his hundred duties, Chava comes out of the study, where she has been copying the rabbi’s new treatise on education. “They tell me I’m a Jew but that I can’t make up a minyon either,” she tells Joseph. “Whatever you are, you are not less than a man.”

  “Chava, if you mean that, teach me to read. I know only what I hear.”

  She is moved by his desire. Most women were illiterate then, although less often among the Jews than among the Christians. Frequently, learned men taught their daughters. But Chava is aware that to be able to read and write sets her off from the great majority of women, who are blind to the words and the knowledge of books. A terrible blindness. “I’d be happy to teach you.”

  Chava finds Joseph strange, observing that he patrols the ghetto and never sleeps, that he has more than human strength. She has read the kabbalah and the texts of Abulafia. She suspects what Joseph is, but she says nothing, not to Itzak, her father, not to Joseph, not to Perl, not to the Maharal. All children are made, she thinks, by a mother and father. So poor Joseph has only a father, one who does not cherish him. Am I to think the less of him for that? He may not be a man as men are, but he’s alive, and he wants to learn. That is a beautiful hunger that should be fed. He saved my life and my pride; I value both. I value him.

  From that moment on, Joseph loves Chava, but he is ashamed of his love. He is a golem of clay. How could any woman embrace him? He could not give her children. If he should touch her, he is terrified he would bruise her flesh that seems light as a petal to him. He would crush her as he crushed the narcissus he tried to pick on the bank of the Vltava. He knows that the Maharal, whom he always longs to please, whom he cannot help but consider his father, would never forgive him. He cannot bear to imagine the anger of the Maharal if he should ever touch Chava. But Chava is the sun of his day, his rose of light. Whenever she is called out for a birth, he walks with her and he waits outside, all night if necessary, until the dawn renders the ghetto as safe as it ever is.

  People think of love as a human emotion, but I have seen dogs and cats and horses die for love, and never yet one person. I have seen women die of love in my youth, when childbirth was more dangerous and abortions not always safe, but not for love. Yod, you are capable of affection, so why cannot Joseph be? His simplicity makes him more vulnerable to the need to bestow and receive affection, not less so. Your capabilities, my dear, I worked long and hard to extend while working on your pleasure and pain centers and your capacity to imagine. In Freud’s terms, that old marvelously creative humbug, that sculptor of urges, I balanced thanatos with eros. Avram should not have let me loose if he wanted a simple man-made cyborg, for you are also woman-made. My knowledge is in you. But nobody, my dear, gave you your infinite hunger to understand. That you gave yourself. Never, Yod, never believe anybody who tells you, not Avram, not even me, what you are and are not capable of. Find out for yourself. Be less humble than Joseph, my angel.

  During this period, in spite of the Maharal’s occasional anger, Joseph is happy. Chava teaches him the Hebrew alphabet and the German alphabet, which is used for Czech also, so he can make out signs, and soon he will be reading real words in real books. He sweeps the synagogue and patrols the ghetto. In the streets people speak to him, no matter how funny they think he looks. Seldom now do the boys throw stones at him or tease him. When he lumbers along the narrow streets, people make way for him. Some smile, others nod. He thinks, I belong here. Here is where I live. People like me. I have friends, and this is my home. Although he cannot smile or laugh, his eyes shine with the joy he feels. If there were cloud-gray jewels, they would be his eyes now briefly when he is alight with happiness.

  FOURTEEN

  By the Light of the Unyellow Moon

  The next day, Shira braced for Gadi’s return, but it was another week before he was shipped in. Then he was rushed immediately to the hospital, a building complex even older than the lab building. The flogging had been far more than a formality. His kidneys were injured—one must be replaced at once—and he had experienced a buildup of toxins. He was unconscious and would remain isolated for ten days to two weeks.

  The next Shabbat, a message robot appeared at the gate, and Malkah and Shira went to fetch it. Message robots were small self-propelled wheeled vehicles; always a strident yellow, they resembled tiny cannons, barrels on treads. They rode a special car in the tube trains and then continued under their own power. They offered a secure way of delivering messages, since they could be blown up but not decoded by anyone who did not have the correct DNA. This one was programmed only for Malkah’s. She had to feed it an injection of her blood. It would only deliver its message if given living tissue. Hair did not work, nor nail clippings. Ironically, in a fully electronic society with everything on computers, the only fully secure channel that could not be hacked into was the little message robot.

  Shira and Malkah squatted in front of the barrel, while it hummed to itself, verifying Malkah’s DNA. Finally it spoke. “I am from Riva,” it said in its affectless high-pitched drone. It sounded like a mechanical mouse. “I have been detained, but I am definitely coming. I am with a friend. We will be arriving as an old lady, your sister Dalia, and her nurse. Make the house as secure as possible.
Arrange that no one exercises curiosity. I am a very dull and demanding old lady. I am programmed to repeat this message once. Are you ready for the second delivery?”

  “Proceed.” Malkah hugged herself in delight. The message robot repeated, then went into erasure mode, when it could not be touched without producing a shock. “I am programmed with the DNA of my sender. Do you have an answer?”

  “It is I, Malkah, responding. I will make the house secure. Shira is here and knows you are coming. I look forward to seeing you, with whatever face. My sister Dalia was always a pain in the ass, and I will be sure everyone here knows that.”

  The robot repeated the message for corrections, then went into encoding mode. When the message had been secured, it trundled off. Shira accompanied it to the gate, watching until its bright yellow disappeared among the dunes. Message robots were seldom bothered, even by gangs in the Glop, since tampering with them never produced a message but did reliably provide a small messy explosion. They ambled around the world through the Glops, into multi enclaves, onto the tubes and the zips, far more freely and safely than people or animals could. Shira watched it wistfully. That was true freedom, she thought, something now available only to special machines.

  It was a quiet day in Tikva; on Shabbat, only essential services continued. Most of the children of the town were out on the streets playing or at children’s events in one or another synagogue, so that today it seemed almost a town of children instead of adults. As was the case everyplace, the leftover radiation from power plant residues and the stockpiles of toxic chemicals long since part of the water table had left most people infertile without heroic measures to conceive (and the credit and/or position to command those measures). Further, every pregnancy outside the Glop was monitored genetically and developmentally. Thus the ability to conceive and bear healthy children was both prized and viewed as somewhat primitive. That capacity, too, had set Shira apart at Y-S. Most educated young people of her generation thought out loud or secretly that infertility was Gaia’s way of protecting her totality. People had gone too far in destroying the earth, and now the earth was diminishing the number of people. Perhaps when the earth had come back into balance, reproduction would become again the simple matter it seemed to have been for their ancestors.