“If you want to fight me for her, do so,” he commanded. “Otherwise step away.”
He was so beautiful, he was a light before her eyes, but she refused to bow to him. She was stronger than a hundred horsemen, but she couldn’t win against Azriel unless she could find a remedy. She knew the cure for beestings; the purest clay must cover every sting. Solomon himself was said to have battled honeybees, coating their hive with clay, for clay was protection both for the bees and for their victims.
Ava lifted Lea in her arms. She was heavy as lead, light as a feather, and she had an unearthly pallor. She was already losing consciousness, and her swollen tongue could no longer fit inside her mouth. Her pulse was weakening, and a red rash had begun to rise in circles over her pale skin. Ava caused the stingers to drop away with a single command. She undressed Lea, then unlatched the locket, which she stored in her pocket. She must cover every inch of the afflicted skin with clay, but there was none to be had; the nearby stream had only a stony granite bank. Ava hastened to unbutton her dress. She knew what she must do, and she quickly reached down and grabbed the flesh covering her hip. She did not flinch as she tugged and pulled. At last it came off in her hands. Once taken from her body it appeared to be ordinary flesh, a bloody portion of it, but when she mixed it with water the flesh once again became the clay it had first been.
The mystical number for beestings was 348, therefore Ava mixed the water and clay 348 times before she applied it, coating Lea’s face and throat and body, taking more handfuls of her own flesh to use for the balm. Beestings could cause blindness, or asthma, or death, and Lea was motionless. Azriel had followed them and was crouching on the bank of the stream.
There was a huge gash in Ava’s side, and once the clay became flesh once more she was shocked to see she still bled, like an ordinary woman. That was impossible, and for a moment her fear burned hot inside her; perhaps she had unmade herself. But when she took her scarf and bound herself with it, she stanched the flow. She was missing a piece of herself and there was a deep indentation over her hip. Her eyes were hot and she ached with some unfamiliar pain, but she could not give in. She must do more to fight the angel. She was made to do more. She knew that honey could cure beestings as well, and that what wounded you could also cure you. She went to the hive, took fistfuls of the honey, then grabbed a dozen bees and crushed them in her palm. She did away with the stingers, and trickled the mixture of honey and crushed bees into Lea’s mouth, then used the rest as a seal over the clay.
She had a single task, to keep Lea safe, and that was what she planned to do. She could not run over the mountain, or escape into the forest. They must flee from Azriel. She went to the neighbor’s house, where she pounded on the door, crying out for help. Monsieur Cazales was shocked when he saw what he believed to be a desperate mother with her limp, unconscious child in her arms, the same two he’d seen at the Félix farm. Clearly some calamity had occurred: the girl’s clothes were in disarray and her breath was shallow.
“Come with me,” Monsieur Cazales told the woman. “We’ll go to the doctor.”
Ava lifted Lea into the bed of the truck, where Cazales kept a blanket for his sheepdog. They went across the mountain on the old roads, sometimes cutting across fields, as Cazales knew the shortest route. He’d had a daughter who’d had measles, and one dark night many years ago, he’d driven this same route in a panic, desperate for the doctor’s help. When they reached the château, Cazales leaned his arm on the horn, and the sound broke through the deep silence and had Girard running for the door. At first he thought the police had come for the guest in his barn, then he saw the old farmer.
“Come,” Dr. Girard called to Ava, who carried the girl inside. He thought perhaps the girl had a head injury, but then he noticed the stings and knew she’d had a severe allergic reaction.
“Do you need me, Doctor?” Cazales wanted to know, but Girard shouted out his thanks and told him to go. Before he turned to care for the girl, he was relieved to spy a glimpse of a figure in the barn.
Once inside the office, Girard switched on the lights. “Put her right on the couch,” he told Ava. He went to get a dose of precious epinephrine, hard to get in these times, which made the unconscious girl gasp and open her eyes for a moment, shuddering from the power of the drug. The angel was outside the window; he had followed, but he came no closer. Ava had turned and had shaken her fist at Azriel. “No,” she said aloud, in a voice that emerged from deep inside of her.
The doctor knew this angel and understood the seriousness of his appearance. He gave Lea another dose of the drug, and they had to hold her down, Ava taking her legs, the doctor her arms, to help control her seizure. After a moment, Lea calmed down and they could let go.
“That’s right,” Girard said to the listless girl. “Breathe deep.”
He took out some apis that a patient had given to him in lieu of payment, a mixture made from honeybees and alcohol with the venom of the bee extracted. He placed a few drops under Lea’s tongue. Perhaps it was an old wives’ tale to battle a disease with a measure of that illness, but he’d seen it help before. There was truth in the locals’ homeopathic remedies, ones they had used for generations, and this girl needed all the help she could get. Lea slipped back into a deep dark sleep, and Girard was pleased that her pulse was now stronger. He had noticed the covering of clay and honey on the girl; the poison had been stopped and therefore had not reached her heart, or kidneys, or lungs, but had stayed pooled beneath her skin.
“You acted wisely,” he told Ava. “Your daughter’s alive because of it.”
Ava didn’t bother to correct him. Her hands still burned from taking hold of Azriel’s coat. It was her fault; she had done what was forbidden. She had left the girl and thought of her own needs. “She’s too pale,” Ava told the doctor, her voice unsteady. “Her breathing isn’t right.”
“She’ll be more stable in the morning,” the doctor promised. “Rest is the best medicine.”
He’d noticed letters on the woman’s arm that he recognized to be Hebrew. When she caught him staring, Ava quickly pulled down her sleeve. Still, it was in his nature, as it is in every doctor’s nature, to be curious. He had not asked many questions about who they were. He assumed they were Jews from Berlin, for in her delirium Lea had murmured Wo ist meine Mutter?
Where is my mother?
Later that evening Girard took a Hebrew book that had belonged to Sarah from the volumes he had hidden in his filing cabinet, for any books relating to Jews were no longer legal to own. He thumbed through the alphabet, writing down the letters he’d seen. They spelled out truth. He sat at his desk, pleased.
He could not imagine a more beautiful word for a woman to carry.
That evening, Girard offered Ava his room, but she declined, insisting she would prefer to keep vigil from the bedroom chair. She wasn’t about to let the girl out of her sight, especially after the doctor said there was another guest in the barn.
In the early hours of the morning, Lea became conscious. When she opened her eyes she thought she was in a bird’s nest. She had spied the heron out in the orchard. He’d managed to find them. He always did, and that comforted Lea. The casing of clay and honey she had been covered with had fallen away, leaving a gray and yellow powder on the sheets. Now that the light had broken, Ava was stunned to see how the girl had changed. Overnight, her hair had turned white as snow. Such things could happen when mortals saw Azriel yet continued to live, when they had come so close to the World to Come that he had become visible in all of his blinding brilliance.
It was shock that had caused it, Dr. Girard told Ava when he came in to check on Lea’s progress. It was possible for a person’s hair to turn white overnight after a traumatic event, certainly he’d heard of such cases. But it was a small price to pay for what had been accomplished. Another girl would not have survived the bees’ attack. Ava took Lea’s hand in hers. Human lives were like quicksilver; let go and they vanished. But not this time. Not n
ow.
“More rest,” the doctor declared. “That’s all she needs. Together we’ve brought her to life.”
CHAPTER THIRTY
THE MAKER AND THE MADE
ARDèCHE, JULY 1944
SHE MIGHT NOT HAVE RECOGNIZED Ava if not for her father’s boots. Those she would never forget, for the morning after the golem was created the rabbi noticed they were missing from the wardrobe. He had the children search the house, but it was a pointless pursuit and Ettie hadn’t bothered to look. She knew she was leaving that night so she ignored her father’s shouts. Had there been a thief in the house? Had someone borrowed his boots without asking? Ettie had stood in the kitchen and memorized it all, down to the spoons and the forks. She’d memorized his voice and the voices of her brothers and sisters.
“Are you too good to look for your father’s boots?” her mother had said when she found Ettie dreaming in the kitchen. She’d been shocked when in response Ettie threw her arms around her and held her tight. Their family did not do such things. Raw emotion was ignored and love went unspoken, and sometimes unknown.
“I was your worst child,” Ettie said thoughtfully, as if she was already gone.
Her mother could not bring herself to say anything. Whether or not that was true there was one thing that was certain. Ettie was her favorite child.
All this time later, the boots looked no worse for wear. Perhaps they had been enchanted, or perhaps the rabbi had chosen the strongest leather available. But Ava had changed. She now resembled a woman more than she did a creature made of clay. Her black hair shone, and she lacked the pallor she’d had when she was made, and now possessed a rosy complexion. More than anything, what was different was the expression in her eyes. If Ettie wasn’t mistaken they had changed color. She remembered them as gray as stone, but now they glinted with light.
They walked toward one another, each measuring the other.
“Do not get to your knees,” Ettie warned the golem when they met.
Ava smiled. She hadn’t intended to. She was not the same foolish creature she had been on the train. “I can still thank you.”
“For bringing you into this wretched place?” Ettie felt a wave of guilt for her selfish actions in creating life in exchange for a price. “I should get on my knees and beg you to forgive me.”
It was a heartless world, but there were the swifts, soaring above them in the half-light.
“No. I’m grateful to you,” Ava said.
“You realize that you were born to do our bidding? To serve us and nothing more?”
Ava knew that her maker was wrong. She was born to walk through the reeds and dance with the heron, she was made to watch Lea sleep safely through the night and to feel the sun on her skin and to stand here in the rabbi’s boots beneath a bower of green leaves.
“And what were you born to do?” she asked her maker.
Ettie grimaced. She knew the truth about herself. “I was born to fight.”
They sat in the wooden chairs where the doctor’s wife had spent early mornings in the last weeks of her life in order to watch the sun rise. Azriel had often kept Sarah Girard company; he had appreciated the long view through the trees, across to the mountains, and now he had returned to sit at Ettie’s feet. He could unleash flames and fire if he wished to do so, he could open the earth to send a plague of snakes and frogs. Instead, he leaned against Ettie’s legs, so that she thought a breeze had come up.
“If you fight,” Ava told her, “you will die.” She could glimpse the future, not for herself, but certainly for her maker. She saw a field and she knew that Ettie wished she had never let go of her sister’s hand.
“We all die,” Ettie responded. “Except for you. Until the girl gets rid of you.”
Lea was in the house, asleep, or sleeping as best she could. She had bad dreams of bees and of those she had lost, dreams that had turned her hair white.
“We had no right to make you and she has no right to unmake you,” Ettie said.
Ava saw Azriel’s eyes flicker over her maker. “If I don’t stop you, you will die.”
She was strong enough, she could do so if she wished.
Ettie nodded. “And if I don’t stop you, you will.”
They exchanged a gaze, aware that they would leave each other to their own fates.
“You have fulfilled your part of the bargain,” Ettie assured her creation. “A mother could not ask for more. As soon as the girl is safe, don’t think twice. Run away.”
But the vow Ava had made was no longer a burden. It was a choice. She might have run if the bees had not changed her fate, but now she would stay. She had been wrong to try to gain more time on earth. That was not why she had been made, but perhaps the first human trait a creature such as herself would acquire was to be selfish. She was renouncing that now. She sat with her maker and they both wept because they would not see each other again. What had been created was alive. Ettie did not see clay before her, but rather a woman who had been made by women, brought to life by their blood and needs and desires.
Later, as the sun was breaking, after Ettie had gone inside, Ava made her way through the woods until she reached the bare reeds. The river was only a trickle now, splashing over the rocks. The fish were singing with their silver voices. It was a perfect summer day, despite the cruelty of the world. When the heron came, Ava bowed to him, then asked for one last favor.
Find him if you can.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
THE BEAST
HAUTE-LOIRE, AUGUST 1944
ETTIE SLEPT MORE FITFULLY AS the day drew closer. It was hard to sleep after you had heard a prophecy, harder still when you believed it. Once Victor came for her, time moved in a rush, as if they had stepped inside a rocket ship that was rattling through the Milky Way, a journey that, once begun, could not be undone. She would be lingering on the road when the captain drove to a café, as he did every Friday. She was to convince him to let her into the car. Victor would be waiting for her, and if anyone could quickly get them away from the scene it was he. She knew what might happen with the captain. Victor had mentioned how she might hold the captain’s attention while the bomb was set in place in the tailpipe of his car, not quite able to meet her eyes as he spoke. She was then to escape from the car and run back to where Victor was parked.
Ettie brushed her glossy red hair, then chose the doctor’s wife’s black dress and slipped on the lucky red shoes. She hadn’t said goodbye to him. It was better this way. Instead she went to stand near a clutch of snowy white phlox Sarah Girard had planted in the last year of her life that were scattered beneath the trees. They had become a field of light. She closed her eyes and recited a section of the Amidah.
We hope all evil will be lost on earth.
The dusk was falling in ashy waves and the white flowers were turning blue when Ava came to stand beside her.
“You should leave,” Ettie told her. “You don’t have to be anyone’s slave.” She took Ava’s hand and shook her head. “You should listen to me, but you won’t.”
“You should listen to me,” Ava responded sadly.
They both knew that when Ettie left she would never return to this place. But she was not really here anyway, she was in the field with her sister.
She’d been there all along.
Victor dropped her off on the road and she stood there in the gloaming. They’d both had a case of nerves on the ride, which was not a bad thing, even though Ettie’s stomach was lurching so violently she had to stop so she could get out and be sick in a nearby jumble of marshy weeds. All the same, their nerves would serve to make them cautious, so fewer mistakes would be made.
Victor felt a stab of guilt once he’d let Ettie out on the road. He waited in the field, parked in the tall grass, ready to follow once the Milice captain had picked her up. Everyone had doubt at a moment like this, everyone had a stab of fear, but by then the captain’s car was headed toward the village and Ettie was standing in the road waving and there was no
time for doubt. The car, a Delage sports car, with black and red paint and red leather seats, had belonged to the previous owner of the house. It pulled over and idled. To Victor, from the darkness of the field where he crouched behind the wheel of his stolen car, the sports car looked like a lizard. Ettie went over to talk to the driver. She was shaky on the high heels, but she quickly regained her balance. She walked around to the passenger seat and then it began. Victor’s hands were sweating as he followed the speeding car. He had a rifle and more explosives in the backseat and the detonator on his lap, wrapped in a cloth so nothing would jog it before it was time.
The captain had suggested to Ettie that they go back to his house. The Jew’s house where the gardens were in ruins and there were still piles of ash from all of the books he had burned. He told her she’d never been in a house like it and would be stunned by its beauty when he led her up to the bedroom where there were silk sheets. She convinced him to pull into a field. Why should they wait? For weeks, Victor had been teaching her to flirt, and she understood she must keep a smile on her face, even though she knew the captain had been responsible for forty souls that had been deported to Auschwitz. Victor had been funny and charming as he pretended to be a girl seducing an old man. You’re so handsome, he had crooned about their ugly, old target. I’m so lucky I met you. Come closer. Closer. They’d laughed over it, but now she felt sick to her stomach again.
As soon as they pulled off the road, the captain kissed her. She thought about the way she’d run when she’d left her sister behind. She had forced herself to go forward, even though it had become impossible to spy Marta when she looked back. Just the hem of her dress, her boots, her newly cut hair. Ettie twisted away now so she could whisper in the captain’s ear. Turn the car off, we will be here for a while. This was her reason to be alive, this was the reason she’d run into the woods.
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