The Golem and the Djinni

“No, Cairo,” he said. “In a freighter. I paid a man to hide me on board, and it was there I became ill. We docked in New Jersey, and I was able to sneak away.” He spoke the learned story easily.

“But we could have helped you! It must have been so frightening, to be sick in a strange country, with only Boutros for a nursemaid!”

The Djinni smiled. “He was an excellent nursemaid. And I had no wish to be a burden.”

Maryam shook her head. “You mustn’t let pride get the better of you. We all turn to each other here, it’s how we make our way.”

“You are right, of course,” the Djinni said smoothly.

Her eyebrows arched. “And our secretive Mister Arbeely, how did you meet him?”

“Last year I passed through Zahleh, and met the smith who taught him. He saw that I was interested in the craft, and told me about his apprentice who had gone to America.”

“And imagine my surprise,” interjected Arbeely, “when this half-dead man knocks on my door and asks if I am the tinsmith from Zahleh!”

“This world works in strange ways,” Maryam said, shaking her head.

Arbeely studied her for signs of skepticism. Did she really believe this concocted story? Many Syrians had traveled odd and winding paths to New York—on foot through the forests of Canada, or fording box-laden barges out of New Orleans. But hearing their tale spoken aloud, Arbeely felt it was too remarkable for its own good. And the Djinni had none of the pallor or weakness of one who had been seriously ill. In fact, he looked like he could swim the East River. Too late to change it now, though. Arbeely smiled at Maryam, and hoped the smile looked natural.

“And are you from near Zahleh?” Maryam asked.

“No, I am Bedouin,” the Djinni replied. “I was in Zahleh to deliver my sheepskins to market.”

“Is that so?” She seemed to look him over again. “How astonishing you are. A Bedu stowaway in New York. You must come to my coffeehouse, everyone will want to meet you.”

“I would be honored,” the Djinni said. He bowed to Maryam and returned to the back room.

“Such a story,” Maryam murmured to Arbeely as he saw her to the door. “Obviously he has the endurance of his people, to have made it here. But still, I’m surprised at you, Boutros. You might have had better sense. What if he’d died in your care?”

Arbeely squirmed in very real embarrassment. “He was adamant,” Arbeely said. “I didn’t want to go against his wishes.”

“Then he placed you in a very difficult position. But then, the Bedouin are certainly proud.” She shot a glance at him. “Truly, he is Bedu?”

“I believe so,” Arbeely said. “He knows very little of the cities.”

“How odd,” she said, almost to herself. “He doesn’t seem …” She trailed off, her face clouding; but then she came back to herself. Smiling at Arbeely, she thanked him for the repair. Indeed, the flask was much improved; Arbeely had smoothed away the dents, restored the polish, and then reproduced the patterned band down to the tiniest awl-mark. She paid and left, saying, “By all means, you must bring Ahmad to the coffeehouse. No one will speak of anything else for weeks.”

But going by the immediate flood of visitors to Arbeely’s shop, it grew clear that Maryam had not waited for their visit; rather, in her enthusiastic manner, she had spread the story of the tinsmith’s new Bedouin apprentice far and wide. Arbeely’s own little coffeepot bubbled constantly on the brazier as the entire neighborhood filed in and out, eager to meet the newcomer.

Thankfully, the Djinni performed his part well. He entertained the visitors with tales of his supposed crossing and ensuing illness, but never spoke so long that he risked tangling himself in his story. Instead he painted in broad strokes the picture of a wanderer who one day decided, on little more than a whim, to steal away to America. The visitors left Arbeely’s shop shaking their heads over their strange new neighbor, who seemed protected by the accidental good fortune that God granted to fools and small children. Many wondered that Arbeely would take on an apprentice with such meager credentials. But then, Arbeely was considered a bit strange himself, so perhaps it was a case of like attracting like.

“Besides,” said a man at the coffeehouse, rolling a backgammon piece between his fingers, “it sounds like Arbeely saved his life, or close to it. The Bedouin have rules about repaying such debts.”

His opponent chuckled. “Let’s hope for Arbeely’s sake that the man can actually work a smith!”

Arbeely was heartily glad when the flood of visitors lowered to a trickle. Besides the pressure of maintaining their story, he’d spent so much time entertaining his neighbors that he’d fallen far behind on business. And it seemed that each visitor had brought along something that needed mending, until the shop was crammed full of dented lamps and burned pots. Many of the repairs were strictly cosmetic, and it was clear that their owners had been moved more by a sense of neighborly support than actual need. Arbeely felt grateful and a little bit guilty. To look at the rows of damaged items, one would think Little Syria had been struck by a plague of clumsiness.

The Djinni found the attention amusing. It wasn’t hard to keep his story consistent; most of the visitors were too polite to press him overmuch for details. According to Arbeely, there was a certain glamour to the Bedu that would work in his favor. “Be a bit hazy,” Arbeely had told him as they prepared their plan and rehearsed their stories. “Talk about the desert. It’ll go over well.” Then he’d been struck by a thought: “You’ll need a name.”

“What would you suggest?”

“Something common, I would think. Oh, let’s see—there is Bashir, Ibrahim, Ahmad, Haroun, Hussein—”

The Djinni frowned. “Ahmad?”

“You like it? It’s a good name.”

It was not so much that he liked it, as that he found it the least objectionable. In the repeated a’s he heard the sound of wind, the distant echo of his former life. “If you think I need a name, then I suppose it’s as good as any.”

“Well, you’ll definitely need a name, so Ahmad it shall be. Only please, remember to answer to it.”

The Djinni did indeed remember, but it was the only aspect of Arbeely’s plan that made him uncomfortable. To him the new name suggested that the changes he’d undergone were so drastic, so pervasive, that he was no longer the same being at all. He tried not to dwell on such dark thoughts, and instead concentrated on speaking politely, and maintaining his story—but every so often, as he listened to the chatter of yet more visitors, he spoke his true name to himself in the back of his mind, and took comfort in the sound.

Of all the people whom Maryam Faddoul told about the newcomer, only one man refused to take interest: Mahmoud Saleh, the ice cream maker of Washington Street. “Have you heard?” she told him. “Boutros Arbeely has taken a new apprentice.”

Saleh made a noise like “hmm” and scooped ice cream from his churn into a small dish. They were standing on the sidewalk in front of Maryam’s coffeehouse. Children waited before him, clutching coins. Saleh reached out a hand, and a child placed a coin in his palm. He pocketed the coin and held out the ice cream dish, careful to avoid looking at the child’s face, or Maryam’s, or indeed at anything other than his churn or the sidewalk. “Thank you, Mister Mahmoud,” the child said—a courtesy due, he knew, only to the presence of Maryam. There was a rattle as the child took a spoon from the cup tied to the side of his tiny cart.

“He’s a Bedouin,” Maryam said. “And rather tall.”

Saleh said nothing. He spoke little, as a rule. But Maryam, practically alone among the neighborhood, wasn’t perturbed by his silence. She seemed to understand that he was listening.

“Did you know any Bedu in Homs, Mahmoud?” she asked.

“A few,” he said, and held out his hand. Another coin; another dish. He’d tried to avoid the Bedu who lived on the outskirts of Homs, close to the desert. He’d thought them a grim people, poor and superstitious.

“I never knew any,” Maryam mused. “He’s an interesting man. He says he stowed away as if for a lark, but I sense there’s more. The Bedu are a private people, are they not?”

Saleh grunted. He liked Maryam Faddoul—in fact, it could be said that she was his only friend—but he wished she would stop talking about the Bedu. Along that path lay memories he did not wish to revisit. He checked the churn. Only three servings of ice cream were left. “How many more?” he asked aloud. “Count off, please.”

Small voices sounded: one, two, three, four, stop pushing, I was here first, five, six.

“Numbers four through six, please come back later.”

There were groans from his would-be customers, and the sound of retreating footsteps. “Remember your places in line,” Maryam called after them.

Saleh served the remaining children and listened as they returned the flimsy tin dishes to their place on the cart, atop the sack of rock salt.

“I ought to go back inside,” Maryam said. “Sayeed will be needing my help. Good day, Mahmoud.” Her hand squeezed his arm briefly—he caught a glimpse of her frilled shirtwaist, the dark weave of her skirt—and then she was gone.

He counted the coins in his pocket: enough for ingredients for another batch. But it was late in the afternoon, and a film of clouds had formed across the sun. In the time it would take him to buy milk and ice and then mix the ice cream, the children would no longer be so eager. Best to wait until tomorrow. He tied down the contents of his cart and began his slow trudge up the street, head bowed, watching his own feet as they moved, black shapes against a field of gray.

It would’ve come as a great shock to his neighbors to know that the man they called Ice Cream Saleh, or Crazy Mahmoud, or simply that strange Muslim who sells ice cream, had once been Doctor Mahmoud Saleh, one of the most respected physicians in the city of Homs. The son of a successful merchant, Saleh had grown up in comfort, free to pursue his studies and then his profession. In school, his excellent marks won him entrance to the medical university in Cairo, where it seemed the entire field was transforming as he watched. An Englishman had discovered that one could avoid postsurgical gangrene simply by dipping the surgical instruments into a solution of carbolic acid. Another Englishman soon established an irrefutable link between cholera and unsanitary drinking water. Saleh’s father, who’d heartily supported his studies, grew angry when he learned that in Cairo his own son was dissecting corpses: did Mahmoud not understand that on the Day of Judgment these desecrated men would be resurrected unwhole, their bodies opened and organs exposed? His son drily replied that if God was so literal in his resurrections, humanity would be brought back in a state of decay so advanced that the marks of dissection would seem minor in comparison. In truth he’d had his qualms as well, but pride kept him from saying so.

After completing his studies, Saleh returned to Homs and established a practice. His patients’ living conditions continually dismayed him. Even the most affluent families had little notion of modern hygiene. Sickrooms were kept closed, the air poor and stifling; he flung open the windows, ignoring the protests. Sometimes he even encountered a patient who’d been burned on the arm or chest, a thoroughly discredited practice meant to draw out ill humors. He would dress the wound and then berate the family, describing to them the dangers of infection and sepsis.

Though sometimes it seemed he waged an impossible battle, Doctor Saleh’s life was not without its joys. His mother’s half-sister approached him regarding her daughter, whom he’d watched mature into a young woman of beauty and gentle character. They were married, and soon they had their own daughter, a darling girl who would stand her little feet on Saleh’s and make him walk her about the courtyard, roaring like a lion. Even when his father died, and was lowered into the grave next to his mother, Saleh took comfort in knowing that the man had been proud of him, despite their differences.

And so it went, the years passing quickly, until one evening, a wealthy landowner came to the door. He told Saleh that the Bedouin family who tended his lands had a sick girl. Instead of a doctor, they’d brought in an old healer woman without a tooth in her head, who was using the most outlandish of folk remedies to try to cure her. The man couldn’t stand to see the child suffer and said that if Saleh agreed to examine her, he would pay the fee himself.

The Bedouin family lived in a hut at the edge of the city, where the carefully tended farmland gave over to scrub and dust. The girl’s mother met Saleh at the door. She was dressed heavily in black, her cheeks and chin tattooed in the style of her people. “It is an ifrit,” she said. “It needs to be cast out.”

Saleh replied that what the girl needed was a proper medical examination. He told her to fetch him a pot of boiled water, and went into the hut.

The girl was in convulsions. The healer woman had scattered handfuls of herbs about the room and now sat cross-legged next to the girl, muttering to herself. Ignoring her, Saleh tried to hold the girl down long enough to peel back one of her eyelids—and succeeded just as the old woman finished her incantation and spat three times upon the ground.

For a moment, he thought he saw something in the girl’s eye leaping toward him—

And then the thing was inside his head, scrabbling to get out—

Unbearable pain seared through his mind. All went dark.

When Saleh came to, there was foam on his lips and a leather strap in his mouth. He gagged and spat it out. “To keep you from biting off your tongue,” he heard the healer say, in a voice that sounded hollow and distant. He opened his eyes—and saw kneeling above him a woman whose face was thin and insubstantial as onionskin, with gaping holes where her eyes should have been. He screamed, turned his head, and vomited.

The landowner fetched one of Saleh’s colleagues. Together they loaded the half-conscious man into a cart and took him back home, where the doctor could conduct a thorough examination. The evidence was inconclusive: perhaps a bleeding in the brain, or a latent condition that had somehow been triggered. There was no way to be certain.

From then on, it was as though Saleh had stepped away from the world. An unreality permeated all his senses. His eye could no longer measure distances: he would reach for something and it would be nowhere near his grasp. His hands shook, and he couldn’t properly hold his instruments. Occasionally a fit would overtake him, and he would fall down and froth at the mouth. Worst of all, he could no longer look at a human face, be it man’s or woman’s, stranger or beloved, without succumbing to nauseated terror.

Weeks and months passed. He tried to return to medicine, listening to complaints and making simple diagnoses. But he couldn’t disguise his malady, and his remaining patients disappeared. The family adapted a more frugal lifestyle, but within months, their savings were gone. Their clothes grew shabbier and the house fell into disrepair. Saleh spent his days alone in a shaded room, trying to consult medical texts he could barely read, searching for an explanation.

His wife became ill. She tried to hide it at first but then turned feverish. Saleh sat by helplessly as his former colleagues offered their aid. Still she worsened. One night, burning and delirious, she mistook Saleh for her long-dead father and begged him for ice cream. What could he do? There was a churn sitting in a cupboard, purchased during more extravagant days. He rolled it into the kitchen and washed the dirt and dust away. His daughter’s chickens had laid that morning. Sugar they still had, as well as salt and ice, and milk from a neighbor’s goat. Laboriously he set out the supplies, moving slowly lest he fumble and spill. He smashed the ice with a hammer, then beat together the eggs and sugar and goat’s milk. He added the ice and rock salt, and packed the mixture around the inside of the churn. He wondered, when had he learned this? Certainly he’d watched his wife make ice cream, as a treat for their daughter and her friends, but he’d never paid any particular attention. Now it was as though he’d done it all his life. He fixed the lid on the churn and turned the crank around and around. It felt good to work. The mixture began to stiffen. A clean sweat broke on his forehead and in his armpits. He stopped when it felt right to do so.

He returned to the bedroom with a small dish of ice cream and found that his wife had descended into chills. He set the dish aside and held her shaking hand. She did not return to consciousness, and died as dawn was breaking. Saleh hadn’t recognized the beginnings of the death throes, and thus hadn’t been quick enough to wake their daughter to say good-bye.

The next afternoon, Saleh sat alone in the kitchen as his wife’s sisters prepared her body. Someone came in and knelt next to him. It was his daughter. She wrapped her arms around him. He closed his eyes so that he could remember how he used to see her, her dark hair and bright eyes, the sweet freckles on her cheek. Then she noticed the churn.

“Father,” she said, “who made the ice cream?”

“I did,” he said. “For your mother.”

She did not remark on the strangeness of this, only dipped two fingers inside the churn, then brought them to her mouth. Her red-rimmed eyes blinked in surprise.

“It’s very good,” she said.

After that, there was little question as to his path. He needed to support himself and his daughter. The house was sold, and his wife’s brother’s family took them in; but they were not wealthy people, and Saleh had no wish to strain their charity. And so, with a white cloth wrapped around his head to keep away the sun, Doctor Mahmoud became Ice Cream Saleh. Soon he was a common sight in the streets of Homs, lugging the churn on a small wheeled cart garlanded with a string of bells, calling out Ice cream! Ice cream! Doors would open and children would come running, clutching coins; and he would keep his head averted so as not to see the light filtering through their bodies, and the bottomless holes in their eyes.

Soon Saleh was one of the most successful ice cream sellers in the neighborhood. Partly this was due to the ice cream itself. All agreed that what made his ice cream superior to others was its smooth texture. Other sellers would use too much ice, and the cream would freeze too quickly, becoming gritty and harsh. Or they might not churn it enough, and the children would be left with a disappointing, half-melted soup. Saleh’s, though, was perfect every time. But his success also developed from his tragic story—there goes Ice Cream Saleh, did you know he was once a famous physician—and for the children it was an exercise in suspense. Would Ice Cream Saleh fall down in the street today, and foam at the mouth? They were always disappointed when he did not, though the ice cream was a consolation. When a fit did overtake him, he’d try to warn the children: “Don’t be frightened,” he would say, the words slurring in his ears. And then his vision would go dark, and he would enter another world, one of hallucinations, whispered words, and strange sensations. He could never remember these visions when he woke, his face in the dust, the children invariably having fled.

He spent years wandering the streets in this way, footsore and hoarse, his hair gone to silver. What money he could spare was put aside for his daughter’s future, as they could no longer count on a generous bride-price. How surprised they were, then, when a local shopkeeper approached Saleh with an offer that was more than he’d dared hope for. Saleh’s daughter, the man said, had impressed him as a rare example of filial piety, and such a woman was all he desired as a wife and mother of his children. No one seemed to think much of him—he was known mostly for his unsolicited opinions on the failings of his neighbors—but he made a good living and didn’t seem cruel.

“If God gave me one wish,” Saleh said to his daughter, “I would tell Him to set the princes of the world before you and say, ‘Choose, whichever one you like, for none is too wealthy or too noble.’” He kept his eyes closed as he spoke; it had now been eight years since he had looked at his own daughter.

She kissed his forehead and said, “Then I thank God you cannot have your wish, for I hear that princes make the worst of husbands.”

The marriage contract was signed that summer. Less than a year later she was dead: a hemorrhage during childbirth, and the baby strangled in the canal. The woman attending the birth had not been able to save either of them.

Her aunts prepared her body for burial, just as they’d prepared her mother, washing and perfuming her and wrapping her in the five white sheets. At the funeral, Saleh stood in the open grave and received his daughter into his arms. Pregnancy had enlarged and softened her body. Her head rested on his shoulder, and he gazed down at the covered landscape of her face, at the ridge of her nose, the hollows of her eyes. He laid her on her right side, facing the Qaba. The shroud’s perfume blended oddly with the clean, sharp smell of damp clay. He knew the others were waiting for him, but he made no move to climb out. It was cool and quiet there. He reached out and drew his fingers across the jagged wall, feeling with his distant senses the ridges left by the gravedigger’s spade, the clay slick and gritty between his fingers. He sat down beside his daughter’s body, and would have stretched out next to her except that he was then hauled out of the grave by his armpits, his son-in-law and the imam having decided to cut short the spectacle before it grew any worse.

That summer he had fewer customers, though the weather was as hot as ever. He could hear parents murmuring to their children as they passed, no, dearest, not from Mister Saleh. He understood: he was no longer merely tragic, but cursed.

He could not pinpoint how the idea first came to him, to take the last of his money and go to America, but when it did he embraced it quickly. His wife’s family thought he’d finally fallen into insanity. How would he survive in America on his own, when he barely could make his way through Homs? His son-in-law told him that there were no mosques in America, and he would not be able to pray properly. Saleh replied only that he had no need of prayer, as he and God had parted company.

None of them understood his purpose. America was not meant to be a new beginning. Saleh had no wish to survive. He would take his ice cream churn across the sea, and there he would die, from sickness or starvation or perhaps even sheer accident. He would end his life away from the pity and the charity and the stares, in the company of strangers who only knew what he was, not what he had once been.

And so he left, in a steamship out of Beirut. He spent the wretched voyage breathing the miasma of close air in the steerage deck, listening to the coughing of the passengers and wondering what he would contract. Typhoid? Cholera? But he emerged unscathed, only to suffer the humiliating interview and examination at Ellis Island. He’d given two young brothers his last bit of money to say he was their uncle, and they kept their word, promising the immigration clerk that they would support Saleh and keep him from indigence. He passed the medical exam only because the doctor could point to nothing physically wrong with him. The brothers took him to Little Syria, and before the disoriented Saleh could protest they had found him a place to live. It cost only a few pennies a week: a tiny room in a damp cellar that smelled of rotting vegetables. The only light came from a small grate, high on the wall. The young men took him around the neighborhood and showed him where he could buy milk and ice, salt and sugar. Then they purchased sacks full of peddling notions, wished him good luck, and left town for a place called Grand Rapids. That evening Saleh found in his pockets two dollars in change that had not been there before. After weeks of seasickness and exhaustion, he didn’t even have the strength to be angry.