Body of Glass (16 page)

“Then do not, do not, do not discuss me behind my back with my grandmother, ever again.”

“What are you threatening me with?”

“My displeasure, Yod, nothing more. I have no power, over you or over anyone in the whole entire world.”

“But you do have power over me, the strength of my desire to please you. Gadi’s important to you because he came early into your life, as you’ve arrived early in mine. You don’t like to hurt anyone, so I’m not afraid of you as I’m afraid of Avram. When I discuss you with Malkah, it’s to learn.”

“Yod, you’re supposed to be learning about the world and how to behave with others so you appear human, you’re not supposed to be studying me.”

“I can create my own goals. Shira, when you talk to me freely and openly about yourself as you just did, I don’t need Malkah to explain you to me.”

“I already communicate with you better than I did with my husband. Oh, shit!” She turned in the water and began swimming off furiously. It was horribly true. She enjoyed better rapport with a machine than she had with Josh. In fact she had always found computers easier to communicate with than Josh. He had all their literal-mindedness but was capable of displaying acidic resentment and of simply ignoring her, as no machine intelligence could.

When Josh finished at Pacifica, she would have to return to him, if she could get him to agree. She would have to truncate herself to fit into his notions of wife and mother, for that was the only way she would ever get Ari back. Tears blinded her till she stopped to tread water.

Yod was churning along at her shoulder. “Shira, is that a boat? I’m not familiar with that mechanism.” He rose in the water to point, just as a net shot over them.

How could she have been so stupid? Organ scavengers. She was being drawn under by the weight of the net. She kicked at it, panicked. It was dragging them towards the boat, yanking them underwater with no way to rise and take a breath. She told herself to stay calm, to think. She remembered the knife. She groped for it, worked it out of the seam of her briefs and began sawing at the coarse mesh. Already she needed oxygen. Her lungs burned. The precious air trickled out of her mouth in bubbles and rose to the surface, silvery above them. The cords were tough. She had to breathe, she had to. She slashed at them, wanting to cry out, to scream. She hacked and hacked at the cords but could only dent them. Her sight was speckling out. She was going to breathe water soon and drown; she would lose control. She sawed hopelessly, frantically.

Yod observed her. He tried to speak, but water flowed in and he grimaced, sputtering. Then he seized the cords of the net in his hands.

Slowly he pulled; gradually the cords stretched a little, stretched more and then finally ripped asunder. The net parted in his hands like a spiderweb. He seized her under the arms and bore her to the surface, where she gasped for breath, coughing out water. Yod was still grasping her as he turned in the water. He began swimming much faster bearing her than she could have done alone, back towards the broken wall where they had entered the water. They had come perhaps a hundred metres.

She heard cries, the whir of an engine, and twisted in Yod’s grasp to stare back. The organ hunters’ skimmer was bearing down on them, a fast hovercraft settled now in the water for capture. It was a small boat with a low cabin, mostly refrigerator hold. She had seen them before, but never almost on top of her. No one growing up on these shores could avoid seeing the hunting boats in the distance. People didn’t survive seeing them close.

Two men, fully filtered and masked, were wielding dart guns. Paralyser was volatile and wouldn’t affect the quality of the organs; scavengers never shot prey with projectiles or lasers. A third man was readying the scoop net to pick up their bodies at once. The masks were the colour of ivory, rigid, beaky, giving the three men on deck the appearance of the tops of totem poles. Although they shouted each other on, the masks were expressionless. They would tear her apart with their knives. They would rip the heart out of her and her eyes and her womb and her liver and kidneys, all would be packed away into vats of gel. She would be paralysed, but she would feel them cutting her to ribbons. She hoped they took her heart first. Yod turned to look at them. He let her go. She realized he had been hit. He plucked a dart from the skin of his shoulder to squint at it.

“Paralyser,” she gasped. He should be reacting already. The poison was instantaneous.

“Dive. Take cover.” He went down like an anchor released. She swam furiously underwater until she had to rise just enough for a breath. She peered around quickly for shelter. Then she dodged past the wreck of a broken and abandoned dredge, keeping it between her and the skimmer. She trod water in the lee of the dredge, peeking through a crack in the metal. She could not hope to escape by swimming. Yod must have sunk to the bottom. She felt a pang of loss for the cyborg. She had grown used to his company. He had become her job. If she could stay under the dredge, she did not think they could get her; but how long could she play hide-and-seek with them? It was all her fault, brooding instead of paying attention. At least Yod had died quickly. Her own chances were dim.

The skimmer was coming slowly to enable the hunters to aim their dart guns. Abruptly it stopped and began to rock in the water. It tipped violently to the left, again, again. A great crunch sounded, as if it had hit a rock or a building. Over it went, spilling the three hunters, the driver crying out from the wheelhouse. It happened so quickly she went on staring. Her body still screeched fight or flight. They must have struck an old wreck or a building that did not break the surface. The driver had forgotten to watch the underwater plotter. These waters were full of hazards, but all boats bigger than dinghies were equipped with sonar.

She had begun swimming again towards the shore when she heard splashing behind her. She still had the knife gripped in her hand. She turned in the water to face her pursuer. She was just in time to see the last of the swimming hunters disappear underwater. He never came up. What stuck its head out a moment later was Yod coming towards her in a powerful crawl.

“I thought you had drowned.” Then she wondered if he could.

“The paralyser didn’t affect me.”

He let her swim on her own. Behind them when she glanced back, the bay was empty except for the capsized boat, slowly filling with water. While she watched, it went down. Four dead men. She could hardly mourn them. They made a living by stealing people and selling the organs to the multi labs that provided implants for execs, talent and security. Artificial replacements for every organ in the body were available, but they could be damaged by certain frequencies: therefore the highly placed, the wealthy wanted the safety of real organs to defy assassins who could attack from a distance. Regular corporate gruds and people in the free towns depended on artificial implants, of the kind Malkah and Shira had in their eyes.

When she and Yod hauled up on shore, Shira would have liked to rest, but the hunters might have a partner boat. She pulled on her sec skin, motioning for Yod to do the same. Then she led the way towards the wrap at a dogged weary trot. Yod was frowning. He was not tired and had no trouble talking while he jogged. “Shira, I must tell you something. This is the first time I have truly defended. It was highly pleasurable. Yet my philosophical and theological programming informs me I’ve committed a wrong. I liked killing them, do you understand? Is that how it should be? Is that right?”

She was startled and took several moments to formulate an answer. “Yod, your programming creates your reactions. You didn’t choose to enjoy it.”

“Killing them was as enjoyable as anything I’ve ever experienced. I think I must be programmed to find killing as intense as sexual pleasure or mastering a new skill. It was that strong.”

“What does it mean for you to feel pleasure?””

“How can I answer that? What does it mean to you? I know that it’s entirely mental with me, but mammals, too, have a pleasure centre in their brains. You’re programmed to like sweet tastes and avoid bitter ones. I’m programmed to find some things pleasurable and others painful.”

She could think of nothing to say; she found his statements frightening. Probably when she felt less exhausted emotionally and physically, she would find his revelation even more disturbing. Yod had not been given knowledge of the organ trade, so she briefed him as they went. Under the sec skin her body was clammy, itchy. She would drop Yod at the lab and head home for a bath and a nap. “Are you impervious to poison of all kinds?”

“No. Most acids would burn me also. But a neural paralyser designed for a mammalian system is ineffective against me.”

A laser would injure you.” She was remembering the broken cyborg Alef, its head blasted open.

“Any explosive or laser device would injure or kill me, Shira, the same as yourself.”

“I was careless today. My past welled up and clouded my judgement.”

“I was careless too. I should have detected the boat, but I didn’t understand what it was. I need to learn more. I need to know far more to protect you adequately. I’m ashamed I didn’t stop them before they frightened you. Never should you be frightened.”

“Yod, I’m not your child any more than you’re mine. This is a frightening world, and it’s best not to forget that, the way we both did this afternoon.”

“Is this outing something I should mention to Avram?”

“Just say that we went out into the raw for a lesson.” Shira smiled and tapped his arm in the sec skin. “You’re learning certain human behaviours rather quickly. Such as discretion.”

“It was a provocative lesson today. Much to reflect on. Tonight, instead of practising with Gimel, I’ll play this back many times.”

A kid standing guard released the gate to them. Tomorrow she would have guard duty for the first time, fitted back into the self-running of the town: every citizen owed the town eight hours of labour a week. Fortunately Yod did not seem to demand gratitude from her. She was too wrung out to force much response. She longed to be alone and quiet and numb. Then she thought, Why did he compare killing to sex? When did he ever experience sex? Would a cyborg masturbate? That was too bizarre. Could a cyborg enjoy a stimmie? She did not want to speculate about his remark, but it disquieted her. As the old hotel came into view, she realized she had not thought of Gadi in an entire hour. Great therapy. Perhaps she should find a little war to join and dangle her life for bait. The danger would serve to keep Gadi out of her mind.

thirteen

Malkah

“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 splendours 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 behaviour 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 quarrelling 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.

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 with 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 centres and your capacity to imagine. In Freud’s terms, that old marvellously 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-grey jewels, they would be his eyes now briefly when he is alight with happiness.