In the Land of Armadillos (22 page)

“Reinhart likes you,” she said.

It was true, Reinhart did like Hersh. The commandant had visited last summer, and Hersh had shown him the grounds: the waterway that ran the mill, the stone storehouse, the giant gears, the pitted stones. At the sight of the great waterwheel paddling in the stream, the German officer had smiled like a little boy.

And because he was Hersh, he told the commandant a story. At least it was a good one, with a midwife, a tabby cat, and a treasure. Clapping Hersh's slight shoulder, Reinhart guffawed and said that no one had told him a bedtime story since his grandmother died. Then he winked at Shayna, climbed into his big black Mercedes, and drove away.

“When the time comes, he'll kill us anyway,” said Hersh.

“They need the mill,” she reminded him. “As long as Reinhart's happy, we're safe.”

“I'll bet Korn thought he was safe, too,” said Hersh, and the discussion was over.

*  *  *

That night was cold, colder than it had been in weeks. It was still dark out when Shayna was awakened by a noise.

She bolted upright, her heart thumping.
Pok. Pok. Pok.
The sound was coming from outside. As her heartbeat slowed, she realized it was the front gate, banging in the wind. Someone must have had left it unlatched.

She settled back into the warmth of her feather quilt. She had been dreaming, and in the dream, her mother, the woman who sold eggs in the market square, and a tabby cat were perched on the end of the mattress, encouraging her to find a suitable young man. Shayna had been explaining to the cat that she liked her independence, a husband would insist on doing things his own way. She was grateful that the noise had roused her. Her jaw was sore from grinding her teeth.

She smelled him before she saw him. As her eyes adjusted to the dark, she saw that someone was standing before her bed. Completely naked, he towered over her, long ropes of muscles bunching and shaking, smeared in filth from his hair down to his toes. His hands were clasped together over the place between his legs.

Seeing that she was awake, he leaned forward. “You called me, Rabbi?” he said urgently. “It's me, Yossel.” And then he fainted dead away.

*  *  *

Two things they established immediately. One, the young man was Jewish; standing before them stark naked, it was impossible to miss. Second, and this was important, he was crazy.

“What's your name?” Shayna asked him again.

“I
told
you,” he answered plaintively. “Yossel.”

“What are you doing here?”

“You called me. You said you'd call me whenever the Jews were in trouble. Don't you remember?”

Hersh stared at him, wide-eyed. “My God,” he said, in a voice choked with laughter. “He thinks he's the Golem.”

She looked at him fiercely. “Real life going on here, Hersh. Not one of your stupid stories.”

“You know this one. It was just before Passover, and Rabbi Yehuda Loew, the Maharal of Prague, got wind of an evil plan. Someone was going to tell the peasants that Jews used the blood of Christian children to make their matzo. It was a lie, but it always worked; angry mobs would storm through the streets where Jews lived, killing everyone they found, destroying everything they touched. So, the Maharal made a man out of clay that he dug from the riverbank. His sole purpose was to protect the Jews from danger.” He corrected himself. “Not a man. A monster. The Golem of Prague.” He smiled sweetly at his sister. “If he's the Golem, I guess that makes you the rabbi.”

They washed him off in the barn. Whatever he was covered in stank of dead fish and decay. Despite repeated applications of soap and water, the color of his hair remained the same, a muddy brown, like the sticky clay they used to scoop out of the land near the river when they were kids.

He was built like a laborer, with a deep wide chest and big sinewy arms. Blank, stony eyes stared out at her from shadowy sockets. From the trunk in the attic where they kept Papa's clothing, Shayna loaned him trousers, a jacket, a shirt. Before she handed it over, she saw Hersh surreptitiously slide a tiny paper scroll into the jacket's inner pocket.

“It's the Shema,” he explained sheepishly. The prayer Jews chanted each morning, at bedtime, and before dying. “The Golem wears it next to his heart. It's how the rabbi brought him to life. Don't look at me like that. He asked.”

“That's ridiculous,” said Shayna. “Fairy tales.”

Hersh and his stories. Before his bar mitzvah, Papa had made arrangements for him to learn Talmud with a doe-eyed rabbinical student who bartered lessons for flour. Dutifully, Hersh had mastered the intricate legal discussions constituting the body of the Mishnah. But when it came to the myths and legends of the Midrash, his eyes took on a misty faraway look, and he would ramble on about the pious ox who refused to work on Shabbos, or the exact number of plagues that befell Pharaoh and his chariots in the Red Sea. This was undoubtedly their mother's influence. Until he was eight, Hersh was confined indoors with weak lungs. To entertain him, Mama had filled his head with talk of dybbuks and demons, fireflowers that conferred mystical powers, enchanted talking bears. Folktales she'd heard from her mother or from the Polish women who cooked and sewed and cleaned for them.

Shayna gave in. “Fine, he's the Golem,” she said. “He must belong to someone. Tonight he can sleep in the barn.”

The next morning Hersh took the wagon to town. No one seemed to be missing a confused young man. Shayna asked the farmers waiting for their flour, receiving terse shakes of the head in response. But when the guard, Achim, went outside to open the sluice, one of the farmers relayed a terrible rumor he had heard: all the Jews in the town of Lubień marched into the Parczew Forest, massacred. Shayna dismissed it. All these
bubbameinsas
about atrocities. Propaganda warmed over from the last war.

“We can't send him away,” said Hersh. “He doesn't have any papers. If the Germans don't get him, someone else will.”

She put her hands on her hips, pursed her lips in a frown. Another dreamer she had to be responsible for. “All right, then. If he's going to stay here, he has to work.”

“You can't give a Golem an ordinary job,” said Hersh. “The Maharal was very clear about that. You have to save him for something really big. Like helping the Jews in their time of trouble.”

“He's helping this Jew,” she said. Turning to the young man, she made sure to speak very slowly and clearly. “We need water,” she enunciated carefully, handing him a bucket. “Fill up the barrel outside the kitchen door.”

The young man gripped the handle, never taking his eyes from her face. Curiously, she studied the even features, the blank expression. Something flickered in the darkness behind those hollow eyes. Was it yearning? A memory?

Not that it mattered. The commandant's rye was not going to grind itself. Shayna returned her attention to the millstones. As it turned out, one of the gears was off, and the waterwheel wouldn't turn. Lost in the repairs, she forgot about Yossel until dinnertime.

*  *  *

The sunset painted the clouds in bands of rose and aquamarine. With work over for the day, the farmhands were grouped around for a smoke outside the kitchen. Shayna's feet ached, her back ached, her fingers, too, as she trudged across the footbridge toward the house.

It didn't register until the mud reached her ankles. The courtyard was flooded. A steady stream slopped from the barrel down to the barn and clear across the road. Whorls of silty water gurgled at the kitchen door, lapped gently at the bottom step of the storehouse.

Yossel labored past her under the weight of two overflowing buckets. As she watched in disbelief, he emptied his pails into the barrel, turned around, and headed back toward the well.

“
Stop!
” she shouted, running at him. He halted midstep. “Give me that,” she said harshly, grabbing the pails from his fingers. “What are you, an idiot?”

Maybe he flinched a little. The men tittered. Fuming, she stomped into the house.

Behind her, the hands filed in for dinner. While they wolfed down their borscht and pierogi, Yossel remained outside, rooted in place. When Achim left to visit a girl at a neighboring farm, the conversation changed course, the men talking in low voices about people who had vanished, news of the war. By the time they pushed themselves away from the table and ambled toward their huts, it was ten o'clock. Yossel was still in the yard, exactly as they had left him, mud setting like cement around his boots.

“You have to tell him what to do,” said Hersh. “Tell him to come in for dinner.”

“No,” she said savagely. “He wants to be a Golem? Let him stand there all night.”

She was sure he was pretending. Looking out the window of her bedroom as she shook out her braid and brushed her hair, she could see him, as lifeless as a slab of granite, shivering in the cold.

The next morning a stiff rain pelted down from an angry sky, pounding the hardened earth. Shayna joined Hersh at the kitchen door. Water was running off the peak of Yossel's cap, dripping from the hem of his sodden cloth coat.

“This is ridiculous,” she said to her brother. “Even animals know enough to come in from the rain.”

But Hersh was staring at him, watching the rain fall drop by drop from the end of his nose. “The Golem doesn't have any will of his own. He only does what the rabbi tells him to.” He threw open the door, hollered to him over the clatter of the rain. He might as well have shouted at the waterwheel; Yossel didn't move. Hersh turned to his sister. “Well, Rabbi,” he said. “He's your Golem. You try.”

She could hardly see him through the long, slanting rays of rain, barely distinguishable from the sea of mud around him. “Come in, you jackass!” she yelled.

He trained his vacant eyes on her, stirred his frozen limbs. Pulling his feet from the sludge with a sucking sound, he lumbered stiffly forward, up the steps, and into the house, where he stopped in front of Shayna, dripping on the kitchen floor.

“Look,” said Hersh. “It's not enough to tell him to fill the water barrel. You also have to tell him when to stop. You can't just say ‘Come in.' You've also got to tell him to take off his boots, change into dry clothes, sit down at the table, have something to eat.”

“He's not a baby,” she said in exasperation.

She told Yossel to wait in the pantry behind the kitchen while she fetched him dry clothing. He disrobed as if she weren't there, allowing her to pass curious eyes over his bare body.

Shayna had never seen a man naked, not even Hersh. Tipping her head to one side, she inspected the width of his shoulders, the angles of his rib cage, the way his muscles lapped forth over his narrow hips. She observed other things, too: the kite-shaped plate of muscle at his back, the upside-down triangle of sinew above his buttocks, the shape outlined by the patch of hair between his thighs.

“What is it, Rabbi?” he said. His voice had a gravelly, unused quality.

Reluctantly, she did as Hersh suggested. “Put these on. Then come to the kitchen, sit down at the table, and have some breakfast.”

She caught her breath at the play of muscles across his chest as he thrust his arms into the sleeves of the shirt. When he turned away from her to pull on the trousers, she withdrew, quietly shutting the door to the pantry behind her.

*  *  *

Thursdays, Shayna delivered flour to the bakery in Włodawa. She left shortly before dawn. She had planned on making her escape before Yossel rose; if he saw her leaving, he would follow on foot behind the wagon, trailing behind her like a wraith for the rest of the day.

Frost lay between the furrows, whitened the stubble of cornstalks razed knee-high in the frozen fields. She flapped the reins over the horse's shoulders just as the sun burst in a pink and orange haze across the horizon. She raised her chin and closed her eyes, letting the early-morning sun warm her skin. She'd been looking forward to this time away from home, where Yossel dogged her every step.

The second job they had given him was impossible to screw up, or so they had thought. All he had to do was carry flour sacks from the warehouse to the wagon that went to Reinhart each week. Yossel managed to heap them into a rickety tower twenty feet high before anyone noticed. Next he was given the unenviable task of mucking out the animal shed, shoveling shit and dirty straw. By the time she stopped him, he had dug himself into a hole five feet deep. When she let him feed the animals, he piled the troughs to the rafters with drifts of hay and filled the henhouse knee-deep with cracked corn. The day she ordered him to top up the samovar, well . . . She could have sworn she told him to stop when it was full.

When properly supervised, Yossel was a good worker; he did whatever he was asked, promptly and without complaint. The other men hissed at him as they passed; he was making them look bad.

She discovered by accident that he'd been sleeping standing up. One night there was a tumult in the barn, someone had left the door open, and a fox made off with two hens. As she pulled the door shut against a wasting wind, she saw him in an empty stall, head down, swaying on his feet.

“What are you doing?” she had asked, unnerved by the sight.

At the sound of her voice, he came to life. “Does the rabbi need me?” he said.

“No,” she said. “And stop calling me Rabbi.”

“What does the rabbi want?”

“The rabbi wants you to lie down and sleep,” she replied firmly, wincing at her own use of the title. “Tonight. Every night.”

He dropped like a stone into the straw. Within moments, the deep chest was rising and falling with the steady rhythmic breathing of sleep. He must have been dreaming. His feet twitched as if he were running, and he brushed at wet eyes with the back of his hand.

It was midmorning by the time she entered Włodawa. Expertly, she maneuvered the wagon through the maze of crooked streets, the rows of poplar trees like columns, past the pastel-colored houses and the onion-domed basilica. Toni flicked his ears back at her, harrumphed white vapor from his velvety nose. In the market, tables were laid out with potatoes, cabbages, mildewy clothing. Merchants stood around fires lit in rusted oil drums, stamping their feet, slapping their arms to stay warm. A squad of German soldiers crowded together in a circle, laughing with an officer.