i
Because
I was “the heathen boy” and smart
enough
to pass for Jewish, free I ran
on
the Friedmans’ neighboring house and grounds.
One
early-summer day, with Marilyn,
a
year my elder, we played in the pines
that
fringed their leaf-filled, empty swimming pool.
An
endless ball of packing twine unwound
around
the spindly trees, not spider webs,
but
corridors and doorways, here a room,
a
closet there – in an almost clearing
a
wide space for a sunbeam-lit ballroom.
The hotel dubbed “The
Sunny-Day-Only”—
the
sleeping rooms and beds would be up above
in
tree-house heights to be scaled by ladders.
As
our fancy turned up to ziggurat
heights
and bird-nest bedding, we didn’t see
the bearded, smiling
Mennonite preacher
until
he was right upon us. “Children!”
he hailed us, then asked
if we believed
in
Jesus, who was up above the trees,
and
died, so we could go to heaven too.
Up then went Marilyn’s
defiant chin.
“We’re Jewish.” He looked at me,
dubious.
“And you?” he asked. I shrugged. “So what are
you?” —
“I’ve never been in a church,” I told him.
A
pine cone fell at his feet and shattered.
“Don’t
you believe in anything?” he growled,
now in a tone that said
grownup-to-child.
“Superman, maybe,” I mocked him, and
turned
to
resume my arbor-building. He left
dumbfounded, his Anabaptist
faith scorned
by
children’s string maze in a Druid grove.
Our
string hotel survived two nights, then vanished.
“My mother
told me the robins took it —”
so Marilyn explained it, “ —
for their nests.
Besides, the guests are coming. It’s June
now,
and the swimming season starts tomorrow.”
The
season,
as we all came to know it,
was at the Friedmans’ immense
swimming pool;
by
June’s end swell, a half a hundred guests,
from
wading toddlers to aquatic teens,
babies
in prams to motionless elders,
umbrella-tabled
at the green-blue pool.
That
afternoon, indoors, we played at cards —
an outsize canasta
with twenty decks,
which drew a great shriek from Mrs.
Friedman
as she came home with the month’s vast larder
of
picnic food and frozen lemonade.
Our task: re-separate and sort
the decks
and stack them up in a neat pyramid.
Summers
these rumpled cards had seen before,
beneath the hawk-eyed
ladies’ gaze, enthroned
and clucking at their poolside card
tables;
the
cards would doubtless outlive some of them.
Scores
would be there by shimmering August,
the men apart from the
women, a cloud
of cigarettes where they leaned together
and
worried over business and politics.
Children in bathing suits
ran to and from
the house, wet trails and footprints to and
from
the bathrooms, the sinks, the freezer. Sometimes
I was
asked to take ice or a pitcher
to one of the tables, there where
I learned
one should never swim just after eating
and
tales of drowning, worries about
the unfortunates who got
polio,
and Mrs. Friedman’s oft-repeated fretting
about
one bad boy who peed in the pool,
(never enough chlorine when
that occurs).
The men talked
of other things I knew
nothing of
in a language I did not understand.
ii
“The
season really starts next week, you see. Next
week.”
As Marilyn explained to me. “Mother has
asked
everyone to come over tomorrow to help.
The pool
needs cleaned, the cobwebbed furniture wiped down,
Dead leaves,
dog poop and pine cones everywhere. We’ll see
if
anyone shows up.” — “Won’t they?” I asked. — “Not one.”
Card
sorting done, we went back to our comic books:
she
read my Superman,
I her Wonder Woman,
a
title no boy would ever be caught reading.
Saturday
came. The day waned and one car only
came up the lane and
parked. All day we made the ice
for grape juice and lemonade
brimful in freezer
and
buckets. Sandwiches were made, and snacks put out.
Squirrels
came to the windows expectantly, bird-chirp
anticipated
the crowd, the crumbs, the leavings.
I lingered for dinner as
Mrs. Friedman seethed on,
serving cold plate with embarrassment
and anger.
The guest was new, a stranger, a bearded, calm man
in
a business suit they called Rabbi. His voice
was
deep, and with a foreign sound I could not place.
“Rabbi
Doctor Baruch,” they said I should call him.
Already he knew
my name, and turning, he said:
“And
you are the little boy who is not Jewish
who made string Stars
of David all over the porch
December last. “I blushed,
recalling Mrs. Friedman’s
horror
at finding her decorated house-front.
“He felt sorry for us,”
Mr. Friedman offered up,
“because we had no Christmas
ornaments outside.”
They all laughed heartily. Still no one
would tell me
why
my six-pointed ornaments had been torn down
with
such speed and alarm. “Anyone
driving by,”
was
all that Marilyn’s mother said, “they could see.”
“But
Rabbi,” Mr. Friedman continued, “I know you wanted
to meet
our friends.” The rabbi shrugged. — “You call those
friends?”
his wife retorted. “All summer long they come
here,
they use the pool, we feed them, and pretend to laugh
at
their worn-out humor. And all this work, for what?
I
could be listening to the opera on the radio.
Not
one of them will come and help us clean the pool!”
“So,
next week I can come back,” the Rabbi offered.
“All of us
need to help Jews get out of Russia.
First Stalin was killing us
all over again,
and
now his heir, that smiling thug Khrushchev.”
Mrs. Friedman had
other worries:
“So who’s going to clean the pool? Not you,
Rabbi!
Shame on us if it came to that.” Mr. Friedman
fussed
with his sandwich and fork in embarrassment.
Silence
and shadow-blink of a passing cloud held us.
The
Rabbi’s long-fingered hands passed twirling circles
twice
in his dark beard, as though he had to ask it,
then, with one
hand extended palm up he asked her,
“Mrs. Friedman, you want I
should make a Golem?”
iii
Mouths
opened wide, eyes wider.
Even I knew what a Golem was.
It
was in the horror comics.
“A
Golem,” Mrs. Friedman gulped.
“Would it — could it —
”
“Anything you want done, it can do.
It’s not an
easy thing, and I need not say
that no one should know
afterwards.
I have been to Prague, where such things are done.”
The
Rabbi turned an intense gaze on me.
“Boy, you are not Jewish?”
—
“No, Rabbi,
I’m not.” —
“You are not Christian?” —
“No, I’m not.” —
“Not
even a tiny bit?” —
“I
went two weeks to Bible School. They asked me
not to come back.” —
“So,
you are not a Christian. Swear it.” —
I cleared my
throat. Whatever this was,
I had to be in on
it.
“I
swear I am not a Christian.” —
“Never baptized?”
I
knew what that was from movies.
“No, never baptized.” —
“So,
you do not know the secret name of God?”
I could
have said “Yahweh” or “Adonai,” two words
I already knew from poetry. Instead I said, “No.” —
“Very
well. You will be my assistant.
At ten o’clock, you come to
the swimming pool. Tell no one.”
I
beamed from ear to ear. “I’ll be there. I promise.”
This
was better than Christmas morning. A Golem. A Golem.
They sent
me home. I crept to my bedroom.
A flashlight and comics would
keep me awake.
At
ten, I ran alongside the Friedman house. Two cars’
headlights
full beamed on the swimming pool.
The Rabbi and Mr. Friedman
were up the slope
that led to the scant woods above the
property.
They stooped and touched bare ground.
“Strange
clay, not like back home, but it will do,”
our sorcerer
intoned, as with a walking stick
he outlined the lumpy shape of
a man
on the bare and eroded clay hillside,
a place I knew,
where owls and wild turkeys
lurked in the shrubs and
saplings.
He passed his cane this way and that,
and
uttering a prayer we could not-quite hear —
it seemed to hover
an inch from his beard
like a will o’the wisp — a prayer not
meant
for human ears but for spirits.
And
the shape he had outlined stood,
and separated itself from the
yellow clay bank.
It stood. It shook itself free
of dust
and tiny stones and tree-root.
It
stood,
and moved no further, inert
as a
sculptor’s first molding.
It
was a lump with but a hint of legs,
arm-like
extrusions bent at the elbow
and
a great square head, two holes
where
eyes should have been
and
a mouth-gap the size of a mailbox.
Mr.
Friedman pulled back in terror.
“I thought you were joking. I
never thought.
My god, I never thought —”
Before I
could react, the Rabbi had lifted me,
and placing a folded
ribbon of paper
into my tiny hand, he put me up
on the
Golem’s forearm.
“Put
the paper in the Golem’s mouth.
Only then will he move
and obey our orders.”
I
started to raise my left hand
to the horizontal gape
that
was the Golem’s mouth.
His beard brushed my ear
as he
whispered, “Do not,
under any circumstances,
look into
the Golem’s eyes.” —
“And
what would happen, Rabbi?” —
“You
would see things no one
was meant to see and live.
Just do
as I ask and no more,
and you will be safe, and blessed.”
My
head averted, I found the mouth
by touch and slid the paper
in.
There came a groan,
as low as a tuba in a passing
parade,
no, low as the bass drum that rattles
your stomach
in passing,
and
then I was standing,
the Rabbi’s hand atop my head
for
the longest time
until he let me go.
We
saw the Golem in silhouette first
as the great shape lumbered
to
the lit-up pool.
And so, with broom and mop
and chemicals,
the hulking thing
descended the shallow-end stairs
into the
vacant pool, as Mrs. Friedman,
at ease as though a local
workman
were there before her, paced round
the pool and
gave out orders.
Sweep
there, no, higher up,
you missed a spot.
How
long this took, I cannot recall.
Marilyn
saw some of it
from her bedroom window,
just
lights and a shape in silhouette
and
her mother going this way, that way
waving
her arms in command.
(Her
little sister, sent to bed early,
saw nothing.)
The
pool was filled, the last leaves swept
into
heaps to be bagged and carted.
Then
Mr. and Mrs. Friedman argued.
She wanted more done. The men were
nervous.
Cars might come along Kingview Road.
So
far, not one had passed.
There
was that house, at hilltop,
whose windows frowned down
on
all their summers, a house
that just a dozen years back
had
hosted a rally of sheeted rioters,
that
day the thirty thousand Klansmen
poured into town to terrify the
Catholics.
Catholics
then, but now the Jews and Negroes.
You
worried about groups of men
riding
on the back of a pickup truck
up
to no good on a Saturday night.
The
moonless night blazed with stars.
Shapes
human and not,
moved
in and out of the headlamps
as the Golem swept, and
scrubbed,
and swept again. At the end of it all,
the Golem
returned to the edge of the wood.
All
looked with relief
at the still-black windows
of the big
white house on the hill.
No light had come on up there.
No
one had seen us.
Then
I was raised once more
to retrieve the undecipherable
scroll
that I knew, but did not tell them,
read “emet,”
the word for truth.
The clay mouth was wider, deeper
than
when the Golem was made,
wide
enough for a small boy
to
fall in and be devoured.
“Go on!”
the Rabbi chided me. “He cannot bite.
He
has no teeth. Just find the paper.”
I reached, back till my
elbow was wet
with clay. He smelled now of chlorine
and
year-old leaves. I found it.
My fingers closed around it.
My
head went back. My eyes
gazed straight into the emerald
furnaces
of the Golem’s still-living orbs.
iv
And
I saw everything —
A
high-domed palace of giants,
packed to the walls with
them,
legion of lumbering Golem shapes
impatient to be
born
from a place of good deeds unbidden,
of help that
could have, but never came —
the nullity of unworked magic
and
failed alchemy.
I
saw new kinds of geometry —
triangles unnamable
through
which the news of past
and future calamities flies
like
telegraphs, most sent
to wrong recipient, and read too late —
how triangles, upward and downward
formed openings how
spun they formed
vast polyhedrous entities
whose facets
were the insides
of never-opened geodes,
arched around
gateways
of onyx and adamantine —
Vectors
of force and how
to form and shape them
from nothing but
will,
nudged by the eye
in forehead’s center
into a
brooding shape
of inward angles
then up and out
bat-winged
hurled down as a smiting force
upon the smiters
—
Power
I saw, but not compassion,
a dark, cold cavern
despite the
light of whirling wish-forms
and the firefly storm of eyes
the
color of emeralds.
v
I
think I fainted.
The
Rabbi, the Friedmans
stood
in a circle around me.
A
cold cloth was on my forehead.
“Thank
God,” said Mrs. Friedman,
“we
don’t have to call an ambulance.”
The
Rabbi leaned down
and hissed in my ear:
“Did
you see? Did you see?”
I
dared not smile, despite
the exultant knowledge
that
flooded over me.
“I
saw,” I answered simply.
He
paused, eyes shining.
“I
saw … everything.”
He
raised his hands in horror,
then
waved two counter-circles
above
my head
as
if to cut a cord above me.
I
went back home. I added
the
Hebrew-lettered paper
to
my scrapbook of monsters,
Golem
marked off between
“Frankenstein”
and “Mummies.”
I
had an ovoid sandstone
warm
in the palm, I dubbed
“The
Philosopher’s Stone,”
thought
it would help make
little
Golems I’d shape one day.
The
following week
the Rabbi ignored me
as
I carried ice and card decks
to
the women’s tables
the
darting eyes of Mrs. Friedman
said
Don’t you dare
tell.
I
stood off in the pines to watch.
The
women sunbathed and played at cards.
The
shirt-sleeved men kept apart
as
one by one they came to the Rabbi’s table
and
passed him envelopes, a stack
before
him by the end of the afternoon.
They
had done their part against Krushchev.
He
watched them.
He watched them watching
as
one another’s wives dived in
to
the deep end of the swimming pool.
His
back was to the women.
After
one walk uphill to the clay bank,
just
to be sure it had resumed its previous state,
I’m
sure, he went to his car. I waved.
I
think he saw me. I think a slight nod
was
his only thank-you. I was the clay
he
could not put back from where it came.
Not
to worry. I am still
not
a Christian.
vi
Rabbi,
The Golem said to tell you:
A
hammer is as nothing
without a hand to wield
it.
A
hand is as nothing
without a mind to guide
it.
A
mind is as nothing
without the will to
drive it
The
will is as nothing
without the gift of
knowing
Knowing
is as nothing
without the love that
burns
at
the core of the never-dying stars:
love
of what was, love of what is,
love of what can be.
vi-a
(The Golem’s message in Yiddish) (tentative)
A
hammar iz gornisht
felndik a hant
tsu vild es.
A
hant iz gornisht
felndik a gayst
tsu firn es.
A
meynung iz gornisht
felndik
di vilpauer
tsu for es.
Vilpauer
iz gornischt
felndik di talant
fun visn.
Veyst
iz gornischt
felndik di libe
vos brent
in di harts
fun
imortal shtern:
libe
aoyb vos iz geven,
libe aoyb voz iz,
libe aoyb vos kenen
zeyn.
