He, She and It, Page 3

  She hurried through the neat, ever new and ever clean city of the enclave. Above the serrated rows of low-tech bins, the silver dome stretched. Three hundred thousand people lived here; as many tubed in and out daily from the Glop. Under the dome it was spring, and the climate was set for what it had probably been like here fifty years before, but the streetlights were on.

  A crocodile of children in their Sunday blue uniforms marked with the Y-S logo marched past. She could tell they were children of management rather than of techies, because they had already been worked on surgically to resemble the Y-S ideal face and body. They were singing one of the corporate hymns, a security ape leading them and one bringing up the rear. The apes moved as heavily as robots, although robots were forbidden to be made in human form since the cyber-riots; apes were simply people altered chemically and surgically and by special implants for inhuman strength and speed. These were high-level children being escorted through the midlevel-tech shopping district to some special event. Normally they would not venture out of Paradise Park, the enclave within the enclave, built behind walls around a real lake of water. A tall elegant woman on a horsicle—a horse robot shining golden and lifting each cobalt hoof high into the air in a mincing gait—rode beside them. Teacher? More likely, from the horsicle—which cost a fortune—and her hair, braided with jewels, one of the mothers.

  She thought of her own mother, Riva, as she had not in years. She had seldom met Riva. The last occasion had been when she was seventeen and about to go off to college. Her mother was a dowdy prematurely middle-aged woman, your typical bureaucrat or middle-level analyst—Shira had never quite grasped what her mother did, but obviously nothing important. The talent that made Malkah recognized worldwide as a genius and that had until recently secured Shira her choice of schools and projects seemed to have skipped Riva. Had Riva ever missed her as she was already missing Ari? She doubted it. Insofar as Shira could visualize her, she saw a fussy woman rubbing her hands together nervously. Riva had turned her over to Malkah with evident relief, Malkah had raised her, and everybody had been happy. No, Shira had not been able to take seriously the family tradition that she give her child to her mother. Her impression was that Riva would have been overburdened raising a gerbil.

  Shira had grown up with cats and birds, but here only high-level techies and execs were permitted real animals. Everyone else made do with robots, but the good ones cost far too much for her. Ari’s little koala was the best she and Josh could do. Ari was crazy about it, Wawa Bear, but Josh had forbidden her to take it along with Ari, saying it was too expensive to drag around.

  Their street was like a hundred others, their house one of the four types for Josh’s rating. Shira grimaced, standing outside the door, which no longer opened at her touch. The house computer had been reprogrammed to treat her like any other stranger. Recently when she picked up Ari, she waited outside for him. The last time she had been inside the house they shared, she had found the living room and kitchen ostentatiously unclean, food containers everywhere, unwashed crockery. The house had screamed neglect: look what you did to us! All Josh had to do was let the cleaning robot at its job. But he had chosen to say with the filth: this is what I have been reduced to. His anger was a stench in her nostrils. She had written a description of the incident in her latest appeal, citing the atmosphere in his household as unsuitable and unhealthy for a toddler. Two could fight with old food.

  The house opened the door. “Come in. There is a message for you.” The voice had been reprogrammed. Actually it sounded as if the house were on neutral, as if no one lived here. The voice was clearly a machine voice, no longer female, no longer familiar.

  “Isn’t Josh at home? Where’s Ari?”

  “Josh is not here. Ari is not here. Please receive the message left for Shira Shipman.”

  She walked through the foyer. Most of the furniture was in place, but personal things had disappeared, the photographs of Josh’s family. He would never remove the pictures of his slaughtered parents and brothers while he occupied this house. They were officially listed as dead in a plague, but they had died fighting. The twisted and half-melted menorah recovered from the ruins was gone from its place. She ran quickly to the terminal. It was not the enhanced one they had always used. It was a minimal terminal, set to run the house, take messages, answer simple questions, control a cleaning robot. It was the caretaker type that lacked even a protect function. She felt as if her chest were filling with cold mud. She felt heavy, formless, chilled through. What was going on? She sank into the chair before the terminal and identified herself.

  Josh’s face appeared on the screen, his lips drawn thin. “I presume you have come here to argue with me. Any further appeals are useless. You left us, and now we have left earth. Yakamura-Stichen has transferred me to Pacifica Platform. I’m taking my assistant Barbra and Ari. I have the full permission of Y-S to take Ari with me. Unless you can get clearance to Pacifica, you’ll have to wait till we return to earth at the end of our tour of duty. The standard two years. Josh Rogovin out.”

  She sat stunned. Then she ran upstairs to Ari’s room. It was stripped. Y-S must have let Josh move Ari’s little bed, his play desk, his toys, his koala robot. She ran through the house, calling hopelessly, futilely. Then she flung herself at the terminal and replayed Josh’s message.

  “You really took revenge on me. You really did,” she said to his face frozen on the screen at message’s end. She went on sitting there while the room darkened. Lights here would not turn on unless she requested it, and she made no request. How dingy and small the house felt around her, devoid of any traces of their marriage beyond wear and tear on the furniture, an occasional stain not yet cleared from the wall. Ari was gone. He was not even on earth.

  It all came down to the simple fact that Josh’s skills were more valuable to Y-S than hers. They had been trying to transfer plasma state physicists to Pacifica Platform, but according to the rights of Y-S citizens, no one could be relocated off-earth without consent. Everyone suspected that there was more hard radiation on Pacifica than the multi was letting on. Josh had never been interested in working in space. Life on a platform was claustrophobia fully realized. Josh had no right to take Ari to spend his childhood in such a place. He had done it to punish her. There was nothing, absolutely nothing she could do.

  She hated Y-S. Her boss had not fought for her hard enough. She had been sacrificed to the need of the multi for scientists willing to spend two years in a large tin can. Two years. The tears slipped down her face. She did not want to cry in this abandoned house that had witnessed the last phase of her stupid misbegotten marriage. She blew her nose hard and went home.

  For what it was worth, she logged a formal protest to Y-S. Then quite openly she sent a message to Avram. She did not speak to him but sent it through the Net, the public information and communication utility that served the entire world. She told him she would accept the position in his lab. As soon as she could clean up her affairs here, she would be with him and go to work at once. She had squandered her accumulated credit on legal battles.

  She had no idea why Avram wanted her to work with him, but a temporary job in Tikva would give her time to think which way to jump, time to negotiate with multis, time to heal. It would be a pleasure to be home again, where Malkah would light the Sabbath candles and they would say the ancient blessings, where she would be free to be who she was. How grim to be returning torn from her child, whom she had so often imagined bringing to Tikva. She anticipated no trouble in resigning. Had Y-S wanted to keep her services, they would have ruled she might share custody of Ari. Had they wanted her as badly as they wanted a plasma physicist on Pacifica, she would have sole custody. Company justice. She was going home.

  THREE

  Malkah Tells Yod a Bedtime Story

  Once upon a time is how stories begin. Half artist, half scientist, I know that much. A mother and a grandmother, I have been telling stories for fifty years. As the children grow, so d
o the tales, from line drawings in motion to the full range of colors and shadings, layered thickly as plaster or blood. Some moral tales belong to kindergarten, the age of being afraid of the dark, the age of venturing from the house alone for a short distance, admonitory fables in primary crayons. But other tales are always with us. We tell them to ourselves in midlife and in old age, different each time, accreting as stalactites press toward earth, heavier with each drop and its burden of secret dissolved rock and minerals, the many salts of the planet.

  Thus, dear Yod, the story I am about to leave you in the Base is not the way I told it to my child Riva or to my child Shira or to Shira and Gadi when they would sit on their haunches like little frogs, all bug eyes and appetite. I am recording this story just for you in the nights of my ash-gray insomnia, when my life feels like an attic full of boxes I have put away, things once precious and now dusty and half forgotten but still a set of demands that I put it, all of it, in order and deal with it, as bequests, as trash, as museum to set open to the family or the world. This is a time of beginnings and endings, of large risks and dangers, of sudden death by mental assassination. It is also the time my sight is failing again, and this time it cannot be repaired. The darkness of night apes the darkness I dread, and sleep is the lover I fear perhaps more than I truly desire his soft warm weight on me.

  This is the story, then, of the Golem: not you, my own little Golem I call little although you are taller than me by the same measure as a tall man (like Razi, my second-to-last lover) and stronger than me by a factor too large to bother guessing. You can lift a block of marble over your head. No, little as an affectionate term, the way so many languages attach suffixes of endearment that diminish in size as they enlarge in affect. Avram has forbidden me to see you, but we can still communicate through the Base, and there I create my bubeh maisehs for you. I am not at all sure to what extent I am guilty of great folly and overweening ambition for my role in your programming, or to what degree I am instead that figure of Strength on the Tarot deck, the woman who tames the lion, who taught you to temper your violence with human connection. A task Avram interrupted.

  I am telling this story for you as I lie alone in my own huge antique bed in the bedroom shaped to me like an old familiar garment, with the scent of narcissus from the courtyard, in this the house of my family with its oasis of green in the desert the world has become. I lie awake sensing the danger gathering around us in this fragile modern ghetto. This is a tale of my family from long ago when the world seemed to be breaking open. They called it rebirth. Renaissance. But nothing ever comes back the same. The world moves in epicycles on the human level, although at the time in which my story is wanting to be told, it was those very projected epicycles of the universe that were being discarded by a few brave astronomers in favor of a system that was simple, clear and utterly alien to the human or rather the man-centered universe held to be immutable and preeminently Christian by most of those living in Europe. But like the Ptolemaic universe, my story has a human center.

  This is the story particularly of one Judah Loew, several men and women around him, and one un-man. But it is also the story of a city, and of a town within a city, a town as special and as isolated and as endangered as our own free town of Jews huddled here beside the rising poisoned sea. Prague is the city, beautiful Prague just taking on its gray and golden, mustard and terra-cotta, strawberry and pistachio stucco warmth, just beginning to be shaped into the city whose Baroque lineaments I walked through in the spring of my twenty-second year—2008—while I was studying philosophy with that brilliant man who was so great a teacher and so awkward a lover, and yet I thought the bargain of my flesh for his company and his conversation a worthy one, and I was right. I wandered those twisted ways and climbed the streets of stairs, dreaming of Kafka, whose stories I carried always with me, and dreaming, too, of Einstein, who had taught at that university while he was creating his theory of relativity. I was a bright, bright student, the best student of my professor and his momentary beloved besides while lilacs bloomed that spring.

  Every day from the university buildings I looked back into what had been the ghetto; every day I crossed it, past the Altneushul, past the Jewish cemetery to my neighborhood of students and workers, a medieval warren of narrow streets, two- and three-story houses washed with mustard stucco over the ancient crumbling bricks on Rasnovka Street. In the Pinkas synagogue, built in the thirteenth century, a synagogue already old when Rabbi Judah Loew walked those narrow streets, on the stripped interior walls are written the 77,397 names of the Jews who perished into smoke from the death camps the year my mother was born in Cleveland, Ohio, forty-one years before my own birth. The lilacs were in bloom when I conceived my only daughter Riva, whom in my barely postadolescent silliness I carried away from Prague, a lump in my womb like a souvenir of delight, as other sojourners carried away artifacts of Czech crystal. Indeed Riva grew up about as malleable as crystal.

  Inside 1600 Prague is Jewtown, the walled ghetto, the Glop of its time, with houses shoehorned into courtyards and families squatting in one room or several families jammed in a space hardly big enough for them to lie down side by side to sleep—the walls that seldom keep out the mobs that periodically rise to ravage and murder. It is not many years since a mob came raging through the streets and in a matter of hours slaughtered a quarter of the inhabitants, maimed and torn bodies flung down like bloody trash in the streets, fallen over cribs, impaled as they prayed, slashed open in the birthing bed. There was not one survivor who had not to bury a husband, a wife, a child, a mother, a beloved. In 1543 all the Jews of Prague were sent into exile, suddenly expelled from their homes with what they could carry and dumped into the hostile countryside to make their way elsewhere, anywhere else. Only yesterday the Jews of Prague heard talk from the burghers, from the crafts guilds too, that it is time they were exiled again. In Judah Loew’s lifetime all Jewish books were seized, many burned and the remainder bought back by a huge ransom. Every year the Jews pay a “leibzoll”—a tax on their right to live.

  They wear on their coats, men and women and children, a yellow symbol proclaiming they are Jews. It is not the six-pointed star, the Magen David, because that symbol is only a local emblem on the banner of the community of Prague and will seem most unusual when it is used, as it will be for one of the characters we will shortly meet, on his tombstone. No, the badge required is simply a cut-out shape of yellow that every Jew must wear so as to be identifiable instantly. It has not been so forever. In fact if things at this moment are briefly a little better for the Jews of Prague, it is only a respite. Life has gotten markedly worse within their memory, and fortunately for their ability to sleep at night, they do not yet have any idea how bad it is going to get in a few years, when the Thirty Years’ War sweeps back and forth and back and forth like a mad scythe harvesting human heads.

  For centuries we had occupied a small, dishonorable but necessary role, because we were the bankers, the pawnbrokers, the exchanges, the source of loans; it was the work permitted us. But once Christians became bankers, Jews began trying to do the same work as everybody else, even though most trades were officially forbidden us. We had to make a living, and we couldn’t just take in each other’s washing. Up to the time of the first Crusade, Jews lived mostly in their own neighborhoods as people do, near their relatives, their friends, but there might be three or four more and less Jewish neighborhoods in a city like Prague, and if a Jew wanted to live someplace else, who cared? But from the first Crusade, the Church was militant, expanding, determined to conquer or extirpate other beliefs. The Fourth Lateran Council decreed Jews should be locked up in ghettos or expelled.

  In the ghetto at Prague there are a few quite rich Jews who still finance foreign trade and whose empire of interests is far-flung and daring, and many, many poor Jews. There are a handful, such as the Loews, in between the hell of the very poor and the heaven of the rich. But in Jewtown everybody, the rich Maisls, the middling Loews, the hungry searc
hing through rubbish for a piece of kindling to burn, they are all crowded into a tiny place and they know each other by name and they all know each other’s business. It is a hot tight place, noisy day and night, where the ragpicker may also be a great scholar and the drayman a cantor who can sing till the birds faint or a fiddler who can make your bones shiver. The rich Jews try every few years to buy a house or some land outside, but they are too hated. No one will sell to them. If anyone entertains an offer, something happens to that seller or else that house or land goes at once off the market. So the rich, too, are stuck in this large quarrelsome family, stuck with the resentments and suspicions of the poor whose shacks and tenements press to the very walls of the fancy houses and whose smells and cries enter through every window and crack, as do the rats that breed in the cellars. Rabbi Loew has quarreled with the wealthy, because he calls them to account, he scolds them, and he insists the poor have the right to the same education as the sons of the well-to-do.

  Let’s look at Judah Loew, about whom this story gathers itself like a cloud that rests on the shoulder of a mountain. He’s called the Maharal. In those days big rabbis have nicknames like sports stars and stars of stimmies. In the embattled ghettos, they are culture heroes and entertainers besides. His given name: Judah Loew ben Bezalel, Judah the Lion. A lion among the Jews.

  The Maharal is a bright fierce man, a hotheaded kabbalist, steeped in ancient tradition so that Torah haunts and informs and sculpts the world for him, but curious, open to the science and the speculation of his time. The Maharal is a crabby saint of towering intellect with a fondness for having at the opposition with every weapon in his arsenal, from reason to high rhetoric to sarcasm to ridicule. He is free with his invective, his insults. In any intellectual contest, the desire to win takes him over and he fights to kill his opponent. He is almost alone in his time in believing that any opinion has the right to be uttered—he believes anachronistically in free speech, not because he is a relativist. No, he believes in the truth of his religion. But he believes too strongly in the sacredness of the intellect to cripple it by forbidding any ideas whatsoever. He conducts running wars of words with most other famous rabbis of his time. But in December of 1599, he receives a summons to debate a priest in public, a dangerous agon, because as a Jew he is supposed to lose. If he doesn’t, the opportunity of the Church for revenge will be multiple, swift or slow-moving as they wish, and neverending—or ending the usual way. It is not a time when someone wishing the sight should lack for the spectacle of burning Jews. But how can the Maharal throw the debate? G-d would not accept less than victory. As a Jew, he is obligated to use his entire mind. The early Biblical critic dei Rossi, whose ideas the Maharal detests, said if you want to offer a sacrifice to G-d, offer it to truth, and perhaps that is the only thing Rossi ever uttered with which the Maharal is in agreement.