The Golem and the Djinni. Helene Wecker
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