Saul put his hand on hers, tilting his head to study the height of the stack. “Like about a foot and a half.”
“Like the Little Gingerbread Man,” Newp offered.
Saul peered at his niece. “You just see this.”
“He talked about Emet, about truth. Yes. I do.”
Saul seemed to be thinking. “Well… Kurt has the clay.”
“But how’s it done?” Newp asked. “You know how to make a clay man?”
“The sculpting is easy. Bringing it to life, not so much.” He started pacing, a new energy taking hold of him. He stuck his head out the door of the office. “Maybe we’re all meshuge. Kurt!”
“Yeah?” Kurt called from his studio in the back.
“Get about four pounds of clay.” Saul turned back to Frannie. “You’re onto something.”
You’re onto something. She felt like she had waited her life to hear someone say something like this to her.
Frannie was not a religious girl. Her parents were intellectuals, played a lot of jazz, never went to Temple. But she knew a religious activity would be called for here. She threw herself completely unto the creation of the golem.
On the day of the beginning of the ritual, Frannie rose and kissed her parents. “We’re making a golem today,” she said to her mom.
Her pop didn’t look up from his paper when he said, “Be sure he doesn’t kill the king’s messenger.”
On her way out to the car that waited for her at the curb, Newp’s engine idling, Frannie heard the laughing chatter of her friends with whom she’d begun the summer.
Carol from down the block threw her a glance from across the street but really barely noticed her as Frannie put her surfboard into the back of Newp’s car. When she got in, Newp nodded towards it. “What’s up with the board?”
“We’re about to start a long process, Saul says, so – oh, come on, I want to get some waves. I need it, it helps me focus.”
They stopped at the beach and paddled our, even as Frannie knew that Kurt would be gathering up the clay and beginning to fashion the crude little body along the lines that they had described—basically Frannie drew a picture of the golem from the movie and said, “make him like that.”
Frannie’s own body felt unformed this morning—she was a paddling clay gangly thing, spindly but muscular legs and arms, almost no breasts to speak of, but here came the swell, and as she brought her feet under her she felt whole, completed by the wave.
“Pipe, Frannie,” Newp called as a vast rolling tube came into being; she aimed for the pipe and hit it just right—she felt drums suspended in the air and in her mind, the chittering of the water hard against the underside of the board came in a drumming rhythm. Shoot the curl.
As she came in, they passed Raph, one of Hooky’s lieutenants, and he muttered, “Not bad.” Shooting the curl, lots of people talked it, but Frannie was doing it regularly now. That wasn’t true of anyone else. Word was getting out.
“Not bad?” she repeated, hauling the board on her shoulder. “That mean I get to go to the luau?”
She looked at Newp and he made a face like he was embarrassed that she was putting him on the spot. “Frannie, come on, it’s…”
“Never mind. I shot the curl. The rest is bullshit.” They hit the café next.
“The instructions for making a golem come from Sefir Yazzir,” Saul said, “in the second-century Book of Creation.” Saul sat cross-legged in a little chalk circle in the attic of the café, wearing white robes. Frannie had no idea where he would have procured white robes, but she couldn’t suppress her giggle when she first saw her uncle dressed like a wizard. “Put these on,” Saul said.
Frannie ducked out to put on her own robes and came back feeling like an idiot. Like Gandalf in the Lord of the Rings books, which had come out when she was a baby and which her parents left around the house through most of her childhood.
When Saul saw his niece, he gestured for her to stand with Newp to Saul’s right at one side of the circle, and now Frannie noticed a little bench on the opposite edge of the circle, about eight feet away on the bench lay a little sheet-covered effigy of a man, about the height of a Chatty Cathy doll. They had fashioned it from clay and baked it in a furnace out back the night before.
“You do the honors, for you have learned the Luria,” Saul said, and handed her a knife.
She pulled the sheet down to the effigy’s shoulders and beheld it. Spectacularly, Kurt had given it exactly the bowl cut, little eyes and flat, thin mouth of the one in the movie. She carved a word in the clay man’s forehead: EMET. Truth.
“Chant with me,” said Saul. The three took hands and she followed Saul’s lead.
The words coming out of Saul’s mouth formed a word bridge of sorts—starting with a simple chant, just a recitation of the Hebrew alphabet, but this was combined with each of the letters of the name of God—the Tetragrammaton, YHWH, YOD, HEI, VAV, HEI— each letter of the Tetragrammaton combined with each letter of the alphabet, so that Saul worked his way through the alphabet and the Tetragrammaton like so:
Alef YOD, Alef HEI, Alef VAV, Alef HEI,
Beit YOD, Beit HEI, Beit VAV, Beit HEI
… and on, all through the alphabet and starting again, so that soon the words entranced her even as she said them.
For hours, chanting.
Saul broke away from his place at the circle and moved to the sheet-covered man. He held forward his hands, palms up.
“I use the words of the creator and wield the might that reflects Him and His secrets, I summon life with a sacred word, Adam, the man from golem, the man from Mud, the life from Clay. So be it, let him rest, and let him rise.”
There was silence and Saul turned back and shrugged. “Okay.”
“Okay?” Frannie stared. “What do we do now?”
“Now? Now we go for dinner.” Saul walked past her, patting her shoulder as he went. “I’ve been standing here for hours and I could eat a horse.”
Frannie’s heart sank as they walked down the stairs. “But—I didn’t see anything.”
“It’s a little clay man.” Saul nodded at Kurt, who was hanging a new painting, and gave him the thumbs up. “Like a doll. Same thing.”
“But don’t you want to know if the spell worked?”
“Not as much as I’d like a corned beef on rye, Frannie. Newp! Make that happen.” Saul was already pouring a beer from the tap. “Frannie, get yourself a soda.”
Get herself a soda? What was this all about if they were already done and nothing had happened? She and Newp pulled up chairs and ate with Uncle Saul, who seemed determined to ignore her clear disappointment. Finally Saul said, “What?”
“It didn’t work, did it?”
Saul shrugged.
And then they heard the pitter patter of little feet.
Chapter 33
“What putrid nonsense are you convincing yourselves of now?”
The voice boomed from somewhere in the room—though it didn’t exactly boom; it sounded distant, ghostly; to Frannie it sounded like an announcer on a radio, reading something that excited him and everyone, but far away, like it was supposed to boom and in some distant land did boom.