Heiresses of Russ 2012 Read online

  “One simple way to conceptualise the mechanisms behind a golem,” Jacob told her, “is as a fire. The body, you see, is the fuel, and the orrery is the very air it needs to thrive, you understand?”

  Sarah schooled her face into one of someone who did, indeed, both see and understand. Naomi, who didn’t have to impress anyone with her marriageable nature, was staring at her brother as if she too had been caught by surprise at his belief that he could lecture his way into a wedding.

  “Then the word of truth is the spark that sets it all alight.” Jacob sounded as proud as if he had come to this conclusion himself. “Naturally, the true alchemical theory is far more complicated than that, but—”

  Behind Jacob’s back, Naomi shrugged apologetically before leaving Sarah to her fate.

  What seemed like hours later, Sarah came home to the smell of brisket and her grandfather’s smile.

  “Tell me, my love,” he said, patting the seat beside him in invitation, “was it really so bad?”

  She thought for a moment, giving his question the care and attention it was due. “No. The kugel was good, and I think I see now how to calibrate the effects of Mars in retrograde.”

  Grandfather put an arm around her and pulled her into a hug. “Will you need me to order some more copper bands?”

  •

  An orrery contained knowledge of the heavens. It was a mechanical device that modelled the movements of the planets and their moons. When Sarah was eight and a half, Rabbi Benjamin had told her that the sky was God’s orrery; a small part of her had never forgiven God for putting the planets so far out of reach.

  The quality of the orrery—its detail, precision and scope—all played their role in giving power to a golem. A pocket watch, stolen or otherwise, could never form the heart of a golem, whatever Mr Dickens might have to say about it.

  Sarah took apart her first orrery when she was a few weeks shy of her eighth birthday. It took her three months and many false starts before she could put it back together again. Every morning of those three months she woke with a new idea of what to try next.

  •

  The second day, she called on Aryeh. The same golem answered the door and ushered her into the same well-scrubbed room, all traces of yesterday’s visit washed and polished away. Naomi served them tea in the same china cups.

  To his credit, Aryeh didn’t start lecturing Sarah on what he believed to be the true alchemical theory behind golems. This was because to lecture her on anything, he would first have needed to speak.

  “The weather has been most clement recently,” Sarah tried.

  Aryeh nodded. Behind him, Naomi looked torn between horror and amusement at her brother’s unique approach to courtship.

  “It’s good for business,” Sarah said.

  Aryeh nodded.

  “And very pleasant to walk by the river,” Sarah said. Her fingers itched for the orrery she had been working on that morning.

  Aryeh nodded.

  Sarah dared another look at Naomi. She had to stifle a laugh at the resigned sympathy on the other woman’s face.

  •

  An old man leaves France with nothing but a bundle of clothes and a bust of Napoleon. He’s stopped by the police, who search his clothes and demand he explain the bust. “What is that?”

  “What is that? What is that?” (When Grandfather told the story, his eyes widened in mock rage and Sarah giggled happily.) “Do not ask me what is that, ask me who is that! That is Napoleon, the greatest friend of the Jewish people. Under him, we have been accepted, been welcomed into French life with open arms. No longer are we Jews separate from French society—we are true citizens at last, as equal as the stars in the sky. I wish to bring a bust of this great man to my family, so we may gaze upon this great liberator of our people and—”

  The police wave him on.

  The old man arrives in England with nothing but a bundle of clothes and a bust of Napoleon. At the port, officials search his clothes and demand he explain the bust. “What is that?”

  “What is that? What is that?” (Sarah joined in the outraged refrain.) “Do not ask me what is that, ask me who is that! That is Napoleon, the greatest enemy of the Jewish people. He has brought more pain to us than any plague, than any war. Under him, the art of the golem has been completely suppressed. We are forbidden from making them, from owning them, from teaching our children their secrets. How can we Jews survive without the golem? I wish to bring a bust of this evil man to my family, so we may spit upon this great enemy of our people and—”

  The officials wave him on.

  The old man arrives at last at his daughter’s home, where he is greeted by his family, embraced and kissed and fussed over. He sets down his bundle of clothes and his bust of Napoleon and attends to every grandfather’s proper duty: the care of his grandchildren.

  (Sarah snuggled closer to her grandfather and he dropped a kiss on the top of her head.)

  One of his grandchildren, a beautiful, clever girl with sharp eyes and a sharper mind, she is fascinated by the bust. “Grandfather, Grandfather,” she says. “Who is that?”

  “Who is that? Who is that?” her grandfather booms. “Do not ask me who is that, ask me what is that! Eight pounds of gold.”

  •

  The third day, she called on Daniel. Naomi answered the door, and immediately she took Sarah’s hands in her own.

  “I love my brothers,” she said earnestly.

  Sarah fought the urge to snatch her hands away. They felt too hot and too cold at the same time, and Naomi was standing very close.

  “I love my brothers,” Naomi said again, “but, please, allow me to apologise in advance for Daniel.”

  For all the fluttering in her chest, Sarah couldn’t help but laugh.

  •

  The gentile scholars whose combustion analogies Jacob took so much pleasure in quoting called orreries Antikythera mechanisms, after a device recovered from an ancient shipwreck. They said it proved that the art of the golem was not inherently Jewish, but in fact had been discovered by the ancient Greeks—those classical gods of all civilisation—and had only later been adopted by the Jews.

  Adopted. Stolen, was what they meant, and everyone knew it—no more Jewish than one of Fagin’s pocket watches.

  It lent their studies an air of respectability that had previously been so lacking. While many might ask what business a university had in sponsoring curiosity over some Jew magic trick, they would not even question the study of valuable ancient Greek science.

  •

  The fourth day, she called on Eli’s son’s house again. Naomi answered the door.

  “I don’t have any more brothers,” Naomi said with a smile. “But if you’ve chosen already, I can fetch the victor.”

  With a courage she did not really feel, Sarah said, “I was hoping I could persuade you to take a walk with me.”

  She didn’t miss the way Naomi flushed, nor the guilt that skittered across her face.

  “I’m not sure that’s a good idea,” Naomi said at last. She gave the impression of having tried and rejected several answers in her head before settling on that one.

  This would be the moment to turn and walk away. Instead, Sarah spoke again. “I rather think the damage has already been done.”

  Naomi really was beautiful when she smiled. “You could be right.” She drew herself together. “And who knows, maybe I will discover you to be boring and you will discover me to be brash.”

  “I am told I can be very dull,” Sarah agreed.

  “Really?” Naomi slipped on her coat. “Tell me more.”

  They found themselves by the river, watching the golems pull flat-bottomed canal boats through the water.

  “What would you do,” Naomi asked, “if you could do anything you wanted?”

  Sarah didn’t even have to think about it. “I’d learn to build a real model of the skies. Something huge and messy and full of surprises, just like the stars themselves.”

 
Naomi was studying her face, her own expression something Sarah couldn’t read and wasn’t sure she wanted to.

  “And you?” Sarah prompted.

  Naomi looked away. “I envy you your certainty. My ambition—” She used the Yiddish word. “—feels like a glass I’ve dropped on the floor. It shatters into tiny pieces, and I want to chase them all.”

  They both stared at the river for a long moment.

  “I want a family,” Naomi said all in a rush. “Happy, noisy children for me to love and cherish. I want to travel the world. I want to see what you see when you look at the night sky. I want to make my family proud. I want to write penny dreadfuls just for the thrill of watching boys save up their farthings to read what happens next. I want you to be boring. Why aren’t you boring?”

  It was as if all the breath had fled Sarah’s lungs.

  “I could marry one of your brothers.”

  “You could.”

  They let the lie hang between them.

  Golems were fashioned from stone so their bodies might bear the demands of their fate. You could wake them simply by telling the truth. And at the heart of every golem, Sarah knew to her bones, was the movement of the planets: Vast, awe-inspiring and utterly beyond human control.

  “Naomi,” Sarah said, finally feeling the courage she had feigned on Naomi’s doorstep. “Would you care to meet my grandfather?”

  •

  La Caída

  Anna Meadows

  When I was seven years old, I caught a monarch butterfly off the fruit trees in my grandmother’s backyard. It had perched on a pear blossom, its wire tongue probing the center for nectar, and I trapped it in one of the blue mason jars Abuelita had once used to can cactus-flower jam. I watched it flutter against the aqua glass, its wings a flash of marigolds and obsidian.

  “Let it go, m’ija,” my grandmother said, pausing from her work in the herb patch.

  “Why?” I asked.

  “It’s hungry.”

  “But so am I.”

  Worry crossed her face. Even after years of watching her granddaughters turn eighteen, when a hunger for salt and iron filled their mouths, she didn’t know why I would want to eat the winged creature. My older sisters and cousins craved blood, only blood. Naguales never wanted anything else.

  “Let it go, m’ija,” she said again.

  “Why?”

  “He could be a warrior,” she said, reminding me of the legend that said fallen Aztec soldiers were reborn as monarchs. “He could be your ancestor.” She picked a handful of marjoram leaves. “And even if he’s not, he could be un ángel caído.”

  “A what?” I asked. I knew as little Spanish as my mother; she’d forgotten all but the Lord’s Prayer since her family moved to Luna Anaranjada when she was five.

  “A fallen one,” my grandmother said. “Sometimes God takes pity on them, depending on what they’ve done. An angel who rebels against Him will see no mercy. He’ll be thrown to the Earth and vanish before he hits the ground.” She pointed up toward the Milky Way, coming into focus and banding the sky as it darkened. “Como un meteoro.” She took the jar in her hands. “But for the lesser sins, he might turn the angel into a monarch on its way down, so it can float to Earth. Its wings turn to limbs only when they touch the ground.” She eased the jar back between my palms. “Do you see, m’ija?”

  I nodded, my eyes down, and unscrewed the lid. The monarch hesitated, crawling along the inside lip, but I shook the jar and it fluttered out.

  I didn’t hunger for another butterfly until after my eighteenth birthday, when I wanted blood so badly I was ready to bite into my own arm. My sisters waited out their cravings like my family had for generations, eating raw, bloody meat from a cousin’s shop, and biding their time until they heard about a man who raped a woman or beat his wife. They would surround him in one of the fallow wheat fields outside town and share the meal like guests at a wedding feast. When a village was rid of such men, we moved on.

  They always invited me. I rarely came. The man’s screams and the sound of my sisters’ teeth tearing into his muscle turned my stomach.

  Carmen made fun of me. “Little sister is hungry, but can’t eat. She doesn’t want to work for it. She wants to buy it in cartons at the store like orange juice.”

  I didn’t hold it against her. She often led my sisters to their next meal, and because of our family, the talk about our kind, los naguales, was changing. Villages used to fear naguales. They called us witches, and whispered that at night we turned to cats and wild dogs to commit our crimes. They said we were why children became sick and crops withered. They blamed murders and missing livestock on our taste for blood.

  Thanks to my family’s penchant for the blood of men so evil no one missed them, wives and mothers now spoke of us as guardians. Good men used us as warnings to their sons and brothers. If they guessed who we were, they did not tell, fearing we would flee before we had rid their village of the kind of men we fed on. If one of those men found us out, he never lived to expose us.

  No one ever found the bodies. My mother and Carmen never told me how they managed that. Once I asked them if it was the graveyards; two of my uncles ran a funeral home the next county over, and a few of my cousins worked as undertakers. But my mother only looked horrified and told me they’d never defile good men’s tombs with the bodies of the depraved.

  Depraved or not, I couldn’t feed on them. My sisters had grown tall and lean on their diet. I’d gained ten pounds trying to fill the gnawing in my stomach with the olive oil cookies and chiles en nogada that were once my favorites. My breasts had bloomed a full cup size. My thighs had softened and widened, and I carried a little pouch of extra fat below my belly button that strangers mistook for baby fat, thinking I was still thirteen.

  I ate and ate because I couldn’t stomach what I needed. It wasn’t that I objected to what my sisters were doing, to what my family had done for a hundred years. But my body rebelled against the nourishment. Carmen, for all her mocking, had brought me a glass of it once. But I heard the cries of the guilty man and their teeth puncturing his ligaments as surely as if I’d been in that fallow field, and I couldn’t keep it down. I was eating myself into the next dress size, and I was still starving.

  It shouldn’t have surprised me that the next time I saw a monarch butterfly floating past a pitaya flower, I imagined its powdered wings on my tongue.

  It was the night Hector Salazar stormed onto our front lawn, stinking of cheap mezcal and crushing the datura under his boots, and waking the whole neighborhood. “Get out here, putas! You filthy, murdering whores! You killed my brother!”

  Carmen strolled onto the front porch, our grandmother’s pearl-handled pistol tucked into her skirt. “Your brother tried to rape another man’s wife.” She cleared flakes of dried oregano from under her fingers, and tossed her head at Adriana, Lucia, and me to tell us to stay back. “God brings swift justice sometimes. It’s not our place to question His ways.”

  He spat on our statue of la virgen. “I’ll kill all of you.” He waggled an unsteady finger at Carmen. “The sheriff thinks you’re pretty. That’s the only reason you’re not in the jail. But it doesn’t matter. I’ll kill all of you myself.” He stumbled over the brick planter border.

  Lucia, pure soul as she is, stepped forward to keep him from falling, but Adriana held her back, and Hector fell into the weeds.

  “Not tonight. I’ll let you putas wait and wonder when I’ll get you.” He staggered to his feet, his knees and elbows coated in mud, and out toward the main road.

  Adriana fumed. I gripped the porch railing so I didn’t tremble. When Lucia caught her breath, she cleaned la virgen with her skirt.

  “Don’t worry,” said Carmen. “He knows what his brother did, and he knows he has nothing to threaten us. Go to bed.”

  Carmen slept like a cat in sunlight, and Adriana and Lucia turned over in their beds until they wore themselves out.

  I knew I wouldn’t sleep until dawn, so I
took a walk in the desert behind our house. That was when I saw the butterfly.

  It looked already dead as it was falling. It flapped its wings no more than the wind would have done for it, and it tumbled toward the ground without riding the updraft. I lost sight of it and found it again, its path swirling through the dust that clouded the air.

  I knew my grandmother couldn’t see me. She’d settled with my mother in Cachcaba, thirty-seven miles away; we brought them blood in blown-glass jars on the weekends. But I searched the dark anyway, just in case. No one would ever know. If it was already dead, it couldn’t be one of my Aztec ancestors, so what could be the harm? Birds ate butterflies every day.

  A last gust of wind swept it up before its body weighted down its wings and pulled it to the Earth. I tried to follow it, but it vanished in the dull gold of blowing dust.

  When the thin dirt settled, the butterfly was gone. In its place, a human body lay curled on its side.

  I gasped. I didn’t know how I’d missed it or how long it had been there. It looked dead, at first. From the cropped hair and straight hips, I thought it was a boy. Then I noticed the slight curve of her breast. She was naked except for bruising that darkened her back.

  She was breathing. I knelt behind her. I reached out to see if she was really there.

  My fingers barely grazed the fine, peach-fuzz hairs on her back, but her shoulder blades pinched, her eyes snapping open. She struggled for breath like I’d just pulled her out of water.

  “Shh.” I stroked her back.

  “Leave me alone,” she said, her voice young, but low.

  “You’re hurt,” I whispered.

  “I’m all right.”

  “You need help.”

  She shivered, though the day’s heat had barely faded with the dark; she must have had a fever. “Please leave me alone.”

  “I won’t hurt you,” I said. “I’ll take you to the doctor. He’s not far.”

  “No,” she said. “Please. Don’t let anyone see me like this.”