The hidden palace, p.37
The Hidden Palace, page 37
A suspicious pause. “What do you mean?”
“The neighborhood is talking about you, Ahmad. You, and the Amherst. They want to know what you’re doing in here, alone in an empty building. Soon they’ll form committees, and hold meetings, to discuss what ought to be done. And then, they’ll come knocking.”
A short, angry laugh. “And what business is it of theirs? Of anyone’s? Did you put them up to this?”
“Ahmad, I’ve spent the last three years keeping Little Syria away from your door.”
A surprised silence from the other side.
“But I can’t do it anymore,” she said. “You’re simply too large of a mystery. They’ve convinced themselves that you’re a threat, that anyone who hides from sight as you do must have a reason.”
“I’m not hiding, Maryam. I’m—” He stopped, and then sighed deeply, and leaned his head back against the wall with a thump that reverberated next to her ear. “These committees,” he said, his voice weary. “What will they say, in their meetings?”
“They’ll make much out of little,” she told him. “They’ll say that, aside from the briefest of glimpses, no one has seen the Amherst’s owner in years. They’ll lament that he refuses to rent out the factory floors when so many Syrian businesses are looking to expand. They’ll ask why all the windows are papered over when the building is supposedly empty. They’ll discuss his character in general, and recall that he once used to walk the rooftops with a strange woman who wasn’t his wife.”
He snorted, annoyed. “So that’s all? I’m to be painted as a scoundrel and a misanthrope?”
“No. There’s also Boutros.”
“What about him?” The edge in his voice had sharpened.
“They’ll question his choice of business partners.”
“Sensible enough.”
“They’ll point out that you weren’t seen at his funeral, and that his death made you the sole remaining owner of the Amherst.”
She paused, trying to gauge if he understood yet. He was silent, thinking. She went on. “But they might go further than that. We all thought that Boutros had made it through the worst of his illness before it returned. It’s possible that some will ask whether his doctors truly tried their utmost—or whether someone gave them a reason not to.”
A pause. “Maryam,” he said slowly, “are you telling me that I’ll be accused of murdering Arbeely?”
She sighed. “I truly don’t know. It’s happened before. An unscrupulous person whispers a bit of slander, and others repeat it as gossip. Before long, the newspapers report it as ‘rumors overheard in the neighborhood.’ If I had to guess . . . yes, I’d say it will happen, eventually. People are frightened, and they want a distraction.”
“Frightened—of what?”
“Of the war.” Then, at his silence: “Do you know about it?”
“No. Not really. Tell me, please.”
“All of Europe is in flames. And it’s spreading outward. Every day, it seems, some new country joins the fighting. America hasn’t declared yet, but few doubt that it’ll happen. And back home, in Lebanon, the fields are stripped bare, and everything goes to the soldiers. The villages are on the edge of famine. Our families . . . Not everyone will survive.”
A long pause, as he took this in. “And you can’t simply . . . bring them here?”
She shook her head. “It’s too dangerous. There’s fighting at sea, and the ports are all under blockade. We send money instead, but it doesn’t always arrive. So we wait, and we worry, and we look for something else to occupy us.”
“Such as myself,” he said.
“Do you blame us? For being curious, and afraid? For wondering what exactly you’re doing in there?”
“I suppose not,” he muttered. Then, “What I’m doing . . . I had an idea, a vision. And I’ve come so close. But there’s something missing, I don’t know what . . .” His voice trailed away; he sighed. “I just wanted a home of my own. Something that would last.”
They sat there in silence, the door solid between them.
“Ahmad,” she said, “have you ever heard of a place called Mount Qaf?”
He turned his head, startled. “You know of it?”
“Yes, the emerald mountain, where the jinn come from.” She paused. “Forgive me, but—have you been there?”
He chuckled. “Of course not. It’s a story, a legend. Like your garden, of Adam and Eve.”
“Oh. What a shame. It always sounded so beautiful.”
“Will you tell me what you’ve heard?”
She thought back. “There was a storyteller in my village who loved to talk about Mount Qaf. He never described it the same way twice. Once he said that it had eight peaks, and that each was home to a different city of jinn. Another time, he said it was possible for us to reach it, but we must walk barefoot for four months, in utter darkness. Oh—and that a fabulous phoenix lived there, but it only laid its eggs on the highest tip of the mountain.”
“The roc,” he muttered, as though in correction.
“Once,” she said, “he told us that the earth itself balanced upon the peaks of Mount Qaf, like a plate held on one’s fingertips. We asked him how that could be possible, since men have crossed the world and sailed every ocean, and no one has ever seen such a thing. He told us, quite seriously, that it was because Mount Qaf was not only a mountain, but a doorway between two different worlds, one visible and the other hidden. And that to pass through, from one world to the other, was a kind of transformation.”
He frowned. “A transformation . . . into what?”
“He left that part unclear.”
“How inconsiderate of him.”
“Does any of that sound like your own legends?”
“Some of it,” he said—but he sounded doubtful, and didn’t elaborate.
They fell silent again. Maryam listened to the whisper of the breeze in the street, the rumble of the forge through the letterbox. Nighttime noises came from open windows: coughs and bed-creaks, the groans of water-closet pipes, infants’ cries that were quickly hushed. Was this, she wondered, what it was like to be him? Eternally awake among the sleepers, watching from rooftops and doorways? The wall was growing uncomfortable against her back, but she stayed where she was, alert in the quiet.
“We aren’t friends now, Maryam,” he said at last. “I don’t want to be your friend.”
She smiled. “And I don’t want to be yours. But I don’t want to be your enemy, either. I told myself I’d never understand you, so I never tried. I set myself against you, I turned everyone’s attention away . . . I thought I was protecting them. I’m ashamed of that now.” She sighed. “I’m sorry, Ahmad. I ought to have helped you instead.”
“I don’t want help,” he muttered. “I told you, I just want to be left alone.”
“You’ve tried that. It doesn’t seem to be working.”
He pondered this, then snorted, half amusement and half acknowledgment.
She said, “Would it be an option, when they come knocking, to simply . . . let them in?”
“No,” he said, his voice sharp in the quiet. And then, less forcefully: “No. The door stays closed.” There was a heaviness to the words that made her think this was, somehow, not entirely his choice.
She said, “Then you’ll need to decide what to do, very soon. It’s in your hands. But know that I’m here, too. And I’ll help in any way I can.”
With that, she stood and brushed the threshold’s dust from her clothing, and went home to her bed, where sleep embraced her.
* * *
The jinniyeh hovered above the Arch.
She’d resolved not to return to the Amherst until dawn; she wanted to give her lover enough time to contemplate her offer, as well as miss her presence. But the wait was growing tedious, and the wind was damp and uncomfortable. Irritated, she left the Arch and floated about the park, searching for currents more to her liking. The buildings at the perimeter of the square were silent and mostly dark, with a few lit windows here and there. She flew toward one of them, and peered inside to see a man sitting at a table, a bottle at his elbow and an empty glass in his hand. He stared outward at nothing for long moments, then picked up the bottle, filled the glass, and drank. When the glass was empty, he resumed his staring.
She peered into other windows. In one, two men sat together upon a couch, one resting his head upon the other’s shoulder. In another, a man was hunched before a boxlike contraption, his fingers dancing over its many round buttons, each one making a clack that she could hear through the glass. She watched children sleeping, and in the next room saw a woman who lay awake, tears rolling slowly down her cheeks for no reason that the jinniyeh could discern.
It ought to have been like watching the Bedu in their half-crumbled citadel—and yet it wasn’t. In the Cursed City, she might float in and out of their lives and be a nuisance as she liked. Here, the humans were sealed away from her reach. She supposed that if she wanted to, she could find a way inside, and cause trouble—but what would be the point? None of them would shout, Iron, O unlucky one, or raise an amulet against her, or set out a ball of wool in hopes of appeasing her. There was no place for her here, not even as their adversary.
Unsettled, she flew upward, away from the windows. Below, the streetlights resolved into lines that stretched down and across, and one wide, bright river that cut through them at an angle. That must be Broadway, she thought, remembering Sophia’s map—and then felt irritated by her own knowledge, as though the woman had planted the name in her mind to annoy her. But there was little else for her to do—and before long she was following Broadway north. Rooftop spires reached toward her as the wide street drifted westward, crossing avenue after avenue. A huge, unlit space appeared, its straight-edged borders holding back a textured murk. Dimly she picked out trees, hills, paths, water. Central Park, she thought. One of Sophia’s favorite places. She thought of the Ghouta, with its jinn-eating creatures, and decided to avoid the park for the moment. But it called to mind something else that Sophia had shown her: the box where the woman had once lived, the mansion, as she’d called it.
She left Broadway behind and flew to the south-east corner of the park, counting the cross-streets, circumnavigating each building in turn, unsure how she would tell Sophia’s from the rest—
There. The balcony with its curving marble balustrade, the twin doors set with glass, the bedroom beyond. All of it exactly as it had been in Sophia’s dream.
There were still hours left until dawn. Here, she thought, she might cause enough mischief to pass the time.
Julia Hamilton Winston lay in her bed, wide awake.
This sleeplessness was nothing new. She only slept in brief spells nowadays, with interminable hours between them. Insomnia often comes with grief, her doctors had told her when first she’d asked if there was something they could do, something they might give her. Now, though, they seemed to think she ought to be past such things. They spoke of mental hardiness, of learning to soothe and regulate her own mind, as though she merely wasn’t giving it the proper effort. Do emotional fancies tend to dominate your thoughts? one specialist had asked her. Do you find yourself susceptible to suggestions? She’d suggested in return that, should he dare to label her a hysteric, she’d drag him before the Board of Health and have his license revoked. She was still Julia Winston; her grief hadn’t sapped her completely.
On this night, though, her unquiet mind was full of more immediate matters. A sympathetic editor at the New York Herald had telephoned that afternoon to say that a woman calling herself Sophia Winston had been spotted at a Washington Square hotel. I can’t keep them from printing it if it’s true, he’d warned her. There’s still too much public interest.
It made her seethe with anger. Once, the Winston name had meant industry, society, influence. Now it only meant the disaster. There were no more soirées in the ballroom, no more luncheons for worthy causes. Most of the servants had left, not wanting their own names chained to a sunken ship. Even Francis’ corporation no longer bore his name. Without a Winston left to run it, the controlling parties had broken it apart, assigned each piece its own petty ruler. Each of them sent a portion of their annual profits to the family coffers, a burnt offering for the departed gods. And now some dimwitted girl dared to call herself Sophia Winston, and drag the name into scandal! Would anyone have attempted such a thing when Francis was alive?
She turned over in her bed, peered at the clock. Three thirty. She turned over again, her mind churning. Locked away in her writing-desk was a stack of Syrian postcards, dozens of them, each one blank save for the address. Many of Julia’s sleepless nights were spent trying to imagine the life behind those silent messages: where Sophia was and whose company she kept, what she’d done in order to survive.
She won’t come back while I’m still alive, Julia told herself. She’d rather starve than be my daughter again.
There was a noise in the dark.
Julia sat up. The heavy curtains let in only a little street-light; but at the far end of the room she could see a figure, a woman, standing in shadow.
“Sophia?” she said, ridiculously.
The figure vanished. It had been there; now it was gone. Julia was certain she hadn’t blinked. She switched on the bedside lamp, saw only her room. Everything was as it should be.
She turned the lamp off again, lay back down, thought of Francis and the man in the fireplace. Do you find yourself susceptible to suggestions? Not long after the disaster, one of Julia’s friends had suggested that she hold a séance, so she might talk with Francis and George again. Julia hadn’t spoken to the woman since.
She lay in the dark. She turned over. Her eyes slowly closed.
Julia was in the ballroom, where the dead had gathered.
All of them were there, fifteen hundred and more, their faces blue and frost-rimed. Sea-water drenched their gowns and dinner-jackets. They stood, they talked; a few danced. Julia walked among them, forcing herself to smile, trying to remember whether she’d invited them, or whether they’d simply arrived. Sophia—where was Sophia?
She caught a flash of a wine-red gown amid the finery. Her daughter was dancing with a man, tall and dark-haired, dressed only in a ragged pair of trousers and a tradesman’s leather apron. Julia recognized him at once. As she watched, he gathered Sophia close, and whispered into her ear; his eyes cut to Julia as he spoke. Sophia smiled, and turned her face to his.
Julia, furious, tried to push through the crowd—but the dead were too cold to touch, and they gathered around her, chilling her through; she was shaking, she would never be warm again—
Go away! she shrieked.
The dead vanished; the room changed. She was in a bedroom—no, a hotel room. Behind her, sheer curtains billowed in a breeze from a half-open window. Sophia trembled upon the bed, her face contorted. The man was bent over her as though examining her. He straightened and became a woman, naked, with long, dark hair.
What have you done to her? Julia cried.
The woman only smiled—
Julia woke, her head pounding. She sat up, one trembling hand to her mouth, wondering if she was about to be ill. A warm breeze trailed across her skin—and then it was gone.
* * *
In her coat and hat Charlotte Levy hurried the half block to the gate on 136th.
The night was cool and windy, the Asylum a weight of dreaming minds. She felt ahead for patrolmen, or runaways looking to jump the fence, but all was quiet. She unlocked the gate and slipped through, walked the path to the stairwell. The dark of the basement greeted her. At the end of the south wing, she placed a hand on the doorknob—You are Charlotte Levy, she told herself, do not forget—and turned it sharply to the left.
Yossele sat in his alcove, slowly examining each of the day’s revelations while Kreindel dreamt above him.
Miss Levy was a cooking instructor. Miss Levy was a golem, too. His master didn’t like her—but his master didn’t know what she was. He, Yossele, was separate from Kreindel. He, not Kreindel, knew the truth of Miss Levy’s nature.
These thoughts were large and unwieldy. He tried to hold them all together, so he could see the larger picture they made, but they slipped from his grasp. He didn’t know how Miss Levy could be both a cooking teacher and a golem. He didn’t know why she had left him so suddenly that morning, though he’d recognized her expression as dismay. He didn’t know how Kreindel’s knowledge of her could be so incomplete. It felt wrong that he knew, and she didn’t.
Distantly, through the maze, came the sound of the doorknob turning.
Yossele came alert. Only now, as the door opened, did he realize that a part of himself had been waiting, hoping that she’d return.
She closed the door behind herself and pulled the locket from around her neck. There was just enough light to read by—she’d be quick, she’d read the words into the air and then forget that anything had ever—
Miss Levy?
The thought, and its hope, pierced her like a spear.
is it Miss Levy?
Her finger shook on the locket’s catch. Of course he’d know her name. He saw Kreindel’s entire life; he would’ve seen her, too. She wanted to cry out, to sob. Everything she had was at risk if he lived, she had to do it, she had to—but—
Miss Levy?
golem?
But here, in this room, she couldn’t pretend. Every buried impulse, every hint of otherness that she’d concealed beneath the polished veneer of Charlotte Levy—everything she’d tried so desperately to leave behind—all of it was rushing to the surface. He was the only other golem she’d ever known, and he sat only a few feet away. She wanted to see him again. Suddenly, she needed to.
She knew the way now, knew the worst of the obstacles: the thicket of cot-legs, the corner that threatened her shins. It must have been Kreindel who’d carved this path. She pictured the small, determined girl hauling at furniture in a pitch-black room, to make a home for her protector.
He was in the alcove, behind the hanging burlap, exactly where she’d left him. She sat, lifted the curtain away, tucked it up into a crevice between stacks of boxes.
