The Puttermesser Papers by Cynthia Ozick Read Free Book Online Page B

encouraged my soul. You circled my clay seven times. You enveloped me with your spirit. Your pronounced the Name and brought me to myself. Therefore I call you mother.”
    Puttermesser’s lungs began to roil. It was true she had circled the creature on the bed. Was it seven times around? It was true she had blown some foreign matter out of the nose. Had she blown some uncanny energy into an entrance of the dormant body? It was true she had said aloud one of the Names of the Creator.
    The thing wrote again: “Mother. Mother.”
    â€œGo away!”
    The thing wrote: “You made me.”
    â€œI didn’t give birth to you.” She would never give birth. Yet she had formed this mouth—the creature’s mute mouth. She looked at the mouth: she saw what she had made.
    The thing wrote: “Earth is my flesh. For the sake of my flesh you carried earth to this high place. What will you call me?”
    A new turbulence fell over Puttermesser. She had always imagined a daughter named Leah. “Leah,” she said.
    â€œNo,” the creature wrote. “Leah is my name, but I want to be Xanthippe.”
    Puttermesser said, “Xanthippe was a shrew. Xanthippe was Socrates’ wife.”
    â€œI want to be Xanthippe,” the thing wrote. “I know everything you know. I am made of earth but also I am made out of your mind. Now watch me walk.”
    The thing walked, firmly, with a solid thump of a step and no stumbling. She wrote on the pad: “I am becoming stronger. You made me. I will be of use to you. Don’t send me away. Call me what I prefer, Xanthippe.”
    â€œXanthippe,” Puttermesser said.
    She succumbed; her throat panted. It came to her that the creature was certainly not lying: Puttermesser’s fingernails were crowded with grains of earth. In some unknown hour after Rappoport’s departure in the night, Puttermesser had shaped an apparition. She had awakened it to life in the conventional way. Xanthippe was a golem, and what had polymathic Puttermesser not read about the genus golem?
    Puttermesser ordered: “All right, go look on the bookshelves. Bring me whatever you see on your own kind.”
    The creature churned into the living room and hurried back with two volumes, one in either hand; she held the pen ready in her mouth. She dumped the books on the bed and wrote: “I am the first female golem.”
    â€œNo you’re not,” Puttermesser said. It was plain that the creature required correction. Puttermesser flew through the pages of one of the books. “Ibn Gabirol created a woman. This was in Spain, long ago, the eleventh century. The king gave him a dressing-down for necromancy, so he dismantled her. She was made of wood and had hinges—it was easy to take her apart.”
    The creature wrote: “That was not a true golem.”
    â€œGo sit down in a corner,” Puttermesser said. “I want to read.”
    The creature obeyed. Puttermesser dived into the two volumes. She had read them many times before; she knew certain passages nearly verbatim. One, a strange old text in a curiously awkward English translation (it was printed in Austria in 1925), had the grass-green public binding of a library book; to Puttermesser’s citizenly shame, she had never returned it. It had been borrowed from the Crotona Park Branch decades ago, in Puttermesser’s adolescence. There were photographs in it, incandescently clear: of graves, of a statue, of the lamp-hung interior of a synagogue in Prague—the Altneuschul—of its tall peaked contour, of the two great clocks, one below the cupola, the other above it, on the venerable Prague Jewish Community House. Across the street from the CommunityHouse there was a shop, with a sign that said V. PRESSLER in large letters; underneath, his hand in his pocket, a dapper mustached dandy in a black fedora lounged eternally. Familiar, static, piercingly distinct though these