schlock.co.uk - Of the Clay

Singing out from the depths of night was that which I had never known before: feeling. I felt with the depth of truth a resounding pain, and looked out into the black, weeping night for its source. Above me were two trembling hands caked with clay.

Judengasse Speyer, 13th Century

Two weeks before, you lay in a sodden heap of bloodied bedding. He, your husband, pressed his forehead to your sweaty brow and clung tightly to your hand. Your mother said something, standing close but sounding very far, and in the blurry edge of your vision you saw the still, red thing in her arms. I was but a glimmer of a thought down a vast corridor in your mind, untrodden. You would not go there—not yet.

Your husband’s hot breath caressed your cheek. You could feel from each trembling exhalation that he was crying, though he blinked back the tears before they could touch you. He swam in your peripheral. You watched nothing but the crimson blur of your failure, held by your mother as she must have once held you, and felt very young. You understood then that you were as much a child as you had ever been, or ever would be again.

You retreated deep within yourself to cast a desperate prayer to God: can I not be a child for just a bit longer? God, in an eternity of wisdom, did not respond.

Consciousness seeped through you in a slow, ebbing flow. It came and went. You were pulled beneath a tide of sleep, laden with strange dreams, and resurfaced in perfect time for them to fade from memory. All that was revealed to you in that odd prophecy was the Rhine river, flowing, flowing, flowing… The veins pumping lifeblood to the beating heart of this place. There was the river and there was your home and there was the wall built between them. You saw something moving there, though blurred and hazy as a half-formed thought. The river, the wall, home. Was it you, you wondered? You had gone beyond the wall, and certainly to the riverbank, many times before. Did you see yourself walking that very same path in dream? And why? Why do you show me these things, only to take them away? you asked God. The room hummed with silence, and you were soon claimed by unquestionable slumber once more.

Eventually, you awoke to find yourself with fresh linens and new clothing, though the metallic fetor of your blood clung to the air still. A single candle flickered feebly on a nearby table. In a chair, slumped forward in the cradle of his folded arms, was Avram. Your husband. He slept deep. Black, ringleted curls lay across his cheeks, gilded in the candlelight, and he was perfectly still but for his gently fluttering eyelashes. You reached out to push the hair from his face and regarded him. You had known this face for many years and seen all of its subtle transmutations.

Eating its fill from you was a vast feeling of emptiness, dullness, numbness. You stared at the loving face of your husband, the father of your failure, and waited for an emotion that would not come. Even in sleep, you could see the grief written upon Avram’s face, and though you searched within yourself for its reflection, it had no match.

It would have been the first child, had it been born screaming rather than still. You remembered it in your mother’s arms, too far from you to discern detail, nothing but a bloody smear. It had been so small and fragile, like a thing not made for life... A dark corner of your mind whispered that it was always meant to be this way. You could not bear a child. You were unsuited for such work. Of course it had been born wrong. It was them, their foolishness, that had caused this. Avram, Mother, the rest… they placed this weight upon you. They made you empty yourself for new life, though the life that had once been your own was not done.

Here, you felt the first inkling of me: a flash of cohesion for scattered dreams. They fell together to align in singing harmony for a single breath. I will create something without you, you thought to Avram. I will not fail again.

When you were children, Avram had been your friend. The two of you were well suited for friendship, thus when the time came, the matchmaker named you well suited for marriage. You had found no just cause to condemn her choice, yet you hated it. You hated him as your husband. You hated yourself as his wife. As your friend, he had brought you home secret knowledge from the Yeshiva to satiate your hungry mind. You were the daughter of a scribe; he was the son of a Rabbi. Your fathers made prayerbooks together. You dreamed of a world where you could grow up to do the same, but woke to reality with the flowering of your moonblood. You were a girl. Soon, you were a wife. You were meant to be a mother now, but…

You slept. That was all that seemed to happen to you in those first few days, sleep and dreams. You saw the strange figure moving in shadow between the river and wall, but what was it moving towards? In one dream you saw it holding a squalling babe red with afterbirth, but the longer you looked the older the child grew. Soon, it was a girl, and the girl was you. She wore her brassy hair in two tight braids behind her protruding ears, her skirts rumpled and gaze lost far away. You looked at her, but felt no recognition. It should be me, but it is not, you thought. The huge, obscure silhouette held her at its bosom, and she put her arms around its neck. Then she was melting, they were merging, flesh and shadow as one, and the girl that should be you was consumed. You found yourself wondering what her name had been.

Your mother came to you. She mopped the sweat from your brow, brushed and braided your hair, cooed at your beauty and bravery as you flickered between consciousnesses. Each caress of her cool fingers jolted with rabid discomfort. Stop touching me, you yearned to say. Yet the words were like stones in your mouth, too heavy to stretch your lips around, and silence claimed you. You watched the way she moved through the room and wondered if she hated being your father’s wife. You needed not wonder if she hated being your mother, for you were already certain that she did.

You were her only daughter, and you were ugly and ungracious. As a child she wrestled you into obedience, and only now that you could not refuse her did she offer you gentleness. Your pregnancy, your pain, had pleased her. At last, you had done what a woman should and suffered.

Others came too, but you struggled to recall them. Avram, then Avram’s father, the Rabbi. You cracked open sleep-crusted eyes to study the shape of his body bent over your bed. Muttered prayers floated about you like miasma, lingering in your ears even when he was gone. Adonai, Creator of the Universe, bless her with mercy. Bless her. Bless her. Mercy. It was as hazy as dreaming.

On the second Shabbat after you miscarried Avram’s child, your husband took you home. You had not been there since your pregnancy worsened, and returning felt queer. Finally, you left the horrid room in your parents’ house, that putrescent hole, its tangled, sweaty sheets, its horrible stench. Yet, you felt a resounding ache as the gaping wound of you cried to be heard. You felt filthy. Your shame had not died in that room as you hoped—just some other part of you.

In your sleeping chambers, you looked down at the pale shape of your naked body. Your stomach was still subtly distended, stretched but empty. White, spidery lines now scarred your abdomen. Long tendrils of unbraided copper hair fell over your swollen breasts. Was this really you? The sight was so foreign it seemed impossible. You longed to mould a new form for yourself, one you could recognize, to free your mind from this body that only knew pain.

‘Do you ever wonder that I was perhaps meant to be someone else?’ you asked Avram.

‘What? What do you mean?’ He came around to face you.

‘Since I was a child, I have detested all that was meant for me.’ You looked down at your hands.

His finger came beneath your chin, then tilted your face up. ‘Every child does not want to do her chores,’ he said. He tried for a smile, but it only angered you.

You pulled from his touch. ‘I was not meant to be a wife.’

You saw the hurt take him. ‘You were meant to be my wife, I think.’

You shook your head. That was wrong, as it had always been. The wrongness was ineffable, unnameable, unknowable, but utterly consuming. Whatever thing had contained it before had been ripped from you with the violence of birth. You could no longer hide yourself from it, or within it.

And so I called you to me, or you called me to you, and we met there at the riverbank. Your hands found me, deep in earth. They pulled me out, up. They showed me the whirling stars, the falling rain. But first I must tell you how we came to each other.

I was a thought. I was the word truth, ringing out over and over again. I was the latent possibility of change, of rebirth. As you lay in bed and imagined a world where you were born unburdened, no one’s daughter, nor wife, nor mother, truth began to take shape. There behind your eyelids danced the memory of your strange, half-forgotten dream. The river, the wall, and the figure caught between… You had to go there, didn’t you? Truth. It would not leave you. In your mind, you saw the characters that spelled it: aleph, mem, tav, aleph, mem, tav, aleph, mem, tav…

You had learned letters from the lap of your father, the scribe. You had one most vivid memory in particular of a Passover Haggadah he created, and its beautiful, illuminated rendering of Miriam singing in celebration of her freedom.

You knew Miriam’s story, you knew her song. It had been told to you as long as you had been alive. Triumph and joy in the face of a lifetime of suffering, freedom for the once-shackled. Now, you thought of the huge wall thrown up around this place, and how last season when a storm made a mess of it, the men of the Judengasse re-laid the stones themselves. The wall containing the Jews of this city was upkept by Jewish hands, in fear of death. You remembered smiling, dancing Miriam and thought, you big fool.

You gathered yourself up, took out Avram’s tallit katan, the woollen prayer shawl men wore beneath their clothing, slid it over your naked body, and covered it in a cloak.

You stepped out into the night. A narrow cobblestone street stretched around one corner to the next, and a row of houses and businesses were shoved side-by-side down its meandering length. You moved silently within their stretching shadows, hoping to avoid the attention of the night watchman, and came to the wall at last.

Supposedly, it was built to protect your people. Your father claimed if it were gone, goyim would come to the Judengasse to terrorize you all. He and the other men guarded it, rebuilt it, for the safety of their wives and children. You could not help but think that you never would have been the sort of man to imprison himself in fear. But standing here before the wall, you realised that you did not know how to live without it.

You recalled the image of Miriam from your father’s Haggadah. There was a woman free from fear, at long last, but you knew that you could not be like her. You would never sing for freedom, for you would never know freedom in this body. It was the stone wall built around you. You reached out to touch the wall, and with your other hand touched your heart. You felt the rise of your breasts, you felt the grit of mortar. Your body, the wall. These things made to protect that only hurt, how could you be without them?

The Rhine, flowing. You went to it, hearing my call.

It began to rain, softly at first, but then severely. A summer storm cracked lightning across the sky like a whip and opened the clouds for water to come pouring out. Your hair flattened against your brow and Avram’s clothing grew heavy on your frame. When you came to the river, it was ink-dark. You dropped to your knees and prostrated yourself at the muddy bank. As the water lapped at your fingertips, it broke the dam in you. At last, the pain for your lost child came. Before, you were unable to mourn it because you were numbed to the pain of mourning yourself; now, you felt all the grief of your life and its death wash over you in a massive wave.

‘I’m sorry,’ you cried. Your tears were joined by those from the heavens. ‘I’m sorry I could not be your mother. I’m sorry, I’m sorry.’

A child could not come to life in your womb; there, it would only fester and rot for the sin of wrongness. But you could make life. At last, you understood how.

You reached into the frothing black water to grab fistfuls of slick mud. Sinking deeper past jagged rocks, you groped for the thicker, sturdier feel of clay. You drew it out, throwing it upon the bank, until it was a huge mound at your back. Mud was caked from beneath your fingernails to the jut of your elbow, splattered across your face and chest, and yet you felt oddly cleansed. After all, the Rhine filled the deep-set sandstone tower of the Mikveh, your Synagogue’s ritual bath, and your flesh remembered the purifying sensation of its touch. It felt right to kneel before the mound of clay and begin to shape it. The water washed you in newness, fed you the power of creation, and so you shaped the clay into a man. Was it your son, or was it you? I felt your hands move over me, making me, and shivered with potential. Who would I be?

You moulded the clay, first, into two legs. They stretched further than your own, with rounded, toeless feet. You made the chest and stomach, then the long arms with big, inarticulate hands. After heaving more clay to my headless shoulders, you rounded it into a skull, and began the work of my face. You pressed your thumbs into the soft slide to make the concave of eye sockets, then dragged out the line of a mouth.

At last, upon my brow your trembling finger scrawled the characters aleph, mem, and tav.

I had whispered my name in your mind as soon as I knew you could hear it. Though I had tried before and failed, I knew that this time you would understand; what happened to you made you understand, as you could not before. Yet, in my desire to be heard I had been foolish, and as soon as I felt the breath of life given to me by the word truth, my name, I knew as much.

The divine laws that enabled my existence were broken by my very creation. I had believed that because you at last knew your own truth, you could give me mine. But still your understanding was in its infancy, fresh as a wound, and all you could grasp from it was a great, tumultuous pain. That pain was the understanding that something in you was wrong, that you had been made wrong, therefore when you reached out to make me, I was wrong, too. I was created by the desperation of suffering. The profound hurt that enabled you to give me life was the hurt I felt then, and in deep, empathetic understanding I cried out into the night. My bellow rippled the river and shook the slick ground below us, as loud as you had never been.

As I reared up, teetering violently on new, uneven limbs, you watched in stricken horror.

‘No, no, no…’ you whispered, realising. It had been a grievous error to labour on the night of rest. ‘Not now, tonight is Shabbat! It is Shabbat, you must rest! Tomorrow, it must be tomorrow!’ You reached for me, to wipe my name from my brow, but you had made me too tall. You fell into the mud as I stomped away from the riverbank. I needed rest, but you, my creator, had never rested—only despaired and destroyed yourself. Now the force of that had been turned back upon the world by my crude, misshapen hands. You had understood truth only through your own hatred of it, so I carried all of your hatred heavy in me, hating myself for what I must do, hating the wrongness that was our very essence.

I was your Golem, galmi, creature of dust, of clay, of light, of truth. Enabled to exist by the magic word upon my brow, my name and my purpose. But your truth was mine too, and then, it was destruction.

I moved through the night. You dragged yourself from the muck to chase after me. We tripped from one narrow city street to the next, smothered in the long shadows of tall buildings, unseen. I did not raise my fists against what stood before me, for what I must bring down was further still… The laws of meaning and purpose drove me forth, compelled me. The kernel of destruction in you had not been planted here, so when you pressed your making hands to my unmade flesh and fed me life, I gained my first violent impulse for the Judengasse.

It was true that you hated that place, it had trapped and tortured you, but you loved it more. Of course, it was your home, the home of your family, and you craved its comforts. Its warmth shielded you from the cruel cold of the city. It was a womb, a cradle. It made you, as you had made me.

At last, I came to the towering stone wall. Rain beat hard against its surface, and harder against your skin. You felt the weight of it pinning you to the ground, stilling you. You knew what I would do. You reached, once more, to attempt to wipe the name from my forehead, but your feet did not move. Your arm hovered feebly for a breath and then dropped. You could not stop me; perhaps you did not want to. I was driven there by your desire. I needed to destroy, but I was still your creation, crafted by your secret yearnings, and you had yearned for destruction before. You had yearned for it often. And so when I tore the wall down, stone by stone, you fell to your knees in fear, or relief, or shame, or joy. You did not try to stop me, knowing you could not, knowing, too, that I was you. This act was your own. We were one. I was your most secret, violent wish, made true by terrible grief. I was the truest part of you, manifested in clay. I tore the wall down as you had been torn from womanhood: brutally, bloodily, bodily. There would be no return.

As a child, you often dreamed of a dark, twilit wood, cut through by a small tributary of the Rhine. The stream was called Speyerbach, and you had walked its course into that shaded grove many times before. When you slept, you found yourself there again, and again, and again... It was a freedom from self. In the water’s reflection, you saw no girl peering back at you, though you could never recall what face was there instead. It did not matter, for in this dream you could dance and play without the nagging, unnameable discomfort of consciousness. Who were you, there? Were you a boy, the boy you were meant to be, trapped in dream? Or were you something else entirely, something beyond? Were you what you had always been, even in waking, simply without the confines of physical appearance? If you were a man all this trouble would have been avoided, you knew, but could it ever be so simple? Could something simple ever be true? You had done as a man could and made me, and I was destruction.

I tore the wall down and stomped into the streets of the Judengasse. By then a crowd had amassed, hearing the rain of rubble and debris. Yet although they came to me, they shrank from me too. I saw that I frightened them, and felt shame. This was the most potent emotion to come to me yet, the one to define me, as it had done you. I did not want to destroy, but had to. To carve out my place in the world was a violent act by the nature of my creation, and I did not want to die. I felt fear, too. I knew if I ceased my path I would cease to be, surrendered back into the dark depth of the unknown, unnamed.

I smashed my thick forearm into the stone face of a house, which crumbled into a yawning hole. Within, I saw children cowering behind their mother’s skirts. Shabbat candles were guttering weakly, nearly dead, casting the place in a faint glow. I struck the wall again, and they tipped over, for flame to lick up the wooden table and engulf the place in roaring light. The fire waxed larger, crawling from the sundered door and into the street. I ripped up the cobblestones of the road and tossed them all about. Wailing screams filled the street.

You remembered the first cohesive thought to find you after the stillbirth of your child: this is their fault, Avram and mother, for forcing me to do something I could not, should not do; they should have seen that I am unsuited for such work, that I have failed all other expectations of womanhood, and would fail this, too. Yet you understood now that Avram and your mother did not see your failures, for they were hidden within the thick stone wall of you. You had not failed at being your mother’s daughter nor Avram’s wife, only in finding comfort and contentment there. You pretended well, only pricking your fingers upon the barbs of your failures in secret. Of course your husband thought you could mother his child, you hid any inability from him in a shroud of shame. And, in the most painful twist of truth, you realised that you had done this to spite your mother; you believed that she thought you would fail, and so you endeavoured to prove her wrong. Yet you knew now that she had only ever wanted you to succeed, since you were a girl, and feared the danger of your failure. That was what it was: fear. All of the times she wrestled you into feminine obedience were not cruelty, but desperation born from fear of the dangerous truth. Who was a woman who did not fill her role if not the dregs of this society, discarded and forgotten? Your mother knew you could not be a man, did not think to want it, and only hoped you could learn to be a good woman. But you could not. Thus you must destroy the daughter, the wife, for them to see the truth that lies beneath its cracked facade.

You remembered the twilit wood. You wanted to go there again now. It was so far… yet closer than it had ever been. Perhaps mine had been the face gazing up at you from the stream all along. Perhaps you were not meant to be born a man, but always this. This, this, this… This body, given to you, and the one you made, mine, were one. This truth, be it painful and destructive, was one of magic and creation, of a singular wholeness.

What magic can be done on the eve of sacred rest? One of unholy violence, it seemed. Pressing into the mayhem, you walked the ruined streets. The soft soles of your bare feet crunched wreckage into bloody rubble while you fingered your knotted tzitzit. Eyes followed you, seeing you covered in the clay that made me, knowing what you had done. You walked through the wreathing flame, feeling its heat upon your face, hearing its crackle. You wondered, what if that magic itself was rest, rest after years of toil, of endless pain? What if the violence of complete desolation made the way for new creation?

You knew where I was, and found me there.

Near the ruinous heap of your home, you discovered your family. Your mother, weeping; your husband, calling your name. They did not see you within the choking smoke, but I did. As we walked to one another, a lance of golden dawn pierced the dark clouds. Sunrise poured down. We crouched behind a fallen, flaming beam. The calls for your name grew dim as your focus sharpened over me. My hands itched to tear apart the beam, the cobblestone street, the house behind us... But something in you, in us, a tether, pulling and binding us together, kept me. I looked into your eyes and saw my reflection in the cool dark. My clay face was misshapen from the fire and falling debris, my name emet no longer clear. Perhaps that was why I did not destroy you: without the full magic word, my power was fading. And so when you reached out to caress my cheek, I did not strike you down. I felt your fingers inch up to my temple, then lay gently shaking over my brow. I knew you would destroy me, as I had destroyed you. I knew that we would at last be together.

You, my creator, my child: red hair shining in flamelight, brown eyes flashing, flushed freckled cheeks, and a still mouth. The words we spoke to each other made no sound. Thank you; I am sorry, we said. You pressed a fingertip into soft clay, undoing your spell and removing my name.

I tumbled into the unknown, falling away from my body, away, away, away… I saw the roiling black surface of the Rhine open itself for me. I felt the prickle of rain. I watched you from very far then, but only for a moment. At last your family saw you, rushed to you. As they approached, you repeated our words to them: thank you. I am sorry. They cried out in confusion, not yet understanding, but seeing my flesh made in your hands.

‘What have you done?’ Avram wept. You imagined him waking alone in your room as chaos reigned outside. You imagined him crying over your battered body on the deathbed of your only child. You imagined him as a boy by the river, telling stories.

He has always loved us, both of us, we thought. But love is not enough.

You began to write in the clay again. I whispered to you through aeons of distance that this time would be alright, that come the new day, we would rest. Our seventh day would finally arrive.

Your mother reached out her hand and opened it. ‘Belet, come home,’ she beckoned.

‘I will, mother.’ You smiled. Your hand finished its work; on my forehead a new name was written. Yours, and ours. Belet. And so when I pulled you to me, or you pulled me to you, we met within the body you made us.

The one that had been yours alone collapsed in ruins. We knelt to pick it up. We looked down at the unmade flesh in our grasp, the relaxed, limp neck, the unclenched fists. She looked peaceful. We touched her cheek, still warm. Her head fell to one side, tresses of hair streaming over her shoulder, chin tucked to collarbone. The sound of agonised grief tore through the air in the shape of your mother’s scream.

We carried her daughter to her; we brought Avram his wife. We laid her gently upon the cleaved stone ground before them. ‘Thank you, I am sorry,’ we said again. The voice was deep and guttural, having never before been used. They wept, and did not understand. They were afraid. But we understood each other, and were together at last; that was all that mattered, then. The rest is yet to be written.

OF THE CLAY Levi Katz