Edited By by Ellen Datlow

Author:Ellen Datlow [Datlow, Ellen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: fantasy, horror, short stories, anthology, ellen datlow

4

The familiar commotion in the hallway of the pension alerted me to my students’ return. One of them, but only one, stopped outside my door. I waited, holding my breath, wishing I’d snapped out the light. But Penny didn’t knock, and after a few seconds, I heard her careful, precise footfall continuing toward her room. And so I was alone with my puppets and my memories and my horrible suspicions, the way I have always been.

The way I am now, one month later, in my plain, posterless Ohio apartment with its cable-less television and nearly bare cupboards and single shelf stacked with textbooks, on the eve of the new school year. I’m remembering rousing myself out of the malaise I couldn’t quite seem to shake—have never, for one instant, shaken since—during that last ride home from my grandfather’s. “I killed him,” I told my father, and when he glanced at me, expressionless, I told him all of it, my grandfather’s gypsy and the Dancing Man and the Way and the thoughts I’d had.

My father didn’t laugh. He also didn’t touch me. All he said was, “That’s silly, Seth” And for a while, I thought it was.

But today, I am thinking of Rabbi Loew and his golem, the creature he infected with a sort of life. A creature that walked, talked, thought, saw, but couldn’t taste. Couldn’t feel. I’m thinking of my father, the way he always was. If I’m right, then of course it had been done to him, too. And I’m thinking of the way I only seem all the way real, even to me, when I see myself in the vividly reflective faces of my students.

It’s possible, I realize, that nothing happened to me during those last days at my grandfather’s. It could have happened years before I was born. The gypsy had offered what he offered, and my grandfather had accepted, and as a result became what he was. Might have been. If that was true, then my father and I were unexceptional, in a way. Natural progeny. We’d simply inherited our natures, and our limitations, the way all earthly creatures do.

But I can’t help thinking about the graves I saw on this summer’s trip, and the millions of people in them. And the millions more without graves. The ones who are smoke.

And I find that I can feel it, at last. Or that I’ve always felt it, without knowing what it was: the Holocaust, roaring down the generations like a wave of radiation, eradicating in everyone it touches the ability to trust people, experience joy, fall in love, believe in love when you see it in others.

And I wonder what difference it makes, in the end, whether it really was my grandfather, or the golem-grandfather that the gypsy made, who finally crawled out of the woods of Chelmno.

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