Avram Davidson: The Avram Davidson Treasury : a tribute collection

One of my many theories about short stories is that their titles and first lines ought to be memorable, because if not memorable they will not be remembered, and if not remembered the stories will not be reprinted (because no one can find them). Well, according to this theory it’s no wonder that “The Golem” is Davidson’s most-reprinted story. It is full of memorable lines; if they were any more memorable than they are, the story would be just a bunch of quotations strung together, as someone said of. Hamlet

But really “The Golem” is memorable for a different reason: because it is a perfect story. I know this seems like gross hyperbole, but the statement has a literal meaning and is true. There isn’t a word in “The Golem” that a sympathetic reader would want to change; one word more would be too many, one less would be too few. There is nothing labored about “The Golem,” it does not falter or wamble; it flows like clear syrup down a tablecloth, and by the way it is very funny. One imagines that the author stared at it in a wild surprise.

He (the author) was twenty-nine or thirty years old, and he had almost forty years of creative triumphs ahead of him. He was then, I take it, living in San Francisco; Anthony Boucher, the editor of F&SF , said he had “ the most beautiful beard that has ever visited this office. ” Later he moved to New York, where I once visited him in a ground-floor apartment with a china cabinet in which there was a half-eaten sandwich. Before that he had been a yeshiva student, a Navy corpsman, and a pioneer in Israel, where he tried to teach the herdsmen to milk their goats from the side, in order to keep the goat-shit out of the milk. (This is the way I remember it, but it may have been sheep. )

THE GRAY-FACED PERSON came along the street where old Mr. and Mrs. Gumbeiner lived. It was afternoon, it was autumn, the sun was warm and soothing to their ancient bones. Anyone who attended the movies in the twenties or the early thirties has seen that street a thousand times. Past these bungalows with their half-double roofs Edmund Lowe walked arm-in-arm with Leatrice Joy and Harold Lloyd was chased by Chinamen waving hatchets. Under these squamous palm trees Laurel kicked Hardy and Woolsey beat Wheeler upon the head with codfish. Across these pocket-handkerchief-sized lawns the juveniles of the Our Gang Comedies pursued one another and were pursued by angry fat men in golf knickers. On this same street — or perhaps on some other one of five hundred streets exactly like it.

Mrs. Gumbeiner indicated the gray-faced person to her husband.

“You think maybe he’s got something the matter?” she asked. “He walks kind of funny, to me.”

“Walks like a golem ,” Mr. Gumbeiner said indifferently.

The old woman was nettled.

“Oh, I don’t know,” she said. “ I think he walks like your cousin Mendel.”

The old man pursed his mouth angrily and chewed on his pipestem. The gray-faced person turned up the concrete path, walked up the steps to the porch, sat down in a chair. Old Mr. Gumbeiner ignored him. His wife stared at the stranger.

“Man comes in without a hello, goodbye, or howareyou, sits himself down and right away he’s at home… The chair is comfortable?” she asked. “Would you like maybe a glass tea?”

She turned to her husband.

“Say something, Gumbeiner!” she demanded. “What are you, made of wood?”

The old man smiled a slow, wicked, triumphant smile.

“Why should I say anything?” he asked the air. “Who am I? Nothing, that’s who.”

The stranger spoke. His voice was harsh and monotonous.

“When you learn who — or, rather, what — I am, the flesh will melt from your bones in terror.” He bared porcelain teeth.

“Never mind about my bones!” the old woman cried. “You’ve got a lot of nerve talking about my bones!”

“You will quake with fear,” said the stranger. Old Mrs. Gumbeiner said that she hoped he would live so long. She turned to her husband once again.

“Gumbeiner, when are you going to mow the lawn?”

“All mankind—” the stranger began.

“ Shah! I’m talking to my husband… He talks eppis kind of funny, Gumbeiner, no?”

“Probably a foreigner,” Mr. Gumbeiner said, complacently.

“You think so?” Mrs. Gumbeiner glanced fleetingly at the stranger. “He’s got a very bad color in his face, nebbich . I suppose he came to California for his health.”

“Disease, pain, sorrow, love, grief — all are naught to—”

Mr. Gumbeiner cut in on the stranger’s statement.

“Gall bladder,” the old man said. “Guinzburg down at the shule looked exactly the same before his operation. Two professors they had in for him, and a private nurse day and night.”

“I am not a human being!” the stranger said loudly.

“Three thousand seven hundred fifty dollars it cost his son, Guinzburg told me. ‘For you, Poppa, nothing is too expensive — only get well,’ the son told him.”

“ I am not a human being! ”

“Ai, is that a son for you!” the old woman said, rocking her head. “A heart of gold, pure gold.” She looked at the stranger. “All right, all right. I heard you the first time. Gumbeiner! I asked you a question. When are you going to cut the lawn?”

“On Wednesday, odder maybe Thursday, comes the Japaneser to the neighborhood. To cut lawns is his profession. My profession is to be a glazier — retired.”

“Between me and all mankind is an inevitable hatred,” the stranger said. “When I tell you what I am, the flesh will melt—”

“You said, you said already,” Mr. Gumbeiner interrupted.

“In Chicago where the winters were as cold and bitter as the Czar of Russia’s heart,” the old woman intoned, “you had strength to carry the frames with the glass together day in and day out. But in California with the golden sun to mow the lawn when your wife asks, for this you have no strength. Do I call in the Japaneser to cook for you supper?”

“Thirty years Professor Allardyce spent perfecting his theories. Electronics, neuronics—”

“Listen, how educated he talks,” Mr. Gumbeiner said, admiringly. “Maybe he goes to the University here?”

“If he goes to the University, maybe he knows Bud?” his wife suggested.

“Probably they’re in the same class and he came to see him about the homework, no?”

“Certainly he must be in the same class. How many classes are there? Five in ganzen: Bud showed me on his program card.” She counted off on her fingers. “Television Appreciation and Criticism, Small Boat Building, Social Adjustment, The American Dance… The American Dance— nu , Gumbeiner—”

“Contemporary Ceramics,” her husband said, relishing the syllables. “A fine boy, Bud. A pleasure to have him for a boardner.”

“After thirty years spent in these studies,” the stranger, who had continued to speak unnoticed, went on, “he turned from the theoretical to the pragmatic. In ten years’ time he had made the most titanic discovery in history: he made mankind, all mankind, superfluous: he made me .”

“What did Tillie write in her last letter?” asked the old man.

The old woman shrugged.

“What should she write? The same thing. Sidney was home from the Army, Naomi has a new boy friend—”

“ He made ME!”

“Listen, Mr. Whatever-your-name-is,” the old woman said; “maybe where you came from is different, but in this country you don’t interrupt people the while they’re talking… Hey. Listen — what do you mean, he made you? What kind of talk is that?”