The Puttermesser Papers by Cynthia Ozick Page A

equipment and seductive provincial voices, all the metropolitan airports assaulted, the decline of theCivil Service, maggots in high management. Rappoport’s Times , repository of a dread freight! All the same, carrying Rappoport’s Times back to bed, Puttermesser had seen Paradise.
    New York washed, reformed, restored.
    â€œXanthippe!”
    The golem, who had been scrubbing spaghetti sauce off the dishes in a little cascade of water-thunder under the kitchen faucet, wiped her hands on her new purple blouse, snatched up ballpoint pen and notepad, and ran to Puttermesser.
    Puttermesser asked, “When you woke into life what did you feel?”
    â€œI felt like an embryo,” the golem wrote.
    â€œWhat did you know?”
    â€œI knew why I was created,” the golem wrote.
    â€œWhy were you created?”
    â€œSo that my mother should become what she was intended to become,” the golem wrote.
    â€œBring me that sack of stuff you were fooling around with in the office,” Puttermesser ordered, but the golem had already scampered off to the bedroom closet to rummage among her boxes and bags of new clothes.
    So Puttermesser set aside her books about the history and nature of the genus golem and settled down to contemplate all the pages the golem had typed for two days in Puttermesser’s sorrowful cubicle, shared with Cracow—the cubicle of her demotion, denigration, disgrace—in the Taxation Section of the Bureau of Summary Sessions of the Department of Receipts and Disbursements of the City of New York.
    What the golem had composed was a PLAN . Puttermesser recognized everything in it. It was as if she had encountered this PLAN before—its very language. It was as if, in the instant it had occurred to her to make the golem, she had read the PLAN in some old scroll. Ah, here was a stale and restless truth: that she did not recollect the actual fabrication of the golem, that she had helplessly, without volition, come upon Xanthippe in her bed as if the golem were some transient mirage, an aggressive imagining, or else a mere forward apparition—this had, with a wearisome persistence, been teasing at the edge of Puttermesser’s medulla oblongata all along, ever since the first mulling of it on her desolate walk to the Y. It was like a pitcher that will neither fill nor pour out. But it was now as plain as solid earth itself that the golem was no apparition. Apparitions do not, in hideous public jargon, type up exhaustive practical documents concerning civic reform! Puttermesser knew what she knew—it unraveled before her in the distance, the PLAN , approaching, approaching, until it crowded her forebrain with its importuning force: how she had set Rappoport’s Times , record of multiple chaos and urban misfortune, down on the floor beside the bed, where the Theaetetus already lay. How, with a speed born of fever and agitation, she had whirled from window sill to window sill, cracking open clay plant pots as though they were eggs, and scooping up the germinative yolks of spilling earth. How she had fetched it all up in her two palms and dumped it into the bathtub. How only a half-turn of the tap stirred earth to the consistency of mud—and how there then began the blissful shudder of Puttermesser’s wild hands, themolding and the shaping, the caressing and the smoothing, the kneading and the fingering, the straightening and the rounding, but quickly, quickly, with detail itself (God is in the details) unachieved, blurred, completion deferred, the authentic pleasure of the precise final form of nostril and eyelid and especially mouth left for afterward. Into the hole of the unfinished face of clay Puttermesser pressed a tag of paper, torn from the blank upper margin of Rappoport’s Times , on which she had written in her own spittle two oracular syllables. The syllables adhered and were as legible as if inscribed in light. Then Puttermesser raised up out