His visitors looked at one another, each unwilling to be the first to speak, for they all knew why here, why him. He was the Maharal, not only wise but good, and able, out of his learning and holiness, to accomplish wonders. It was well known that he had once made a golem: a figure of earth, sculpted on the ground like a dead man or like the figure of dirt that God's fingers first made, which the rabbi then, by prayers and other rituals few know about and fewer would have dared repeat, caused to stir, awake, rise. To sit up groggily on his elbows, dropping clods, looking about himself in wonder (or was he an unthinking lump still, with no more consciousness than the Emperor's Uhrwerk figures, which seem to obey the Emperor's orders like courtiers and knights, but were only metal pins and springs—earth too?) and at length stand up on unsteady earthen legs, not very well formed but not the less amazing for that, and ready to obey the Maharal's instructions, until the wise rabbi drew from its muddy mouth (or ear, in other accounts) the shem ha-meforash, the capsule containing the Name, that had animated it, whereupon the big fellow broke apart into clods again. Or—in another story—until the rabbi erased one diacritical mark of the sacred word Truth, emet, that he had inscribed upon the creature's forehead, leaving the equally sacred word met or Death.

—Those are untrue stories, said the Maharal. Such things can be done by the cunning, but the truly learned refrain from them. To press light into darkness, to mix clean and unclean? Those who do so are brave perhaps and have great knowledge perhaps, but may the Holy One, blessed be he, protect me from imitating them.

—I don't ask that you do those things that are forbidden, said the Ass. Only that you help me to learn what I must, to do it for myself. I ask for what anyone ignorant may ask of you: instruction.

The rabbi regarded the beast before him. If it was not forbidden, it seemed to be required; it would be a mitzvah to help any being in the condition this one found itself in. The animal looked up at him with his great moist long-lashed eyes in supplication, and the rabbi had an irresistible impulse to scratch its head.

* * * *

This too, then, would become one of the stories told of the Maharal, in some worlds at least; how he used to walk sometimes in the town with an ass by his side, without lead or halter, an ass that would stay obediently by him like a nobleman's dog, and look up with doglike attention to the Maharal, who seemed to speak to it confidentially, though surely (observers supposed) his words were for himself alone, or were for God's ear, for who else could hear?

—The Torah has six hundred thousand faces, the Maharal said to the Ass. One face for every Jew alive at the time Moshe rebiana revealed it. Some faces of the Torah are turned toward us, and some away; it is these turned-away faces we seek through Hokhmath ha-Tseruf, or, as it is said, gematria.

—This is the art by which form and substance may be transmuted, said the Ass.

When the rabbi said nothing in assent, the Ass added: So I have read in ancient authors.

—All the beings in the universe have come into existence through the work of the twenty-two letters, said the rabbi. By combining their different kinds, the twenty-two make, in all, 231 gates. Through these gates have come, in their troops and legions, all the things that have names, in all the three realms, that is, the World, the Year, and the Soul.

—Did they, then, precede the saying of the Fiat lux?

—Perhaps they did, said the rabbi. A midrash says that the Holy One, blessed be he, asked for workers to make the world, and the Torah replied: Take these twenty-two, of which I am made.

He spoke in simple terms, not only because he spoke in a language not his own, but also because he spoke to a famously simple beast, whose hooves clattered on the cobblestones beside him, whose long ears twitched and pointed as though in search of wisdom.

—Even so, the rabbi went on, it took several attempts to get a creation that would sustain itself at all: earlier creations preceded this one, coming to be and going out like the sparks thrown off by a smith's hammer as it strikes the iron on the anvil.

The Ass hee-hawed, for the idea of a Jove or Jehovah laboring over an infinite smithy, spoiling his work and beginning again, suited him very well: it was as though he'd thought of it himself.

The rabbi (not noticing the interruption) went on to explain that those first universes emanated entirely from his Power, his strict Justice; each was too difficult to maintain, and destroyed itself; only when balanced by the smile of his other aspect, Wisdom, Mother, and Spouse, was the world able to remain alive and persist in the place it had been summoned to.

—Yet even now the creation is not completed, said the rabbi. It is said that this world grows up through a succession of Years, or shemitah, each different in kind. The present shemitah emanates from the sefira Gevurah, judging Power: that is, the left hand of the Holy One. Anyone can see that this is so. And if this is so then the former age must have been that of the sefira Hesed, sweet Loving-kindness.

—And the age to come? asked the donkey.

—Rahamim: Beauty, Compassion, Mercy.

For a moment he paused, and lowered his head, and so did the beast beside him: as though to await that age, so long in dawning.

—Each Year, the rabbi then said, is seven thousand ordinary years long, and at the end of each, all things begin again, but differently.

—All things?

—Some say that in former shemitah, even the Torah did not contain the possibilities it contains now, and in the shemitah to come it will not contain them again, but will contain others it does not now. There are those who hold that there is a letter not present in the Torah in this age, a letter that the next age will reveal. A revelation that must of course change everything, however slightly.

—Ah, said the Ass; so it must.

—Others say that there are certain unfortunate souls formed in the last Year but still persisting in this one, where they wander in dissatisfaction, never at home, and not knowing why.

The Ass pondered this, and his own state.

—Perhaps, he said then, they are the greatest scholars, as well as the greatest fools. Searching for the sense that they remember, or expect, but that has changed forever.

The rabbi walked silently for a moment, as though testing against his inward understandings this remark, to see if it could be so.

—In any case, he said at last, those tales are false. There is but one age, one world, one Torah, one soul for each man.

The Ass didn't dispute the Great Rabbi, wise enough to know better, patient enough to wait. That he himself was the proof that a man could have more than one soul made for him in the bosom of Amphitrite he forbore to say. He only paused and parted his hind legs, and sent a stream of urine into the gutter, while the rabbi tactfully went on ahead, and paid no attention.

* * * *

The work was long: the rabbi said it would be. The Giordanisti took rooms in a house in the castle district named after the Three Kings, die Heilige drei Königen (where one day in another world Franz Kafka would live, and dream about metamorphosis). To make their daily bread and board they put on plays once again, safer in this city than anywhere in the Empire. They acted, besides Onorius and Lucius, a new play of Johannes Faustus, like the ones the Pragerei loved—only in theirs the devil with whom Faust negotiates the sale of his soul was not a schwarze Pudel but a well-spoken Ass.

Meanwhile, every day if he could, the Ass traveled to the Jewish quarter, to the rabbi's house, to learn and hope.