The Golem Read online

  This strange sense of unease inside me was growing, driving me to distraction. There was something invisible calling me, something from the other side, and I could not understand it. I felt like a horse being broken in: it can feel the tug on the reins, but doesn’t know which movement it’s supposed to perform, cannot tell what is in its master’s mind.

  Go down to Shemaiah Hillel?

  Every fibre in my body resisted the idea.

  The vision I had had in the Cathedral, when Charousek’s head had appeared on the monk’s body in answer to my mute appeal for help, was indication enough that I should not reject vague feelings out of hand. For some time now hidden powers had been germinating within me, of that I was certain; the sense was so overpowering that I did not even try to deny it. To feel letters, not just read them with my eyes in books, to set up an interpreter within me to translate the things instinct whispers without the aid of words: that must be the key, I realised, that must be the way to establish a clear language of communication with my own inner being.

  ‘They have eyes to see, and see not; they have ears to hear and hear not’; the passage from the Bible came to me like an explanation.

  “Key … key … key …” As my mind was teasing me with these strange ideas, I suddenly noticed that my lips were mechanically repeating that one word. “Key … key …?” My eye fell on the wire hook which I had used to open the door to the loft, and immediately I was inflamed with the desire to see where the square trapdoor in the studio led. Without pause for thought, I went back into Savioli’s studio and pulled the ring on the trapdoor until I had managed to raise it.

  At first, nothing but darkness.

  Then I saw steep, narrow steps descending into the blackness. I set off down them, but they seemed never-ending. I groped my way past alcoves damp with mould and mildew, round twists, turns and sharp corners, across passageways leading off ahead, to the left or the right, past the remains of an old wooden door, taking this fork or that, at random; and always the steps, steps and more steps, leading up and down, up and down, and over it all the heavy, stifling smell of soil and fungoid growth.

  And still not a glimmer of light. If only I had brought Hillel’s candle with me!

  At last the ground became level. From the dull crunching sound of my footsteps I guessed I was walking on dry sand. It could only be one of those countless passages that run, without rhyme or reason, from the Ghetto down to the river. I was not in the least surprised; half the town had been built over this network of tunnels and since time immemorial the inhabitants of Prague had had good reason to shun the light of day.

  Even though I seemed to have been walking for an eternity, the complete lack of sound from above my head told me that I must still be within the confines of the Ghetto, where a tomb-like silence reigns at night. Had I been below even moderately busy streets or squares, the clatter of carriages would have reached me.

  For a second fear grabbed me by the throat: what if I was merely going round in circles? What if I should fall down some hole and injure myself, break a leg and be stuck down here?! What would happen to her letters then? They lay in my room, and Wassertrum was sure to get his hands on them.

  Unbidden, the comforting presence of Shemaiah Hillel, whom I vaguely associated with the idea of help and guidance, flooded through my mind. To be on the safe side, however, I went more slowly, checking my foothold at each step and holding one arm above me so as not to knock my head against the roof if the passage should suddenly get lower. Occasionally, and then with increasing frequency, my hand hit the rock above me until eventually it was so low that I had to bend down to continue.

  Suddenly there was empty space above my upraised arm. I stood still and stared up. Eventually I seemed to make out a scarcely perceptible shimmer of light coming from the ceiling. Could it be the opening of some shaft, perhaps from a cellar? I stretched up and felt around with both hands above head height. The opening was rectangular and lined with stone. Gradually I began to make out the shadowy outlines of a horizontal cross at the top of the opening and finally I managed to grasp the bars that formed it and pull myself up and through the gap between them.

  Standing on the cross, I tried to get my bearings. If my fingers were not deceiving me, that must be the remains of an iron spiral staircase? I had to spend a long, long time groping in the darkness until I found the second step, then I started climbing. There were eight steps in all, each one at almost head height above the last.

  Strange! At the top, the staircase came up against a kind of horizontal panelling which let through, in regular lines, the shimmer of light that I had seen from below. I bent down as far as I could to see if, from the extra distance, I could make out the pattern of the lines. To my astonishment I realised that they formed the precise shape of a six-pointed star, such as is found on synagogues.

  What on earth could it be?

  Suddenly it dawned on me: this, too, was a trapdoor, with the light seeping round the edges. A wooden trapdoor in the shape of a star. I put my shoulder against it and heaved; one second later I was standing in a room flooded with bright moonlight. It was fairly small and completely empty apart from a pile of rubbish in one corner. There was only one window, and that had strong iron bars. I checked the walls several times, but however carefully I searched I could find no door or other kind of entrance, apart from the one I had just used. The bars over the window were too close for me to put my head through, but from what I could see of the street outside, the room must have been roughly on a level with the third floor, as the houses opposite had only two storeys and were considerably lower.

  The pavement on the other side of the street was just in view, but the dazzling moonlight that was shining full in my face formed deep shadows, rendering it impossible for me to make out any details. The street must be part of the Jewish Ghetto, for all the windows of the building opposite were bricked up and merely indicated by ledges projecting from the wall; nowhere else in the city do the houses turn their backs on each other in this odd fashion.

  In vain I racked my brains to try to work out what this singular building in which I found myself might be. Could it perhaps be one of the abandoned side-towers of the Greek Church? Or did it somehow form part of the Old-New Synagogue?

  The situation was all wrong for that.

  Again I looked round the room: not the slightest clue. The walls and ceiling were bare, the whitewash and plaster had long since flaked off and there were neither nails nor holes to suggest the room had ever even been inhabited. The floor was ankle-deep in dust, as if no living being had been here for decades.

  I shuddered at the idea of examining the rubbish in the corner. It was in deepest darkness and I could not make out what it consisted of. At first glance it appeared to be rags tied up in a bundle. Or was it a couple of old, black suitcases? I prodded it with my foot and managed to use my heel to drag part of it towards the ray of light the moon cast across the room. It looked like a broad, dark strip of material that was slowly unrolling.

  What was that spot, glittering like an eye? A metal button perhaps?

  It gradually resolved itself into the arm of some curiously old-fashioned coat hanging out of the bundle. And beneath it was a little white box, or something like that; under the pressure of my foot it gave way and crumbled into a mottled, layered heap. I gave it another poke with my foot and a piece of paper fluttered into the light.

  A picture?

  I bent down: a Juggler, the lowest trump in the game of Tarock. What I had taken for a white box was a pack of cards.

  I picked it up. How grotesque, a pack of cards in this eerie place! The strange thing was, I had to force myself to smile as a faint shudder of horror crept up my spine. I tried to think of a simple explanation of how they came to be here, mechanically counting the pack as I did so. Seventy-eight cards, it was complete. Even as I was counting them I was struck by the fact that the cards felt like slivers of ice. They gave off a glacial cold, and I found that my fingers were
so stiff that it was almost impossible to release the cards from their grip. Once more I looked for a rational explanation. My thin suit and the long walk without coat or hat through the underground passages, the bitter cold of the winter’s night, the stone walls, the severe frost that seemed to flow in through the window with the moonlight – if there was anything odd it was that I had only started to feel the cold now. The fever of excitement I was in must have made me insensible to it.

  Fits of shivering rippled across my skin, penetrating deeper and deeper into my body. My skeleton seemed to be turning to ice and I was aware of each individual bone in my body as if it were a cold metal rod onto which my flesh was freezing fast. Walking round the room, stamping my feet on the ground, beating my arms against my sides – nothing helped. I clenched my teeth to stop them chattering.

  It must be Death, I said to myself, laying his chill hand on my skull. And I fought like a madman against the numbing sleep in which the freezing cold was enveloping me like a stifling, soft woollen cloak.

  The letters in my room, her letters! The words exploded in my brain like a howl of despair. They will be found if I die here! And she is relying on me, she is looking to me to save her! Help! – Help! – Help!

  And I screamed out through the bars of the window, sending my cry echoing through the deserted street, “Help! Help! Help!” I threw myself to the ground and immediately jumped up again. I mustn’t die, I mustn’t! For her sake, for her sake alone! I had to find warmth, even if it meant striking a spark from my own bones. Then I caught sight of the rags in the corner, and I rushed across to them and pulled them on over my own clothes with shaking hands. It was a threadbare suit of some thick, dark material in an ancient, curious style.

  It gave off a smell of decay.

  Then I huddled down in the opposite corner and felt my skin slowly, very slowly begin to grow warmer. But the gruesome awareness of the icy skeleton inside my body refused to leave. I sat there motionless, my eyes wandering round the room. The playing card I had noticed first – the Juggler – was still in the ray of light that ran across the middle of the room.

  I stared at it, I could not tear my eyes away.

  As far as I could tell from that distance, it seemed to be a crude picture, painted in watercolours by a child’s hand, representing the Hebrew character Aleph in the form of a man in quaint, old-fashioned dress, with a short, pointed beard, and one hand raised whilst the other pointed downwards. I could feel a disturbing thought seeping its way into my mind: did the man’s face not bear a strange resemblance to my own? That beard, it wasn’t right for a Juggler. I crawled over to where the card lay and threw it into the corner with the rest of the jumble, just to rid myself of the tormenting sight.

  There it was now, lying there and gleaming across at me through the gloom, a blurred, greyish-white smudge.

  I forced myself to think about what I could do to get back to my room. Wait for morning, then call out from the window to passers-by to find a ladder and bring me some candles or a lantern! Without a light I would never manage to find my way back through the maze of tunnels, that was certain, horrifyingly certain. Or, if the window should be too high, perhaps someone could climb onto the roof and use a rope …? My God! It struck me like a bolt of lightning. Now I knew where I was! A room without an entrance, with only a barred window, the ancient house in Altschulgasse that everyone avoided! Many years ago someone had let himself down by a rope to look in through the window and the rope had broken and … Yes! I was in the house where the ghostly figure of the Golem disappeared each time!

  I was overwhelmed with horror. I tried to resist, but in vain; even the memory of the letters was powerless against it. My mind was paralysed and my heart started to contract convulsively.

  Hastily I told myself it was only the icy draught blowing from the corner over there. Lips numb with fear, I repeated it over to myself, faster and faster, my breath whistling, but it was no use: that smudge of white over there, the card, it was swelling into blistered lumps, feeling its way forward to the edge of the ray of moonlight and then creeping back into the darkness. The silence in the room was punctuated by dripping sounds, half imagined, half real … outside me, all around me, and yet somewhere else at the same time … deep within my heart and then out in the room once more; it was the sound a pair of compasses makes when it falls and the point sticks into a piece of wood.

  And again and again, that smudge of white … that smudge of white! “It’s a card, a miserable, stupid little playing card!” I sent the scream echoing round my skull, but in vain … now it was … was taking on human form … the Juggler … and was squatting in the corner and staring at me with vacant eyes out of my own face!

  For hour after hour I sat there without moving, huddled up in my corner, a frozen skeleton in mouldy clothes that belonged to another. And across the room he sat, he … I … myself.

  Mute and motionless, we stared into each other’s eyes, the one a hideous mirror-image of the other. Can he see the moonbeam too, as it sucks its way across the floor as sluggishly as a snail, and crawls up the infinite spaces of the wall like the hand of some invisible clock, growing paler and paler as it rises?

  I fixed him with my gaze, and it was no use his trying to dissolve in the half-light of morning which was coming in through the window to help him. I held him fast.

  Step by step I wrestled with him for my life, for the life that is mine because it no longer belongs to me. He grew smaller and smaller, and as the day broke he crept back into the playing card. I stood up, walked across the room and put the Juggler in my pocket.

  The street below was still completely deserted.

  I rummaged through the things in the corner that were now revealed in the dull morning light: some broken pottery, there a rusty pan, here scraps of mouldy material, the neck of a bottle. Inanimate objects, and yet so remarkably familiar. And the walls too, how clear the lines and cracks were becoming! Now where had I seen them before?

  I picked up the pack of cards and it began to dawn on me. Had I not painted them myself? As a child? A long, long time ago? It was an ancient set of tarot cards. With Hebrew signs. Number twelve must be the Hanged Man, I seemed to remember, hanging head downwards with his arms behind his back? I flicked through the pack. There! There he was!

  Then another image, half dream, half certainty, appeared before my inner eye: a blackened schoolhouse, crooked, hunch-backed, a sullen witches’ cottage, its left shoulder too high, the other merging into a neighbouring house. There are several of us, adolescent boys … somewhere there is an abandoned cellar …

  Then I looked down at my body and was thrown into confusion once more. I did not recognise the old-fashioned suit at all …

  I started at the clatter of a cart on the cobbles, but when I looked down from the window there was not a soul to be seen, just a mastiff standing pensively by the corner of a house.

  There! At last! Voices! Human voices! Two old women were trotting slowly down the street. I forced my head part-way through the bars and called out to them. Open-mouthed, they stared up, asking each other what it might be. But when they saw me they let out a piercing cry and fled. I realised they had taken me for the Golem.

  I expected a crowd to gather so I would be able to explain my situation to them, but a good hour passed during which, now and then, a pale face would arrive below, peer up warily at me and immediately start back in mortal fear. Should I wait – perhaps for hours, perhaps even until tomorrow – for the police to arrive, those state-licensed crooks, as Zwakh calls them?

  No, I would rather try to investigate the underground passages, to follow them a little way to see where they led. Perhaps now it was day a glimmer of light might come through cracks in the rock?

  I clambered back down the spiral stairs and continued on the way I had been following yesterday, over whole mounds of broken bricks, through subterranean cellars, then up a ruined staircase – to find myself suddenly in the hallway of the black schoolhouse I had
seen in my dream.

  Immediately I was engulfed in a tidal wave of memories: desks bespattered from top to bottom with ink, arithmetic jotters, songs bawled out at full voice, a boy setting a cockchafer loose in the class, readers with sandwiches squashed between the pages and smelling of orange peel. But I wasted no time in reflection and hurried home.

  The first person I met – it was in Salnitergasse – was a misshapen old Jew with white side-locks. Scarcely had he caught sight of me than he covered his face with his hands and started to reel off Hebrew prayers in a loud howl. At the noise, many people must have rushed out of their hovels, for an incredible clamour broke out behind me. I turned round and saw a teeming throng of pale, terror-struck faces surging down the alley behind me. I stood dumbfounded until I looked down at myself: I was still wearing the strange, medieval clothes from the night before over my suit; the people must think they were seeing the Golem. Quickly I hurried round the corner and hid in an entrance, tearing off the mouldy clothes.

  A second later the crowd was pouring past me, waving sticks in the air and shouting abuse.

  LIGHT

  Several times during the course of the day I had knocked at Hillel’s door. I felt I could not rest until I had asked him what all the strange events I had been through could mean, but each time I was told he was not at home. His daughter said she would let me know as soon as he came home from the Jewish Town Hall.

  What a strange girl she is, that Miriam. A type of girl I have never come across before. A beautiful girl, but with a beauty so foreign that at first you can’t comprehend it, a beauty that strikes you dumb when you look at her and, in some inexplicable way, makes you feel disheartened. As I mused on this, the only explanation I could come up with was that her face must be formed according to laws of proportion that have been lost for thousands of years. I wondered what precious stone I would have to choose to capture it in a cameo while still engraving it according to the rules of my art. The attempt failed at the very first hurdle: the blue-black sheen of her hair and eyes were beyond any stone I could think of. How then could I even contemplate trying to capture the vision, the spirit of the unearthly slimness of that face in a cameo? All that would emerge would be the tedious similitude of an academic portrait. I came to see that only a mosaic would do, but what materials would I use? It would take a lifetime just to assemble a suitable supply of them.