The Golem Page 17

  “What wouldn’t you want, Miriam?”

  She raised her hand and quickly stood up, saying, “You have a visitor, Herr Pernath.”

  There was a rustle of silk out in the corridor, an impetuous knock and then: Angelina!

  Miriam was going to leave, but I held her back. “Allow me to introduce you. The daughter of an old friend – Countess —”

  “One can’t even drive up to the house any more, the roads have been dug up everywhere. When are you going to move to an area that’s fit for human habitation, Pernath? Outside the snow is melting, the sky is enough to make your heart burst with joy, and here you are stuck in your dank, dark cavern like an old frog. By the way, do you know I went to see my jeweller yesterday and he said you’re the finest gem-cutter, the greatest engraver living today, if not one of the greatest who ever lived?” Angelina chattered on like a river in spate, and I sat spellbound. I was mesmerised by her radiant blue eyes, her little feet in their tiny patent-leather boots, her coquettish face beaming out of a mountain of furs, and her little rosy ear-lobes.

  She hardly gave herself time to draw breath. “My carriage is waiting at the corner. I was afraid I might not find you at home. I hope you haven’t had lunch yet? First of all we’ll drive to – now, where shall we drive first? We’ll head for – just a minute – yes! To the Arboretum, perhaps – or, well – anywhere out in the country, anywhere one can really feel all the sap rising and the buds budding. Come on, come on, where’s your hat? Then I’ll take you back to my house for lunch and we can chat until evening. There’s your hat, what are you waiting for? I’ve got a lovely, soft, warm rug down in the carriage. We can wrap ourselves up to the ears in it and snuggle up together till we’re boiling hot.”

  What could I say? ‘I’ve just arranged to go out for a ride with the daughter of my old friend here’? Miriam had quickly taken her leave of Angelina before I could get the words out. I saw her to the door, even though she made it clear, with a friendly smile, that it wasn’t necessary.

  “Listen, Miriam, out here on the stairs I can’t really tell you how fond I am of you, and that I would much rather go with –”

  “You mustn’t keep the lady waiting, Herr Pernath”, she insisted. “Goodbye, and enjoy your drive.”

  She said it with unfeigned warmth, but I could see that the brightness had gone from her eyes. She hurried down the stairs and my heart was too full for words. I felt I had lost a whole world.

  Intoxicated, I sat at Angelina’s side as we drove at a furious gallop through the crowded streets. Life was surging all around so that, dazed as I was, I only registered tiny glints of the scenes slipping past me: sparkling jewels in an earring or a muff-chain, a shiny top hat, a lady’s white gloves, a poodle with a pink bow round its neck that ran along yapping at the carriage wheels, black horses in silver harnesses and covered in foam racing towards us, a shop window with gleaming bowls full of pearl necklaces and glittering jewelry, the sheen of silk round slim, girlish hips.

  The chill wind cutting into our faces made the sensuous warmth of Angelina’s body seem even more beguiling.

  The policemen at the crossings jumped respectfully to one side as we flew past them.

  Then we were going down the Embankment, which was one long line of carriages, at a walk, and past the ruins of the stone bridge with its throng of gawping sightseers. I scarcely gave it a glance. The slightest word from Angelina, her eyelashes, the rapid twitching of her lips, it was all much more important to me than watching the blocks of stone down in the river heave the tumbling ice-floes up into the air.

  An avenue through the park; then the give of soil trampled flat, the rustle of dead leaves under the wheels; damp air; huge bare trees full of crows’ nests; pallid green fields with grubby white islands of melting snow, it all flashed past me as if in a dream.

  Angelina mentioned Dr. Savioli, but only in a few, almost indifferent words. “Now the danger is past”, she said, with her delightful, childlike lack of inhibition, “and I know that his health has improved, everything I have been through seems so terribly boring. And I want to enjoy myself again, close my eyes and plunge into life’s glittering bubbles. I think all women are like that, only they won’t admit it. Or are they so stupid that they don’t realise it? Don’t you think so too?” She ignored my answer. “Anyway, I think women are completely uninteresting. You mustn’t think I’m just trying to flatter you, but I know that I far prefer the mere presence of a man I like to the most stimulating conversation with a woman, however intelligent. When it comes down to it, it’s all chitter-chatter about some silly nonsense. At best they’ll talk about clothes, and fashions don’t change that often, do they?” She suddenly gave me a coquettish look and said, “I’m dreadfully frivolous, aren’t I?” I was so beguiled by her charm that it was all I could do not to take her head in my hands and plant a kiss on the nape of her pretty little neck. “Tell me I’m frivolous.” She snuggled up closer to me and took my arm.

  We were leaving the main avenue now, driving past clumps of ornamental shrubs, still wrapped in their protective winter coats of straw, so that they looked like the trunks of monsters that had had their heads and limbs chopped off. People sitting in the sunshine on the benches watched us drive by and immediately their tongues started wagging.

  We were silent for a while, each immersed in our own thoughts. How completely different Angelina was from the Angelina who existed in my imagination! To me it seemed as if today she had entered the real world of the present for the first time. Was this really the same woman I had comforted that evening in the Cathedral? I could not take my eyes off her half-open lips.

  Still she did not say anything; she seemed to be seeing some image in her mind’s eye.

  The carriage was rolling over a damp meadow. It smelt of the awakening earth.

  “Do you know, Countess –”

  She interrupted softly, “Call me Angelina.”

  “Do you know, Angelina, yesterday I … I spent the whole night dreaming of you?” I almost had to force the words out.

  She made a slight movement, as if to withdraw her arm from mine, and looked at me wide-eyed. “Incredible! And I dreamt of you! And just now I was thinking exactly the same!”

  Again our conversation juddered to a halt and we both guessed that we had had the same dream. I could feel it by the throbbing of her blood. Her arm was quivering ever so slightly against my breast and she was looking fixedly away from me, out of the carriage.

  Slowly I drew her hand to my lips, pulled back the soft, scented glove and, as her breathing grew more agitated, pressed my teeth, mad with love, into the ball of her thumb.

  Hours later I was staggering like a drunken man down through the evening mist to the town. I followed any street that took my fancy, and it was a long time before I realised I was walking round in a circle.

  Then I found myself leaning over the iron railings by the river, staring down into the roaring waves. I could still feel Angelina’s arms around my neck, and I could see the stone basin of the fountain, where once before, years ago, we had taken leave of one another; it was full of rotting elm-leaves, and once again she was walking with me, as she had only a few hours ago, silent, her head on my shoulder, through the twilit park of the castle where she lived.

  I sat on a bench and pulled my hat down over my face to help me dream.

  The waters were thundering over the weir, drowning the last grumblings of the city as it went to sleep. From time to time I looked up as I pulled my coat tighter round me, and the shadow on the river grew deeper and deeper until, under the heavy pressure of night, it was a mere grey-black flow, with the foam of the weir a strip of dazzling white running diagonally across to the other bank.

  I shuddered at the thought of having to go back to my dreary lodgings. The glory of one short afternoon had made me for ever a stranger in my own home. A few weeks, a few days perhaps, and my bliss would surely be over, leaving me with nothing but a beautiful, painful memory.

&
nbsp; And then?

  Then I would not belong anywhere, neither here nor on the other side, neither on this bank nor across river.

  I stood up. Before I returned to the darkness of the Ghetto, I wanted to have one more look through the park railings at the castle and the windows of the room where she was sleeping. I set off in the direction from which I had come, feeling my way through the thick fog along rows of houses and across slumbering squares, past black monuments that suddenly reared up menacingly before me, past lonely sentry boxes and the scrollery of baroque facades. In the thick mist, the dull glow of the street-lamps grew into fantastic, gigantic rings coloured like faded rainbows, turned into piercing, pale-yellow eyes, then dissolved in the mist behind me.

  My foot felt a broad stone step strewn with gravel. Where was I? It was a steeply rising, sunken lane. To the left and right were smooth garden walls with the bare branches of a tree trailing down over them. They seemed to come down from the sky, the trunk was hidden behind the wall of fog. A few thin, rotten twigs snapped off with a loud crack as my hat brushed against them, and tumbled down my coat into the misty abyss concealing my feet.

  Then a point of light shone out, a single, lonely point of light somewhere in the distance, mysteriously suspended between heaven and earth.

  I must have taken a wrong turning, it could only be the Old Castle Steps that ran across the slope of the Fürstenberg Gardens.

  Long stretches of clayey soil, then a paved path.

  A bulky shadow towered up above me, the top ending in a stiff black pointed hat: the Dalibor Tower, the dungeon where many subjects had died of hunger whilst their kings hunted game in the Stag Moat below.

  A narrow twisting alley with crenelations, a spiral staircase scarcely wide enough for my shoulders, then I was standing opposite a row of houses none of which was taller than myself; if I stretched out my arm I could touch their roofs.

  I was in ‘Goldmakers Alley’ where, in the Middle Ages, the adepts of alchemy heated the philosophers’ stone and poisoned the moonbeams. There was no other way out than the one by which I had come, but I could not find the gap in the wall. Instead I bumped into a wooden gate. ‘It’s no use’, I thought to myself, ‘I’ll have to wake someone up to show me the way out.’

  Strange, there is a house blocking the end of the street, larger than the others and apparently lived in. I can’t remember ever having seen it before. It is shining so brightly out of the mist, it must be whitewashed.

  I go through the gate, across the narrow strip of garden and press my face against the window-panes. Everything is dark. I knock on the window. Inside, an ancient man, as old as Methuselah, comes tottering in through the door, stops in the middle of the room, slowly turns his head towards the dusty alchemical flasks and retorts on the shelves, gives the huge spiders’ webs in the corners a reflective stare and then turns his gaze directly towards me.

  The shadow of his cheek-bones falls across his eyes sockets, so that it looks as if they were empty as those of a mummy.

  He obviously cannot see me.

  I knock on the glass.

  He can’t hear it. As silently as a sleepwalker, he goes out of the room.

  I wait in vain. I knock on the door of the house. No one opens.

  There was nothing left for it but to go on looking until I found the way out of the street.

  It would be best, I decided, to go and mix with people. To go to the Old Toll House, where my friends, Zwakh, Prokop and Vrieslander would surely be, in order to drown my desperate longing for Angelina’s embraces for at least a few hours. I quickly set off for the inn.

  They were sitting round the worm-eaten old table like a trio of dead men, all three with white, thin-stemmed clay pipes clenched between their teeth. The whole room was full of smoke. The dark-brown walls so swallowed up the meagre light from the old-fashioned hanging lamp that it was almost impossible to tell which was which.

  In the corner sat the taciturn waitress, flat-chested and weatherworn, with her blank gaze and yellow duck’s-bill of a nose, eternally knitting away at a sock. Dull-red blankets had been hung over the closed doors, so that the voices from the next room sounded like the soft hum of a swarm of bees.

  Vrieslander, with his straight-brimmed conical hat on his head, his pointed beard, leaden complexion and scar under his eye, looked like some drowned Dutchman from a bygone century.

  Joshua Prokop had stuck a fork through his musician’s locks and was keeping up a constant drumming with his uncannily long, bony fingers whilst admiring Zwakh’s efforts to clothe a pot-bellied bottle of arrack in a purple cloak from one of his puppets.

  “It’s going to be Babinski”, explained Vrieslander with the utmost gravity. “You don’t know who Babinski was? Zwakh, tell Pernath who Babinski was.”

  “Babinski”, explained Zwakh at once, without interrupting his work for a moment, “was a celebrated robber and murderer who used to live in Prague. For many years he went about his deplorable business without anyone noticing. Gradually, however, it began to strike people in the better families that this or that member had been missing at dinner and never reappeared. Though at first nothing was said – the matter did, after all, have its good side in that it meant less cooking – they could not ignore the fact that people might start to talk and the family’s social prestige would suffer. Especially when it was daughters of marriageable age who disappeared without trace. Anyway, family pride demanded that they publicly demonstrate the high regard in which they held family values.

  Those sections of the personal columns in the local newspapers headed ‘Come Back, All Is Forgiven’ grew out of all proportion – a fact which Babinski, with that thoughtlessness which is characteristic of professional murderers, had not taken into account – and finally aroused general attention.

  At heart Babinski was a man of simple tastes, and his untiring industry had enabled him to establish a cosy home in the idyllic little village of Krtsch just outside Prague. It was the tiniest of cottages, but sparkling clean and had a garden at the front full of geraniums.

  Since, on his income, he could not afford to acquire more land, he found it necessary, in order to dispose of his victims unobtrusively, to do without the extra flower-bed he had set his heart on and establish in its stead a simple, yet practical grassy mound which could easily be enlarged whenever business or the season demanded.

  It was on this blessed spot that every evening Babinski, after all the trials and tribulations of the day, would sit enjoying the last rays of the setting sun and playing all sorts of melancholy tunes on his flute.”

  “Just a moment”, interrupted Joshua Prokop and, taking his house-key out of his pocket, held it to his lips like a clarinet and played on it, “Toorali toorali-addy.”

  “Were you there, then”, asked Vrieslander in astonishment, “since you know just which tune it was he played.”

  Prokop threw him a furious glance. “No. Babinski lived too long ago for that. But, as a composer, I ought to know what Babinski played if anyone does. It’s not for you to judge, you’ve no ear for music. Toorali toorali toorali-ay.”

  Deeply moved, Zwakh listened until Prokop put away his house-key, then went on, “The constant increase in the size of the mound gradually aroused his neighbours’ suspicions, but the credit for finally putting an end to the fiend’s selfish activities goes to a policeman from the suburb of Zizkov, who happened to observe, from a safe distance, Babinski strangling a highly respectable old lady. He was arrested at his country retreat.

  Taking his otherwise exemplary character into account as a mitigating circumstance, the court condemned him to death by hanging, at the same time commissioning the firm of Leipen Bros., Wholesale and Retail Rope Merchants, to supply the authorities with the requisite cordage at a reasonable price and with invoices in triplicate.

  In spite of all such precautions, however, it happened that the rope broke and Babinski’s sentence was commuted to life imprisonment.

  Twenty years the mur
derer spent behind the walls of Saint Pancras Prison without a single word of complaint ever crossing his lips; even today the staff of the institution still sing the praises of his model behaviour, he was even granted permission to play his flute on the official birthday of our most noble sovereign –”

  Prokop immediately felt for his house-key, but Zwakh stopped him with a wave of the hand.

  “On the occasion of a general amnesty, the rest of his sentence was remitted and he was given the position of gatekeeper at the Convent of the Sisters of Mercy. Thanks to his proficiency with the spade, which he had acquired in his previous walk of life, the light gardening, which was part of his duties, took up so little of his time that he had leisure enough to purify his heart and mind through the study of carefully selected works of improving literature.

  The results were pleasing in the extreme. Whenever the Mother Superior sent him to the local inn on a Saturday evening, to raise his spirits a little, he would always return punctually before nightfall, remarking that he found the general decline in moral standards depressing; there were so many shady characters making the roads unsafe that the sensible course for any right-thinking person was to see that he set off for home in good time.

  At that time in Prague the candle-makers had developed the unfortunate tradition of selling little figures with red cloaks representing the murderer Babinski. There was not one among the bereaved families who did not have such a figure. Usually, however, they were to be seen in the shops under a glass cover, and there was nothing calculated to infuriate Babinski so much as as the sight of one of these.

  ‘It is extremely degrading and betokens an unparalleled coarseness of spirit to keep on confronting a person with his youthful peccadilloes’, Babinski would say on such occasions, adding, ‘and it is deeply regrettable that the authorities have taken no steps to deal with such an outrage.’