The Golem Read online

  Charousek took out a small medicine bottle and went on with quivering voice, “I’m going to put these mementoes of my late friend, the withered rose and the phial, on the table here. How many times during those desolate hours when, lonely at heart and consumed with longing for my mother, I wished for death, have I played with that phial. It was comforting to know that I only needed to pour the liquid onto a cloth and breathe in the fumes to float painlessly to the realm where dear Theodore is resting from the tribulations of this vale of tears.

  And now I beg you, Pernath, for the sake of the high esteem in which I hold you, to take them and give them to Herr Wassertrum. Tell him you had them from someone who was close to Dr. Wassory, but whose name you have sworn never to reveal, perhaps a lady’s. He will believe you, and they will be a reminder of his son, just as they reminded me of a dear friend.

  That will be my way of thanking him without his knowing. I am a poor man, and it is all I have, but I will be content to know that both will now belong to him, and yet he will never suspect that they came from me. Merely to think of it is balm to my soul.

  And now, goodbye, and a thousand thanks for your help in this matter. I know I can rely on you.”

  He grasped my hand, gave me a meaningful wink, and then, when I did not understand, mouthed some silent words at me.

  “Just a moment, Herr Charousek, and I’ll see you down the stairs”, I said, mechanically repeating the words I read from his lips, and followed him out. We stopped on the dark first-floor landing. Before taking my leave of Charousek, I told him to his face, “I can imagine what the purpose of your little charade was. You … you want Wassertrum to poison himself with the phial!”

  “Of course”, Charousek admitted cheerfully.

  “And you imagine I’ll be a party to that?!”

  “Not at all necessary.”

  “But up there you said I was to take the bottle to Wassertrum!”

  Charousek shook his head. “When you go back up to your room you will see that he has already pocketed both.”

  “How can you assume that?” I asked in astonishment. “Someone like Wassertrum will never kill himself, he’s much too much of a coward, and he never acts on impulse.”

  “Then you know nothing about the insidious poison of suggestion”, Charousek countered earnestly. “Had I spoken in normal tones, you would perhaps be correct in your assessment, but I had worked out beforehand how I was going to speak, right down to the slightest emphasis. Swine like that only react to the most nauseatingly turgid rhetoric. Believe me! I could have described his expression at every sentence I spoke. There is no Kitsch too crass to draw tears from such rabble, rotten to the core though they be. Don’t you think that, if it were not for that, all the theatres would have long since been razed to the ground? You can recognise scum by their sentimentality. Thousands of poor devils can starve to death without a single tear being shed, but dress up any greasepaint bitch as a country bumpkin and let her roll her eyes at them from the stage and they’ll blubber like abandoned lap-dogs. Even if by tomorrow old Papa Wassertrum has forgotten the scene that has just cut him to his dung-heap of a heart, when the time comes when he feels sorry for himself, every single one of my words will reawaken within him. At such moments of spiritual diarrhoea all it needs is a gentle shove – and I shall make sure he gets one – and even the most cowardly cur will reach for the poison. It just has to be close at hand! Friend Theo would probably not have gone through with it if I hadn’t made it easy for him.”

  “But Charousek, that’s dreadful!” I exclaimed, horrified. “Don’t you feel any –”

  He quickly put his hand over my mouth and pushed me into an alcove. “Quiet! Here he comes!”

  Wassertrum came stumbling down the stairs, supporting himself against the wall, and lurched past us. Charousek quickly shook my hand and crept after him.

  When I returned to my room, I saw that the rose and the phial had disappeared. In their place on the table lay Wassertrum’s battered gold watch.

  At the bank they told me I would have to wait eight days until I could get my money; that was the usual notice.

  I told them to fetch the manager. I was going to leave town within the hour and was in a great hurry, I lied.

  He was in conference, they said, but anyway, he would not be able to alter the bank’s standard practices. At that a man with a glass eye, who was waiting at the counter behind me, snorted with laughter.

  So I would have to wait eight days, eight dreadful, dreary days, for death. They seemed to stretch out endlessly before me.

  I was so depressed that I walked up and down, up and down, outside a coffee house without any idea of how long I had been doing so. Finally I went in, simply to get rid of the awful fellow with the glass eye who had followed me from the bank. He was hovering nearby, and whenever I looked at him he immediately started searching around on the ground, as if he had lost something. He was wearing a bright check jacket that was much too tight and baggy black trousers with shiny patches that hung down like sacks round his legs. His left boot had a raised, egg-shaped leather patch sewn on, so that it looked as if he wore a signet ring on his toe.

  Scarcely had I found a seat than he came in and sat down at the next table. I thought he was going to try to cadge a loan from me and I was already getting my purse out when I caught the flash of a diamond on his fat, butcher’s fingers.

  Hour after hour I sat in the coffee house, feeling I was about to go mad from the strain on my nerves, but where else could I go? Home? Wander round the city? The one seemed worse than the other.

  The stale air, the incessant, inane clatter of the billiard balls, the perpetual hacking cough of a half-blind journalist opposite me, the spindle-shanked infantry officer, alternately picking his nose or combing his moustache with nicotine-stained fingers in front of a small pocket-mirror, the seething clump of vile, sweaty, gabbling Italians round the card table in the corner, now rapping their knuckles and squawking as they played their trumps, now hawking up a lump of phlegm and spewing it onto the floor: all that was bad enough, but to see it reflected two, three times over in the mirrors on the walls! It slowly sucked the blood out of my veins.

  It gradually began to grow dark, and a flat-footed, weak-kneed waiter poked at the gas lamps with a long pole until, with a shake of the head, he resigned himself to the fact that they were not going to light.

  Whenever I turned my head I met the wolfish squint of the man with the glass eye, who then quickly hid behind a newspaper or dipped his grubby moustache into the cup of coffee which he had long since finished. He had pulled his hard, round hat well down over his face so that his ears stuck out almost horizontally, but he showed no signs of wanting to leave.

  It was unbearable.

  I paid and left.

  As I was closing the door behind me, someone took the handle out of my hand. I turned round: that fellow again! I turned left for the Jewish quarter, but he came up close beside me and stopped me. “That’s the absolute limit!” I shouted at him.

  “To the right”, he said curtly.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  He gave me an insolent stare. “You’re Pernath!”

  “I assume you mean Herr Pernath?”

  He just gave a scornful snigger. “That’s enough fooling around. You’re coming with me.”

  “Are you mad? Who are you, anyway?”

  In reply he silently opened his jacket, revealing a worn, tin double-headed eagle pinned to the lining. I understood at once: the rogue was a secret policeman and he was arresting me.

  “But for God’s sake, tell me what I’m supposed to have done.”

  “You’ll find out soon enough. At the station”, he said rudely. “Off we go now. Quick march.”

  I told him I would prefer to take a cab.

  “Nothing doing.”

  We walked to the police station.

  A policeman led me to a door. The name on it read:

  ALOIS OTSCHIN
<
br />   Superintendent of Police

  “In you go”, said the policeman.

  Two grubby desks with three-foot high panels hiding the occupants stood facing each other; between them were a couple of rickety chairs; a portrait of the Emperor on the wall looked down on a goldfish tank on the windowledge.

  Otherwise the room was empty.

  Sticking out from under the left-hand desk were a club-foot and, beside it, a huge felt slipper, both surmounted by frayed grey trouser-legs. I heard a rustle of papers. Someone murmured a few words in Czech, and immediately afterwards the Superintendent appeared from behind the right-hand desk and came up to me. He was a short man with a grey, pointed beard and the peculiar habit of baring his teeth every time he was about to speak, like someone staring into bright sunlight. Then he would screw up his eyes behind his glasses, which gave him a frighteningly malicious expression.

  “Your name is Athanasius Pernath and you are –” he looked at a sheet of paper with nothing written on it, “– a gem engraver.”

  Immediately the club-foot under the other desk came to life; it rubbed against the leg of the chair, and I could hear the scratch of pen on paper.

  I concurred. “Pernath. Gem engraver.”

  “Well, we’re both agreed on that, Herr … Pernath … Pernath, yes, Pernath. Yes, yes.” Suddenly the Superintendent was full of warmth, as if he had just heard the most gratifying news. He stretched out both hands towards me and made grotesque attempts to sound harmless. “Tell me, Herr Pernath, what do you do all day?”

  “I think that is no business of yours, Herr Otschin”, I answered coolly.

  He screwed up his eyes for a moment then suddenly shot out a lightning-quick question, “Since when has the Countess been having this affair with Savioli?” but I had been expecting something of the kind and did not bat an eyelid.

  He interrogated me cunningly, darting from one topic to another in his attempt to get me to contradict myself, but although my heart was in my mouth with fright, I said nothing to give myself away and kept insisting that I had never heard the name of Savioli, was acquainted with Angelina from my father’s time and that she had frequently commissioned cameos from me.

  In spite of that, I had the feeling the Superintendent could tell whenever I was lying and was inwardly fuming that he had not managed to get anything out of me. He thought for a moment, then pulled me towards him by the lapel, gave a warning jerk of the thumb towards the left-hand desk and whispered in my ear, “Athanasius, your late father was my best friend. I want to save you, Athanasius. But you’ll have to tell me everything about the Countess. Everything, do you hear?”

  I had no idea what he was talking about. “What do you mean, you want to save me?” I asked him out loud.

  The club-foot stamped irritatedly on the floor. The Superintendent’s face went ashen-grey with hatred. His lip curled. He waited. I knew that he would pounce again (his shock tactics reminded me of Wassertrum), so I waited, too. A goat-like face, obviously belonging to the owner of the club-foot, appeared above the desk-panels, then suddenly the Superintendent yelled at me in an ear-splitting voice:

  “Murderer!”

  I was speechless with astonishment.

  With a sour look on his goat’s face, club-foot withdrew behind his desk.

  The Superintendent also seemed rather taken aback by my calm, but cleverly disguised his surprise by drawing up a chair and offering me a seat.

  “So you refuse to make the statement I have requested about the Countess, Herr Pernath?”

  “I have no statement to make, Superintendent, at least not the statement you expect. In the first place, I know nobody by the name of Savioli, and secondly I am firmly convinced that the suggestion that she is deceiving her husband is a vile calumny.”

  “Are you prepared to repeat that under oath?”

  My heart missed a beat. “Yes. Any time you like.”

  “Good. Hmm.”

  There was quite a long pause, during which the Superintendent appeared to be racking his brains. When he looked at me again, there was a rather obviously assumed expression of pain on his face. As he spoke, his voice vibrant with tears, I was immediately reminded of Charousek. “But Athanasius, you can tell me – me, your father’s old friend – me, who carried you in his arms when you were a little baby –” I could hardly stop myself from laughing: the man was at most ten years older than I, “tell me, Athanasius, it was self-defence, wasn’t it?”

  The goat’s face reappeared.

  “What was self-defence?” I asked, completely mystified.

  “The affair with … ZOTTMANN!” The Superintendent suddenly yelled the name at me, and it struck me like a blow from a dagger. Zottmann! Zottmann! The watch! Zottmann was the name engraved on the watch. The blood throbbed in my veins. That fiend Wassertrum had given me the watch to throw suspicion of the murder onto me.

  Immediately the Superintendent threw off his mask, bared his teeth and screwed up his eyes. “So you admit the murder, Pernath?”

  “But it’s all a mistake, a dreadful mistake. For the love of God, listen to me. I can explain everything, Superintendent!” I cried.

  “Now will you tell me everything about the Countess?” he quickly broke in. “I must point out that it will be counted in your favour.”

  “I can’t say any more than I have already. The Countess is innocent.”

  He clenched his teeth and turned to goat-face. “Take this down: Pernath confesses to the murder of Karl Zottmann, insurance agent –”

  I was seized by a blind fury. “You swine! How dare you?!” I roared at him and looked round for a heavy object.

  The next moment two policemen had grabbed me and handcuffed me. At that the Superintendent strutted before me like a cock on the dung-heap. “And this watch?” – he suddenly had the battered watch in his hand – “Was poor Zottmann still alive when you stole it from him or not?”

  I had calmed down now and simply stated: “The junkdealer, Anton Wassertrum, gave me that watch this morning.”

  There was a snort of laughter, and I saw the club-foot and the felt slipper perform a dance of joy under the desk.

  RACK

  My hands tied behind my back and followed by a policeman with his bayonet fixed, I had to walk through the lamplit streets. Scores of street urchins ran alongside, bawling and yelling, women flung open windows, waved their wooden spoons and shouted insults at me. In the distance appeared the massive stone cube of the Law Courts, with the inscription over the entrance:

  Avenging Justice Protects

  the Law-abiding Citizen

  Then I was passing through a huge gateway, along a corridor and into a room that reeked of kitchen smells. A man with a bushy beard and wearing a sabre, uniform jacket and cap, his bare feet protruding from long johns tied at the ankles, stood up, put the coffee mill he had been holding between his knees on one side, and ordered me to take all my clothes off. He looked through my pockets, taking out everything he found in them, and asked me if I was infested with any vermin.

  When I said no, he took the rings off my fingers and said that was all, now I could get dressed again. Then I was taken up several flights of stairs and along corridors with large, grey lockable chests standing in the window embrasures. The other side of the corridor was an unbroken row of iron doors with massive bolts and small, barred windows; above each burnt a gas jet.

  A giant of a gaoler with a military bearing – the first honest face I had seen for hours – opened one of the doors, pushed me into a dark, closet-like cavity with a pestilential stench, and locked the door behind me. I was in complete darkness, and found my bearings by feeling my way round. My knee bumped against a galvanised iron bucket. Finally – the room was so narrow I could hardly turn round – I managed to find the door-handle to hold on to. I was in a cell: double bunk-beds with straw mattresses ran along the walls on either side, the gap between them scarcely one pace wide. A barred window three feet square high above the back wall let in the
dull light of the night sky. The heat was unbearable, the cell filled with the smell of unwashed clothes.

  When my eyes had become accustomed to the darkness, I saw that one bunk was empty, but the other three were occupied by men in grey prisoners’ uniforms sitting with their elbows on their knees and their faces in their hands.

  Not one spoke a word.

  I sat on the empty bunk and waited. Waited. Waited.

  One hour.

  Two hours, three hours.

  Whenever I thought I heard a step outside, I sat up. Now, I thought, now they’re coming to fetch me to see the examining magistrate.

  Each time my hopes were dashed. The sound of the steps faded down the corridor.

  I tore open my collar, I felt I was going to suffocate. One by one, I heard the groans of the other prisoners as they stretched out on their mattresses.

  “Can’t we open the window up there?” I put my despairing question to the general darkness around, almost starting at the sound of my own voice.

  “No”, was the sour response from one of the straw mattresses.

  Nevertheless, I felt along the mildewed wall … a shelf at chest height … two jugs of water … a few stale crusts of bread. With difficulty I managed to clamber onto it, grasped the bars and pressed my face to the gap, so that at least I could breathe some fresh air. And there I stood, until my knees started to tremble, staring out into a monotony of dark-grey fog. The cold iron bars seemed to sweat.

  It must soon be midnight.

  Behind me I heard snoring. There was only one of them who seemed unable to sleep. He tossed and turned on the straw, sometimes moaning softly to himself.

  Would morning never come? There! A clock was chiming! And again.

  I counted with trembling lips. One – two – three! – Thank God, only a few more hours until it would begin to get light. The chiming continued. Four? Five? The sweat started pouring down my face. Six! – Seven!! … It was eleven o’clock! Only one hour had passed since I had last heard the clock strike.