The Golem Read online

  The following year he became involved in a mysterious sequence of scandals. While still married to his first wife, his affection for Philomena Bernt, who finally became his second wife in 1905, drew him into a series of duels with the officer corps of one of Prague’s smart regiments. Then there was scandal at the bank. Meyrink was rumoured to be relying on advice from the spirit world to direct the bank’s affairs. There was also talk of money having been misappropriated. He was thrown into prison and, perhaps as a result of rough treatment was temporarily paralysed. (The author’s experiences in prison are also fed into The Golem.)

  A few months later he was cleared of the charges and he resumed his writing and his esoteric researches. He was haunted by horrific apparitions of a green face – and these visitations surfaced in a later novel, Das grüne Gesicht. He also took to travelling on the astral sphere and, it is said, that he or rather his astral double actually manifested itself to his wife one evening. So the Golem is in every sense the artist’s double. The original title for the book, however, was The Eternal Jew and it seems that work on it may have been started as early as 1907. In the same year he and Richard Teschner were working together on an unsuccessful project to establish a puppet theatre. This too is in the novel, this fascination with puppets, moving figures with human shapes but no human life.

  Writing was by now a matter of financial necessity for him. Though he had been exonerated, the scandal of 1902 had ruined him. He moved away from Prague and the bulk of The Golem must have been written in Bavaria. At the same time he laboured on a translation of the complete works of Dickens into German, Dicken’s taste for city life, for grotesque characters and heightened sentiment was Meyrink’s too and is patent in The Golem. The final version of the story was related by Meyrink into a dictaphone and transcribed by a secretary. It was first published as a serial in Die Weissen Blatter and then sold to the publisher Kurt Wolff in Leipzig for a lump sum. When the novel appeared in 1915 it was received with immediate acclaim and rapidly sold 200,000 copies.

  ‘Lurking and waiting … waiting and lurking … the terrible perpetual motto of the Ghetto.’ Cabalism is literary occultism par excellence. The Cabalist and the novelist are jointly committed to the magical creation of a world through the manipulation of words. Some novels – and the novels of David Lindsay and Charles Williams are examples – achieve an effect which is not a purely literary one and an effect which lingers on in the mind of the reader long after the reading of the book has been concluded. The Golem is one of these novels. ‘The path I am pointing out to you is strewn with strange happenings: dead people you have known will rise up and talk with you! They are only images!’.

  Robert Irwin

  1985

  SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Y. Caroutch (ed.) Gustav Meyrink = Cahiers de l’Herne, vol. 30 (1976)

  E. Frank, Gustav Meyrink (1957)

  P. Mariel (ed.) Dictionnaire des Sociétés Secrètes en Occident (1971)

  L. Pauwels and J. Bergier, The Morning of the Magicians (1963)

  P. Raabe, The Era of Expressionism (1974)

  G. Scholem, Kabbalah (1974)

  J. Webb, The Occult Establishment (1981)

  L. Eisner, The Haunted Screen (1969)

  SLEEP

  The moonlight is shining on the foot of my bed, lying there like a large, bright, flat stone.

  Whenever the disc of the full moon begins to shrink and its right-hand side starts to wither – like a face approaching old age, in which one cheek becomes hollow and wrinkled first – that is the time when at night I am seized by a dark and agonising restlessness. I am not asleep, nor am I awake, and in my reverie things I have seen mingle with things I have read or heard, like rivers of different colour or clarity meeting.

  I had been reading about the life of the Buddha before I went to bed, and one passage kept on running through my mind in a thousand variations, going back to the beginning again and again:

  “A crow flew to a stone which looked like a lump of fat, thinking perhaps it had found something good to eat. But when the crow found that it was not good to eat, it flew off. Like the crow that went to the stone, so do we – we, the tempters – leave Gautama, the ascetic, because we have lost our pleasure in him.”

  And the image of the stone that looked like a lump of fat grew in my mind to enormous dimensions:

  I am walking along a dried-up river-bed, picking up smooth pebbles, bluish-grey ones with specks of glittering dust. I rack my brains, but I still have no idea what to do with them. Then I find black ones with patches of sulphurous yellow, like the petrified attempts of a child to form crude, blotched salamanders.

  I want to throw them away, these pebbles, far away from me, but they keep just falling out of my hand, and I cannot banish them from my sight.

  All the stones that ever played a role in my life push up out of the earth around me. Some are struggling clumsily to work their way up through the sand to the light, like huge, slate-coloured crabs when the tide comes in, as if they were doing their utmost to catch my eye, in order to tell me things of infinite importance. Others, exhausted, fall back weakly into their holes and abandon all hope of ever being able to deliver their message.

  At times I emerge with a start from the half-light of this reverie and see again for a moment the moonlight lying on the humped cover at the bottom of the bed like a large, bright, flat stone, only to grope my way blindly once more after my departing consciousness, restlessly searching for the stone which is tormenting me, the one which must lie hidden somewhere in the debris of my memory and which looks like a lump of fat.

  The end of a rainwater pipe must once have reached the ground beside it, I imagine, bent at an obtuse angle, its rim eaten away by rust, and I furiously try to force such an image into my mind in order to beguile my startled thoughts and lull them back to sleep.

  I do not succeed.

  Again and again, again and again, with idiotic persistence, tireless as a shutter blown by the wind against the wall at regular intervals, an obstinate voice inside me keeps insisting, ‘That is something else, something quite different, that is not the stone that looks like a lump of fat.’

  There is no escape from the voice.

  A hundred times I object that that is all beside the point, but, although it goes silent for a little while, it starts up again, imperceptibly at first, with its stubborn ‘Yes, yes, you may be right, but it’s still not the stone that looks like a lump of fat’.

  I am slowly filled with an unbearable sense of my own powerlessness.

  I do not know what happened after that. Did I voluntarily give up all resistance, or did my thoughts overpower me and bind me?

  All I know is that my body is lying asleep in bed and my senses are detached and no longer tied to it.

  ‘Who is this ‘I’, now?’, is the question that suddenly occurs to me; but then I remember that I no longer possess an organ with which I can ask questions; and I am afraid that the voice will start up again with its endless interrogation about the stone and the lump of fat.

  So I turn away.

  DAY

  I suddenly found myself standing in a gloomy courtyard and through the reddish arch of a gateway opposite, across the narrow, filthy street, I could see a Jewish junk-dealer leaning against a shop-front which had bits of old iron, broken tools, rusty stirrups and skates, and all kinds of other dead things hanging round the open doorway.

  And this image had about it that tormenting monotony which characterises all impressions which, like pedlars, cross the threshold of our perception with a certain regularity, day in, day out, and did not arouse either curiosity or surprise within me.

  I became aware that I had been living in this neighbourhood for a long time now.

  In spite of its contrast with what I had perceived only shortly beforehand, and with the manner in which I had come here, this awareness did not make any deep impression on me either.

  As I made my way up the worn steps to my room, musing in pass
ing on the greasy appearance of the stone treads, I was suddenly visited by the notion that at some time I must have heard or read of a strange comparison between a stone and a lump of fat.

  Then I heard footsteps going up the higher flights ahead of me, and when I reached my door I saw that it was Rosina, the fourteen-year-old red-head belonging to the junk-shop owner, Aaron Wassertrum. I had to squeeze past her, and she stood with her back against the banisters, arching her body lasciviously. She had her grubby hands curled round the iron rail for support and I could see the pale gleam of her bare arms in the murky half-light.

  I avoided her glances.

  Her teasing smile and waxy, rocking-horse face disgust me. I feel she must have white, bloated flesh, like the axolotl I saw just now in the tank of salamanders in the pet-shop. I find the eye-lashes of people with red hair as repulsive as those of rabbits.

  I unlocked my door and quickly slammed it behind me.

  From my window I could see the junk-dealer, Aaron Wassertrum, standing outside his shop. He was leaning against the wall of the arched opening, nipping at his fingernails with a pair of pliers.

  Was the red-haired Rosina his daughter or his niece? He did not resemble her at all.

  Among the Jewish faces that appear day by day in Hahnpassgasse I can clearly recognise different tribes, whose distinguishing features can no more be blurred by the close relationship of particular individuals than oil and water can be mixed. You cannot say, ‘Those two are brothers, or father and son.’ This man belongs to one tribe and that to another; that is the most that can be read from these features.

  Even if Rosina did look like the junk-dealer, what would that prove?

  These tribes harbour a secret loathing and revulsion for each other, which can even burst through the barriers of close blood-ties; but they know how to conceal it from the outside world, as one would guard a dangerous secret. Not one of them gives the slightest hint of it, and in this accord they resemble blind people filled with hatred who are clinging to a rope dripping with slime: some grasp it tight with both fists, others keep a reluctant hold with one finger, but all are possessed by the superstitious fear that they would be doomed to perdition the moment they abandoned their communal security and separated themselves from the rest.

  Rosina is one of that red-haired tribe which is even more repulsive in its physical characteristics than the others; the men are pigeon-chested and have long, skinny necks with protuberant Adam’s apples. Everything about them is freckled, and their whole life through they suffer the torments of lust, these men, and fight an unending, losing battle against their desires, on the rack of a constant, loathsome fear for their health.

  It was not at all clear to me how I had come to assume Rosina and the junk-dealer, Aaron Wassertrum, were in any way related. I have never seen her anywhere near the old man, nor ever noticed them calling out to each other.

  But she was almost always in our courtyard or hanging around the dark corners and passages of our house.

  I am sure that all the other inhabitants of the building think she is a close relative or some kind of ward of the old junk-dealer, but I am convinced that not one of them would be able to give a reason for this supposition.

  I wanted to drag my thoughts away from Rosina, so I looked out of the open window of my room, down into Hahnpassgasse. As if he had felt my eye light on him, Aaron Wassertrum suddenly turned his face up towards me, a horrible, expressionless face, with its round, fish’s eyes and gaping hare-lip. He seemed to me like a human spider that can sense the slightest touch on its web, however unconcerned it pretends to be.

  And whatever did he live on? What were his thoughts, his plans? I had no idea. The same dead, worthless objects hang down from the rim of the arched entrance to his shop, day after day, year in, year out. I could have drawn them with my eyes shut: the buckled tin trumpet without any keys, the picture painted on yellowing paper with that strange arrangement of soldiers; and in front, piled up close to each other on the ground so that no one can cross the threshold of his shop, a row of round, iron hotplates from kitchen stoves.

  These objects never increase or decrease in number, and whenever the occasional passer-by stops and asks the price of this or that, the junk-dealer falls prey to a violent agitation. It is horrible to see then how the two parts of his hare-lip curl up as he spews out a torrent of incomprehensible words in an irritated, gurgling, stuttering bass, so that the potential buyer loses all desire to pursue the matter further, shrinks back and hurries off.

  Quick as a flash Wassertrum’s gaze had slipped away from my eye to rest with studied interest on the bare walls of the neighbouring house just beyond my window. What could he find to look at there? The house turns its back on Hahnpassgasse and its windows look down into the courtyard! There is only one that gives onto the street.

  By chance, someone seemed to have entered the rooms next door – I think they form part of some rambling studio – that are on the same storey as mine; through the wall I can hear a male and a female voice talking to each other.

  But it would have been impossible for the junk-dealer to have heard that from down below!

  Someone moved outside my door, and I guessed it must be Rosina, still standing out there, hot with expectation that I might yet call her in after all.

  And below, on the half-landing, Loisa, the pockmarked adolescent, would be waiting with bated breath to see if I would open my door; even here in my room I could feel the air quiver with his hatred and seething jealousy. He is afraid to come any closer because Rosina might see him. He knows he is dependent on her, as a hungry wolf is dependent on its keeper, yet most of all he would like to leap up and abandon himself to a frenzy of rage.

  I sat down at my table and took out my tweezers and gravers, but no creative work would come out right, and my hand was not steady enough to clear out the fine lines of the Japanese engraving.

  There is a bleak, gloomy atmosphere hanging round this house that quietens my soul, and old images keep surfacing within me.

  Loisa and his twin brother Jaromir cannot be much more than a year older than Rosina. I could scarcely remember their father, a baker who specialised in communion wafers, and now, I believe, they are looked after by an old woman, though I have no idea which one it is of the many who live in the house, like so many toads hiding under their stones. She looks after the two boys, that is, she provides them with lodgings; for that they have to hand over to her whatever they manage to beg or steal. Does she feed them as well? I shouldn’t imagine so, the old woman comes home very late at night.

  They say her job is laying out corpses.

  I often used to see Loisa, Jaromir and Rosina playing together innocently in the yard when they were children.

  Those times are long since past.

  Loisa spends the whole day chasing after the red-haired Jew girl. Sometimes his search is fruitless, and if he can’t find her anywhere he creeps up to my door and waits, a grimace on his face, for her to make her surreptitious way up here. At such times, as I sit at my work, I can see him in my mind’s eye, lurking outside in the crooked corridor, listening with his head bent forward on his gaunt neck.

  Sometimes the silence is broken by a furious outburst of noise: Jaromir, who is deaf and dumb, and whose head is permanently filled with a crazed lust for Rosina, roams the house like a wild animal, and the unarticulated howling he emits, half out of his mind with jealousy and suspicion, is so eerie that it freezes the blood in your veins.

  He is looking for the pair of them. He always assumes they are together somewhere, hiding in one of the thousand filthy nooks and crannies, and he rushes about in a blind frenzy, goaded on by the idea that he must be at his brother’s heels, to make sure there is nothing going on with Rosina that he doesn’t know about.

  And it is precisely this unceasing torment of the deaf-mute which, I suspect, keeps provoking Rosina into carrying on with his brother. Whenever her ardour or her willingness abate, Loisa always thinks up some ne
w piece of nastiness to arouse her lust once more. For example, they let Jaromir catch them in the act, apparently or really, and then, when he is beside himself with fury, slyly lure him into dark corridors where they have set up vicious traps – rusty barrel-hoops that shoot up when he treads on them and iron rakes with the points sticking up – which he trips over, bloodying his hands and knees.

  From time to time, just to tighten the screw, Rosina will think up some devilish trick of her own. All at once she will change her behaviour towards Jaromir, acting as if she has suddenly taken a liking to him. With the smile that is permanently fixed on her face, she hurriedly tells the poor deaf-mute things that drive him almost insane with arousal; to communicate with him she has invented a mysterious, only half-comprehensible sign-language which never fails to entangle him in a net of uncertainty and hope that drains all the strength from him.

  Once I saw him standing in front of her in the courtyard, and she was talking to him so insistently, and with such vigorous gestures and lip movements that I thought he would collapse with nervous strain at any moment. The sweat was pouring down his face with the superhuman effort it required of him to grasp the meaning of a message which was deliberately hurried, deliberately unclear.

  He spent the whole of the following day in a fever of expectation on the steps of a half-ruined house farther along the narrow, filthy Hahnpassgasse, until it was too late for him to beg for his few kreutzer on the street corners. And when he arrived home in the evening, half dead from hunger and agitation, his foster-mother had long since locked the door.