The Golem Read online

  Bit by bit I started to work out what must have happened. Wassertrum had tricked me into accepting Zottmann’s watch so that I would be suspected of murder. He must be the murderer himself, or how else could he have come into possession of the watch? If he had come across the corpse somewhere and then stolen the watch, he would certainly have claimed the thousand crowns reward which had been offered for information leading to the discovery of the missing man. But that could not be the case: the posters were still up in the streets, as I had clearly seen as I made my way to the prison.

  What was obvious was that the junk-dealer had informed against me; also that, as far as Angelina was concerned, he was in league with the Superintendent. Why else the interrogation about Savioli? On the other hand, that showed that Wassertrum had not yet managed to get hold of Angelina’s letters.

  I thought hard.

  Suddenly the whole plot was revealed to me with awful clarity, as if I had been there myself. Yes, that’s what must have happened: Wassertrum had searched my room with his police accomplice and must have secretly taken my strong box, suspecting it contained compromising material. He wouldn’t have been able to open it right away, since I had the key with me … perhaps he was in his lair, trying to break it open at this very moment.

  In a frenzy of desperation I shook the bars. In my mind I could see Wassertrum rifling through Angelina’s letters. If only I could tell Charousek what had happened, so that he could at least warn Savioli in time!

  For a moment I clung to the hope that the news of my arrest would have spread through the Jewish quarter like wildfire. I trusted Charousek as I would trust my guardian angel. Wassertrum could not match his fiendish cunning. “I will have him by the throat the very moment he thinks he has Dr. Savioli at his mercy”, Charousek had said.

  The next moment I rejected the whole idea and was seized with panic. What if Charousek came too late?

  Then Angelina was lost.

  I bit my lips till the blood came, and tore my breast with remorse at not having burnt the letters straight away. I swore a solemn oath that I would kill Wassertrum the moment I was free again.

  What did it matter to me whether I died by my own hand or on the gallows?!

  Not for a single moment did I doubt that the examining magistrate would believe me if I told him the story of the watch and of Wassertrum’s threats. I was sure to be free by the morrow, and at the very least the court would order Wassertrum’s arrest on suspicion of murder. I counted the hours, praying for them to pass more quickly. All the while I stared out into the black murk outside.

  After an interminable time it began to get lighter and, first as a dark patch, then clearer and clearer, a huge copper disc appeared out of the mist: the face of an old clock on a tower. But – yet another torment – the hands were missing.

  Then five o’clock struck.

  I heard the other prisoners waking up and starting a conversation in Czech. One voice seemed familiar. I turned round and clambered down from the shelf. There was the pock-marked Loisa sitting on the bunk opposite mine and staring at me in amazement. The other two were hardfaced rogues who scrutinised me contemptuously. “Embezzler, don’t you think?” the one asked his mate in an undertone, giving him a dig in the ribs at the same time. The other muttered some disparaging remark, rummaged around in his mattress, pulled out a black piece of paper and lay it on the floor. Then he splashed a little water from the jug onto it, knelt down and used it as a mirror as he combed his hair into a kiss-curl with his fingers. Then he dried the paper with solicitous care and hid it in his mattress again.

  “Pan Pernath, Pan Pernath.” Loisa kept muttering my name to himself, staring at me wide-eyed, as if he had seen a ghost.

  “You gentlemen appear to be acquainted, if you’ll allow the remark”, said the prisoner with uncombed hair in the slightly stilted manner characteristic of Viennese Czechs, sketching a mocking bow in my direction. “Permit me to introduce myself: Vóssatka’s the name, Black Vóssatka. Arson”, he added an octave lower, his voice throbbing with pride.

  The man with the kiss-curl spat through his teeth, stared at me contemptuously for a few seconds, then said laconically, pointing to his own chest, “Breaking and entering.”

  I remained silent.

  “Well, and what’s brought you here, Count?” the Viennese Czech asked after a short pause.

  I thought for a moment and then said calmly, “Murder in the course of robbery.”

  The two started in surprise, the scornful expression on their faces giving way to a look of utmost respect as, with one voice, they exclaimed, “An ’onour to share a cell with you.”

  When they saw that I took no notice of them, they withdrew to a corner where they held a whispered conversation. Then the one with the kiss-curl stood up and came over to me, silently felt my biceps and returned to his companion, shaking his head.

  In a low voice, so the other two would not hear, I asked Loisa, “I suppose you’re being kept on suspicion of having murdered Zottmann as well?”

  He nodded. “Yes, a long time now.”

  More hours passed. I closed my eyes and pretended to sleep. Suddenly I heard Loisa calling softly, “Herr Pernath, Herr Pernath!”

  “Yes?” I pretended to wake up.

  “Please – excuse me, Herr Pernath, but – please – do you know what Rosina’s doing? Is she at home?” the poor lad stammered. I felt extremely sorry for him as he stood there staring at me with his bloodshot eyes, convulsively wringing his hands with worry.

  “She doing well. She’s … she’s a … waitress at … the Old Toll House Tavern”, I lied. I could hear his sigh of relief.

  Two convicts brought in a tray with enamel bowls containing the liquid left over from boiling sausages and, without a word, left three in the cell. After a few more hours the bolts rattled and the gaoler took me to the examining magistrate. My knees trembled with suspense as we went up and down stairs.

  “Do you think it’s possible I might be let out today?” I asked the gaoler anxiously.

  I saw him repress his smile, out of pity for me. “Hm? Today? Hmm? God, everything’s possible.”

  A chill ran down my spine.

  Again I was looking at a door with a name on an enamel sign:

  Karl, Freiherr von Leisetreter

  Examining Magistrate

  Another bare room and another two desks with three-foot high panels. In front of one stood a tall, old man with a white bushy beard neatly parted down in the middle, a black frock coat, thick red lips and creaky boots.

  “You are Herr Pernath?”

  “Yes.”

  “Gem engraver?”

  “Yes.”

  “Cell 70?”

  “Yes.”

  “Held on suspicion of the murder of Karl Zottmann?”

  “Baron Leisetreter, may I first –”

  “Held on suspicion of the murder of Karl Zottmann?”

  “Probably. At least, that’s what I imagine. But –”

  “Have you made a confession?”

  “What is there to confess, Baron Leisetreter, I’m innocent?”

  “Have you made a confession?”

  “No.”

  “Remanded in custody. Gaoler, take the man out.”

  “Please listen to me, your Honour. It is imperative that I get home today. I have important things to do –”

  Behind the second desk someone cackled.

  Baron Leisetreter grinned.

  “Gaoler, take this man out.”

  The days crept by, week followed sluggish week, and still I was sitting in my cell. At twelve o’clock every day we were allowed out into the prison courtyard with the other convicts and prisoners on remand to trudge round on the damp earth for twenty minutes.

  Talking to each other was forbidden.

  In the middle of the yard was a bare, half-dead tree; an oval picture of the Virgin Mary painted on glass had grown into the bark. Along the walls ran a scraggy privet hedge, its leaves almost black
from soot; all around were the barred windows of our cells from which, occasionally, we could see a putty-coloured face with anaemic lips looking down at us.

  After the twenty minutes it was back up to our living tombs and bread, water and sausage broth; on Sundays we had putrid lentils.

  In all that time I had had only one further interrogation. Did I have any witnesses that ‘Herr’ Wassertrum had given me the watch?

  “Yes. Herr Shemaiah Hillel … that is …. no” (I remembered that he had not been there) “but Herr Charousek … no, he wasn’t there, either.”

  “In brief: no one else was present?”

  “No, no one else was there, Baron Leisetreter.”

  Again the cackle from behind the other desk followed by:

  “Gaoler, take this man out.”

  My anxiety about Angelina had turned into a dull feeling of resignation. There was no longer any point in worrying about her, I told myself; either Wassertrum had succeeded in carrying out his revenge or Charousek had stepped in.

  Now it was my concern for Miriam that was almost driving me mad. I imagined her waiting hourly for the ‘miracle’ to happen again, running out to meet the baker every morning and examining the bread with trembling hands; perhaps she was worrying herself sick with fears for my safety.

  Often during the night these anxieties would hound me from my sleep, and I would clamber up onto the shelf and stare out at the copper face of the clock in the tower, consumed with the desire that my thoughts might reach Hillel, might scream out to him to help Miriam and liberate her from the torment of waiting for a miracle.

  Then sometimes I would throw myself onto the straw mattress and hold my breath until I almost burst, trying to force the image of my double to appear so that I could send it to comfort her. Once it did even appear beside my bunk with the words Chabrat Zereh Aur Bocher in mirror writing on its breast. I was about to shout out loud with joy that everything would be all right now, but it disappeared into the ground before I could order it to go to Miriam.

  And why no news from my friends? I asked my cellmates whether letters were forbidden. They did not know. They had never received any, but then they had no one who could write to them, they said. The gaoler promised to make enquiries when the opportunity arose.

  My nails were all torn because I had to bite them to keep them short, and my hair was a tangled mass, for we were not allowed scissors, a comb or brush. Nor was there any water for washing.

  Most of the time I was fighting against nausea because they used soda instead of salt in the sausage broth, a prison regulation ‘to combat the sexual urge’.

  Time passed in awful, grey monotony; I was stretched out on the rack of the hours and minutes.

  There were moments – all of us at some time fell prey to them – when one or another would jump off his bunk and pace up and down for hour after hour like a wild animal, finally to collapse back onto his mattress and lie there listlessly waiting – waiting – waiting.

  When evening came the bugs appeared in droves, crisscrossing the walls like ants. It made me wonder why the fellow with the sabre and long johns had even bothered to ask me whether I was carrying any vermin. Perhaps the court was worried about cross-breeding producing new species of insects?

  Usually on Wednesday mornings a man with flapping trouser-legs and a slouch-hat over his piggy eyes and fat snout would appear – Dr. Rosenblatt, the prison doctor – to assure himself that we were all in the best of health. If any of us claimed to be ill, he would prescribe zinc ointment for rubbing on the chest, whatever the complaint.

  Once the president of the district court – a tall, perfumed scoundrel from so-called ‘good’ society who had the crudest vices written all over his face – even accompanied him, to see that everything was in order or, as my cell-mate with the kiss-curl put it, “whether any of us ’as topped ’isself.”

  I went over to put a request to him, at which he immediately jumped behind the gaoler, pointed a revolver at me and screamed, “What do you want?”

  I asked politely whether there were any letters for me. For answer Dr. Rosenblatt gave me a push in the chest and then quickly made his escape. The president of the court also left, jeering at me from the safety of the doorway that I would do better to confess to the murder. Only then would I receive any letters this side of the tomb.

  I had long since become accustomed to the heat and bad air. I was shivering with cold all the time, even when the sun was shining. The occupants of two of the bunks had changed several times, but I ignored the newcomers. One week it would be a pickpocket and a footpad, the next a counterfeiter and a fence.

  Everything happened one day, was forgotten the next. Nothing could touch me apart from my gnawing concern for Miriam. There was only one thing that had made an impression on me, sometimes a distorted version even haunted my dreams:

  I had been standing on the shelf to stare up at the sky when I suddenly felt a sharp object sticking into my thigh. When I looked I discovered it was the file which had made a hole in my pocket and found its way into the lining of my jacket. It must have been there for a long time, otherwise the man who checked my clothes would have found it. I took it out and tossed it onto my straw mattress. When I climbed down from the shelf, it had disappeared, and I had no doubt that it could only have been Loisa who had taken it. A few days later they took him out to transfer him to a cell on the next floor down. It was quite wrong, said the gaoler, for two remand prisoners such as Loisa and myself, who were accused of the same crime, to be kept in the same cell.

  With all my heart I hoped the poor lad might manage to escape with the help of the file.

  MAY

  When I asked him what the date was – the sunshine was as hot as in the middle of summer and the tired tree in the courtyard had put out a few buds – the gaoler was silent for a moment, but then he whispered to me that it was the fifteenth of May. Actually he shouldn’t be telling me, he added, it was forbidden to talk to the prisoners at all, and especially those who had not confessed were supposed to be kept in the dark about the passage of time.

  Three whole months I had been in prison, and still no news from outside!

  In the evening, the soft sound of a piano came through the barred window that was now left open on warm days. One of the convicts told me that it was the daughter of the warder who lived below playing.

  Day and night I dreamt of Miriam. I wondered how she was. At times I had a comforting feeling, as if my thoughts had reached her, were standing by her bedside while she slept and had placed a cool hand on her brow.

  At other times, when my cell-mates were taken to be interrogated one after the other, all except me, I had moments of despair in which a shadowy fear that she was long dead took me by the throat.

  Then I would try to question destiny as to whether she was alive or dead, sick or well. I would take a handful of straws out of my mattress and read the answer from the number. And almost every time it was the ‘wrong’ answer, and I searched through my mind for a glimpse into the future. I tried to trick my soul, which was concealing the secret from me, by asking what appeared on the surface to be a different question: Would the day ever come when I would be happy and once more able to laugh? In such cases the oracle always answered yes, and then for an hour I rejoiced and was glad.

  Just as a plant sprouts and grows in secret, so had a deep, unfathomable love for Miriam gradually awoken within me, and I could not understand how I had been able to sit and talk with her all those times without being aware of it.

  At such moments my trembling hope that she, too, might be thinking of me with similar feelings would often harden to a certainty, and if I heard a step in the corridor outside, I was almost afraid that they might come and release me, and my dream would be torn to shreds by the harshness of reality outside.

  Over the long months of my imprisonment my hearing had become so sharp that I heard even the quietest sounds. Every day at nightfall I heard a carriage in the distance and racked my
brains to think who might be in it. There was something strange in the idea that there were people outside who could do whatever they liked, who could move around and go here or there and yet not feel intoxicated by it. That I should ever be in that happy position again, able to walk through the streets in the sunshine, I was no longer capable of imagining. The day when Angelina had held me in her arms seemed to be part of an existence that belonged to the distant past. When I looked back on it, it was with the kind of mild sadness that creeps over you when you open a book and find between the pages a withered flower once worn by the beloved of your youth.

  Would old Zwakh still be sitting in the Old Toll House every evening with Prokop and Vrieslander, embarrassing Eulalia to the roots of her old maid’s soul? No, it was May, the time when he went with his puppet theatre touring the provincial backwaters and playing Bluebeard on a green meadow outside the town gates.

  I was alone in my cell. Vóssatka, the arsonist and my sole companion for the last week, had been taken to the examining magistrate several hours ago.

  His interrogation was lasting a remarkably long time.

  There. The iron bar on the door clanked and, beaming with delight, Vóssatka rushed in, threw a bundle of clothes onto his bunk and began to change with lightning speed. He threw his prison uniform onto the floor, accompanying each item with an oath.

  “Not been able to prove a thing, not a sausage, the bunglers. Arson! I ask you!” He pulled down his lower lid with his index finger. “You have to be up early to catch Black Vóssatka. Was the wind, I said. And never budged from that. Sir Blowhard Wind, you can lock him up, if you can catch him. Just wait for this evening. Loisitchek’s’ll really be humming.” He threw out his arms and danced a few steps of a polka. “The springtime of lo-ove will soon fade away”, he sang. With a smack he slapped a hard hat sporting a blue-spotted jay’s feather onto his head. “Oh, yes, you’ll be interested to hear this, Count. D’you know the latest? Your friend, that Loisa’s escaped! I heard it when I was up there with the bunglers. Towards the end of last month it was. By now he’ll be over the hills and – poof!” he snapped his fingers, “far away.”