The Golem Page 3

  A cheerful woman’s laugh came through the wall from the studio next to my room. A laugh – a cheerful laugh! – in these houses? There is no one living anywhere in the Ghetto capable of laughing cheerfully.

  Then it came back to me that a few days ago Zwakh, the old puppeteer, had told me that some young gentleman had taken the room from him, at a high rent, clearly in order to be able to meet his lady-love undisturbed. And now the new tenant’s expensive furniture had to be secretly carried up, gradually, so that no one in the house would notice, piece by piece every night. The kind-hearted old man had rubbed his hands with glee as he told me about it, childishly pleased at the clever way he had gone about it so that none of the other tenants would have any idea of the presence of the romantic couple. There were, he confided, entrances to the studio from three different buildings. It even had access through a trapdoor! And if you unlatched the iron door to the loft, which was very easy from the other side, you could get along the corridor past my room to the stairs in our house and use those as a way out.

  Once more the cheerful laughter rang out, releasing within me the vague memory of an aristocratic family and their luxurious apartment, to which I was often called to carry out minor repairs to costly objets d’art.

  Suddenly I heard a piercing scream from the room next door. Startled, I listened to what was going on. The iron door to the loft was rattled violently and the next moment a lady rushed into my room, her hair undone, her face as white as a sheet, and with a length of gold brocade flung round her bare shoulders.

  “Herr Pernath, hide me, for Christ’s sake hide me! Ask no questions, but just let me hide here!”

  Before I could answer, my door was torn open once again and then immediately slammed to. For just a second the face of Aaron Wassertrum was visible, grinning like some horrible mask.

  A round patch of gleaming light appears before me, and by the light of the moon I once more recognise the foot of my bed.

  Sleep is still spread over me like a heavy, woollen coat, and the name of Pernath stands in golden letters before my memory. Now where have I read that name? Athanasius Pernath?

  I think … I think that once, a long, long time ago, I took the wrong hat somewhere, and even then I was surprised that it fitted me so well, since my head has a very individual shape. And I looked into this hat that belonged to someone else … all those years ago, and … yes … there it was in letters of gold on the white silk lining:

  ATHANASIUS PERNATH

  I was wary of the hat, frightened of it, though I didn’t know why.

  Then suddenly the voice, the voice I have forgotten, the voice which kept asking me where the stone was that looked like a lump of fat, flies towards me like an arrow.

  Quickly, I imagine Rosina’s sharp profile with its sickly-sweet grin and thus manage to avoid the arrow, which immediately disappears into the darkness.

  Ah, Rosina’s face! It is stronger than that voice and its mindless prattling. And now that I’ll soon be back, safe and sound, in my room in Hahnpassgasse, I’ve nothing to worry about.

  I

  Unless I the feeling I have is mistaken, someone is following me up the stairs, always staying the same distance behind me, in order to visit me, and he must be just about on the last landing now.

  And now he must be coming round the corner where Hillel, the archivist at the Jewish Town Hall, lives, up the worn stone stairs and out onto the top-storey landing, with its floor of red brick.

  Now he is feeling his way along the wall, and now, right now, he must be reading my name on the door-plate, laboriously deciphering each letter in the dark.

  I positioned myself in the middle of the room, looking towards the entrance.

  The door opened, and he came in.

  He took only a few steps towards me, neither removing his hat nor saying a word of greeting.

  That is the way he behaves when he feels at home, I sensed, and I found it quite natural that he acted as he did and not otherwise.

  He put his hand into his pocket and took out a book.

  He spent a long time leafing through its pages.

  The cover of the book was of metal, with indentations in the form of rosettes and sigils filled with enamel and small stones.

  Finally he found the place he was looking for and pointed to it.

  I could make out the title of the chapter: Ibbur – ‘The Impregnation of Souls’.

  I automatically ran my eye over the page. Half of it was taken up with the large initial I in red and gold which was damaged at one edge.

  I was to repair it.

  The initial was not stuck onto the page, as I had previously seen in old books; rather, it seemed to consist of two thin pieces of gold leaf welded together in the middle and with their ends wrapped round the edge of the parchment.

  So there must be a hole cut in the page where the letter was?

  If that was the case, then the I must be visible in reverse on the next page?

  I turned the page and found that my assumption was correct. Without thinking, I read that page as well, and the one opposite.

  And I read on and on.

  The book was speaking to me, just as dreams can speak, only more clearly and much more distinctly. It was like a question that touched me to the heart.

  Words streamed out from an invisible mouth, took on life and came towards me. They twisted and turned before me, changing their shapes like slave-girls in their dresses of many colours, then they sank into the ground or turned into an iridescent haze in the air and vanished, making room for the next. For a little while each hoped I would choose it and not bother to look at the next.

  Some there were among them which strutted around like peacocks in shimmering garments, and their steps were slow and measured.

  Others were like queens, but aged and worn out, their eyelids painted, their wrinkles covered with an ugly layer of rouge, and with a lascivious twist to their lips.

  I looked past them to those that were still approaching, and my glance skimmed over long rows of grey figures with faces that were so ordinary, so devoid of expression, that it seemed impossible they could impress themselves on one’s memory.

  Then they dragged along a woman who was stark naked and as gigantic as a brazen colossus.

  For a second the woman stopped before me and bent down to me.

  Her eyelashes were as long as my whole body and she was pointing mutely to the pulse in her left wrist. Its throb was like an earthquake, and I sensed within her the life of a whole world.

  From the distance a wild, bacchic procession was charging towards us. Among them were a man and a woman with their arms clasped around each other; I could see them coming when they were still far off, and nearer and nearer came the din of the procession.

  Now I could hear the singing of the ecstatic dancers echoing all round me, and my eyes sought the entwined couple. But they had been transformed into a single figure, a hermaphrodite, half male, half female, sitting on a throne of mother-of-pearl.

  And the hermaphrodite wore a crown of red wood with a square piece at the front into which the worm of destruction had eaten mysterious runes.

  Trotting along one behind the other in a cloud of dust came a herd of small, blind sheep, animals the gigantic hermaphrodite kept to feed its bacchic horde.

  At times there were among the figures that came streaming from the invisible mouth some arisen from graves, with shrouds over their faces. And they halted before me, suddenly letting their winding sheets fall to the ground, staring greedily at my heart with predatory eyes and sending an icy shock through my brain that dammed up my blood like a river into which huge boulders have suddenly fallen from the sky, blocking its course.

  A woman floated past. I could not see her face, it was turned away and she was wearing a cloak of flowing tear-drops.

  Strings of people in fancy dress danced past, laughing, ignoring me. Only a pierrot turned and gave me a thoughtful look, then came back to plant himself in front of me an
d look me in the face as if it were a mirror. There was an eerie force in the bizarre faces he pulled and the movements of his arms, now hesitant, now lightning fast, that filled me with an irresistible urge to imitate him, to wink as he did, to shrug my shoulders and turn down the corners of my mouth. Then he was shouldered aside by the figures behind, impatient to push their way to the front and all wanting to show themselves to me.

  But none of these beings has any permanence.

  They are strings of pearls slipping along a silk thread, single notes of a melody pouring from the invisible mouth.

  It was no longer a book speaking to me now, it was a voice. A voice that wanted something from me which I could not understand, however hard I tried. A voice that tormented me with burning, incomprehensible questions.

  But the voice that spoke these visible words was dead and without echo. Every sound that appears in the here and now has many echoes, just as every object has one large shadow and many small shadows. But this voice no longer had any echoes, they must have long since died away and disappeared.

  I had read the book right to the end and was still holding it in my hands, and yet I felt as if I had been searching through my brain and not leafing through a book!

  Everything the voice had said to me I had carried within myself all my life, only it had been obscured and forgotten, had kept itself hidden from my thoughts until this day.

  I looked up.

  Where was the man who had brought me the book?

  Gone!?

  Will he return when it’s ready? Or am I to take it to him?

  But I could not remember him saying where he lived.

  I tried to recall his appearance, but failed.

  What had he been wearing? Was he old, was he young? And what had been the colour of his hair, his beard?

  Nothing, I could see nothing with my mind’s eye. Every picture I tried to conjure up disintegrated inexorably, even before it was properly fixed in my mind. I closed my eyes and pressed my hand against my lids in an attempt to catch just one tiny scrap of his portrait.

  Nothing, nothing.

  I stood in the middle of the room, looking at the door, just as I had been doing before, when he arrived, and pictured the scene: now he’s coming round the corner, now he’s crossing the red brick landing, now he’s reading the nameplate – Athanasius Pernath – on my door, and now he’s coming in. All to no avail. Not the faintest trace of a memory of what he looked like stirred within me.

  I looked at the book lying on the table and tried to summon up in my mind the hand that went with it, that had taken it out of the pocket and handed it to me. I could not even remember whether it had a glove on or was bare, whether it was young or wrinkled, had rings on its fingers or not.

  Then I had a curious idea. It was like an irresistible inspiration.

  I put on my coat and hat and went out into the corridor and down the stairs, then walked slowly back to my room, slowly, very slowly, just as he had done when he came. And when I opened the door, I saw that my chamber was shrouded in dusk. Had it not been broad daylight when I went out a few seconds ago?

  How long must I have stood down there, lost in thought, oblivious of the time?!

  I was trying to imitate the gait and expression of the unknown man when I could not even remember them. How could I expect to imitate him if I had no clue at all as to what he looked like!

  But what happened was different, completely different from what I imagined. My skin, my muscles, my body suddenly remembered, without revealing the secret to my brain. They made movements that I had not willed, had not intended.

  As if my limbs no longer belonged to me!

  All at once, when I took a few steps into the room, I found myself walking with a strange, faltering gait. That is the way someone walks who is constantly in fear of falling forward on to his face, I said to myself.

  Yes, yes, yes! That was the way he walked!

  I knew quite clearly: that is the way he is.

  I was wearing an alien face, clean-shaven, with prominent cheek-bones; I was looking at my room out of slanting eyes. I could sense it, even though I could not see myself.

  I wanted to scream out loud that that was not my face, wanted to feel it with my hand, but my hand would not obey me; it went into my pocket and brought out a book, just as he had done earlier.

  Then, suddenly, I was sitting down again at the table, without my hat and coat, and was myself, I – I, Athanasius Pernath.

  I was shaking with terror, my heart was pounding fit to burst and I knew that ghostly fingers had been poking round the crevices of my brain. They had left me a moment ago, but I could still feel the chill of their touch at the back of my head.

  Now I knew what the stranger was like, and I could have felt him inside me, whenever I wanted – if I had wanted. But to picture him, to see him before me, eye to eye, that I still could not do, nor will I ever be able to.

  I realised that he is like a negative, an invisible mould, the lines of which I cannot grasp, but into which I must let myself slip if I want to become aware of its shape and expression.

  In the drawer of the desk I kept an iron box. I decided to lock the book away in it and only take it out again when this strange mental derangement had left me. Only then would I set about repairing the broken capital I.

  So I picked up the book from the table: it felt as if I had not touched it at all.

  I took the box in my hand – the same feeling. It was as if my sense of touch had to pass through a long tunnel of deepest darkness before it surfaced in my consciousness, as if the objects were separated from me by a seam of time a year wide and were part of a past which had long since left me.

  The voice, which is circling round in the darkness, searching for me to torment me with the stone or the lump of fat, has passed me by without seeing me. I know that it comes from the realm of sleep. But everything that I have just experienced was real life, and I sense that is why it could not see me, why its search for me was vain.

  PRAGUE

  Standing beside me was Charousek, the collar of his thin, threadbare coat turned up; I could hear his teeth chattering. The poor student will catch his death of cold in this icy, draughty archway, I said to myself, and invited him to come over to my room with me, but he declined. “Thank you, Herr Pernath”, he murmured, shivering, “but unfortunately I have not much time left. I have to get to the city as quickly as possible. Anyway, we’d be soaked to the skin after a couple of steps if we went out into the street now. This downpour just won’t let up!”

  Showers of water swept across the roof-tops, streaming down the faces of the houses like floods of tears.

  If I turned my head a little I could see my window on the fourth floor across the street; with the rain trickling down, the panes looked like isinglass, opaque and lumpy, as if the glass were soggy. A filthy yellow stream was coursing down the street, and the archway was filling up with passers-by, who had all decided to wait for the storm to die down.

  Suddenly Charousek said, “There goes a bridal bouquet”, pointing to a spray of withered myrtle floating past in the dirty water. Someone behind us gave a loud laugh at this remark. When I turned round I saw that it was an elegantly dressed, white-haired old gentleman with a puffy, frog-like face. Charousek also looked round briefly and muttered something to himself.

  There was something unpleasant about the old man, and I turned my attention away from him to the discoloured houses squatting side by side before me in the rain like a row of morose animals. How eerie and run-down they all looked! Plumped down without thought, they stood there like weeds that had shot up from the ground. They had been propped against a low, yellow, stone wall – the only surviving remains of an earlier, extensive building – two or three hundred years ago, anyhow, taking no account of the other buildings. There was a half house, crooked, with a receding forehead, and beside it was one that stuck out like a tusk. Beneath the dreary sky, they looked as if they were asleep, and you could feel none of
the malevolent, hostile life that sometimes emanates from them when the mist fills the street on an autumn evening, partly concealing the changing expressions that flit across their faces.

  I have lived here for a generation and in that time I have formed the impression, which I cannot shake off, that there are certain hours of the night, or in the first light of dawn, when they confer together, in mysterious, noiseless agitation. And sometimes a faint, inexplicable quiver goes through their walls, noises scurry across the roof and drop into the gutter, and with our dulled senses we accept them heedlessly, without looking for what causes them.

  Often I dreamt I had eavesdropped on these houses in their spectral communion and discovered to my horrified surprise that in secret they are the true masters of the street, that they can divest themselves of their vital force, and suck it back in again at will, lending it to the inhabitants during the day to demand it back at extortionate interest as night returns.

  And when I review in my mind all the strange people who live in them, like phantoms, like people not born of woman who, in all their being and doing, seem to have been put together haphazardly, out of odds and ends, then I am more than ever inclined to believe that such dreams carry within them dark truths which, when I am awake, glimmer faintly in the depths of my soul like the after-images of brightly coloured fairy-tales.

  Then it is that a ghostly legend wakes to new life in the hidden recesses of my mind, the legend of the Golem, that man-made being that long ago a rabbi versed in the lore of the Cabbala formed from elemental matter and invested with mindless, automatic life by placing a magic formula behind its teeth. And just as the Golem returned to inert clay immediately the arcane formula was removed from its mouth, so, I imagine, must all these people fall lifeless to the ground the very second a minuscule something is erased in their brains – in some the glimmer of an idea, a trivial ambition, a pointless habit perhaps, in others merely a dull expectation of something vague and indefinite.