The Golem Read online

  Across the street Rosina and the old man disappeared in the darkness of the entrance hall.

  PUNCH

  We had opened the window to get rid of the tobacco smoke from my tiny room. The cold night wind blew in and set the shaggy coats hanging on the door gently swinging to and fro.

  “Prokop’s noble specimen of the hatter’s art is tempted to fly away”, said Zwakh, pointing to the musician’s huge floppy hat, the broad brim of which was beginning to flap like a pair of black wings.

  Joshua Prokop gave a cheery wink. “It probably wants to –”

  “– go to Loisitchek’s, to listen to the dance band”, interrupted Vrieslander.

  Prokop laughed and beat time to the music that was borne across the roofs on the thin winter air. Then he picked up my old, battered guitar that was leaning against the wall, pretended to pluck its broken strings and sang a strange song in a squawking falsetto, exaggerating the pronunciation of its canting jargon:

  A dusty hen

  With gelt to cough;

  A zaftik naffka

  For your kife;

  Jack-a-dandy,

  Snout and scoff:

  Nothing but fressing –

  That’s the life.

  “Shows a natural aptitude for thieves’ slang, doesn’t he?” laughed Vrieslander, joining in a reprise with his rumbling bass:

  Jack-a-dandy,

  Snout and scoff:

  Nothing but fressing –

  That’s the life.

  Zwakh explained. “It’s a peculiar song that Nephtali Schaffranek – the meshuggenah with the green eyeshade – croaks out every night at Loisitchek’s; there’s a dolled-up woman plays the accordion and joins in the words. It’s an interesting dive, you should come along with us some time, Pernath. Perhaps later on, when we’ve run out of punch. What do you think? As a birthday treat for you?”

  “Yes, you should come along with us”, said Prokop, closing the window, “it really is worth seeing.”

  Then we went back to our hot punch, each one occupied with his own thoughts. Vrieslander was carving away at a puppet.

  Zwakh broke the silence. “You literally cut us off from the outside world, Joshua, when you closed that window. Since then, no one’s said a word.”

  “I was just thinking about the way those coats started flapping earlier on”, Prokop answered quickly, as if to excuse his silence. “Isn’t it strange the way the wind makes inanimate objects move? Doesn’t it look odd when things which usually just lie there lifeless suddenly start fluttering. Don’t you agree? I remember once looking out onto an empty square, watching huge scraps of paper whirling angrily round and round, chasing one another as if each had sworn to kill the others; and I couldn’t feel the wind at all since I was standing in the lee of a house. A moment later they seemed to have calmed down, but then they were seized once more with an insane fury and raced all over the square in a mindless rage, crowding into a corner then scattering again as some new madness came over them, until finally they disappeared round a corner.

  There was just one thick newspaper that couldn’t keep up with the rest. It lay there on the cobbles, full of spite and flapping spasmodically, as if it were out of breath and gasping for air.

  As I watched, I was filled with an ominous foreboding. What if, after all, we living beings were nothing more than such scraps of paper? Could there not be a similar unseeable, unfathomable ‘wind’ blowing us from place to place and determining our actions, whilst we, in our simplicity, believe we are driven by our own free will? What if the life within us were nothing other than some mysterious whirlwind? The wind of which it says in the Bible, ‘Thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth’? Do we not sometimes dream we have plunged our hands into deep water and caught silvery fish, when all that has happened is that our hands have been in a cold draught?”

  “Prokop, you’re talking like Pernath. What’s wrong with you?” asked Zwakh, giving the musician a suspicious look.

  “It’s the story about the Book of Ibbur that we heard earlier – pity you came too late to hear it – that’s given him such strange ideas”, said Vrieslander.

  “A story about a book?”

  “Actually about the odd appearance of a man who brought a book. Pernath doesn’t know what he’s called, where he lives or what he wanted, and although he says his appearance was very striking, he can’t describe it.”

  Immediately Zwakh pricked up his ears. “That’s remarkable”, he said after a pause. “Did this stranger happen to be smooth-faced, without any growth of beard? Did he have slanting eyes?”

  “I think so”, I said. “That is, I … I’m quite certain of it. Do you know him?”

  The puppeteer shook his head. “It’s just that it reminded me of the Golem.”

  Vrieslander put down his knife. “Golem? I’ve heard so many people talk about that. Do you know anything about the Golem, Zwakh?”

  “Who can claim to know anything about the Golem?” replied Zwakh with a shrug of the shoulders. “Everyone says it’s a myth until one day there’s something happens in the streets that brings it back to life. Then for a while everybody talks about it, and the rumours grow and grow until they’re so blown up, so exaggerated they become completely implausible and everyone dismisses them. The origin of the story is supposed to go back to the sixteenth century. A rabbi, following instructions in a lost book of the Cabbala, is said to have created an artificial man, the so-called Golem, as a servant to help him ring the synagogue bells and do other menial tasks.”

  But it had never become a true human being, Zwakh went on. It led a kind of semi-conscious, vegetable existence, and that only by day, so it is said, through the power of a scrap of paper with a magic formula that was placed behind its teeth, attracting free stellar energy from the cosmos. And when, one evening before prayers, the rabbi forgot to take this seal out of the Golem’s mouth, it went raging through the streets in the dark, crushing everything that happened to be in its way. Finally the rabbi managed to block the creature in its path and destroy the scrap of paper. At that, the Golem sank lifeless to the ground. Nothing was left of it but the dwarf clay figure which can be seen over there in the Old-New Synagogue even today.

  “That same rabbi is supposed to have been summoned to the Emperor in the castle on the Hradschin, where he called up the spirits of the dead in visible form”, added Prokop. “Modern scientists claim he must have used a magic lantern.”

  “A magic lantern! People will believe anything nowadays”, Zwakh rejoindered, unperturbed. “As if Emperor Rudolf, who had devoted his whole life to such matters, would not have seen through a crude trick like that right away.

  It is true that I don’t know where the legend of the Golem originated, but of this I am sure: there is something abroad in the Jewish quarter, something connected with it that never dies. My ancestors have lived here for many generations and I think I can say that there is no one who has more evidence, ancestral and personal, of the periodic appearance of the Golem than I have.”

  Zwakh suddenly stopped talking and we, too, could feel how his thoughts had wandered off into the past. Seeing him sitting there at the table, his head propped in his hand, the light emphasising the strange contrast between the youthful redness of his cheeks and the whiteness of his hair, I could not help comparing his features with the mask-like faces of his puppets which he had shown me so often.

  Strange how like them the old man was! The same profile, the same expression!

  There are, I felt, some things on earth which cannot keep apart. As I contemplated Zwakh’s simple life, it suddenly seemed monstrous, even uncanny, that someone like him, even though he had had a better education than his forebears and been intended for the acting profession, should have suddenly returned to the shabby puppet booths and fairgrounds of his ancestors, putting the same puppets with which they had made their meagre living through the same clumsy movements and acting out the same threadbare p
lots. I realised that he was unable to abandon them. They were part of his life, and when he was far away from them, they changed into thoughts which lodged in his mind and made him unsettled and restless until he returned home. That is why he looked after them so lovingly and proudly dressed them up in their tawdry finery.

  “Aren’t you going to tell us more, Zwakh?” asked Prokop, with a questioning look at Vrieslander and myself, to see whether we agreed.

  The old puppeteer began hesitantly. “I don’t know where to begin”, he said, “the story of the Golem is so difficult to pin down. It’s just like Pernath said, he knows exactly what the stranger looked like, but he can’t describe him. Roughly every thirty-three years something happens in these streets which is not especially exciting in itself and yet which creates a sense of horror for which there is no justification nor any satisfactory explanation: at these intervals a completely unknown person, smooth-faced, with a yellow complexion and mongoloid features, dressed in faded, old-fashioned clothes and with a regular but oddly stumbling gait, as if he were going to fall down on his face at any moment, is seen going through the Ghetto from the direction of Altschulgasse until … the figure suddenly vanishes.

  Usually it turns a corner and disappears.

  Once, so it is said, it walked in a circle and returned to the point from which it started out, an ancient house close to the Synagogue.

  On the other hand, you come across agitated people who maintain they saw it coming round a corner towards them. Although it was quite clearly walking towards them, it gradually grew smaller and smaller, like the figure of someone disappearing into the distance, until it finally disappeared.

  Sixty-six years ago it must have made a particularly profound impression; I can still remember – I was just a little boy at the time – how they searched the house in Altschulgasse from top to bottom. All that they discovered was that there really was a room in the house with a barred window to which there was no access. They hung washing from all the windows, so as to check the rooms from the street, and that’s how they found out about it. As there was no other way in, a man had himself let down by a rope from the roof in order to look in. Scarcely had he reached the window, however, than the rope broke and the unfortunate man smashed his skull on the pavement. And when they decided to try and repeat the experiment some time later, they could not agree on which was the right window and gave up the whole idea.

  It was about thirty-three years ago that I encountered the Golem myself for the first time in my life. It was coming towards me in a passageway and we almost knocked against each other. Even today I still can’t work out precisely what was going on inside me. You don’t go around, day in, day out, expecting to meet the Golem, for God’s sake, and yet I’m certain, absolutely certain, that in the instant before I saw it something inside me screamed ‘The Golem!’ And at that very moment something came stumbling out of the darkness of a doorway and an unknown figure passed me. A second later a stream of pale, agitated faces was coming towards me, bombarding me with questions. Had I seen it?! Had I seen it?!

  When I answered them, it felt as if my tongue were suddenly free, although before I had not been aware of being unable to speak. I felt astonished that I could move my limbs, and I realised that I must have suffered from a kind of paralysis, even if only for a fraction of a second.

  I have thought about this long and often, and I think that the closest approach to the truth is something like this: once in every generation a spiritual epidemic spreads like lightning through the Ghetto, attacking the souls of the living for some purpose which is hidden from us, and causing a kind of mirage in the shape of some being characteristic of the place that, perhaps, lived here hundreds of years ago and still yearns for physical form.

  Perhaps it is right here among us, every hour of the day, only we cannot perceive it. You can’t hear the note from a vibrating tuning fork until it touches wood and sets it resonating. Perhaps it is simply a spiritual growth without any inherent consciousness, a structure that develops like a crystal out of formless chaos according to a constant law.

  Who can say?

  Just as on sultry days the static electricity builds up to unbearable tension until it discharges itself in lightning, could it not be that the steady build-up of those never-changing thoughts that poison the air in the Ghetto lead to a sudden, spasmodic discharge? A spiritual explosion blasting our unconscious dreams out into the light of day and creating, as the electricity does the lightning, a phantom that in expression, gait and behaviour, in every last detail, would reveal the symbol of the soul of the masses, if only we were able to interpret the secret language of forms?

  And just as there are natural phenomena which suggest that lightning is about to strike, so there are certain eerie portents which presage the irruption of that spectre into the physical world. The plaster flaking off a wall will resemble a person striding along the street; the frost patterns on windows will form into the lines of staring faces; the dust drifting down from the roofs will seem to fall in a different way from usual, suggesting to the observant that it is being scattered by some invisible intelligence lurking hidden in the eaves in a secret attempt to create all sorts of strange patterns. Whether the eye rests on a uniform sameness of texture or focuses on irregularities of the skin, we fall prey to our unwelcome talent for discerning everywhere significant, ominous shapes which grow to gigantic proportions in our dreams. And always, behind the spectral attempts of these gathering swarms of thoughts to gnaw through the walls surrounding our everyday existence, we can sense with tormenting certainty that our own inmost substance is, deliberately and against our will, being sucked dry so that the phantom may take on physical form.

  When I heard Pernath tell us just now that he had encountered a man with a beardless face and slanting eyes, the Golem immediately appeared before my inward eye, just as I had seen it all those years ago. It just seemed to materialise from nowhere, as if by magic. For a moment I was seized with a vague fear that once again something inexplicable was about to happen. It was the same fear I had felt as a child when the first eerie portents foreshadowed the appearance of the Golem.

  That must have been sixty-six years ago now. It happened one evening when my sister’s fiancé was visiting us and the date of their wedding was decided upon. For amusement, they decided to tell their fortunes by dropping molten lead into water. I looked on open-mouthed, not really understanding what they were doing. In my confused, childish imagination I connected it with the Golem I had often heard of in my grandfather’s tales. I could almost visualise the door opening and the strange figure entering the room.

  My sister poured the spoonful of molten metal into the tub of water and, when she saw me looking on all agog, gave me a merry laugh. With wrinkled, trembling hands, my grandfather picked the glittering lump of lead out of the water and held it up to the light. Immediately the grown-ups became excited and all started talking at once. I tried to push my way to the front, but they held me back. Later on, when I was older, my father told me that the molten metal had solidified into the distinct shape of a small head, smooth and round, as if it had been poured into a mould. Its resemblance to the Golem was so uncanny that they all felt a shiver of horror.

  I have often discussed it with Shemaiah Hillel, the archivist at the Jewish Town Hall and Warden of the Old-New Synagogue who also looks after that clay model from Emperor Rudolf’s time that I told you about. He has studied the Cabbala and thinks the lump of clay shaped into human form is a portent from the old days, just like the lead that shaped itself into a human head in my youth. He believes the unknown figure that haunts the district must be the phantasm that the rabbi in the Middle Ages had first to create in his mind, before he could clothe it in physical form. It reappears at regular intervals, when the stars are in the same conjunction under which it was created, tormented by its urge to take on physical existence.

  Hillel’s late wife also saw the Golem face to face and had the same sensation as I did of b
eing paralysed as long as the mysterious being was in the vicinity. She used to say she was firmly convinced that it could only have been her own soul which had left her body for a moment and confronted her for a brief second with the features of an alien creature. In spite of the terrible dread with which she was seized, she said she was never in the slightest doubt that the other could only be part of her inmost self.”

  “Incredible”, muttered Prokop, lost in thought. Vrieslander also seemed engrossed in his ruminations.

  Then there was a knock on the door and, without a word, the old woman who brings me water and anything else I need in the evening came in, put the earthenware jug on the floor and went out. We all looked up, staring round the room as if we had just woken, but for a long time no one spoke. It was as if some new influence had slipped in through the door behind the old woman and we needed time to get used to it.

  “Yes!” said Zwakh suddenly, apropros of nothing, “that Rosina with the red hair, she has one of those faces that you can’t get out your mind, that keep on popping up all over the place. That frozen, grinning smile has accompanied me throughout my life; first her grandmother, then her mother! Always the same face, not the slightest change. The same name, Rosina, each was the resurrection of the previous one.”

  “Isn’t Rosina the daughter of Wassertrum, the junkdealer?” I asked.

  “So people say”, replied Zwakh. “But Aaron Wassertrum has any number of sons and daughters people don’t know about. As for Rosina’s mother, no one knows who her father was either, nor what became of her; she had a child when she was fifteen and no one’s seen her since. As far as I can remember, her disappearance was connected with a murder, of which she was the cause and which took place in this house.