Where on earth was Hillel? I found myself longing for him as for a dear, old friend. It was remarkable how attached to him I had grown in the last few days. After all, to be precise, I had only spoken to him once in my whole life.
Of course! The letters – her letters. I was going to find a better hiding place for them. For my own peace of mind, in case I should have to be away from home for any length of time again. I took them out of the chest; they would be safer kept in the iron box.
A photograph slipped out from among the letters. I tried not to look, but it was too late. ‘She’ was looking me straight in the eyes, a brocade gown round her shoulders, just as I had seen her the first time, when she had fled from Savioli’s studio and taken refuge in my room.
A stabbing pain almost drove me to distraction. I read the dedication underneath without taking in the words; then came the name:
Your Angelina.
Angelina!!
As I spoke the name, the veil that had shut off my youth from me was rent from top to bottom.
I felt I was going to collapse under the weight of misery. I clawed the air and bit my hand, I whimpered: O dear God, only let me be blind once more, let me continue that life-in-death I have lived until now!
The agony welled up inside me, rose to my lips and poured forth. It tasted strangely sweet, like blood …
Angelina!!
The name throbbed through my veins; it was an unbearable, ghostly caress.
With a violent shudder I pulled myself together and forced myself, my clenched teeth grinding together, to stare at the photograph until I slowly mastered it.
Mastered it!
As I had mastered the playing card during the night.
Steps at last! A man’s tread.
He was here!
Joyfully I rushed to the door and threw it open.
Outside stood Shemaiah Hillel and behind him – I reproached myself for the feeling of disappointment it caused me – with his red cheeks and round, child’s eyes, was old Zwakh the puppeteer.
“It gives me great pleasure, Herr Pernath, to see you in such good health”, said Hillel.
Such a cold tone?
Ice. Suddenly the room was full of ice, searing, numbing ice.
In a daze, I only half listened to what Zwakh, breathless with excitement, was prattling on to me about.
“Have you heard? The Golem is haunting the Ghetto again! We were talking about it not that long ago. You remember, don’t you, Pernath? The whole of the Ghetto is in uproar. Vrieslander saw it with his own eyes. And this time again it started with a murder!” I looked up in astonishment: a murder?
Zwakh shook me. “Yes. Don’t you ever hear anything, Pernath? There’s a huge police notice appealing for witnesses at every corner: fat old Zottmann, the ‘Freemason’ – I mean Zottmann the managing director of the Life Assurance Company – has been murdered, so they say. Loisa – the one who lives in this house – has already been arrested. And Rosina has disappeared without trace. The Golem … the Golem … it’s enough to make your hair stand on end.”
I made no answer, but searched Hillel’s eyes. Why was he staring at me so fixedly? All at once the corners of his mouth twitched with a suppressed smile. I realised it was meant for me.
I was so beside myself with joy I could have flung my arms around his neck. In my ecstasy I rushed aimlessly round the room. What should I bring first? Glasses? A bottle of burgundy? (I only had the one.) Cigarettes? Finally I managed to speak. “But why don’t you sit down?” Quickly I pushed chairs across for my friends.
Zwakh was beginning to get irritated. “Why do you keep smiling like that, Hillel? Perhaps you don’t believe the Golem is haunting the Ghetto? It seems to me you don’t believe in the Golem at all.”
“I would not believe in it even if I were to see it standing before me in this very room”, Hillel calmly answered, with a glance at me. I understood the double meaning his words contained.
In astonishment, Zwakh took his glass from his lips without drinking. “And the evidence of hundreds of people counts for nothing to you, Hillel? But just you wait and mark my words: now there will be murder after murder in the Jewish quarter. I know about these things. The Golem brings some macabre things in its wake.”
“There is nothing miraculous about a proliferation of similar events”, replied Hillel. He stood up as he spoke, went over to the window and looked down at the junk shop. “When the thaw comes, the roots begin to stir, the poisonous ones as well as the wholesome ones.”
Zwakh gave me a merry wink, jerking his head in Hillel’s direction. “If the Rabbi wanted, he could tell us things that would make your hair stand on end”, he said in a half-whisper. Shemaiah turned round.
“I am not a Rabbi, even if I have the right to use that title. I am just a poor archivist at the Jewish Town Hall and keep the register of the living and the dead.”
I felt there was some hidden significance in his words. The old puppeteer seemed unconsciously aware of it as well. He fell quiet, and for a long time none of us spoke.
It was Zwakh who broke the silence, and his voice sounded unusually grave. “By the way, Rabbi – I’m sorry, I mean Herr Hillel, there’s something I have been meaning to ask you for a long time. You don’t have to answer if you’d rather not, or if you’re not allowed to …”
Shemaiah came over to the table and idly fingered the wine-glass. He did not drink, perhaps there were Jewish rituals forbidding it.
“Ask away, Herr Zwakh.”
“You know something of the Jewish esoteric doctrine called the Cabbala, Hillel?”
“Only a little.”
“I have heard there is supposed to be a collection of mystical writings from which one can learn the Cabbala: the Sohar …”
“Yes, the Sohar, the Book of Splendour.”
“There you are, you see!” Zwakh said angrily. “Isn’t it scandalous that a book that is supposed to contain the keys to the understanding of the Bible and to eternal bliss –”
Hillel interrupted him. “Only some keys.”
“All right! But some keys at least! And isn’t it scandalous that this work, because of its great value and extreme rarity, is only available to the rich? In fact I believe I’m right in saying there is only one copy, and that in the British Museum in London and written, what’s more, in Chaldaean, Aramaic, Hebrew or whatever. Have I, for example, in my whole life ever had the opportunity to learn those languages or to go to London?”
“Are all your desires set so passionately on that goal”, asked Hillel, gently mocking.
“Well, to be honest … no”, Zwakh admitted, somewhat deflated.
“Then you can have no cause for complaint”, Hillel said drily. “Unless you cry out for the spirit with every atom in your body, as a man who is suffocating gasps for air, you cannot see the mysteries of God.”
‘Despite that, there is said to be a book which contains all the keys to the puzzles of the other world, not just some.’ As the thought flashed through my mind, my hand automatically fingered the Juggler, which I still had in my pocket, but before I could formulate the question, Zwakh had spoken it out loud.
Once again Hillel smiled his sphinx-like smile. “Every question that can be asked by man is answered the moment it is asked in the spirit.”
Zwakh turned to me, “Have you any idea what he means by that?” But I gave no answer, I was holding my breath so as not to miss a single word of what Hillel was saying.
Shemaiah went on, “The whole of life consists of nothing but questions which have taken on physical form and which bear the seed of their answer within them, and of answers which are pregnant with questions. A man who sees anything else in it is a fool.”
Zwakh thumped the table. “Yes: questions that are different every time and answers that mean different things to different people.”
“That is the whole point”, said Hillel amicably. “It is, I believe, solely the doctor’s privilege to have ‘one pill for every ill�
��. Each questioner is given the answer best suited to his needs; otherwise humanity would not follow the path of their longings. Do you think there is no rhyme or reason why our Jewish books are written in consonants alone? Each reader has to find for himself the secret vowels that go with them and which reveal a meaning that is for him alone; the living word should not wither into dead dogma.”
The old puppeteer disagreed violently. “That’s nothing but words, Rabbi, words! Call me a fairground juggler if I can make head or tail of it!”
A fairground juggler! Like a bolt from the blue, Zwakh’s words immediately brought back to mind the Juggler I had found during the night. I almost fell off my chair in horrified surprise.
Hillel avoided my eye. I heard his voice as from a great distance. “A juggler? Perhaps that is what you are. One should never be too sure of oneself. By the way Herr Zwakh, talking of jugglers, do you play Tarock?”
“Tarock? Of course. Since I was a boy.”
“Then I’m astonished you can ask me about a book which contains the whole of the Cabbala when you must have held it in your hand thousands of times.”
“Me? In my hand? My own hand?” Zwakh scratched his head in bewilderment.
“Yes, you! Has it never struck you that the Tarock pack has twenty-two trumps – precisely the same number as the letters of the Hebrew alphabet? And, what is more, do not our Bohemian cards have pictures which are obviously symbols? The Fool, Death, the Devil, the Last Judgment? How loud, my friend, do you want life to shout its answers to you? It’s not necessary, of course, for you to know that Tarock, or Tarot, is the same as the Jewish word Tora, ‘the Law’, or the old Egyptian tarut, which means ‘One who is asked’, and the ancient Zend word tarisk, which means ‘I demand the answer’. But scholars should know these facts before they assert that the Tarock pack originated during the time of Charles the Sixth. And just as the Juggler, the lowest trump, is the first card in the pack, so man is the first figure in his own picture book, his own double: the Hebrew character Aleph, which is formed after the shape of a man, with one hand pointing up at the sky and the other downwards, saying, therefore, ‘As it is above, so it is below; as it is below, so it is above.’ That is why I said before, who knows whether you are really Zwakh the puppeteer and not the ‘Juggler’? Do not tempt fate.”
As he spoke, Hillel fixed his gaze on me, and I gradually felt greater and greater depths of new meaning open up at his words. “Do not tempt fate, Herr Zwakh. If you do, you can find yourself straying into dark passages from which no one has ever returned unless he bore a talisman with him. There is a legend that once three men descended into the realm of darkness; one went mad, the other blind, and only the third, Rabbi ben Akiba, returned safely home and said he had met himself. You may object that there are a number of people – Goethe, for example, – who have met themselves, usually on a bridge or some other footway leading from one bank of a river to the other, have looked themselves in the eye and not gone mad. But that was just a reflection of their own consciousness and not a true double, not what is called Habal Garmin, ‘the breath of the bones’, of which it is said, ‘As it went down into the grave, in bone incorruptible, so will it rise up on the day of the Last Judgment’.” Hillel’s gaze pierced deeper and deeper into mine. “Our grandmothers say of him, ‘He lives high above the ground in a room without a door, with only one window, from which it is impossible to communicate with mankind. Anyone who manages to bind him and to refine him, will be reconciled with himself’ … to get back to Tarock, however, you know as well as I do that each person is dealt a different hand, but it is the one who knows how to use the trumps aright who wins the game. But come along now, Herr Zwakh, it’s time to go, otherwise you’ll drink all of Herr Pernath’s wine and there’ll be none left for him.”
CARE
A snow-battle was raging outside my window. One snowflake regiment after the other, tiny soldiers in shaggy, white coats, rushed across the window-panes for minutes on end, always in the same direction, as if they were all fleeing from some particularly vicious enemy. Then all of a sudden they would tire of running away, seemed, for some inexplicable reason, to be consumed with anger and dashed back again until they were ambushed from above and below by new hostile armies and everything dissolved into a chaotic, swirling mass.
I felt as though months had elapsed since the strange experiences which I had been through such a short while ago. Had it not been for the fact that several times a day new and ever more grotesque rumours of the Golem would reach my ears and refresh my memory of that night, I think there would have been moments when I suspected I had been the victim of a hallucination.
The thing that stood out most vividly from the fantastic pattern the events had woven round me was what Zwakh had told me about the murder of the so-called ‘Freemason’, which was still unsolved. I really could not see pockmarked Loisa as the murderer, although I was not without my own, dark suspicions. Almost immediately after Prokop claimed to have heard a weird noise from the sewers, we had seen the lad at Loisitchek’s. On the other hand, there was no reason to believe the shout from underground was a cry for help, even assuming it was not simply a figment of the imagination.
The flurries of snow were dazzling my eyes and I was beginning to see everything as a jumble of dancing stripes. I turned my attention back to the cameo I was working on. I had made a wax model of Miriam’s face and I felt that the moonstone, with its bluish sheen, ought to be perfect for it. I was very pleased; it was a happy chance that I had found something so suitable among my stock of stones. The deep-black hornblende setting gave it just the right light, and its shape fitted so well it was as if nature had created it especially to be transformed into a lasting likeness of Miriam’s delicate profile.
Initially it had been my intention to cut a cameo from it representing the Egyptian god Osiris. I had been inspired by the vision of the hermaphrodite from the Book of Ibbur which I could recall to mind at will with remarkable clarity but, after I had made the first incisions, I gradually came to see such a close resemblance to the daughter of Shemaiah Hillel, that I altered my plan.
The Book of Ibbur!
The memory affected me so strongly that I laid aside my burin. It was incredible, all the things that had come into my life in such a short stretch of time! All at once, like someone who suddenly finds himself transported into the middle of an interminable sandy desert, I became conscious of the immense, profound loneliness separating me from my fellow men. Had I a single friend, apart from Hillel, with whom I could talk about my experiences?
It was true that in the still small hours of recent nights the memory had returned of how, throughout my youth, going back even to my earliest childhood, I had been tormented by an indescribable, agonising thirst for the miraculous, for anything that lay beyond mortality. But the fulfilment of my yearning had come like a violent hurricane, crushing the joy even as it welled up in my soul. I was trembling with fear at the thought of the inevitable moment when I would wake to my past, when those forgotten events would come alive in their full, soul-searing immediacy.
But not yet, not yet! Let me first savour the pleasure of watching this unutterable radiance come towards me!
It was in my power! I only had to go into my bedroom and unlock the box in which lay the Book of Ibbur, the gift of the invisible ones.
How long ago it was since my hand last touched it when I locked up Angelina’s letters with it!
From time to time, when the wind sends the snow piled up on the roofs cascading down to the ground, there is a dull rumbling from outside. Otherwise all is hushed silence, as the carpet of snow over the cobble-stones absorbs every noise.
I was about to go back to my engraving when suddenly, along the street below, came the sound of horses’ hooves, the clash of steel on stone so sharp I could almost see the flash of sparks. It was impossible to open the window to look down, it was bound to the masonry with icy sinews and the lower half was white with drifting snow. All I coul
d see was Charousek, who was standing and talking, apparently quite amicably, to Wassertrum. I saw the words die on their lips and amazement spread across both their faces as they stared, presumably at the carriage, which was invisible from where I was.
It must be Angelina’s husband, was the thought that flashed through my mind. It couldn’t be Angelina herself, it would be sheer madness for her to drive up in her carriage outside my house in Hahnpassgasse for everyone to see! But what should I tell her husband if that is who it is and he asks me straight out?
Deny it, of course, deny everything!
Quickly I tried to work out what might have happened. It can only be her husband; he’ll have received an anonymous letter – from Wassertrum most likely – telling him she’s meeting her lover here; she’ll have thought up some excuse, probably that she’s commissioned a cameo or something of the kind from me. There! A furious knocking at my door and – Angelina was standing before me.
She was incapable of speech, but the expression on her face told me everything: there was no point in hiding any more, the game was up.
And yet there was something inside me that rejected this interpretation. I just could not bring myself to think that the feeling that I could help her had been a delusion. I led her to the armchair and silently stroked her hair as she, like a weary child, pressed her face to my breast. We could hear the crackling of the logs in the stove and see the red glow of the flames fluttering across the floorboards, flaring up and dying away – flaring up and dying away – flaring up and dying away …
The Golem Page 11