I seemed to hear a voice inside me singing, ‘Where is the heart of coral red?’ I started up. Where am I? How long has she been sitting here?
I questioned her, cautiously, gently, oh! so gently, so as not to alarm her, taking care that my probing should not touch the painful wound. Piece by piece, I learnt all I needed to know, putting it together like a mosaic.
“Your husband knows …?”
“No, not yet; he’s away.”
So Charousek had guessed correctly: it was Dr. Savioli whose life was in danger. And it was because it was Savioli’s life that was being threatened and not hers any more, that she was here. I realised she no longer had any thought of concealment.
Wassertrum had been to see Savioli again; had forced his way to his sick-bed by means of threats and force.
Go on! Go on! What did he want from him?
What he wanted? Half Savioli had told her, half she had guessed: Wassertrum wanted … wanted … Savioli … to … to take his own life. Now she knew the reason for Wassertrum’s wild, unbridled hatred: it was Savioli who had driven his son, Wassory the eye specialist, to his death.
The first thought that flashed through my mind was to dash down and reveal everything to Wassertrum, to tell him that it was Charousek who had struck the blow, Savioli had only been his instrument … ‘Traitor! Traitor!’ screamed a voice inside my brain, ‘You would hand over Charousek to the vengeance of that vindictive rogue, a penniless, consumptive student who tried to help you and her!’ I felt as though I were being torn into two bleeding halves. Then a calm, ice-cold voice gave me the solution. ‘You fool! The answer is in your own hand. All you have to do is pick up that file on the table over there, run down the stairs and stick it into that junk-dealer’s throat until the point comes out through the back of his neck!’
My heart sent up a jubilant cry of thanksgiving to God.
I continued my questioning. “And Dr. Savioli?”
He would kill himself, there was no doubt about it, unless she managed to save him. The nurses were not letting him out of their sight; they had drugged him with morphine, but perhaps he would suddenly wake up, perhaps he was … even now … and … and … No! No! She had to leave, she mustn’t waste another second; she would write to her husband, confess everything; let him take the child from her, as long as Savioli was saved; if she told her husband, that would rob Wassertrum of the only weapon he possessed against them.
She must reveal their secret herself before he could betray it.
“No, Angelina, that you will not do”, I cried, thinking of the file, and my voice cracked with jubilant delight at the thought of the power I held in my hand.
Angelina tried to tear herself away; I held her tight.
“Just answer me one thing: will your husband take Wassertrum’s word for it?”
“But he has evidence, he obviously has my letters, perhaps a picture of me, all the things that were hidden in the desk next door.”
Letters? A picture? The desk? I could control myself no longer. I drew Angelina to my breast and kissed her. Her hair fell in a golden veil over my face. Then I grasped her slim hands, and told her, the words coming tumbling out of my mouth, that Wassertrum’s mortal enemy, a penniless Czech student, had taken the letters and everything for safe keeping; they were now in my possession, securely locked away.
She flung her arms around my neck, laughing and crying at the same time. She kissed me, then ran to the door, turned back and kissed me again. Then she was gone.
I stood there in a daze. I could still feel her breath on my cheek.
I heard the thunder of her carriage over the cobbles, the furious gallop of the horses’ hooves. A minute later everything was silent. Silent as the grave.
The silence filled my heart, too.
Suddenly the door creaked softly behind me and Charousek appeared in the room.
“Excuse me, Herr Pernath, but I knocked for a long time; you didn’t seem to hear.”
I just nodded.
“I hope you don’t assume I’ve made my peace with Wassertrum, because you saw me talking to him just now?” Charousek’s mocking grin told me it was just one of his bitter jokes. “I must say, fortune seems to be on my side. That vermin down there is beginning to take a liking to me, Herr Pernath. It’s a strange thing, the call of the blood”, he added softly, almost as though speaking to himself. I had no idea what he was talking about, and assumed I had missed part of what he had said. I was still trembling from the after-effects of all the excitement.
“He wanted to give me a coat”, Charousek went on in his normal voice. “I thanked him but said no, of course. My skin is hot enough as it is. And then he forced some money on me.”
I was about to exclaim, ‘You didn’t accept it?’ but just managed to keep my tongue. Round red blotches appeared on Charousek’s cheeks. “Naturally I accepted the money.”
My head was going round and round. “Ac…cepted it?” I stammered.
“I would never have thought such pure, unalloyed joy was possible here on earth.” He paused for a moment and twisted his face into a grotesque expression. “Is it not elevating, dear brethren, to contemplate ever new proofs of the wisdom and prudence with which Providence’s thrifty hand orders Mother Nature’s domestic economy?” He was declaiming like a preacher, at the same time jingling the coins in his pocket. “Verily, I shall regard it as my sacred duty to devote this charitable gift to the worthiest of ends, right down to the very last kreutzer.”
Was he drunk? Or mad?
Charousek suddenly changed his tone. “The fact that it is Wassertrum himself who is paying for his … medicine, is not without a certain diabolical humour, don’t you think?”
The hidden meaning behind Charousek’s words gradually began to dawn on me; I felt a shiver of horror at the feverish look in his eyes.
“But that’s enough about that, Herr Pernath. First let us deal with more immediate matters. That lady just now, that was her, wasn’t it? What did she think she was doing, driving up here so openly?”
I told Charousek what had happened.
“Wassertrum certainly has no evidence”, he interrupted triumphantly, “otherwise he wouldn’t have searched the studio again this morning. Odd you didn’t hear him? He spent a good hour there.”
I was puzzled how he came by all this precise knowledge, and told him so.
“May I?” In order to illustrate his explanation, he took a cigarette from the table, lit it and began, “You see, if you open the door now, the draught coming in from the stairwell will blow the cigarette smoke in the other direction. It is perhaps the only law of nature with which Herr Wassertrum is well acquainted and with that in mind he had a small, concealed aperture inserted in the wall of the studio overlooking the street – the house belongs to him, as you know. It is a kind of ventilation shaft, and in it he has hung a little scrap of red cloth, so that when anyone goes into or out of the room – that is, opens the door – Wassertrum can tell from below by the fluttering of the red rag. However, I know that too.” Charousek added drily, “and, if necessary, I can see it perfectly from the basement opposite, which a merciful Providence has graciously assigned to me for my abode. The neat little trick with the ventilation shaft is that worthy patriarch’s very own, but I’ve known about it for years.”
“Your hatred for him must be beyond all human bounds, for you to follow his every step like that. And you’ve been doing it for years, you tell me!?”
“Hatred?” Charousek gave a twisted smile. “Hatred? Hatred’s not the word for it. The word to express my feelings for him has yet to be invented. To be precise, it’s not him I hate, it’s his blood. Can you understand that? Like a wild animal, I can scent if someone has a single drop of his blood in their veins and” – he clenched his teeth – “that happens now and then here in the Ghetto.” He had worked himself up into such a fury, that he was incapable of going on. He went over to the window and stared out. I could hear his heavy suppressed breathing. For a
while neither of us spoke.
“Here, what’s this?” He suddenly started up and waved me over. “Quick, quick! Haven’t you any opera glasses or something like that?”
We peered down cautiously from behind the curtains. Jaromir, the deaf-mute, was standing outside the entrance to Wassertrum’s junk-shop and, as far as we could tell from his sign-language, was offering to sell him a small, glittering object he was holding, half concealed, in his hand. Wassertrum pounced on it like a vulture then darted back into his shop. The next moment he rushed back out again, deathly pale, and grabbed Jaromir. A violent struggle ensued, but then suddenly Wassertrum let go and seemed to be considering his next move as he gnawed furiously at his hare-lip. Casting a suspicious glance in our direction, he took Jaromir amicably by the arm and led him into his shop.
We must have waited a good quarter of an hour, they seemed to be taking a long time to come to terms. Eventually Jaromir emerged with a satisfied smile on his face and went on his way.
“What do you think that was about?” I asked. “It can’t have been of any great importance. The poor chap was probably just turning some object he’d managed to beg into ready cash.”
Charousek did not reply, but went back to the table and silently sat down. He obviously thought the episode of no importance for, after a short silence, he continued where he had left off.
“Yes. As I said, I hate his blood. By the way, you must interrupt me, Pernath, if I get too worked up again. I want to remain cool; I mustn’t waste my best feelings like that. When I do, I have a kind of hang-over afterwards. A man with any sense of decency should speak calmly, not with flowery affectation like some whore or poet. Since the world began it would never have occurred to anyone to ‘wring their hands in grief’ had not ham actors thought up that particularly visual gesture.”
I realised he was deliberately just rambling on in an attempt to restore his inner calm. Not that he was having great success at the moment. He walked up and down the room in an agitated manner, picking up all sorts of objects and then putting them down again with a preoccupied air. Then he suddenly pulled himself together and returned to the subject.
“I can recognise his blood in the slightest unconscious movement a person makes. I know children who look like him and are supposed to be his, but do not belong to the same tribe, it is impossible for me to be deceived. For years no one told me that Dr. Wassory was his son, but I – how shall I put it? – I could scent it.
Even as a small boy, before I had any idea of what Wassertrum’s connection with me was” – for a moment he gave me a searching glance – “I possessed this gift. They kicked me and beat me – there is probably no part of my body that has not experienced acute pain – they starved me until I was half crazy with hunger and thirst and happy to eat rotting scraps, but I was incapable of feeling hatred towards those that tormented me. It was simply impossible. There was no room for hatred within me. Do you understand? In spite of the fact that my whole being was soaked in hatred.
Wassertrum has never caused me the least harm. By that I mean that he never beat me, nor threw things at me, nor even swore at me when I was a ragged street-urchin running round the Ghetto. I am perfectly aware of that, and yet all the hatred, all the rancour boiling up inside me was directed at him, at him alone!
One remarkable fact is that as a child I never once played a trick on him. If the other children did, I immediately went my own way. But I could spend hours standing in a doorway, hidden behind the door, staring at his face through the crack until everything went black, so intense was this inexplicable feeling of hatred.
It must have been then, I think, that I laid the foundations of the second sight that awakes within me the moment I come into contact with people, or even with things, that have some connection with him. As a child I must have unconsciously absorbed his every movement – the way he wears his coat, the way he picks things up, or drinks, or coughs and all that kind of thing – and learnt them off by heart until they had etched themselves on my soul, so that anywhere I can unfailingly recognise the merest traces in others as his legacy. Later on it started to become an obsession. I would throw away the most inoffensive objects, merely because I was tormented by the thought that his hand might have touched them. Others, however, were dear to me because I felt they were like friends who wished him ill.”
Charousek was silent for a moment. I saw him gazing abstractedly into space. Mechanically, his fingers stroked the file on the table.
“Then when a few teachers took pity on me and collected enough to allow me to study philosophy and medicine – and to learn to think for myself, by the by – I gradually came to understand what hatred is. We can only hate something as deeply as I do, if it is part of ourselves.
And when I found out … learnt everything, bit by bit … what my mother was … and still must be, if … if she is still alive … and that my own body” – he turned away so that I should not see his face – “is filled with his foul blood … then it was clear to me where the root of it lay. At times I feel there is even some mysterious connection in the fact that I am consumptive and spit blood: my body fights against everything that comes from him, and spews it up in disgust.
Often my hatred of him follows me into my sleep and tries to console me with visions of all possible kinds of torture which, in my dreams, I inflict on him; but I have always rejected them because they leave me feeling dissatisfied.
Whenever I think about myself, I am filled with surprise that I find it impossible to hate, even to feel a mild antipathy towards anyone or anything in the world apart from him and his tribe. At such times a nauseating feeling begins to creep over me: I could be what people call a ‘good man’. Fortunately that is not the case. As I told you, there is no room for that left inside me.
You mustn’t go thinking that I have been embittered by misfortune (it was only later on that I learnt what he had done to my mother). I have had one day of joy that eclipses anything granted to ordinary mortals. I don’t know if you have ever had a truly intense, burning religious experience? I never had, until the day Wassory put an end to himself. I was standing outside the shop down there and I saw him receive the news. Anyone unacquainted with the true theatre of life would have called his reaction ‘impassive’, but when I saw him stand there for a full hour, listless, his blood-red hare-lip just drawn up a fraction of an inch higher than normal over his teeth, and a peculiar look in his eye, as if it were turned inwards on itself – when I saw him like that, I caught a whiff of incense from the wings of the Archangel passing overhead. Do you know the statue of the Black Madonna in the Tyn Church? I flung myself to the ground before it, and my soul was enveloped in the darkness of paradise.”
As I looked at Charousek standing there, his big, dreamy eyes full of tears, I remembered what Hillel had said about how incomprehensible the dark path that the Brothers of Death follow appears to us.
Charousek went on, “You are probably not the least bit interested in the material circumstances which ‘justify’ my hatred, or at least render it comprehensible to the paid servants of the law. Facts give the appearance of milestones but are, in reality, only empty eggshells; they are the insistent popping of champagne corks at the tables of the rich, which only a simpleton would take for the banquet itself. Wassertrum used all the fiendish means which people like him have at their disposal to persuade my mother – if it wasn’t worse then that – to let him have his way with her. And then … then he sold her off to … to a brothel; that kind of thing isn’t difficult if you count the Police Commissioner among your business associates. But he didn’t do it because he was tired of her. Oh no! I know every nook and cranny of that heart of his. The day he sold her off was the awful day he realised just how passionately in love with her he was. Someone like him may appear to behave without rhyme or reason, but deep down he’s always consistent. The squirrel inside him gives a screech of horror the moment anyone comes and buys something from his junk-shop. No matter how much they pay
for it, all that he feels is that he is being forced to hand something over. His favourite verb is ‘to have’, and if he were capable of thinking in abstract terms, ‘possession’ would be the concept that expressed his ideal.
During the affair with my mother, fear grew and grew within him until it was a gigantic mountain, the fear of no longer being in control of himself; the fear not of giving love, but of being compelled to give love; the fear of finding some invisible presence inside him that would fetter his will, or what he would like to think of as his will. That was how it began, the rest followed automatically, just as a pike automatically pounces, whether it wants to or not, when something that glitters floats past at the right moment.
The logical consequence for Wassertrum was to sell my mother into slavery. It gratified those other characteristics sleeping within his soul, his greed for money and the perverse pleasure he finds in tormenting himself.
You must forgive me, Herr Pernath”, Charousek’s voice suddenly took on such a harsh, sober tone that I started in surprise, “forgive me for all this clever talk, but when you’re studying at the University you come across masses of idiotic books and you automatically adopt their fatuous jargon.”
I forced myself to smile to try and cheer him up; secretly I knew he was fighting back the tears.
‘I must find some way of helping him’, I thought; ‘at least do whatever I can to relieve his immediate need.’ Without his noticing, I took the hundred-crown note I kept at home out of the sideboard drawer and slipped it into my pocket.
“When, later on, you set up as a doctor and live in a better district, you’ll feel at peace with yourself, Herr Charousek”, I said, in order to give the conversation a conciliatory turn. “Will you soon be qualified?”
“In a short time. I owe it to the people who have been kind enough to support me. Otherwise there’s no point; my days are numbered.”
The Golem Page 12