I finished my account. I told him everything, even the things Miriam had said about the ‘hermaphrodite’. When I stopped and looked up, I noticed that Laponder had turned as white as a sheet and that the tears were running down his face. Quickly I stood up and pretended I hadn’t noticed, walking up and down in the cell until he was calm again. Then I sat down opposite him and summoned up all my persuasive powers to try and convince him how important it was to inform his judges of his psychological condition.
“If only you hadn’t confessed to the murder!” were my final words.
“But I had to! They asked me on my honour”, he said naively.
Somewhat puzzled, I asked, “Do you think a lie is worse than … than rape and murder?”
“As a general principle probably not, but in my case yes, definitely. You see, when the examining magistrate asked me if I admitted the crime, I had the strength to tell the truth. That is, it was in my power to lie or not to lie. When I committed the rape and the murder I had no choice. Even though I was fully aware of what I was doing, I still had no choice. There was something inside me, the presence of which I had until then never suspected, that woke up and was stronger than I. Do you imagine I would have murdered someone if I had had the choice? I have never killed anything, not even the smallest animal; now I would be absolutely incapable of doing so.
Just assume for the moment it was the law that you had to murder people, and not to do so would incur the death penalty, as is the case in wartime; at this very moment I would deserve to be condemned to death. I just could not commit a murder. When I committed my crime, it was the other way round.”
“But all the more, now that you feel you are a different person, you should do everything in your power to avoid the sentence”, I objected, but Laponder waved my argument away. “That is where you are wrong! From their point of view the judges’ decision was quite correct. Should they let someone like me to go around free? To commit another crime tomorrow or the day after?”
“No. But they should intern you in a hospital for the mentally ill, that’s what I am saying!”
“If I were mad, then you would be right”, replied Laponder, unconcerned. “But I’m not mad. I am something quite different, something that might look very much like madness, but is, in fact, the opposite. Listen to me, please, and you will understand at once. You remember you told me about the apparition of the headless phantom – which is, of course, a symbol, you can easily find the key if you think about it. Well, it appeared to me as well. Only I took the seeds! That means I am following the ‘Path of Death’. For me, the most sacred thing imaginable is to allow my steps to be guided by the spirit within me, blindly, wholly trusting in it wherever the path may lead, to poverty or riches, to the gallows or a throne. I have never hesitated when the choice was mine.
That is why I did not lie, when the choice was mine.
Do you know the words of the Prophet Micah, ‘He hath shewed thee, O man, what is good; and what the Lord doth require of thee’?
If I had lied, I would have created an ultimate cause, because I had the choice. When I committed the murder, I did not create a cause. It was merely the effect of a cause that had long been slumbering within me, and over which I had no control, that was released.
That is why my hands are clean.
By making me into a murderer, the spirit within me has carried out an execution on me; by stringing me up on the gallows, men will detach my fate from theirs: I will reach freedom.”
This man is a saint, I thought to myself, and my hair stood on end as I shuddered at my own insignificance.
“You told me that a doctor used hypnotism to treat you, with the result that for a long time you lost the memory of your childhood and youth”, he continued. “That is the characteristic – the stigma – of all those who have been ‘bitten by the snake of the spiritual realm’. It seems almost as if, inside us, one life has to be grafted onto another, as a scion is grafted onto a wild tree, before the miracle of awakening can occur. The separation that usually comes with death is in our case achieved by erasing the memory, sometimes just by a sudden spiritual about-turn.
In my case, there was no obvious external cause. I just woke up one morning in my twenty-first year a different person. All at once I was completely indifferent to everything that I had cared for until then. Life seemed nothing more than a silly story of cowboys and indians and lost its reality; dreams became absolute certainty – and I mean true and demonstrable certainty – and everyday life became a dream.
Everyone could do that if they had the key. And that key lies solely in becoming aware, while asleep, of the ‘form’ of one’s ‘self’ – of one’s skin, so to speak – and finding the narrow slit through which our consciousness slips between wakefulness and deep sleep. That is why I said ‘I roam’, and not ‘I dream’.
The struggle for immortality is a battle for the sceptre against the ghosts and sounds within us, and waiting for our own self to be crowned king is waiting for the Messiah.
The spectral Habal Garmin which you saw, the ‘Breath of the Bones’ of the Cabbala, that was the king. At the moment when he is crowned, the thread, by which you are bound to the world through your physical senses and your reason, will tear apart.
You will ask how it could happen that I, in spite of my detachment from the world, could turn into a rapist and murderer over night? Human beings are like glass tubes with coloured balls running along them. In most cases there is only one ball during a whole lifetime: if the ball is red, then the person is ‘bad’; if it is yellow, the person is ‘good’. If there are two, one red and one yellow, then ‘one’ has an ‘unstable character’. We who have been ‘bitten by the snake’ go through as much in one lifetime as the whole of mankind goes through in an epoch. The red and yellow balls shoot along the glass tube one after the other, and when they are finished, then we will have become prophets, will be the mirrors of God.”
Laponder was silent. For a long time I found it impossible to say a word. I was dazed from what he had told me.
“Why were you so concerned to ask me about my experiences, when you are so far above me?” I asked eventually.
“You are wrong”, said Laponder. “I am far below you. I asked you because I felt you were in possession of the one key I still lacked.”
“Me? In possession of a key? Good God!”
“Yes, you. And you gave it to me. I don’t think there can be a happier man on earth than I am today.”
Outside there was the noise of the bars being pulled back; Laponder paid no attention to it.
“What you said about the hermaphrodite, that was the key. Now I possess certainty. That is why I am glad that they are coming for me, for soon I will reach my goal.”
I could not see Laponder’s face for tears, but I could hear the smile in his voice. “And now, farewell, Herr Pernath, and remember: what they will hang tomorrow is only my outer garments. It is you who have revealed to me the ultimate beauty; now the mystical marriage can take place.” He stood up and followed the gaoler. “It is connected with the rape and murder”, were the last words I heard, though I could only dimly understand them.
Every night after that when the full moon was in the sky, I kept imagining I could see Laponder’s sleeping face on the grey linen of the bed. In the days after he had been taken away I had heard the sound of thunderous hammering and sawing from the execution yard, sometimes continuing through the night until the dawn. I knew what it meant and sat for hours with my hands over my ears in despair.
Month after month passed. I could see how the summer was trickling away in the sickly appearance of the sparse foliage in the exercise yard; I could smell it in the mouldy air from the walls. Every time I noticed the dying tree with the glass picture of the Virgin in its bark, I automatically saw it as an image of the way Laponder’s face had lodged within me. It was always with me, his Buddha’s face with its smooth skin and strange, constant smile.
Only once, in September,
had the examining magistrate sent for me and asked me suspiciously what reason I could give for saying at the bank that I had to leave the town on urgent business, and why in the hours before my arrest I had been in such an uneasy mood, and why I had all my precious stones on me?
When I replied that I had had the intention of committing suicide, there again came the scornful cackle from behind the other desk.
Until then I had been alone in the cell and could immerse myself in my thoughts, in my grief for Charousek, whom I felt must be dead by now, and Laponder, and in my yearning for Miriam. Then new prisoners came: thieving, dissipated-looking office workers, pot-bellied bank clerks, ‘orphans’ as Black Vóssatka would have called them, ruining the air and my mood. One day one of them told us full of indignation about a sex murder that had taken place in the city some time ago. Fortunately, he went on, they had caught the murderer straight away and soon made short work of him.
“Laponder was ’is name, the evil-minded bastard!” shouted out another, a ruffian with predatory features who had been given the heavy sentence of fourteen days in prison for child abuse. “They caught ’im in the act, they did. A lamp fell over while they was fighting and the room burnt down. The girl’s corpse was so charred they still haven’t been able to find out who she was. She had black hair and a narrow face, and that’s all what’s known. And that Laponder refused point blank to come out with ’er name. If I’d ’ve ’ad my way, I’d ’ve skinned ’im alive and sprayed pepper all over ’im, but then that’s your upper classes for you, innit? Murderers the ’ole lot of ’em. As if there wasn’t plenty of other ways, if you want to get rid of a tart”, he added with a cynical grin.
I was seething with rage; for two pins I’d have knocked the fellow to the ground. Every night he snored in the bed where Laponder had lain. I breathed a sigh of relief when he was finally released.
But even then I wasn’t free of him. What he had said stuck in me, like a barbed arrow. Constantly, especially during the dark, the awful suspicion gnawed at me that Laponder’s victim might have been Miriam. The more I fought against the notion, the tighter it wrapped its tendrils round me, until it threatened to become an obsession.
Sometimes though, especially when the moon shone brightly through the bars, things were better. I could relive the hours I had spent with Laponder, and the feeling he aroused in me dispelled the torment. But all too often those terrible moments would return in which I would see Miriam’s charred corpse, and feel that I was about to go mad with anxiety. At such moments the vague suspicions on which my fear was based would harden into the firm conviction revealed in a vivid picture full of indescribably horrific detail.
One November evening towards ten o’clock – it was already pitch-dark and my despair had reached such a point of intensity that, like an animal dying of thirst, I had to bite my straw mattress to stop myself from crying out loud – the gaoler suddenly opened the door and ordered me to follow him to the examining magistrate. I felt so weak that I staggered rather than walked.
Any hope I had of ever leaving this awful place had long since died within me.
I prepared myself for the usual icy question followed by the usual cackling from behind the desk, before I was sent back into the darkness. Baron Leisetreter had already gone home and there was no one in the room but an old, hunchbacked, spider-fingered clerk. I just stood there, dully waiting to see what would come next. Then I noticed that the gaoler had stayed in the room and was giving me encouraging winks, but I was much too downhearted to ask myself what they might mean.
“The investigation into the case of Karl Zottmann has led to the conclusion –”, the clerk began, cackled, clambered onto a chair and rummaged around in the papers on the shelf before he found the one he wanted, then continued, “– the conclusion that prior to his death the aforementioned Zottmann, in the course of a secret assignation with the former prostitute Rosina Metzeles, spinster, generally known at the time as Rosie the Redhead, later procured for an undisclosed sum from Kautsky’s Wine Bar by the deaf-mute, Jaromir Kwássnitschka, silhouette artist, now detained at His Imperial Majesty’s pleasure, and since April of this year living in a common-law marriage – Rosie the Redhead, that is – with His Highness Prince Ferri Athenstädt, was enticed – the aforementioned Zottmann, that is – into a disused cellar of the house, cadastral number 21,873, stroke Roman III, commonly referred to as Hahnpassgasse no. 7, where he was incarcerated against his will and left to starve or freeze to death.” The clerk peered at me over his spectacles and leafed through several pages of the document before continuing.
“The investigation led to the further conclusion that subsequent to his decease the aforementioned Karl Zottmann was, in all probability, robbed of all the possessions he carried on his person, in particular of the double-cased pocket-watch” – the clerk held up the watch by its chain – “enclosed under section capital P, stroke b. The testimony of Jaromir Kwássnitschka, silhouette artist, orphan of the late manufacturer of communion wafers of the same name, in which he claimed to have found the abovementioned watch in the bed of his brother, Loisa, who has since absconded, and disposed of it to Aaron Wassertrum, dealer in second-hand goods and owner of several properties subsequently deceased, for an agreed sum, was rejected due to the unreliable character of the deponent.
The investigation also established that the corpse of the aforementioned Karl Zottmann contained, at the time of its discovery, a notebook in its rear trousers pocket in which it had made, presumably some time before its demise, several entries relevant to the case and which assisted the Imperial and Royal authorities in identifying the criminal. The testimony of the entries in the deceased’s notebook casts strong suspicion on Loisa Kwássnitschka, at present a fugitive from justice, to whom the Imperial and Royal state prosecution service has accordingly turned its attention. In consideration of the new material evidence detailed above, the detention order against Athanasius Pernath, gem engraver with no previous convictions at present, is therefore to be revoked and the proceedings against him withdrawn.
Prague, July 189-
signed
Dr. Freiherr von Leisetreter”
The ground seemed to give way under my feet, and for a few minutes I lost consciousness. When I came to, I was sitting on a chair and the gaoler was giving me a friendly pat on the shoulder. The clerk remained utterly impassive, sniffed, blew his nose and then said, “Notification of the decision could not take place before today due to the fact that your name begins with a ‘P’ and must therefore naturally come towards the end of the alphabetical order.” Then he continued reading:
“In addition, Athanasius Pernath, gem engraver, is to be apprised of the fact that, by the terms of the last will and testament of Innocence Charousek, medical student of this city, who died in May of this year, he, Athanasius Pernath, is declared heir to one third of the total estate of the said Innocence Charousek, and is hereby required to append his signature below in acknowledgement of this notification of the court’s decision.”
As he read the last word, the clerk dipped his pen in the ink-well and began scrawling across the paper. I expected his usual cackle, but he refrained from it.
“Innocence Charousek”, I murmured, lost in thought. The gaoler leant over and whispered to me:
“He came to visit me, did Herr Dr. Charousek. It was just before he died and he was asking after you. ‘Give him my very, very best wishes’, he said. Of course I couldn’t tell you then. Strictly against the rules. He came to a terrible end, did that poor Dr. Charousek. Did away with himself, he did. They found him lying on his front on the grave of that Anton Wassertrum. He’d dug two deep holes in the ground, cut open the arteries in his wrists and stuck his arms down the holes. He must have bled to death. Mad he probably was, that poor Dr. Char–”
The clerk pushed his chair back noisily and handed me the pen to sign. Then he stood up, full of self-importance, and said, in exactly the tones of his aristocratic superior, “Gaoler, take this
man out.”
Once again – after how many, many months? – the man with the sabre and long johns in the room in the gatehouse had put aside the coffee-mill he was holding between his knees, only this time he did not examine me, but returned my precious stones, my purse with the ten crowns in it, my coat and all my other things.
Then I was out in the street.
“Miriam, Miriam! Soon at last we shall see each other again!” It was all I could do to suppress a wild shout of joy. It must have been midnight. Like a dull brass plate, the full moon was floating wanly behind a veil of cloud. The cobbles were covered with a layer of sticky mud. In the mist the cab looked like a prehistoric monster; I was so unused to walking that my legs almost gave way, and I staggered towards it, the soles of my feet completely numb, as if I were suffering from inflammation of the spinal chord.
“Hahnpassgasse, Cabbie, as quick as you can, number seven. D’you hear? Hahnpassgasse No. 7.”
FREE
We had only driven a few yards when the cab stopped.
“Hahnpassgasse, your Honour?”
“Yes, yes, on you go!”
The cab set off again, and again it stopped.
“For God’s sake, what’s the matter now?!”
“You did say Hahnpassgasse, your Honour?”
“Yes, yes. Of course I did!”
“But I can’t take you to Hahnpassgasse.”
“Why ever not?”
“ ’Cos they’ve dug up the roads everywhere. They’re pulling the whole of the Jewish quarter down.”
The Golem Page 23