“Take me as far as you can, then, but be quick about it!”
His nag took one leap forward and then subsided into its habitual amble. I let down the rattling windows and greedily sucked in the cool night air. Everything had become so strange, so bewilderingly new, the houses, the streets, the closed shutters. A white dog trotted past, alone and morose, along the damp pavement. How strange! A dog! I had completely forgotten the existence of such animals. Full of a childish delight, I shouted after it, “Come on now, how can you look so glum?”
What would Hillel say? And Miriam?
Only a few more minutes and I would be there. I would not stop hammering on their door until I had roused them from their beds. Now everything was going to be all right, all the trials and tribulations of this year over at last. What a splendid Christmas it would be! And this time I wouldn’t sleep through it like last year!
For a moment my old fear returned to paralyse me as I remembered the words of the ruffian with the predatory features. The charred face – rape – murder. No! No! I forced myself to shake off the horrifying images. No, no, it could not be true. Miriam was alive! Had I not heard her voice from Laponder’s lips?
Just one more minute – thirty seconds – and then –
The cab stopped beside a mountain of rubble. Everywhere the road was barricaded by heaps of cobblestones with red lamps on top of them. An army of navvies was working by the light of blazing torches.
The way was blocked by piles of debris and broken masonry. I clambered over it, sinking in up to my knees.
There, that must be Hahnpassgasse, mustn’t it? I had the greatest difficulty orienting myself, nothing but ruins all around. Wasn’t that the house where I had lived? The faade had been ripped off.
I climbed to the top of a mound of earth; far below, what had been the street had become a narrow passageway between black walls. I looked up. The lattice of exposed rooms rose up into the air like the cells of a gigantic honeycomb, lit half by the torchlight, half by the dull moon.
That one up there, that must have been my room. I could recognise it by the paint on the walls, although there was only a small patch left to see. And next to it the studio, Savioli’s studio. I suddenly had an empty feeling in my heart. How strange! The studio! Angelina! That was all so far, so immeasurably far behind me now.
I turned round. Of the house in which Wassertrum had lived there was not one stone left standing on another. Everything had been razed to the ground, the junk-shop, Charousek’s basement, everything, everything.
A phrase I had read somewhere came to mind, ‘Our days on the earth are as a shadow, and there is none abiding.’
I asked one of the workmen whether he knew where the people who had left these houses lived now. Did he know Shemaiah Hillel, the archivist at the Jewish Town Hall?
“Nix daitsch”, was the curt answer, but when I offered him a crown, he immediately found he could understand German; however he still could not help me. None of his workmates either.
Perhaps I would find out more if I asked at Loisitchek’s? – Loisitchek’s was closed, they said, the house was being renovated.
Well, then, I could wake up someone in the area, anyone. Wouldn’t that be possible? – There was no one living in the area, no one at all, not even a stray cat. Forbidden by the authorities. Because of typhoid.
“But the Old Toll House Tavern? The Old Toll House must be open?”
“Closed.”
“Are you sure?”
“Sure.”
I tried a few names, the first that came into my head, of people who had run small shops or stalls in the neighbourhood; then Zwakh, Vrieslander, Prokop …?
At every name the man shook his head.
“Perhaps you know Jaromir Kwássnitschka?”
The worker looked up. “Jaromir? Deaf and dumb?”
Thank God! Someone I knew at last. “Yes, he’s a deafmute. Where is he living?”
“Does he cut out those little pictures? Out of black paper?”
“Yes, that’s him. Where can I find him?”
With many digressions, corrections and repetitions, the workman told me the way to an all-night café in the centre of town and went back to his digging.
For over an hour I fought my way through the maze of rubble, balancing over planks and ducking under beams that barred the way. The whole Jewish quarter was a waste of brick and stone, as if the Ghetto had been destroyed by an earthquake. Breathless with agitation, covered in dust and my shoes all torn, I eventually made my way out of the labyrinth and found the sleazy tavern only a few blocks away. Café Chaos said the sign over the door. It consisted of one tiny, almost deserted room which scarcely had space for the tables placed against the walls. In the middle was a three-legged billiard table on which the waiter was snoring. A market-woman, with her basket of vegetables on the floor beside her, was sitting dozing in a corner, a glass of tea in front of her.
Finally the waiter deigned to wake up and ask me what I wanted. The insolent look with which he scanned me from head to toe made me realise how tattered and torn I must look. I glanced in the mirror and was horrified to see an unfamiliar face staring at me, pale and anaemic, wrinkled, grey as putty, with a scrubby beard and long, tangled hair.
As I ordered a black coffee, I asked the waiter whether he had seen Jaromir, the silhouette cutter.
“No idea where he can have got to”, he yawned, then lay down on the billiard table and went back to sleep.
I took the Prager Tagblatt down from its hook on the wall, but the letters seemed to be scuttling about like ants all over the page, so that I did not take in one word of what I was reading.
Hours passed, and through the window-panes appeared that dubious dark-blue colour that signals the arrival of dawn for a gas-lit café. Now and then a few policemen would peer in, the feathers on their helmets a shimmering green, and depart again with their slow, heavy tread.
Three bleary-eyed soldiers came in.
A street-sweeper had a glass of schnapps.
At long, long last, Jaromir.
He was so changed, that at first I did not recognise him. His eyes were dull, he had lost his front teeth, his hair was thinning and there were deep hollows behind his ears.
I was so overjoyed to see a familiar face after all this time, that I jumped up, went over to him and wrung his hand. He appeared extraordinarily apprehensive and kept glancing towards the door. I used every sign I could think of to show him that I was glad to see him, but for a long time he did not seem to believe me, and whatever questions I asked, they all received the same helpless gesture of incomprehension.
How could I make him understand? Ah, an idea!
I borrowed a pencil and drew the faces of Zwakh, Vrieslander and Prokop.
“What? None of them in Prague any more?”
He waved his arms around in the air, made a gesture indicating money being counted out, marched his fingers across the table and slapped himself on the back of the hand. I guessed that all three had probably been given money by Charousek with which they had made a going concern of the puppet theatre company and were now on tour.
“And Hillel? Where is he living now?” I drew his face and a house followed by a question mark. The question mark Jaromir did not understand since he could not read, but he realised what I wanted to know; he took a match, apparently threw it up in the air, but actually made it disappear like a conjuror.
What did that mean? Hillel was also away on a journey?
I drew the Jewish Town Hall. Jaromir shook his head vigorously.
“Hillel is not there any more?” A violent shake of the head.
“Then where is he?” Again the trick with the match.
“He’s just saying the gentleman has gone away, but no one don’t know where”, explained the street-sweeper, who had been watching us with interest the whole time.
Fear struck at my heart; Hillel had gone! Now I was completely alone in the world. The objects in the room began to dance
before my eyes.
“And Miriam?” My hand was trembling so much that for a long time I could not achieve the likeness.
“Has Miriam disappeared too?” Miriam had disappeared too, disappeared without trace.
I groaned out loud and paced up and down the room, making the three soldiers give each other puzzled looks. Jaromir tried to calm me down and made great efforts to tell me something else he had heard. He lay his head on his arm, like someone sleeping.
I grasped the table to steady myself. “For God’s sake, you don’t mean Miriam is dead?” A shake of the head. Jaromir repeated his mime of someone sleeping.
“Has she been ill?” I drew a bottle of medicine. A shake of the head. Again Jaromir laid his head on his arm. By now it was daylight and the gaslamps were turned off one after the other, but still I could not fathom what the gesture was intended to convey.
I gave up and sat thinking. The only thing left to do was to go to the Jewish Town Hall as soon as it opened and ask there if they had any idea where Hillel and Miriam might have gone. I had to look for him.
I sat next to Jaromir in silence, as deaf and dumb as he was. When, after a long time, I looked up, I saw that he was snipping away at a silhouette. I recognised Rosina’s profile. He handed me the scrap of paper, put his hand over his eyes and softly began to cry. Then he suddenly leapt to his feet and staggered out of the door without another word.
At the Jewish Town Hall all they could tell me was that one day their archivist, Shemaiah Hillel, had been absent without explanation and had not reappeared since. He must have taken his daughter with him, for since that day she had not been seen either.
No clue as to where they might have gone.
At the bank they told me my account was still blocked by a court order, but any day now they expected it to be released. Charousek’s legacy would have to go through official channels as well, of course, just when I was impatient to get my hands on the money so that I could do everything to trace Hillel and Miriam.
I sold the precious stones I had on me and rented two small furnished rooms in the attic of a house in Altschulgasse, the only street that had been excluded from the demolition of the old Ghetto. By a strange coincidence it was the very house into which, according to legend, the Golem disappeared.
I asked the inhabitants of the house, mostly small tradesmen and artisans, what was the truth about the room without an entrance, and they laughed in my face. How could anyone believe that kind of nonsense!
My own experiences connected with it had, during my time in prison, taken on the pale cast of a dream that had long since faded, and I now looked on them as empty symbols lacking the pulse of real life, and struck them out of the book of memory. It was the words of Laponder, which sometimes I could hear as clearly as if he were still sitting opposite me in our cell, which encouraged me in the belief that it must have been purely an inner vision, even though at the time it had seemed like tangible reality.
How many things that I once possessed had vanished for good? The Book of Ibbur, the fantastic pack of Tarock cards, Angelina, even my old friends, Zwakh, Vrieslander and Prokop.
It was Christmas Eve and I had brought home a little Christmas tree with red candles. I wanted to relive my youth with the glitter of lights and the fragrance of pine needles and burning wax around me. Before the end of the year I might well already be on my way, searching for the two of them in villages and towns, or anywhere else I felt I might find them. I had gradually lost all my impatience at having to wait, and all my fear that Miriam might have been murdered. I knew in my heart that I would find them both.
All the time I was inwardly smiling with happiness, and whenever I put my hand on some object it felt as if it gave off healing power. In some inexplicable way, I was filled with the content of a person who, after many years of wandering, sees from a distance the towers and spires of his native town gleaming in the sunlight.
Once I went to the tiny café to invite Jaromir to spend Christmas Eve with me, but I was told he had not been back since I was last there. Disappointed, I was about to leave, when an old pedlar came in with worthless bric-à-brac on his tray. I was rummaging around among all the fobs, small crucifixes, hairpins and brooches when I happened upon a heart carved of some red stone on a faded silk ribbon. To my astonishment, I realised it was the memento that Angelina had wanted to give me, when she was still a little girl, at the fountain in the castle where she lived.
All at once the days of my youth flashed past my inward eye, as if I were watching a peep-show drawn by a child. I was so moved I just stood there for a long time, staring at the tiny red heart in my hand.
I was sitting in my attic listening to the crackle of the pine-needles whenever a twig that was above one of the candles began to glow.
‘Perhaps, somewhere or other, at this very moment old Zwakh is putting on his Puppets’ Christmas’, I imagined, ‘and is declaiming that verse by his favourite writer, Oskar Wiener, in cryptic tones,
Where is the heart of coral red?
It hangs upon a silken thread.
Give, oh give it not away,
For I was true; I loved it dear
And laboured seven years and a day
To win this heart I loved so dear.
All of a sudden I was filled with a strangely solemn feeling. The candles had burnt down. Just one was still flickering. The smoke was gathering in drifts around the room. As if there were a hand tugging me, I suddenly turned round:
There on the threshold was my likeness, my double, dressed in a white cloak, a crown on its head.
Just for a second it stood there, then flames burst through the wooden door and a suffocating cloud of hot smoke poured into the room.
Fire! The house was on fire! Fire!
I tore open the window and climbed onto the roof. Already I could hear the piercing siren of the fire-engine approaching.
Gleaming helmets and brusque commands, then the ghostly, flapping rhythm of the pumps breathing in and out as the water demons gathered their strength to pounce on their mortal enemy: fire. The tinkle of glass; red tongues of fire shooting out of all the windows; mattresses thrown down into the street, people jumping down, injuring themselves, being carried off.
I do not know why, but I felt a wild, jubilant ecstasy coursing through my veins. My hair was standing on end.
I ran to the chimney so as not to get burnt, the flames were clutching at me. A chimney-sweep’s rope was wrapped round it. I uncoiled it. One twist round wrist and leg, as we had been taught at gym in school, and I calmly began to let myself down the front of the house.
Past a window: inside the light is dazzling.
And I see … I see … My whole body becomes one great, echoing shout of joy:
“Hillel! Miriam! Hillel!”
I make a jump for the bars. Miss. Lose my grip on the rope.
For a moment I am hanging between heaven and earth, head downwards, legs forming a cross.
The rope twangs as it takes my weight. The fibres stretch and creak.
I am falling.
Consciousness is fading.
As I fall I grab the window-ledge, but my hand slips off. No grip. The stone is smooth.
Smooth, like a lump of fat.
END
“… like a lump of fat!”
That is the stone that looks like a lump of fat.
The words are still ringing in my ears. Then I sit up and try to remember where I am.
I am in bed. In my hotel.
And I’m not called Pernath.
Was it all a dream? No, dreams are not like that. I look at the clock; I have hardly been asleep for an hour. It’s half past two. And there on the hook is someone else’s hat that I took by mistake in the Cathedral today, while I was sitting in a pew during high mass.
Is there a name in it?
I take down the hat; in gold letters on the white silk lining is the unknown and yet so strangely familiar name:
ATHANASIUS PERNATH
Now it won’t leave me in peace any more. I dress quickly and hurry down the stairs.
“Porter! Open the door! I’m going out for a walk for an hour or so.”
“Where to, if I might ask, sir?”
“To the Jewish quarter. To Hahnpassgasse. There is a street of that name, isn’t there?”
“Certainly there is, certainly.” The porter gave a suggestive grin. “But there’s not much going on in the Jewish quarter nowadays, if you catch my meaning. It’s all been rebuilt.”
“That doesn’t matter. Where is Hahnpassgasse?”
The porter pointed to the map with a fat finger, “There, sir.”
“And Loisitchek’s bar?”
“Here, sir.”
“Give me a large sheet of paper.”
“Here you are, sir.”
I wrapped up Pernath’s hat in it. The odd thing about it was that it was almost new, spotlessly clean, and yet as brittle as if it were ancient.
As I made my way, my mind ran over these strange events. In my dream I experienced everything this Athanasius Pernath experienced; in the course of one night I saw, heard, felt everything as if I was Pernath. But then why did I not know what he saw through the barred window at the moment when the rope broke and he called out, “Hillel, Hillel!”?
That, I realised, was the moment at which he separated from me.
I decided I must find this Athanasius Pernath, even if it meant running round this city for three days and three nights.
So that’s Hahnpassgasse? Not the least like it looked in my dream. Nothing but new houses.
A minute later I was sitting in Café Loisitchek, a characterless but fairly clean place. It did, though, have a raised dais with a wooden balustrade at the back; a certain resemblance to the old Loisitchek’s of my dream was undeniable.
“What can I get you, sir?” asked the waitress, a buxom girl who was literally bursting out of a red velvet tail-coat.
The Golem Page 24