by Primo Levi
Therefore, at the decisive moment, when it was time to place in the servant’s lion skull the three principles of movement—the Nous, the Epithemia, and the Thymos1—Aryeh destroyed what was written regarding the first two and wrote on a piece of parchment only the third. Underneath, he added in large, fiery script the signs of the ineffable name of God, rolled up the parchment, and put it in a silver case. The Golem, then, didn’t have a mind, but he had courage and strength, and the ability to come to life only when the silver case containing the Name was placed between his teeth.
When it was time for the first experiment, Aryeh’s whole body trembled as never before. He inserted the Name in the designated position, and the monster’s eyes lit up and stared at him. He expected him to ask, “What do you desire of me, O Lord,” but instead he heard another question, familiar to him, and sounding full of anger: “Why do the wicked prosper?” The Rabbi realized that the Golem was his son, and he felt joy, and at the same time fearful before the Lord, because, as it is written, the joy of the Jew comes with a seed of terror.
Aryeh was not disappointed by his servant. When the Name was removed, he reposed in the cellar of the synagogue, entirely inert, a lifeless hunk of clay, and needed neither hay nor grain. When the Name brought him back to life, he drew all his strength from the Name itself and from the air around him. He had no need of meat or bread or wine. Nor did he need the gaze and love of his master, upon which the horse and the dog feed. He was never sad, never happy, but in his heart of clay, hardened by fire, burned a tense anger, quiet and eternal, the same one that had flashed forth in the question that was his first act of life. He did nothing without Aryeh ordering him to, but he did not do everything Aryeh ordered him to. The Rabbi soon realized this and was both happy and worried. It was useless to ask the Golem to go into the forest to cut wood or to go to the well for water. He would respond, “It will be done, O Lord,” ponderously turn his back, and depart with his thunderous footsteps, but as soon as he was out of sight he would slip into his dark bed, spit out the Name, and stiffen into his habitual rock-like inertia. On the other hand, he accepted with a glint of delight in his eye all undertakings that required courage and valor, and he carried them out with a dark flair all his own.
For many years he was an able defender of the Prague community against iniquity and violence. His many exploits were often recounted: how he, by himself, had blocked the way of a tribe of Turkmen warriors intent on knocking down the White Gate to sack the ghetto; how he foiled the plans for a massacre by capturing the actual perpetrator of an assassination that the Emperor’s henchmen had tried to disguise as a ritual murder; how he, again alone, had saved the wheat stocks in the warehouse when the Vltava suddenly and disastrously flooded.
It is written: “The seventh day is a Sabbath to Yahweh your God: in it you shall not do any work, you, nor your son, nor your daughter, your manservant, nor your maidservant, nor your cattle, nor the stranger that is within your gates.” Rabbi Aryeh reflected: the Golem was technically not a servant but, rather, a machine, animated by the spirit of the Name. In this respect, he was similar to windmills, which are permitted to grind on the Sabbath, and to sailboats, which are permitted to sail. But then he remembered that he had to put a hedge around the Law, and he resolved to take the Name from him every Friday at sunset, and this he did for many years.
Then there came a day (it was in fact a Friday) on which the Rabbi brought the Golem to where he lived, on the second floor of an ancient tenement on Broad Street, whose façade was blackened and corroded by time. He gave him a pile of logs to split, then lifted his arm and placed in his hand an ax. The Golem, holding the ax frozen in midair, turned slowly toward him, his ugly face expressionless and fierce. He didn’t move.
“Let’s go, get chopping!” Aryeh commanded, and a deep laugh tickled his heart without appearing on his face. The monster’s laziness and disobedience impressed, even flattered him, because these are native human traits and the Rabbi hadn’t inspired them—the clay colossus had conceived them on his own. He was more human than the Rabbi had intended. “Let’s go, get to work,” Aryeh repeated.
The Golem took two heavy steps toward the wood, holding the ax in front of him with an outstretched arm. He then let the ax fall with a crash to the granite floor. With his left hand he grabbed a log, placed it vertically on a stump, and let his right hand fall on it like a cleaver. The log split in two. He did the same with a second and a third log and then with all the others: two steps from the stump to the pile, a half turn, two steps from the pile to the stump, splitting with his naked hand of clay at every half turn. Aryeh, both fascinated and disturbed, observed his servant’s angry and mechanical work. Why had he refused to use the ax? He thought about it for a while. His mind was accustomed to interpreting the Law and the sacred texts, which are made up of difficult questions and ingenious, convoluted responses. For at least half an hour, an answer eluded him, but he persisted in searching for one. The Golem was his creation, his son, and it is a painful blow to discover that our children have opinions and desires that are different, incomprehensible, and foreign to our own.
It was like this: the Golem was a servant who didn’t want to be a servant. For him the ax was a servile instrument, a symbol of servitude, like the bit for a horse or the yoke for an ox. It wasn’t so for the hand, which is a part of you, your destiny imprinted on your palm. The Rabbi was pleased with this response and lingered over his analysis, comparing it to the texts, and he was satisfied. It was shrewd, quick-witted, plausible, and piously felicitous. He tarried so long that he didn’t notice what was happening—indeed, what had already happened—outside his window in the open air of Broad Street, under Prague’s hazy sky: the sun had set, the Sabbath had begun.
By the time he noticed, it was too late. Aryeh tried in vain to stop his servant and to extract the Name from his mouth. But the Golem evaded him, swatted him away with his stiff arms, and turned his back on him. The Rabbi, who had never before touched him, came to know his inhuman weight, his rock-hardness. Like a pendulum, the Golem blundered back and forth across the little room, smashing wood against wood so that chips flew up to the rafters. Aryeh hoped and prayed that the Golem’s fury would subside when the pile of logs was finished, but instead the giant leaned over, all his joints creaking, picked up the ax, and with it rampaged until dawn, shattering everything around him—furniture, shutters, windows, partition walls, even the safe containing the silver, and the shelves holding the sacred books.
Aryeh hid under the stairs, and here he had the time and opportunity to contemplate a terrible truth: nothing leads to madness more than two conflicting commands. In the Golem’s rock-like brain, it was written: “You shall faithfully serve your Lord: you shall obey him like a corpse.” But also written there was the entire Law of Moses, which had been transmitted to him with every letter of the message with which he was born, because every letter of the Law contains the whole Law. Therefore it was also written inside of him: “You shall rest on the Sabbath. You shall not do any work.” Aryeh understood his servant’s madness, and he praised God for that understanding, because he who has understood is more than half way. He praised God in spite of the destruction of his house, because he realized that the fault was neither God’s nor the Golem’s but his alone.
When the dawn of the Sabbath came through the broken windows and nothing remained to destroy in the Rabbi’s house, the Golem stopped, exhausted. Aryeh fearfully approached him and with a tentative hand removed from his mouth the silver case that contained the Name.
The monster’s eyes closed, and never opened again. In the evening, when that sad Sabbath was over, Aryeh tried in vain to bring him back to life so that he might help, with the methodical strength he once had, to put the Rabbi’s devastated house back together. The Golem remained motionless and inert, entirely similar now to a forbidden and odious idol, an indecent man-beast of red clay, chipped here and there by his own frenzy. Aryeh touched him with a finger and the giant
fell to the ground and shattered. The Rabbi gathered up the fragments and put them in the attic of the house on Broad Street in Prague, dilapidated already then, where it is widely reported that they still can be found.
1. In Plato’s Republic, man is described as being composed of four parts: the physical, or Soma; the mind, or Nous; desire, or Epithemia; and the spirit, or Thymos.
Mutiny
To Mario Rigoni Stern1
The Faragos have been cultivating the land next to our garden for ten years now and, as will happen over a fence or across a river, a rudimentary friendship, perfunctory and vague, originated because of it. The Faragos have always been horticulturists and we both admire and envy them. They always know the right thing to do, in the right way, and at the right time, while we, amateurs and urbanites, feed off our errors. We devoutly heed their advice, both requested and the other kind, which the Farago patriarch yells at us across the fence when he observes us commit some grotesque mistake, or when the results of our grotesque mistakes cry out to the heavens. And yet, despite our humility and docility, our tiny plot of earth is full of weeds and anthills, while their vegetable gardens, which cover no less than two hectares, are clean, orderly, and thriving.
“It takes a good eye,” the Faragos say, or “It takes the right hands.” With the exception of Clotilde, they don’t come over to see what we’re doing very willingly. Perhaps they don’t want the responsibility, or they realize that a greater intimacy or understanding between us is neither possible nor desirable. Or maybe, indeed probably, they don’t want to teach us too much. One never knows, someday it might occur to us to steal their profession. Advice, yes, but from a distance.
Clotilde is different. We’ve watched her grow summer after summer like a poplar, and now she is eleven years old. She’s slender, her brown hair is always falling over her eyes, and she is full of mystery, like all adolescents. But she was mysterious even before, when she was chubby, knee high to a grasshopper, covered in dirt up to her eyes, and had, it seemed, learned to talk and walk directly from above. Or maybe she’d learned from the earth itself, with which she had an obvious but indecipherable relationship. At that time, we often saw her lying between the furrows, on the moist, warm, just tilled soil. She smiled at the sky with her eyes closed, intent on the beating wings of the butterflies that alighted on her as if she were a flower. She stayed perfectly still so as not to frighten them away. She held crickets and spiders in her hands with no sign of repugnance, and without hurting them. She stroked them with her brown finger just as you do with pets, and then returned them to the ground.
“Go, little creature, go on your way.”
Now that she’s grown, she, too, gives us advice and explanations, but of another kind. She explained to me that bindweed is kind but lazy. If you let it go, it invades the fields and suffocates them, but not to do damage, like couch grass—it’s just too lazy to grow upright. “See what it does? It puts down roots in the ground but not too deep, because it doesn’t want to tire itself out, since it’s not very strong. It then splits into threads and each thread runs along the ground searching for food, and they never cross. They’re no fools, they agree what to do beforehand: you head east, I’ll go west. They produce flowers that are pretty enough and even a little fragrant, and they also produce these little balls, see? Because they, too, think about the future.”
She had no pity for the couch grass, however. “It’s entirely useless for you to chop it to pieces with the hoe since every piece will grow again, like the heads of a dragon in fables. Actually, it really is a dragon. If you look at it closely, you can see teeth, nails, and scales. It kills other plants, and never dies, because it lives underground. What you see aboveground is nothing, those thin little grass-like leaves seem so innocent, but the more you dig, the more you find, and if you dig deep enough you’ll find a black, gnarled skeleton as hard as iron and older than I can guess—that is couch grass. Cows trample it and it doesn’t die. If you were to put it into a tomb made of stone, it would crack the stone and find its way out. The only way to beat it is with fire. I don’t talk to couch grass.”
I asked her if she talks with the other plants and she told me she certainly does. Her mother and father, too, but she is better at it. It’s not actually a matter of speaking with your mouth, like humans, but it’s clear that when they want something plants make signs and grimaces, and they understand ours. However, because in general plants are very slow in their movements, their understanding, and their self-expression, it’s important not to lose patience in trying to understand them and in making yourself understood.
“See this?” she said to me, pointing to one of our lemon trees. “It’s whining, and it’s been whining for a while, and if you don’t understand, how can you know something’s wrong? And so it continues to suffer.”
“What’s it whining about? It’s got plenty of water, and we care for it just like the others.”
“I don’t know, it’s not always easy to comprehend. See here, on this side, all its leaves are shriveled. Something’s wrong with it on this side. Maybe its roots are colliding with a rock. And see, on this same side, there’s an ugly gash in its trunk.”
In Clotilde’s opinion everything that grows from the earth and has green leaves is “someone like us,” with whom we could find a way to get along. In fact, for this reason one shouldn’t keep plants and flowers in pots because it’s like putting animals in a cage. They become stupid or mean or, in any case, they’re no longer the same, and it’s pure selfishness on our part to keep them so restricted just for our viewing pleasure. The couch grass, in fact, is an exception because it comes not from the earth but from the under-earth, the kingdom of treasure, dragons, and the dead. In her opinion, the under-earth is a complicated country like ours, only there it’s dark while here it’s light. There are caves, tunnels, streams, rivers, and lakes, and it also has veins of ore that are all poisonous and noxious except for iron, which is, within certain parameters, man’s friend. Treasure is also to be found there—some of it hidden by men from the distant past, some, like gold and diamonds, having been there forever. The dead also live there, but Clotilde doesn’t like to talk about them. Last month, an excavator was digging on the property on their other side. Clotilde, pale and fascinated, watched the mighty work of the machine until the hole was three meters deep, then she disappeared for a few days and returned only when the machine had left and all that could be seen in the great big hole was dirt and rocks, puddles, and a few exposed roots.
She told me, too, that not all the plants get along. There are those that have been domesticated, like cows and chickens, that wouldn’t know what to do without people, but there are others that protest, attempt to escape, and sometimes succeed. If we aren’t careful, they become wild and no longer produce fruit or, instead of producing it to our taste, they make it to suit themselves—bitter, hard, all pit. If a plant hasn’t been completely domesticated, it becomes homesick, especially if it is anywhere near a wild wood. It wants to return to the wood, where the bees alone take care of its fertilization, and the birds and the wind spread its seeds. She showed me the peaches from their orchard and it was just as she said, the trees nearest the fence stretched their branches over it, like arms.
“Come with me, I have to show you something.” She led me up a hill in the middle of a wood that almost no one knows, it’s so thick with brush. Furthermore, it seemed to be defended by a border of crumbling old terraces covered over with a kind of prickly ivy I couldn’t identify. The ivy was beautiful to look at, its pear-shaped leaves bright green with white speckles, but the stems, branches, even the backs of the leaves themselves, were bristling with hooked thorns, barbed like arrowheads, and if they merely skimmed the flesh they would penetrate it and claim a piece.
Along the way, while I had only enough breath to govern my steps and give voice now and again to a syllable of assent, Clotilde talked. She told me she had just learned an important piece of news, and that she had heard i
t from a rosemary, a plant that is somewhat special, a friend to humans but only from afar, like a cat; it prefers to do things its own way. The aromatic flavor that goes so well with roasts is its invention. Humans like it, but insects find it bitter. In short, it’s a repellent that the rosemary plant invented thousands and thousands of years ago, when humans weren’t yet here, and in fact you’ll never see rosemary eaten by slugs or caterpillars. Even its needle-shaped leaves are a great invention, but this was not the rosemary’s doing. Pine trees and firs invented those many years earlier. They are a good defense, because the little creatures who eat leaves always begin at the tip and if they find it woody and sharp they immediately lose courage.
The rosemary plant, by means of gestures, had given Clotilde to understand that she should go into the wood in a particular direction and for a particular distance, and that there she would find something important. She had already visited the place a few days before, and what the rosemary had said was true, and she wanted to show me, too. Only, she was a little disappointed that the rosemary plant had turned out to be a snitch.
She showed me a path half buried in brambles that allowed us to penetrate the wood without too many scratches. And then, at the center of the forest, there it was: a small circular clearing that had never existed before. At the spot, the ground was almost flat, and the soil appeared smooth, compacted, without a single blade of grass or pebble. There were, however, three or four rocks about a meter from the circle’s edge that Clotilde told me she had put there as markers to verify what the rosemary plant had told her: the place was a tree school, a secret place where trees taught one another to walk, in defiance of humans and unbeknownst to them. She led me by the hand (her hand was hardly childlike, but rather rough and strong) around the circle, and showed me many small, imperceptible things. She showed me that around every tree trunk the earth was loose and broken up, as if blocked on the outside and sunken on the inside. She showed me that all the trunks were leaning outward a little and even the vines ran radially toward the outside. Of course, I’m not at all sure that such signs can’t be detected elsewhere, in other clearings, or perhaps in all of them, and that they don’t have a different significance, or none at all. But Clotilde was full of excitement.