The Golem (18 page)

She stretched out her hand to me. “And you won’t ever say again that you want to help me – or us –, will you, Herr Pernath? Now that you know it would deny me the chance of a miracle happening if you were to?”

I promised, but in my heart I made a reservation.

The door opened and Hillel came in. Miriam embraced him, and he greeted me in a warm, friendly manner, but once more using the formal mode of address. Also there seemed to be a slight tiredness or uncertainty about him. Or was I imagining it? Perhaps it was just the result of the twilight that filled the room.

“You must have come”, he said, when Miriam had left us alone together, “to ask for my advice in the case concerning the lady –”

I was so astonished, I was about to interrupt, but he forestalled me. “It was Charousek who told me. He looked so remarkably changed that I spoke to him in the street. His heart was full to overflowing, and he told me all about it. He also told me you gave him some money.” He gave me a penetrating look, emphasising each word in a most curious manner, but I could not understand what he meant by it. “It is true that it means a few more drops of happiness have fallen from heaven … and … and in this … case I think there’s no harm done, but …” he thought for a while, “but sometimes one only causes sorrow to oneself and to others with such deeds. Helping people is not as easy as you think, my friend. If it were, then redeeming the world would be a very, very simple matter indeed. Or don’t you agree?”

“But don’t
you
give money to the poor as well, Hillel? Often everything you possess?” I asked.

He shook his head and smiled. “It seems to me you have turned into a Talmudist overnight, answering a question with another question. That makes it difficult to have a proper argument.”

He paused, as if he expected me to answer, but once again I could not understand what he was waiting for.

“Well, to get back to the subject”, he went on in a different tone of voice, “I don’t think your protégée – I mean the lady – is in any danger just at the moment. Cross your bridges when you come to them. People do also say, ‘A stitch in time saves nine’, but I think it is wiser to let things take their course and be ready for anything. There may be the possibility of a meeting between Aaron Wassertrum and myself, but the initiative has to come from him; I can take no steps to bring it about, it is he who must cross the street. Whether he comes to see you or me does not matter, I will speak to him. It will still be
his
decision whether he follows my advice or not. I’ll wash my hands of the matter.”

Apprehensively, I tried to read his face. I had never before heard him speak in such a cold and menacing manner. But behind those dark and deep-set eyes lay a slumbering abyss. Miriam’s words, ‘as if there were a glass wall between us’, came to mind. All I could do was to shake his hand and depart without saying a word.

He accompanied me out into the passage, and when I turned round on the stairs and looked back, I saw that he was still standing there, giving me a friendly wave, but with the expression of someone who would like to say more, yet cannot.

It had been my plan just to collect my coat and walking-stick from my apartment and then go out for a meal at the Old Toll House Tavern, where Zwakh, Prokop and Vrieslander would be sitting, as they did every night, telling each other crazy stories until the early hours, but scarcely had I entered my room than my intention vanished, just as if a hand had whipped away a scarf or something similar I had been wearing.

There was a tension in the air which I could not explain, but which was almost tangible and which, within a few seconds of my entering, took such violent hold of me that I hardly knew what to do first: light the lamp, close the door behind me, sit down or walk up and down.

Had someone crept in while I was out and hidden themselves in the room? Was it someone’s fear of being seen that I had caught? Was perhaps Wassertrum here? I pulled the curtains aside, opened the wardrobe, glanced into the other room: no one.

The iron box had not been moved from where I had left it.

Would the best thing be to burn the letters right away and remove that worry once and for all? My fingers were already feeling for the key in my waistcoat pocket but did it have to be now? There was time enough before the morning.

Light the lamp first of all!

I could not find the matches.

Was the door locked? I took a few steps back towards it then stopped again. Why this sudden fear?

I tried to tell myself I was behaving like a coward, but the thought came to a halt, right in the middle of the sentence.

I was suddenly seized by the insane idea that I should quickly climb up onto the table and take a chair with me to hit ‘the thing’ on the head that was crawling round on the floor, if … if it should come that close.

“But there’s no one here”, I said to myself out loud, in some irritation; “have you ever been afraid in your life?”

It made no difference. The air I was breathing had turned thin and sharp, like ether.

If only I had been able to see something,
anything
, however awful, my fear would have vanished in a trice.

Nothing came.

My eyes searched every corner: nothing.

Everywhere I looked, nothing but familiar things: furniture, chests, the lamp, the picture, the wall clock, faithful old friends all of them, and lifeless.

I hoped they would change their shape as I looked at them, allowing me to assume some optical delusion had been the cause of the fear that was paralysing me.

No, that was not it, either. They stood there, rigid, remaining true to their shapes. Much too rigid, given the murkiness of the light in the room, for it to be natural.

‘They are under the same spell as you are’, I told myself. ‘They don’t dare make even the slightest movement.’

Why wasn’t the wall clock ticking?

The lurking presence all around devoured every noise.

I shook the table and was surprised that I could hear the sound.

If at least the wind were whistling round the house. Not even that! Or if the wood in the stove would crackle. The fire had gone out.

And all the time the same awful lurking presence filling the air incessantly, like the constant sound of running water! All my senses permanently ready to pounce, but with nothing to clutch at! I doubted whether I would ever survive it, the room full of eyes I could not see, full of aimlessly wandering hands I could not grasp.

This, I realised, was terror giving birth to itself, the paralysing dread at an inexplicable, shapeless nothing that eats away the boundaries of our thought.

Stiffening every sinew, I stood and waited.

I must have waited a quarter of an hour. Perhaps ‘it’ could be tricked into trying to creep up on me from behind, and I could catch it.

I swung round: still nothing. The same nothing that
did not exist
, and yet filled the room with its ghastly life and chilled me to the marrow.

If I were to run out? What was there stopping me?

But I knew with absolute certainty that ‘it’ would go with me. I also realised that it would not help if I lit the candle, and yet I still searched for the matches until at length I found them.

But the wick refused to burn, for a long time it was nothing more than a faint glimmer. The little flame could neither live nor die, and when it finally won the battle for survival it gave off a consumptive glow, as dull as a dirty yellow piece of tin. No, darkness was better. I put it out again and threw myself fully clothed onto my bed. I counted my heartbeats, one … two … three … four … up to a thousand and then again and again from the beginning, for hours, days, weeks, as it seemed, until my lips were dry and my hair was standing on end. No relief, not even for a second.

I started saying words out loud, any words that came into my head: “prince”, “tree”, “child”, “book”, and repeating them mechanically until they suddenly stood before me, naked, stripped of sense, fearful sounds from a distant, barbaric past, and I had to cudgel my brains to rediscover their meaning: p-r-i-n-c-e? b-o-o-k?

Had I gone mad? Or was I dead? I pinched myself to see.

“Stand up”, I commanded. “Sit down in that chair.”

I collapsed into the armchair.

If only death would come! If only I could escape from the sense of this intangible, lurking presence! “I won’t!” I screamed. “I WON’T! – Can’t you hear me?!”

Drained of all strength, I slumped back into the chair; incapable of thought, incapable of action, I stared dully into space.

‘Why does he keep insisting on offering me the seeds?’ The thought washed over me, receded and then returned. Receded. Returned.

I slowly realised there was a strange being standing there – perhaps had been standing before me since I had sat down in the chair – holding out his hand towards me. It was a grey, broad-shouldered creature, about the size of a sturdily built human, leaning on a knotted, corkscrew stick of white wood. Where the head should have been I could see nothing but a sphere of pale mist. The apparition gave off a dismal odour of sandalwood and damp slate.

I was in the grip of a feeling of utter helplessness, which almost robbed me of my senses. All the torment, which for weeks had been gnawing at my nerves, had condensed into mortal fear and taken shape in this abortion. My instinct for self-preservation told me – warned me, screamed in my ear – that I would go mad with terror if I could see the face of the phantom, and yet it drew me like a magnet, so that I found it impossible to avert my gaze from the pale, misty sphere and kept scrutinising it for eyes, a nose, a mouth. Despite all my efforts, however, I could not discern the slightest movement in the misty sphere. I could visualise all kinds of heads on the body, but I knew that each and every one was a product of my own imagination. And they always dissolved, almost at the very moment I had created them.

The one that retained its shape longest was an Egyptian ibis head.

In the darkness the phantom was outlined in a spectral haze. The only perceptible movement was a slight contraction of the silhouette, which then dilated again, as if the whole of its body were pulsating with deep, slow breaths. Instead of feet, it was standing on bony stumps, from which the grey, bloodless flesh was pushed up for a few inches in bulging rolls.

Immobile, it held out its hand towards me. In it were little seeds the size of beans, red with black spots round the edges.

What on earth was I supposed to do with them?

I had a vague, nagging feeling that an enormous responsibility lay upon me, a responsibility that went far beyond the confines of this world, were I to make the wrong decision. Somewhere in the realm of prime causes, I sensed, there was a balance with the weight of half the world in each scale, and the one into which I cast my handful of dust was the one that would sink to the ground.

That, I realised, was the cause of this awful, lurking presence all around me. ‘Do not move a muscle’, reason advised, ‘even if death should never come to release you from your torment.’

‘But that’, another voice whispered, ‘would still be making a choice; that would be to reject the seeds. There is no way round it; you must decide.’

I looked round for help, for some sign to tell me what I should do. Nothing. I probed the recesses of my mind: not a spark of an idea, everything lifeless, dead.

I recognised that in this terrible moment the lives of myriads of men and women weighed as light as a feather.

It must already have been deep into the night, for I could no longer distinguish the walls of my room. From the studio next door came the sound of steps. I could hear someone moving wardrobes, pulling out drawers and letting them crash to the floor; I thought I recognised Wassertrum’s rasping bass cursing and swearing. I ignored the sounds. They meant as little to me as the rustling of a mouse.

I closed my eyes. Long lines of human faces passed me in endless procession, rigid death masks with the eyelids firmly closed: my own kin, my own ancestors. They rose from their graves, and all had the same shape of skull, however much individuals appeared to vary, with hair brushed smooth and parted, curled or cut short, with full-bottomed wigs or pigtails fastened with a ring; down the centuries they came, their features growing more and more familiar until they merged into one last face: the face of the Golem, with which the chain of my ancestors broke off.

Then the darkness dissolved the room into an infinite, empty space, the centre of which was myself sitting in my chair with the grey shadow still in front of me, its arm outstretched. And when I opened my eyes, I could see strange beings standing round us in two circles, intersecting so that they formed a figure of eight.

Those in the one circle were swathed in robes of shimmering violet, the others reddish black. They were people of an alien race, tall and unnaturally slight in stature, their faces hidden behind shining cloths.

From the quivering of my heart I could tell that the moment of decision had come. My fingers itched to take the seeds; at that I saw a tremor go through the figures in the reddish circle.

Should I reject the seeds? The trembling passed to those in the bluish circle. I examined the headless man closely; he was still standing in the same posture, as motionless as ever.

Even the breathing had stopped.

I raised my arm, still with no idea what I should do, and – struck the outstretched hand of the phantom, so that the seeds rolled away over the floor.

For one moment, with the sudden violence of an electric shock, I lost consciousness and felt I was plunging down through bottomless depths; then I found my feet firmly on the ground.

The grey apparition had disappeared. Likewise the figures from the reddish circle.

The bluish figures on the other hand had formed a circle round me. On their breasts they bore an inscription in golden hieroglyphs and silently – it looked as if they were taking an oath – they raised their hands, each holding between index finger and thumb one of the red seeds I had knocked out of the headless phantom’s hand.