The Golem (8 page)

Zwakh’s words had grasped me like a slaughterer grasping a defenceless animal and were squeezing my heart with rough, cruel hands. There had always been a vague torment gnawing at my soul, a feeling as if something had been taken from me and as if I had passed through long periods of my life like a sleepwalker going along the edge of a precipice, but I had never been able to find the cause. Now the secret was out, and it stung unbearably like an open wound.

My morbid dislike of any indulgence in reminiscences of the past; this strange dream that keeps on returning from time to time of being locked in a house with room after room that I can’t get into; the frightening failure of my memory in things concerning my youth – suddenly there was a terrible explanation for it all: I had been mad and they had used hypnosis to treat me, they had closed off the ‘room’ that gave access to those chambers of my brain, rendering me homeless in the midst of the life around me.

And without any hope of ever recovering the lost memories!

I realised that the mainspring of all my thoughts and actions lay hidden in another, forgotten existence, and that I would never be able to uncover it. I am a cutting that has been grafted onto another stem, a branch sprouting from an alien stock. Even if I were to succeed in forcing my way into that locked ‘room’, would that not just mean I would once again fall prey to the ghosts that have been locked away in it?

The story of the Golem that Zwakh told us an hour ago went through my mind and suddenly I saw that there was a gigantic, secret link between the legendary chamber without an entrance in which the unknown being was said to live, and my ominous dream. Yes! And if I were to try to look in through the barred window in my psyche, my ‘rope’ would break too!

The strange connection became clearer and clearer to me and began to take on an aspect of indescribable horror. I could sense that there are things, incomprehensible things, which are yoked together and race along side by side like blind horses, not knowing where their course is taking them.

And in the Ghetto: a chamber, a room to which no one can find the entrance, and a shadowy being that lives there, occasionally feeling its way through the streets to sow terror and panic among men.

Vrieslander was still carving away at the puppet-head, I could hear the rasp of the blade against the wood. The sound of it was almost painful, and I looked over to see if it was soon going to be finished. The way the head moved to and fro in the painter’s hand made it look as if it were alive and were peering into every corner of the room. Then the eyes stayed fixed on me for a long time, satisfied that they had finally found me. I could not turn my eyes away and stared, as if hypnotised, at the wooden face. For a while Vrieslander’s knife seemed to hesitate, unsure of itself, then it scored a firm, decisive line and the wooden features suddenly took on a frightening life of their own.

I recognised the yellow face of the stranger who had brought me the book.

Then everything went blurred. The vision had only lasted for a second, but I could feel my heart stop beating and then start fluttering nervously. And yet, just as when it had brought the book, I still retained awareness of its face.

I had turned into it
and was lying on Vrieslander’s lap, peering round. My gaze wandered round the room, someone else’s hand moving my head. All at once I saw an expression of dismay etch itself on Zwakh’s features, and heard him exclaim, “Good God! That’s the Golem!”

There was a brief struggle as they tried to prise the carving from Vrieslander’s grasp, but he pushed them off, laughing, “What do you mean? It’s just a botched job.” He tore himself away from them, opened the window and threw the head down into the street.

Consciousness left me and I plunged into a profound darkness with shimmering gold threads running through it. It seemed to me that it was only after a long, long time that I came to, and it was only then that I heard the clatter of the wooden head on the cobblestones outside.

“You were so sound asleep that you didn’t even notice we were shaking you”, said Prokop. “The punch is all finished, there’s not even a glass left for you.”

A burning pain at the things I had overheard swept through me, and I wanted to scream at them that I had not dreamt up the story of the man with the
Book of Ibbur,
I could take it out of the iron box and show it to them. But these thoughts could not find words to express themselves and they were drowned in the atmosphere of general bustle that had overtaken my guests as they prepared to leave.

Zwakh insisted on putting my coat round my shoulders, shouting, “Come along to Loisitchek’s with us, Pernath, it’ll revive your spirits.”

Unresisting, I let Zwakh lead me down the stairs. The smell of the fog, which penetrated the house from the street, grew stronger and stronger. Prokop and Vrieslander had gone on a little way ahead, and we could hear them talking outside the entrance.

“It must have fallen right through the grating into the sewers, Devil take it.” We came out into the street and I could see Prokop bending down, looking for the puppet-head.

“I’m glad you can’t find the stupid thing”, growled Vrieslander. He was leaning against the wall and at regular intervals his face shone brightly and then faded again as he sucked the hissing flame of a match into his short pipe.

Prokop waved his arm for silence and bent down even lower. He was almost kneeling on the cobbles. “Do be quiet! Can’t you hear anything?”

We went over to where he was squatting. He pointed silently at the grating over the sewer and put his hand by his ear. We stood there for a while, listening for sounds from the drain.

Nothing.

“What was it you heard?” It was the old puppeteer who finally asked the question, but Prokop immediately grabbed him by the wrist.

For a brief moment, scarcely more than the length of a heartbeat, it had seemed to me as if somewhere down below a hand were knocking, almost inaudibly, on a sheet of iron. The next second, when I thought about it, it had disappeared, but in my breast there was an echo, like a memory of the sound, that gradually dissolved into a vague sense of terror. Steps coming down the street dispelled the feeling.

“Let’s go. What are we hanging around for?” Vrieslander demanded.

We continued down the street, Prokop following reluctantly. “I’m willing to wager my last breath there was someone down there screaming for dear life.”

None of us responded, but I felt it was an almost imperceptible fear rising within us that tied our tongues.

Soon we were looking at the red-curtained window of a tavern. A piece of cardboard announced:

SALON LOISITCHEK

Grande Conserte Tonight

The edges were decorated with faded photographs of women.

Before Zwakh could grasp the knob, the door opened inward and we were greeted with much bowing and scraping by a big burly fellow with black, brilliantined hair and no collar, but a green silk tie round his bare neck and the waistcoat of his dress suit adorned with a bunch of pig’s teeth.

“Well, well well, what fine gentlemen”, he said, and hurriedly twisted his head round to shout across the crowded tavern, “Quick, Pane Schaffranek, a fanfare.” The response was a tinkling sound from the piano, as if a rat were running along the keys.

“Well, well well, what fine gentlemen, what fine gentlemen. Isn’t that nice”, the burly man kept muttering to himself as he helped us off with our coats. “Yes, we have the whole of the aristocracy of the land gathered here tonight”, he said proudly, in response to Vrieslander’s astonished expression at the appearance of a few elegant young men in evening dress on a kind of raised dais at the back of the tavern that was separated from the front part by a balustrade and a couple of steps.

Clouds of pungent tobacco smoke hung in drifts above the tables. Against the walls behind them, the benches were full of figures in rags and tatters: whores from the old ramparts, unkempt, grubby, barefoot, their firm breasts scarcely concealed beneath their discoloured shawls, beside them pimps with their blue soldiers’ caps and cigarettes behind their ears; cattle-dealers with hairy hands and clumsy fingers whose every gesture was a mute statement of infamy; out-of-work waiters with insolent looks and pock-marked clerks in check trousers.

We heard the oily voice of the burly man say, “I’ll bring you a screen so you won’t be disturbed”, and a wheeled partition with little pictures of dancing Chinamen all over it slowly rolled into position alongside the corner table where we had seated ourselves.

The babble of voices died down as the grating tones of a harp made themselves heard. At a brief rest in the tune there was deathly silence, as if everyone were holding their breath, and it was with a sudden shock we became aware of the hissing of the flat, heart-shaped flames from the iron gas-pipes; then, almost immediately, the music swelled up and swamped the noise.

As if they had simply materialised before my eyes, two strange figures appeared out of the clouds of tobacco smoke. One was an old man with the long, white beard of an Old Testament prophet, and a black silk skull-cap such as Jewish patriarchs wear on his bald head. He was blind, and his glassy, milky-blue eyes were fixed on the ceiling as his skinny, claw-like fingers tore at the strings of the harp, his lips moving in silent song. Beside him, the picture of hypocritical bourgeois respectability in her greasy black taffeta dress with a jet cross round her neck and jet bracelets on her arms, was a bloated female with a concertina on her lap.

A wild jumble of notes came lurching out of the instrument which then, exhausted, confined itself to a feeble accompaniment. The old man snapped at the air a few times, then opened his mouth wide so that we could see the blackened stumps of his teeth. Slowly, amid all sorts of strange Hebrew gutterals, a wild bass voice forced its way up from his chest:

“Sta-haars both re-hed and bluuuue –”

“Trallala”, screeched the female, immediately snapping her spittle-flecked lips shut, as if she had said too much.

“Sta-ars both red and blue,

Crescent mo-hoons too.”

– “Trallala.” –

“Redbeard, Greenbeard,

All kinds of sta-hars,”

– “Trallala, trallala.”

Couples stepped onto the floor and the dancing began.

“It’s the song of the
chomezig borchu,
the blessing of the leavened bread”, the old puppeteer explained with a smile as he softly beat out the rhythm on the table with the tin spoon that, oddly enough, was fixed to the table by a chain. “It must have been a hundred years ago or more that two bakers, Redbeard and Greenbeard, put poison into the bread rolls – they were star-shaped and crescentshaped – on the eve of the first Sabbath in Passover,
Shabbes Hagodel
, to cause the wholesale murder of Jews in the Ghetto. But the beadle – the
meshores
– was warned in time by a divine revelation and managed to catch the two would-be murderers and hand them over to the authorities. To commemorate this miraculous deliverance from death, the learned scholars, the
landomin
and the
bocherlech
, composed this strange song which you can hear now being played as dance music in a brothel.”

– “Trallala – trallala.”

“Sta-hars both re-hed and bluuue,” the old man’s bawling was gradually turning into a hollow-sounding, fanatical howl.

Suddenly the tune became muddled and gradually adapted itself to the rhythm of the Bohemian
Slapak
, a shuffling
pas de deux
in which the partners danced closely entwined, cheek to sweaty cheek.

“That’s the way. Bravo. Here you are. Catch. Giddy-up!” a slim young swell on the raised dais with a monocle in his eye called out to the harpist, putting his hand in his pocket and throwing a silver coin in the musician’s direction. It didn’t reach him. I saw it glitter as it flew over the crowded dance floor, then it suddenly disappeared. Some ruffian – I seemed to know his face, I think it must have been the same one who was standing next to Charousek when we were sheltering from the rain recently – had slipped his hand out of his partner’s blouse, where it had been pretty firmly ensconced until then, and in one movement, slick as a monkey, without for a moment getting out of step with the music, had snatched the coin out of the air. The rogue’s face remained as impassive as ever, only two or three couples dancing near him grinned slyly.

“Must be one of the ‘Regiment’, to judge by the quickness of the hand”, said Zwakh with a laugh.

“I’m sure Pernath has never heard about the ‘Regiment’ ”, Vrieslander quickly interrupted, with a surreptitious wink to the old puppeteer that I was not supposed to see. I well understood what they were about; it was the same as earlier on in my room. They thought I was ill and wanted to cheer me up. The idea was that Zwakh should tell me some story, any old story. The look of pity the old man gave me pierced me to the heart and sent a hot flush spreading over my face. If only he knew how his pity wounded me.

I missed the old puppeteer’s introduction to his story, I just felt as if I were slowly bleeding to death. I felt myself growing colder and colder, more and more rigid, just as when I had seen the wooden face lying on Vrieslander’s lap. Then I suddenly found myself right in the middle of the story; I felt somehow alienated from it, as if it were a lifeless piece from a school anthology.

Zwakh began:

“
The story of the learned Dr. Hulbert and his Regiment

Well, how shall I start? His face was all covered in warts and his legs were as bandy as a dachshund’s. Even as a boy all his time was spent at his studies, dry-as-dust studies that frayed his nerves. He made a meagre pittance by giving private lessons, and from that he had to support his sick mother. I think he probably only knew what green meadows looked like, or hedges and hills covered with flowers and trees, from books. You know yourself how little sunshine reaches Prague’s dark streets and alleys.

He was awarded his doctorate with distinction, as was expected, and in time became a celebrated lawyer. He was so famous that everybody, even judges and old attorneys, would come to him if there was anything they didn’t know. And all the time he still lived in a wretched little attic looking out over the courtyard behind the Tyn Church where the Old Toll House Tavern is where we usually go for our drink.