The Golem (10 page)

I made no effort to follow what they were saying to each other, and I guessed more than heard that Zwakh was telling her that I had had an accident; they had come to ask for help to bring me round and give me first aid.

Still I could not move a muscle, still the invisible fingers held my tongue fast; but my mind was sure and firm, and the feeling of terror had left me. I knew exactly where I was and what was happening to me and I did not even find it strange when they carried me, like a corpse, stretcher and all, up to Shemaiah Hillel’s study, set me down and left me alone there.

I was filled with a calm and natural contentment, such as you feel when coming home after a long journey.

It was dark in the room and the blurred lines of the cross shapes in the window-frames stood out against the dull, hazy gleam coming up from the street. Everything seemed quite natural, and I was not in the least surprised when Hillel entered carrying a seven-flamed Menorah, nor that he calmly wished me ‘Good evening’ as if he were expecting me.

As he went about the room, adjusting a few objects here and there on the sideboard, then using the candelabra to light another seven-armed one, I was suddenly struck by something about him which until that moment I had not registered as special, in spite of the fact that we would meet on the stairs two or three times a week: the elegant proportions of his body and limbs, and the slim, delicate lines of his face with its high forehead. And, as I could now see in the light from the candles, he could not be any older than I was, forty-five at the most.

“You arrived a few minutes earlier than I had assumed”, he began after a while, “otherwise I would have had the candles ready lit.” He pointed to the two candelabra and came up to the stretcher looking, so it seemed, with his dark, deep-set eyes at someone who was standing or kneeling by my head whom I, however, could not see. At the same time his lips moved, speaking soundless words.

Immediately the invisible fingers let my tongue go and the paralysis left me. I sat up and looked behind me: there was no one in the room apart from Shemaiah Hillel and myself. The person who had come a few minutes earlier than he had been expecting must be me, then?

What I found much more bewildering than the mere fact, was that I was incapable of feeling the least surprise at it.

Hillel obviously guessed my thoughts, for he gave me a friendly smile and helped me up from the stretcher, pointed to a chair and said, “There is nothing mysterious about it at all. It is only magic and sorcery –
kishuf
– that frighten men; life itches and burns like a hairshirt, but the rays from the sun of the spiritual world are mild and warming.”

I said nothing, since nothing occurred to me that I could say in reply, and he did not seem to expect any, but sat down opposite me and calmly continued, “A silver mirror, if it had feeling, would only suffer pain while it was being polished. Once it was smooth and shining, it would reflect all the images that struck it without suffering or emotion.

Happy the man”, he went on softly, “who can say of himself, ‘I have been polished’.” For a moment he was wrapped in thought and I heard him murmur a few words in Hebrew, “Lishu’oskho kivisi Adoshem.” Then his voice was clearly to be heard again:

“Thou camest to me in a deep sleep and I have woken thee. In the Psalm of David it says, ‘Then spake I with myself, now shall I begin. It is the right hand of the Lord that hath wrought this change.’

When men arise from their beds, they think they have shaken off sleep and they know not that they have fallen victim to their senses and are in the grip of a much deeper sleep than the one they have just left. There is only one true state of wakefulness, and that is the one you are now approaching. If you should speak to others of it, they will say you are sick and they cannot understand you. For that reason it is pointless and cruel to speak to them of it.

Lord, Thou carriest them away as with a flood;

They are as a sleep:

They are as grass which groweth up:

In the evening it is cut down and withereth.”

I wanted to ask, ‘Who was the stranger who came to me in my room and gave me the
Book of Ibbur
? Was I awake or dreaming when I saw him?’ but Hillel answered before even I could put the thought into words.

“Assume that the man who came to you and whom you call the Golem signifies the awakening of the dead through your innermost spiritual life. Each thing on earth is nothing but an eternal symbol clothed in dust.

How is it possible to think with your eyes? Each shape that you see is a thought in your eye. Everything that takes on shape was a ghost before.”

I felt ideas, which until then had been firmly anchored in my mind, tear themselves loose and drift like rudderless ships on a boundless ocean.

Placidly Hillel went on,

“Anyone who has been wakened can no longer die; sleep and death are the same.”

“… can no longer die?” A dull ache gripped me.

“Two paths run beside each other: the Path of Life and the Path of Death. You have taken the
Book of Ibbur
and read in it. Your soul has been made pregnant by the Spirit of Life”, I heard him say.

“Hillel, Hillel, let me take the path that all men take, the Path of Death!” everything within me screamed out loud. Hillel’s countenance froze in an expression of deep earnestness:

“Men do not take any path, neither that of life nor that of death. They drift like chaff in the wind. In the Talmud it is written, ‘Before God created the world he showed the souls a mirror, wherein they could see the spiritual sufferings of existence and the joys that followed. Some accepted the suffering. But the others refused and God struck them out of the Book of the Living.’ But you are
taking
a path and you have set out on it of your own free will, even if you are no longer aware of it. Do not grieve; as knowledge comes gradually, so does memory.
Knowledge and memory are the same thing.”

The friendly, almost kindly tone in which Hillel concluded this speech restored my calm, and I felt safe and sound, like a sick child that knows its father is close by.

I looked up and saw that the room was suddenly peopled with figures standing in a circle round us. Some had white shrouds such as the rabbis of old used to wear, others had three-cornered hats and silver buckles on their shoes. But then Hillel passed his hand over my eyes and the room was empty once more.

Then he accompanied me out onto the stairs and gave me a burning candle for me to light my way up to my room.

I went to bed and tried to sleep, but sleep would not come and instead I found myself in a strange state that was neither dreaming, nor waking, nor sleeping.

I had snuffed the candle, but in spite of that everything in the room was so clear that I could distinguish each individual shape. At the same time I felt completely comfortable and free from that agonising restlessness which usually torments you when you find it impossible to get to sleep.

Never before in my life had I been capable of such sharp and precise thought as now. The rhythm of health flowed through my every nerve, arranging my thoughts in orderly rows, like an army awaiting my command.

I only needed to call on them, and they stepped up and did what I wanted.

During the last few weeks I had been trying, without making any progress whatsoever, to carve a cameo out of sunstone; I never managed to make all the flecks in the stone fit in with the face I had in mind. Now I remembered the piece, and in a flash I could see the solution and knew precisely what line to take with the graver to do justice to the texture of the gem.

Formerly I had been the slave of a horde of fantastic impressions and visions, and often I could not say whether they were feelings or ideas. Now I suddenly found I was lord and master in my own kingdom. Calculations, which previously I had only been able to do with much groaning on paper, now seemed to work themselves out in my head as if by magic.

All this was the result of my new-found ability to perceive and retain those things – and only those things – that I needed: numbers, shapes, objects or colours. And if it was a matter of questions which could not be answered by means of such tools – philosophical problems and the like – then my inner vision was replaced by hearing, and the voice I heard was that of Shemaiah Hillel.

I was granted the strangest insights.

I suddenly saw things, which a thousand times previously I had allowed to slip past my ear as mere words, now clear before me, and soaked with significance in every pore; things I had learnt ‘off by heart’, I now ‘grasped’ at one stroke so that I ‘owned’ them. Mysteries hidden in the forms of words that I had never even suspected were now revealed to me.

The ‘high’ ideals of humanity, which until now, chests puffed out and besplattered with decorations, had looked down their respectable aldermanic noses at me, removed the masks from their features and apologised: they themselves were really only poor souls, but still they were used to prop up an even more insolent fraud.

Might I perhaps not have been dreaming after all? Could it be that I had not talked to Hillel?

But no, there was the candle Shemaiah had given me. Happy as a little boy who has slipped out of bed on Christmas Eve to make sure the marvellous jumping-jack really is there, I snuggled back down into the pillows.

Like a tracker dog I penetrated further into the jungle of spiritual puzzles surrounding me.

First of all I tried to go to the point farthest back in my life that memory could reach. From there it must be possible, or so I believed, for me to see that part of my life which a quirk of fate had hidden in darkness.

But however hard I tried, I still could get no farther than seeing myself in the gloomy courtyard of this house with a view through the arched gateway to Aaron Wassertrum’s junk-shop; it was as if I had spent a hundred years as an engraver of gems in this house without ever having been a child.

I had almost decided that any further groping around in the wells of the past was hopeless, when I suddenly realised with dazzling clarity that, although in my memory the broad highway of events ended at that arched gateway, that was not the case with a whole host of narrow footpaths which had presumably always accompanied the main road, but which I had ignored. ‘Then where’ – it was like a voice screaming in my ear – ‘did you learn the skills by which you earn your living? Who taught you to engrave gems, and everything that goes with it? To read, to write, to speak? To eat and walk, breathe, think and feel?’

Immediately I began to follow the advice that came from within me. Systematically I retraced my life.

I forced myself to follow an uninterrupted but inverted chain of thought: What had just happened? What had led to it? What came before that? And so on, back into the past.

I was back at that arched gateway again. Now! Now! Only a little jump into empty space and surely I would have crossed the abyss separating me from my forgotten past? Then I saw something which I had missed on my way back through my thoughts. It was Shemaiah Hillel passing his hand over my eyes, just as he had done before in his study.

And everything was erased. Even my desire to delve into the past.

There was only one thing left that I had gained from it, and that was the realisation that the sequence of events in one’s life is a road leading to a dead end, however broad and easy it might appear. It is the narrow, hidden tracks that lead back to our lost homeland; what contains the solution to the last mysteries is not the ugly scar that life’s rasp leaves on us, but the fine, almost invisible writing that is engraved in our body.

Just as I could find my way back to the days of my childhood, if I went through my alphabet book from back to front, from Z to A, to reach the point where I had started reading it at school, so too, I realised, I ought to be able to journey to that other distant home which is beyond all thought.

I carried a world of work on my shoulders. Hercules, I remembered, had also borne the weight of the vault of heaven on his head, and I saw the gleam of hidden significance in the old legend. And just as Hercules had managed to escape from it through his cunning in asking Atlas, ‘Just let me tie a layer of rope round my head so that the awful burden does not crush my brain’, so perhaps, I sensed, there was a dark path leading away from this precipice.

A deep distrust of blindly following my thoughts any farther in this direction suddenly crept over me. I stretched out straight in bed and covered my eyes and ears with my hands so as not to be distracted by my senses; so as to kill off every thought.

But my determination was smashed by an iron law: one thought could only be driven away by another thought, and if that one should die there would already be the next feasting on its flesh. I sought refuge in the roaring torrent of my blood, but my thoughts were ever at my heels; I hid in the pounding forge of my heart, but after a short while they had discovered me there.

Once more Hillel’s kindly voice came to my rescue, saying, “Keep to your path and do not falter. The key to the art of forgetting belongs to our brothers who follow the Path of Death; but you have been made pregnant by the Spirit of Life.”

The
Book of Ibbur
appeared before me with two letters engraved in flame upon it: the one representing the bronze woman was throbbing, powerful as an earthquake; the other was infinitely far away:
the hermaphrodite on the mother-of-pearl throne with the crown of red wood on its head
.

Then Shemaiah Hillel passed his hand over my eyes for the third time and I fell asleep.

Dear, dear Herr Pernath,

I am writing this letter to you in great haste and fear. Please destroy it as soon as you have read it – or, even better, bring it to me together with the envelope. Only that will put my mind at rest. But do not tell a soul I have written to you! Not even at the place where you will go today!