The Golem (11 page)

Recently (from this brief reference to an event that you witnessed, you will guess who is the author of this letter; I am too afraid to put my name at the end of it) your good, honest face filled me with a great feeling of trust; also, your dear late father taught me as a child: all this gives me the courage to turn to you, perhaps you are the only person who can help me!

I beseech you: be in the Cathedral on the Hradschin at five o’clock this evening.

A lady known to you.

I must have sat there for a quarter of an hour with the letter in my hand. The strange atmosphere of reverent solemnity, in which I had been enveloped since last night, was dissipated in a trice, blown away by the fresh breeze of a new day with its earthly tasks. A new-born destiny, wreathed in auspicious smiles, a veritable child of spring, was coming towards me. A human soul had turned to me for help! To me! What a change it brought about in my room! The worm-eaten cupboard suddenly had a smile on its carved features and the four chairs looked like four old folk sitting round the table, chuckling happily over a game of cards.

Now there was something to give meaning to my days, something rich and radiant. Was the rotten tree to bear fruit after all?

I could feel a current of vital energy coursing through my veins. It had long slept within me, concealed in the depths of my soul, buried beneath the debris of daily routine, but now it poured forth, like a spring gushing from the ice when the grip of winter is broken. And I
knew,
just as certainly as I knew I was holding her letter in my hand, that I would be able to help, whatever the danger that threatened her. It was the rejoicing in my heart that gave me that certitude.

Again and again I read the line, “… also, your dear late father taught me as a child …” It took my breath away. Did it not sound like the promise, ‘Today thou shalt be with me in paradise’? The hand that she was stretching towards me for help also held out a gift:
the memory that would lead me back to the past I longed to reach
; it would reveal to me the secret, help to lift the veil that had closed off my past.

“Your dear late father”, how alien the words sounded when I repeated them over to myself! Father! For a brief moment I saw the tired face of an old man with white hair appear in the armchair beside the chest: a stranger, a complete stranger, and yet so eerily familiar! Then normal vision reasserted itself and the hammerstrokes of my heart beat out the actual hour of the clock.

I started in horror. How long had I been dreaming? Had I missed the appointed time? I looked at the clock: the Lord be praised, it was only half past four.

I went into my bedroom for my hat and coat and set off down the stairs. Today I was impervious to the mutterings of the dark corners, the petty, spiteful, sour misgivings that emanated from them: “We’re not letting you go – you belong to us – we don’t want you to be happy – happiness in this house, the very idea!” Usually in these passages and alcoves there is a fine, poisonous dust that grabs me by the throat and chokes me, but today it retreated before the vital breath streaming from my mouth. I paused for a moment outside Hillel’s door. Should I go in? Some hidden awe kept me from knocking. I felt so different today, as if it would be
wrong
for me to go in to him. Already the hand of life was pushing me on, down the steps.

The street was white with snow.

I think many people wished me good afternoon; whether I replied or not, I can’t remember. I kept touching my breast pocket to make sure I still had the letter. The place where it lay felt warm.

I made my way through the massive stone arcades of the Old Town Square, past the bronze fountain, its baroque railings covered in icicles, and across the stone bridge with its statues of saints and its monument to St. John Nepomuk.

Down below, the river foamed as it pounded the piers of the bridge with waves of loathing.

Half dreaming, my eye caught the monument to St. Luitgard: on the hollowed-out sandstone the ‘Torments of the Damned’ were carved in high relief and the snow was lying thick on the lids of the souls in purgatory and on their manacled hands raised in supplication.

Arches swallowed me up and released me, palaces with arrogant carved portals on which lions’ heads bit into bronze rings slowly passed me by.

Here too was snow, snow everywhere. Soft and white as the fur of a gigantic polar bear. Tall, proud windows, their ledges glittering with ice, stared coldly up at the sky. I was astonished to see the air so full of migrating birds. As I climbed the countless granite steps to the Hradschin, each one the width of four bodies laid head to foot, the city with its roofs and gables sank, step by step, from my conscious mind.

Already the twilight was creeping along the rows of houses as I stepped out into the empty square in the middle of which the Cathedral towers up to the heavenly throne. Footsteps, the edges encrusted with ice, led to the side door.

From somewhere in a distant house the soft, musing tones of a harmonium crept out into the stillness of the evening. They were like melancholy tears trickling down into the deserted square.

The well-padded door swung to with a sigh behind me as I entered the Cathedral and stood in the darkness of the side aisle. The nave was filled with the green and blue shimmer of the dying light slanting down through the stained-glass windows onto the pews; at the far end, the altar gleamed at me in a frozen cascade of gold. Showers of sparks came from the bowls of the red glass lamps. The air was musty with the smell of wax and incense.

I leant back in one of the pews. My heart grew strangely calm in this realm where everything stood still. The whole expanse of the Cathedral was filled with a presence that had no heartbeat, with a secret, patient expectation.

Eternal sleep lay over the silver reliquaries.

There! From a long, long way away the sound of horses’ hooves reached my ear, muffled, scarcely audible; they seemed to approach and then fell silent.

A dull thud, like the closing of a carriage door.

The rustle of a silk dress came through the church and a slim, delicate lady’s hand touched my arm. “Please, please can we go to that pillar over there. Out here among the pews I cannot bring myself to speak of the things I must tell you.”

The holy images all around came into sharp focus. I was suddenly wide-awake and alert.

“I don’t know how to thank you, Herr Pernath, that you have come all the way up here in this terrible weather for my sake.”

I stammered a few banal phrases.

“But I could think of no other place where I would be safer from spies and danger than here. I’m sure no one has followed us to the Cathedral.”

I took out the letter and handed it to her. She was almost completely enveloped in a luxurious fur, but I had recognised her as the terrified woman who had sought refuge from Wassertrum in my room in Hahnpassgasse. It did not surprise me at all; I had not expected it to be anyone else.

My eyes did not leave her face, which presumably seemed paler in the twilit alcove than it was in reality. Her beauty took my breath away and I stood there, spellbound. It was all I could do not to fall down on my knees and kiss her feet because she was the one I was to help, because she had chosen me for the task.

“Please, I beg you from the bottom of my heart to forget – at least for as long as we are in here – the situation in which you saw me when we last met”, she went on urgently. “I don’t know how you feel about such things …”

All I could think of to say was, “I am an old man, but never in my life have I been so arrogant as to feel called upon to sit in judgment on my fellow men.”

“I thank you, Herr Pernath”, was her warm but simple reply. “But now I must ask you to listen patiently, to see if you can help me in my desperate situation, or at least advise me.” I could feel she was in the grip of some terrible fear, her voice trembled. “That night, in the studio, that was when, to my horror, I suddenly realised that hideous monster was deliberately spying on me. For months already I had noticed that wherever I went – whether alone, or with my husband or … with … with Dr. Savioli – the villainous face of that junk-dealer would always appear somewhere in the vicinity. Awake or asleep, those squinting eyes haunted me. There is still no sign of what his intentions are, but that only increases the fear that torments me at night: when is he going to slip the noose round my neck?

At first Dr. Savioli tried to reassure me. What could a poor wretch like this Aaron Wassertrum do? At worst it would be some petty blackmail or something of the kind. But his lips went white, every time the name of Wassertrum was mentioned, and I began to suspect that, to reassure me, Dr. Savioli was concealing something from me, something dreadful that might cost him his life – or me mine!

And then I learnt what it was that he was carefully trying to conceal from me:
this Wassertrum has been to see him several times, at night, in his apartment!
I
know
something is going on, I can sense with every fibre of my body that something is gradually tightening round us like a snake crushing its prey. What does that murderer think he’s doing? Why can’t Dr. Savioli shake him off? No, no, I won’t put up with it any longer, I must do something – anything – before it drives me mad.”

I tried to put in a few words of comfort, but she interrupted me. “And in the last few days the nightmare that is threatening to choke me has taken on more and more tangible form. Dr. Savioli has suddenly fallen ill; I cannot contact him, cannot visit him without the constant fear of my love for him being discovered. He is delirious, and all that I could find out is that in his fever he imagines he is being pursued by some monster with a hare-lip: Aaron Wassertrum!

I know how brave Dr. Savioli is, so you can imagine how much it terrifies me to know that he has collapsed, paralysed by a fear which to me just seems like the dark presence of the Angel of Death.

You will say that I am a coward. If my love for him is so great, why do I not openly admit it, why do I not give up everything for him, wealth, honour, reputation and so on? But” – she screamed out the words so that they echoed round the galleries – “I
cannot
! I have my child, my dear little girl! I
can’t
give up my girl! Do you think my husband would let me keep her? Here, Herr Pernath, take this” – frantically she tore open a bag that was stuffed full of strings of pearls and jewels – “and give it to this Wassertrum. I know how rapacious he is, he can have everything I possess, but he must leave me my child. That will keep him quiet, won’t it? Please say something, please, for the love of God, even if it’s only one word! Say you will help me!”

She was almost beside herself, but with great difficulty I managed to calm her sufficiently to get her to sit down in one of the pews. I said whatever came into my head, a tangle of disjointed phrases. All the while thoughts were whizzing round my brain, fantastic bubbles that burst scarcely had they seen the light of day, so that I hardly knew myself what my lips were saying.

Unconsciously, my gaze was fixed on the painted statue of a monk standing in a niche in the wall. As I talked and talked, the statue gradually became transformed, the monk’s habit turning into a threadbare overcoat with a turned-up collar out of which appeared a youthful face with emaciated cheeks and unhealthy red blotches. Before I could comprehend my vision, the monk had returned. The throb of blood in my veins was too loud.

The unfortunate woman was bent over my hand, sobbing gently. I gave her some of the energy which had come to me when I had read her letter and which I could feel again now, coursing powerfully through my limbs. Slowly she seemed to recover.

After a long silence she started to speak softly, “I will tell you why it is you I have turned to, Herr Pernath. It is because of a few words you once said to me, and which I have never forgotten, even though it was all those years ago.”

All those years ago? My blood froze.

“You were saying goodbye to me – I can’t remember why, I was still a child – and you said in a friendly, but oh, so sad voice, ‘I presume it will never happen, but if there should come a time in your life when you don’t know where to turn, then remember me. Perhaps the good Lord will allow
me
to be the one to help you.’ I turned away quickly and dropped my ball into the fountain so that you would not see my tears. What I would really have liked to do would have been to give you the heart of red coral that I wore on a silk ribbon round my neck, but I was too embarrassed, it would have seemed so silly.”

Memory

The invisible, choking fingers were feeling their way towards my tongue again. Without warning an image appeared before my mind’s eye, like the pale reflected shimmer of a long-lost, yearned-for land: a little girl in a white dress, and all around her the parkland of a country estate surrounded by old elm-trees. I could see it quite clearly.

I must have changed colour, I could tell by the hurried way she went on. “I know that what you said then was just prompted by the mood of farewell, but they have often been a comfort to me, and … and I thank you for that.”

I clenched my teeth and called up all my strength to bury the raging pain deep in my breast which was threatening to tear me apart.

I realised that the hand which had bolted the door to my memories had performed an act of mercy. That brief shimmer from the old days had etched its message on my mind: for years a love that was too strong for my heart had gnawed at my mind until insanity had spread the soothing balm of oblivion over my wounded spirit.

Gradually insensibility spread its peace over me, cooling the tears behind my eyelids. Solemnly, proudly, the bells echoed through the Cathedral, and I could look with a joyful smile into the eyes of the one who had come to seek help from me.

Once more I heard the dull thud of the carriage door and the clatter of the horses’ hooves.

Trudging through the glittering, midnight-blue snow, I made my way back down into the town. The street-lamps blinked at me in astonishment, and the piles of Christmas trees stacked up high whispered of tinsel and silver-painted nuts and the coming celebrations. Beside the column bearing the statue of the Mother of God, the old beggarwomen with their grey scarves over their heads were muttering a rosary of the Virgin by candlelight. The stalls of the Christmas market were crouched around the dark entrance to the old Ghetto. Right in the middle of them, covered with red canvas, illuminated by the harsh light of smoky torches, was the open stage of a puppet theatre. Zwakh’s Punchinello, dressed in crimson and magenta, his whip with a skull dangling from it in his hand, clattered across the boards on a wooden stallion.