The Golem (16 page)

“Here, what’s this?” He suddenly started up and waved me over. “Quick, quick! Haven’t you any opera glasses or something like that?”

We peered down cautiously from behind the curtains. Jaromir, the deaf-mute, was standing outside the entrance to Wassertrum’s junk-shop and, as far as we could tell from his sign-language, was offering to sell him a small, glittering object he was holding, half concealed, in his hand. Wassertrum pounced on it like a vulture then darted back into his shop. The next moment he rushed back out again, deathly pale, and grabbed Jaromir. A violent struggle ensued, but then suddenly Wassertrum let go and seemed to be considering his next move as he gnawed furiously at his hare-lip. Casting a suspicious glance in our direction, he took Jaromir amicably by the arm and led him into his shop.

We must have waited a good quarter of an hour, they seemed to be taking a long time to come to terms. Eventually Jaromir emerged with a satisfied smile on his face and went on his way.

“What do you think that was about?” I asked. “It can’t have been of any great importance. The poor chap was probably just turning some object he’d managed to beg into ready cash.”

Charousek did not reply, but went back to the table and silently sat down. He obviously thought the episode of no importance for, after a short silence, he continued where he had left off.

“Yes. As I said, I hate his blood. By the way, you must interrupt me, Pernath, if I get too worked up again. I want to remain cool; I mustn’t waste my best feelings like that. When I do, I have a kind of hang-over afterwards. A man with any sense of decency should speak calmly, not with flowery affectation like some whore or poet. Since the world began it would never have occurred to anyone to ‘wring their hands in grief’ had not ham actors thought up that particularly visual gesture.”

I realised he was deliberately just rambling on in an attempt to restore his inner calm. Not that he was having great success at the moment. He walked up and down the room in an agitated manner, picking up all sorts of objects and then putting them down again with a preoccupied air. Then he suddenly pulled himself together and returned to the subject.

“I can recognise his blood in the slightest unconscious movement a person makes. I know children who
look
like him and are
supposed
to be his, but do not belong to the same tribe, it is impossible for me to be deceived. For years no one told me that Dr. Wassory was his son, but I – how shall I put it? – I could
scent
it.

Even as a small boy, before I had any idea of what Wassertrum’s connection with me was” – for a moment he gave me a searching glance – “I possessed this gift. They kicked me and beat me – there is probably no part of my body that has not experienced acute pain – they starved me until I was half crazy with hunger and thirst and happy to eat rotting scraps, but I was incapable of feeling hatred towards those that tormented me. It was simply impossible. There was no room for hatred within me. Do you understand? In spite of the fact that my whole being was soaked in hatred.

Wassertrum has never caused me the least harm. By that I mean that he never beat me, nor threw things at me, nor even swore at me when I was a ragged street-urchin running round the Ghetto. I am perfectly aware of that, and yet all the hatred, all the rancour boiling up inside me was directed at him, at him alone!

One remarkable fact is that as a child I never once played a trick on him. If the other children did, I immediately went my own way. But I could spend hours standing in a doorway, hidden behind the door, staring at his face through the crack until everything went black, so intense was this inexplicable feeling of hatred.

It must have been then, I think, that I laid the foundations of the second sight that awakes within me the moment I come into contact with people, or even with things, that have some connection with him. As a child I must have unconsciously absorbed his every movement – the way he wears his coat, the way he picks things up, or drinks, or coughs and all that kind of thing – and learnt them
off by heart
until they had etched themselves on my soul, so that anywhere I can unfailingly recognise the merest traces in others as his legacy. Later on it started to become an obsession. I would throw away the most inoffensive objects, merely because I was tormented by the thought that his hand might have touched them. Others, however, were dear to me because I felt they were like friends who wished him ill.”

Charousek was silent for a moment. I saw him gazing abstractedly into space. Mechanically, his fingers stroked the file on the table.

“Then when a few teachers took pity on me and collected enough to allow me to study philosophy and medicine – and to learn to think for myself, by the by – I gradually came to understand what hatred is. We can only hate something as deeply as I do, if it is part of ourselves.

And when I found out … learnt everything, bit by bit … what my mother was … and still must be, if … if she is still alive … and that my own body” – he turned away so that I should not see his face – “is filled with
his
foul blood … then it was clear to me where the root of it lay. At times I feel there is even some mysterious connection in the fact that I am consumptive and spit blood: my body fights against everything that comes from
him
, and spews it up in disgust.

Often my hatred of him follows me into my sleep and tries to console me with visions of all possible kinds of torture which, in my dreams, I inflict on
him
; but I have always rejected them because they leave me feeling dissatisfied.

Whenever I think about myself, I am filled with surprise that I find it impossible to hate, even to feel a mild antipathy towards anyone or anything in the world apart from
him
and his tribe. At such times a nauseating feeling begins to creep over me: I could be what people call a ‘good man’. Fortunately that is not the case. As I told you, there is no room for that left inside me.

You mustn’t go thinking that I have been embittered by misfortune (it was only later on that I learnt what he had done to my mother). I have had
one
day of joy that eclipses anything granted to ordinary mortals. I don’t know if you have ever had a truly intense, burning religious experience? I never had, until the day Wassory put an end to himself. I was standing outside the shop down there and I saw
him
receive the news. Anyone unacquainted with the true theatre of life would have called his reaction ‘impassive’, but when I saw him stand there for a full hour, listless, his blood-red hare-lip just drawn up a fraction of an inch higher than normal over his teeth, and a peculiar look in his eye, as if it were turned inwards on itself – when I saw him like that, I caught a whiff of incense from the wings of the Archangel passing overhead. Do you know the statue of the Black Madonna in the Tyn Church? I flung myself to the ground before it, and my soul was enveloped in the darkness of paradise.”

As I looked at Charousek standing there, his big, dreamy eyes full of tears, I remembered what Hillel had said about how incomprehensible the dark path that the Brothers of Death follow appears to us.

Charousek went on, “You are probably not the least bit interested in the material circumstances which ‘justify’ my hatred, or at least render it comprehensible to the paid servants of the law. Facts give the appearance of milestones but are, in reality, only empty eggshells; they are the insistent popping of champagne corks at the tables of the rich, which only a simpleton would take for the banquet itself. Wassertrum used all the fiendish means which people like him have at their disposal to persuade my mother – if it wasn’t worse then that – to let him have his way with her. And then … then he sold her off to … to a brothel; that kind of thing isn’t difficult if you count the Police Commissioner among your business associates. But he didn’t do it because he was tired of her. Oh no! I know every nook and cranny of that heart of his. The day he sold her off was the awful day he realised just how passionately in love with her he was. Someone like him may appear to behave without rhyme or reason, but deep down he’s always consistent. The squirrel inside him gives a screech of horror the moment anyone comes and buys something from his junk-shop. No matter how much they pay for it, all that he feels is that he is being forced to hand something over. His favourite verb is ‘to have’, and if he were capable of thinking in abstract terms, ‘possession’ would be the concept that expressed his ideal.

During the affair with my mother, fear grew and grew within him until it was a gigantic mountain, the fear of no longer being in control of himself; the fear not of
giving
love, but of being
compelled
to give love; the fear of finding some invisible presence inside him that would fetter his will, or what he would like to think of as his will. That was how it began, the rest followed automatically, just as a pike automatically pounces, whether it wants to or not, when something that glitters floats past at the right moment.

The logical consequence for Wassertrum was to sell my mother into slavery. It gratified those other characteristics sleeping within his soul, his greed for money and the perverse pleasure he finds in tormenting himself.

You must forgive me, Herr Pernath”, Charousek’s voice suddenly took on such a harsh, sober tone that I started in surprise, “forgive me for all this clever talk, but when you’re studying at the University you come across masses of idiotic books and you automatically adopt their fatuous jargon.”

I forced myself to smile to try and cheer him up; secretly I knew he was fighting back the tears.

‘I must find some way of helping him’, I thought; ‘at least do whatever I can to relieve his immediate need.’ Without his noticing, I took the hundred-crown note I kept at home out of the sideboard drawer and slipped it into my pocket.

“When, later on, you set up as a doctor and live in a better district, you’ll feel at peace with yourself, Herr Charousek”, I said, in order to give the conversation a conciliatory turn. “Will you soon be qualified?”

“In a short time. I owe it to the people who have been kind enough to support me. Otherwise there’s no point; my days are numbered.”

I made the usual objection that he was taking too pessimistic a view of things, but he waved it away with a smile. “It’s better like that. It would be no pleasure to act the part of the great physician, perhaps even to end up with a title after a career as a licensed poisoner. However”, he added with his caustic humour, “I’m afraid this earthly ghetto is soon going to be deprived of the benefit of any further medical miracle-working from me.” He picked up his hat. “But I won’t take up any more of your time. Or is there something else we need to discuss in the Savioli case? I think not. But you will let me know directly you hear anything new, won’t you? The best thing would be to hang a mirror up in the window as a sign that I should come to see you. One thing, though – you must never come to my cellar, Wassertrum would jump to the conclusion that we are in this together straight away. I’m very curious to know what he’ll do, now that he has seen the lady come to see you. You must simply tell him she brought you a piece of jewelry to repair and if he tries to press you, just pretend to go berserk.”

No suitable opportunity arose to press the bank-note on Charousek, so I picked up my modelling clay from the window-sill. “Let’s go then; I’ll accompany you downstairs as far as Hillel’s. He’s expecting me”, I lied.

He stopped in surprise. “Is he a friend of yours?”

“In a way. Do you know him? Or do you suspect him as well?” I had to smile at the very idea.

“God forbid!”

“What makes you say it like that?”

Charousek hesitated, pondering before he answered. “I’ve no idea why. It must be some subconscious impulse. Whenever I meet him in the street I want to step off the pavement and go down on my knees before him, as if he were a priest carrying the host. You see, Pernath, in Hillel you have a person who is the opposite of Wassertrum in every atom of his being. For example, among the Christians in the district, who, in this case are as wrongly informed as always, he has the reputation of being a miser and a secret millionaire; in fact, he’s incredibly poor.”

I stopped, appalled at the thought. “Poor?”

“Yes, even poorer than I am, if that’s possible. I think he only knows the verb ‘to receive’ from books. When he leaves the Jewish Town Hall on the first of the month, the beggars run
away
from him because they know he would press his meagre salary on the first one he came across and end up starving – together with his daughter – a few days later. There’s an old Talmudic legend that says that of the twelve tribes of Israel, ten are cursed and two holy. If that’s true, then he represents the two holy ones and Wassertrum all the ten others put together. Have you never noticed the way Wassertrum goes all colours of the rainbow whenever Hillel passes him in the street? Interesting fact, that. I tell you, blood like that could never mix, the children would all be stillborn; that is, assuming the mothers hadn’t died of horror first. And another thing: Hillel’s the only person Wassertrum steers clear of, he avoids him like the plague. Probably because Hillel represents something completely incomprehensible to him, something he just cannot work out. Perhaps he senses the cabbalist in him, as well.”

We were already on our way down the stairs.

“Do you believe there are still cabbalists around today? Do you believe there is anything at all in the Cabbala?” I asked, curious as to what he would answer, but he seemed not to have been listening. I repeated my question.

He seemed flustered by it and diverted my attention to a door giving onto the stair-well that was made from the lids of packing-cases nailed together. “You’ve got some new neighbours there”, he said. “It’s a Jewish family, but poor: that meshugge musician, Nephtali Schaffranek, with his daughter, son-in-law and grandchildren. When it gets dark and he’s left alone with the girls, he goes into one of his crazy moods and ties their thumbs together so they won’t run away. Then he squeezes them into an old chicken-coop and gives them ‘singing-lessons’, as he calls it, so that they’ll be able to earn a living when they grow up; that is, he teaches them the weirdest songs, fragments, German words that he’s picked up somewhere and, in his deranged mind, takes for – Prussian battle-hymns, or I don’t know what.”