The Golem (21 page)

“Is that the reason why you wished the miracles had never happened?” I asked.

“Only partly. There’s something else as well. I … I”, she thought for a while, “I wasn’t ready yet for a miracle of that kind. That’s it. How can I explain it to you? Suppose, just for the sake of example, that every night for years I have been having one and the same dream, which keeps on developing, and in which someone – let’s say an inhabitant of another world – is giving me instruction, not only by showing me through a mirror-image of myself and the gradual changes in it how far I am from the maturity in the magic sphere needed to experience a ‘miracle’, but also by supplying the solution to intellectual problems I happen to be concerned with, solutions I can verify during my waking hours. I’m sure you will understand what I mean when I tell you that such a being makes up for the loss of any earthly ‘happiness’. He is a bridge connecting me with the ‘other side’, a ladder, such as Jacob dreamt of, by which I can climb from the darkness into the light; he is both guide and friend to me, and the confidence I feel that, whatever dark paths my soul might tread, I will never stray into the black abyss of madness, comes from ‘him’ who has never deceived me. And then, contrary to everything he has told me, a miracle appears in my life!? What should I believe now? Was that being, in whom for many years I found fulfilment, a mere delusion? If I were forced to give up my faith in him, I would plunge head first into a bottomless pit. And yet a miracle did occur! I would dance for joy, if –”

“If?” I interrupted, breathless. Perhaps she herself would say the word I was waiting for, and I could confess everything.

“If I were to learn that I was wrong, that it wasn’t a miracle at all. But I know, just as well as I know that I’m sitting here, that it would destroy me.” At this my heart stood still. “To be dragged down, to have to leave heaven and come back to earth. Do you think anyone could bear that?”

“Why don’t you ask your father to help you?” I said, helpless with fear.

“Ask my father? To help me?” She gave me a blank look. “When there are only two possible paths for me, how could he find a third? Do you know what the only way out of it is? If the same thing should happen to me as happened to you. If at this very moment I could forget everything that lies behind me, my whole life up to today. Isn’t it strange: what is a misfortune to you would be the greatest happiness to me!”

For a long time neither of us said anything. Then she suddenly took my hand and smiled, almost a happy smile.

“I don’t want you to be sad for my sake.” (She was comforting me,
me!
) Before, you were so full of joy at the spring outside, and now you’re the incarnation of gloom. I shouldn’t have spoken at all. Dismiss it from your mind and return to your previous thoughts. I’m so happy –”

“You are happy, Miriam?” I interrupted in bitter tones.

She gave me a resolute smile. “Yes! Happy! Really! When I came up here to see you, I felt so incredibly anxious. I don’t know why, but I just couldn’t get over the feeling that you were in some great danger” – I was all ears – “and now, instead of being pleased to find you safe and sound, I’ve been burdening you with my troubles and –”

I forced myself to be cheerful, “– and can only make up for it by coming out for a drive with me.” I made every effort to sound as light-hearted as possible. “Just for once, Miriam, I’d like to try and see if I can blow away your gloomy thoughts. You can say what you like, you’re still far from being an Egyptian mage; for the moment you’re just a young girl who’ll have to be on her guard against the tricks the spring breezes can play.”

She suddenly became quite high-spirited. “What’s got into you today, Herr Pernath? I’ve never seen you like this before! And talking of the ‘spring breezes’, it is a well-known fact that for Jewish girls it is the parents who direct the ‘spring breezes’, we have only to obey. And we do, it’s in our blood. Not mine, though,” she added in a rather more serious tone, “my mother flatly refused to marry that awful Aaron Wassertrum.”

“What? Your mother? Marry the old junk-dealer from across the road?”

Miriam nodded. “Thank God nothing ever came of it; though it was a devastating blow for the poor man.”

“Poor man, you call him?” I exclaimed. “The fellow’s a criminal!”

She shook her head from side to side reflectively. “It’s true he’s a criminal. But anyone with his handicaps would have to become either a criminal or a prophet.”

Intrigued, I pulled my chair closer. “What precisely do you know about him? I’d be interested to hear, for a quite particular –”

“If you had ever seen his shop from inside, Herr Pernath, you would understand the workings of his mind straight away. I say that because I was often in there as a child. Why the astonished look? Is that so strange? He was always kind and friendly to me. I remember once he even gave me a large, sparkling stone which had particularly caught my fancy among the things in his shop. My mother said it was a diamond and, of course, I had to take it back there and then.

At first he refused to take it back, but then he grabbed it out of my hand and threw it away in fury. But I saw the tears pouring down his face, and even at that age I knew enough Hebrew to understand what he was murmuring. ‘Everything my hand touches, is cursed.’ It was the last time I was allowed to go and visit him, and since then he has never invited me in. And I know why. If I had not tried to comfort him, everything would have stayed as it was, but because I felt so awfully sorry for him and told him so, he never wanted to see me again. You can’t understand that, Herr Pernath? But it’s simple. He is obsessed. The moment someone touches his heart, he is filled with distrust, a distrust it is impossible to dislodge. He believes he is much uglier than he really is, if that is possible, and that is the basis for everything he thinks and does. People say his wife loved him; perhaps it was more pity than love, but a lot of people believed she loved him. The only one who was convinced of the opposite, was Wassertrum himself. Everywhere he smells hatred and betrayal.

The only exception was his son. Who could say what the reason was? Perhaps because he had watched his son’s development from a tiny baby and had thus seen every characteristic from the moment of germination, so to speak, there was never anything to trigger off his distrust. Or perhaps it was the Jewish blood in him which led him to lavish all the love he was capable of on his offspring; our race has an instinctive fear of dying out and not being able to fulfil its mission, which we have forgotten anyway, but which lives on in some obscure corner of our being.

He guided his son’s upbringing with a shrewdness which bordered on wisdom and was nothing short of miraculous in such a completely uneducated man. In order to spare his child mental torment later in life, he showed the insight of a psychologist in shielding him from any experience that might have contributed to the development of a conscience.

As his tutor he employed an outstanding scientist, who held that animals were insensitive to pain and that expressions of distress were mere mechanical reflexes. The fundamental principle underlying this far-sighted educational system was to squeeze as much pleasure and enjoyment as possible out of any creature and then throw away the shell as useless.

As you can well imagine, Herr Pernath, money, as the key to and symbol of ‘power’, played a leading role in all this. And just as he is careful to keep his own wealth secret, in order to cloak the extent of his influence in obscurity, so he thought up a way of making that possible for his son, whilst at the same time sparing him the discomfort of a life of apparent poverty: he imbued him with the pernicious cult of ‘beauty’, taught him an aesthete’s responses and gestures, brought him up to appear outwardly like one of the lilies of the field, whilst inside he was a vulture.

Of course, this whole business of ‘beauty’ can hardly have been his own idea; it was probably his ‘improvement’ of a suggestion from some more cultured person.

He never resented the fact that, later on, his son disowned him at every opportunity. On the contrary, it was he who obliged him to behave in that way. It was a selfless love, and one that, as I have already said of my father’s, reaches beyond the grave.”

Miriam was silent for a while, but I could tell from the look on her face, and from the change in her tone of voice when she continued, that she was following the thread of her thoughts. “Strange fruits grow on the tree of Jewry.”

“Tell me, Miriam”, I asked, “have you never heard the rumour that Wassertrum keeps a wax doll in his shop? I can’t remember who told me, perhaps it was only a dream …”

“No, no, Herr Pernath, it’s quite true. There’s a life-size wax doll in the corner where he sleeps on his straw mattress surrounded by piles of grotesque jumble. They say he took it in payment of a debt from the owner of a waxworks, years ago, simply because it resembled a Christian … a woman who is supposed to have been his lover once.”

‘Charousek’s mother!’ was the thought that immediately came to mind. “You don’t know her name, Miriam?”

Miriam shook her head. “If it’s important, would you like me to try and find out?”

“Good Lord, no, Miriam, it’s no matter at all.” (I could see from the brightness of her eyes how worked up she was. I resolved not to let her relapse into her old state.) “What I’m more interested in is something you touched on earlier. I mean what you said about the ‘spring breezes’. I’m sure your father wouldn’t dream of dictating to you whom you should marry?”

She gave a merry laugh. “My father? What on earth are you thinking!”

“Well, that makes me very happy.”

“Why?” she asked, unsuspecting.

“Because it means I still have a chance.”

It was only meant as a joke, and that’s how she took it, but she still jumped up and ran to the window so that I shouldn’t see her blush.

To help her over her embarrassment, I said, “As an old friend, there’s one thing I must ask of you. When the time comes, you must let me in on the secret. Or are you thinking of staying an old maid?”

“No! No! No!” Her denial was so emphatic I couldn’t repress a smile. “I’ll have to get married some time.”

“Of course! Naturally!”

She became as flustered as a schoolgirl. “Can’t you be serious for a single minute, Herr Pernath?” I obediently put on my schoolmaster’s face, and she sat down again. “When I say I’ll have to get married some time, I mean that, although up to now I have not given the when or the whom any thought, it would go against what I see as the meaning of life if I were to assume that I, as a woman, had come into the world to remain childless.”

For the first time I saw the woman behind the girl.

“It is a dream of mine”, she went on softly, “to imagine that it is one of the goals of life for two beings to fuse into one, into – have you ever heard of the Egyptian cult of Osiris? – something of which the ‘hermaphrodite’ is a symbol.”

The word caught my attention. “The hermaphrodite …?”

“By that I mean the magic union of the male and female principles in the human race to create a demi-god. As a final goal! No, not as a final goal, as the beginning of a new course, which will be eternal, which will have no final end.”

I was deeply moved. “And you hope that some time you will find the one you seek? Could it not be that he lives in some far-off land, is perhaps not even here on earth?”

“I know nothing about that”, she replied simply. “All I can do is wait. If he is separated from me by time or space – which I cannot believe, why then would I be bound to the Ghetto here? – or if we do not recognise each other, and I do not find him, then my life will have been without purpose, just the mindless whim of some idiotic demon. But please, please, let’s not talk about that any more”, she pleaded. “Whenever a thought is put into words, it gets an ugly, earthly taste, and I wouldn’t want –.” She suddenly broke off.

“What wouldn’t you want, Miriam?”

She raised her hand and quickly stood up, saying, “You have a visitor, Herr Pernath.”

There was a rustle of silk out in the corridor, an impetuous knock and then: Angelina!

Miriam was going to leave, but I held her back. “Allow me to introduce you. The daughter of an old friend – Countess —”

“One can’t even drive up to the house any more, the roads have been dug up everywhere. When are you going to move to an area that’s fit for human habitation, Pernath? Outside the snow is melting, the sky is enough to make your heart burst with joy, and here you are stuck in your dank, dark cavern like an old frog. By the way, do you know I went to see my jeweller yesterday and he said you’re the finest gem-cutter, the greatest engraver living today, if not one of the greatest who ever lived?” Angelina chattered on like a river in spate, and I sat spellbound. I was mesmerised by her radiant blue eyes, her little feet in their tiny patent-leather boots, her coquettish face beaming out of a mountain of furs, and her little rosy ear-lobes.

She hardly gave herself time to draw breath. “My carriage is waiting at the corner. I was afraid I might not find you at home. I hope you haven’t had lunch yet? First of all we’ll drive to – now, where shall we drive first? We’ll head for – just a minute – yes! To the Arboretum, perhaps – or, well – anywhere out in the country, anywhere one can really feel all the sap rising and the buds budding. Come on, come on, where’s your hat? Then I’ll take you back to my house for lunch and we can chat until evening. There’s your hat, what are you waiting for? I’ve got a lovely, soft, warm rug down in the carriage. We can wrap ourselves up to the ears in it and snuggle up together till we’re boiling hot.”

What could I say? ‘I’ve just arranged to go out for a ride with the daughter of my old friend here’? Miriam had quickly taken her leave of Angelina before I could get the words out. I saw her to the door, even though she made it clear, with a friendly smile, that it wasn’t necessary.

“Listen, Miriam, out here on the stairs I can’t really tell you how fond I am of you, and that I would much rather go with –”

“You mustn’t keep the lady waiting, Herr Pernath”, she insisted. “Goodbye, and enjoy your drive.”