The Golem (24 page)

“Ah, Herr Pernath, my dear friend, how can I tell you how much pleasure it gives me to find you alone, and in such good health, too.” He was talking like a ham actor, and his pompous, unnatural language was in such stark contrast to his contorted face that I shuddered with horror.

“Never, Herr Pernath, would I have presumed to visit you in your home in the tattered attire in which you have, I am sure, frequently seen me in the street. But what am I saying? Seen me!? You were often gracious enough to give me your hand! Today you see me with a clean white collar and a spotless suit. And do you know whom I have to thank for that? One of the noblest and, I regret I have to say, most misunderstood men in the city. I am overcome with tears whenever I think of him.

Although he enjoys but a modest income, he is ever ready to help the poor and needy. Whenever I used to see him standing so sadly outside his shop, I was moved by a heartfelt urge to go up to him and, without a word, shake him by the hand. A few days ago he called to me as I was passing and gave me some money, enabling me to put down the deposit for a suit.

And do you know, Herr Pernath, who my benefactor is? It is with pride that I tell you, for I have long been the only person to suspect that beneath that modest exterior beats a heart of gold. It is Herr Anton Wassertrum!”

I realised, of course, that Charousek was acting out this comedy for the benefit of the junk-dealer listening in the next room, but I had no idea what he hoped to achieve by it. I was not at all convinced that the rather crude flattery would fool the suspicious Wassertrum. Charousek obviously deduced my thoughts from the anxious expression on my face, for he grinned and shook his head. His next words were presumably designed to tell me that he knew his man, and knew precisely how far he could go.

“Yes, Herr – Anton – Wassertrum! It makes my heart bleed not to be able to tell him myself how eternally grateful I am, and I must beg you, Herr Pernath, never to reveal to him that I was here and told you all this. I know that the selfishness of his fellow citizens has embittered him and filled him with a deep, ineradicable and, unfortunately, all too justified distrust.

I have trained as a psychologist, but it is my instinct that tells me that it would be best if Herr Wassertrum never heard, not even from my own lips, in what high esteem I hold him. That would be to sow the seeds of doubt in his unhappy soul, and far be it from me to do that. Better that he should think me ungrateful.

Herr Pernath, I myself have known, from my earliest childhood, what it is to be unhappy, to stand alone and abandoned in the world. I do not even know my father’s name, nor have I ever seen my dear mother’s face. She must have died very early on.” At this point Charousek’s voice took on a strangely mysterious, urgent tone. “But I am convinced she must have been one of those profoundly sensitive characters who can never express their innermost feelings – just like Herr Wassertrum.

I possess one page torn out of my mother’s diary – I keep it always close to my breast – and in it she wrote that she loved my father, although he is supposed to have been ugly, more than any mortal woman has ever loved a man. And yet she seems never to have told him. Perhaps for the same reason why I, for example, could not tell Herr Wassertrum, even if it should break my heart, how grateful I feel towards him.

But there is one more thing that page from her diary tells me, even if I had the greatest difficulty deciphering it since the words have been rendered almost illegible by tears: My father – may his memory be erased in heaven and on earth – must have maltreated my mother most dreadfully!”

Charousek suddenly fell on his knees with a resounding crash, and screamed in such spine-chilling tones that I could not tell whether he was still play-acting or had actually gone mad, “O thou almighty being, whose name man should not speak, I kneel before thee and beg thee: cursèd, thrice cursèd, be my father for all eternity!”

His teeth snapped shut, literally biting the last word in two, and he listened for a while, eyes wide open. Then he grinned a fiendish grin. I thought I could hear a faint groan from Wassertrum in the next room.

“You must forgive me, Herr Pernath”, Charousek went on, after a pause, in a histrionically strangled voice, “for letting myself go like that, but I pray morning, noon and night that the Almighty will grant that my father, whoever he may be, should die the most gruesome death imaginable.”

I was about to make some automatic reply, but Charousek quickly interrupted me. “But now, Herr Pernath, I come to the request I have to make of you. Herr Wassertrum had a protégé to whom he was inordinately attached, probably a nephew of his. People even say it was his son, but I can’t believe that, since in that case he would have borne the same name. In fact he was called Wassory, Dr. Theodore Wassory.

Whenever I see him in my mind’s eye I can’t hold back my tears. I was devoted to him, heart and soul, as if we were bound by some direct tie of love and kinship.” Charousek sobbed, as if he was so moved he could hardly speak. “Oh, that such a noble spirit had to depart this life. For some reason that I have never discovered, he killed himself. And I was one of those called to his assistance, but too late, too late, oh, too, too late! And then, as I stood alone at his deathbed, covering his cold, pale hand with kisses, I – why should I not confess it, Herr Pernath? It could not be called theft – I took a rose lying on the breast of the corpse and slipped into my pocket the phial with the contents of which the poor unfortunate had put an end to a life so full of promise and achievement.”

Charousek took out a small medicine bottle and went on with quivering voice, “I’m going to put these mementoes of my late friend, the withered rose and the phial, on the table here. How many times during those desolate hours when, lonely at heart and consumed with longing for my mother, I wished for death, have I played with that phial. It was comforting to know that I only needed to pour the liquid onto a cloth and breathe in the fumes to float painlessly to the realm where dear Theodore is resting from the tribulations of this vale of tears.

And now I beg you, Pernath, for the sake of the high esteem in which I hold you, to take them and give them to Herr Wassertrum. Tell him you had them from someone who was close to Dr. Wassory, but whose name you have sworn never to reveal, perhaps a lady’s. He will believe you, and they will be a reminder of his son, just as they reminded me of a dear friend.

That will be my way of thanking him without his knowing. I am a poor man, and it is all I have, but I will be content to know that both will now belong to
him
, and yet he will never suspect that they came from me. Merely to think of it is balm to my soul.

And now, goodbye, and a thousand thanks for your help in this matter. I know I can rely on you.”

He grasped my hand, gave me a meaningful wink, and then, when I did not understand, mouthed some silent words at me.

“Just a moment, Herr Charousek, and I’ll see you down the stairs”, I said, mechanically repeating the words I read from his lips, and followed him out. We stopped on the dark first-floor landing. Before taking my leave of Charousek, I told him to his face, “I can imagine what the purpose of your little charade was. You … you want Wassertrum to poison himself with the phial!”

“Of course”, Charousek admitted cheerfully.

“And you imagine I’ll be a party to that?!”

“Not at all necessary.”

“But up there you said I was to take the bottle to Wassertrum!”

Charousek shook his head. “When you go back up to your room you will see that he has already pocketed both.”

“How can you assume that?” I asked in astonishment. “Someone like Wassertrum will never kill himself, he’s much too much of a coward, and he never acts on impulse.”

“Then you know nothing about the insidious poison of suggestion”, Charousek countered earnestly. “Had I spoken in normal tones, you would perhaps be correct in your assessment, but I had worked out beforehand how I was going to speak, right down to the slightest emphasis. Swine like that only react to the most nauseatingly turgid rhetoric. Believe me! I could have described his expression at every sentence I spoke. There is no
Kitsch
too crass to draw tears from such rabble, rotten to the core though they be. Don’t you think that, if it were not for that, all the theatres would have long since been razed to the ground? You can recognise scum by their sentimentality. Thousands of poor devils can starve to death without a single tear being shed, but dress up any greasepaint bitch as a country bumpkin and let her roll her eyes at them from the stage and they’ll blubber like abandoned lap-dogs. Even if by tomorrow old Papa Wassertrum has forgotten the scene that has just cut him to his dung-heap of a heart, when the time comes when he feels sorry for himself, every single one of my words will reawaken within him. At such moments of spiritual diarrhoea all it needs is a gentle shove – and I shall make sure he gets one – and even the most cowardly cur will reach for the poison. It just has to be close at hand! Friend Theo would probably not have gone through with it if I hadn’t made it easy for him.”

“But Charousek, that’s dreadful!” I exclaimed, horrified. “Don’t you feel any –”

He quickly put his hand over my mouth and pushed me into an alcove. “Quiet! Here he comes!”

Wassertrum came stumbling down the stairs, supporting himself against the wall, and lurched past us. Charousek quickly shook my hand and crept after him.

When I returned to my room, I saw that the rose and the phial had disappeared. In their place on the table lay Wassertrum’s battered gold watch.

At the bank they told me I would have to wait eight days until I could get my money; that was the usual notice.

I told them to fetch the manager. I was going to leave town within the hour and was in a great hurry, I lied.

He was in conference, they said, but anyway, he would not be able to alter the bank’s standard practices. At that a man with a glass eye, who was waiting at the counter behind me, snorted with laughter.

So I would have to wait eight days, eight dreadful, dreary days, for death. They seemed to stretch out endlessly before me.

I was so depressed that I walked up and down, up and down, outside a coffee house without any idea of how long I had been doing so. Finally I went in, simply to get rid of the awful fellow with the glass eye who had followed me from the bank. He was hovering nearby, and whenever I looked at him he immediately started searching around on the ground, as if he had lost something. He was wearing a bright check jacket that was much too tight and baggy black trousers with shiny patches that hung down like sacks round his legs. His left boot had a raised, egg-shaped leather patch sewn on, so that it looked as if he wore a signet ring on his toe.

Scarcely had I found a seat than he came in and sat down at the next table. I thought he was going to try to cadge a loan from me and I was already getting my purse out when I caught the flash of a diamond on his fat, butcher’s fingers.

Hour after hour I sat in the coffee house, feeling I was about to go mad from the strain on my nerves, but where else could I go? Home? Wander round the city? The one seemed worse than the other.

The stale air, the incessant, inane clatter of the billiard balls, the perpetual hacking cough of a half-blind journalist opposite me, the spindle-shanked infantry officer, alternately picking his nose or combing his moustache with nicotine-stained fingers in front of a small pocket-mirror, the seething clump of vile, sweaty, gabbling Italians round the card table in the corner, now rapping their knuckles and squawking as they played their trumps, now hawking up a lump of phlegm and spewing it onto the floor: all that was bad enough, but to see it reflected two, three times over in the mirrors on the walls! It slowly sucked the blood out of my veins.

It gradually began to grow dark, and a flat-footed, weak-kneed waiter poked at the gas lamps with a long pole until, with a shake of the head, he resigned himself to the fact that they were not going to light.

Whenever I turned my head I met the wolfish squint of the man with the glass eye, who then quickly hid behind a newspaper or dipped his grubby moustache into the cup of coffee which he had long since finished. He had pulled his hard, round hat well down over his face so that his ears stuck out almost horizontally, but he showed no signs of wanting to leave.

It was unbearable.

I paid and left.

As I was closing the door behind me, someone took the handle out of my hand. I turned round: that fellow again! I turned left for the Jewish quarter, but he came up close beside me and stopped me. “That’s the absolute limit!” I shouted at him.

“To the right”, he said curtly.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

He gave me an insolent stare. “You’re Pernath!”

“I assume you mean
Herr
Pernath?”

He just gave a scornful snigger. “That’s enough fooling around. You’re coming with me.”

“Are you mad? Who are you, anyway?”

In reply he silently opened his jacket, revealing a worn, tin double-headed eagle pinned to the lining. I understood at once: the rogue was a secret policeman and he was arresting me.

“But for God’s sake, tell me what I’m supposed to have done.”

“You’ll find out soon enough. At the station”, he said rudely. “Off we go now. Quick march.”

I told him I would prefer to take a cab.

“Nothing doing.”

We walked to the police station.

A policeman led me to a door. The name on it read:

“In you go”, said the policeman.

Two grubby desks with three-foot high panels hiding the occupants stood facing each other; between them were a couple of rickety chairs; a portrait of the Emperor on the wall looked down on a goldfish tank on the windowledge.

Otherwise the room was empty.

Sticking out from under the left-hand desk were a club-foot and, beside it, a huge felt slipper, both surmounted by frayed grey trouser-legs. I heard a rustle of papers. Someone murmured a few words in Czech, and immediately afterwards the Superintendent appeared from behind the right-hand desk and came up to me. He was a short man with a grey, pointed beard and the peculiar habit of baring his teeth every time he was about to speak, like someone staring into bright sunlight. Then he would screw up his eyes behind his glasses, which gave him a frighteningly malicious expression.