The Golem (5 page)

I have lived here for a generation and in that time I have formed the impression, which I cannot shake off, that there are certain hours of the night, or in the first light of dawn, when they confer together, in mysterious, noiseless agitation. And sometimes a faint, inexplicable quiver goes through their walls, noises scurry across the roof and drop into the gutter, and with our dulled senses we accept them heedlessly, without looking for what causes them.

Often I dreamt I had eavesdropped on these houses in their spectral communion and discovered to my horrified surprise that in secret they are the true masters of the street, that they can divest themselves of their vital force, and suck it back in again at will, lending it to the inhabitants during the day to demand it back at extortionate interest as night returns.

And when I review in my mind all the strange people who live in them, like phantoms, like people not born of woman who, in all their being and doing, seem to have been put together haphazardly, out of odds and ends, then I am more than ever inclined to believe that such dreams carry within them dark truths which, when I am awake, glimmer faintly in the depths of my soul like the after-images of brightly coloured fairy-tales.

Then it is that a ghostly legend wakes to new life in the hidden recesses of my mind, the legend of the Golem, that man-made being that long ago a rabbi versed in the lore of the Cabbala formed from elemental matter and invested with mindless, automatic life by placing a magic formula behind its teeth. And just as the Golem returned to inert clay immediately the arcane formula was removed from its mouth, so, I imagine, must all these people fall lifeless to the ground the very second a minuscule something is erased in their brains – in some the glimmer of an idea, a trivial ambition, a pointless habit perhaps, in others merely a dull expectation of something vague and indefinite.

And the constant furtive look in their eyes! You never see them work, these creatures, and yet they are up early, at the first flicker of dawn, waiting with bated breath, as if for a victim that never comes. If it ever happens that someone enters their territory, someone defenceless they can fleece, then they are immediately paralysed by a fear which sends them scuttling back into their holes, trembling, discarding all their skulking designs. There seems to be no one so weak that they have the courage to seize him.

“Degenerate, toothless predators, who’ve lost their strength and their claws”, said Charousek, hesitantly, looking at me.

How could he know what I was thinking? I had the feeling that sometimes you can fan the flame of your thoughts so vigorously that they give off a spray of sparks that fly to the brain of the person standing next to you.

“What on earth can they live on?” I said, after a while.

“Live? What on? Why, there are millionaires among them!”

I stared at Charousek. What could he mean by that? But the student was silent and looked up at the clouds. For a moment the murmur of voices in the archway had stopped and all one could hear was the spatter of the rain.

What ever could he mean by, ‘there are millionaires among them’?

Again it was as if Charousek had guessed my thoughts. He pointed to the junk shop next door, where the water was washing off the rust from the old ironware into brownish-red puddles. “Aaron Wassertrum, for example! He’s a millionaire, owns almost a third of the Jewish quarter. Didn’t you know that, Herr Pernath?”

It literally took my breath away. “Aaron Wassertrum?! Aaron Wassertrum from the junk shop a millionaire?!”

“Oh, I know him well”, Charousek went on, determined to tell me the story; it was as if he had just been waiting for me to ask. “I knew his son as well, Dr. Wassory. Have you never heard of him? Dr. Wassory, the eye-specialist? He was famous. Only a year ago the whole city was raving about him, about that great ‘scientist’. No one knew then that he’d changed his name, that he was called Wassertrum before. He used to like to play the unworldly man of science, and if ever the conversation came round to origins, he would modestly intimate, with a few deeply felt but vague words, that his father came from the Ghetto; had to work his way up from the very bottom, you could have no idea of the cares and worries! That kind of thing. Of course! Cares and worries! But
whose
cares and
whose
worries, and by
what
means, that he didn’t say! But I know what the connection with the Ghetto is!”

Charousek grabbed my arm and shook it violently. “Herr Pernath, I’m so poor it’s beyond belief. I have to go about half-naked, like a tramp, – look – and yet I’m a medical student, I’m an educated man!”

At that he tore open his coat, and to my horror I could see that he was wearing neither jacket nor shirt; he had nothing but his bare skin under his coat.

“And I was already as poor as this when I caused the downfall of that monster, the eminent, all-powerful Dr. Wassory, and even today no one knows it was me behind it. In the city people think it was a doctor called Savioli who brought his shady practices to light and drove him to suicide. Savioli was merely my instrument, I tell you! I alone it was who thought up the plan, gathered the material, supplied the evidence; I alone it was who loosened the edifice Dr. Wassory had erected, quietly, imperceptibly, stone by stone, until it only needed the slightest nudge to send it tumbling down – and no money on earth, none of your Ghetto tricks could avert the disaster.

You know, like … like playing chess. Yes, just like playing chess.

And no one knows it was me!

I think there must be nights when Aaron Wassertrum can’t sleep because he is haunted by the thought that there must be someone else – someone he does not know about, someone who is always close by but whom he can’t catch, someone besides Dr. Savioli – who had a hand in the matter. Wassertrum is one of those men with eyes that can see through walls, but he still cannot conceive that there are minds which are capable of working out how to insert long, invisible, poison-tipped needles through such walls, between the masonry, past gold and precious stones, to pierce the hidden vital artery.”

Charousek slapped his hand against his forehead and gave a wild laugh. “Aaron Wassertrum will soon find out! On the day he thinks he has Savioli at his mercy! On that very day! That’s another chess game I’ve worked out, right down to the last move. This time it’ll be the king’s bishop’s gambit. There’s no move I can’t counter with a crushing reply, right to the bitter end. Anyone who accepts my king’s bishop’s gambit will end up dangling in the air, I tell you, helpless as a puppet on a string, and I’ll be pulling the strings, do you hear, I’ll be pulling them and then it’ll be goodbye to free will for him!”

Charousek was talking feverishly. I looked at him in horror. “What have old Wassertrum and his son done to you to fill you so full of hate?”

Charousek waved my question away. “Forget that! Ask instead what it was that broke Dr. Wassory’s neck. Or would you like to discuss it another time? The rain’s stopping, perhaps you want to get home?” He had lowered his voice, like someone who has suddenly come to his senses. I shook my head.

“Have you heard how they cure glaucoma nowadays? No? I’ll have to explain it to you if you’re to understand everything, Herr Pernath. Glaucoma is a malignant disease of the eyeball that leads to blindness and there is only one means of stopping its progress, an operation called an iridectomy in which a wedge-shaped sliver of the iris is snipped out. There is an unavoidable side-effect: the patient suffers from glare for the rest of his life. Usually, however, he is saved from total blindness.

But there is one odd fact about the diagnosis of glaucoma: there are times, especially in the initial stages of the disease, when the symptoms, although they have previously been most clearly evident, seem to disappear completely. In such cases it is impossible for a doctor, even though he cannot detect the slightest trace of the disease, to say for certain that his colleague who examined the patient and diagnosed glaucoma must have been wrong.

But once the iridectomy, which can, of course, be carried out on a healthy eye as well as on a diseased one, has been performed, it is impossible to determine whether glaucoma had been present or not.

It was on this and other factors that Dr. Wassory based his fiendish plan. Time after time he diagnosed glaucoma – especially in women – when the patient was suffering from some relatively harmless complaint, just so that he could perform an operation which was simple for him, but which brought in a lot of money.

You see, Herr Pernath, the people he had in his power were completely defenceless; fleecing them demanded no courage at all. The degenerate predator had found a territory where it could devour its prey without needing strength or claws. Without taking any chances! Do you understand?! Without risking anything!

By getting a large number of spurious articles published in the scientific journals Wassory had acquired the reputation of an outstanding specialist; he had even managed to pull the wool over the eyes of his colleagues, who were far too decent and naive to see through him. The logical result was a stream of patients looking for help. Whenever someone went to him with a minor impairment of their vision, he immediately set about his devilish plan. First of all, he questioned the patient in the usual manner, but to cover himself for all eventualities he was careful only to note down those answers which were compatible with glaucoma. He also carried out a thorough check as to whether the patient had already been examined by another doctor. In the course of his conversation with the patient, he would casually let drop that he had been urgently called abroad on professional business and would have to leave the following day.

His next step was to examine the patient, and when, in the course of this, he shone the light into the patient’s eyes, he deliberately caused as much pain as possible. All part of his plan! All part of his plan!

When the examination was over and the patient had asked the natural question, ‘Was there anything to fear’, Wassory played the opening move of his gambit. He would sit down facing his patient, wait for a good minute and then pronounce, in measured, sonorous tones, “Blindness in both eyes is inevitable in the near future.”

Not surprisingly, the scene that followed was harrowing. Often the people would faint, cry or scream and throw themselves to the ground in desperation.

To lose one’s sight is to lose everything.

Then, when the moment came, as it invariably did, when the poor victim was clasping Wassory’s knees and begging him for the love of God to help them, the fiend made his second move and transformed himself into a god in the patient’s eyes by offering him a chance of saving his sight.

Everything in the world is like a game of chess, Pernath, everything.

“If we operated immediately”, Wassory would muse, almost as if he were debating with himself, “there might just be a chance; anyway, it’s the only hope.” Then his vanity would take over and he would launch into a bombastic tirade consisting of long-winded descriptions of various cases, all of which were supposed to bear an uncommon similarity to the present one, and a list of the countless patients whom he had saved from blindness. He basked in the feeling that he was some kind of higher being, charged with the welfare of his fellow-men.

All the while his hapless victim, the cold sweat of terror on his – or, more often, her – forehead, would sit there, not daring to interrupt the torrent of words for fear of angering the one person that could help him.

Unfortunately – thus Wassory would conclude his harangue – he would not be able to perform the operation until after he had returned from his journey abroad, in a few months time. It was to be hoped – hope sprang eternal – that it would not be too late by then.

Naturally the patients would leap up in horror, insisting that they were under no circumstances prepared to wait one day longer, and plead with him to advise them as to which of the other eye-specialists in the city he might recommend to carry out the operation. Now the moment had come when Wassory could deliver the decisive blow. He would pace up and down, with furrowed brow, deep in thought, until finally he would explain, in a hesitant, concerned voice, that an operation by a different doctor would, unfortunately, require
another
examination of the eye, which would involve shining the torch into it again and which, because of the dazzling light, – the patient himself would remember how painful it was – could well have disastrous consequences. So another doctor – quite apart from the fact that iridectomy was one area where many of them lacked the necessary expertise – would not be able to operate for some time, not until the optic nerves had recovered from this first examination.”

Charousek clenched his fists. “That is what in chess we call
zugzwang
, my dear Pernath, a forced move, which leads to further forced moves.

Almost out of his mind with desperation, the patient would now beg Dr. Wassory to have pity on him and put off his departure for just one day so that he could perform the operation himself. His was, the poor victim would say, a fate worse than death; death might come quickly, but the cruel torment of the constant fear of going blind was the most wretched state imaginable.

And the more the monster refused and protested that delaying his departure might cause immeasurable damage to his reputation, the higher were the sums the patients offered him. When Wassory finally decided the sum was high enough, he gave way and on the very same day, to avoid any chance occurrence that might reveal his plan, inflicted irreversible damage on the healthy eyes of his poor victims. His treatment left them with the constant feeling of being dazzled which made their lives a torment, but which destroyed the evidence of his villainy once and for all.

Such operations on healthy eyes not only increased Wassory’s fame as an incomparable doctor who had never yet failed to avert the danger of blindness, they also satisfied his lust for money and flattered his vanity. What could be more pleasing than to see those whom he had robbed of their health and their money look up to him as a good Samaritan, to hear them praise him as their saviour?