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?

Only a man whose roots were in the Ghetto and whose every fibre was soaked in Ghetto lore, a man who had learnt from his earliest childhood to lie in wait for his prey like a spider, could have gone on perpetrating such atrocities for years without being caught. To do that, it took a man who knew everyone in the city, who knew such intimate details of their affairs and their finances that he almost seemed to have psychic powers. And if it hadn’t been for me, he would still be up to his tricks, would have carried on until he retired to spend his declining years as a venerable patriarch, surrounded by his loved ones, a shining example to future generations until at last he, too, went the way of all flesh.

But I also grew up in the Ghetto, my blood is tainted with its fiendish cunning as well. I was the author of his downfall, striking him unawares, like a bolt from the blue. Dr. Savioli, a young German doctor, is generally given the credit for unmasking him, but he was merely the tool in my hand. I it was who piled up the evidence and supplied the proof, until the day came when the long arm of the law was reaching out for Dr. Wassory.

That was when the fiend committed suicide, the Lord be praised! It was as if my double had been beside him, guiding his hand! He took his life with the very phial of amyl nitrate that I had deliberately left in his surgery when I went there myself to trick him into falsely diagnosing glaucoma in me as well. When I left it I breathed a fervent prayer that it would be this phial of amyl nitrate that would deliver the coup de grâce.

Word went round the city that he had died from a stroke – the effect of amyl nitrate when it is inhaled resembles a stroke. It was not long, however, before the truth was known.”

Charousek stared into space, lost in thought, as if immersed in some deep problem; then he shrugged a shoulder in the direction of Aaron Wassertrum’s junk shop. “Now he’s alone”, he muttered, “all alone with his greed and – and – and with his wax doll.”

My heart began to thump. I stared at Charousek in horror. Was the man mad? It must be the wanderings of a fevered mind. Of course! Of course! He must have invented it all, dreamt it up. That tale about the eye-specialist can’t be true. He’s consumptive, it’s the fever of death spinning round and round in his brain. I decided to make some jocular remark to calm him down, to set his thoughts moving in a more cheerful direction, but before anything suitable occurred to me, a memory struck me like a bolt of lightning: the door to my room being torn open and the face of Aaron Wassertrum with its hare-lip and round, fish’s eyes staring in.

Savioli? Dr. Savioli?! Now wasn’t that the name that Zwakh, the old puppeteer, had whispered to me as the name of the young gentleman who had rented his studio? Dr. Savioli! It was as if someone were screaming the name inside my head. A stream of twitching, nebulous figures danced through my mind, jostling with sudden inklings that were racing towards me.

Filled with fear, I was about to question Charousek, to tell him everything I had seen and heard from the room next to mine, when he was suddenly racked with a violent fit of coughing that almost sent him tumbling to the ground. He nodded a brief farewell, and I saw him grope his way along the wall and out into the rain. His story, I now felt, was not the figment of a fevered imagination.