“Did this stranger happen to be smooth-faced, without any growth of beard? Did he have slanting eyes?”

“I think so”, I said. “That is, I … I’m quite certain of it. Do you know him?”

The puppeteer shook his head. “It’s just that it reminded me of the Golem.”

Vrieslander put down his knife. “Golem? I’ve heard so many people talk about that. Do you know anything about the Golem, Zwakh?”

“Who can claim to know anything about the Golem?” replied Zwakh with a shrug of the shoulders. “Everyone says it’s a myth until one day there’s something happens in the streets that brings it back to life. Then for a while everybody talks about it, and the rumours grow and grow until they’re so blown up, so exaggerated they become completely implausible and everyone dismisses them. The origin of the story is supposed to go back to the sixteenth century. A rabbi, following instructions in a lost book of the Cabbala, is said to have created an artificial man, the so-called Golem, as a servant to help him ring the synagogue bells and do other menial tasks.”

But it had never become a true human being, Zwakh went on. It led a kind of semi-conscious, vegetable existence, and that only by day, so it is said, through the power of a scrap of paper with a magic formula that was placed behind its teeth, attracting free stellar energy from the cosmos. And when, one evening before prayers, the rabbi forgot to take this seal out of the Golem’s mouth, it went raging through the streets in the dark, crushing everything that happened to be in its way. Finally the rabbi managed to block the creature in its path and destroy the scrap of paper. At that, the Golem sank lifeless to the ground. Nothing was left of it but the dwarf clay figure which can be seen over there in the Old-New Synagogue even today.

“That same rabbi is supposed to have been summoned to the Emperor in the castle on the Hradschin, where he called up the spirits of the dead in visible form”, added Prokop. “Modern scientists claim he must have used a magic lantern.”

“A magic lantern! People will believe anything nowadays”, Zwakh rejoindered, unperturbed. “As if Emperor Rudolf, who had devoted his whole life to such matters, would not have seen through a crude trick like that right away.

It is true that I don’t know where the legend of the Golem originated, but of this I am sure: there is something abroad in the Jewish quarter, something connected with it that never dies. My ancestors have lived here for many generations and I think I can say that there is no one who has more evidence, ancestral and personal, of the periodic appearance of the Golem than I have.”

Zwakh suddenly stopped talking and we, too, could feel how his thoughts had wandered off into the past. Seeing him sitting there at the table, his head propped in his hand, the light emphasising the strange contrast between the youthful redness of his cheeks and the whiteness of his hair, I could not help comparing his features with the mask-like faces of his puppets which he had shown me so often.

Strange how like them the old man was! The same profile, the same expression!

There are, I felt, some things on earth which cannot keep apart. As I contemplated Zwakh’s simple life, it suddenly seemed monstrous, even uncanny, that someone like him, even though he had had a better education than his forebears and been intended for the acting profession, should have suddenly returned to the shabby puppet booths and fairgrounds of his ancestors, putting the same puppets with which they had made their meagre living through the same clumsy movements and acting out the same threadbare plots. I realised that he was unable to abandon them. They were part of his life, and when he was far away from them, they changed into thoughts which lodged in his mind and made him unsettled and restless until he returned home. That is why he looked after them so lovingly and proudly dressed them up in their tawdry finery.

“Aren’t you going to tell us more, Zwakh?” asked Prokop, with a questioning look at Vrieslander and myself, to see whether we agreed.

The old puppeteer began hesitantly. “I don’t know where to begin”, he said, “the story of the Golem is so difficult to pin down. It’s just like Pernath said, he knows exactly what the stranger looked like, but he can’t describe him. Roughly every thirty-three years something happens in these streets which is not especially exciting in itself and yet which creates a sense of horror for which there is no justification nor any satisfactory explanation: at these intervals a completely unknown person, smooth-faced, with a yellow complexion and mongoloid features, dressed in faded, old-fashioned clothes and with a regular but oddly stumbling gait, as if he were going to fall down on his face at any moment, is seen going through the Ghetto from the direction of Altschulgasse until … the figure suddenly vanishes.

Usually it turns a corner and disappears.

Once, so it is said, it walked in a circle and returned to the point from which it started out, an ancient house close to the Synagogue.

On the other hand, you come across agitated people who maintain they saw it coming round a corner towards them. Although it was quite clearly walking towards them, it gradually grew smaller and smaller, like the figure of someone disappearing into the distance, until it finally disappeared.

Sixty-six years ago it must have made a particularly profound impression; I can still remember – I was just a little boy at the time – how they searched the house in Altschulgasse from top to bottom. All that they discovered was that there really was a room in the house with a barred window to which there was no access. They hung washing from all the windows, so as to check the rooms from the street, and that’s how they found out about it. As there was no other way in, a man had himself let down by a rope from the roof in order to look in.