Scarcely had he reached the window, however, than the rope broke and the unfortunate man smashed his skull on the pavement. And when they decided to try and repeat the experiment some time later, they could not agree on which was the right window and gave up the whole idea.

It was about thirty-three years ago that I encountered the Golem myself for the first time in my life. It was coming towards me in a passageway and we almost knocked against each other. Even today I still can’t work out precisely what was going on inside me. You don’t go around, day in, day out, expecting to meet the Golem, for God’s sake, and yet I’m certain, absolutely certain, that in the instant before I saw it something inside me screamed ‘The Golem!’ And at that very moment something came stumbling out of the darkness of a doorway and an unknown figure passed me. A second later a stream of pale, agitated faces was coming towards me, bombarding me with questions. Had I seen it?! Had I seen it?!

When I answered them, it felt as if my tongue were suddenly free, although before I had not been aware of being unable to speak. I felt astonished that I could move my limbs, and I realised that I must have suffered from a kind of paralysis, even if only for a fraction of a second.

I have thought about this long and often, and I think that the closest approach to the truth is something like this: once in every generation a spiritual epidemic spreads like lightning through the Ghetto, attacking the souls of the living for some purpose which is hidden from us, and causing a kind of mirage in the shape of some being characteristic of the place that, perhaps, lived here hundreds of years ago and still yearns for physical form.

Perhaps it is right here among us, every hour of the day, only we cannot perceive it. You can’t hear the note from a vibrating tuning fork until it touches wood and sets it resonating. Perhaps it is simply a spiritual growth without any inherent consciousness, a structure that develops like a crystal out of formless chaos according to a constant law.

Who can say?

Just as on sultry days the static electricity builds up to unbearable tension until it discharges itself in lightning, could it not be that the steady build-up of those never-changing thoughts that poison the air in the Ghetto lead to a sudden, spasmodic discharge? A spiritual explosion blasting our unconscious dreams out into the light of day and creating, as the electricity does the lightning, a phantom that in expression, gait and behaviour, in every last detail, would reveal the symbol of the soul of the masses, if only we were able to interpret the secret language of forms?

And just as there are natural phenomena which suggest that lightning is about to strike, so there are certain eerie portents which presage the irruption of that spectre into the physical world. The plaster flaking off a wall will resemble a person striding along the street; the frost patterns on windows will form into the lines of staring faces; the dust drifting down from the roofs will seem to fall in a different way from usual, suggesting to the observant that it is being scattered by some invisible intelligence lurking hidden in the eaves in a secret attempt to create all sorts of strange patterns. Whether the eye rests on a uniform sameness of texture or focuses on irregularities of the skin, we fall prey to our unwelcome talent for discerning everywhere significant, ominous shapes which grow to gigantic proportions in our dreams. And always, behind the spectral attempts of these gathering swarms of thoughts to gnaw through the walls surrounding our everyday existence, we can sense with tormenting certainty that our own inmost substance is, deliberately and against our will, being sucked dry so that the phantom may take on physical form.

When I heard Pernath tell us just now that he had encountered a man with a beardless face and slanting eyes, the Golem immediately appeared before my inward eye, just as I had seen it all those years ago. It just seemed to materialise from nowhere, as if by magic. For a moment I was seized with a vague fear that once again something inexplicable was about to happen. It was the same fear I had felt as a child when the first eerie portents foreshadowed the appearance of the Golem.

That must have been sixty-six years ago now. It happened one evening when my sister’s fiancé was visiting us and the date of their wedding was decided upon. For amusement, they decided to tell their fortunes by dropping molten lead into water. I looked on open-mouthed, not really understanding what they were doing. In my confused, childish imagination I connected it with the Golem I had often heard of in my grandfather’s tales. I could almost visualise the door opening and the strange figure entering the room.

My sister poured the spoonful of molten metal into the tub of water and, when she saw me looking on all agog, gave me a merry laugh. With wrinkled, trembling hands, my grandfather picked the glittering lump of lead out of the water and held it up to the light. Immediately the grown-ups became excited and all started talking at once. I tried to push my way to the front, but they held me back. Later on, when I was older, my father told me that the molten metal had solidified into the distinct shape of a small head, smooth and round, as if it had been poured into a mould. Its resemblance to the Golem was so uncanny that they all felt a shiver of horror.

I have often discussed it with Shemaiah Hillel, the archivist at the Jewish Town Hall and Warden of the Old-New Synagogue who also looks after that clay model from Emperor Rudolf’s time that I told you about. He has studied the Cabbala and thinks the lump of clay shaped into human form is a portent from the old days, just like the lead that shaped itself into a human head in my youth. He believes the unknown figure that haunts the district must be the phantasm that the rabbi in the Middle Ages had first to create in his mind, before he could clothe it in physical form. It reappears at regular intervals, when the stars are in the same conjunction under which it was created, tormented by its urge to take on physical existence.

Hillel’s late wife also saw the Golem face to face and had the same sensation as I did of being paralysed as long as the mysterious being was in the vicinity. She used to say she was firmly convinced that it could only have been her own soul which had left her body for a moment and confronted her for a brief second with the features of an alien creature.