I wouldn’t mind betting he dreamed it all up.”

Zwakh nodded. “You’re quite right. It’s like taking a naked light into a dusty chamber, where the walls and ceiling are lined with mouldy cloth and the floor is ankle-deep in the withered debris of the past: one little touch and the whole lot would burst into flames.”

“Did Pernath spend a long time in the lunatic asylum?” asked Vrieslander. “It’s a pity about him, he can’t be any more than forty.”

“I don’t know, nor have I any idea where he might come from or what work he did before. With his slim figure and pointed beard he looks like some ancient French nobleman. A long, long time ago an old doctor I was friendly with asked me to take him under my wing and find him a room somewhere round here, where no one would notice him or bother him with questions about old times.” Again Zwakh gave me a concerned look. “Since then he’s lived here repairing antiques and engraving gems, and he’s managed to make a decent living out of it. The fortunate thing is that he seems to have forgotten everything to do with his madness. I beg of you, never ask him about things that might call the past back to mind for him. How often the old doctor used to emphasise that. ‘You know, Zwakh’, he would always say, ‘we have our method for dealing with this; with great effort, we’ve managed to wall up his illness, if I can put it like that, just as you might build a wall round the site of some tragedy, because of the unhappy memories associated with it.”

Zwakh’s words had grasped me like a slaughterer grasping a defenceless animal and were squeezing my heart with rough, cruel hands. There had always been a vague torment gnawing at my soul, a feeling as if something had been taken from me and as if I had passed through long periods of my life like a sleepwalker going along the edge of a precipice, but I had never been able to find the cause. Now the secret was out, and it stung unbearably like an open wound.

My morbid dislike of any indulgence in reminiscences of the past; this strange dream that keeps on returning from time to time of being locked in a house with room after room that I can’t get into; the frightening failure of my memory in things concerning my youth – suddenly there was a terrible explanation for it all: I had been mad and they had used hypnosis to treat me, they had closed off the ‘room’ that gave access to those chambers of my brain, rendering me homeless in the midst of the life around me.

And without any hope of ever recovering the lost memories!

I realised that the mainspring of all my thoughts and actions lay hidden in another, forgotten existence, and that I would never be able to uncover it. I am a cutting that has been grafted onto another stem, a branch sprouting from an alien stock. Even if I were to succeed in forcing my way into that locked ‘room’, would that not just mean I would once again fall prey to the ghosts that have been locked away in it?

The story of the Golem that Zwakh told us an hour ago went through my mind and suddenly I saw that there was a gigantic, secret link between the legendary chamber without an entrance in which the unknown being was said to live, and my ominous dream. Yes! And if I were to try to look in through the barred window in my psyche, my ‘rope’ would break too!

The strange connection became clearer and clearer to me and began to take on an aspect of indescribable horror. I could sense that there are things, incomprehensible things, which are yoked together and race along side by side like blind horses, not knowing where their course is taking them.

And in the Ghetto: a chamber, a room to which no one can find the entrance, and a shadowy being that lives there, occasionally feeling its way through the streets to sow terror and panic among men.

Vrieslander was still carving away at the puppet-head, I could hear the rasp of the blade against the wood. The sound of it was almost painful, and I looked over to see if it was soon going to be finished. The way the head moved to and fro in the painter’s hand made it look as if it were alive and were peering into every corner of the room. Then the eyes stayed fixed on me for a long time, satisfied that they had finally found me. I could not turn my eyes away and stared, as if hypnotised, at the wooden face. For a while Vrieslander’s knife seemed to hesitate, unsure of itself, then it scored a firm, decisive line and the wooden features suddenly took on a frightening life of their own.

I recognised the yellow face of the stranger who had brought me the book.

Then everything went blurred. The vision had only lasted for a second, but I could feel my heart stop beating and then start fluttering nervously. And yet, just as when it had brought the book, I still retained awareness of its face.

I had turned into it and was lying on Vrieslander’s lap, peering round. My gaze wandered round the room, someone else’s hand moving my head. All at once I saw an expression of dismay etch itself on Zwakh’s features, and heard him exclaim, “Good God! That’s the Golem!”

There was a brief struggle as they tried to prise the carving from Vrieslander’s grasp, but he pushed them off, laughing, “What do you mean? It’s just a botched job.” He tore himself away from them, opened the window and threw the head down into the street.

Consciousness left me and I plunged into a profound darkness with shimmering gold threads running through it. It seemed to me that it was only after a long, long time that I came to, and it was only then that I heard the clatter of the wooden head on the cobblestones outside.

“You were so sound asleep that you didn’t even notice we were shaking you”, said Prokop. “The punch is all finished, there’s not even a glass left for you.”

A burning pain at the things I had overheard swept through me, and I wanted to scream at them that I had not dreamt up the story of the man with the Book of Ibbur, I could take it out of the iron box and show it to them. But these thoughts could not find words to express themselves and they were drowned in the atmosphere of general bustle that had overtaken my guests as they prepared to leave.

Zwakh insisted on putting my coat round my shoulders, shouting, “Come along to Loisitchek’s with us, Pernath, it’ll revive your spirits.”

NIGHT

 

Unresisting, I let Zwakh lead me down the stairs. The smell of the fog, which penetrated the house from the street, grew stronger and stronger.