All at once she will change her behaviour towards Jaromir, acting as if she has suddenly taken a liking to him. With the smile that is permanently fixed on her face, she hurriedly tells the poor deaf-mute things that drive him almost insane with arousal; to communicate with him she has invented a mysterious, only half-comprehensible sign-language which never fails to entangle him in a net of uncertainty and hope that drains all the strength from him.

Once I saw him standing in front of her in the courtyard, and she was talking to him so insistently, and with such vigorous gestures and lip movements that I thought he would collapse with nervous strain at any moment. The sweat was pouring down his face with the superhuman effort it required of him to grasp the meaning of a message which was deliberately hurried, deliberately unclear.

He spent the whole of the following day in a fever of expectation on the steps of a half-ruined house farther along the narrow, filthy Hahnpassgasse, until it was too late for him to beg for his few kreutzer on the street corners. And when he arrived home in the evening, half dead from hunger and agitation, his foster-mother had long since locked the door.

A cheerful woman’s laugh came through the wall from the studio next to my room. A laugh – a cheerful laugh! – in these houses? There is no one living anywhere in the Ghetto capable of laughing cheerfully.

Then it came back to me that a few days ago Zwakh, the old puppeteer, had told me that some young gentleman had taken the room from him, at a high rent, clearly in order to be able to meet his lady-love undisturbed. And now the new tenant’s expensive furniture had to be secretly carried up, gradually, so that no one in the house would notice, piece by piece every night. The kind-hearted old man had rubbed his hands with glee as he told me about it, childishly pleased at the clever way he had gone about it so that none of the other tenants would have any idea of the presence of the romantic couple. There were, he confided, entrances to the studio from three different buildings. It even had access through a trapdoor! And if you unlatched the iron door to the loft, which was very easy from the other side, you could get along the corridor past my room to the stairs in our house and use those as a way out.

Once more the cheerful laughter rang out, releasing within me the vague memory of an aristocratic family and their luxurious apartment, to which I was often called to carry out minor repairs to costly objets d’art.

Suddenly I heard a piercing scream from the room next door. Startled, I listened to what was going on. The iron door to the loft was rattled violently and the next moment a lady rushed into my room, her hair undone, her face as white as a sheet, and with a length of gold brocade flung round her bare shoulders.

“Herr Pernath, hide me, for Christ’s sake hide me! Ask no questions, but just let me hide here!”

Before I could answer, my door was torn open once again and then immediately slammed to. For just a second the face of Aaron Wassertrum was visible, grinning like some horrible mask.

A round patch of gleaming light appears before me, and by the light of the moon I once more recognise the foot of my bed.

Sleep is still spread over me like a heavy, woollen coat, and the name of Pernath stands in golden letters before my memory. Now where have I read that name? Athanasius Pernath?

I think … I think that once, a long, long time ago, I took the wrong hat somewhere, and even then I was surprised that it fitted me so well, since my head has a very individual shape. And I looked into this hat that belonged to someone else … all those years ago, and … yes … there it was in letters of gold on the white silk lining:

ATHANASIUS PERNATH

 

I was wary of the hat, frightened of it, though I didn’t know why.

Then suddenly the voice, the voice I have forgotten, the voice which kept asking me where the stone was that looked like a lump of fat, flies towards me like an arrow.

Quickly, I imagine Rosina’s sharp profile with its sickly-sweet grin and thus manage to avoid the arrow, which immediately disappears into the darkness.

Ah, Rosina’s face! It is stronger than that voice and its mindless prattling. And now that I’ll soon be back, safe and sound, in my room in Hahnpassgasse, I’ve nothing to worry about.

I

 

Unless I the feeling I have is mistaken, someone is following me up the stairs, always staying the same distance behind me, in order to visit me, and he must be just about on the last landing now.

And now he must be coming round the corner where Hillel, the archivist at the Jewish Town Hall, lives, up the worn stone stairs and out onto the top-storey landing, with its floor of red brick.

Now he is feeling his way along the wall, and now, right now, he must be reading my name on the door-plate, laboriously deciphering each letter in the dark.

I positioned myself in the middle of the room, looking towards the entrance.

The door opened, and he came in.

He took only a few steps towards me, neither removing his hat nor saying a word of greeting.

That is the way he behaves when he feels at home, I sensed, and I found it quite natural that he acted as he did and not otherwise.

He put his hand into his pocket and took out a book.

He spent a long time leafing through its pages.

The cover of the book was of metal, with indentations in the form of rosettes and sigils filled with enamel and small stones.

Finally he found the place he was looking for and pointed to it.

I could make out the title of the chapter: Ibbur – ‘The Impregnation of Souls’.

I automatically ran my eye over the page. Half of it was taken up with the large initial I in red and gold which was damaged at one edge.

I was to repair it.

The initial was not stuck onto the page, as I had previously seen in old books; rather, it seemed to consist of two thin pieces of gold leaf welded together in the middle and with their ends wrapped round the edge of the parchment.

So there must be a hole cut in the page where the letter was?

If that was the case, then the I must be visible in reverse on the next page?

I turned the page and found that my assumption was correct. Without thinking, I read that page as well, and the one opposite.

And I read on and on.

The book was speaking to me, just as dreams can speak, only more clearly and much more distinctly. It was like a question that touched me to the heart.

Words streamed out from an invisible mouth, took on life and came towards me. They twisted and turned before me, changing their shapes like slave-girls in their dresses of many colours, then they sank into the ground or turned into an iridescent haze in the air and vanished, making room for the next. For a little while each hoped I would choose it and not bother to look at the next.

Some there were among them which strutted around like peacocks in shimmering garments, and their steps were slow and measured.

Others were like queens, but aged and worn out, their eyelids painted, their wrinkles covered with an ugly layer of rouge, and with a lascivious twist to their lips.

I looked past them to those that were still approaching, and my glance skimmed over long rows of grey figures with faces that were so ordinary, so devoid of expression, that it seemed impossible they could impress themselves on one’s memory.

Then they dragged along a woman who was stark naked and as gigantic as a brazen colossus.

For a second the woman stopped before me and bent down to me.

Her eyelashes were as long as my whole body and she was pointing mutely to the pulse in her left wrist. Its throb was like an earthquake, and I sensed within her the life of a whole world.

From the distance a wild, bacchic procession was charging towards us. Among them were a man and a woman with their arms clasped around each other; I could see them coming when they were still far off, and nearer and nearer came the din of the procession.

Now I could hear the singing of the ecstatic dancers echoing all round me, and my eyes sought the entwined couple. But they had been transformed into a single figure, a hermaphrodite, half male, half female, sitting on a throne of mother-of-pearl.

And the hermaphrodite wore a crown of red wood with a square piece at the front into which the worm of destruction had eaten mysterious runes.

Trotting along one behind the other in a cloud of dust came a herd of small, blind sheep, animals the gigantic hermaphrodite kept to feed its bacchic horde.

At times there were among the figures that came streaming from the invisible mouth some arisen from graves, with shrouds over their faces. And they halted before me, suddenly letting their winding sheets fall to the ground, staring greedily at my heart with predatory eyes and sending an icy shock through my brain that dammed up my blood like a river into which huge boulders have suddenly fallen from the sky, blocking its course.

A woman floated past. I could not see her face, it was turned away and she was wearing a cloak of flowing tear-drops.

Strings of people in fancy dress danced past, laughing, ignoring me. Only a pierrot turned and gave me a thoughtful look, then came back to plant himself in front of me and look me in the face as if it were a mirror. There was an eerie force in the bizarre faces he pulled and the movements of his arms, now hesitant, now lightning fast, that filled me with an irresistible urge to imitate him, to wink as he did, to shrug my shoulders and turn down the corners of my mouth. Then he was shouldered aside by the figures behind, impatient to push their way to the front and all wanting to show themselves to me.

But none of these beings has any permanence.

They are strings of pearls slipping along a silk thread, single notes of a melody pouring from the invisible mouth.

It was no longer a book speaking to me now, it was a voice. A voice that wanted something from me which I could not understand, however hard I tried. A voice that tormented me with burning, incomprehensible questions.

But the voice that spoke these visible words was dead and without echo.