Charousek also looked round briefly and muttered something to himself.

There was something unpleasant about the old man, and I turned my attention away from him to the discoloured houses squatting side by side before me in the rain like a row of morose animals. How eerie and run-down they all looked! Plumped down without thought, they stood there like weeds that had shot up from the ground. They had been propped against a low, yellow, stone wall – the only surviving remains of an earlier, extensive building – two or three hundred years ago, anyhow, taking no account of the other buildings. There was a half house, crooked, with a receding forehead, and beside it was one that stuck out like a tusk. Beneath the dreary sky, they looked as if they were asleep, and you could feel none of the malevolent, hostile life that sometimes emanates from them when the mist fills the street on an autumn evening, partly concealing the changing expressions that flit across their faces.

I have lived here for a generation and in that time I have formed the impression, which I cannot shake off, that there are certain hours of the night, or in the first light of dawn, when they confer together, in mysterious, noiseless agitation. And sometimes a faint, inexplicable quiver goes through their walls, noises scurry across the roof and drop into the gutter, and with our dulled senses we accept them heedlessly, without looking for what causes them.

Often I dreamt I had eavesdropped on these houses in their spectral communion and discovered to my horrified surprise that in secret they are the true masters of the street, that they can divest themselves of their vital force, and suck it back in again at will, lending it to the inhabitants during the day to demand it back at extortionate interest as night returns.

And when I review in my mind all the strange people who live in them, like phantoms, like people not born of woman who, in all their being and doing, seem to have been put together haphazardly, out of odds and ends, then I am more than ever inclined to believe that such dreams carry within them dark truths which, when I am awake, glimmer faintly in the depths of my soul like the after-images of brightly coloured fairy-tales.

Then it is that a ghostly legend wakes to new life in the hidden recesses of my mind, the legend of the Golem, that man-made being that long ago a rabbi versed in the lore of the Cabbala formed from elemental matter and invested with mindless, automatic life by placing a magic formula behind its teeth. And just as the Golem returned to inert clay immediately the arcane formula was removed from its mouth, so, I imagine, must all these people fall lifeless to the ground the very second a minuscule something is erased in their brains – in some the glimmer of an idea, a trivial ambition, a pointless habit perhaps, in others merely a dull expectation of something vague and indefinite.

And the constant furtive look in their eyes! You never see them work, these creatures, and yet they are up early, at the first flicker of dawn, waiting with bated breath, as if for a victim that never comes. If it ever happens that someone enters their territory, someone defenceless they can fleece, then they are immediately paralysed by a fear which sends them scuttling back into their holes, trembling, discarding all their skulking designs. There seems to be no one so weak that they have the courage to seize him.

“Degenerate, toothless predators, who’ve lost their strength and their claws”, said Charousek, hesitantly, looking at me.

How could he know what I was thinking? I had the feeling that sometimes you can fan the flame of your thoughts so vigorously that they give off a spray of sparks that fly to the brain of the person standing next to you.

“What on earth can they live on?” I said, after a while.

“Live? What on? Why, there are millionaires among them!”

I stared at Charousek. What could he mean by that? But the student was silent and looked up at the clouds. For a moment the murmur of voices in the archway had stopped and all one could hear was the spatter of the rain.

What ever could he mean by, ‘there are millionaires among them’?

Again it was as if Charousek had guessed my thoughts. He pointed to the junk shop next door, where the water was washing off the rust from the old ironware into brownish-red puddles. “Aaron Wassertrum, for example! He’s a millionaire, owns almost a third of the Jewish quarter. Didn’t you know that, Herr Pernath?”

It literally took my breath away. “Aaron Wassertrum?! Aaron Wassertrum from the junk shop a millionaire?!”

“Oh, I know him well”, Charousek went on, determined to tell me the story; it was as if he had just been waiting for me to ask. “I knew his son as well, Dr. Wassory. Have you never heard of him? Dr. Wassory, the eye-specialist? He was famous. Only a year ago the whole city was raving about him, about that great ‘scientist’. No one knew then that he’d changed his name, that he was called Wassertrum before. He used to like to play the unworldly man of science, and if ever the conversation came round to origins, he would modestly intimate, with a few deeply felt but vague words, that his father came from the Ghetto; had to work his way up from the very bottom, you could have no idea of the cares and worries! That kind of thing. Of course! Cares and worries! But whose cares and whose worries, and by what means, that he didn’t say! But I know what the connection with the Ghetto is!”

Charousek grabbed my arm and shook it violently. “Herr Pernath, I’m so poor it’s beyond belief. I have to go about half-naked, like a tramp, – look – and yet I’m a medical student, I’m an educated man!”

At that he tore open his coat, and to my horror I could see that he was wearing neither jacket nor shirt; he had nothing but his bare skin under his coat.

“And I was already as poor as this when I caused the downfall of that monster, the eminent, all-powerful Dr. Wassory, and even today no one knows it was me behind it. In the city people think it was a doctor called Savioli who brought his shady practices to light and drove him to suicide. Savioli was merely my instrument, I tell you! I alone it was who thought up the plan, gathered the material, supplied the evidence; I alone it was who loosened the edifice Dr. Wassory had erected, quietly, imperceptibly, stone by stone, until it only needed the slightest nudge to send it tumbling down – and no money on earth, none of your Ghetto tricks could avert the disaster.

You know, like … like playing chess. Yes, just like playing chess.

And no one knows it was me!

I think there must be nights when Aaron Wassertrum can’t sleep because he is haunted by the thought that there must be someone else – someone he does not know about, someone who is always close by but whom he can’t catch, someone besides Dr.