Part 2
No sooner had I stretched out my hand to catch this spook than, quick as a flash, it disappeared and I saw the next instant a laughing nut-brown face, framed by jet-black locks, near the grave of the Chief Rabbi as if she wanted to entice me after her again, tempting me this time to chase her over the old burial ground. But this time I did not permit myself to be led astray for I already knew full well that it would do me no good to run after her. She would only have vanished into the ground, down into that black earth, or, what was perhaps even more likely, have disappeared into the elder trees sheltering the graves. I continued to stand there stock-still and took not the least bit of comfort from the fact that it was broad daylight and high noon, for who could say but that this haunted place might be subject to supernatural laws quite different from the natural laws that operated elsewhere.
I stood there and was very careful not to move and when the imp saw that her laughter and come-hither gestures were no longer helping her, this little enchantress of mine changed her tack. Her young face grew serious, and, jumping down gracefully from her branch, she bowed politely to me and then, planting herself squarely in front of me, bowed again, saying: "Forgive me, handsome sir. I shan't do you any more mischief now."
She tolerated my taking her by the hand and did not try to prevent me from pulling her nearer so that I could look her straight in the eye. She even, to my amazement, gave a clear and sensible account of herself when I asked her where she came from and what she was called. Unless she was lying like a leprechaun this neglected and yet utterly charming being did not entirely inhabit the ethereal realm of Make-Believe and was not a daughter of Oberon and Titania but the progeny instead of very down-to-earth parents who were dealers in old clothes and general household requisites in the Josephstown area of Prague. I also learned the number of the house where she lived and her name, Jemimah, like the daughter of Job, that splendid fellow who hailed from the land of Uz, and Jemimah means 'day'.
Even though her father's name was not Job but Baruch Loew, the latter was a passable counterpart to that paragon of patience in his time of trouble. On the subject of Jemimah's mother I would rather not say anything.
Nor will I enlarge upon the squalor I saw in house number 533 in the Jewish quarter when I went there for the first time after making the acquaintance of the daughter of the house. I craftily pawned my watch there even though I had a new, not inconsiderable personal allowance in my pocket. And what I smelt in that house was almost worse than what I saw.
But a spell had been put on me and it was a powerful spell and was destined to become a dark spell. How could it be otherwise when, forty years later, in that elegant, peaceful and spotlessly clean Berlin home all it took was a garland of elderflowers, worn by a young girl at a dance, to bring it all back to me again?
I had come to Prague from the fleshpots of Vienna with the firm intention of gracing the College of Doctors there, to work extremely conscientiously and to make up for lost time with renewed zeal. Nothing came of it. It was not that I reverted to my former wild behaviour, to that life-style which has brought many a young medical student to the point of having to apply the noble art of healing to his own body. On the contrary, neither midnight revelry accompanied by crazy bouts of drinking, neither Melniker wine, Pilsner beer, nor slivovice had retained the attraction they had had for me formerly and yet I was no less intoxicated for all that and used up endless quantities of Hungarian tobacco to allay the confusion of my dreams. That little Jewish witch, Jemimah Loew, followed me everywhere: to my room in Nekazalka Street, to lectures, even as far as the dissecting room table. It was a forlorn hope for me now to study therapeutics and pathology and to slice up human corpses and the vital organs of dogs, cats, rabbits and frogs. And so, in Prague too, I set to one side my resolution to be diligent and put it off until another later time and another university.
In my room in Nekazalka Street I lay down on the hard settee, veiled in thick, blue, aromatic clouds of smoke and pondered the deepest and most sensible propositions ever formulated on the wonders of the human soul. I should, of course, have been quite incapable then of writing a book on how passion comes to fruition and then withers away. When I had smoked and dreamed my fill, I got up to continue my daydreaming standing, drifting away through the streets of a town which itself is like a dream.
In the Grosser Ring I could hear girls chattering away in Czech and German at the fountain and at night I would listen to the pious praying of the congregation in Tyn Church to their statue of the Blessed Virgin Mary. The Hungarian grenadier-guards on sentry duty at the Old Town Hall were relieved by their Italian counterparts. Life's richest tapestries shifted and changed just as in a magic lantern show. Then, once again, I strolled up and down the Vyshehrad Hill where geese cackle and goats graze over the floors of sunken royal palaces and abnormally torn and tattered washing is hung up to dry. Once more I placed myself under the protection of St John Nepomuk on his famous bridge and gazed for hours at the Moldau without any justification for doing so that my rational immortal soul could make sense of. Then I would climb through the steep streets of the Kleinseite, walk up the steps to the Hradcany Castle area and look out over the battlements to see that proud Bohemian city stretched out at my feet. Many a hot summer hour I spent in the cool and shady vestibule of St Vitus's Cathedral but Jemimah Loew followed me even under the purple canopy that overhangs St John Nepomuk's sarcophagus. Here, in the Wenceslas Chapel, is the great door ring which the holy duke and patron saint of Prague held on to in his final agony while he was being murdered by his treacherous brother. If one kisses this ring with all due solemnity it is useful and effectual against many kinds of evil, but oh, against the problems that were pressing down on me such a kiss would not have helped. Moreover a good remedy for headaches is to rub off the dust from an old wooden carving near the main door and to make three signs of the cross on one's forehead with it. I often had headaches, genuine physical ones, not just imaginary, in those strange days and was never once able to cure them by crossing myself. The pain only abated somewhat when I rushed helter-skelter down the steps from St Vitus's Cathedral and the imperial castle and crossed the Charles Bridge, passing the statue of St John Nepomuk and various other statues en route to the Josephstown Jewish quarter. Only in the shadow of the old grim walls and houses of the Jewish ghetto did my head feel better, but I went on feeling feverish for all that.
I had now been friendly with the gatekeeper of the famous graveyard for a long time and no longer paid the six kreuzers which the royal and imperial authorities had fixed as his remuneration for showing round curious foreigners whenever I wished to gain access to this kingdom of the dead.
I had won early on the affection of this greybeard inasmuch as I knew how to see eye to eye with him on the intrinsic value of the history of the Jewish people and so we wandered up and down among the graves and many a life story and many a legend I let him tell me there. In effect, one could learn a great deal from these monuments and grey stones which bear such a strong resemblance to those strewn about in the valley of Jehoshaphat.
Jemimah Loew was related to the gatekeeper, his granddaughter, great-granddaughter, great-niece or some such thing: the passage of time has erased from my mind the actual degree of kinship. She often came with us on our walks, sat next to us and made her own observations, often clever and appropriate ones, by way of contribution to our conversations.
Those were the days. What precious hours we spent together. There were moments that we shared in that old graveyard with its overhanging elder trees, the melancholy charm of which it would be impossible for me to describe in words. Now the air in this place was no longer unbreathable to me and there were no more ghosts in the sunlight that penetrated through the leaves and danced on the graves. I was now on increasingly familiar terms with those grey stones. Better even than the old man Jemimah introduced me to them and when the gatekeeper had fallen asleep in his armchair or had plunged too deeply into the unfathomable subtleties of the Talmud, we took good care not to disturb him. Hand in hand we slipped away to Beth-Chaim and were a law unto ourselves during those singular summer days which had not been so lovely for many a long year.
Yes, Beth-Chaim! This graveyard had truly become for me a "house of life". When this young girl spelt out for me the wondrous hieroglyphics on those Hebrew headstones, the life of a person of whose very existence I had hitherto had no notion was vividly conjured up for me. Wise, virtuous and pious men and women, noble perseverers of both sexes, handsome men and boys awoke from a slumber that had lasted centuries and soon their shades had taken on the most lifelike of appearances. Soon I was on intimate terms with all these people from a world previously unknown to me which, for all its differences, still had much in common with the present, and believed in them as I believed in the historical and legendary characters of my own country's history.
Usually we sat near the tomb of Rabbi Loew, from whom my little teacher thought herself to be descended and of whom she was very proud. She told me many things about this learned man: how he had had dealings with the Emperor Rudolf the Second and had called up for him the spirits of the patriarchs, how he had known everything there was to know about the Talmud and the Cabbala, how he had employed a 'golem' or servant from the spirit world, how he had courted his wife, the beautiful Pearl, daughter of Samuel, and how he had had 400 scholars studying under him and lived to be 140 years old.
I took it all in, however, hanging on my storyteller's each and every word more single-mindedly than any of the 400 scholars had hung on the erstwhile words of Chief Rabbi Loew in the yeshiva of the three cells.
We did not speak of love for, strictly speaking, I suppose, I did not love this girl, but was, and still am, incapable of putting any other name to the tender feelings that drew me to her. These oscillated like the moods of the girl herself, like the weather on an April day, like the light summer clouds scudding over Prague and the elderflower and lilac bushes of Beth-Chaim.
There were times when I considered that Jemimah, a direct blood descendant of Hayyim, Chief Rabbi Jehuda's elder brother, was nothing more or less than a mischievous little guttersnipe with whom one could, agreeably enough perhaps, while away the odd quarter of an hour. At other times she struck me as a sprite, endowed and equipped with superior powers to torture mankind and, with the best will in the world, a predisposition to misuse those powers. Then she went back to being a poor but pretty, melancholic, albeit radiant creature, half child, half woman, for whom one might quite easily have shed one's blood, for whom one might have gladly died. I was fatally smitten at the time with a fever that was gradually getting worse, for the fluctuating shapes and sensations which assailed my soul then are only to be found in the fantasies of fever victims.
That was also a time when I read with great zeal and enjoyment tinged with sorrow the works of Shakespeare, so much so that I used to imagine that all that author's heroines had come together as one in this uneducated Jewish teenager, the quarrelsome Katharina no less than the sweet-tempered Imogen, Rosalind no less than Helena, Titania, Olivia, Sylvia, Ophelia, Jessica, Portia and all the rest of them.
Jemimah Loew had never read Shakespeare, had indeed never even heard of him, and all she was able to surmise from my rambling dissertations on this writer was that I was comparing her to various pagan and Christian women and she smiled incredulously at me and one day, round about the middle of autumn, just as the first signs of winter were in the air, as the leaves of the elder and lilac were turning to their autumn tints just like all the other leaves, one day in mid-autumn she grabbed my hand and dragged me down a gloomy graveyard path to a cemetery wall where there was a grave that we had not so far looked at.
She read me the inscription on the headstone and stated: "That'll be me!" The word MAHALATH had been chiselled thereon in Hebrew letters and underneath it the date: 1780.
Why did I feel so frightened? Was it not foolishness on my part to stare like a numbskull, as if the cat had got my tongue, at the girl now standing next to me?
And yet she was not laughing at me, nor was she pleased at the successful outcome of a jest. With melancholy gravity and folded arms she stood there, leaning against the headstone, and said, without so much as waiting to be asked: "Her name was Mahalath and that's exactly what she was: in other words, a dancer. Her heart was sick like mine and she was the last woman to be laid to rest here in this, our Beth-Chaim, the very last. After that the good emperor Joseph forbade that any more of our people should be interred in this cemetery. This woman, Mahalath, was the last of them. The good emperor Joseph also dismantled the wall of the Jewish ghetto hereabouts and gave to it his own compassionate and glorious name as a living memorial to his and to our own posterity. He it was who smashed down the walls of this prison and at long last let us breathe again in the company of other nations. May the God of Israel have mercy on his ashes."
"But who was this Mahalath? What do you have to do with Mahalath, Jemimah?" I enjoined.
"Her heart was sick and it broke."
"Don't be so silly. How can you know that about someone who was buried in the year 1780?"
"We remember our people for a long time. I know Mahalath like a sister and I also know that her fate will be my fate too."
"Now you're being ridiculous!" I shouted. But at this, Jemimah Loew suddenly put her hand over her heart and her face twitched with pain as if she were suffering some great physical discomfort.
Once more I was violently assailed by fear and when she took my hand and placed it on her bosom, my fear increased.
"Can you hear how it beats and throbs, Herman? It's my death knell ringing for my funeral. You call yourself a great doctor and you haven't even noticed it?"
She spoke these last words with such a charming smile on her face that the idea of her early demise seemed all the more shocking to me. I seized both her hands in mine and shouted at her angrily: "To joke about such things is madness! In the ordinary way I make allowances for you, but such words go too far, even for you!"
"No joke was intended," she replied. "Do you want me to tell you Mahalath's story?"
I could only nod my head, prey to an endless malaise of gloom and foreboding.
Jemimah Loew commenced there and then to tell me the story: "She who lies buried here was called Mahalath because her limbs were slim and supple and her feet seemed to dance when she walked. She too was born in the grime of poverty and darkness like I was, and in even greater poverty and even greater darkness than me, for the Jewish quarter of Prague was a much less happy place than it is today during the reign of the great and mighty empress Maria Theresa, and not even fresh air was granted to us free of charge and every year we had to pay two hundred and eleven thousand guilders for her gracious permission to waste away here by ourselves amidst mist and darkness. But Mahalath's soul was freer than that of the proudest Christian woman in Prague. She was well-read too and played the lute with those fine hands of hers so that she came to be called a pearl of her race like Rabbi Jehuda's wife, Pearl. She was born in darkness and longed for the light. Many great men from all over the world have died for that. Why should a poor girl not lay down her life for it too? Why are you looking at me like that, Herman? Are you also of the opinion that a girl can only die for love? Don't go thinking it was love that killed our Mahalath even though her heart broke in the end. Those who are of the opinion that she died because of her affair with a young count are wrong. The young count in question tried to abduct her from her father's house by force and Her Imperial Majesty Maria Theresa later admitted that he had had to flee abroad. Mahalath laughed at this young fop who had nothing more to give her than his name, his wealth, his velvet frockcoat and his plumed hat. They called her the dancer and she died because her soul was too proud to reveal outwardly what she suffered for her people inwardly. The only place where she could see the sun was here in Beth-Chaim. She read the inscriptions on the gravestones here and learned the stories of those who lie buried under them and her soul danced over the graves until the dead pulled her down to join them down below!"
How ominously the young girl at my side uttered that brief phrase 'down below'!
"Jemimah," I cried, clasping together my hands, not knowing what I was doing: "Jemimah, I love you!"
But she stretched out her hand at me with an admonitory gesture and stamped on the ground with her tiny foot. "That's not true. The young lordling in his green and gold, the one with the white plumed hat, didn't love Mahalath either and whoever proclaims that she died for the love of him is lying. She had something wrong with her heart and our defunct forebears dragged her down to their level to join them. You say you love me, Herman, but, were I to begin right now this minute to sink into Hades, you wouldn't lift a finger to pull me back!"
How penetrating was the look she gave me! It was as though her dark eyes were drawing from my heart its deepest secrets. If I had truly loved her, I would have borne that look and answered it in kind, but she was right to say I didn't love her and, because of the high fever I was running, I averted my eyes from her and lowered them.
The last thing that I wanted was to play her false, to betray her. In befriending this poor girl no wicked thought had as yet suggested itself to me. Then why this debilitating guilt, this feeling of remorse for which my memory was unable to account? I felt the burden of a terrible responsibility nagging at me as I timidly and almost fearfully contemplated this adorable creature in her threatening posture as her eyes flashed and her hand became a fist in desperation to defend herself against her feelings of affection for me.
"Poor Jemimah! Poor Jemimah!" I cried, and now, for the first time, our eyes met. Gradually her looks grew less angry and her eyes moistened and shone. Her clenched fist fell open and was placed on my arm.
"Don't be sad, my dear. It's not your fault. You have made me very happy, dirty, ignorant, useless little thing that I am, and for that I can never thank you enough. You're not to blame if my heart is so foolish it will one day overstep the limits God has set to keep it safe inside my breast. Feel how it's beating. We have here in the ghetto a great lady doctor. I listened once behind the door when she and my mother were talking about me. It cannot be otherwise. My heart, when it gets too big, will be the death of me."
"Jemimah, Jemimah, I'll get you other, better doctors who'll listen to your chest with a stethoscope and tell you you're mistaken, that the old quack has made an error in her diagnosis!" I shouted. "You'll live for a very long time and be a beautiful and gracious lady. You'll escape from this decadent and pestilential atmosphere, from this horrible place that you're in!"
"Where to? No, better to remain here where my ancestors have been buried since the destruction of the Temple. But you, my dear, will go back to your own country and forget me as one forgets a dream. How can you prevent a dream from coming to an end and the pale and sensible morning from waking you and telling you that it was nothing after all? Leave and leave soon. Both of us are fated to. You will be an erudite and well-respected gentleman in your own land, kind and compassionate to poor and weak alike as you were kind and compassionate to me, for I too was poor and I too was weak and you could have done me a great deal of harm had you really wanted to. Now these elder trees are bare and I am alive, but when these old trees and bushes next spring stretch out their blossoms to each other over the graves, I shall be lying as peaceful and still under my headstone as Mahalath the dancer here who died in the same year as the great and mighty empress, Maria Theresa. How long will you remember Jemimah Loew from the Josephsstadt when the lilacs bloom then in Prague?"
Once again I tried to be totally objective and reasonable about this silly speech, but could not, for the life of me, manage it and righteous indignation met with just as scant success. We both just stood there mutely, side by side, at the dancer's final resting place and, just as on that first morning, when I first came to this spot, horror gripped me with its ghostly hand in broad daylight. It was as if the earth itself were heaving like a molehill, as if ghastly and skeletal hands were everywhere at once toppling back the stones and pushing leaves and grass away from each other. I stood there as if caught between mounds of rolling skulls and all that lively putrefaction reached out to me grinning and seemed to have designs on the beautiful girl at my side.
It was a thing greatly to be wondered at that the tall thin man from Danzig and the fat man from Hamburg who were having themselves shown round Beth-Chaim at the time by Jemimah's old relative, were signally oblivious to this freak of nature. They strolled on serenely, their hands in their trouser pockets, chinking their small change in the hollow-eyed and grinning face of each putrescent century. The presence in this place of these two men in no way frightened off the Manitou as might have been expected. They only, on the contrary, served to accentuate its menace, for it was quite unnatural that two grown men should be so blithely unaware of what was going on under their very feet and all around them.
As they came towards us I could hear how the man from Hamburg was saying to the man from Danzig that he held the highly and unjustly renowned Jewish cemetery of Prague to be nothing more or less than a damnable swindle and a blasted old quarry and, once again, I pulled myself together, wiped the sweat from my brow and cried out: "No! No! This is lunacy! It's the product of a sick mind! How can anyone let a stupid thing like this put the wind up them to this extent? If there wasn't something wrong with me, I too would be walking round here every bit as calmly as those two visitors."
"Stop trying to fight it," said Jemimah, and, as the two strangers and her old relative drew nearer to us, she ran away from me, skipped lightly over Mahalath's grave, doubled over and slid off through the low branches of the elder bushes, turning back once more to look at me through their foliage and called out to me, putting her finger to her mouth as was her wont: "Remember the elderflower!"