Part 3

Then she disappeared and I never saw her again. Is it not a bitter truth that every human hand is like the hand of a child that cannot hold on to anything for very long? It snatches at anything shiny or attractive or at anything expressly forbidden to it. The first it destroys out of childish curiosity while it stands before the second open-mouthed or drops it out of sheer panic.

"Just who was this Mahalath who lies here underneath this tombstone?" I asked the gatekeeper after the two Northern Germans had departed.

The old man shrugged his shoulders.

"Her descendants still live in the ghetto. The family is a respected one in Jewish circles and, because of that, we are loath to talk about it. In the forty years since her death a whole host of legends have grown up about her. She had a love affair with a young man from the Kleinseite, from the Malteserplatz. For Jewish people generally the honour of their family is paramount. In matters where the honour of a family is at stake we are punctilious and can be very cruel. Suffice it to say that the poor creature ended her life unhappily and that the story is a sad one."

When the old man opened up the gate to Beth-Chaim for me, he had good reason to stare at me, shaking his head. Like a drunken man I wandered up and down that day and tried in vain to weigh my guilt and innocence against each other. In vain I did everything possible to shift the burden weighing now so heavy on my soul elsewhere or at least to make it lighter by telling myself that the words of this young girl were merely the meaningless whims and fancies of an immature mind.

Finally I staggered back to my room in Nekazalka Street, took out my medical textbooks and my slovenly and intermittent lecture notes and began, all of a tremble, with unflagging application, to con all that was written therein on the subject of the human heart, the actual physical entity itself, its functions, its well-being and its various ailments. I later wrote a book about these things which medical science has deemed most useful and which has been reprinted several times. If only medical science knew what this reputation as a leading authority on heart disease has cost me in personal terms. Not only literary works are born out of personal sorrow and grief.

It was very sultry that day. Heavy white clouds came rolling up over the rooftops and congregated there in threatening, leaden grey cloudbanks and, in spite of the fact that there was hardly a breath of air anywhere, I was driven from my room yet again, down into the hot and sticky streets. As the first clap of thunder reverberated sonorously, making windows in the town vibrate in their frames, I pulled on the rickety bell of the gatekeeper's house at the entrance to the old Jewish cemetery.

Instead of the long-bearded, venerable head of the ancient there appeared at the grille the wrinkled sallow face of the gatekeeper's old female servant.

"Where is your master? I must speak to him at once."

"God in heaven, young man. You look awful. Whatever's happened? Why have you come back again so soon? What spell is it that binds you to this place?"

Without so much as bothering to answer her questions, I pushed my way past the old chatterbox. On over the dark, now, in the thunderstorm, frightening, appallingly dark, paths of the cemetery I hurried, and, on reaching the grave of the Chief Rabbi, found there the old man, unperturbed by the ever more powerful outbreaks of the storm.

Whoever has not seen the place where I now was at a time like the one I am describing knows nothing whatsoever about it. There is no other place in the whole of the world where the advent of doomsday will be awaited with greater trepidation. The sky will then, as now, become "as black as sackcloth", the lightning flash, the thunder crack and people bow their heads in fear and trembling. How those old elder bushes writhe as they resist the storm's ravages. They shriek and groan like living beings at the end of their tether. Not like other trees and bushes do they rustle in the rain. The earth laps up the constant streams of water trickling down the topsy-turvy gravestones with a grateful and uncanny gurgle. Today is the day of the Lord; today is truly a "destruction from the Almighty".

We searched for a sheltered corner where we might, to some extent, find refuge from the fury of the storm and could only find it in the part of the cemetery where Mahalath was buried. There I spoke to the old man and told him everything without holding anything back. I told him the story of my friendship with Jemimah right from the beginning. As clearly and distinctly as I could I told him of our meetings with each other. I would have willingly accounted for each hour and every minute we had spent together.

He let me speak without once interrupting me. When I came to the end of my story, having, by then, run out of breath, he stroked my hair and forehead with his hard and bony hand.

"Your heart is a good one, my son, and I am as glad for your sake as I am for Jemimah's that you have spoken to me as you have. It is a fine thing for a conscience to be easy to arouse and for it not to need to hear, in order to be woken, the clarion calls of an avenging angel. I am grateful to you for coming here like this to pour out your heart to me. You need not fear that I will reproach you with angry words. Whoever walks among these stones, whoever breathes the air in this place, learns to look with tolerance on both the deeds and misdeeds of his fellow men. There are worse things you could have told me and I, in my turn, could have shown you graves here under which even more terrible secrets lie buried or to which rumours of such secrets have attached themselves. Thank God that you do not belong to the ranks of the wicked who, after causing irreparable harm, laugh and scoff and earn great notoriety because of it. You have only been frivolous and thoughtless. What yesterday was still a game is now in deadly earnest. A spark can grow into a flame before we realise it and then we beat it down as anxiously and urgently as we can but find ourselves unable to extinguish it. Poor wee Jemimah! She's always been a square peg in a round hole, even when she was younger. I should never have allowed her to turn this terrible garden of mine into her playground. Why did I need, old fool that I am, to keep her by my side through so many summer days just to tell her the stories of these headstones the way other children get told fairy tales about pixies and dwarves? Woe is me, for whose fault is it if it is so? But such things cannot be. Half of her hasn't grown up yet and we can still make amends for our sins of omission. What does she have to do with the dead anyway? Just because I was only able to live here, within these walls, I shut her young soul up in here with me, and, in doing so, kept her safe from all the dirt outside in the street, but it meant that only here did she see the light of day and the flowers that bloom in the spring. A sun that shines on corpses! Elder flowers growing on graves! But she'll never set foot here again. She'll leave and see life as other children do. She won't die, will she? Because of us? Because of me?"

I could not answer him. A red flash of lightning broke over our heads and, once again, a thunderbolt came crashing in its wake.

"You too, my boy, should never set foot here again," the old man went on. "It won't do you any good either! You too are too young to breathe the air here. If you're still in Prague tomorrow, curse your luck and depart immediately. That's my advice!"

"You want to separate me from her? Now you want to separate me from her?" I shouted. "That's no good. That won't help to cure her. You too, old man, are ignorant of the ways of the living. For the love of God, do not separate me from her. What good can it do to drive me away from her now?"

"We have no choice," said the old man, now more himself again. "You are no less sick than the girl herself. Healing lies in separation for the one as for the other."

I had no weapons against that cruel old man. He threatened, he cajoled and I finally gave in to him, even though I knew that it was not a good thing to do, and so I killed my poor Jemimah from the Josephstown, and that is why the elderflower, which to everybody else gives so much pleasure, is, for me, the flower of death and judgement.

I fled but I could not flee from myself. I shut my ears in order not to hear the plaintive voice that called me back to Prague yet could not help but hear it day and night.

The following winter I studied in Berlin and, what at first sight must appear unlikely, genuinely studied. I doubt that the pursuit of any branch of learning save the study of mankind's afflictions and infirmities would have been possible for me from that moment on. Such study had, of necessity, to agree with me and with masochistic pleasure I gave myself up to it completely and managed to derive therefrom a certain peace of mind. Afterwards they told me it had been a long, hard winter; I was scarcely aware of the snow and the blizzards and the frost. Only with the renewed onset of spring did I awake from this wretched condition, but it was no healthy awakening, more of a sudden jolt forward impelled by the touch of a cold and ghostly hand.

When I finally scrambled, shocked and shaken, to my feet, I saw that there was nobody there.

It happened on the ninth day of May, 1820, a Sunday. I was sitting in a park near the Schoenhaus Gate without quite knowing how I came to be there. All around me the springtime clientele of an outdoor cafe were enjoying themselves. Children played, old people chattered, loving couples communicated in a language all their own through looks or through whispers. I sat alone at my table gazing dreamily at my glass and felt as cold as ice. How happy I had been in former times to be surrounded by such joyful goings-on and how little I cared for such things now.

Not far from the half-hidden place where I was sitting a girl began to laugh, a high-pitched, hearty, long guffaw. I was back in the old Jewish graveyard in Prague, the sun was shining through the elder trees and there, behind the tomb of Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel, my lovely Jemimah was making fun of me and her pretty face and body seemed to hover in mid air over a moss-covered headstone. When I looked up, of course, the mirage had vanished. I asked the waiter to tell me what day it was and repeated the date to myself in amazement when he told me.

Now, for the first time, I stood up and looked around me. The trees were all either green or covered in blossoms. The air was warm. The sky was clear. Winter had changed into spring without my noticing. To many people such things are beautiful and many poets, for instance, have told of them with rapture. That strong feeling of consternation that takes one by surprise when one wakes up in this way is a good and profitable source of inspiration for a poem. This unperceived passing of time is, in my book, however, one of the least palatable things that one has, from time to time, to reflect on in life.

The elder trees too were in flower above me, all around me. The newly opened buds were already coming into blossom, robed in white and ruddy raiment, and the blossoms were being slightly, ever so slightly, agitated by a moving of the wind amid the bright green leaves. The following day I was on my way to Prague having fought hard but fruitlessly against the voice that was calling me back there.

I travelled night and day, but as there were no steam trains then, those trains that seem to us nowadays to creep along so slowly that their speed defies description, it was only during the afternoon of the fifteenth day of May that I finally reached the town that I was so afraid of reaching and already, in the distance, a collective chiming of festive church bells heralded the turmoil in which I was shortly to find myself. The following day was the feast day of that great patron saint of Bohemia, St John Nepomuk, and whole villages were walking in procession with crosses, banners, censers and holy pictures, singing ancient hymns all in praise of the poor father confessor of Queen Joan, all on their way to the centre of Prague as I was. The old grey town itself was virtually unrecognizable. All the houses were adorned, including their gable ends, with greenery, floral tributes and carpets. Everywhere preparations were underway for candlelight processions. The streets and squares of the town were practically impassable and, like a swimmer caught by a strong undertow, one had to fight against the forward movement of the crowd in order not to lose one's direction.

After a great deal of effort I finally obtained accommodation at the 'Golden Goose' in the Horse Market, subsequently known as Wenceslas Square.

The room assigned to me in this hostinec was not notable for its spaciousness and even less so for its view. Its one and only window overlooked a long courtyard hemmed in on all sides by tall buildings and balconies. A terrible tangle of carts and waggons pressing in on one another had arisen despite which room was still being found for plush and fashionable carriages of the latest design, only just now rolling up, from whence issued a constant stream of late arrivals decked out in the most bizarre and colourful of costumes. Coachmen and stable boys were swearing like troopers in Czech and German. Women and children were screeching and howling in every key conceivable. Peasants, town folk and the military endeavoured to make it easier for the ladies to step out of the carriages, or, as sometimes happened in certain cases, more difficult.

Directly opposite my window a tailor had just put the finishing touches to a high-days-and-holidays pair of trousers, for which an anxious customer was no doubt waiting, and was now blowing on a hunting horn his own good-natured proclamation of seasonal merriment out of his own window. Just at that moment all the bells in Prague started once again to ring out in harmony and I leaned against the frame of my upstairs window in more of a daze than ever.

I was just about to close it so as not to succumb to the strong smell of sweat exuded by the crowd when my eye beheld a shape the sight of which brought me to my senses immediately.

In a circle of laughing Bohemians and Germans stood a Jewish pedlar with a bundle of brightly coloured kerchieves and ribbons which he was offering for sale to the women and girls alighting from the carriages. I recognized the man right away: it was Baruch Loew, Jemimah's father, and one minute later I was standing in front of him and holding his arm in a vice-like grip.

"Is it still going? Is it still going strong? It hasn't packed up yet? You haven't buried it like Mahalath's, have you?"

"What the devil!" cried the street hawker, taken aback by being accosted so crazily. "What's up?"

Then he knew me and, naturally enough, thought only of the watch I had once left in hock at his house and never been back to reclaim. He looked me in the face with an apologetic smile.

"Blow me down with a feather if it isn't that handsome clever clogs of a medical student. Well, this is a surprise and no mistake. Why shouldn't it still be going strong then? It keeps time to the minute even now, but I'm sorry to say I don't have it any more. What can I do for you apart from that?"

I pushed the man out of the courtyard of the 'Golden Goose' into the site of the old horse fair. There I repeated my question to him, mentioning his daughter by name, and now his face altered so dramatically, and he looked at me so stunned and stony-faced and crestfallen that there was no need to wait for his answer. A procession that was even then making its way over that very spot separated us from each other and I apathetically allowed myself to be shoved, dragged along and borne away by the crowd.

In the Jewish quarter it was as quiet as the grave. The silence was unnerving. Once again I rang the bell at the entrance to Beth Chaim and once again a grille was opened in the gate and the wrinkled, nearly centenarian face of the guardian of this 'house of life' appeared in the opening and, at the same time, the bolt was pulled back.

"So it's you!" said the old man. "I knew that somehow I'd see you again. Come through!"

He walked in front of me and I followed him down the shadowy graveyard paths and the festive exultations of a thousand clamouring voices in the great city of Prague were blotted out by the silence. The elder flowers in bloom made a splendid show over the graves but there were no birds to sing in them.

"Have they already told you she's passed on?" said the greybeard.

I nodded and the latter continued and spoke almost word for word like the royal psalmist of his people: "I am like one forsaken among the dead, like one whose joy has been removed from him. The loveliest flower of the field has been plucked and the voice of the cantor is no more heard among us."

He gently took hold of my hand: "Do not weep, my son. What they always say is always true: tears won't bring her back to us. Perhaps it was wrong of me to drive you away, but who could have said then what was right and what was wrong? Her funeral was only last week. The greatest of physicians were at her bedside but were powerless to help her. She was right. Her heart was too big. Do not hold yourself responsible for her death. You were just as sick as she was. All those scholarly gentlemen agreed that she couldn't have held out much longer at best. Her memories of you, my son, were joyful ones, expressed in affectionate terms of endearment. You were a ray of sunlight in her short, dark and poverty-stricken life. Through you she became conversant with the blue vault of heaven and the land of the living of which I had kept her so fearfully ignorant. You brought her much joy and a great deal of happiness and a thousand blessings intended for you were on her lips when she died. Oh, it was a great, sad and beautiful miracle how even her thoughts as well as the whole of her physical being were utterly transformed. The Lord of All knows best how to lead His children out of darkness, out from behind prison walls into light and freedom. She was beautiful when she died, truly beautiful. I could only keep her hostage here and so the God of the Living took her from me to be with Him forever in the real 'House of Life'. May His name be ever glorified!"

What answer I made to the old man's words I no longer know. "Remember the elderflower!" she had said and how I did remember it throughout my life I have just related. Her grave was not to be found in the old Jewish cemetery in Josephstown for the good emperor Joseph had forbidden any further burials to take place there. Mahalath's had been the last.

I have taken a long time to write down all the memories that went through my mind as I held that garland of elderflowers in my hand which another dead girl had worn. Now a grieving mother took it off me and put it back into the pretty box from which she had taken it in the first place.

Then she laid her hand upon my shoulder: "How grateful I am to you, doctor, for sharing my grief so closely."

I looked at her, incapable of a reply. The fire in the stove had gone out and the room had grown cold. The sun had gone down behind the skyline. The brightness of that winter day had faded. I cannot describe how heavily I felt the burden of my years weigh down on me.

Sadder, yes, but none the worse for that, I made my way downstairs again, past an ever-young and meditative muse, and left that quiet, chilly, fatal house behind me.