The Golem E-Book

Gustav Meyrink

• Herausgeber: Dedalus
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Beschreibung

A remarkable work of horror, half-way between Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde

Das E-Book The Golem wird angeboten von Dedalus und wurde mit folgenden Begriffen kategorisiert:
fiction, horror, Prague ghetto, golem

Leseprobe

Contents

The Author

The Translator

Introduction

Sleep

Day

I

Prague

Punch

Night

Awake

Snow

Ghosts

Light

Care

Fear

Urge

Eve

Ruse

Rack

May

Moon

Free

End

Copyright

The Author

Gustav Meyrink (1868–1932) found worldwide critical and commercial acclaim with his first novel The Golem (1915). It established his reputation as the master of the occult and the grotesque.

Dedalus is part of the European-wide movement championing Meyrink’s work. A new translation of The Golem was published by Dedalus in 1995, which was revised and updated in 2017, and the first English translations of The Green Face; Walpurgisnacht, The Angel of the West Window, The White Dominican, The Opal (and other stories), were published by Dedalus (1991–94), making all of Meyrink’s major work available in English.

In 2008 Dedalus published the first English language biography of Gustav Meyrink: Vivo: The Life of Gustav Meyrink by Mike Michell. In 2010 Dedalus published The Dedalus Meyrink Reader, which contained previously untranslated short stories, essays and biographical material, as well as a sampler of the rest of the Meyrink oeuvre.

The Translator

For many years an academic with a special interest in Austrian literature and culture, Mike Mitchell has been a freelance literary translator since 1995.

He has published over seventy translations from German and French, including Gustav Meyrink’s five novels and The Dedalus Book of Austrian Fantasy. His translation of Rosendorfer’s Letters Back to Ancient China won the 1998 Schlegel-Tieck Translation Prize after he had been shortlisted in previous years for his translations of Stephanie by Herbert Rosendorfer and The Golem by Gustav Meyrink.

His translations have been shortlisted four times for The Oxford Weidenfeld Translation Prize: Simplicissimus by Johann Grimmelshausen in 1999, The Other Side by Alfred Kubin in 2000, The Bells of Bruges by Georges Rodenbach in 2008 and The Lairds of Cromarty by Jean-Pierre Ohl in 2013.

His biography of Gustav Meyrink: Vivo: The Life of Gustav Meyrink was published by Dedalus in November 2008.

Introduction

Gustav Meyrink and Prague

Although Gustav Meyrink (1868–1932) spent only twenty of his sixty-four years in Prague, the city had a decisive influence on his thought and writing. Three of his five novels use Prague as a setting and the Amsterdam of his second, The Green Face, is very similar in atmosphere to the Prague of The Golem, including a Jewish ghetto. In The City with the Secret Heartbeat, published in 1928, he wrote:

The city I am talking about is old Prague… Even then, forty-five years ago, as I walked over the ancient Stone Bridge which crosses the calm waters of the Moldau to Hradčany, the hill with its dark castle exuding the arrogance of ancient generations of Habsburgs, I was overcome with a profound sense of horror, for which I could find no explanation. Since that day this feeling of apprehension has never left me for a moment during all the time – the length of a whole generation – I lived in Prague, the city with the secret heartbeat. It has never entirely left me, even today it comes over me when I think back to Prague or dream of it at night.1

The illegitimate son of an actress and an aristocrat, Meyrink came to Prague in 1883, when his mother took up an engagement at the theatre there. On reaching his majority he came into possession of the large sum of money his father had deposited for him and set up a bank. At the same time he became what he later described as ‘the vainest, most systematic dandy in Prague’:

He had a terrarium with two African mice he had given the names of characters from Maeterlinck, a genuine confessional he had dug up God knows where, pictures of Madame Blavatsky, the sculpture of a ghost disappearing into the wall and lots of other things that had no place in the home of a banker.2

He was also a leading figure in a riotous group, similar to that following Prince Ferri Athenstädt in The Golem, that enjoyed the night life of Prague. His notoriety was such that Thomas Mann used him, without mentioning his name, in his novella of 1903, Tonio Kröger, as a figure embodying two contradictory qualities, the respectability of the bourgeois and the dubious nature of the artist.

The Prague that Meyrink came to in 1883 was a city in transition. In 1850 German-speakers made up half the city’s population and were dominant socially, culturally and politically. By 1880 the higher Czech birth rate, the migration of workers from the countryside and the incorporation of outlying districts mainly inhabited by Czechs had reduced this to 14% and by 1910, when Meyrink was writing The Golem, to 6–7%. For the declining German population, to which Meyrink belonged, and especially for writers and artists, for example the young Rilke, Prague became associated with the past, with decay, an image both gloomy and romantic. A prime example is the art of Hugo Steiner, who added ‘Prag’ to his name and was the first illustrator of Meyrink’s Golem.

For the Czechs on the other hand, who had fully taken over the city council by 1888, Prague was to become the symbol of the resurgent nation. That meant slum clearance and redevelopment, which included the razing of the Josefstadt, the old Jewish ghetto, apart from the cemetery, town hall and some of the older synagogues. As James Baker, who had been travelling to the Austro-Hungarian Empire since 1873, wrote:

This famous old city, with a tremendous history, Zlata Praha, Golden Prague, as the Slavs so love to call it, is being, or rather has been, transformed during the last twenty years. The crooked, nauseous, dirty streets through which one twisted and wandered thirty years ago have nearly all disappeared.3

Central to the Prague of The Golem are the ‘crooked streets’ of the Jewish ghetto, which had ceased to exist as such even before it succumbed to redevelopment. Following the 1848 revolution the Jews had been released from the obligation to live there and many had indeed moved out. The large old tenements were like rabbit warrens, with doors and passageways knocked through from one building to another, then often closed up again or diverted – as in the block where Pernath the hero of The Golem lives. Who actually owned what was often difficult to establish and when families, usually the richer inhabitants, moved out, apartments were frequently left empty – until someone, often criminals and the like attracted by their usefulness as a bolthole, moved in. It is perhaps best described in the words of Hugo Steiner-Prag:

It was picturesque, hazardous and dreary at the same time. It smelled of corruption and misery. The people fit the setting. But side by side with this misery lived peaceful lower-class people and pious Jews. On Friday evenings one could hear the monotone of prayers mingling with the bickering of whores and the loud tumult of the drunken… Around 1885 the demolition was begun… but for one who knew this district as it once was, in spite of its seeming ugliness, it remains immortal.4

This ‘immortal’ ghetto, which is the setting for Meyrink’s novel, is the home of the golem. The idea of a golem, the creation of an artificial man from earth, originated in mediaeval Jewish commentaries on a seminal Jewish text, the Sefer Yezirah (Book of Creation) and it was not until the 19th century that it became a legend associated with the historical 16th-century Rabbi Loew, who was said to have made a golem to protect the inhabitants of the ghetto.

The legend of the golem was popular among artists and writers of the early 20th century, the best-known version being Paul Wegener’s film, the first, lost, version of which dates from 1914. Meyrink’s novel is close to the extant, 1920 version of Wegener’s film in the eerie atmosphere of the city it creates, but whereas the film retells the legend of Rabbi Loew and the golem, Meyrink uses it symbolically. It is a mysterious figure that at one point appears to the hero of the novel, the amnesiac Pernath; at others it is a kind of alter ego accompanying him on his spiritual journey of self-discovery, but above all, it represents the spirit of the old Jewish ghetto and encapsulates the feeling of horror Prague evoked in Meyrink.

1 In Die Gartenlaube; republished in Das Haus zur letzten Latern, ed. Eduard Frankfurt/M, 1993, p157.

2 Paul Leppin: Bankier Meyer. Erinnerungen an Gustav Meyrinks Prager Zeit, Zeit im Bild, 1932, no 8, pp. 4-5.

3 James Baker: Austria: her People & their Homelands, illus. Donald Maxwell, London, 1913, p. 21.

4 Quoted in: Golem! Danger Deliverance and Art, ed. Emily D. Bilski, The Jewish Museum, New York, 1988, p. 59.

Sleep

The moonlight is shining on the foot of my bed, lying there like a large, bright, flat stone.

Whenever the disc of the full moon begins to shrink and its right-hand side starts to wither – like a face approaching old age, in which one cheek becomes hollow and wrinkled first – that is the time at night when I am seized by a dark and agonising restlessness. I am not asleep, nor am I awake, and in my reverie things I have seen mingle with things I have read or heard, like rivers of different colour or clarity meeting.

I had been reading about the life of the Buddha before I went to bed, and one passage kept on running through my mind in a thousand variations, going back to the beginning again and again:

“A crow flew to a stone which looked like a lump of fat, thinking perhaps it had found something good to eat. But when the crow found that it was not good to eat, it flew off. Like the crow that went to the stone, so do we – we, the tempters – leave Gautama, the ascetic, because we have lost our pleasure in him.”

And the image of the stone that looked like a lump of fat grew in my mind to enormous dimensions:

I am walking along a dried-up river-bed, picking up smooth pebbles, bluish-grey ones with specks of glittering dust. I rack my brains, but I still have no idea what to do with them. Then I find black ones with patches of sulphurous yellow, like the petrified attempts of a child to form crude, blotched salamanders.

I want to throw them away, these pebbles, far away from me, but they just keep falling out of my hand, and I cannot banish them from my sight.

All the stones that ever played a role in my life push up out of the earth around me. Some are struggling clumsily to work their way up through the sand to the light, like huge, slate-coloured crabs when the tide comes in, as if they were doing their utmost to catch my eye, in order to tell me things of infinite importance. Others, exhausted, fall back weakly into their holes and abandon all hope of ever being able to deliver their message.

At times I emerge with a start from the half-light of this reverie and see again for a moment the moonlight lying on the humped cover at the bottom of the bed like a large, bright, flat stone, only to grope my way blindly once more after my departing consciousness, restlessly searching for the stone which is tormenting me, the one which must lie hidden somewhere in the debris of my memory and which looks like a lump of fat.

The end of a rainwater pipe must have once reached the ground beside it, I imagine, bent at an obtuse angle, its rim eaten away by rust, and I furiously try to force such an image into my mind in order to beguile my startled thoughts and lull them back to sleep.

I do not succeed.

Again and again, again and again, with idiotic persistence, tireless as a shutter blown by the wind against the wall at regular intervals, an obstinate voice inside me keeps insisting, ‘That is something else, something quite different, that is not the stone that looks like a lump of fat.’

There is no escape from the voice.

A hundred times I object that that is all beside the point, but, although it goes silent for a little while, it starts up again, imperceptibly at first, with its stubborn, ‘Yes, yes, you may be right, but it’s still not the stone that looks like a lump of fat’.

I am slowly filled with an unbearable sense of my own powerlessness.

I do not know what happened after that. Did I voluntarily give up all resistance, or did my thoughts overpower me and bind me?

All I know is that my body is lying asleep in bed and my senses are detached and no longer tied to it.

‘Who is this ‘I’ now?’ is the question that suddenly occurs to me; but then I remember that I no longer possess an organ with which I can ask questions; and I am afraid that the voice will start up again with its endless interrogation about the stone and the lump of fat.

So I turn away.

Day

I suddenly found myself standing in a gloomy courtyard and through the reddish arch of a gateway opposite, across the narrow, filthy street, I could see a Jewish junk-dealer leaning against a shop-front which had bits of old iron, broken tools, rusty stirrups and skates, and all kinds of other dead things hanging round the open doorway.

And this image had about it that tormenting monotony which characterises all impressions which, like pedlars, cross the threshold of our perception with a certain regularity, day in, day out, and did not arouse either curiosity or surprise within me.

I became aware that I had been living in this neighbourhood for a long time now.

In spite of its contrast with what I had perceived only shortly beforehand, and with the manner in which I had come here, this awareness did not make any deep impression on me either.

As I made my way up the worn steps to my room, musing in passing on the greasy appearance of the stone treads, I was suddenly visited by the notion that at some time I must have heard or read of a strange comparison between a stone and a lump of fat.

Then I heard footsteps going up the higher flights ahead of me, and when I reached my door I saw that it was Rosina, the fourteen-year-old redhead belonging to the junk-shop owner, Aaron Wassertrum. I had to squeeze past her, and she stood with her back against the banisters, arching her body lasciviously. She had her grubby hands curled round the iron rail for support and I could see the pale gleam of her bare arms in the murky half-light.

I avoided her glances.

Her teasing smile and waxy, rocking-horse face disgust me. I feel she must have white, bloated flesh, like the axolotl I saw just now in the tank of salamanders in the pet shop. I find the eyelashes of people with red hair as repulsive as those of rabbits.

I unlocked my door and quickly slammed it behind me.

From my window I could see the junk-dealer, Aaron Wassertrum, standing outside his shop. He was leaning against the wall of the arched opening, nipping at his fingernails with a pair of pliers.

Was the red-haired Rosina his daughter or his niece? He did not resemble her at all.

Among the Jewish faces that appear day by day in Hahnpassgasse I can clearly recognise different tribes, whose distinguishing features can no more be blurred by the close relationship of particular individuals than oil and water can be mixed. You cannot say, ‘Those two are brothers, or father and son.’ This man belongs to one tribe and that to another; that is the most that can be read from these features.

Even if Rosina did look like the junk-dealer, what would that prove?

These tribes harbour a secret loathing and revulsion for each other, which can even burst through the barriers of close blood-ties; but they know how to conceal it from the outside world, as one would guard a dangerous secret. Not one of them gives the slightest hint of it, and in this accord they resemble blind people filled with hatred who are clinging to a rope dripping with slime: some grasp it tight with both fists, others keep a reluctant hold with one finger, but all are possessed by the superstitious fear that they would be doomed to perdition the moment they abandoned their communal security and separated themselves from the rest.

Rosina is one of that red-haired tribe which is even more repulsive in its physical characteristics than the others; the men are pigeon-chested and have long, skinny necks with protuberant Adam’s apples. Everything about them is freckled, and their whole life through they suffer the torments of lust, these men, and fight an unending, losing battle against their desires, on the rack of a constant, loathsome fear for their health.

It was not at all clear to me how I had come to assume Rosina and the junk-dealer, Aaron Wassertrum, were in any way related. I have never seen her anywhere near the old man, nor ever noticed them calling out to each other.

But she was almost always in our courtyard or hanging around the dark corners and passages of our house.

I am sure that all the other inhabitants of the building think she is a close relative or some kind of ward of the old junk-dealer, but I am convinced that not one of them would be able to give a reason for this supposition.

I wanted to drag my thoughts away from Rosina, so I looked out of the open window of my room, down into Hahnpassgasse. As if he had felt my eye light on him, Aaron Wassertrum suddenly turned his face up towards me, a horrible, expressionless face, with its round, fish’s eyes and gaping harelip. He seemed to me like a human spider that can sense the slightest touch on its web, however unconcerned it pretends to be.

And whatever did he live on? What were his thoughts, his plans? I had no idea. The same dead, worthless objects hang down from the rim of the arched entrance to his shop, day after day, year in, year out. I could have drawn them with my eyes shut: the buckled tin trumpet without any keys, the picture painted on yellowing paper with that strange arrangement of soldiers; and in front, piled up close to each other on the ground so that no one can cross the threshold of his shop, a row of round, iron hotplates from kitchen stoves.

These objects never increase or decrease in number, and whenever the occasional passer-by stops and asks the price of this or that, the junk-dealer falls prey to a violent agitation. It is horrible to see then how the two parts of his harelip curl up as he spews out a torrent of incomprehensible words in an irritated, gurgling, stuttering bass, so that the potential buyer loses all desire to pursue the matter further, shrinks back and hurries off.

Quick as a flash Wassertrum’s gaze had slipped away from my eye to rest with studied interest on the bare walls of the neighbouring house just beyond my window. What could he find to look at there? The house turns its back on Hahnpassgasse and its windows look down into the courtyard! There is only one that gives onto the street.

By chance, someone seemed to have entered the rooms next door – I think they form part of some rambling studio – that are on the same storey as mine; through the wall I can hear a male and a female voice talking to each other.

But it would have been impossible for the junk-dealer to have heard that from down below!

Someone moved outside my door, and I guessed it must be Rosina, still standing out there, hot with expectation that I might yet call her in after all.

And below, on the half-landing, Loisa, the pockmarked adolescent, would be waiting with bated breath to see if I would open my door; even here in my room I could feel the air quiver with his hatred and seething jealousy. He is afraid to come any closer because Rosina might see him. He knows he is dependent on her, as a hungry wolf is dependent on its keeper, yet most of all he would like to leap up and abandon himself to a frenzy of rage.

I sat down at my table and took out my tweezers and gravers, but no creative work would come out right, and my hand was not steady enough to clear out the fine lines of the Japanese engraving.

There is a bleak, gloomy atmosphere hanging round this house that quietens my soul, and old images keep surfacing within me.

Loisa and his twin brother Jaromir cannot be much more than a year older than Rosina. I could scarcely remember their father, a baker who specialised in communion wafers, and now, I believe, they are looked after by an old woman, though I have no idea which one it is of the many who live in the house, like so many toads hiding under their stones. She looks after the two boys, that is, she provides them with lodgings; for that they have to hand over to her whatever they manage to beg or steal. Does she feed them as well? I shouldn’t imagine so, the old woman comes home very late at night.

They say her job is laying out corpses.

I often used to see Loisa, Jaromir and Rosina playing together innocently in the yard when they were children.

Those times are long since past.

Loisa spends the whole day chasing after the red-haired Jew girl. Sometimes his search is fruitless, and if he can’t find her anywhere he creeps up to my door and waits, a grimace on his face, for her to make her surreptitious way up here. At such times, as I sit at my work, I can see him in my mind’s eye, lurking outside in the crooked corridor, listening with his head bent forward on his gaunt neck.

Sometimes the silence is broken by a furious outburst of noise: Jaromir, who is deaf and dumb, and whose head is permanently filled with a crazed lust for Rosina, roams the house like a wild animal, and the inarticulate howling he emits, half out of his mind with jealousy and suspicion, is so eerie that it freezes the blood in your veins.

He is looking for the pair of them. He always assumes they are together somewhere, hiding in one of the thousand filthy nooks and crannies, and he rushes about in a blind frenzy, goaded on by the idea that he must be at his brother’s heels, to make sure there is nothing going on with Rosina that he doesn’t know about.

And it is precisely this unceasing torment of the deaf-mute which, I suspect, keeps provoking Rosina into carrying on with his brother. Whenever her ardour or her willingness abate, Loisa always thinks up some new piece of nastiness to arouse her lust once more. For example, they let Jaromir catch them in the act, apparently or really, and then, when he is beside himself with fury, slyly lure him into dark corridors where they have set up vicious traps – rusty barrel-hoops that shoot up when he treads on them and iron rakes with the points sticking up – which he trips over, bloodying his hands and knees.

From time to time, just to tighten the screw, Rosina will think up some devilish trick of her own. 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 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. Every sound that appears in the here and now has many echoes, just as every object has one large shadow and many small shadows. But this voice no longer had any echoes, they must have long since died away and disappeared.

I had read the book right to the end and was still holding it in my hands, and yet I felt as if I had been searching through my brain and not leafing through a book!

Everything the voice had said to me I had carried within myself all my life, only it had been obscured and forgotten, had kept itself hidden from my thoughts until this day.

I looked up.

Where was the man who had brought me the book?

Gone!?

Will he return when it’s ready? Or am I to take it to him?

But I could not remember him saying where he lived.

I tried to recall his appearance, but failed.

What had he been wearing? Was he old, was he young? And what had been the colour of his hair, his beard?

Nothing, I could see nothing with my mind’s eye. Every picture I tried to conjure up disintegrated inexorably, even before it was properly fixed in my mind. I closed my eyes and pressed my hand against my lids in an attempt to catch just one tiny scrap of his portrait.

Nothing, nothing.

I stood in the middle of the room, looking at the door, just as I had been doing before, when he arrived, and pictured the scene: now he’s coming round the corner, now he’s crossing the red brick landing, now he’s reading the nameplate – Athanasius Pernath – on my door, and now he’s coming in. All to no avail. Not the faintest trace of a memory of what he looked like stirred within me.

I looked at the book lying on the table and tried to summon up in my mind the hand that went with it, that had taken it out of the pocket and handed it to me. I could not even remember whether it had a glove on or was bare, whether it was young or wrinkled, had rings on its fingers or not.

Then I had a curious idea. It was like an irresistible inspiration.

I put on my coat and hat and went out into the corridor and down the stairs, then walked slowly back to my room, slowly, very slowly, just as he had done when he came. And when I opened the door, I saw that my chamber was shrouded in dusk. Had it not been broad daylight when I went out a few seconds ago?

How long must I have stood down there, lost in thought, oblivious of the time?!

I was trying to imitate the gait and expression of the unknown man when I could not even remember them. How could I expect to imitate him if I had no clue at all as to what he looked like!

But what happened was different, completely different from what I imagined. My skin, my muscles, my body suddenly remembered, without revealing the secret to my brain. They made movements that I had not willed, had not intended.

As if my limbs no longer belonged to me!

All at once, when I took a few steps into the room, I found myself walking with a strange, faltering gait. That is the way someone walks who is constantly in fear of falling forward on to his face, I said to myself.

Yes, yes, yes! That was the way he walked!

I knew quite clearly: that is the way he is.

I was wearing an alien face, clean-shaven, with prominent cheekbones; I was looking at my room out of slanting eyes. I could sense it, even though I could not see myself.

I wanted to scream out loud that that was not my face, wanted to feel it with my hand, but my hand would not obey me; it went into my pocket and brought out a book, just as he had done earlier.

Then, suddenly, I was sitting down again at the table, without my hat and coat, and was myself, I – I, Athanasius Pernath.

I was shaking with terror, my heart was pounding fit to burst and I knew that ghostly fingers had been poking round the crevices of my brain. They had left me a moment ago, but I could still feel the chill of their touch at the back of my head.

Now I knew what the stranger was like, and I could have felt him inside me, whenever I wanted – if I had wanted. But to picture him, to see him before me, eye to eye, that I still could not do, nor will I ever be able to.

I realised that he is like a negative, an invisible mould, the lines of which I cannot grasp, but into which I must let myself slip if I want to become aware of its shape and expression.

In the drawer of the desk I kept an iron box. I decided to lock the book away in it and only take it out again when this strange mental derangement had left me. Only then would I set about repairing the broken capital I.

So I picked up the book from the table: it felt as if I had not touched it at all. I took the box in my hand – the same feeling. It was as if my sense of touch had to pass through a long tunnel of deepest darkness before it surfaced in my consciousness, as if the objects were separated from me by a seam of time a year wide and were part of a past which had long since left me.

The voice, which is circling round in the darkness, searching for me to torment me with the stone or the lump of fat, has passed me by without seeing me. I know that it comes from the realm of sleep. But everything that I have just experienced was real life, and I sense that is why it could not see me, why its search for me was vain.