The Golem Read Free Page A

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 red-head 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 eye-lashes 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