The Golem (29 page)

Would he know what had happened?

Finally he opened his eyes, met my gaze and looked aside. I immediately went over to him and took his hand. “You must excuse me, Herr Laponder, for my unfriendly behaviour, but I’m not accustomed –”

“Oh please, my dear sir, you may rest assured that I understand completely”, he interrupted. “It must be an awful feeling to have to be shut up with a murderer and rapist.”

“Say no more about it”, I begged him. “Last night I turned the whole matter over in my mind, and I can’t help thinking that perhaps you …”

He spoke the thought that was in my mind, “You think I am ill.”

I agreed. “There were certain signs that led me to that conclusion. I … I … may I ask you a rather direct question, Herr Laponder?”

“Please do.”

“It may sound rather strange, but … would you tell me what dreams you had last night?”

With a smile he shook his head. “I never dream.”

“But you were talking in your sleep.”

He looked up in surprise, thought for a while and then said firmly, “That could only be if you had asked me a question.” I admitted I had. He paused, then repeated, “As I said, I never dream”, adding, almost under his breath, “I … I roam.”

“You roam? What exactly does that mean?”

He seemed somewhat unwilling to speak, so I decided it would be best to tell him what had led me to question him, and I gave him a summary of what had happened during the night.

When I had finished, he said solemnly, “The one thing you can be sure of is that everything I said in my sleep is based on truth. When I said just now that I did not dream, but ‘roamed’, I meant that my dream-life was different from that of, shall we say, normal people. If you like, you can call it leaving the body behind. Last night, for example, I was in the strangest room which you entered from below, through a trapdoor.”

“What did it look like?” I interpolated quickly. “Was there no one there? Was it empty?”

“No, there was furniture in it, though not much. And a bed in which a young girl was asleep – or in some state of suspended animation – and a man was sitting beside her with his hand over her forehead.” Laponder described their faces. There was no doubt about it, it was Hillel and Miriam. I could hardly breathe with suspense.

“Please go on. Was there anyone else in the room?”

“Anyone else? Just a moment … no, there was no one else in the room. There was a seven-branched candelabra on the table … Then I went down a spiral staircase.”

“It was broken?” I broke in.

“Broken? No, no, it was in good repair. There was a room leading off on one side, and in it there was a man sitting with silver buckles on his shoes. He looked very foreign, a type that I have never seen before, with a yellow complexion and slanting eyes. He was leaning forward and seemed to be waiting for something. For instructions, perhaps.”

“A book, a big, old book? You didn’t see anything like that anywhere?” I asked.

He rubbed his forehead. “A book, you say? Yes, that’s right. There was a book on the floor. It was made of parchment. It was open and the page began with a large letter ‘A’ painted in gold.”

“Don’t you mean with an ‘I’?”

“No, with an ‘A’.”

“Are you sure of that? Wasn’t it an ‘I’?”

“No, it was definitely an ‘A’.”

I shook my head and began to have my doubts. It was clear that in his trance Laponder had read what was in my mind, but had confused everything: Hillel, Miriam, the Golem, the
Book of Ibbur
and the subterranean passage.

“Have you had this gift of being able to ‘roam’, as you call it, for long?” I asked.

“Since I was twenty-one –” he broke off and seemed unwilling to talk about it. Then an expression of utter astonishment spread across his face and he stared at my chest as if he could see something there. Ignoring my puzzlement, he hastily grasped my hand and begged me, almost pleading, “For heaven’s sake, tell me
everything
. Today is the last day I can spend with you. They’ll be coming to fetch me soon, within the hour perhaps, to hear the death sentence read –”

Appalled, I interrupted him. “Then you must take me with you as a witness! I will testify that you are ill. You are a somnambulist, a sleep-walker. They mustn’t be allowed to execute you without a psychiatrist’s report. You must see that?!”

In some agitation he waved away my objections. “That’s all so irrelevant. Please, tell me everything.”

“But what is there to tell you? Let’s talk about
you
instead and –”

“I realise now that you must have had certain strange experiences that concern me closely, more closely than you can ever imagine; please, I beg you, tell me everything!” he pleaded.

I could not understand why my life should interest him more than his own affairs which, at the moment were, in all truth, urgent enough, but to calm him down I told him all the incomprehensible things that had happened to me. After each incident, he nodded with a satisfied air, like a person who has seen to the bottom of some matter.

When I came to the part where the headless apparition had stood, holding out the red beans with black spots towards me, he could hardly wait for me to finish.

“So you knocked them out of his hand”, he muttered reflectively. “I never thought there could be a
third
‘path’.”

“That wasn’t a third path”, I said. “It was the same as if I had rejected the seeds.”

He smiled.

“You don’t think so, Herr Laponder?”

“If you had rejected them, you would presumably also have followed the ‘Path of Life’, but the seeds, which represent magic powers, would not have remained behind. As it is, they rolled onto the ground, you said. That means that they have remained here and will be guarded by your ancestors until the time of germination comes. Then the powers, which at the moment slumber within them, will come to life.”

I didn’t follow. “The seeds will be guarded by my ancestors?”

“To a certain extent you have to understand your experiences symbolically”, explained Laponder. “The circle of blue luminous beings around you was the chain of inherited ‘selves’ which all those born of woman carry with them. The soul is not a single unity; that is what it is destined to become, and that is what we call ‘immortality’. Your soul is still composed of many ‘selves’, just as a colony of ants is composed of many single ants. You bear within you the spiritual remains of many thousand ancestors, the heads of your line. It is the same with all creatures. How could a chicken that is artificially hatched in an incubator immediately look for the right food, if the experience of millions of years were not stored inside it? The existence of ‘instinct’ indicates the presence of our ancestors in our bodies and in our souls. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to interrupt you.”

I finished my account. I told him everything, even the things Miriam had said about the ‘hermaphrodite’. When I stopped and looked up, I noticed that Laponder had turned as white as a sheet and that the tears were running down his face. Quickly I stood up and pretended I hadn’t noticed, walking up and down in the cell until he was calm again. Then I sat down opposite him and summoned up all my persuasive powers to try and convince him how important it was to inform his judges of his psychological condition.

“If only you hadn’t confessed to the murder!” were my final words.

“But I had to! They asked me on my honour”, he said naively.

Somewhat puzzled, I asked, “Do you think a lie is worse than … than rape and murder?”

“As a general principle probably not, but in my case yes, definitely. You see, when the examining magistrate asked me if I admitted the crime, I had the strength to tell the truth. That is, it was in my power to lie or not to lie. When I committed the rape and the murder I had
no
choice. Even though I was fully aware of what I was doing, I
still had no choice
. There was something inside me, the presence of which I had until then never suspected, that woke up and was stronger than I. Do you imagine I would have murdered someone if I had had the choice? I have never killed anything, not even the smallest animal; now I would be absolutely incapable of doing so.

Just assume for the moment it was the law that you had to murder people, and not to do so would incur the death penalty, as is the case in wartime; at this very moment I would deserve to be condemned to death. I just could not commit a murder. When I committed my crime, it was the other way round.”

“But all the more, now that you feel you are a different person, you should do everything in your power to avoid the sentence”, I objected, but Laponder waved my argument away. “That is where you are wrong! From their point of view the judges’ decision was quite correct. Should they let someone like me to go around free? To commit another crime tomorrow or the day after?”

“No. But they should intern you in a hospital for the mentally ill, that’s what I am saying!”

“If I were mad, then you would be right”, replied Laponder, unconcerned. “But I’m not mad. I am something quite different, something that might look very much like madness, but is, in fact, the opposite. Listen to me, please, and you will understand at once. You remember you told me about the apparition of the headless phantom – which is, of course, a symbol, you can easily find the key if you think about it. Well, it appeared to me as well. Only I
took
the seeds! That means I am following the ‘Path of Death’. For me, the most sacred thing imaginable is to allow my steps to be guided by the spirit within me, blindly, wholly trusting in it wherever the path may lead, to poverty or riches, to the gallows or a throne. I have never hesitated when the choice was mine.

That is why I did not lie, when the choice was mine.

Do you know the words of the Prophet Micah, ‘He hath shewed thee, O man, what is good; and what the Lord doth require of thee’?

If I had lied, I would have created an ultimate cause, because I had the choice. When I committed the murder, I did not create a cause. It was merely the
effect
of a cause that had long been slumbering within me, and over which I had no control, that was released.

That is why my hands are clean.

By making me into a murderer, the spirit within me has carried out an execution on me; by stringing me up on the gallows, men will detach my fate from theirs: I will reach freedom.”

This man is a saint, I thought to myself, and my hair stood on end as I shuddered at my own insignificance.

“You told me that a doctor used hypnotism to treat you, with the result that for a long time you lost the memory of your childhood and youth”, he continued. “That is the characteristic – the stigma – of all those who have been ‘bitten by the snake of the spiritual realm’. It seems almost as if, inside us, one life has to be grafted onto another, as a scion is grafted onto a wild tree, before the
miracle of awakening
can occur. The separation that usually comes with death is in our case achieved by erasing the memory, sometimes just by a sudden spiritual about-turn.

In my case, there was no obvious external cause. I just woke up one morning in my twenty-first year a different person. All at once I was completely indifferent to everything that I had cared for until then. Life seemed nothing more than a silly story of cowboys and indians and lost its reality; dreams became absolute certainty – and I mean
true
and demonstrable certainty – and everyday life became a dream.

Everyone could do that if they had the key. And that key lies solely in becoming aware, while asleep, of the ‘form’ of one’s ‘self’ – of one’s
skin
, so to speak – and finding the narrow slit through which our consciousness slips between wakefulness and deep sleep. That is why I said ‘I roam’, and not ‘I dream’.

The struggle for immortality is a battle for the sceptre against the ghosts and sounds within us, and waiting for our own self to be crowned king is waiting for the Messiah.

The spectral
Habal Garmin
which you saw, the ‘Breath of the Bones’ of the Cabbala, that was the king. At the moment when he is crowned, the thread, by which you are bound to the world through your physical senses and your reason, will tear apart.

You will ask how it could happen that I, in spite of my detachment from the world, could turn into a rapist and murderer over night? Human beings are like glass tubes with coloured balls running along them. In most cases there is only one ball during a whole lifetime: if the ball is red, then the person is ‘bad’; if it is yellow, the person is ‘good’. If there are two, one red and one yellow, then ‘one’ has an ‘unstable character’. We who have been ‘bitten by the snake’ go through as much in one lifetime as the whole of mankind goes through in an epoch. The red and yellow balls shoot along the glass tube one after the other, and when they are finished, then we will have become prophets, will be the mirrors of God.”

Laponder was silent. For a long time I found it impossible to say a word. I was dazed from what he had told me.

“Why were you so concerned to ask me about
my
experiences, when you are so far above me?” I asked eventually.

“You are wrong”, said Laponder. “I am far
below
you. I asked you because I felt you were in possession of the one key I still lacked.”

“Me? In possession of a key? Good God!”

“Yes,
you
. And you gave it to me. I don’t think there can be a happier man on earth than I am today.”

Outside there was the noise of the bars being pulled back; Laponder paid no attention to it.

“What you said about the hermaphrodite, that was the key. Now I possess certainty. That is why I am glad that they are coming for me, for soon I will reach my goal.”

I could not see Laponder’s face for tears, but I could
hear
the smile in his voice. “And now, farewell, Herr Pernath, and remember: what they will hang tomorrow is only my outer garments. It is you who have revealed to me the ultimate beauty; now the mystical marriage can take place.” He stood up and followed the gaoler. “It is connected with the rape and murder”, were the last words I heard, though I could only dimly understand them.