The Golem by Gustav Meyrink Read Free Book Online Page B

couldn’t feel the wind at all since I was standing in the lee of a house. A moment later they seemed to have calmed down, but then they were seized once more with an insane fury and raced all over the square in a mindless rage, crowding into a corner then scattering again as some new madness came over them, until finally they disappeared round a corner.
    There was just one thick newspaper that couldn’t keep up with the rest. It lay there on the cobbles, full of spite and flapping spasmodically, as if it were out of breath and gasping for air.
    As I watched, I was filled with an ominous foreboding. What if, after all, we living beings were nothing more than such scraps of paper? Could there not be a similar unseeable, unfathomable ‘wind’ blowing us from place to place and determining our actions, whilst we, in our simplicity, believe we are driven by our own free will? What if the life within us were nothing other than some mysterious whirlwind? The wind of which it says in the Bible, ‘Thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth’? Do we not sometimes dream we have plunged our hands into deep water and caught silvery fish, when all that has happened is that our hands have been in a cold draught?”
    “Prokop, you’re talking like Pernath. What’s wrong with you?” asked Zwakh, giving the musician a suspicious look.
    “It’s the story about the Book of Ibbur that we heard earlier – pity you came too late to hear it – that’s given him such strange ideas”, said Vrieslander.
    “A story about a book?”
    “Actually about the odd appearance of a man who brought a book. Pernath doesn’t know what he’s called, where he lives or what he wanted, and although he says his appearance was very striking, he can’t describe it.”
    Immediately Zwakh pricked up his ears. “That’s remarkable”, he said after a pause. “Did this stranger happen to be smooth-faced, without any growth of beard? Did he have slanting eyes?”
    “I think so”, I said. “That is, I … I’m quite certain of it. Do you know him?”
    The puppeteer shook his head. “It’s just that it reminded me of the Golem.”
    Vrieslander put down his knife. “Golem? I’ve heard so many people talk about that. Do you know anything about the Golem, Zwakh?”
    “Who can claim to know anything about the Golem?” replied Zwakh with a shrug of the shoulders. “Everyone says it’s a myth until one day there’s something happens in the streets that brings it back to life. Then for a while everybody talks about it, and the rumours grow and grow until they’re so blown up, so exaggerated they become completely implausible and everyone dismisses them. The origin of the story is supposed to go back to the sixteenth century. A rabbi, following instructions in a lost book of the Cabbala, is said to have created an artificial man, the so-called Golem, as a servant to help him ring the synagogue bells and do other menial tasks.”
    But it had never become a true human being, Zwakh went on. It led a kind of semi-conscious, vegetable existence, and that only by day, so it is said, through the power of a scrap of paper with a magic formula that was placed behind its teeth, attracting free stellar energy from the cosmos. And when, one evening before prayers, the rabbi forgot to take this seal out of the Golem’s mouth, it went raging through the streets in the dark, crushing everything that happened to be in its way. Finally the rabbi managed to block the creature in its path and destroy the scrap of paper. At that, the Golem sank lifeless to the ground. Nothing was left of it but the dwarf clay figure which can be seen over there in the Old-New Synagogue even today.
    “That same rabbi is supposed to have been summoned to the Emperor in the castle on the Hradschin, where he called up the spirits of the dead in visible form”, added Prokop. “Modern scientists claim he must have used a magic