The Golem Read Online Free PDF Page A

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 cheek-bones; 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