Elderflowers

A Recollection of the “House of Life”

by Wilhelm Raabe

Table of Contents part 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6

part 3

I had come to Prague from the fleshpots of Vienna with the firm intention of gracing the College of Doctors there, to work extremely conscientiously and to make up for lost time with renewed zeal. Nothing came of it.

It was not that I reverted to my former wild behaviour, to that lifestyle which has brought many a young medical student to the point of having to apply the noble art of healing to his own body. On the contrary, neither midnight revelry accompanied by crazy bouts of drinking, neither Melniker wine, Pilsner beer, nor slivovice had retained the attraction they had had for me formerly, and yet I was no less intoxicated for all that and used up endless quantities of Hungarian tobacco to allay the confusion of my dreams.

That little Jewish witch, Jemimah Loew, followed me everywhere: to my room on Nekazalka Street, to lectures, even as far as the dissecting room table. It was a forlorn hope for me now to study therapeutics and pathology and to slice up human corpses and the vital organs of dogs, cats, rabbits and frogs. And so, in Prague, too, I set to one side my resolution to be diligent and put it off until another later time and another university.

In my room on Nekazalka Street, I lay down on the hard settee, veiled in thick, blue, aromatic clouds of smoke and pondered the deepest and most sensible propositions ever formulated on the wonders of the human soul. I should, of course, have been quite incapable then of writing a book on how passion comes to fruition and then withers away. When I had smoked and dreamed my fill, I got up to continue my daydreaming standing, drifting away through the streets of a town which itself is like a dream.

In the Grosser Ring I could hear girls chattering away in Czech and German at the fountain and, at night, I would listen to the pious praying of the congregation in Tyn Church to their statue of the Blessed Virgin Mary. The Hungarian grenadier guards on sentry duty at the Old Town Hall were relieved by their Italian counterparts. Life’s richest tapestries shifted and changed just as in a magic lantern show.

Then, once again, I strolled up and down the Vyshehrad Hill where geese cackle and goats graze over the floors of sunken royal palaces and abnormally torn and tattered washing is hung up to dry. Once more, I placed myself under the protection of St. John Nepomuk on his famous bridge and gazed for hours at the Moldau without any justification for doing so that my rational immortal soul could make sense of.

Then I would climb through the steep streets of the Kleinseite, walk up the steps to the Hradcany Castle area and look out over the battlements to see that proud Bohemian city stretched out at my feet. Many a hot summer hour I spent in the cool and shady vestibule of St. Vitus’s Cathedral, but Jemimah Loew followed me even under the purple canopy that overhangs St John Nepomuk’s sarcophagus.

Here, in the Wenceslas Chapel, is the great door ring which the holy duke and patron saint of Prague held onto in his final agony while he was being murdered by his treacherous brother. If one kisses this ring with all due solemnity, it is useful and effectual against many kinds of evil; but oh, against the problems that were pressing down on me such a kiss would not have helped.

Moreover a good remedy for headaches is to rub off the dust from an old wooden carving near the main door and to make three signs of the cross on one’s forehead with it. I often had headaches, genuine physical ones, not just imaginary, in those strange days and was never once able to cure them by crossing myself.

The pain abated somewhat only when I rushed helter-skelter down the steps from St. Vitus’s Cathedral and the imperial castle and crossed the Charles Bridge, passing the statue of St John Nepomuk and various other statues en route to the Josephstown Jewish quarter. Only in the shadow of the old grim walls and houses of the Jewish ghetto did my head feel better, but I went on feeling feverish for all that.

* * *

I had now been friendly with the gatekeeper of the famous graveyard for a long time and no longer paid the six kreuzers which the royal and imperial authorities had fixed as his remuneration for showing around curious foreigners whenever I wished to gain access to this kingdom of the dead.

I had won early on the affection of this greybeard inasmuch as I knew how to see eye to eye with him on the intrinsic value of the history of the Jewish people, and so we wandered up and down among the graves, and many a life story and many a legend I let him tell me there. In effect, one could learn a great deal from these monuments and grey stones, which bear such a strong resemblance to those strewn about in the valley of Jehoshaphat.

Jemimah Loew was related to the gatekeeper: his granddaughter, great-granddaughter, great-niece or some such thing: the passage of time has erased from my mind the actual degree of kinship. She often came with us on our walks, sat next to us and made her own observations, often clever and appropriate ones, by way of contribution to our conversations.

Those were the days. What precious hours we spent together. There were moments that we shared in that old graveyard with its overhanging elder trees, the melancholy charm of which it would be impossible for me to describe in words. Now the air in this place was no longer unbreathable to me, and there were no more ghosts in the sunlight that penetrated through the leaves and danced on the graves. I was now on increasingly familiar terms with those grey stones.

Better even than the old man, Jemimah introduced me to them and, when the gatekeeper had fallen asleep in his armchair or had plunged too deeply into the unfathomable subtleties of the Talmud, we took good care not to disturb him. Hand in hand, we slipped away to Beth-Chaim and were a law unto ourselves during those singular summer days, which had not been so lovely for many a long year.

Yes, Beth-Chaim! This graveyard had truly become for me a “house of life.” When this young girl spelt out for me the wondrous hieroglyphics on those Hebrew headstones, the life of a person of whose very existence I had hitherto had no notion was vividly conjured up for me.

Wise, virtuous and pious men and women, noble perseverers of both sexes, handsome men and boys awoke from a slumber that had lasted centuries, and soon their shades had taken on the most lifelike of appearances. Soon I was on intimate terms with all these people from a world previously unknown to me but which, for all its differences, still had much in common with the present, and believed in them as I believed in the historical and legendary characters of my own country’s history.

Usually, we sat near the tomb of Rabbi Loew, from whom my little teacher thought herself to be descended and of whom she was very proud. She told me many things about this learned man: how he had had dealings with the Emperor Rudolf the Second and had called up for him the spirits of the patriarchs, how he had known everything there was to know about the Talmud and the Cabala, how he had employed a “golem” or servant from the spirit world, how he had courted his wife, the beautiful Pearl, daughter of Samuel, and how he had had four hundred scholars studying under him and lived to be 140 years old.

I took it all in, however, hanging on my storyteller’s each and every word more single-mindedly than any of the four hundred scholars had hung on the erstwhile words of Chief Rabbi Loew in the yeshiva of the three cells.

We did not speak of love for, strictly speaking, I suppose, I did not love this girl but was, and still am, incapable of putting any other name to the tender feelings that drew me to her. These oscillated like the moods of the girl herself, like the weather on an April day, like the light summer clouds scudding over Prague and the elderflower and lilac bushes of Beth-Chaim.

There were times when I considered that Jemimah, a direct blood descendant of Hayyim, Chief Rabbi Jehuda’s elder brother, was nothing more or less than a mischievous little guttersnipe with whom one could, agreeably enough perhaps, while away the odd quarter of an hour. At other times she struck me as a sprite, endowed and equipped with superior powers to torture mankind and, with the best will in the world, a predisposition to misuse those powers.

Then she went back to being a poor but pretty, melancholic, albeit radiant creature, half-child, half-woman, for whom one might quite easily have shed one’s blood, for whom one might have gladly died. I was fatally smitten at the time with a fever that was gradually getting worse, for the fluctuating shapes and sensations which assailed my soul then are only to be found in the fantasies of fever victims.

That was also a time when I read with great zeal and enjoyment tinged with sorrow the works of Shakespeare, so much so that I used to imagine that all that author’s heroines had come together as one in this uneducated Jewish teenager, the quarrelsome Katharina no less than the sweet-tempered Imogen, Rosalind no less than Helena, Titania, Olivia, Sylvia, Ophelia, Jessica, Portia and all the rest of them.

Jemimah Loew had never read Shakespeare, had indeed never even heard of him, and all she was able to surmise from my rambling dissertations on this writer was that I was comparing her to various pagan and Christian women, and she smiled incredulously at me and, one day, round about the middle of autumn, just as the first signs of winter were in the air, as the leaves of the elder and lilac were turning to their autumn tints just like all the other leaves, one day in mid-autumn she grabbed my hand and dragged me down a gloomy graveyard path to a cemetery wall where there was a grave that we had not so far looked at.

She read me the inscription on the headstone and stated: “That’ll be me!” The word MAHALATH had been chiselled thereon in Hebrew letters and underneath it the date: 1780.

Why did I feel so frightened? Was it not foolishness on my part to stare like a numbskull, as if the cat had got my tongue, at the girl now standing next to me?

And yet she was not laughing at me, nor was she pleased at the successful outcome of a jest. With melancholy gravity and folded arms she stood there, leaning against the headstone, and said, without so much as waiting to be asked: “Her name was Mahalath, and that’s exactly what she was: in other words, a dancer. Her heart was sick like mine, and she was the last woman to be laid to rest here in this, our Beth-Chaim, the very last.

“After that, the good emperor Joseph forbade that any more of our people should be interred in this cemetery. This woman, Mahalath, was the last of them. The good emperor Joseph also dismantled the wall of the Jewish ghetto hereabouts and gave to it his own compassionate and glorious name as a living memorial to his and to our own posterity. He it was who smashed down the walls of this prison and at long last let us breathe again in the company of other nations. May the God of Israel have mercy on his ashes.”

“But who was this Mahalath? What do you have to do with Mahalath, Jemimah?” I enjoined.

“Her heart was sick, and it broke.”

“Don’t be so silly. How can you know that about someone who was buried in the year 1780?”

“We remember our people for a long time. I know Mahalath like a sister, and I also know that her fate will be my fate, too.”

“Now you’re being ridiculous!” I shouted. But at this, Jemimah Loew suddenly put her hand over her heart and her face twitched with pain as if she were suffering some great physical discomfort.

Once more I was violently assailed by fear, and when she took my hand and placed it on her bosom, my fear increased.

“Can you hear how it beats and throbs, Herman? It’s my death knell ringing for my funeral. You call yourself a great doctor and you haven’t even noticed it?”

She spoke these last words with such a charming smile on her face that the idea of her early demise seemed all the more shocking to me. I seized both her hands in mine and shouted at her angrily: “To joke about such things is madness! In the ordinary way I make allowances for you, but such words go too far, even for you!”

“No joke was intended,” she replied. “Do you want me to tell you Mahalath’s story?”

I could only nod my head, prey to an endless malaise of gloom and foreboding.

* * *

Proceed to part 4...

Copyright © 1863 by Wilhelm Raabe
Translation copyright © 2023 by Michael E. Wooff

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