Elderflowers

A Recollection of the “House of Life”

by Wilhelm Raabe

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

part 4

Jemimah Loew commenced there and then to tell me the story: “She who lies buried here was called Mahalath because her limbs were slim and supple, and her feet seemed to dance when she walked. She, too, was born in the grime of poverty and darkness as I was, and in even greater poverty and even greater darkness than I, for the Jewish quarter of Prague was a much less happy place than it is today during the reign of the great and mighty empress Maria Theresa, and not even fresh air was granted to us free of charge, and every year we had to pay two hundred and eleven thousand guilders for her gracious permission to waste away here by ourselves amidst mist and darkness.

“But Mahalath’s soul was freer than that of the proudest Christian woman in Prague. She was well-read, too, and played the lute with those fine hands of hers so that she came to be called a pearl of her race like Rabbi Jehuda’s wife, Pearl. She was born in darkness and longed for the light. Many great men from all over the world have died for that. Why should a poor girl not lay down her life for it, too?

“Why are you looking at me like that, Herman? Are you also of the opinion that a girl can die only for love? Don’t go thinking it was love that killed our Mahalath, even though her heart broke in the end. Those who are of the opinion that she died because of her affair with a young count are wrong. The young count in question tried to abduct her from her father’s house by force, and Her Imperial Majesty Maria Theresa later admitted that he had had to flee abroad.

“Mahalath laughed at this young fop who had nothing more to give her than his name, his wealth, his velvet frockcoat and his plumed hat. They called her the dancer, and she died because her soul was too proud to reveal outwardly what she suffered for her people inwardly. The only place where she could see the sun was here in Beth-Chaim. She read the inscriptions on the gravestones here and learned the stories of those who lay buried under them, and her soul danced over the graves until the dead pulled her down to join them down below!”

How ominously the young girl at my side uttered that brief phrase “down below”!

“Jemimah,” I cried, clasping together my hands, not knowing what I was doing: “Jemimah, I love you!”

But she stretched out her hand at me with an admonitory gesture and stamped on the ground with her tiny foot. “That’s not true. The young lordling in his green and gold, the one with the white plumed hat, didn’t love Mahalath, either, and whoever proclaims that she died for the love of him is lying. She had something wrong with her heart, and our defunct forebears dragged her down to their level to join them. You say you love me, Herman, but, were I to begin right now this minute to sink into Hades, you wouldn’t lift a finger to pull me back!”

How penetrating was the look she gave me! It was as though her dark eyes were drawing from my heart its deepest secrets. If I had truly loved her, I would have borne that look and answered it in kind, but she was right to say I didn’t love her and, because of the high fever I was running, I averted my eyes from her and lowered them.

The last thing that I wanted was to play her false, to betray her. In befriending this poor girl, no wicked thought had as yet suggested itself to me. Then why this debilitating guilt, this feeling of remorse for which my memory was unable to account? I felt the burden of a terrible responsibility nagging at me as I timidly and almost fearfully contemplated this adorable creature in her threatening posture as her eyes flashed and her hand became a fist in desperation to defend herself against her feelings of affection for me.

“Poor Jemimah! Poor Jemimah!” I cried, and now, for the first time, our eyes met.

Gradually her looks grew less angry, and her eyes moistened and shone. Her clenched fist fell open and was placed on my arm. “Don’t be sad, my dear. It’s not your fault. You have made me very happy — dirty, ignorant, useless little thing that I am — and for that I can never thank you enough. You’re not to blame if my heart is so foolish it will one day overstep the limits God has set to keep it safe inside my breast. Feel how it’s beating. We have here in the ghetto a great lady doctor. I listened once behind the door when she and my mother were talking about me. It cannot be otherwise. My heart, when it gets too big, will be the death of me.”

“Jemimah, Jemimah, I’ll get you other, better doctors who’ll listen to your chest with a stethoscope and tell you you’re mistaken, that the old quack has made an error in her diagnosis!” I shouted. “You’ll live for a very long time and be a beautiful and gracious lady. You’ll escape from this decadent and pestilential atmosphere, from this horrible place that you’re in!”

“Where to? No, better to remain here where my ancestors have been buried since the destruction of the Temple. But you, my dear, will go back to your own country and forget me as one forgets a dream. How can you prevent a dream from coming to an end and the pale and sensible morning from waking you and telling you that it was nothing after all?

“Leave, and leave soon. Both of us are fated to. You will be an erudite and well-respected gentleman in your own land, kind and compassionate to poor and weak alike as you were kind and compassionate to me, for I, too, was poor, and I, too, was weak, and you could have done me a great deal of harm had you really wanted to. Now these elder trees are bare and I am alive, but when these old trees and bushes next spring stretch out their blossoms to each other over the graves, I shall be lying as peaceful and still under my headstone as Mahalath the dancer here, who died in the same year as the great and mighty empress, Maria Theresa. How long will you remember Jemimah Loew from the Josephsstadt when the lilacs bloom then in Prague?”

Once again I tried to be totally objective and reasonable about this silly speech, but could not, for the life of me, manage it and righteous indignation met with just as scant success. We both just stood there mutely, side by side, at the dancer’s final resting place and, just as on that first morning, when I first came to this spot, horror gripped me with its ghostly hand in broad daylight. It was as if the earth itself were heaving like a molehill, as if ghastly and skeletal hands were everywhere at once toppling back the stones and pushing leaves and grass away from each other. I stood there as if caught between mounds of rolling skulls and all that lively putrefaction reached out to me grinning and seemed to have designs on the beautiful girl at my side.

* * *

It was a thing greatly to be wondered at that the tall thin man from Danzig and the fat man from Hamburg, who were having themselves shown round Beth-Chaim at the time by Jemimah’s old relative, were signally oblivious to this freak of nature. They strolled on serenely, their hands in their trouser pockets, chinking their small change in the hollow-eyed and grinning face of each putrescent century. The presence in this place of these two men in no way frightened off the Manitou as might have been expected. They only, on the contrary, served to accentuate its menace, for it was quite unnatural that two grown men should be so blithely unaware of what was going on under their very feet and all around them.

As they came towards us. I could hear how the man from Hamburg was saying to the man from Danzig that he held the highly and unjustly renowned Jewish cemetery of Prague to be nothing more or less than a damnable swindle and a blasted old quarry and, once again, I pulled myself together, wiped the sweat from my brow and cried out: “No! No! This is lunacy! It’s the product of a sick mind! How can anyone let a stupid thing like this put the wind up them to this extent? If there wasn’t something wrong with me, I too would be walking round here every bit as calmly as those two visitors.”

“Stop trying to fight it,” said Jemimah, and, as the two strangers and her old relative drew nearer to us, she ran away from me, skipped lightly over Mahalath’s grave, doubled over and slid off through the low branches of the elder bushes, turning back once more to look at me through their foliage and called out to me, putting her finger to her mouth as was her wont: “Remember the elderflower!”

* * *

Then she disappeared, and I never saw her again. Is it not a bitter truth that every human hand is like the hand of a child that cannot hold on to anything for very long? It snatches at anything shiny or attractive or at anything expressly forbidden to it. The first it destroys out of childish curiosity while it stands before the second open-mouthed or drops it out of sheer panic.

“Just who was this Mahalath who lies here underneath this tombstone?” I asked the gatekeeper after the two northern Germans had departed.

The old man shrugged his shoulders. “Her descendants still live in the ghetto. The family is a respected one in Jewish circles and, because of that, we are loath to talk about it. In the forty years since her death, a whole host of legends have grown up about her. She had a love affair with a young man from the Kleinseite, from the Malteserplatz. For Jewish people generally, the honour of their family is paramount. In matters where the honour of a family is at stake, we are punctilious and can be very cruel. Suffice it to say that the poor creature ended her life unhappily and that the story is a sad one.”

When the old man opened up the gate to Beth-Chaim for me, he had good reason to stare at me, shaking his head. Like a drunken man, I wandered up and down that day and tried in vain to weigh my guilt and innocence against each other. In vain I did everything possible to shift the burden weighing now so heavy on my soul elsewhere or at least to make it lighter by telling myself that the words of this young girl were merely the meaningless whims and fancies of an immature mind.

Finally I staggered back to my room in Nekazalka Street, took out my medical textbooks and my slovenly and intermittent lecture notes and began, all of a tremble, with unflagging application, to con all that was written therein on the subject of the human heart, the actual physical entity itself, its functions, its well-being and its various ailments. I later wrote a book about these things, a book that medical science has deemed most useful and which has been reprinted several times. If only medical science knew what this reputation as a leading authority on heart disease has cost me in personal terms. Not only literary works are born out of personal sorrow and grief.

* * *

Proceed to part 5...

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