Elderflowers

A Recollection of the “House of Life”

by Wilhelm Raabe

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

part 5

It was very sultry that day. Heavy white clouds came rolling up over the rooftops and congregated there in threatening, leaden grey cloudbanks. In spite of the fact that there was hardly a breath of air anywhere, I was driven from my room yet again, down into the hot and sticky streets. As the first clap of thunder reverberated sonorously, making windows in the town vibrate in their frames, I pulled on the rickety bell of the gatekeeper’s house at the entrance to the old Jewish cemetery.

Instead of the long-bearded, venerable head of the ancient, there appeared at the grille the wrinkled sallow face of the gatekeeper’s old female servant.

“Where is your master? I must speak to him at once.”

“God in heaven, young man. You look awful. Whatever’s happened? Why have you come back again so soon? What spell is it that binds you to this place?”

Without so much as bothering to answer her questions, I pushed my way past the old chatterbox. On over the dark, now, in the thunderstorm, frightening, appallingly dark, paths of the cemetery I hurried, and, on reaching the grave of the Chief Rabbi, found there the old man, unperturbed by the ever more powerful outbreaks of the storm.

Whoever has not seen the place where I now was at a time like the one I am describing knows nothing whatsoever about it. There is no other place in the whole of the world where the advent of doomsday will be awaited with greater trepidation. The sky will then, as now, become “as black as sackcloth,” the lightning will flash, the thunder crack, and people will bow their heads in fear and trembling.

How those old elder bushes writhe as they resist the storm’s ravages. They shriek and groan like living beings at the end of their tether. Not like other trees and bushes do they rustle in the rain. The earth laps up the constant streams of water trickling down the topsy-turvy gravestones with a grateful and uncanny gurgle. Today is the day of the Lord; today is truly a “destruction from the Almighty.”

We searched for a sheltered corner where we might, to some extent, find refuge from the fury of the storm and could find it only in the part of the cemetery where Mahalath was buried. There I spoke to the old man and told him everything without holding anything back. I told him the story of my friendship with Jemimah right from the beginning. As clearly and distinctly as I could, I told him of our meetings with each other. I would have willingly accounted for each hour and every minute we had spent together.

He let me speak without once interrupting me. When I came to the end of my story, having, by then, run out of breath, he stroked my hair and forehead with his hard and bony hand.

“Your heart is a good one, my son, and I am as glad for your sake as I am for Jemimah’s that you have spoken to me as you have. It is a fine thing for a conscience to be easy to arouse and for it not to need to hear, in order to be awakened, the clarion calls of an avenging angel. I am grateful to you for coming here like this to pour out your heart to me. You need not fear that I will reproach you with angry words. Whoever walks among these stones, whoever breathes the air in this place, learns to look with tolerance on both the deeds and misdeeds of his fellow men. There are worse things you could have told me and I, in my turn, could have shown you graves here under which even more terrible secrets lie buried or to which rumours of such secrets have attached themselves.

“Thank God that you do not belong to the ranks of the wicked who, after causing irreparable harm, laugh and scoff and earn great notoriety because of it. You have only been frivolous and thoughtless. What yesterday was still a game is now in deadly earnest. A spark can grow into a flame before we realise it, and then we beat it down as anxiously and urgently as we can but find ourselves unable to extinguish it.

“Poor, wee Jemimah! She was always a square peg in a round hole, even when she was younger. I should never have allowed her to turn this terrible garden of mine into her playground. Why did I need, old fool that I am, to keep her by my side through so many summer days just to tell her the stories of these headstones the way other children are told fairy tales about pixies and dwarves? Woe is me, for whose fault is it, if it is so?

“But such things cannot be. Half of her hasn’t grown up yet, and we can still make amends for our sins of omission. What does she have to do with the dead anyway? Just because I was able to live here only within these walls, I shut her young soul up in here with me and, in doing so, kept her safe from all the dirt outside in the street, but it meant that only here did she see the light of day and the flowers that bloom in the spring. A sun that shines on corpses! Elderflowers growing on graves! But she’ll never set foot here again. She’ll leave and see life as other children do. She won’t die, will she? Because of us? Because of me?”

I could not answer him. A red flash of lightning broke over our heads and, once again, a thunderbolt came crashing in its wake.

“You, too, my boy, should never set foot here again,” the old man went on. “It won’t do you any good, either! You, too, are too young to breathe the air here. If you’re still in Prague tomorrow, curse your luck and depart immediately. That’s my advice!”

“You want to separate me from her? Now you want to separate me from her?” I shouted. “That’s no good. That won’t help to cure her. You too, old man, are ignorant of the ways of the living. For the love of God, do not separate me from her. What good can it do to drive me away from her now?”

“We have no choice,” said the old man, now more himself again. “You are no less sick than the girl herself. Healing lies in separation for the one as for the other.”

I had no weapons against that cruel old man. He threatened, he cajoled, and I finally gave in to him, even though I knew that it was not a good thing to do, and so I killed my poor Jemimah from Josephstown, and that is why the elderflower, which to everybody else gives so much pleasure, is, for me, the flower of death and judgment.

I fled but could not flee from myself. I shut my ears in order not to hear the plaintive voice that called me back to Prague yet could not help but hear it day and night.

* * *

The following winter I studied in Berlin and, what at first sight must appear unlikely, genuinely studied. I doubt that the pursuit of any branch of learning save the study of mankind’s afflictions and infirmities would have been possible for me from that moment on. Such study had, of necessity, to agree with me and with masochistic pleasure I gave myself up to it completely and managed to derive therefrom a certain peace of mind.

Afterwards, they told me it had been a long, hard winter; I was scarcely aware of the snow and the blizzards and the frost. Only with the renewed onset of spring did I awake from this wretched condition, but it was no healthy awakening, more of a sudden jolt forward impelled by the touch of a cold and ghostly hand.

When I finally scrambled, shocked and shaken, to my feet, I saw that there was nobody there.

It happened on the ninth day of May 1820, a Sunday. I was sitting in a park near the Schoenhaus Gate without quite knowing how I came to be there. All around me the springtime clientele of an outdoor cafe were enjoying themselves. Children played, old people chattered, loving couples communicated in a language all their own through looks or through whispers. I sat alone at my table gazing dreamily at my glass and felt as cold as ice. How happy I had been in former times to be surrounded by such joyful goings-on and how little I cared for such things now.

Not far from the half-hidden place where I was sitting, a girl began to laugh, a high-pitched, hearty, long guffaw. I was back in the old Jewish graveyard in Prague, the sun was shining through the elder trees and there, behind the tomb of Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel, my lovely Jemimah was making fun of me, and her pretty face and body seemed to hover in mid-air over a moss-covered headstone. When I looked up, of course, the mirage had vanished. I asked the waiter to tell me what day it was and repeated the date to myself in amazement when he told me.

Now, for the first time, I stood up and looked around me. The trees were all either green or covered in blossoms. The air was warm. The sky was clear. Winter had changed into spring without my noticing. To many people, such things are beautiful, and many poets, for instance, have told of them with rapture. That strong feeling of consternation that takes one by surprise when one wakes up in this way is a good and profitable source of inspiration for a poem. This unperceived passing of time is, in my book, however, one of the least palatable things that one has, from time to time, to reflect on in life.

The elder trees, too, were in flower above me, all around me. The newly opened buds were already coming into blossom, robed in white and ruddy raiment, and the blossoms were being slightly, ever so slightly, agitated by a moving of the wind amid the bright green leaves.

The following day I was on my way to Prague, having fought hard but fruitlessly against the voice that was calling me back there.

* * *

I travelled night and day, but as there were no steam trains then, those trains that seem to us nowadays to creep along so slowly that their speed defies description, it was only during the afternoon of the fifteenth day of May that I finally reached the town that I was so afraid of reaching and already, in the distance, a collective chiming of festive church bells heralded the turmoil in which I was shortly to find myself.

The following day was the feast day of that great patron saint of Bohemia, St John Nepomuk, and whole villages were walking in procession with crosses, banners, censers and holy pictures, singing ancient hymns all in praise of the poor father confessor of Queen Joan, all on their way to the centre of Prague as I was.

The old grey town itself was virtually unrecognizable. All the houses were adorned, including their gable ends, with greenery, floral tributes and carpets. Everywhere preparations were underway for candlelight processions. The streets and squares of the town were practically impassable and, like a swimmer caught by a strong undertow, one had to fight against the forward movement of the crowd in order not to lose one’s direction.

After a great deal of effort, I finally obtained accommodation at the Golden Goose in the Horse Market, subsequently known as Wenceslas Square.

The room assigned to me in this hostinec was not notable for its spaciousness and even less so for its view. Its one and only window overlooked a long courtyard hemmed in on all sides by tall buildings and balconies. A terrible tangle of carts and wagons pressing in on one another had arisen despite which room was still being found for plush and fashionable carriages of the latest design, only just now rolling up, from whence issued a constant stream of late arrivals decked out in the most bizarre and colourful of costumes.

Coachmen and stable boys were swearing like troopers in Czech and German. Women and children were screeching and howling in every key conceivable. Peasants, town folk and the military endeavoured to make it easier for the ladies to step out of the carriages or, as sometimes happened in certain cases, more difficult.

Directly opposite my window, a tailor had just put the finishing touches to a high-days-and-holidays pair of trousers, for which an anxious customer was no doubt waiting, and was now blowing on a hunting horn his own good-natured proclamation of seasonal merriment out of his own window. Just at that moment, all the bells in Prague started once again to ring out in harmony, and I leaned against the frame of my upstairs window in more of a daze than ever.

I was just about to close it so as not to succumb to the strong smell of sweat exuded by the crowd when my eye beheld a shape the sight of which brought me to my senses immediately.

In a circle of laughing Bohemians and Germans stood a Jewish pedlar with a bundle of brightly coloured kerchiefs and ribbons, which he was offering for sale to the women and girls alighting from the carriages. I recognized the man right away: it was Baruch Loew, Jemimah’s father, and one minute later I was standing in front of him and holding his arm in a vise-like grip.

“Is it still going? Is it still going strong? It hasn’t packed up yet? You haven’t buried it like Mahalath’s, have you?”

“What the devil!” cried the street hawker, taken aback by being accosted so crazily. “What’s up?”

Then he knew me and, naturally enough, thought only of the watch I had once left in hock at his house and had never been back to reclaim. He looked me in the face with an apologetic smile. “Blow me down with a feather if it isn’t that handsome clever clog of a medical student. Well, this is a surprise and no mistake. Why shouldn’t it still be going strong then? It keeps time to the minute even now, but I’m sorry to say I don’t have it any more. What can I do for you apart from that?”

I pushed the man out of the courtyard of the Golden Goose into the site of the old horse fair. There I repeated my question to him, mentioning his daughter by name, and now his face altered so dramatically, and he looked at me so stunned and stony-faced and crestfallen that there was no need to wait for his answer. A procession that was even then making its way over that very spot separated us from each other and I apathetically allowed myself to be shoved, dragged along and borne away by the crowd.

* * *

Proceed to part 6...

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