"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.