We searched for a sheltered corner where we might, to some extent, find refuge from the fury of the storm and could only find it 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 woken, 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's always been 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 get 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 only able to live here, 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! Elder flowers 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 the Josephstown, and that is why the elderflower, which to everybody else gives so much pleasure, is, for me, the flower of death and judgement.
I fled but I 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.