We came at last into a narrow dead-end and turned off to the right between two high stone walls at the end of which a curious round arched door led to an equally curious dark passageway. My light footed guide came to a halt outside this entrance, pointed to the darkness that prevailed there and said with an apparent candour that really took the biscuit: "Just knock on that door down there."
Although I did not have the slightest inkling of where it was I ought to knock, I groped my way along the passage more by good luck than good management, till I finally stumbled on a darkened door. I knocked on it, hearing moans and groans and then a shuffling sound coming from inside. Then the door opened and I stood there rooted to the spot in terror by an unsavoury old witch screeching at me in Czech. Three more of these sorceresses were creeping up on me on crutches and they too were snarling something unintelligible at me. Totally taken aback I gazed about me in the semi-darkness of the long low room. There were six beds there and, in two of them, two terrible spectres were sitting up and staring at me like the unfortunate creatures that Gulliver encountered on his travels, those beings who were born with a black spot on their forehead and who were incapable of dying. I had the temerity to repeat my question about the Jewish cemetery even though my own misgivings warned me I had let myself be led here by the nose and that the question itself was quite inadmissible under the circumstances. I found myself, a moment later, back again in the sinister dark passage already depicted, happy to have gained my freedom without having had my eyes scratched out. Inside the room there was pandemonium. The urchin, my will-of-the-wisp, my precious Jewish sweetheart, had led me for my half-a-dozen kreuzers to a charitable hospice for six old Christian ladies instead of to the venerable Israelite to whom the key to Beth Chaim had been entrusted.
A sound of high-pitched laughter roused me from my vexed and disconcerted state. Outside in the alleyway the sun was shining and, in the sunshine at the end of the dark passage, another witch was dancing and "dere iss no creadure vairer dan a vitch van she is younk beink."
She danced in the sunshine and pulled a long face at me and I shook my fist at her threateningly: "Just you wait, you witch, you temptress, you little female devil from Prague, you!"
She, however, pointed with her finger at her mouth and called out mockingly: "Strc prst skrz krk!" These lilting syllables, noticeable for the richness of their consonant clusters, roughly translated mean something like: "Go and stick your finger down your throat!" Then the goblin disappeared and I was free to reflect on the underlying meaning of her words to my heart's content, but I chose not to and, after such an untoward experience, I decided not to ask anyone else the way to the old Jewish cemetery, but began, with Germanic thoroughness, to look for it myself. I trusted to my own lights and they did not leave me in the lurch, but brought me, in the end, by way of the dirtiest labyrinth of buildings that the human mind can imagine, to the gate that led to that awesome, oft-described domain of a thousand years of dust.
I saw there the countless tombstones piled up on top of one another and the ancient elder trees that twist and spread their gnarled old branches round and over them. I wandered down the narrow graveyard paths and saw the jugs of Levi and the hands of Cohen and the grapes of Canaan. As a mark of respect I laid, like everyone else, a small stone on the grave of the Chief Rabbi, Judah Loew ben Bezalel. Then I sat down on a grimy gravestone dating from the fourteenth century and the uncanny nature of the place impressed itself upon me with considerable force.
For a thousand years the dead of God's chosen people had been gathered here together, hemmed in in the same way that the living had been by the narrow walls of the ghetto. The sun shone brightly and it was spring and, from time to time, a cool gust of wind stirred the branches and the blossoms of the elder trees so that they brushed against the graves and filled the air with a sweet fragrance. I, on the other hand, was finding it more and more difficult to breathe. Was this really the place they called Beth Chaim, the House of Life?
From that black, damp, mouldy earth which had swallowed whole so many sorely-tried, ill-treated, put-upon and harassed generations of living beings and into which life after life had sunk as into a bottomless, all-consuming swamp—from that mildewed ground, I say, rose a pungent aroma of decomposition more suffocating than the stench that emanates from the unburied carcass of a beached whale, sufficiently funereal as an odour to cancel out completely all the sunlight and the pleasant scents exuded by both flowers and spring breezes.
I have already mentioned that I was, at that time in my life, something of a hell-raiser. The feeling, however, I was gripped by at that moment was adequate proof, even to me, of a latent, as yet underlying seriousness in my character.
My head was lolling further and further down on my chest when, suddenly, right next to me, on top of me, I heard the sound of childish, high-pitched laughter already familiar to me from my having heard it once before. This time I was startled and, looking up quickly, caught a fleeting glimpse of a delightful female form.