I had now been friendly with the gatekeeper of the famous graveyard for a long time and no longer paid the six kreuzers which the royal and imperial authorities had fixed as his remuneration for showing round curious foreigners whenever I wished to gain access to this kingdom of the dead.
I had won early on the affection of this greybeard inasmuch as I knew how to see eye to eye with him on the intrinsic value of the history of the Jewish people and so we wandered up and down among the graves and many a life story and many a legend I let him tell me there. In effect, one could learn a great deal from these monuments and grey stones which bear such a strong resemblance to those strewn about in the valley of Jehoshaphat.
Jemimah Loew was related to the gatekeeper, his granddaughter, great-granddaughter, great-niece or some such thing: the passage of time has erased from my mind the actual degree of kinship. She often came with us on our walks, sat next to us and made her own observations, often clever and appropriate ones, by way of contribution to our conversations.
Those were the days. What precious hours we spent together. There were moments that we shared in that old graveyard with its overhanging elder trees, the melancholy charm of which it would be impossible for me to describe in words. Now the air in this place was no longer unbreathable to me and there were no more ghosts in the sunlight that penetrated through the leaves and danced on the graves. I was now on increasingly familiar terms with those grey stones. Better even than the old man Jemimah introduced me to them and when the gatekeeper had fallen asleep in his armchair or had plunged too deeply into the unfathomable subtleties of the Talmud, we took good care not to disturb him. Hand in hand we slipped away to Beth-Chaim and were a law unto ourselves during those singular summer days which had not been so lovely for many a long year.
Yes, Beth-Chaim! This graveyard had truly become for me a "house of life". When this young girl spelt out for me the wondrous hieroglyphics on those Hebrew headstones, the life of a person of whose very existence I had hitherto had no notion was vividly conjured up for me. Wise, virtuous and pious men and women, noble perseverers of both sexes, handsome men and boys awoke from a slumber that had lasted centuries and soon their shades had taken on the most lifelike of appearances. Soon I was on intimate terms with all these people from a world previously unknown to me which, for all its differences, still had much in common with the present, and believed in them as I believed in the historical and legendary characters of my own country's history.
Usually we sat near the tomb of Rabbi Loew, from whom my little teacher thought herself to be descended and of whom she was very proud. She told me many things about this learned man: how he had had dealings with the Emperor Rudolf the Second and had called up for him the spirits of the patriarchs, how he had known everything there was to know about the Talmud and the Cabbala, how he had employed a 'golem' or servant from the spirit world, how he had courted his wife, the beautiful Pearl, daughter of Samuel, and how he had had 400 scholars studying under him and lived to be 140 years old.
I took it all in, however, hanging on my storyteller's each and every word more single-mindedly than any of the 400 scholars had hung on the erstwhile words of Chief Rabbi Loew in the yeshiva of the three cells.
We did not speak of love for, strictly speaking, I suppose, I did not love this girl, but was, and still am, incapable of putting any other name to the tender feelings that drew me to her. These oscillated like the moods of the girl herself, like the weather on an April day, like the light summer clouds scudding over Prague and the elderflower and lilac bushes of Beth-Chaim.
There were times when I considered that Jemimah, a direct blood descendant of Hayyim, Chief Rabbi Jehuda's elder brother, was nothing more or less than a mischievous little guttersnipe with whom one could, agreeably enough perhaps, while away the odd quarter of an hour. At other times she struck me as a sprite, endowed and equipped with superior powers to torture mankind and, with the best will in the world, a predisposition to misuse those powers. Then she went back to being a poor but pretty, melancholic, albeit radiant creature, half child, half woman, for whom one might quite easily have shed one's blood, for whom one might have gladly died. I was fatally smitten at the time with a fever that was gradually getting worse, for the fluctuating shapes and sensations which assailed my soul then are only to be found in the fantasies of fever victims.
That was also a time when I read with great zeal and enjoyment tinged with sorrow the works of Shakespeare, so much so that I used to imagine that all that author's heroines had come together as one in this uneducated Jewish teenager, the quarrelsome Katharina no less than the sweet-tempered Imogen, Rosalind no less than Helena, Titania, Olivia, Sylvia, Ophelia, Jessica, Portia and all the rest of them.