Wilhelm Raabe

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ That little Jewish witch, Jemimah Loew, followed me everywhere: to my room in Nekazalka Street, to lectures, even as far as the dissecting room table. It was a forlorn hope for me now to study therapeutics and pathology and to slice up human corpses and the vital organs of dogs, cats, rabbits and frogs. And so, in Prague too, I set to one side my resolution to be diligent and put it off until another later time and another university. ”

“ Then I would climb through the steep streets of the Kleinseite, walk up the steps to the Hradcany Castle area and look out over the battlements to see that proud Bohemian city stretched out at my feet. Many a hot summer hour I spent in the cool and shady vestibule of St Vitus's Cathedral but Jemimah Loew followed me even under the purple canopy that overhangs St John Nepomuk's sarcophagus. Here, in the Wenceslas Chapel, is the great door ring which the holy duke and patron saint of Prague held on to in his final agony while he was being murdered by his treacherous brother. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Those who are of the opinion that she died because of her affair with a young count are wrong. The young count in question tried to abduct her from her father's house by force and Her Imperial Majesty Maria Theresa later admitted that he had had to flee abroad. Mahalath laughed at this young fop who had nothing more to give her than his name, his wealth, his velvet frockcoat and his plumed hat. They called her the dancer and she died because her soul was too proud to reveal outwardly what she suffered for her people inwardly. The only place where she could see the sun was here in Beth-Chaim. ”

“ 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 only find it in the part of the cemetery where Mahalath was buried. ”

“ 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. ”

“ She was beautiful when she died, truly beautiful. I could only keep her hostage here and so the God of the Living took her from me to be with Him forever in the real 'House of Life'. May His name be ever glorified!"
What answer I made to the old man's words I no longer know. "Remember the elderflower!" she had said and how I did remember it throughout my life I have just related. Her grave was not to be found in the old Jewish cemetery in Josephstown for the good emperor Joseph had forbidden any further burials to take place there. Mahalath's had been the last. ”

“ The sun was dancing still over the ballroom favour in my hand and the solitary hair, which its beautiful wearer had left behind between the white and now reddish blossoms, glowed like a thread of spun gold. I remembered the old city of Prague with its one hundred towers and another fair maiden whose hair though had been black and I remembered other elderflowers. Prague! A town of lunacy and gaiety! A town of martyrs and musicians and beautiful women! Prague! ”

“ In my room in Nekazalka Street I lay down on the hard settee, veiled in thick, blue, aromatic clouds of smoke and pondered the deepest and most sensible propositions ever formulated on the wonders of the human soul. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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! ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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!" ”

“ Many a wreath is destroyed before completion and many a proud garland, having adorned the head of some elevated personage, eventually falls into the hands of a total stranger who, while holding it, examines it and tears it apart leaf by leaf as an austere winter sun, ill-disposed to all borrowed plumes and tinsel, looks on impassively. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Many great men from all over the world have died for that. Why should a poor girl not lay down her life for it too? Why are you looking at me like that, Herman? Are you also of the opinion that a girl can only die for love? Don't go thinking it was love that killed our Mahalath even though her heart broke in the end. ”

“ They say that when a Czech mother has given birth to a child, she lays it on the roof: if it stays there it is destined to become a thief, if it rolls off it is destined to be a musician. If the foregoing aphorism had come out of a German head, Bohemians would probably have had a lot to say about it, but, as it is a pan-Slavic dictum, we must take it as it is, at face value. In the old and fabulous city of Prague, when I was studying medicine there, such a child existed, the offspring of a Bohemian mother who was also Jewish. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ I cannot complain of my heart and my nerves as they are robust and have often held out when other people's, not without good reason, would have failed. We doctors become, as it were, both inwardly and outwardly thick-skinned, and, as we become immune to epidemic viruses, so nothing can prevent us from assuming roles as loyal and imperturbable counsellors to unadulterated grief and inarticulate despair. ”

“ Over here was a piano with the lid up and, in front of it, a piano-stool the seat of which had been embroidered. A songbook lay open on the music holder. Everything in that room pointed to the fact that a woman and, moreover, a young woman, lived there or rather had lived there. Everything bore the hallmark of a single young lady's delicacy; a married woman or an old maid would not have had the same taste in interior design. ”

“ 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. ”

“ I had been flung out into the world to fend for myself quite early on in life and had lived as an orphan, heir to a not inconsiderable fortune, in the house of a relative who was also a bilious hypochondriac carrying morbid thoughts of death even into the most cheerful of days and binding me with iron fetters to my daily chores and then to unremitting study. ”

“ Her wiry form sprang forthwith down three dirty steps, sailed past me without even turning round and started to lead me in a veritable zigzag through the most abominable nooks and crannies, back streets and alleyways in which offers came from all directions with a view to purchasing my old black German velvet frock-coat. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Unless she was lying like a leprechaun this neglected and yet utterly charming being did not entirely inhabit the ethereal realm of Make-Believe and was not a daughter of Oberon and Titania but the progeny instead of very down-to-earth parents who were dealers in old clothes and general household requisites in the Josephstown area of Prague. I also learned the number of the house where she lived and her name, Jemimah, like the daughter of Job, that splendid fellow who hailed from the land of Uz, and Jemimah means 'day'. ”