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eyebrows, his wide mouth, and his large dark eyes, he looked so droll and yet so desperate that Marx put down the music sheet with something like a frown. Then Solomon Weil took out from a pile of sheets another photograph of Leno beside a song entitled “Isabella with the Loose Umbrella” in which he was dressed as “Sister Anne” in
Bluebeard
. “He is what they call a screamer,” Weil explained as he placed the sheet neatly back in its place within the pile.
    “Yes. I might well scream. It is the
Shekhina
.”
    “Do you believe so? No. It is not the shadow female. It is male and female joined. It is Adam Kadmon. The Universal Man.”
    “I see there is no end to your wisdom, Solomon, if you can make a cabbala out of the music hall. No doubt the gas lamps in the gallery become the
Sephiroth
of your vision.”
    “But don’t you understand why they love it so? For them it is so sacred that they talk of the gods and of the pit. I even discovered, quite by chance, that many of these halls and little theaters were once chapels and churches. You were the one who talked of hidden connections, after all.” So Karl Marx and Solomon Weil continued their conversation into the night and, while Jane Quig was being mutilated, the scholars discussed what Weilcalled the material envelope of the world. “It can assume whatever shape we please to give it. In that respect it resembles the golem. You know of the golem?”
    “I have a vague recollection of the old tales, but it has been so long …”
    Already Solomon Weil had gone over to his bookcase and taken down a copy of Hartlib’s
Knowledge of Sacred Things
. “Our ancestors thought of the golem as an homunculus, a material being created by magic, a piece of red clay brought to life in the sorcerer’s laboratory. It is a fearful thing and, according to the ancient legend, it sustains its life by ingesting the spirit or soul of a human being.” He opened a page to the description of this creature, beside a large engraving of a doll or puppet with holes for the eyes and for the mouth. He brought it over to Marx, and then resumed his seat. “Of course we do not have to believe in golems literally. Surely not. That is why I read it in an allegorical sense, with the golem as an emblem of the
Klippoth
and a shell of degraded matter. But then what do we do? We give it life in our own image. We breathe our own spirit into its shape. And that, don’t you see, is what the visible world must be—a golem of giant size? Do you know Herbert, the cloakroom attendant at the Museum?”
    “Of course I know him.”
    “Herbert is not a man of any great imagination. I think you would agree with me there?”
    “Only in the expectation of tips.”
    “He really only understands coats and umbrellas. But the other day our friend told me a curious story. One afternoon he was walking with his wife down Southwark High Street—taking his constitutional, as he put it—when they passed the old almshouses set back from the road there. Now Herbert and his wife happened to glance that way, when both of them glimpsed—justfor a moment, you understand—a hooded figure bent over towards the ground. And then it was gone.”
    “And what are you going to tell me about Herbert’s story?”
    “The figure was there. They did not imagine it. They could not have imagined anything so appropriate to a medieval dwelling.”
    “So you, Solomon Weil, are telling me that it was a ghost?”
    “Not at all. You and I do not believe in ghosts any more than we believe in golems. It was more interesting than that.”
    “Now you are engaging in paradox, like a good Hebrew scholar.”
    “The world itself took that form for a moment because it was expected of it. It created that figure in the same way that it creates stars for us—and trees, and stones. It knows what we need, or expect, or dream of, and then it creates such things for us. Do you understand me?”
    “No. I do not.” The fog had begun to