No no, they told the authorities who questioned them. No no, not magic, no none of that. Just ordinary stage tricks, sleight of hand, Jahrmarktsgaukelei. The Ass stood meekly silent before the tribunal as one of the company showed how the trick was done, ventriloquia, nothing forbidden about it. They were lucky to be only driven out of the parish and the town.

But it was hard for him to be silent. The more he wrote and spoke and thought, the more he seemed to himself the man who had once been, and the less the ass he was. For the first time he was ashamed of his nakedness. From patient he grew ill tempered, from gentle to surly, and at last became melancholy, would neither think nor write, finally not speak, not eat.

What to do? His fellows vowed to help him, do all they could, but there seemed only one possibility: he must hope for a further transformation, and somehow become a man entire. As Lucius Apuleius the Golden Ass does.

One certainty consoled me then in my darkest hour, says Lucius, that the new year was here at last, and the wildflowers would soon be coming out to color the meadows; and in the gardens the rosebuds long imprisoned in their thorny stocks would appear, and open, and breathe out their indescribable odor; and I would eat and eat, and become once again myself.

—But I am myself, said the Ass. I am an ass not figuratively, or platonically, or cabalistically, or in disguise or in effect, but actually. There is no rose for me to feed upon that will change me back; there is no way back at all.

—Ah, said the players, who pitied him, even though it would surely reduce their income if he were somehow made a man.

—I can't return, he said, to that Pythagorean way I chose to tread, and take the other way.

—No, said his fellows sadly, for neither could they.

—Very well then, said the Ass, and the players lifted their heads, for they heard a new note, as players are quick to do. We can't go back. No one can. What we were is not, but what we will be, we cannot know.

—Yes, said his companions.

—There is one place I could go, said the Ass after long thought. A city of wise workers, a city where transformation is not only possible but likely.

—What city?

—I was there. I was summoned to counsel the Emperor. I, I.

—Yes! said his companions. The little ass seemed in their eyes to grow in stature as he spoke, to a noble height, a proud determination.

—We'll go on, said the Ass. Go on by going back. To Prague.

—Prague! They rose as one, and looked on each other with gay resolve. Actors can do this, too: more than once they had got themselves in awful trouble by suddenly, and convincingly, pretending to grand emotions, a ringing curtain line. Eagle-browed Ass! Winged Ass! they sang. To Prague! they sang, and they set to, and packed their bags and their properties, and loaded them on the back of the Ass and into the bright new wagon that his mute cousin the mule pulled, and set out. Soon the road unrolled before them, running ever on. Over the hills and far away, sang the players.

Tom he was a piperes sonne

He stole a pipe and awaye he ronne

And the onlie tune that hee could play

Was Over the hills and farre away.

They all sang the chorus, and even the Ass hee-hawed like the famous ass musician of Bremen:

Over the hills and a grete way off

The wind shall blow my topknot off.

4

Behind the gallimordium, the old royal brothel, up a winding alley, were the gates of the great Jewish quarter of the city. Each evening those who had been out and about the city hurried within before the gates were shut, artisans and laborers and peddlers in their caftans marked with yellow circles and their tall pointed yellow hats with curious balls atop them, the richer men's caftans of silk, their hats brimmed with fur. The Ass and his two companions, Tom and another who best knew the German tongue, went in through the gates with them, looking neither right nor left, and into the crowded streets, some of the streets so narrow that the housewives could touch from window to window above the heads of those who passed or struggled to pass below. Other streets were closed above altogether, the buildings joined above them and turning them to caves or tunnels that went up and down stairs in the dark before debouching again into the day.

Up the little city past the Town Hall, whose clock was set out in Hebrew letters and whose hands ran backward like the eyes of Torah readers, past the synagogue called the New Synagogue that was as old as almost any church of the city (for the Jews, so the Jews asserted, had been in Prague from its founding): black and small it was, though, not great, and inside the walls were black too with a thousand years of candle smoke, the cantor ululating softly in the almemar as they went by.

Up farther, under another gallery, past a market now closing, cooped ducks, geese, and doves; a further tunnel of darkness, drip of cisterns, branching alleys to choose from, all different but indistinguishable; and at last to the house they sought, the most famous house of the quarter, before which a small crowd was as always gathered.

From surprise at their appearing there with the little ass beside them without lead or halter, the crowd let the players pass through, and go into the court within. Tom and his comrade went through an inner door and up a stairway, along a lightless corridor, Tom reaching before him with his hands to find the door; going first through a room of women and girls whose pale faces took light from the evening candles, who spoke and laughed among themselves as they passed, and then into a farther room, the bet ha-midrash, where the Great Rabbi taught, and men and boys listened and read.

He was Judah Loew ben Bezalel, the most famous of all the famous wise men of Prague. Jews from Rus and Damascus and Fez and Venice came to consult him. Doctor John Dee when he had lived here had heard of his wisdom, his rabínská moudrost, and had come here to learn with him. The Emperor Rudolf himself had been in awe of it, and once summoned the Rabbi to the Hradcany to question him; the Rabbi's son-in-law Isak Kohen wrote later that the Rabbi was brought to a small room, a curtain was pushed aside, the Emperor came in, asked the rabbi several questions, and then retired. What questions? What answers? Isak Kohen wrote: what they talked of must, as is the imperial practice, not be revealed.

Whatever the actors said to the rabbi, what craft of their own they exercised on the great still figure in the crowded room, it was enough to bring him down the stairs to the courtyard; there the little ass stood patiently, big head looking from side to side; and the rabbi sent away the other supplicants who waited there, and bent down, with his hands upon his knees, toward the Ass, and waited for it to tell its tale—as the two actors had said it would do, and all by itself.

And so it did, from beginning to end, supplemented by the human persons who had come with it. The rabbi, who considered it an affront to the endless invention of the Most High to be astonished by the speaking of an Ass, listened in silence to the end. Then he asked what it was the beast desired of him.

—I wish, said the Ass, to be transformed from the shape I now hold, and acquire a shape more suited to the spirit within me. For I can't go into the places of men in this form. I would be spurned, or burned for a devil. Burned again.

—And why is it, the rabbi said then (speaking in his own Jewish tongue, which an ancient secretary translated into German for the Ass and his companions) that you have come here to me? Why do you think I have a remedy for you?