He wasn’t showing me letters.
No.
Something else was happening.
I looked.
I stared.
I saw.
My hands fell to my side. A frisson ran up and down my back.
So quick was the event I couldn’t react. His face was changing. When I saw what was taking place, I closed my eyes for a minute or two like a Jew does when the kohanim bless the congregation.
Klein became younger, as if shedding skins, born anew. As he reached my age, it seemed as if I were looking into a mirror. Had we switched identities?
Skeptics will say that I turned away from Mr. Klein for a moment and looked in the mirror and saw myself. But to skeptics I say: There was no mirror in the room.
Had he put on a mask, similar to the almost realistic faces one sees in a wax museum?
He gazed at me.
I tried to speak. No sounds came from my mouth.
“A mask, huh?” he said.
It was only then he showed me the transformation. What I had seen was just the quick preview. A coming attraction. First, back to Mr. Klein. He did this in an instant, so quickly as if I’d been drugged for a minute. Then the years just dropped off him. So stunned was I by what I was witnessing, I couldn’t see, focus, on anything else. Not his collar, not his neck, not his sweater. I didn’t even know what he was doing with his hands, moving them to enhance the hocus pocus, or add/ detract from abracadabra. It was the reverse of that famous scene in the classic Frank Capra film, Lost Horizon, where as soon as the people leave the magical kingdom, Shangri-La, and step out of the enchanted Tibetan paradise, they suddenly age. Years leaped on to their faces. Wrinkles etched in skin. But here, now, with Mr. Klein, the years fled.
It began with his white Van Dyke beard. When photos are developed, the image slowly materializes. Here it was just the reverse. His beard began fading. Soon nothing was left. His hair darkened as though an invisible black rinse were washing through it. Black hair covered his head. He became a man of fifty or fifty-five.
Then, for a few magical moments, I saw the young K — yes, now I called him K — before me. The dense black hair parted in the middle. The angular face. The slightly protruding, pointy ears. The straight thick black brows. The high cheekbones giving his big sad eyes, luminous and piercing, an almost Oriental cast. The cheeks fuller. The long, compressed lips. Gone the almost feminine softness of the old man’s lips.
Had a spell come over me? Had he cast stardust into my face, a sprinkling so subtle I hadn’t even seen it? Did the Sandman put me into a sleep trance that made me believe what I thought I saw?
But while K’s face was transforming, something was also happening to me. As I looked at him I sensed something shift in my head, a wall appearing, and a movement, maybe me, sailing to the other side, then realizing I too was someone else, somewhere else.
I heard music, music on a different plane. Music thick and compressed, like the music I had heard in Jiri’s hospital room, a forty-minute symphony, the spaces between the notes gone, condensed to four seconds. Music so dense I floated on it, as if on thick water. Then I sank. But it was not like drowning — descending is the better word. It was like descending into Champagne-like bubbles, between which one can breathe, then rise. Between the bubbles, I was Josephine the mouse; a carapaced insect on the ceiling looking down at my sister, my parents; in the courtyard of the castle, standing before the bar protesting my innocence; I floated to the Great Wall and walked along it; fasted in the cage for forty days and forty nights; then found myself in the synagogue, watching the furry little brown animal crawling in the woman’s gallery.
Then K began to speak. I had heard recordings of people who had lived in the late nineteenth, early twentieth centuries: Sholom Aleichem, Edison, Mark Twain, people who were older than K. But I had never heard a recording of his voice. They either didn’t have machines like that in Prague — or, if they did, K never made use of them.
He stood straight, looked even taller than before. His eyes sharpened, danced brightly. A wise look glowed in his blue eyes. He took a deep breath. He put his hand to his mouth, a gesture people use when they try to remember something, four long, elegant fingers over lips, or index finger upright, pressing against the cheek, bent middle finger near the lower lip. However, it seemed to me that K put his index finger and thumb between his lips for a moment, a quick movement whose significance I would understand only much later.
“I would have you understand, ladies and gentlemen, that you know more Yiddish than you think you do. So many of you are so frightened of Yiddish one can almost see it in your faces. But there are powers in you that make you understand Yiddish intuitively and, if you bear that in mind, you begin to come quite close to Yiddish. Relax — and you will suddenly find yourselves immersed in it. For Yiddish is everything: the words, the Hasidic melody, the theater and songs. And once the language has taken hold of you, you will forget your former reserve. Then you will understand the true unity of Yiddish.”
“Your famous speech in the Prague Jewish Town Hall. When you arranged an evening for a poor Yiddish actor and his troupe.”
“The only speech I ever gave…. Now you know who I am?”
I couldn’t say anything but “Yes.”
So this, then, was the A Major Major Discovery that awaited me in Prague. The treasure my dreams told me I would find. Jiri’s and Yossi’s unfinished remark.
And just then, at that “Yes,” something lit up in my head. Flashed a cynical thought, calculating, exploitative: in my mind’s eye I saw a leer on my face I wasn’t accustomed to. One really strange to me. Still, it was there, side by side with that light still glowing in my head.
I had to video this man. I must. Nothing should, will, stand in my way. What an event a video of him would be! Of course, no one would believe it. Why should they? Just because I and my subject claimed that he was K? But with proof, the same proof he had just shown me, the news of this astonishing discovery, this miraculous revelation would become known all over. The Rosetta Stone with a human touch. What a video! My God, what a documentary! Earth shaking. Worldwide news headlines. Features. Intergalactic publicity. The find of the millennium. If the three-inch, one-time headline of the New York Times in 1969, MEN WALK ON MOON, was astounding, wait till people see K FOUND ALIVE IN PRAGUE. And it wouldn’t be a National Enquirer scandal sheet fake story either.
But would K repeat that proof for me with the camera on?
I hope my relationship with him won’t change, I thought. That I won’t look at him only in one way. As a subject. To be exploited. It had to go one way or the other. I couldn’t have it both ways. Was this why I was sent here? Yes, sent. And if so — I had no choice.
Then into my reverie came his voice.
“Now you believe me?”
“Yes.”
“That I was telling the truth?”
“Yes.”
“That I’m not delusionary?”
“Yes.”
“Like Karoly Graf?”
That I wasn’t sure of. But since I had established a rhythm, I said, “Yes.”
“Now you sound like me,” K said.