“Does Eva know?”
“Know what?”
He knew very well what I meant.
“You know what I mean. This.”
But he did not reply. In my mind I heard his spokesman saying, K neither confirms nor denies this.
Now I understood why all the whispering, why Jiri and Betty spoke that strange language. Tara pilus. Tara glos. But I still didn’t understand who I was too old or too young for. Maybe K would know why Jiri and Betty spoke that language. Did Betty also know that Mr. Klein was K? That he was Jiri’s father? She must have known something; otherwise, why the secret tongue? But perhaps K knew nothing about Betty, so it was better not to ask.
“Now you understand why I said I have good news for you.”
“Can you imagine? About a week ago I dreamt that you told me.”
“I did?” He sounded like a surprised little boy. “What did I say?”
“I dreamt I was rebutting you about being Jiri’s father. I said people make all kinds of crazy claims here in Prague. And you said, ‘You mean like Karoly Graf who claims to be my son?’ Then I corrected you, saying: ‘Not your son, K’s son.’”
“I’m more careless in dreams,” K said with a laugh.
“In my dream I didn’t pay too much attention to your slip of the tongue. But had it happened in the real world, I would have caught it.”
“There is no such thing as the real world,” he said. “It’s all a dream.”
“But you just said you’re more careless in dreams.”
“Yes,” K said.
Was what I had just witnessed also a dream, a phantasmagoria prompted by extreme exhaustion, like those exhaustion-induced quick visions I wrote about before? If I could have looked at myself I would not have seen a man with a straight back. I would have seen a man shaped like a huge question mark. My lips, my tongue, my eyes, my brain were all question marks. Supple, bent, ready to spring. Ready to ask. But I held back. I didn’t want to intrude.
I was confident that Klein/K would tell me his story. Why was I so sure? It was the classic a fortiori reasoning. Which meant: how much the more so. The kal va-chomer of Talmudic disputation. If a man can lift fifty pounds, a fortiori, kal va-chomer, how much the more so, he can lift five pounds. If Klein had chosen to share his amazing secret with me, it stands to reason he would tell me how all this happened to him. Did he die and come back to life? No, impossible. We haven’t yet reached Messianic times and resurrection of the dead. Or did K not die at all? Was his illness a sham? And how is it that he had lived this long? And in total silence?
I looked up into K’s eyes. Yes, up. Those who know K only from his photographs have no indication of his height. In fact, no fulllength photos exist of him standing next to someone else. I too had imagined him to be of middling height. Jews in Europe are not known for being tall. In Poland they tend to be on the short side. With his well-known slenderness I had imagined K to be about fiveseven or eight, but six feet tall! K a six-footer? Star of his high school basketball team?
Ask any K expert, How tall was K? A glazed look will come over his eyes. He will shrug, with perhaps a supercilious smile on his lips, indicating an irrelevant, even idiotic, question, and say: How should I know? It’s his works that are important, not he. And I, who stand fiveten, had to look up into his eyes. Age had not diminished his height; age had not shrunk his frame; age had not bent his back. And old age, advanced old age, had not compromised his skeletal structure. He still held himself erect and was the full six feet plus he was reported to be. No little-old-lady shrinkage, no osteoporotic diminution of spine, neckbone, femurs. He was as straight and thin as ever. And those blue eyes still radiated a special light. One can fake identity cards, accent, vocabulary, even language. But height, like long fingers, is unique and inimitable. So K was either real or a superb sorcerer.
The last thing I saw as I bade him goodbye were the two models of the early double-winged aeroplanes that moved slightly with the invisible breeze in the room. Then I remembered K loved planes. He had gone to visit early demonstrations of flight and even wrote a little essay about planes in Brescia.
K didn’t have to tell me to come back. We both knew I’d come back. Can paper clips resist a magnet? But with all the excitement in his room, I had forgotten to ask him to reconcile his two ages.
22. The Extra Kroner
The next time I came K was already holding his walking stick.
“Come, let’s go for a walk.”
Now he’s going to tell me his story, I thought. We’ll walk in the park near his house and he’ll tell me what I was waiting to hear.
“It’s so beautiful here. This entire city is just stunning.”
“You really like Prague, don’t you?”
“I love it.”
But what I loved about it couldn’t be put into words. How can I describe that floaty, delicious feeling, that air of possessiveness, that pride I felt when I was in K’s room. When I was with him, I glowed with the thought that it was I, me, who was spending time with the greatest writer of the twentieth century, and only I knew it was he. And I could not shout it out from the rooftops either. I myself couldn’t believe I had the privilege of seeing him almost every day. And during my visits I sometimes felt myself levitating from the high of being with him. And at night, when I wrote about my hours with K, a special thrill of joy came over me, a feeling no doubt that drunkards or drug abusers feel, they’re sitting on top of the world, everything going their way, that touchdown with thirty seconds to go, that bases loaded, game-winning home run at the bottom of the ninth. Or, best of all, a Golden Globe Award or a Cannes Prize for a documentary film you’ve made.
I was spending time with K. Who would believe me? And soon, when — if (again that magical, slippery IF) — I put him into my film, everyone will believe it and envy me for having known him, brought him to the attention of the world.
No wonder I loved Prague.
“I love it. If I had arms big enough I would embrace it. But tell me, where is the mystical Prague? Where is the ethereal, golemic, middle-ages magic of the city? Tell me, is it travel-brochure talk or is it real?”
“So you want to see something mystical, something at the cusp of the real and the unreal.”
I marveled at K’s use of the word “cusp.” But if I were to marvel at everything he said, I would be marveling all day long. Wasn’t everything about him, his very presence before me, a marvel?
But I didn’t want to sound overly enthusiastic. For I knew quite well what was considered mystical in Prague. The touristy mystical. Which had as much connection to the truly mystical as the popular version of fast-food, I-want-it-now kabbala in America had to the true study of the onerously difficult authentic Aramaic kabbala. You know what the touristy mystical was? A walk around the Altneushul with a sprinkling of legends about the golem. The clock on the Jewish Town Hall with its Hebrew letters, which run backwards. The grave of the Maharal.
That’s why I said,
“Yes, I would,”
slowly, with absolute self-control, no tremor in my voice. But as I was to learn later, I had unfairly denigrated K’s offer. It wasn’t a tourist site at all. In fact, “cusp” was an exaggeration. What he showed me was squarely, firmly, in the lap of the unreal.
“There’s an unusual synagogue I want to show you, which no tourists know about.”
“Too bad you didn’t tell me before. I would have brought my camera.”
“Impossible. Good you didn’t. Photography is not permitted.”