We walked along residential streets I hadn’t seen before, then turned into a small, busy shopping street.
“Here’s the post office. Wait. I’ll be right out. I need some stamps.”
Meanwhile, I watched the parade of people passing by. Now, with freedom (my finger slips and I type “g” instead of “f,” a good word “greedom,” showing the Czechs’ pent-up fascination with wealth and goods), the sunshine suppressed under the Soviets burst through the grey fog. People moved with a buzz of energy, heads up. Not quite like actors in a Hollywood musical, a smile on every face, a song on every lip. Still, the sun shone in their eyes. Gone the grey.
Here came K.
“Just a minute,” he said, standing next to me. He looked into a little leather change purse. “I must check something.”
Maybe in old European black-and-white films or early twentieth-century novels do you see a man putting coins into a small leather purse, with no metal clasp, closed by a little leather tongue that slips under a strap. It must have been a hundred years old, K’s purse. He took the coins out and counted them.
“Oh my, she gave me an extra kroner…well, I have to go back.”
K stood in the line again — this time I joined him — and returned the coin to the surprised girl.
Outside, K pressed his lips and shook his head. He took out the purse and counted the coins again.
“Turns out she gave me the correct change in the first place. Sorry.” He licked his lips, wondering what to do. Return to the window again? But by now the line was longer. Ten people stood waiting.
“Forget it,” I suggested.
“But it’s wrong,” K replied. “It’s not the kroner, Max, it’s the integrity. Just as it was wrong for me to take an extra kroner that didn’t belong to me, so is it wrong for her to take an extra kroner that does not belong to her. And, anyway, who knows what problems this could cause her at the end of the day, when they discover extra money in her till?”
I countered with: “But if in your heart you declare it now belongs to her, a gift you’ve given her, then it’s no longer a fault. She didn’t take the kroner. You gave it to her.”
“But don’t you see it’s a matter of honesty? Like a coin, honesty too has two sides.”
I liked the ring of the metaphor, even though I didn’t grasp its meaning at once.
Suddenly I was overwhelmed by a sense of déjà vu. The scene was familiar. Was I reliving something? Waiting at a post office. The mistake with a returned coin. Had I experienced this before myself or with someone? Or had I read about it as an illustration of K’s absolute sense of honesty?
Wait. Something had passed me by. I had heard it only with an outer ear, like a remark absorbed absently that surfaces only later, delayed like a bright light on the retina seen when the light is gone. K had called me Max. So I was right. He had done something like this decades ago, more than seventy or seventy-five years ago, with Max Brod present, and I must have read about it in my unrelenting, omnivorous passion to read every word K wrote and every word written about him, in order to recreate him in my mind. Could I have known that I would invade a special time zone, bridge the impossible gap, the years between the death of my hero and my own birth and, miraculously, magically, meet the man I had always wanted to meet?
And so K stood in line for a third time to get his kroner back, while I waited outside again and observed the citizens of Prague. The merry sound of children with their mothers added music to the scene. Then a sudden tweak in my heart. I watched a tall young mother in a blue beret pushing a double baby carriage. Of course it wasn’t Katya, but fantasies are sweet.
A couple of shops down from the post office I noticed a video store. I ran up to K.
“I’m going to buy some batteries. See that video shop two doors down? I’ll meet you either here or in there.”
I entered the small shop. An attendant addressed me in Czech.
“English?”
“Little.”
“I need some batteries for a video camera.”
“Good. Moment.”
I felt a tap on my shoulder. I turned. Froze as I saw who I saw. Oh, my God, another fight, like the one with the actor I had knocked over by mistake. I wished I could have run away again from the director like I did last time. But now, here, trapped in the little shop, nowhere to flee.
“I’m Michele Luongo.” He smiled as he stretched his hand out to me.
I shook his hand.
“How fortunate,” he said with his Italian-accented English. “This coincidence is out of a Russian novel. I was just thinking of you but of course had no way of contacting you, and here you are…. Why did you run away that day?”
“Embarrassed.”
“Oh, come on.”
“The trouble I caused your film.”
“A Cannes Prize winner, embarrassed?”
“You know me?”
“Of course. I recognized you right away. I saw you at the Cannes Festival two years ago, but you don’t remember me.”
“I’m sorry about the trouble I caused you. And I’m prepared to reimburse you for damages.” I felt my face flushing. The heat rose in my neck. “In fact, I asked at my hotel how to reach your film company but they knew nothing. They said these film crews appear one day and disappear the next.”
“Forget it. We left that scene in. It’s hilarious. It gave our film a slapstick turn we never even thought of.”
“I’m so glad.” I took a deep breath. “By the way,” I said with as much innocence as I could muster, “do you know where the girl is?”
“Katya? No. We engaged her for that one shoot but then she disappeared.”
“She keeps disappearing. That’s the third place she disappeared from. And some other people I know have disappeared too.”
“Maybe it’s you.” And Michele Luongo laughed.
“You know, I actually thought of that.”
Luongo lowered his head and looked over glasses that weren’t there. “So you have a thing for her. I don’t blame you. She’s quite an unusually pretty girl.”
“Well… Did she ever mention the place she was headed for?”
“No. I told you…she just left. But when I interviewed her before the film, she said she had studied in Brno. Who knows, maybe that’s her hometown. Look, why chat here? Let’s get together and continue the conversation.”
“Wonderful. How much longer you going to be here?”
“About three weeks. And you?”
“Probably another month.”
“Here’s my card,” Luongo said. “You can always reach me on my cell phone.”
“Terrific. I’ll call you.” And I wrote my address and phone number for him. “By the way,” I added. “Is that actor still around? The one I accidentally knocked down?”
“Stacek?”
“I never got his name. That good-looking, aggressive fellow who played alongside Katya.”
“I suppose so. He doesn’t work with me anymore. Why do you ask?”
“I think he was stalking me a few days ago. Yelled ‘American!’ at me and chased me through the little lanes and across the square and then I eluded him.”
“What’s wrong with him?”
“I don’t know. He’s probably still mad. Did you know he sought me out at the Old New Synagogue about a week ago and wanted to pick a fight with me?”
“No! I didn’t think he was that touchy.”
“I apologized to him right away. He seemed to accept it, grudgingly. But he’s still harboring an enmity. Now I keep having to look over my shoulders to see if he’s following me.”
I looked toward the shop doorway. Suddenly, K materialized on the threshold.
“There’s an old gentleman looking at you. You know him?”
I did what Schweik would do. Pop a lie gratuitously. On the spot.