“What did you want? Remember?”
“What did I want?” I said aloud, starting to reckon my wants. “I wanted to film you and I did. No, the film isn’t ready, not finished yet. I wanted the attic, but that is laughably unavailable, along with the golem.” I wanted Katya but I wasn’t going to share that with him. “So what else did I want? I don’t know. Please remind me.”
“To find someone you asked me. You forgot already? So important that someone is to you? You asked me to find him, even if I didn’t know he was a Jew.”
“Graf!” I exclaimed. “Karoly Graf! You found him?”
“What you think?”
I made believe I was thinking. Like Rodin’s The Thinker, I put my hand to my face and thought.
“Yes, I think you did find him.”
“You asked. I looked. I f…”
“So you found him. Bravo!”
“Well, no,” the shamesh backtracked. “I didn’t found him.”
Then why was he teasing me?
“Then who did? You just gave me the impression you found him.”
“I didn’t found him.” The shamesh paused. For drama. For effect. “Actually, he found me.”
“How? Where?”
“I am the shamesh,” he asserted slowly. “Here.” He gave me a slip of paper with Graf’s name and address. “Go. He waits for you. Tomorrow. Two p.m.” And the shamesh told me precisely which Metro and which connecting bus to take for the twenty, twenty-five minute ride.
“You’re a miracle man. A modern Maharal. How did you do it, shamesh?”
But he just smiled.
“Thank you, shamesh. Thank you so much. You don’t know how much this means to me.”
I looked down at the name and address.
“Did he give you a phone number?”
“No. No phone. Just address.”
I hoped it wouldn’t be another wild goose chase.
24. How He Got Better
K sensed me at the other side of the door. I didn’t even get a chance to knock. He began to speak as — even before — he/I opened the door.
“Two crucial events occurred within days of each other. In the year I died of tuberculosis, Dora Diamant and I wanted to get married. She wrote to her father for permission but her Hasidic papa didn’t want his daughter to marry a Jew who wasn’t Orthodox, even though Dora herself had long ago moved away from that tradition. And never mind I was much older; I could have been her father. She was only eighteen or so at the time. But the papa didn’t want to say no without consulting his rebbe, for Hasidic Jews like him don’t make a move within any arena of consequence — family, marriage, business, job, education — without consulting their rebbe, their spiritual leader, their all-around guide. So Dora’s papa went to the Gerer Rebbe, who said one word, No! With rebbes there is no arguing, no negotiating, no compromise. No maybe. No let’s see. With them it’s either Yes or No. So No it was. Which meant I couldn’t marry, couldn’t have a family within the framework of a traditional Jewish family structure.
“Even though I had found happiness with Dora — why are you standing? Please sit down — that I had never had before, the rebbe’s No smothered my happiness, robbed me of my future, exacerbated my illness. Yes, his decision made me sick. And not metaphysically. Actually sick. Doctors now agree that a psychological blow has its physiological consequences. Further examination seemed to show the tuberculosis spreading to my larynx. But Doctor Klopstock said he would await final word from the laboratory report that would come back in a week. Perhaps, he said, his observation with the naked eye was wrong.
“At this time Dora decided to make one last personal appeal and see her father. And I told Doctor Klopstock that I’m going back home to Prague for about ten days. I needed to get away from the sanatorium. I needed the pretense of normality. Medically, there was nothing I could do. I needed home. Space. The ambience of family. I hadn’t seen my parents and sisters in months, for I had discouraged them from coming to the sanatorium in the outskirts of Vienna until I felt better.” K stopped, looked out the window as if seeing Prague, 1924, in black and white. “It was good to be home. I tried to expunge from my mind the suspense about the laboratory report. Meanwhile, at home, everyone said how much better I looked; how the fresh air of the Vienna woods agreed with me, helped me. Whether it was true or wishful thinking or conventional lying I could not tell. I didn’t even get to see Brod. He hadn’t known I was coming and went hiking in Slovakia. At the end of my stay I kissed my parents and my three sisters goodbye. I did not tell them the extent of my illness. Would I ever see them again? I asked them not to accompany me to the train. Train station departures are too emotionally wrenching. And banal too, straining out the window, waving a silly handkerchief.
“On my way to the train station I asked the taxi driver to stop for a few minutes at the Altneushul. At that time it was always open. I hadn’t been there in years, since my bar mitzvah, and I wanted to bid goodbye to it. I sensed that this would be the last time I would be in Prague. Little did I know the synagogue would be my place of refuge less than twenty years later. I had always been impressed by its antiquity, its grandeur, its odd architecture, the magic it exuded, the legends infused in it.”
“The golem,” I said.
“Yes.”
“And the Maharal.”
“Of course. The legendary Rabbi Loew, Chief Rabbi of Prague, creator of the famous golem who, so the legend goes, lies undisturbed under a mountain of torn pages from holy books. Until he is needed. In this shul Jews had prayed more than eight hundred years ago. I walked up the three steps to the Aron Kodesh, approached the curtain that covered the Holy Ark. I saw the Ten Commandments embroidered on part of the curtain. I bent forward and brushed my lips on the First Commandment, ‘I am the Lord your God.’ Then I turned and walked down the three steps and made my way past the bimah to the door. I thought: I am not an observant Jew, but my faith in God, the Creator of the Universe, is unshakable.
“At first nothing untoward happened. I felt the same. But as I approached the door, ready to return to my waiting taxi, a line of electric energy ran through me, as if a new vein or artery had been placed in me. I felt a jolt, as if a bolt of lightning had entered one part of me and exited from another. But it was not the pain one expects from an electric shock; it was its mirror image. Joy. A thrill. An uplift. An infusion of light, of happiness, a giddy feeling of wine in me, as if suddenly I could walk on air. I was filled with new oxygen.
“As I took a deep, deep breath, I could feel clean mountain air filling my lungs. Oh, that uplift, that surge. I felt it like sweet laughter. I felt energized. Not a dark energy but a bright energy, as though I had been touched, blessed, with a beneficent light, a benison. I was vibrating. Not shaking, vibrating. Vibrating with the light within me.”
K paused, bent his head, looked down at the floor, then raised his eyes and looked at, through, me. Tears stood in his eyes. His eyes were moist with happiness.
“I felt elevated. I felt I was up there on the slanted old ceiling looking down at myself. I felt I was floating. I felt myself rising even higher to the attic that was or wasn’t there. I felt I was a miniature man walking between the lines of the Torah, sailing horizontally near the slightly raised letters written with gall nut ink. I felt I was the eyes of the lions that guard the top of the Holy Ark in the small shuls in Prague. New sensations ran through me. Sensations I had never felt before. Or since. I was melody. I was a cluster of notes, triplets, trills. I, who cannot carry a tune. I, of whom Max Brod, who was also a famous composer, said, ‘He can’t tell the difference between Bach and Offenbach,’ I suddenly was able to lift my voice and sing — and my throat did not hurt as it did an hour ago. Nor did any coughs rattle my chest and take my breath away. And I sang the verse from the Psalms, ‘God has tormented me but did not give me over to death.’ Days earlier, as I died slowly, a different verse from the Psalms flashed before me, ‘The bonds of death surround me. I have only trouble and grief.’ Every day I watched myself die. But now that the thrum of electricity was like a flood of lifeblood in me, other verses from the Psalms rose before my eyes: ‘I shall not die but live,’ and ‘You rescued my soul from death…I shall go before the Lord in the Land of the Living.’