“Now I felt a sense of well-being, yes, health I had never felt before. At first I thought I was dreaming. How could it be? So used to malaise was I, I closed and opened my eyes, assuming the dream would go away. But it was no dream. I felt well. That was the first magical moment in my lonely and blessed life. I returned for a moment to the Holy Ark. And I sang out, facing the Aron Kodesh, I sang into the ancient and holy space of the Altneushul, ‘Sh’ma Yisroel’ and ‘Blessed are you, O Lord, who cures the sick.’”
K stopped, took a deep breath. His face shone as he relived those nonpareil moments. I thought he would continue the rhythm of his remarks, but he surprised me with:
“You know there is such a thing as unreal numbers.”
Yes, I thought. For instance, sixty-nine minus eighty.
“In higher mathmatics, mathematicians use math to calculate the inconceivable, the undetectable, the nonexistent, the impossible. There even exist equations that represent things that not only can we not visualize, we can’t even imagine being able to visualize them. They are beyond visualization. Beyond imagining.
“When that jolt of beneficent energy went through my body, killing at once, like a powerful antibiotic, all bacteria in me and restoring me to health, I was in a special time zone that physicists today call flowing time and textured space, but I didn’t know it then. I was in a realm of unreal numbers. And in that special moment, all I knew was that for the first time in my adult life I had a sense of well-being.
“On the train back to Vienna and to the sanatorium I couldn’t wait to share my good news with Dora, who said she would be back before me. I rehearsed my words several times. Like in a modernist drama I froze time and said the same thing in several different ways. I also hoped she would have good news for me: her father had relented; the rebbe had changed his mind and was giving her permission to marry me. One miracle would join another. We would both surprise each other with good news and I would marry her, not in illness but in health.
“When I returned, Doctor Klopstock met me at the entrance, a concerned look on his face. I didn’t see Dora and assumed since she didn’t know when exactly I was returning, she had gone to spend some time in Vienna. Doctor Klopstock did not comment on how I looked, which — I admit — annoyed me, for I thought that the change that had come over me was visible on my face. I thought it shouted wordlessly right out of me. So I concluded that my feeling of good health was illusory, that it was just an anaesthetic my body was producing to cloak the approaching end. It often happens in severe illness that there is a momentary surge of feeling well just before one dies. I didn’t tell Dr. Klopstock I felt fine, for when he heard a remark like that he would comment drily, ‘That’s what they all say.’ What he said next explained why he had made no comment about the way I looked.
“The doctor said, ‘I had hoped the laboratory report would be different, but sadly it shows that your larynx and epiglottis have been infected. I am sorry, but there is no hope for further medical solutions, except painkillers, morphine, or pantopen.’
“I was silent. This was not the time to tell Klopstock how good I felt. Instead, I asked about another patient, a man without a family who also had an advanced case of tuberculosis. ‘Johann? Not well,’ said Doctor Klopstock. ‘Johann Eck probably has no more than three or four weeks left to live.’ And I? I asked the doctor silently. But maybe he read my mind. He raised his eyebrows and looked up, as if to say, Only God knows.
“I looked out the window into the garden of the sanatorium. The owl I had previously seen in a tree was no longer there.”
K stopped. But I knew this was not, could not possibly be, the end of the drama. There was another player to account for.
“And Dora?” I asked.
“Yes, Dora,” K said. “When I asked Klopstock where she was, he said: ‘I thought you knew. Didn’t you get her letter?’
“‘What letter?’
“‘She said she wrote to you.’
“‘I got nothing. So she didn’t return?’
“‘She did come back,’ Klopstock told me, ‘but spent only a day or so here and then announced she’s going back to Poland and would write to you.’
“‘I didn’t get a letter.’
“Again Klopstock said, ‘Dora said she would write to you.’
“Well, we could go on repeating those two lines forever. That’s it, I realized. She abandoned me. Her father’s wishes have prevailed. She succumbed to her father’s demand to return home and leave me. Dora was brave, rebellious — but as far as I was concerned, not brave and rebellious enough. She abandoned me; my heart abandoned her. Alas, I learned much later the real reason for her leaving, written in a letter that was much delayed in the post. Had I had that letter when I returned to Vienna, my history, perhaps hers, would have been different. I was waiting to surprise her with my return to health but she had another surprise waiting for me. And that’s when I decided to die,” K said sadly.
“What do you mean?” I interjected.
“I told the doctor, ‘I’m as good as dead.’”
“But you said you didn’t die.”
“Didn’t die in one sense. Did — in another. It was at that moment, learning that Dora had gone, at that very moment the idea that fixed my destiny came to me. I knew I would die. She knew it. Her father knew. His rebbe knew — maybe he even wished it. I have no doubt he wished it. Then the idea spun quickly in me. All the details. Let them all assume I was dead. The wish that people in rage always have: I’ll die and then they’ll be sorry. I was cured but heartsick. Dead inside. With Dora leaving me, the lifestuff in me was sucked away. I had no desire to live. To write. To go over my manuscripts. I was finished.”
For a moment K looked up at the two model double-winged aeroplanes as though he wished to fly away with them.
“I loved Dora but I was furious with her. True, she was young, but she always seemed mature for her age. But why didn’t she have the courage to stay? The father summons her home, forbidding the marriage to a non-observant sinner, a secular Jew like me, and she obeys like a little pussycat. Why couldn’t she free herself, is what I thought at the time, from the shackles of her father, who himself was chained to his Hasidic rebbe? Although my attitude softened over the years, especially in the thirties and forties, when I mourned for her, thinking she was one of the six million, but at that time she was dead for me and I would be dead for her. Let her think I was dead and the separation would be complete, on my side and hers.
“I didn’t receive her letter until much later, but by then it was too late. Doctor Klopstock had assumed she had written to Prague. But she didn’t. She wrote to me at the sanatorium and, in one of those mix-ups that occur in cheap romantic novels, the letter got lost and surfaced many weeks later. I didn’t read that letter until I went to visit Klopstock much later — he met me in Vienna, of course, not at the sanatorium. The letter had just come, but he didn’t want to take a chance forwarding it to Prague lest it get lost again. Had I had that letter earlier I would have lived out my life as the real K.”