I absorbed the words but still couldn’t fathom what difference it made if she left him because of her father’s intransigence or her own lack of courage in being with him when he died. But for K it was apparently crucial. He felt Dora had abandoned him. Many years had passed; he had made his decision. I couldn’t question him on this now.
“Thank you for sharing this with me. She writes so touchingly, so lovingly.” Then I asked him:
“Why do you keep that letter here and not at home?”
“As I told you. Because here it is safe. Despite evil regimes, nothing has ever happened to this synagogue in all the years of its existence. And nothing ever will. It is safer here than at home.”
K walked up to the Holy Ark, kissed the curtain, and returned.
“The last time I did that was sixty-nine, almost seventy, years ago.” He looked up at the soaring space of the synagogue, admiring the source of his salvation, as if beholding it for the first time.
“If not for the Maharal, where would I be?” he said suddenly into the silence. “Sometimes I think he breathed his spirit into me.”
Did K mean this or was it just a metaphor? Maybe wishful thinking.
“Especially during the war years,” he added.
I looked at him as if to say: Come on now, really! He caught the skepticism in my look. Suddenly he raised his hands. He stood taller than ever. In the synagogue’s chiarascuro light it seemed as if gauze were appearing between his outspread hands and his hips. K spread his wings.
“I am the Maharal,” he boomed slowly. His voice frightened me. I felt chills running down my spine.
I stepped back, saw the word emet, truth, glowing white on his forehead. Three Hebrew letters, aleph, mem, tov—the first letter, the middle letter, the final letter of the Hebrew alphabet.
I blinked, rubbed my eyes.
K dropped his hands, laughed again. “Sorry, I was just joking. How can anyone but the Maharal be the Maharal? But, still, I felt that something of him had rubbed off on me in the attic, protecting me.”
“What attic?”
“I told you. The attic of the Al-tnigh-shul. Here. Upstairs.” And he rolled his eyes up to the ceiling.
“But there is no attic,” I chittered. My voice laughed of its own accord, rolling the laughter around each word.
K laughed too, but I couldn’t gauge the timbre, the import of that laugh.
“So God made a miracle for you.”
The words that came out of my mouth had a familiar ring. But these words were someone else’s. Not mine. I heard sarcasm in those words, a sarcasm that belonged to someone else. Who had told me those words?
“The shamesh told you,” K said. “And where is he?” K looked at his pocket watch, one he may have had from before World War I, and then to the door. “That’s the shamesh’s position: ‘There is no attic.’ But there was an attic when I was there. Either that or I was living on thin air.”
“A miracle,” I repeated. I said it gently, bemusedly, admiringly. “How did you get up there?”
“A ladder.”
“Whose?”
“Jacob’s.”
I wanted to ask him if he met any angels descending as he climbed up.
“You ask how I got up into the attic. It’s not so simple. It’s like asking how one gets to the fifth floor of a three-story building…. Do you know The Guide of the Perplexed?”
“Not well.”
“In it, Maimonides writes that only a small, serpentine letter marks the difference between ‘comic’ and ‘cosmic.’ If you look at my story from a cosmic point of view, it’s not too strange at all. The light we see from the moon is one and a half seconds old. But the light we see from some stars is already millions of years old. In some cases, the light we see is shining from a star long dead. When we look up at the sky we look back in time. If you are aware, you see how the parameters we normally deal with are mixed up. Do you see?”
I said yes, but I didn’t see.
“And more, there is a force in the world called ‘dark energy,’ which accelerates the expansion of the universe.”
“I remember you once told me that you are blessed with dark energy. So what’s the connection?”
“It’s this dark energy that helped me get into the attic.”
“But you said the Germans came looking for you.”
“Yes.”
“How did they get there?”
K leaned forward. He brought his face close to mine. His lips became thin. Anger suffused every pore of his face.
“How did they get everywhere? How did they spread like a cancer to every village, every town, every city, street, alley, and lane in Europe? How did they get to every house, cellar, attic? Who taught them such organizational skills? Does water have to be taught to run downhill? Do cows have to be taught to come home from the meadow? In a village in Bohemia, on a trip with Brod, I once saw a cowherd bringing the cows back from a day in the fields. Once he was in the main street, it was like a magic show — each cow, on its own, branched off into a side street, into its own yard, like a worker returning home. If you like, you can call the Germans’ power of searching, sniffing out, finding, instinct. Their penchant for evil. How else did they get to every house, cellar, attic?”
“Not by Jacob’s ladder.”
K moved his head a bit to the left, a bit to the right, hard to say if agreeing or not. Perhaps his gesture said: I do not know.
He took a breath and said, “If you noticed, I spoke Czech to Eva, not German, the language we were all educated in. Since the war I do not let those execrable sounds cross my lips.” He stopped for a moment, then continued: “When they talk of miracles, survivors always say, It was a miracle I came through alive. But you also have to consider anti-miracles, the negative side, events and incidents powered by an infernal machine. Theirs. The anti-miracle. Like death and murder, which for them was ordinary. Usual. While for us, life, survival, was extraordinary.” He nodded and said, “Yes.”
“Then what did you do to avoid them?”
“To repel them I cast at them a spark of impenetrable darkness. In that spark there was enough light energy to drive out those dark, evil forces.”
“And you were able to survive there in the dark? With no windows, no natural light?”
“Yes. No natural light. Do you know the verse in the first chapter of Genesis, where God says: Ye-hee or! Let there be light?”
“I do.”
“It wasn’t the light of the sun, remember. The sun wasn’t created yet. It is a special light, a divine light. A light that was no light. The sort of day that wasn’t day and wasn’t night.”
“Then what made the light?”
“The sheymes. The loose torn pages from prayer books and other holy texts that contain God’s name. Because of their sanctity they cannot be thrown out, so they are either buried or stored. There were hundreds of them up there in the attic. They prompt a strange kind of bioluminescence, like the dying elephants of Africa whose tusks glow in the dark as they go instinctively to their secret burial grounds. The light doesn’t necessarily come directly from the sheymes because they don’t like to reveal themselves, but their light glows elsewhere, in different spots, like a referred pain, which does not come from the place of the hurt but from somewhere else. Do you follow?”
“No.”
“Yes,” said K and nodded, as if saying: I’m glad you’re getting it.
“Okay,” I said. “That’s the cosmic point of view. What about the comic?”
K smiled. “Read my ‘Metamorphosis.’”