“Maybe a moment of madness, which even Klopstock, loving you as a friend, admiring you, overwhelmed by your miraculous cure, acquiesced to.”
“That’s what it was. Undoubtedly. Maybe a moment of madness. But I hurt many people with that moment of madness, most of all my beloved friend Max…” K stopped, gazed at me, somewhat shyly, it seemed to me, and added, “When I met Brod I apologized to him.”
“You saw Brod again?”
“Maybe I’ll tell you some other time.”
And he smiled, in a good mood again.
Like a desire, that good mood of his sent a warm feeling through me. Perhaps I could ask him again. My argument would be: Filming you would be like undoing your mistake. It would help explain to yourself why you did what you did. It would undo your regrets. But K sensed what was going through me and I saw the subtle transformation on his face. It became stiff, suspicious.
K had me. I kept silent.
But other plans, inchoate still, but schemes nevertheless, were whirring through my brain like wild winds.
30. Quandary
I was seeing K practically every day and he still eluded me.
I was torn between ambition and politesse; goals and mentchlikhkeyt, simple decency; the drive for a world-resonating scoop and my affection for K and my desire to protect his privacy. What do I do?
Sometimes I felt like a character out of a book — torn, not between ambition and politesse, but torn as if torn from pages of a book, torn out of that novella, Ladies and Gentlemen, the Original Music of the Hebrew Alphabet, where Isaac Gantz, an instructor of musicology, wants to get the manuscript of the music of the Hebrew alphabet from a poor, lonely, crippled Holocaust survivor, and finally make a name for himself and perhaps get tenure at his two-bit college.
Me, it wasn’t tenure I was after or a one-day halo of fame. What I was getting at was the entire rainbow — and then that word, shaped like a rainbow in my mind, brought back the other rainbow, the first rainbow I was hoping for, another person who was eluding me, the lovely Katya — a rainbow spanning east to west, in glorious Technicolor, sunrise and sunset at once, the cosmos spinning on my fingertip.
So what do I do? How do I preserve for posterity this living legend, in all caps or in italics, if not through chicanery? Then it caught me, that word. It caught and shamed me. I stopped, beheld my eyes behind and above me like a searchlight and, blinded by the beam, beheld myself. Is chicanery the only path? What is the correct path for a man to choose? asks the Ethics of the Fathers.
Had I met Rashi in Troyes, Maimonides in Fez, Mozart in Vienna, Mark Twain or Sholom Aleichem in New York long after their recorded death, wouldn’t I have raced to my camera and started the film rolling? Shoot first, ask questions later is not only a Special Forces order, it’s the photographer’s First Commandment.
Do we owe any debt to history — that is, to the future, to the public at large? Or is anything that is considered historically important discovered by a man of flesh and blood tainted with ego, the self-aggrandizement and ambition of the historian, the mediator between historic/legendary figures and the public?
In short, is the correct path ethical consideration or historical truth? And if precedent is our teacher, the guide that holds a single candle to light our way through darkness, we have Max Brod with K’s manuscripts willed to flames, but saved. Because Max was true to history, to literature, to K himself.
I should consult someone, I thought. Talk it over. Get the ethical slant from someone slightly removed. But with whom? I wish I had a rebbe to consult like Dora’s father. I had no friends here. And anyway, no matter how good, how objective the advice, no stranger, no friend, can make such a crucial and — in my case — life-changing decision for someone else.
And there was yet another quandary, a quandary wrapped in an enigma, to paraphrase (wrongly, you’ll say, and right you’ll be) Churchill’s famous phrase about the Soviet Union: in the very articulation of my ethical quandary, I’d be revealing, perforce I’d have to reveal, the details of my amazing discovery. What a trade-off!
In the attempt to gain peace of conscience, I would compromise my intellectual proprietorship, give up my scoop. Unless, somehow, I could cloak the ethical conundrum in a different garb, disguise the players, use cunning, otherspeaking, wield a magic wand and cast facts into parable, truth into fable.
And maybe, in trying to be as objective as possible, in trying to look at myself at a remove, maybe in seeking advice, I was subconsciously wishing to slough off the responsibility for my plan of action by, if not having an outsider make the decision for me, then at least nudging me this way or that. Another voice is good; always good is another voice. Even kings and presidents have advisors.
But then again, I thought, why consult? Why listen to other voices? I had other voices in plenitude in me. Proven by my quavering wavering from this side to that. In fact, so many were the voices, each with a different opinion and slant, I could have opened my own consultation service. One voice, you know this one, said, Go ahead. Its opposite, this one you know too, said, Don’t. Not too exciting these voices, right? Not voices that shatter glass or make you inhale suddenly with astonishment. No subtle variations; neither glorious bel canto nor sultry contralto. No surprising trills or miraculously sustained high notes. Just a monotonous, mundane Yes or No.
And in between — nuanced signals, many of them flying a little breeze-blown banner. But on the other hand… No wonder Harry Truman — sick of economic advisors who said, On the one hand we should do this, but on the other hand — quipped, Will you please find me a one-armed economist?
As my pendulum swung between Yes and No, I decided to postpone a decision for a couple of days. I needed time to think it over (even though one part of me, the larger part to be sure, already knew what the ultimate decision would be — I may be nice and kind and ethical, but I was nobody’s fool), for this was a matter that had historic echoes and ramifications. Page-one news: FILMMAKER DISCOVERS K ALIVE. But as I reread the headline in my mind, my stomach sank. It smacked of the National Enquirer, not the New York Times. Perhaps I would have to get a new headline writer.
But then my decision was put on hold because I was distracted by someone. Not only is the world at large full of surprises; one’s little world has them too.
31. The Letter
The next morning I went with my camera bag to the morning service in the Al-tnigh. When everyone was departing, I asked the shamesh:
“May I stay here alone for a while to meditate?”
“Fine with me.” Then he laughed. “But don’t let me catch you going up to the attic.”
I laughed too.
Yossi, standing near me, smiled. “So he wants to meditate,” he said.
“Yes, meditate. Alone,” the shamesh said. “Maybe the attic will magically appear.”
They’re starting again, went through my mind. But I’m going to keep my cool.
“Or maybe the golem,” said Yossi.