Eva opened the door. We were so happy to see each other, we embraced spontaneously.
“I missed you,” I said. “How was your journey?”
“All right,” she said, but not with her usual upbeat tone.
“Is Mr. Klein in?”
“He went out for a walk.”
For the first time something predictable, rock solid, immutable, a set order, like the old man always at home, had been broken. Come whenever you want, he had once told me. I’m always at home. So why wasn’t he at home now? Or was he at home and didn’t want to see me?
As if reading my thoughts, Eva Langbrot opened the door to K’s room.
What is it with these people that they can hear unvoiced remarks? “How long has he been gone?”
She looked up at the kitchen clock. It was 11:30. I usually came about this time and stayed till it was time for his lunch.
“Since 10:30.”
“Did he tell you where he was going?”
“No.”
“Is he usually gone this long?”
“No.”
“And you’re not worried?”
“No.”
Eva smiled at the mantra of her short answers.
Again I thought: maybe he’s not as old as he says he is. Healthy men in their eighties, even nineties, can and do go out on their own. But someone 110?
Eva walked me into his room.
“Make yourself comfortable. He should be back soon.”
Eva and I stood facing the open door to the hallway. I glanced at her and bemoaned the wasted time. For me time was like oxygen. If I’m stuck in traffic — the worst waste of time — I feel my oxygen depleted and I choke. Now precious minutes were lost. What should I do now? Wait, or go back to town? I was so much looking forward to seeing K today I had even rehearsed an apology and a speech that would make him change his mind about the film. It included letting K preview the video and cut anything he didn’t like.
Eva saw me looking at her. A moue of guilt appeared on her face, as if K’s absence was her fault. She shrugged, as though to say, Sorry, but what can I do?
Just then a girl breezed by in the doorway. Just like last time, I caught only a scant glance of her: back of her head and shoulders, swish of dark skirt. But what I caught was with a camera’s eye. I captured that fleet move and, with neural gear shifts, converted it into slow motion. It was odd. Even though she moved swiftly, the girl’s beauty moved slowly. As if a faint image of her was stripped from her and floated behind her. How shall I describe that sensation that bridged the palpable and the evanescent? Even though she had gone out of view, a transparent replica of herself had settled in my mind. I didn’t see her face, but I caught the aura of her presence, and it was enough to tease and allure me, to make me lose my focus on K for a moment. I dashed to the door but there wasn’t even a hint of her, not a faint click of a door closing, a trail to follow, a rung to a perhaps nonexistent ladder.
But my focus on K returned soon enough. Through a haze I asked Eva, still seeing that girl lighting up the haze:
“Did Mr. Klein tell you where he was going?” even though I was dying to ask another question: Who is she? Likely she was a boarder, a college girl from a small town renting a room whose location I wasn’t yet aware of. But it wasn’t nice to be nosey.
“But you already asked me that.” Eva smiled.
“I did? Sorry…and what was your answer?”
“He didn’t tell me,” is what she said.
I moved to the door, about to say goodbye.
“Where are you going?”
“To look for him.”
“Where?” A look of alarm crossed her face, as if I were intruding on a private domain.
“I don’t know. He’s an old man. He may get lost. He might fall.”
“You would be amazed at his vitality.”
“But that doesn’t make him any younger.”
“It does,” Eva said.
If I hadn’t known Eva was Jewish, I’d have assumed she was a Czech farmer woman, round-faced, well-fed, and genial. She invariably beamed. Even her hair smiled. But as she stood before me now, resolute, her arms folded on her chest, her softness vanished. Despite her affability, I now saw an elemental force in her. It probably served her well in the Resistance during the war.
Then she took my hand and guided me back into the room.
“Sit and wait as long as you wish,” she said. “He will be, he is, fine. Just don’t move anything. He can’t stand if things are moved. It’s as though he has a photographic memory. His toothbrush has to be on the right side of the sink, not the left. And he won’t eat without a tablecloth. If the tablecloth doesn’t cover the entire table, if a part of the table is bare, he won’t eat. And once he couldn’t find his shabbes glasses.”
“What’s that?”
“Glasses he uses only for the Sabbath. A fine pair of glasses with a thin, elegant gold frame. Otherwise, he won’t read. And once I moved his wastepaper basket from here,” she demonstrated, “to here. Just a foot away and he got upset…. Just wait a while longer. He’ll be back soon.”
“I understand. I don’t like my toothbrush moved either. And open windows have to be perfectly aligned.”
“Just like him.” Eva gave a broad smile. “You’re not related, are you?”
I sat down, not in K’s easy chair but on the wooden one next to his writing table where I usually sat. It moved back an inch as I sat down. I moved it forward.
“That’s right,” said Eva. “Mr. Klein is very, how you say, metic—?”
“Meticulous?”
“Yes. Meticulous. He likes everything in order, like I told you. He even combs his hair before he goes to sleep.”
“In case he meets a pretty woman in his dreams.”
“Not any pretty woman, but—”
Eva was about to say, I could swear a name was at the tip of her tongue. But she held back.
“Maybe someone he loved in the past,” I helped her.
“Could be,” Eva said.
Later, I thought about it and concluded that she wanted to say Dora — but for some reason kept still.
I didn’t think I would wait as long as I did. Every fifteen or twenty minutes I told myself, I’ll wait just ten minutes more. And every time I rose to leave, I would think, Suppose he comes back during the next few minutes and I miss him. I was dying to apologize about the Dora letter incident and then give my little speech. Then I decided: Since I waited so long, I might as well wait a bit longer.
At one point I heard a Mozart piano sonata. Probably Eva practicing.
While sitting, I was torn between curiosity, noting everything in the room — no radio I could see (perhaps he had a transistor under his pillow) and no television — and etiquette, hesitant to intrude on his privacy. Restraining myself from looking about too much, I actually felt my neck stiffen, the muscles of my hands and feet charley-horsed. How I wanted to open drawers, doors, to see how much farther I could penetrate the quiddity of K.
Then I looked at my watch. My God, it’s already twelve thirty. I stood. If I stayed longer, Eva would offer me lunch, and I didn’t want to impose. I stretched. Relaxed my tense limbs. Swiveled my neck left and right a few times. Enough. Time to go. I’ll go out and see if I can find him. Maybe he’s sitting in the park up the hill.
At the door, the recurring doubts about K’s story assailed me again. They actually crept on the skin of my hands, tiny prickles, moving goosebumps, that spread upward to my face. Could Mr. Klein be taking all the information about K, his entire gestalt, his persona, from perhaps a little-known Czech or German or Slovakian novel about K, a book perhaps entitled K’s Son or The Children of K, and it was this that fed his appetite for the grand drama, the luscious theater of his life? Could he indeed be a fraud like Karoly Graf, with his pathetic proof that he was K’s son? Too bad K couldn’t show me a birthmark on his abdomen or forearm that everyone would recognize from a well-documented source that would reveal him to be the lost princess of the classic fairy tales. Then that phrase that K had censored surfaced — about the pretty nurse, Miriam — and made me rethink Graf’s claim.