K really had me. I couldn’t even discuss my doubts, never mind the ethics of secretly videoing him, with anyone lest, if his story was true, I would betray his secret.
Then it dawned on me that one crucial question could be answered by Eva, who had probably known him for years.
The piano sounds had stopped. I went out to the kitchen, where she now was sitting reading a newspaper. I thanked her for her friendly welcome and, without even giving myself a chance to catch my breath, asked:
“Do you by any chance happen to know how old the gentleman is?”
“No. I don’t. But he’s certainly older than me,” and she laughed.
She knew I wasn’t going to ask her age.
“But, in any case, I make it a practice to protect the privacy of people who live here. You should really ask him yourself.”
“It isn’t polite.”
She smiled at me an admonishing smile, scolding me pleasantly.
“Neither is it polite to ask behind someone’s back.”
I had to admit she was right. But her attitude closed the door to any further personal questions.
Then she was back to her smiling, grandmotherly mode. “Look, since you waited so long, why don’t you wait another fifteen minutes? Why take a chance on missing him? And meanwhile I’ll make you some lunch.”
“That’s what I’ve been telling myself the past two hours. And no lunch, thanks.”
“You know what? Try just another fifteen, twenty minutes. Maybe they will be beneficial.”
“Okay.” I sat in K’s room, my mind a blank, staring at K’s old framed print of a wheat field, fearful that my staring might shift the angle of the frame and cause K discomfort. I ran out of fingers and toes counting the fifteen-minute chunks of time I’d lost.
Suddenly an idea popped into my head. Inspect K’s shem. Bottom drawer. Perhaps this is why Jiri sent me here. To get the shem. Jiri liked me and wanted to reward me. I imagined K standing in front of his chest of drawers, his back pressed against it, as if to say: Nothing doing — guarding his treasure like the fiery angel with the revolving sword who guarded the Garden of Eden to prevent the exiled Adam from returning.
But now I was drawn to that chest of drawers like a nail to a magnet. A wave of enchanted desire swept over me. Pulled me forward a force greater than my power of resistance. I wanted to, I had to see that piece of parchment. I wanted to hold it, inspect it, gaze at it, get my fill of it. But a strange thing happened. Not that I ever watch horror movies or suspense shows on TV, but sometimes as you switch channels you catch a moment of suspense or horror and an odd feeling begins on the nape of your neck and rills down your spine and a fright as though you’re in mortal danger overwhelms you. That’s what happened to me.
As I drew closer to the drawer I heard a hum: something vibrating. A combination of sound and touch. An electric thrum. The sound you hear on electric wires or telegraph lines in the countryside with total silence all around. First I heard it, then I felt it in my body, as if a tuning fork had been pressed against me and I caught its vibrations and moved in sympathy with it. And then the tinge of vibrating pain, first mild, uncomfortable, a subliminal pain, then stronger, as if I were holding on to a live wire or my finger were pressed into a bulb socket. A painful electric shock, a burn that made me step back quickly.
I looked to the door. No one. In one swift movement, as I imagine taking the shem, K enters and says calmly:
“But it is inefficacious.”
“What is?”
“Please don’t pretend.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Yes,” he says. That frustrating Yes of his.
“What are you talking about?”
“The shem in your pocket. In your hand. It is only a blank parchment.”
“But I didn’t take it.”
“Yes.”
I looked at him.
“But you thought of taking it.”
I was tempted to say that Yes of his.
“Take it out. You will see that it is blank.”
From out of my pocket I took the parchment I thought of taking but didn’t take.
“See?” he said.
It was blank.
K said, “It only works for me.”
Thinking of the shem, I recalled telling K once:
“You were so lucky to have that shem to sustain you.”
He said he was fortunate, doubly blessed. “You see, I have two of them,” he said with a soft shyness that was not characteristic of him.
And then he said something that made him sound like a faith healer, a spiritual guide. But it wasn’t facile, gimme-a-donation TV spirituality. He spoke out of experience. He meant what he said.
“You know what I learned over the years. Everyone has a shem in him. You just have to know where it’s hidden, where to find it.”
At once I moved my tongue in my mouth, exploring, like someone searching for a canker sore. I touched my upper lip, the upper palate. I went above my front teeth to the gum line, below my lower teeth, to the inside of my cheeks. I stretched the limits of the tip of my tongue, curled it, again searched the roof of my mouth, probed all around as far back as it could go. But I found nothing. Where could it be? I wondered. Maybe it wasn’t in my mouth at all. Who said the shem had to be in one’s mouth? But where else could it be? It wasn’t on my forehead. For if it were it would have been obvious to outsiders and plucked off long ago. If I had a shem, perhaps it was somewhere else. Maybe it couldn’t be found that easily. Maybe, like a magic elixir, one had to search hard and long before one discovered it. And maybe, like the fountain of youth, you had to search all your life only to discover, finally, when you looked in the mirror and were shocked, that it didn’t exist, but that, nevertheless, the search for it and the confidence that one had a shem was the blessing.
I turned to follow the singing sunshine in the room. Saw K’s writing table. Its one drawer was slightly open, like a woman’s parted lips, signaling, hinting at invitation. I stood; the chair moved behind me. Remembering K’s penchant for neatness and order, I brought the chair back carefully to its original position. I drew near the table, then backed away, pretending I was thinking about my next move but knowing that I would open the drawer. Without even turning, confident that K was nowhere near, I opened the drawer some more.
Jiri’s letter lay there, part of a packet of his letters held together by a rubber band. I recognized Jiri’s handwriting. Did K leave the drawer open on purpose? To tempt me? Test me? To see if I had learned my lesson or if I was an incorrigible recidivist?
At once — and you can’t imagine how quickly: as quick as movie frames, each of which is a still photo, running through a projector— at once the scenario for my film changed. Soon as I saw Jiri’s letter it changed. My film would not open with the statue of the Maharal in Prague’s Town Hall. The film would reflect my beginnings with Prague in New York. It would open with the building where my first encounter took place, the Eldridge Street shul. The image, in black and white, would linger, silently, like a long sustained note. I would video the synagogue from a roof across the street and capture its elegant Moorish, Romanesque, and Gothic façade. The audience would see the synagogue longer than they would normally have patience for, and with no commentary. Next I’d talk about Jiri and tell his story.