“Then pretty soon all of me will be with you, and all of you will be with me, so in order to know who’s who we will have to negotiate a prisoner exchange.”
Then, reading my expression — I didn’t have to say, Don’t make fun of my tender feelings, words I indeed held myself back from saying — seeing that her flip remark had taken the wind out of me, Katya said, “I’m just kidding.” She hugged me and pressed her face to mine and said, “I’m sorry,” so softly I could hardly hear her. “I can’t wait for next Wednesday.”
She kissed me on the lips, then went, I could have sworn she was sailing, out the door. I returned to K and begged his pardon once more.
Seven days. I’d have to wait seven days to see Katya again. And a sour taste in my mouth spread to my heart. But then at once I berated myself. You fool, thank God you found the girl in the blue beret at your doorstep. Thank God you are one of the few people on Earth who knows this twentieth-century icon is alive.
Bow your head in gratitude, I commanded myself.
And I listened to the voice within me.
“Why are you bowing your head?”
“Because I am thankful I met you, and I’m thankful I met Katya. I’m grateful to have met Jiri and Yossi and Eva. And how lucky I am to discover Katya at your house.”
“If you are happy, I am happy too.”
Yes, I was happy, but my nervous system was still on edge, as if a vibrato voice were thrumming inside me. The image of the lions with their huge jaws open kept returning like an unwanted ad on the screen of my mind. I wondered if K thought about this too. Why is it that the same picture is larger than life in one man’s imagination and soon forgotten in another’s?
“Tell me, please. Why did those lions attack me? My insides are still quivering.”
“Because.”
“Because?”
“Because they felt threatened.”
I began laughing, part amused laughter, part sarcastic.
“They? Those huge lions felt threatened? By me? I thought they protect the Jewish people.”
“I’m Jewish too,” K said. “They felt threatened for me. They also protect me.”
“From what?”
“From outside incursion. You see, they sensed you wanted something of mine that I wasn’t prepared to give you. But—”
K stopped, as if cut off in mid-word.
He smiled.
“But now I am.”
My heart leaped. My prayers answered. Katya and the video.
“Where are you running?”
“To get my camera.”
“No no no. Not that. It’s something else I had in mind. We’ll talk about it when Katya comes back.”
Maybe, I figured, he’s relenting on Dora’s letter. My heart surged. The fear running through me like an alternating current abating. Good. Everything will work out.
“Tell me, dear K,” I said in a friendly, almost pleading tone, “now that we’re alone, tell me why did you really run away? I mean, you could have just refused to see me.”
“Uh-huh.”
“What do you mean by that?” I said impatiently.
“Other things happened because of that.” K brightened suddenly. “You’ll admit it was not a wasted day after all…. The synagogue and…” He gestured to the spot where Katya had stood, a sly, conspiratorial smile in his eyes.
“You planned it? Purposely?” I couldn’t help blurting out.
“Yes.”
“How did you know what I would do?”
“Do I not know you, my dear boy? We have spent quite a bit of time together, don’t you think?” There was a warm, almost fatherly, golden glow in his clear blue eyes as he said this. I thought he would put his hands on my shoulders and embrace me. “I knew you would try to find me, and Eva kept you here as long as she could until Katya was ready to leave.”
“Thank you. Thank you so much.” I stopped, swallowed, then came out with, “But I still—”
“I’m sorry. Please understand. I would like to help you, but as much as I like you I cannot go against my own nature.”
“All right,” I said half-heartedly.
“Sometimes I see things differently. If you read my work, I’m sure you are aware of that. Like Paul Klee’s famous Window Display for Lingerie, where a highly stylized woman with a helmet hat is seen from the front from her knees up, yet from the knees down, as one can tell by the seams and the back of her high high heels, she is facing the other way. That is how I sometimes see things.”
“In imagination or reality?”
“Yes.”
I looked at him.
“It’s the same thing, isn’t it?” K said.
And then I said something absurd, to match the Klee painting. “And that’s how you get out of your trouser leg you’ve put your wrong foot into, right?”
“Correct.”
“You become the Klee model and simultaneously face forward and back, a Janus in half a pair of trousers.”
K began chuckling. “You are quite clever, my boy.”
I just was hoping, praying that K wouldn’t now say to me: Now, promise me, my boy, that you will no longer pursue the idea of a film.
I would not have been able to make, or keep, that promise. But I wanted so badly to keep my other promise. To return Jiri’s letter. If only K would leave the room. And at once he seemed to read my mind, that darling man.
“Please excuse me for a moment.”
As soon as the door closed, I replaced Jiri’s letter in the drawer. At once departed the halo of heat around my pocket, gone the stone about my neck and the unease pulsing in my heart.
37. Calling Luongo
Things have got to get moving, I thought. I’ve been here long enough. I felt I was that eponymous Russian character, Oblomov, taking sixty-seven pages to get out of bed. Time was flowing over me, both quickly and slowly, as if I were atoms in some string-theory experiment, where opposite and contradictory physical laws shared the same space. I was in a slow-motion film where everything proceeded lugubriously, and yet my kinship with K was rushing forward like a raft on churning whitewater. To what else can I compare this odd feeling? I’m on a high-speed train, the countryside a blur. Still, I walk slowly, hesitantly, from one end of the lounge car to the other.
I had a plan. At first it was like an invisible seed, a nanoscopic thread. But like undersoil growth, little by little, in the tiniest of increments, it grew. Of course, I had been vaguely aware of the plan all along; it danced somewhere in the behind-the-curtains recesses of my mind. Then leaped out. Video him. Sew a small video camera inside my baseball cap, like something out of a Future Science comic strip from years ago, or maybe what CIA operatives use today — but decided against it. Tricking K in his own home wasn’t right.
But despite his impassioned plea, I decided to go ahead. To bow to the pressure of history. If I am a burglar, a bandit, a cheat, I thought, I would also be considered burglar, bandit, and cheat if I cheated posterity of this amazing turn in history. And I would be remiss to historical truth — another ethical flaw — if I did not let the world know what I knew.
I loved K. I loved him very much. But I would have to hurt him. And even though Katya had supported me, I would not tell her what I planned to do.
Everyone and everything I needed was out there, waiting for me to film. K and me, Michele Luongo, the vegetarian restaurant, all pieces in a scattered jigsaw puzzle. But the final picture, solid, neat, colorful, was in my head. Needed were a few moves to pick up the pieces and put them in place.
K waited 110, almost 111 years, for me. How much more could he wait? How much more could I wait? My time in Prague was not infinite. I knew what I had to do.