“Jiri,” said Mr. Klein.
At once I saw his face pale for an instant, followed by a slight flush, a bit of discoloration by the roots of his hair and on his scalp. One nostril flared. What have I done? I reproached myself. Maybe I shouldn’t have brought him up?
I told him how I befriended Jiri and about the affection between us.
“How was he feeling when you saw him?” Mr. Klein put his hand on his heart as though expecting sad news. I looked at his face, noticed for the first time his long black, youthful eyelashes.
“Good, last time I saw him.” A surge of fright rushed through me. I felt my face reddening. “Then I had to go out of town for a while and then I came here.”
I was babbling and I knew it.
Mr. Klein drew closer. Again that high color on his forehead. He looked me in the eye, then up over my head.
“He’s dead, isn’t he?” he said in a low but firm voice that hinted: do not contradict me.
What should I say now? I had given Eva my word I would not mention Jiri’s death. In fact, I myself hadn’t been absolutely sure until Yossi golem confirmed it.
“He was all right when I left. Why don’t you ask Yossi or Eva? They have some links to him.”
“They want to spare me sorrow. But I know.”
“How do you know?”
“I look at Eva’s face. At yours.” Which he did as he spoke, reading me like pristine Greek, from right to left, then left to right. “One knows these things without being told. Faces have music, you know. And I hear that sad music on Eva’s face. I can read the notes on little lines vibrating on her face when she talks to me, notes that spell out the Kaddish melody. Now on your face too. Lips lie. Eyes don’t.”
Mr. Klein’s face now clouded with sorrow. I stared down at the edge of the Bokhara carpet on the wooden floor. I wanted to cover the sad music on my face, the Kaddish notes in my eyes, but I could not.
“How can you be so sure?”
He looked through my eyes into the screen of my retina and said slowly:
“A father can tell.”
I felt a blow on my head. My brain rattled, my equilibrium atilt. Mr. Klein, Jiri’s father? How could that be? First of all, they looked nearly the same age. Secondly, they didn’t even have the same family name. The only contiguity between Klein and Krupka-Weisz was the letter K. They didn’t even look alike.
“You’re Jiri’s father?”
“Yes.”
He’s delusional, I thought. Lots of crazy claims here in Prague. Karoly Graf, K’s son; Klein, Jiri’s father. What’s wrong with these people? I felt I had stepped into a wrong room in a rehearsal studio. I better back into the hallway and enter again. Maybe the play I had chanced into would change and I would be in another story. Or perhaps I should commandeer one of the little napkin boats that Danny K had set sail and head for a less absurdist port? I looked up again at Mr. Klein’s model aeroplanes. Don’t get any ideas, I imagined him saying.
“Even without reading the music in one’s eyes and voice, a father can tell. I felt it in my heart, a twinge, a rush of pain into my head, the moment he died. On—”
And Mr. Klein mentioned the day and date I had spoken to Patient Information at Beth Israel. But it still didn’t jibe. How can Mr. Klein be Jiri’s father when Jiri himself told me he was eighty? Could Jiri have made himself older than he really was? Not likely. Especially since he remembered seeing the Czech writer, Arnošt Lustig, as a baby in the late 1920s. If Mr. Klein’s assertion is true, he has to be over… No. Impossible.
Then again I spoke without thinking.
“May I ask how old you are?”
“Yes.”
So I asked again.
Mr. Klein’s response was, “Sixty-nine, almost seventy.”
Again I had crossed the boundary. Once more I was in the never-never land of Jiri and Betty’s language, in a world where numbers were listed alphabetically and alphabets were circular.
Mr. Klein knew I would ask; I saw his eyes twinkling. I could not resist; I succumbed.
“How is it possible for a father to be younger than his son?”
“Yes.”
“Jiri told me he was eighty.”
“Yes.”
“And you say you’re sixty-nine.”
“Almost seventy.”
“Can you explain?”
“Yes.”
I waited.
Mr. Klein didn’t explain.
We sat in the room, looking at each other. A few minutes ago it felt as if we didn’t have anything to talk about, like strangers meeting. Now we had plenty to talk about. But Mr. Klein would have to do the talking. The silence hummed; not like the anticipatory silence Haydn creates between passages, an arc between one lovely melody and another. Here the silent hum soon became oppressive. It didn’t seem to bother Mr. Klein that he was ignoring my question.
Finally, as the silence stretched like a rubber band about to snap, he said:
“Too complicated.”
The tone of finality to his remark, like an auctioneer’s hammer blow, did not invite further exploration. He put both hands out, all ten fingers outspread. Mr. Klein had a wide vocabulary with very few words. His hands, eyes, tone of voice, were his extended speech. If he wanted to elaborate, fine. If not, I wouldn’t ask. That’s it. I had asked enough. Maybe he would tell me some other time. I looked at Mr. Klein. Yes, he looked eighty, just about Jiri’s age, maybe even younger. But if indeed he was Jiri’s father, he — no! Could Mr. Klein really be over one hundred? He had to be, unless he had fathered Jiri at nineteen. And walk up a hill in that consistent faux-speedy fashion? It didn’t add up. Something was wrong here.
For the last couple of months I found myself in a world where the edges were fuzzy and boundaries between real and dream fluid. Then the Altneushul shamesh told me the fabled attic did not even exist. And that lovely girl in the blue beret gone into the mist. Then a woman suddenly plays a clone duet of a Bach gigue with a recording. And now a man who claims to be sixty-nine tells me he’s the father of my late eighty-year-old friend, Jiri.
I just hope the someone who’s videoing me caught my facial expressions when Mr. Klein made that statement.
I leaned forward in my chair.
“When I saw you from the balcony the other night at the concert, I had a hunch you’d be an interesting man. But I didn’t know you’d be mesmerizing.”
Mr. Klein’s response was a glowing smile, like a girl praised for her wit and beauty.
“Yes,” he said, stroking his Van Dyke once.
If Mr. Klein’s assertion that he was Jiri’s father was true — and if true, what a chapter in my film; another surprising twist in the narration ongoing in my head — it explained, perhaps, why Jiri and Betty wove that strange language around me. Maybe Jiri wanted to tell me he was going to send me to his father, and Betty, for some mysterious reason, was attempting to dissuade him from revealing this. Now that I think of it, yes, indeed, it must have been so, for when Betty went to the bathroom in Jiri’s hospital room and left me alone with him, he said something about how important it would be for me to meet someone in Prague. I distinctly remember Jiri saying the word “my” and then he closed his eyes. Did he want to say “my father” just as a spell of weakness came over him?
Also, could tara pilus and tara glos — too young and too old— have some relevance here? Was Mr. Klein the one who was too old? And too old for what? Too old to reveal his age to me?
What else did Jiri and Mr. Klein share beside the first letter of their last name? Love of literature and—?
Wait. How about head gear? Jiri, like his putative dad, also wore a beret.
I know I’m groping. But even if you’re up against a smooth wall you still grope. And pray outlandish prayers, like wishing the tips of your fingers were suction cups. If I had a father who was, or even claimed to be, over one hundred, I would stand on a truck with a bullhorn and drive slowly around town blathering the news at the top of my lungs. If Mr. Klein were my father, at one hundred plus, I’d let everyone know. I’d be proud, not secretive, of my healthy old papa.