But he did not complete his thought. Instead, he pointed to an old-fashioned pen on the night table, an item I hadn’t noticed before, or, if noticed, hadn’t paid attention to.
“Write down the following.”
I pulled out a notepad from my pocket and took the pen.
In the bathroom, Betty flushed, and I prayed she would stay there a while longer, perhaps affected by a stomach cramp or two. She was washing her hands. I leaned forward.
Jiri turned his head toward the bathroom.
“Quickly,” he said. “I want you to see…” Then his eyes fluttered shut.
Now it was too late to write. And in an unconscious gesture — a move I did not analyze until later — I slipped the pen into my inside jacket pocket, out of sight.
Jiri opened his eyes again, looked at me with his mild glance, and whispered, “Amschl, Amschl.”
“Yes,” I said.
How did he know my Hebrew name? He had stepped out of the sanctuary that Sabbath two weeks or so ago when I gave the gabbai my name before my aliya to the Torah.
But once more Jiri closed his eyes and fell silent, a morose, frustrated silence — perhaps I should even say angry silence — etched on to his face.
Betty came out of the bathroom, looked at Jiri, and put an index finger to her lips.
“He’s asleep,” she said in a low voice. “Please, mister, don’t sap the little bit of strength he has. He’s not a well man. Can’t you see that? Can’t you?”
“Seems to me you’re talking to him much more than me.”
Jiri opened his eyes. He turned to Betty.
“Please.” And he made a drinking motion with his cupped hand.
Betty looked at the night table. “Where’s the water? The nurse forgot to fill the pitcher. What’s the matter with those nurses? All they do is hang around the nurses’ station and jabber.”
Then she rushed to the bathroom again.
“Come tomorrow, bruderl,” Jiri said softly. “Early. She doesn’t come until…”
“I can’t, Jiri. I teach a film course on Monday mornings… What about the old…?”
But all Jiri said was, “I hope you weren’t hurt by our language. But I hope you’ll understand someday.”
Which sense of understand did he mean? That I would someday understand that language, or that I’d understand why they used it today?
“It’s all right…absolutely fascinating… Please tell me about the old man.”
Betty returned with the water but Jiri’s eyes were shut again.
“You’re not very considerate,” she said bitterly.
Through still-closed eyes Jiri countered with, “Leave him alone.”
His remarks during Betty’s brief absence made me feel a bit better. Still, I couldn’t shake off my annoyance. Why did such a courtly, decent man use that private lingo right in front of me, shamelessly violating all standards of social politesse? It didn’t add up. Once again, I was about to share with him something about my Prague past but held back. A childish bit of getting even. Maybe next time, I consoled myself. When he clarifies that business with the old man.
I prayed Jiri would recuperate and return home soon. He was special. He was special from the moment I first saw him — tall, dignified, of princely demeanor — and heard his wise, gentle voice. Looking at him, kinships tumbled within me: father, zayde, uncle, brother.
Like other children of Holocaust survivors who had no grandparents, I missed the older people who surrounded my American-born friends, their faces beaming with love when they visited, crouching down, arms spread wide, waiting for their little grandchildren to dash into their embrace. Maybe for me Jiri was the zayde I never had.
Sad to say, I didn’t feel that way about his wife, or whatever she was. She was American, Lower East Side, crass, lowborn, simple, uncultivated. No match for him, despite her fluency in that Togo-flavored, Tagalog-spiced Ubangi Gibberish they wove like fine silken threads around me. From her I felt distant. I sensed her chill. Maybe she resented his warmth toward me. They didn’t seem to have any children and he treated me like a son or young brother — remember that sweet bruderl word? — like family. Maybe she wanted him all to herself, even though there didn’t seem to be any affection between them. To be fair, but, she devotedly cared for the much older man. And, somehow, I felt sorry for her. Yet, still, each time she left us alone, a distinct sense of relief waved through me.
“I’m going,” I said. I thought she’d say: to Prague?
“Go.”
I watched her lips. Was it my overwrought fantasy, or did I really see her mouth the words: Go to Prague, mister, go?
Still stood room the. Jiri, Betty, me in a frame freeze. Even the thin jagged jumping red lines of the monitor stopped. Into the instant video replay of my mind came all the words of that Babel tongue. All the words of that Babel tongue that comprised all sounds. All the words of that Babel tongue that comprised all sounds of all languages returned. All at once the words returned, not as hammer blows but as a massive pressure on my soul, soft walls squeezing me from all sides. And from the chrestomathy of unfathomable words, one phrase — that signature phrase — surfaced. Which then bubbled, blurted, out of me.
“Nepa tara glos,” I hissed at Betty. “I understood every word.”
It hit her like a bolt of lightning, a sudden storm wind — for her head snapped back like a dead branch on the easy chair and her eyes fluttered shut, the whites rolling as consciousness fades.
I said I understood everything. And a second later I did. What started out as bluff ended up as truth. Soon as I said those words I broke the code. I felt a surge. A flow. A current. A Rosetta Stone clicked into place in my head and at once it all made sense. The words lined up swiftly with their translations. What I read overwhelmed me. It was astonishing. Headline-grabbing. Page-one news. What a film this will make, I thought. But no one will believe it. It was too incredible. I couldn’t wait to get to Prague, and here I was still in Jiri’s hospital room, full of the secret language, its dense secret content — its dense secret content revealed.
I leaped up from my chair; better yet, the phenomenal revelation catapulted me from it. Wait a minute! What am I talking about? Was I in la-la land? There was no chair. I wasn’t sitting on a chair. I had been standing all along. Everything understood I now. No wonder they wanted to keep all this from me. I understood the language and I understood why they used it, meshing, as Jiri wished, both senses of understand. Anyone with information like that surely wouldn’t have shared it with outsiders. I would have done the same, I confess. Now I didn’t blame them for their secret language, that lingua polynuanced magnificent, that brilliantly orchestrated transcultural code.
Everything was clear now. Oh, how clear it was. Sunshine flooded my head. The clouds gone. I must get to Prague quickly. Before it’s too late. But the knowledge I now bore within me was like a forty-minute symphony, the molecules of whose notes are pressed together — to make it graphic, imagine a huge hot-air balloon compressed to golf ball size — to form a piece no longer than four seconds. Music of unbearable intensity. No sooner do you sense the first movement than the second is finishing. The tones as thick as smoke. The replay of their conversation, the torrent of words repeating in my mind overflowed like an open faucet pouring water upon water into a little cup without stop. What I held back from telling Jiri before fused seamlessly with what they didn’t want to tell me now. These two unsaids clicked together like pieces in a jigsaw puzzle.
Now I had the entire picture. I couldn’t wait to get to Prague. Oh, if only I were in Prague right now! But, alas, my torrent of understanding lasted only the four strides from the chair I wasn’t sitting on to the door. Only four seconds, as long as that supercom-pressed symphony. For as soon as I got to the door it all vanished, was vacuumed — whhsht — out of me. There, at the door, on the threshold, I promptly forgot everything. I didn’t even know what it was I forgot. It was as if I woke from a dream, knew I had a dream — was groping for words to describe the scenes and people I had just seen, but ended up clutching air, a passing shadow, grasping the edges of clouds — but remembered absolutely nothing of the dream.