Another two decades pass.
One spring day in 1974, I try to sketch Hansi for the first time in years, but my hands can no longer find the shape and substance of him. He has slipped away from me forever, and even worse, I feel as though I’ve invented our childhood together, as if all the people who gave my life its form—Isaac and Vera most of all—never existed.
That night, however, I get up to go to the bathroom at three in the morning. I flip on the light. And there he is staring back at me from the mirror above the sink. “Hansi,” I say, as if it is the most natural thing in the world to greet him.
Then I grow frightened; I remember that he’s dead. Yet there he is: his thin face, his silken hair, his questioning eyes. I can feel our neighborhood in Berlin pulsing around us both, waiting for us to grab our coats and dash outside. I can even smell the hops from the Schultheis Brewery and hear a cello playing softly in the distance. After all my searching, I know now that he has been hiding in the most obvious place all along. And helping the bees do their work inside me.
* Published in English as The Last Kabbalist of Lisbon.
The Seventh Gate Page 61