Avram by James C. Clar
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Avram by James C. Clar
In the oldest part of the city stands the once-grand National Library. There, in the basement reading room, I saw Avram Yandek for the first and the last time. (And I use the verb advisedly). It was a cold morning. Despite their persistent knocking and humming, the radiators in the room gave off little actual heat. Yandek sat at a small table beneath a feeble and flickering lamp. The old man was surrounded by books that looked as though they had not been opened for centuries. He caressed the spine and edges of the one he was currently holding with affection, even reverence.
After nodding to the librarian at her desk, I sat down next to the man whose name I was quickly to learn. He had piqued my curiosity, to be sure, but my decision to sit where I did was dictated by the fact that it was the only other unoccupied chair in that dim, often-neglected section of the library. The fact that the room was unaccountably full that day turned out to be the least remarkable aspect of my experience.
At first, I was certain that he hadn’t noticed my arrival. He never shifted his gaze to meet mine. I studied his face. It was gaunt and looked as though it had been carved from the very stone and granite of the library itself.
“Pardon me,” I said in nearly a whisper. “I don’t mean to disturb you, but there is nowhere else to sit.”
Still, Yandek didn’t look up. If my initial thought was that he was blind, I was beginning to consider the possibility that he might also be deaf. After a pause that seemed to last an eternity, he spoke.
“You needn’t pretend to speak to me … My name is Avram Yandek and, I am, in reality, invisible.”
That seemingly outrageous statement was delivered with neither the arrogance of an individual who thought himself extraordinary nor with the fervor of the madman. It was stated simply as a matter of fact. If he had told me what he had eaten for breakfast that morning the inflection and tone would have been the same. I waited for the man sitting across from me to continue, but the silence fell over us like dust from the thousands of books moldering above and around us.
“Invisible? I finally asked, unable to stop myself from doing so.
“Yes,” Yandek replied, he lifted his gaze and, for the first time, looked directly at me. His eyes seemed fathomless, dark and reflective like water in a deep well illuminated obliquely by the cold rays of the moon. “I walk among men and listen to their voices and yet,” he seemed to pause for effect, “they do not see me.”
I hesitated for what seemed yet another eternity. I was unsure, frankly, how to respond. Should I humor him or challenge the utter absurdity of his claim? At last, I said simply, “But I see you now.”
Yandek smiled with what seemed like pity or the patient affection of a grandparent for a particularly obtuse child.
“You believe you do, but that is only because I’ve allowed it. In this place, at this time and by you, I am willing to be seen. Once you leave this room, and over time, you will forget me. I will become as invisible to memory as I am to sight.”
I restrained myself from replying that what he was describing struck me as the normal operation of human memory and forgetting. Still, there was a hypnotic quality to his words as well as a tone of absolute conviction that compelled me to refrain from offending the man.
“How did you acquire this … ‘invisibility’?” I did my best to hide any trace of skepticism from my voice.
Yandek leaned back in his chair. “I will tell you, but if you doubt the veracity of my former assertion, there is little chance that you will believe what I am about to tell you now.”
“Perhaps you misjudge me,” I replied. “But in any case, I should very much like to hear your story.
“Very well,” Yandek began. “It was more years ago than I can remember. I worked as a minor functionary in a meaningless government office the precise name of which eludes me. My job was insignificant. My life utterly, benignly forgettable. I got up, arrived at work, filed and stamped papers, exchanged inane pleasantries with my more-or-less anonymous coworkers and took my lunch at the same time every day. If you were to ask those with whom I worked to tell you about me, the most they might do would be to shrug. They knew of my presence, to be sure, but certainly not of my existence.”
The man paused briefly. He placed the book he was holding on one of the piles that lay near his elbow before continuing.
“One evening, after another day of tedium, I found myself in a small bookshop I had somehow never noticed before. It was at the end of a narrow lane I had walked for decades, tucked between a druggist’s shop and a taxidermist. The owner, a man whom I had never met, greeted me with an expression which seemed to say – ‘I have been expecting you’. Without preamble, he handed me a thin, leatherbound book of obvious antiquity.”
“Did you open it?” I asked with more than a little impatience.
“Before I could do so,” Yandek explained, “the bookseller told me that the volume was blank. There was nothing whatsoever written in it.”
As I was about to ask another question, the man across from me spoke once more.
“The shop owner offered me a fountain pen. ‘Once you write your name anywhere in the book, you will begin to disappear from the world. It won’t happen all at once, of course. People will forget the sound of your voice. Then, over time, they will forget the contours of your face. Finally, they will forget you ever existed. At that point, your name will likewise disappear from the book’.”
The man named Avram Yandek paused once more. I re-considered the possibility that he was mad after all. Soon, however, he spoke again. Once more his quiet conviction made me desire to hear the rest of his story, no matter how incredible or outlandish it seemed.
“I did it. I wrote my name in the book. I’m not sure why. It may only have been curiosity but, in the years since, I believe it was because I secretly desired to be free of the burdens of this world … the burdens, if you will, of being ‘known’. At first, nothing seemed to happen. But then slowly, inexorably, my neighbors no longer greeted me, my colleagues failed to notice my absence from the office. My reflection in the mirror every morning as I shaved began to grow dimmer, less definite until, one day, it disappeared. I had become invisible.”
“And now,” I asked with a mixture of real concern and more than hint of mocking, “do you regret your decision?”
Yandek’s gaze grew even more distant as he responded.
“At times I do. But I’ve discovered there is a certain freedom in being invisible. I move about not only unseen but unremembered. I know things, secrets, that no one else could ever know. I have, as you can well imagine, witnessed scenes of unparallelled beauty as well as those of abject horror. In a way, I have learned the inner workings of the world, the warp and weft of things. What Melville wrote of the cabin boy on the Pequod is true also of me. I have ‘seen God’s foot on the treadle of the loom’. In sum, I’d say that my decision has been worth it.”
It would be hard to describe my reaction to Yandek’s words. I had a thousand questions. I wanted to challenge him, ask for proof. Dismiss him outright. At one point, I almost laughed in his face. In the end, civility outweighed my incredulity.
“Yet, you have ‘revealed’ yourself to me. You are still sitting here – visibly – across from me!”
“For the moment,” he whispered. “But, as I said, when you leave here today you will already have begun to forget that you saw me, spoke with me. You will forget, in fact, that I was ever here.”
I suddenly felt a chill that was not due entirely to the temperature of the room in which we sat. Yandek’s story and the outré logic it had woven around us had begun to oppress me. I rose from my chair, desperate to escape this room, this man. I turned and, without uttering another word, fled the library.
The next day, unaccountably, I found myself back in the reading room. It was, as usual, nearly unoccupied. There was no sign of Avram Yandek. The table where the two of us had sat was empty.
I approached the librarian.
“Excuse me,” I said. “Do you perhaps recall what the older man across from whom I was sitting yesterday morning looked like?” I pointed toward the other side of the room, moderately disturbed that I could not quite recall Yandek’s features. “It was at that table, the one over right over there.”
The librarian looked at me with a puzzled yet sympathetic expression. She took off her glasses and began to clean them distractedly with the sleeve of her blouse.
“I’m sorry, sir,” she responded, “I distinctly recall you sitting at that table, but you were alone the entire morning. The chair across from you was empty. You may have forgotten. I found it a little odd, to be honest. After all, yesterday was our busiest day in months and that particular chair was the only one unoccupied. It remained so for most of the day.”
* * * * THE END * * * *
Copyright James C. Clar 2025
My goodness, James. Your oh so brief story is a powerful metaphor for the insignificance and the virtual invisibility of the human species. And so welll written, too Thank you for sharing it with your readers. I look forward to more fiction from you. Good luck in future.