Curt Leviant - Kafka's Son

She spoke slowly, the tall blonde. She was about thirty, with an angular face and two long, curved lines in her cheeks from her nostrils to her lips. Not the sort of woman that made heads swivel as men passed her on the square. What exigency had made her, a grown woman, do this sort of coolie work? Then I saw a dictionary sticking out of her bag. The words traveled from the pages, filtered through leather, cloth, and skin and infiltrated her synapses, where an odd short-circuiting took place.

“Your boss grabs?”

“Overling grabs me. He grabs overthing and underwhere. Big eyes. Underling like me caput. I am flamed.”

“Aha. Now I overstand. Your overling oceans everything, all the underlings, grabs underthings, overwear?”

“Yes. With big eyes. Grabs me everywhere.”

“The swine.”

“Eyes all over. He oceans all the plakat-holders. Grabs me conversationing with you, he flames me. I need job. Please. I have no desire…” She stopped. “To be flamed.”

I studied the program on her chest and said:

“On the one arm, I don’t want you to be fired either. But on the other arm, I have no desire to hear music by Benda, Koželuch, Zelenka, and Reicha…”

She smiled. Looked at me for a moment with her sad eyes. Maybe she didn’t understand I had refused her. Was she waiting for a message from, as the Yiddish had it, her words-book?

“You possess top of stepladder Czech compositor pronouncification,” she said flirtatiously.

Now she pulled out her dictionary and consulted.

“You double-Czech word?” I asked.

“No. Verb. To look for cinnamon for ‘farewell.’ One moment.” She licked her forefinger in the European manner as she moved from page to page. “Oho. Okay. Please. If you no overstand verb ‘farewell’ I prostitute other verb: ‘So long.’ Please, so long a ticket for concert for me, othersmart I be burned.”

I bowed my head. “With extreme mournfulness and grand regretification, I no farewell ticket. I no want to so long ticket. I am leaving now. Good-purchase!”

At once the little gleam exited the blonde’s eyes. She turned abruptly and walked into the crowd. I too turned to see if I could find her boss. Maybe he would know where the girl in the blue beret had gone. But in the crush of people I couldn’t tell overling from tourist. Then it dawned on me: there was no boss. It was just a standard tactic used by the ticket sellers to make a sale.

I stood before another placard-holder, a bearded fellow with long hair. Maybe he would remember a pretty coworker. But he didn’t know her either.

“Don’t you all work for the same company?”

“Are you kidding?” He laughed. “We are all competitors. Sellers of tickets to the great Mozart Hall, the Dvořák Hall, the Rudolf-inium, the small churches.”

“But she’s been here, in this part of the square. I’ve seen her a few times.”

“People come and go often in this job. The pay isn’t so good, you know. A salesgirl might even quit in the middle of a conversation with you. Like this.”

And he walked away.

What kind of absurd joke was this? I wondered. Had he somehow rehearsed this scenario and waited, God knows how long, for it to be realized? I watched him move to another spot. I shook my head, still incredulous.

Not far from the K Museum stood a young man just where the girl in the blue beret had been days before. I wanted to imagine it was she but I couldn’t bend reality. I didn’t have the magic to turn a balding twenty-five-year-old into the lovely girl in the blue beret.

“Excuse me, but do you know a girl who used to work here carrying a placard? A girl from Georgia who wore a blue beret?”

“Georgia? No. But there did used to be a girl here… You know her name?”

“No. Was she pretty?”

“Yes. Very.” And he smiled as if remembering the girl in the blue beret. “Blue beret, you say? Well, maybe she did.”

“Ah, good. Finally getting somewhere. Do you know how I can reach her?”

“No. She left.”

“Left?”

“Yes. Left.”

“You mean she’s gone?”

“Gone. Left. Same meaning. Is English your native tongue?”

I disregarded his question, which may have had sarcastic undertones.

“Gone? Like altogether gone?”

“Yes,” he said testily. “Like they say in America, gone gone.”

“Gone gone where?”

“How should I know? Maybe back home. Lots of students work here from different countries, then they get homesick and go home for a while.”

“Did she say where she was going?”

“No. And I didn’t know her that well. And who says that — with-out a name — that we talk about the same person.”

“Is she coming back?”

“If the she is the same she in your half of the conversation as is the she in mine, I don’t know. She just said she was leaving. Maybe she didn’t even say she was leaving and just left.”

“She worked for your company, right?”

“Right, and why are you so interested in her?”

“Will your boss tell me?”

“Why should my boss tell you more than me? Why should he give you personal information about employees? We have new privacy laws. You want ticket to tonight’s concert?”

“Why? Is your overling coming toward you and you will be flamed for chatting too muchly with me?”

The chap looked at me as if I were loco. Maybe that line I had twice heard before wasn’t a ploy after all. Just a coincidence I was misreading.

Frustration needled me. I felt I had walked into a bramble bush. Why didn’t I ask her name, the girl in the blue beret? What an idiot! A golem! I had a half date with a girl whose name I didn’t know. I wanted to ask her but thought it would be intrusive. If she felt I was becoming too personal, she might turn and walk away, just like that golem I had addressed a few minutes ago. I should have gotten her name and phone number like a normal person and made a date. Well, I did have sort of a half-baked date, didn’t I? I wondered if prizes are given by social science foundations for creating new social forms.

Why did I dilly-dally, knowing in the depths of my skin that precisely this would happen — that she would slip away from me, that my lethargy — just call me Oblomov — would do me in? When it came to making my films, I was pretty forthright, even aggressive. Why not with girls? Could it be that the interest she had shown in chatting with me, in saying I looked like Danny K, was just politesse? That she wasn’t interested in me at all? I got so used to looking like thirty, I forgot that someone might see me as a man of forty, and what would a twenty-year-old girl want with a much older guy? On the other hand, the few conversations I had with her seemed to be personal, not routine, salesgirl’s talk. But who can enter another human being’s heart? We try and try but never succeed. I wished I could pull a magical dictionary out of my pocket and with several key words enter another’s heart.

Plan A didn’t work. Since I couldn’t find her on the square, I couldn’t buy another ticket from her for the concert. But that didn’t mean I couldn’t go. And so, that night, at the Dvořák Hall, although I had told her I couldn’t attend, I bought a first-row balcony seat. I didn’t consider what to say if I met her in the lobby while buying a ticket. No doubt I’d see her during intermission and make up some story about my canceled appointment. But, besides seeing her, there was another, subliminal, reason for my going. I wanted to see if she really would attend and had not sold the ticket again (as I probably would have done) and pocketed the profit.

Te hall — where Mozart had premiered his “Prague” symphony, the 38 th—was stunning: red-velvet paneling and gold lamé on the walls. From my perch I looked down into the orchestra where the girl in the blue beret should be sitting. But I couldn’t find her. I looked left and right. So she did take the money and run. Good for her. Maybe she needed it. Then a wave of applause. Soon the music would begin — Bach’s Brandenburg No. 1 and then Dvořák’s Piano Quintet — and I still am scanning the seats row by row. I still hadn’t found her. And no wonder. I kept looking for a blue beret. But why should she wear her hat indoors? Then I looked once more, and there, there, there she was, in the left front of the orchestra.