Curt Leviant - Kafka's Son

“Why they fall slow soly?” Katerina Maria asked.

“Because of poor gravity in room. I lowered gravity, increased levity.”

Katerina Maria laughed but didn’t understand a word I said.

“Do you know differdance between gravitate and levitate?” I asked.

“Differdance?”

“Like what’s the reffidance between good and bad?”

“You mean ferdidance,” she said.

“Yes.”

“No,” said Katerina Maria.

“Heavy, light,” I explained. “Sink and float. Serious and funny.”

“Too fiddicult for I.”

By now, I think she was pulling my tibia.

We stopped talking. Her body was even nicer once she unhooked the heavy cloak of her bad English. On her back, silent, her cheeks flushed, she looked good. Her breasts were full and luscious, but one nipple pointed up, the other down. If there was a message there— about English or anything else — I didn’t get it. Soon her tender touch made my sin skingle. The walls bent, shook in place, the ceiling rippled like northern lights in the sky. A long loud shriek tore out of one of us, which one I don’t know, for our eyes were closed, maybe out of both of us.

I began whispering an endearment into her ear.

“Not presently,” she said. “I am still arriving. Did you arrive?”

“Yes.”

“I too. I have arrived six multiples and am still arriving.”

But sadness was built into her, poor Katerina Maria, for afterward she immediately burst into tears.

“You are not going to ocean me anymore,” she declared.

“We’ll ocean,” I said.

She stopped crying. She looked at me and smiled.

“Know you. I affectionate the way you kiss my kitten.”

“Any clock,” I said.

“You make goodly use of your language that has gaven me best arrival I ever have.”

“Because I speak in tongues, many of them forked…. And I affectionate being naked with you, Katerina Maria.”

“And I very muchly affectionate my naked being with you.”

Suddenly, she jumped up and rummaged in her pocketbook.

“What’s the matter?”

“I possess something interesting in writing. Let me theater you.”

She showed me a little handwritten three-by-five-inch card.

“Ocean this,” said Katerina Maria.

I looked at the six-word sentence. The words reminded me of a title of one of Borges’ stories, “Tlön, Uqbar…”

“Where you achieve this?” I asked her. “And may I copy it?”

“Indeedly.” From her bag she took a pen and a piece of paper. “From goodly friendly I achieve this.”

“Know you what this means?”

She shrugged. “Is mystery. I possess not the passing-outest idea. Know you?”

“Easily,” I said. I read the words aloud slowly, with dramatic sonority. “Oth oiksis alanti ojeca postra aspo.”

“Ahh. Your baritonal declamification make me feel eroticlish.”

“I am muchly gratitudinous.” I pointed out the first word to her. “‘Oth’ is one of the iconic words in the pan-Gothic linguistic family. Know you what Goth is?”

“Indeedly. I believe in Goth. You do?”

“No no no. That’s God, not Goth. Goth is like Gothic cathedral in Old Town Square around which you carry plakat.”

“Ahh, goodly. I overstand.”

“‘Oth’ in Gothic, Ostrogothic and Visigothic means I, being, existence, everything.”

“Know you Ostrogothic too?” Katerina Maria marveled.

“Muchly. I told you I have many tongues. Ostrogothic is my second tongue after English and Albanish. And Visigothic and Gothic too. There is cunning linguistic relationboat between Ostrogothic, just plain Gothic, and Visigothic. Thusly, every goddam Goth knows ‘oth.’ Even every Ostrogoth and Visigoth, those brutes.”

“Yet you have not eclaired the meaning. Is hardly?”

“No. Is simply. It is the Goths’ demand of surrender from the Visigoths who, in turn, sent it to the Ostrogoths in their epic three-sided struggle for the domination of northern Manygerm. You see, the Goths and the Ostrogoths kept switching loyalties so often that after thirty-three years of war no one knew who was on whose side. So, at a peace conference, where they sat around a triangular table, they decided to slaughter one another. Still, there is a problem, linguistically.”

“Tell.”

“Easily. Although Gothic and Ostrogothic have same vocabulary, many words have different meanings. The note you theatered me can be read as both demand for surrender or a rejection of surrender, depending if you read it in Gothic or Ostrogothic. In Gothic, the line reads, ‘oiksis alanti ojeca,’ which means: ‘I demand you surrender or Goth death doth cometh.’ But in Ostrogoth, the same phrase, rather than demanding surrender, is Ostrogothically rendered, ‘I do not surrender for I will be all-knowing after death.’”

“You make large impressing on me with your know-shelf of many tongues,” Katerina Maria gushed. “You are indeedly very nicely. You possess affiction for books. You are very tome-ish. I affectionate to hangman around with smart, light ineffectuals as you.”

“I am honorific to repay compliment. And you, Katerina Maria, are quite lovely. Especially once you are undressed from your plakat. Your eyes are lovely, your cheeks are pinkishly lovely, your red lips, once they are silenced of that angled Manglish, are lovely. And going south on the adorable appurtenances inventory, your neck is lovely kissably, your breasts are nibblingly delicate essen, even if they point in two different directions. And like Demetrius said to his daughter, Ifeelya, ‘etcetera, etcetera, etcetera,’ down to the celestial Southern Hemisphere. And, oh my goodness, I almost forgotly: you have a massageable, menagable, garagable donkey. I would rather ride on your donkey than in any late-model-year autocar.”

Hearing such praise made Katerina Maria blush; the old girl, I couldn’t believe it, actually reddened with pleasure.

“I am so gladful my auto body is pleasant to your taste.”

“Now I must take my leave of you. Parting is such sugared sadness.”

She kissed me on the mouth before she left. “I hope to ocean you again.”

What thoughts ran through my mind during the hour or so we spent together? Although she was fun, I saw no place for Katerina Maria in my film. At least not yet. But I must admit that at the height of her ecstasy I was thinking of a placard. Not hers. The one behind which stood the girl in the blue beret.

My missing rainbow.

* But with my pen silent and the top missing I gradually forgot about the pen, using it only on occasion in my apartment (having fashioned a temporary top for it from an old ballpoint pen). Not until much later, during a seminal moment, was I reminded of it once more.

One day I found the rainbow again.

Walking up a tiny side lane from the great square, a lane I had never explored before, I saw her displaying marionettes in front of a puppet store. She held the handles in two hands and manipulated the dolls so skillfully they seemed to dance on the pavement of their own accord. My heart took a little leap.

“Aha. I found you.”

“Hello.” It played nicely, that hello. Its music friendly, that hello. A little klieg-like smile, bright and full of wattage, that lit up in me, crinkled in her eyes.

“I thought you went back to Georgia.”

“No. Just up the street.”

“Why? What happened? Were you flamed?”

“Flamed? What is ‘flamed’?”

“Flamed is Georgian slang for ‘fired.’”

“No no. I didn’t want to carry those heavy signs anymore. They hurt my shoulders. Boring work.”

“But meeting such interesting people.”