Curt Leviant - Kafka's Son

Early the next morning out of my apartment hotel went I. To take a walk and think about my film. But what happened next was really out of a film.

I step out into the normally quiet, cobblestoned street. Commotion at its edge makes me turn right. A crowd of people watching a struggle. A man fighting with a young woman. He held her by the shoulders, his back to me, blocking her face, and was attempting to force her down. Why are these golems standing unmoved like the wicked men of Sodom and not doing anything to help her?

As I ran toward her, a shout from a rooftop opposite my hotel made me stop. I look up. A man is pointing a rifle toward the crowd. I didn’t know whether to run into the hotel and shout to the clerk to call the police or run to the girl. Now she screamed. I looked again. Now I saw her face. My God, it was her, she. But without the blue beret. And no one doing anything. Just standing there. Why?

At that moment all the feelings, inchoate as the wind, impalpable as emotions, all the attraction I felt for her, her pretty face, the dimple in her left cheek, and left cheek only, as she smiled, her fetching blue beret, her dark green eyes, described previously at length and in lovingly precise if not poetic detail, all my feelings for her coalesced like disparate numbers adding up to a preordained sum — as the cute little tyke with the angelic countenance usually seen hovering in the air in the upper left of a Renaissance painting with a soft white leather quiver on his back appeared, unwilling to let slip the opportunity of triumphing over me and my heart, and wished to add that heart of mine to his list of trophies.

And so, the angelic little creature, with the slightly pudgy apple cheeks, baby blue eyes, blond curly locks, and eternally innocent doll-like face, stole up softly and without anyone, including me, seeing him, discharged an arrow from his golden bow that pierced my heart through and through.

Cupid, they say, for I think that is his name, is a blind little boy, but boy how good his aim. Right on the mark. Arrow to the heart omni temporis. Not lung, not liver, not legs, but arrow from quiver to bow, from bow snap straight to the heart. And then the sly, sightless little rascal with the innocent who me? face vanished, for he always accomplishes what he sets out to do without being held accountable, since he has been, is, and will always be invisible, his arrows swift and painless — and always, pphht, on target.

And I flew, as if a bow had released me, as if I were the arrow, and not the one arrowed, and shot toward her without thinking and hearing other shouts that I muted out, I at once grabbed the man overpowering the girl in the blue beret and threw him to the ground. He was easy prey, no resistance, and shouts grew in intensity, hurrahs and applause, and I turned to the crowd:

“Why are you standing there like golems when someone is attacked? What’s the matter with you?”

Then I turned to the girl and asked:

“Are you all right?”

“You!” she said. “What’s the matter with you? …I don’t know whether to laugh or to cry.”

“Cut. Cut. Cut!” someone shouted.

“You just killed my scene,” she said sadly.

“Oh, my God!” I looked around, saw the camera, added lamely, “Is this a film?”

“Yes,” she hissed.

“Then that sniper on top of the other building, he…”

“Yes. Yes. Yes.”

“I’m so sorry. I thought you were being attacked. And no one coming to help you.”

I turned to apologize to the man I had thrown down. I helped him up. The guy muttered and walked away. I kept saying “I’m so sorry” to his back.

“Can’t you tell when a film is being shot? Don’t you know anything about films?”

“I should. I’m a…”

Just then the man who looked like the director was heading our way.

Soon as I saw him, I grew jealous. It’s not for nothing that the marvelous English language, so subtle, direct, on the ball, uses the word “grew” with “jealous.” Because it’s like a wild plant that grows, increases vastly, like bamboo, no stopping it. He’s her boyfriend, I thought. A good-looking guy in his late thirties with long black hair combed straight back and a slightly scruffy beard. A movie-star look.

And when I saw her looking at him the jealousy intensified. Now jealousy is usually a bedfellow, and the compound components of that word are apropos here, a bedfellow of possession. I didn’t possess her. I didn’t even know her name, for goodness’ sake. Still, a liquid spurt of jealousy rose to the back of my mouth, bitter as gall, sour as bile, awful-tasting on my tongue, and turned my stomach to knots.

I called her aside, apologized again.

“I have to run now. Quick, tell me. Are my four days up? What’s your answer?”

“I’ll talk to you tomorrow by the marionette shop.”

“Really? And you’ll be there?”

“Of course.”

“And we’ll make arrangements to get together.”

She was about to say yes, but she took a breath and swallowed. But I sensed that yes. Oh, how the knots in my stomach dissolved. Oh, how the embarrassment of making a fool of myself vanished. Oh, how I floated up and looked down at the sniper on the rooftop. He winked at me and I, happy, winked back.

I stood there and looked at her, wondering if I would disappear from her consciousness as soon as I left her.

I wanted to hex her to not forget me. I wanted to imprint an image of myself into her mind; impress myself into her eyelids so that every time she blinked she’d see a little photo of me, but so subtly, so imperceptibly, so below her level of awareness it would be like those quick cinematic ads clever admen created where a frame of a product would flash for a fragment of a second, unseen on the screen, but nevertheless slyly embedding its message.

Thus my wish for her. So she wouldn’t, couldn’t, forget me.

But what spell or kabbalistic formula to use to realize my wish? Mutter phrases? Pray? Recite incantations? A certain patter of words in an unknown or concocted tongue with my eyes shut, my lips pressed tight, fists clenched too, and my brow furrowed?

I did what I did, thought what I thought, wished what I wished.

No one can fault me for lack of concentration or for not bidding Godspeed to my wishes.

And I ducked quickly into the crowd before the director could castigate me.

Then I remembered. What a dummy I am! Why didn’t I give her my phone number or tell her in which hotel I was staying?

Or maybe it happened this way, for nothing is made up here. I am recording the story exactly as it happened. As I said at the beginning:

A true story.

Perhaps in a world where there are multiple universes and parallel cosmos, and where one atom can be in two places at the same time, can one event take place in two different versions. Perhaps because of its importance it looms so large and variegated in my memory.

Oddly, I remember it in two ways. In the course of the confusion, I can swear that both took place. But even if one of the two happened, does this mean the other did not?

No.

For both happened, one in real life as I saw it, and the other in memory. But which is which is hard to confirm.

If you read two versions of a story in two different newspapers one of them surely is, if not purposely untrue, then inadvertently false. But this isn’t a newspaper, so you can be certain that what I say really happened.

Who says the same event can’t happen twice?*

It can.

Here is part two:

I came out of my apartment hotel and walked into a side street fenced off by the police. A crowd is watching a trial. A judge sat on a slightly raised wooden platform. He wore no hat or wig but a black judicial robe. Behind him, stretching far to the right, was a fake wall with a courthouse scene. A man and a woman whose backs were to me — I watch from the far edge of the crowd — stood before the judge. The woman, with a large red kerchief around her head, complained that the man had taken liberties with her in the field just outside Prague.