Curt Leviant - Kafka's Son

I looked up into K’s eyes. Yes, up. Those who know K only from his photographs have no indication of his height. In fact, no fulllength photos exist of him standing next to someone else. I too had imagined him to be of middling height. Jews in Europe are not known for being tall. In Poland they tend to be on the short side. With his well-known slenderness I had imagined K to be about fiveseven or eight, but six feet tall! K a six-footer? Star of his high school basketball team?

Ask any K expert, How tall was K? A glazed look will come over his eyes. He will shrug, with perhaps a supercilious smile on his lips, indicating an irrelevant, even idiotic, question, and say: How should I know? It’s his works that are important, not he. And I, who stand fiveten, had to look up into his eyes. Age had not diminished his height; age had not shrunk his frame; age had not bent his back. And old age, advanced old age, had not compromised his skeletal structure. He still held himself erect and was the full six feet plus he was reported to be. No little-old-lady shrinkage, no osteoporotic diminution of spine, neckbone, femurs. He was as straight and thin as ever. And those blue eyes still radiated a special light. One can fake identity cards, accent, vocabulary, even language. But height, like long fingers, is unique and inimitable. So K was either real or a superb sorcerer.

The last thing I saw as I bade him goodbye were the two models of the early double-winged aeroplanes that moved slightly with the invisible breeze in the room. Then I remembered K loved planes. He had gone to visit early demonstrations of flight and even wrote a little essay about planes in Brescia.

K didn’t have to tell me to come back. We both knew I’d come back. Can paper clips resist a magnet? But with all the excitement in his room, I had forgotten to ask him to reconcile his two ages.

The next time I came K was already holding his walking stick.

“Come, let’s go for a walk.”

Now he’s going to tell me his story, I thought. We’ll walk in the park near his house and he’ll tell me what I was waiting to hear.

“It’s so beautiful here. This entire city is just stunning.”

“You really like Prague, don’t you?”

“I love it.”

But what I loved about it couldn’t be put into words. How can I describe that floaty, delicious feeling, that air of possessiveness, that pride I felt when I was in K’s room. When I was with him, I glowed with the thought that it was I, me, who was spending time with the greatest writer of the twentieth century, and only I knew it was he. And I could not shout it out from the rooftops either. I myself couldn’t believe I had the privilege of seeing him almost every day. And during my visits I sometimes felt myself levitating from the high of being with him. And at night, when I wrote about my hours with K, a special thrill of joy came over me, a feeling no doubt that drunkards or drug abusers feel, they’re sitting on top of the world, everything going their way, that touchdown with thirty seconds to go, that bases loaded, game-winning home run at the bottom of the ninth. Or, best of all, a Golden Globe Award or a Cannes Prize for a documentary film you’ve made.

I was spending time with K. Who would believe me? And soon, when — if (again that magical, slippery IF) — I put him into my film, everyone will believe it and envy me for having known him, brought him to the attention of the world.

No wonder I loved Prague.

“I love it. If I had arms big enough I would embrace it. But tell me, where is the mystical Prague? Where is the ethereal, golemic, middle-ages magic of the city? Tell me, is it travel-brochure talk or is it real?”

“So you want to see something mystical, something at the cusp of the real and the unreal.”

I marveled at K’s use of the word “cusp.” But if I were to marvel at everything he said, I would be marveling all day long. Wasn’t everything about him, his very presence before me, a marvel?

But I didn’t want to sound overly enthusiastic. For I knew quite well what was considered mystical in Prague. The touristy mystical. Which had as much connection to the truly mystical as the popular version of fast-food, I-want-it-now kabbala in America had to the true study of the onerously difficult authentic Aramaic kabbala. You know what the touristy mystical was? A walk around the Altneushul with a sprinkling of legends about the golem. The clock on the Jewish Town Hall with its Hebrew letters, which run backwards. The grave of the Maharal.

That’s why I said,

“Yes, I would,”

slowly, with absolute self-control, no tremor in my voice. But as I was to learn later, I had unfairly denigrated K’s offer. It wasn’t a tourist site at all. In fact, “cusp” was an exaggeration. What he showed me was squarely, firmly, in the lap of the unreal.

“There’s an unusual synagogue I want to show you, which no tourists know about.”

“Too bad you didn’t tell me before. I would have brought my camera.”

“Impossible. Good you didn’t. Photography is not permitted.”

We walked along residential streets I hadn’t seen before, then turned into a small, busy shopping street.

“Here’s the post office. Wait. I’ll be right out. I need some stamps.”

Meanwhile, I watched the parade of people passing by. Now, with freedom (my finger slips and I type “g” instead of “f,” a good word “greedom,” showing the Czechs’ pent-up fascination with wealth and goods), the sunshine suppressed under the Soviets burst through the grey fog. People moved with a buzz of energy, heads up. Not quite like actors in a Hollywood musical, a smile on every face, a song on every lip. Still, the sun shone in their eyes. Gone the grey.

Here came K.

“Just a minute,” he said, standing next to me. He looked into a little leather change purse. “I must check something.”

Maybe in old European black-and-white films or early twentieth-century novels do you see a man putting coins into a small leather purse, with no metal clasp, closed by a little leather tongue that slips under a strap. It must have been a hundred years old, K’s purse. He took the coins out and counted them.

“Oh my, she gave me an extra kroner…well, I have to go back.”

K stood in the line again — this time I joined him — and returned the coin to the surprised girl.

Outside, K pressed his lips and shook his head. He took out the purse and counted the coins again.

“Turns out she gave me the correct change in the first place. Sorry.” He licked his lips, wondering what to do. Return to the window again? But by now the line was longer. Ten people stood waiting.

“Forget it,” I suggested.

“But it’s wrong,” K replied. “It’s not the kroner, Max, it’s the integrity. Just as it was wrong for me to take an extra kroner that didn’t belong to me, so is it wrong for her to take an extra kroner that does not belong to her. And, anyway, who knows what problems this could cause her at the end of the day, when they discover extra money in her till?”

I countered with: “But if in your heart you declare it now belongs to her, a gift you’ve given her, then it’s no longer a fault. She didn’t take the kroner. You gave it to her.”

“But don’t you see it’s a matter of honesty? Like a coin, honesty too has two sides.”

I liked the ring of the metaphor, even though I didn’t grasp its meaning at once.

Suddenly I was overwhelmed by a sense of déjà vu. The scene was familiar. Was I reliving something? Waiting at a post office. The mistake with a returned coin. Had I experienced this before myself or with someone? Or had I read about it as an illustration of K’s absolute sense of honesty?