Curt Leviant - Kafka's Son

Wait. Something had passed me by. I had heard it only with an outer ear, like a remark absorbed absently that surfaces only later, delayed like a bright light on the retina seen when the light is gone. K had called me Max. So I was right. He had done something like this decades ago, more than seventy or seventy-five years ago, with Max Brod present, and I must have read about it in my unrelenting, omnivorous passion to read every word K wrote and every word written about him, in order to recreate him in my mind. Could I have known that I would invade a special time zone, bridge the impossible gap, the years between the death of my hero and my own birth and, miraculously, magically, meet the man I had always wanted to meet?

And so K stood in line for a third time to get his kroner back, while I waited outside again and observed the citizens of Prague. The merry sound of children with their mothers added music to the scene. Then a sudden tweak in my heart. I watched a tall young mother in a blue beret pushing a double baby carriage. Of course it wasn’t Katya, but fantasies are sweet.

A couple of shops down from the post office I noticed a video store. I ran up to K.

“I’m going to buy some batteries. See that video shop two doors down? I’ll meet you either here or in there.”

I entered the small shop. An attendant addressed me in Czech.

“English?”

“Little.”

“I need some batteries for a video camera.”

“Good. Moment.”

I felt a tap on my shoulder. I turned. Froze as I saw who I saw. Oh, my God, another fight, like the one with the actor I had knocked over by mistake. I wished I could have run away again from the director like I did last time. But now, here, trapped in the little shop, nowhere to flee.

“I’m Michele Luongo.” He smiled as he stretched his hand out to me.

I shook his hand.

“How fortunate,” he said with his Italian-accented English. “This coincidence is out of a Russian novel. I was just thinking of you but of course had no way of contacting you, and here you are…. Why did you run away that day?”

“Embarrassed.”

“Oh, come on.”

“The trouble I caused your film.”

“A Cannes Prize winner, embarrassed?”

“You know me?”

“Of course. I recognized you right away. I saw you at the Cannes Festival two years ago, but you don’t remember me.”

“I’m sorry about the trouble I caused you. And I’m prepared to reimburse you for damages.” I felt my face flushing. The heat rose in my neck. “In fact, I asked at my hotel how to reach your film company but they knew nothing. They said these film crews appear one day and disappear the next.”

“Forget it. We left that scene in. It’s hilarious. It gave our film a slapstick turn we never even thought of.”

“I’m so glad.” I took a deep breath. “By the way,” I said with as much innocence as I could muster, “do you know where the girl is?”

“Katya? No. We engaged her for that one shoot but then she disappeared.”

“She keeps disappearing. That’s the third place she disappeared from. And some other people I know have disappeared too.”

“Maybe it’s you.” And Michele Luongo laughed.

“You know, I actually thought of that.”

Luongo lowered his head and looked over glasses that weren’t there. “So you have a thing for her. I don’t blame you. She’s quite an unusually pretty girl.”

“Well… Did she ever mention the place she was headed for?”

“No. I told you…she just left. But when I interviewed her before the film, she said she had studied in Brno. Who knows, maybe that’s her hometown. Look, why chat here? Let’s get together and continue the conversation.”

“Wonderful. How much longer you going to be here?”

“About three weeks. And you?”

“Probably another month.”

“Here’s my card,” Luongo said. “You can always reach me on my cell phone.”

“Terrific. I’ll call you.” And I wrote my address and phone number for him. “By the way,” I added. “Is that actor still around? The one I accidentally knocked down?”

“Stacek?”

“I never got his name. That good-looking, aggressive fellow who played alongside Katya.”

“I suppose so. He doesn’t work with me anymore. Why do you ask?”

“I think he was stalking me a few days ago. Yelled ‘American!’ at me and chased me through the little lanes and across the square and then I eluded him.”

“What’s wrong with him?”

“I don’t know. He’s probably still mad. Did you know he sought me out at the Old New Synagogue about a week ago and wanted to pick a fight with me?”

“No! I didn’t think he was that touchy.”

“I apologized to him right away. He seemed to accept it, grudgingly. But he’s still harboring an enmity. Now I keep having to look over my shoulders to see if he’s following me.”

I looked toward the shop doorway. Suddenly, K materialized on the threshold.

“There’s an old gentleman looking at you. You know him?”

I did what Schweik would do. Pop a lie gratuitously. On the spot.

“He’s my grandfather.”

“Don’t give me that salami. He doesn’t look old enough to be your grandfather. Dad, maybe.” Luongo looked at his watch. “Oof! Late. Got to run. See you soon, eh?”

We shook hands.

“Let me introduce you quickly on your way out…. Mr. Klein, look who I met here? My friend, Michele Luongo, a film director. Meet Mr. Klein.”

“Please to meet you, signore. You have a very talented grandson. Sorry, but I have to rush off to an appointment. Ciao!”

K nodded to him, then looked at me quizzically. I watched Luongo run off, weaving in and around people on the sidewalk as if heading for a train he had to catch.

I shrugged. “Italiano. Loco, but with great imagination…. Done?” I asked K.

“Done,” he said, triumphant, and held up the kroner like a trophy. “Circle closed. Now we can move on.” He slipped his arm into mine as we walked. Do you folks know who is moving among you? I sang to the people passing by. If you knew you’d fall to your knees in obeisance. I smiled but they didn’t know why I was smiling.

K pointed to a bearded man sitting on the sidewalk, leaning against a lamppost.

“You see that beggar sitting there. He tugs at me, for my sympathies are with the poor. But at the same time I wonder why an apparently healthy man has to sit there without doing an honest day’s work. Look how many coins he already has in his hat.”

K stopped and observed the beggar.

“Soon he’ll take them and hide them, for it isn’t good policy to show the public how good is a beggar’s treasure. See? He’s putting most of the coins in his pocket, the rascal.”

But as we passed him, K gave him the kroner he had retrieved.

“Why did you do that?” I asked. “Your entire line of reasoning showed you weren’t inclined to give him a penny.”

“Man’s rational thinking and his emotions often run on parallel tracks. And anyway, my mother always said, better to give to a beggar who you think doesn’t need it than not to give to one who might need it. That’s the Jewish way.”

K still hadn’t said a word to me about his past. Was he deliberately doing this to keep me in suspense, or didn’t he think his story was important enough to share with me? I decided to wait a bit more and then ask him to solve for me the riddle of his life.

We turned into a side street and passed a classical three-story building set back on a spacious lawn adorned with flowers and attractive shrubs. On the iron fence I saw a plaque with a Star of David and words in Czech I could not make out.

“I see it’s a Jewish institution. This isn’t the synagogue you had in mind, is it? It doesn’t look like a synagogue.”