Curt Leviant - Kafka's Son

“Even though I had found happiness with Dora — why are you standing? Please sit down — that I had never had before, the rebbe’s No smothered my happiness, robbed me of my future, exacerbated my illness. Yes, his decision made me sick. And not metaphysically. Actually sick. Doctors now agree that a psychological blow has its physiological consequences. Further examination seemed to show the tuberculosis spreading to my larynx. But Doctor Klopstock said he would await final word from the laboratory report that would come back in a week. Perhaps, he said, his observation with the naked eye was wrong.

“At this time Dora decided to make one last personal appeal and see her father. And I told Doctor Klopstock that I’m going back home to Prague for about ten days. I needed to get away from the sanatorium. I needed the pretense of normality. Medically, there was nothing I could do. I needed home. Space. The ambience of family. I hadn’t seen my parents and sisters in months, for I had discouraged them from coming to the sanatorium in the outskirts of Vienna until I felt better.” K stopped, looked out the window as if seeing Prague, 1924, in black and white. “It was good to be home. I tried to expunge from my mind the suspense about the laboratory report. Meanwhile, at home, everyone said how much better I looked; how the fresh air of the Vienna woods agreed with me, helped me. Whether it was true or wishful thinking or conventional lying I could not tell. I didn’t even get to see Brod. He hadn’t known I was coming and went hiking in Slovakia. At the end of my stay I kissed my parents and my three sisters goodbye. I did not tell them the extent of my illness. Would I ever see them again? I asked them not to accompany me to the train. Train station departures are too emotionally wrenching. And banal too, straining out the window, waving a silly handkerchief.

“On my way to the train station I asked the taxi driver to stop for a few minutes at the Altneushul. At that time it was always open. I hadn’t been there in years, since my bar mitzvah, and I wanted to bid goodbye to it. I sensed that this would be the last time I would be in Prague. Little did I know the synagogue would be my place of refuge less than twenty years later. I had always been impressed by its antiquity, its grandeur, its odd architecture, the magic it exuded, the legends infused in it.”

“The golem,” I said.

“Yes.”

“And the Maharal.”

“Of course. The legendary Rabbi Loew, Chief Rabbi of Prague, creator of the famous golem who, so the legend goes, lies undisturbed under a mountain of torn pages from holy books. Until he is needed. In this shul Jews had prayed more than eight hundred years ago. I walked up the three steps to the Aron Kodesh, approached the curtain that covered the Holy Ark. I saw the Ten Commandments embroidered on part of the curtain. I bent forward and brushed my lips on the First Commandment, ‘I am the Lord your God.’ Then I turned and walked down the three steps and made my way past the bimah to the door. I thought: I am not an observant Jew, but my faith in God, the Creator of the Universe, is unshakable.

“At first nothing untoward happened. I felt the same. But as I approached the door, ready to return to my waiting taxi, a line of electric energy ran through me, as if a new vein or artery had been placed in me. I felt a jolt, as if a bolt of lightning had entered one part of me and exited from another. But it was not the pain one expects from an electric shock; it was its mirror image. Joy. A thrill. An uplift. An infusion of light, of happiness, a giddy feeling of wine in me, as if suddenly I could walk on air. I was filled with new oxygen.

“As I took a deep, deep breath, I could feel clean mountain air filling my lungs. Oh, that uplift, that surge. I felt it like sweet laughter. I felt energized. Not a dark energy but a bright energy, as though I had been touched, blessed, with a beneficent light, a benison. I was vibrating. Not shaking, vibrating. Vibrating with the light within me.”

K paused, bent his head, looked down at the floor, then raised his eyes and looked at, through, me. Tears stood in his eyes. His eyes were moist with happiness.

“I felt elevated. I felt I was up there on the slanted old ceiling looking down at myself. I felt I was floating. I felt myself rising even higher to the attic that was or wasn’t there. I felt I was a miniature man walking between the lines of the Torah, sailing horizontally near the slightly raised letters written with gall nut ink. I felt I was the eyes of the lions that guard the top of the Holy Ark in the small shuls in Prague. New sensations ran through me. Sensations I had never felt before. Or since. I was melody. I was a cluster of notes, triplets, trills. I, who cannot carry a tune. I, of whom Max Brod, who was also a famous composer, said, ‘He can’t tell the difference between Bach and Offenbach,’ I suddenly was able to lift my voice and sing — and my throat did not hurt as it did an hour ago. Nor did any coughs rattle my chest and take my breath away. And I sang the verse from the Psalms, ‘God has tormented me but did not give me over to death.’ Days earlier, as I died slowly, a different verse from the Psalms flashed before me, ‘The bonds of death surround me. I have only trouble and grief.’ Every day I watched myself die. But now that the thrum of electricity was like a flood of lifeblood in me, other verses from the Psalms rose before my eyes: ‘I shall not die but live,’ and ‘You rescued my soul from death…I shall go before the Lord in the Land of the Living.’

“Now I felt a sense of well-being, yes, health I had never felt before. At first I thought I was dreaming. How could it be? So used to malaise was I, I closed and opened my eyes, assuming the dream would go away. But it was no dream. I felt well. That was the first magical moment in my lonely and blessed life. I returned for a moment to the Holy Ark. And I sang out, facing the Aron Kodesh, I sang into the ancient and holy space of the Altneushul, ‘Sh’ma Yisroel’ and ‘Blessed are you, O Lord, who cures the sick.’”

K stopped, took a deep breath. His face shone as he relived those nonpareil moments. I thought he would continue the rhythm of his remarks, but he surprised me with:

“You know there is such a thing as unreal numbers.”

Yes, I thought. For instance, sixty-nine minus eighty.

“In higher mathmatics, mathematicians use math to calculate the inconceivable, the undetectable, the nonexistent, the impossible. There even exist equations that represent things that not only can we not visualize, we can’t even imagine being able to visualize them. They are beyond visualization. Beyond imagining.

“When that jolt of beneficent energy went through my body, killing at once, like a powerful antibiotic, all bacteria in me and restoring me to health, I was in a special time zone that physicists today call flowing time and textured space, but I didn’t know it then. I was in a realm of unreal numbers. And in that special moment, all I knew was that for the first time in my adult life I had a sense of well-being.

“On the train back to Vienna and to the sanatorium I couldn’t wait to share my good news with Dora, who said she would be back before me. I rehearsed my words several times. Like in a modernist drama I froze time and said the same thing in several different ways. I also hoped she would have good news for me: her father had relented; the rebbe had changed his mind and was giving her permission to marry me. One miracle would join another. We would both surprise each other with good news and I would marry her, not in illness but in health.

“When I returned, Doctor Klopstock met me at the entrance, a concerned look on his face. I didn’t see Dora and assumed since she didn’t know when exactly I was returning, she had gone to spend some time in Vienna. Doctor Klopstock did not comment on how I looked, which — I admit — annoyed me, for I thought that the change that had come over me was visible on my face. I thought it shouted wordlessly right out of me. So I concluded that my feeling of good health was illusory, that it was just an anaesthetic my body was producing to cloak the approaching end. It often happens in severe illness that there is a momentary surge of feeling well just before one dies. I didn’t tell Dr. Klopstock I felt fine, for when he heard a remark like that he would comment drily, ‘That’s what they all say.’ What he said next explained why he had made no comment about the way I looked.