Curt Leviant - Kafka's Son

“The doctor said, ‘I had hoped the laboratory report would be different, but sadly it shows that your larynx and epiglottis have been infected. I am sorry, but there is no hope for further medical solutions, except painkillers, morphine, or pantopen.’

“I was silent. This was not the time to tell Klopstock how good I felt. Instead, I asked about another patient, a man without a family who also had an advanced case of tuberculosis. ‘Johann? Not well,’ said Doctor Klopstock. ‘Johann Eck probably has no more than three or four weeks left to live.’ And I? I asked the doctor silently. But maybe he read my mind. He raised his eyebrows and looked up, as if to say, Only God knows.

“I looked out the window into the garden of the sanatorium. The owl I had previously seen in a tree was no longer there.”

K stopped. But I knew this was not, could not possibly be, the end of the drama. There was another player to account for.

“And Dora?” I asked.

“Yes, Dora,” K said. “When I asked Klopstock where she was, he said: ‘I thought you knew. Didn’t you get her letter?’

“‘What letter?’

“‘She said she wrote to you.’

“‘I got nothing. So she didn’t return?’

“‘She did come back,’ Klopstock told me, ‘but spent only a day or so here and then announced she’s going back to Poland and would write to you.’

“‘I didn’t get a letter.’

“Again Klopstock said, ‘Dora said she would write to you.’

“Well, we could go on repeating those two lines forever. That’s it, I realized. She abandoned me. Her father’s wishes have prevailed. She succumbed to her father’s demand to return home and leave me. Dora was brave, rebellious — but as far as I was concerned, not brave and rebellious enough. She abandoned me; my heart abandoned her. Alas, I learned much later the real reason for her leaving, written in a letter that was much delayed in the post. Had I had that letter when I returned to Vienna, my history, perhaps hers, would have been different. I was waiting to surprise her with my return to health but she had another surprise waiting for me. And that’s when I decided to die,” K said sadly.

“What do you mean?” I interjected.

“I told the doctor, ‘I’m as good as dead.’”

“But you said you didn’t die.”

“Didn’t die in one sense. Did — in another. It was at that moment, learning that Dora had gone, at that very moment the idea that fixed my destiny came to me. I knew I would die. She knew it. Her father knew. His rebbe knew — maybe he even wished it. I have no doubt he wished it. Then the idea spun quickly in me. All the details. Let them all assume I was dead. The wish that people in rage always have: I’ll die and then they’ll be sorry. I was cured but heartsick. Dead inside. With Dora leaving me, the lifestuff in me was sucked away. I had no desire to live. To write. To go over my manuscripts. I was finished.”

For a moment K looked up at the two model double-winged aeroplanes as though he wished to fly away with them.

“I loved Dora but I was furious with her. True, she was young, but she always seemed mature for her age. But why didn’t she have the courage to stay? The father summons her home, forbidding the marriage to a non-observant sinner, a secular Jew like me, and she obeys like a little pussycat. Why couldn’t she free herself, is what I thought at the time, from the shackles of her father, who himself was chained to his Hasidic rebbe? Although my attitude softened over the years, especially in the thirties and forties, when I mourned for her, thinking she was one of the six million, but at that time she was dead for me and I would be dead for her. Let her think I was dead and the separation would be complete, on my side and hers.

“I didn’t receive her letter until much later, but by then it was too late. Doctor Klopstock had assumed she had written to Prague. But she didn’t. She wrote to me at the sanatorium and, in one of those mix-ups that occur in cheap romantic novels, the letter got lost and surfaced many weeks later. I didn’t read that letter until I went to visit Klopstock much later — he met me in Vienna, of course, not at the sanatorium. The letter had just come, but he didn’t want to take a chance forwarding it to Prague lest it get lost again. Had I had that letter earlier I would have lived out my life as the real K.”

“You still are the real K,” I said.

He took a deep breath, responded obliquely: “In any case, it was there, at the sanatorium, when I returned from my ten-day visit to my family that the thought, the idea, came to me. You recall I asked Klopstock right away about the man without family who was nearing death. He was a slightly retarded man who had been cared for by an elderly housekeeper in Vienna before she died. I stayed at the sanatorium three days and asked Klopstock to examine me. He couldn’t believe it. ‘What miracle happened to you?’ he asked me. I told him what I knew. He shook his head. ‘I’ve never seen anything like this.’

“‘Still,’ I told him, ‘I want to die. Officially.’

“Fortunately, Klopstock was a mentch , a friend. He had nursed me, helped me, nurtured me, even babied me. Klopstock and I looked at each other. It was as if the same thought came to both of us at the same time.

“‘I have a life-and-death favor to ask you,’ I told the doctor.”

It took me thirty minutes to get to Graf’s house. Of course, I took my camera. Now the problem was — would he be there? This was certainly a marvelous turn of events, I mused. If one of the two people who disappeared in Prague was found, could the second be far behind? It was a good omen, a fine omen, an excellent omen. Provided of course I actually laid eyes on Karoly Graf, K’s putative son.

Yes, in the foreroom of the apartment house Graf was on the list of tenants. So the address was correct. I wondered if he had a family, for the concierge of Graf’s old apartment building had referred only to Graf alone.

I rang the bell. A man’s voice spoke in Czech. I told him in English who I was, “sent by the shamesh.”

“Wonderful. You’re here. Happy, happy, happy am I. Come up. Fourth floor. Sorry, no elevator.”

A smiling Graf waited for me by the open door. He was cleanshaven, had lost that haggard, grizzly look he had had when I first met him outside the K Museum and mistook him for a beggar. He was tall and thin as ever, with a prominent Adam’s apple. But his cheeks were no longer hollow and he didn’t give me the edgy feeling I was speaking to one of life’s unfortunate creatures.

Graf greeted me affably and invited me into his small, light-filled apartment. Books everywhere. In bookcases, on wooden shelves propped by bricks, on the floor. An entire section, I saw at once, devoted to K.

“Come in, come in, man from the Shawmee State, who pays homage to K. So happy to see you.”

“I too. But I must ask you—”

But he interrupted me with, “Why did you not come to see me?”

So he beat me to it. I was just waiting to express my righteous indignation, but Graf got to me first.

I could have — I wanted to — explode with: What’s the matter with you? Why did you give me a card with the wrong address? Why did you do that to me after you so excitedly and passionately told me you’re K’s son? I took my camera with me and was prepared to video you, to make you a leading figure in my film. I can’t understand why you invited me and then gave me a wrong address.

But I said nothing. Like Joseph before his brothers, dying to speak, I controlled myself. I merely — and with marvelously understated dramatic flair — pulled his card out of my wallet and showed it to him.