Curt Leviant - Kafka's Son

“Because I used that expression only with you. So it was weird hearing someone say that Yossi said it. That’s why I thought maybe you told it to Yossi.”

Graf shook his head. “Some mistake is happening here. Something, as you say, weird.”

Then he went to his bookcase and took out a folder.

“Here. See. Look. It will make all residents of Shawmee State happy as they see the proof.”

He held a beige envelope, thin at the edges from too much handling. He took out a sheet of paper and showed it to me.

“So I told Dr. Klopstock,” K continued his narration, “‘I have a life-and-death favor to ask you.’”

“‘Anything,’ he said.

“‘You said that Johann Eck, that slightly retarded man, will die soon. He has no family. He’s all alone in the world.’

“‘He’s dying alone and will be buried alone,’ said Dr. Klopstock.

“‘We can arrange a good funeral for him. This is my request. We shall switch identities. When he dies, arrange to have the coffin sent to our family plot in Prague. And we will give the word out that K has passed away.’

“Klopstock seemed stunned. I told him, ‘The life I wanted with Dora can never be. Not in sickness nor in health. All my life I longed for a stable, traditional family life, wife and children. It won’t happen with her. And if it won’t happen with her, it won’t happen with anyone. I am incapable of living with any woman but her. Will you do it, Klopstock?’

“Doctor Klopstock pressed his eyes shut. ‘This is to be expected from a man with a fantastic imagination like yours…but the fact is I agreed before I even heard your request. But you must first return to inform your parents and sisters. I cannot consent to this extraordinary arrangement if you don’t do that.’

“At once I cried out, ‘Willingly! I wouldn’t have done it any other way.’

“‘And what about your appearance?’ Klopstock said. ‘Won’t people recognize you?’

“‘Don’t worry. I thought about that too. I won’t look like this. I will grow a Van Dyke beard. I will crop my hair short in the German style and will wear a blue beret. I will become my own distant kinsman,’ is what I told Klopstock.

“You see, my young American friend, I grew a beard not only to disguise myself from others but also to hide from the Angel of Death. True, I was feeling fine — but maybe he hadn’t been informed yet. If he came after me again, he wouldn’t recognize me with a beard. It was something the religious Jews do when they are deathly ill. They change or add to a Hebrew name in order to fool that angel, who is never fooled. When he seeks someone by a certain name and presumably can’t find him because that certain someone has changed his name, he finds him anyway. For that angel’s arrows, like Cupid’s, always find their mark.”

“But you were called Mr. Klein,” I interrupted, seeing before me his Ph. Klein name plate.

“But my Hebrew name,” K continued, “I didn’t change. Just my face.” K smiled, chuckled softly and whispered, “It seems to have worked,” and he broke into a laugh. And I laughed with him.

“When poor Johann Eck died they prepared the coffin. Meanwhile I returned to my family. They almost didn’t recognize me, but they were delirious about my recovery. But their mood changed when I told them about the staged death and the funeral that would follow. I had a row with my father. I told him to appreciate my return to health rather than criticize me for my drama. ‘Mad writer,’ he called me. ‘Looney Bohemian.’ I told him I could have pretended to have died and then at the funeral of the lonely man revealed myself. But that probably would have killed him. To make a long story short, they buried the poor fellow in a grave whose tombstone read K, 1883–1924, and my parents and sisters went through the shiva while I took a room somewhere.”

“And you didn’t share this with your beloved Max?” I said and felt myself sailing through the decades in the space of K’s sunny, book filled room.

“No, I’m sorry to say. For then I would have had to include several others in our group and then secrecy would have been impossible. It was a hard decision, but I kept to it.”

“And how did your parents explain your presence at home later?”

“Aha. Good question. I was passed off as a distant cousin from Hamburg who had come to help out at the business. If people marked that I looked a little bit like poor, beloved K, my sisters would say that Philippe Klein had always been known as a K lookalike.”

“Is it possible you did what you did to get back at your father?”

The old man’s face turned white, as if in a backstage dressing room talc had been smeared over his face for some special actorly effect. I thought he would die now. So I hit the nail. It was all done for his father.

K stared at me, anguish in his eyes. The color returned slowly to his face. Behind the retina I detected a faint look of disdain. He said nothing. Not a word. Just gazed at me. After a long period of silence — how discomfiting that angry silence — he declared:

“I loved my father and my mother. And they reluctantly, and not without arguments, complied with my wishes. For me, to go along with my madness, they had to undergo the torments of a sham mourning, my father and mother and sisters, sitting shiva for a ghost. So make no mistake. Don’t be a literary pseudo-psycholog. I loved them. You of all people, you’re a creative artist, you say you make films, so you should know that you can’t read fiction as biography or autobiography.”

I licked my lips, took the rebuke, then said softly:

“And what about the funeral? Tell me. Was Brod there? Did he speak? Were you there?”

“I’ll tell you about the funeral.”

As I videoed Graf, and before he gave me the document, he asked:

“How old do you think I am?”

With his cheeks fuller and shaven, he looked younger than last time, perhaps sixty-five.

“Fifty-five,” I said.

“Very kind of you. But I am sixty-eight years old. I was born at the end of December, 1924, several months after K died. Dora Diamant’s departure created a vacuum and so K befriended Miriam, one of the devoted nurses, a very beautiful, tender woman, and when it was time to have the baby, that is, me, she had it in the Jewish Children’s Home. For reasons of privacy she didn’t have the baby in Vienna. And for reasons of sentiment she had the baby in Prague. You see, as a single woman, working full time, she was unable to care for the infant. And the document I’m holding testifies to this point.”

I looked at the paper, filmed it. It stated that the baby boy named Karoly was born to the nurse, Miriam Graf, religion Jewish, of the Vienna Woods Sanatorium, in the Jewish Children’s Home Adoption Center, and placed there for one year, then reclaimed by nurse Graf.

“This is fascinating,” I said.

“See? See? I told you you would be impressed.”

“But nowhere in this document does it state that K is the father.”

Karoly Graf looked at me as if I were a moron.

“But that is obvious! As obvious as you looking into a mirror and seeing yourself.”

“Sometimes I look into a mirror and don’t see myself.”

“I’m talking about normal people. It is obvious because K stayed on at the sanatorium for about a month after Dora Diamant left for Poland. He was ill, lonely, depressed. Within a month he would die. The staff was very kind to him. Everybody loved him, including my mother, with whom K had a special bond. They formed, how shall we say, a union, and nine months later, by this time K was already dead, Karoly came into the world. Think of it. How many people beside K stayed at the sanatorium and lived in Prague?”