Curt Leviant - Kafka's Son

“Easy. I saw the gabbai in shul yesterday. How are you feeling?”

“So-so.” And he spread his hands in a gesture of resignation. “Maybe my good genes are getting tired.”

Above Jiri’s head a framed print hung on the wall. It was a happy Miro design full of swirling colors, starbursts of yellow and chartreuse and burnt orange, and, if you stared long enough, the seeming outline of a smiling face.

I almost didn’t notice Betty in the easy chair. Her dark blue sweater and slacks melted into the blue chair and only her swarthy face was seen.

“I’m so glad you came,” Jiri said. “I was thinking about you.”

“And I missed you in shul yesterday, and so did the old man you helped last time.”

“Ay, ay, bruderl, der mentch tracht un Gott lacht,” he quoted the Yiddish apothegm. “Man makes plans but God laughs; or, man proposes but God disposes.”

I liked that Yiddish word, bruderl . It meant, literally, “little brother,” but was used to signify “pal,” “buddy,” “good friend.”

To change the mood, I said enthusiastically, “Well, I’m going…”

Up piped Betty. “But you just came, mister. Stay another few minutes.”

“I didn’t finish. I wanted to say that I’m starting to work on plans for my trip to Prague.”

“Wonderful,” said Jiri. “Don’t forget Yossi at the Altneu. He’ll be a good shadchen , a good matchmaker, for you,” here he took a deep breath and sighed slowly, “to meet interesting people. When I go back home, I’ll give you more names and addresses. But Yossi is the key.”

In response, as a gesture of friendship, I was about to share with Jiri a fascinating bit of personal information that few people knew, but just then Betty began speaking that language she had used briefly in their apartment last week. This time Jiri responded.

The language was so unfamiliar I couldn’t even place it. Betty spoke more than Jiri. I picked up the shards of her words, tried to reconstruct them, but they fell apart like dry clods. It was like working with a jigsaw puzzle not only on the verso side but with the little rounded tentacles snipped off. What I was able to dredge up fit no language, no syntax, I knew. I had a hunch it wasn’t Czech. In fact, I was sure it wasn’t.

Then two phrases surfaced. Each was two words and the first was the same in both phrases. Again and again I heard Betty exclaim “tara pilus” and “tara glos.” Jiri repeated the phrases but preceded them with “nepa”—“nepa tara pilus,” “nepa tara glos.” After a while, among the jibble jabble, bibble babble, I gathered that the phrases meant “too young” and “too old,” and that “nepa” was a negative — with Jiri arguing “not too young” and “not too old.”

How did I penetrate those phrases? I’ll tell you how. Why did they use them? I’ll tell you why. The how is fact, the why speculation. I kept hearing the word “tara” before “pilus” and before “glos.” So I assumed it was a modifier. Then, once or twice, when Betty said “tara pilus,” she stretched her hand, palm down flat, and lowered it to the floor, as if indicating a child or young person; one other time, when she said “tara glos,” she ran her thumb and forefinger over her chin, as if stroking the hairs of an imaginary beard. It then dawned on me that “tara pilus” meant “too young” and “tara glos” too old. That’s the how.

The why is guesswork. Perhaps they wanted me to get the hint and when — and if — the time (whatever time it was) came, to act accordingly. Then again, even if I was right on those phrases, what did they have to do with me? If it had anything to do with me. And, anyway, what was I too young or too old for?

Then, suddenly — as if in mid-phrase — Betty said:

“So you were born in Prague, right, mister?”

I nodded, amazed that at last I was understanding their language. It took a moment for me to realize that she had spoken English. Betty and Jiri exchanged glances; then, without so much as a pause, or shift in gears, they resumed speaking.

Nevertheless, despite my frustration, their language fascinated me. I almost didn’t want them to stop. I felt I had landed in an undiscovered bourne, was hearing something no one had heard before. Did they speak in etymons or glyphs, metaphors or metonyms? I don’t know. I was hypnotized, paid scant attention to the hum of the hospital, Jiri’s shifting positions in bed, Betty’s rocking motion as she spoke, the coming and going of nurses, the stereo broadcasting its zigzag thin red lines. All I know is I didn’t understand a word. No, that’s not quite so. I could understand a word, about one in seventy. I understood but couldn’t grasp its meaning. The words came to me in spurts. As if a radio was on and every few seconds the volume knob was suddenly turned left and right, erratically, maliciously. It sounded like waves rushing, as if someone had clapped palms over my ears, then opened and shut them, oo-wah, oo-wah, oo-wah, the rush, the arrhythmic swoosh of words, then silence. Maybe they were using reverse phonemes, or perhaps articulating logographic symbols.

But there were moments — like in a fleeting daydream or in an exhaustion-induced, sleep-deprived hallucination, the sort of one-second waking dream that seems to last for minutes — when I thought I understood them, and I imagined myself in Prague (I knew they were speaking of Prague even though they didn’t mention Prague; how could they not be speaking of Prague?), in some exotic, surprising locale, discovering people and sites no one knew of, like perhaps a secret entrance to the Altneu synagogue attic or a magical shul no one knew about. Perhaps rescue a damsel in distress or become a hero of my own film. And my video camera is capturing every moment.

Imagine this contradiction. They spoke slowly. I heard quickly. Words and sentences compressed by locomotives huffing at both ends. Adding to the verbal traps were the glottal stops in Jiri’s remarks, the!clicks in Betty’s chatter. They spoke in sonorants and yeks, they alternated voiced and unvoiced aspirants. I wish I could have recorded them. I couldn’t tell if the arcane phrases, spoken in what I now presumed was High Double Dutch, were purposeful or spontaneous. Who knows, perhaps all of it was amphigoric speech.

Or maybe phonic mesmerization. Maybe even aphonic.

One thing was obvious. They were talking about me. About me? Yes, about me. I don’t know how doubt is shredded, but the phrase “without a shred of doubt” is applicable here. For once in a while Jiri’s eyes slid in my direction — I who was standing at the foot of his bed, while Betty, who sat in an easy chair almost blending into it, now bent close to him, her chin over the edge of his blanket — even though he looked at, faced, Betty. She didn’t look at me either, but occasionally nodded or tilted her head to the left where I was standing, to the tune of — yes, again—“tara glos,” too old. But after a while that phrase disappeared. By the shifts in tone, the up-and-down decibels of their private lingo, small gestures in body language, I gathered they were arguing, negotiating whether or not to reveal something to me.

This wasn’t the first time this happened to me, but it never lasted long. I seem to be a magnet for secretive speech. Here’s number two, the third will come soon. Once, in Jerusalem, where I had been filming a documentary about the Western Wall, I had to see a dentist. As I sat in his waiting room, two sixteen-year-olds entered. They had long curly payess and wore the typical black hats, tieless white shirts, and black suits of the ultra-Orthodox community. They sat down next to me on the small red plastic-covered bench and immediately began to chatter in Yiddish. But it was a Yiddish that would have been Greek even to Sholom Aleichem. They spoke in quick gushes, swallowing without even a blessing most of the syllables, then slowed down and feigned an accent, perhaps Warsaw Yiddish, that distorted and stretched some of the vowels and shortcutted others. They obviously used this private cant in public — a kind of kosher Yiddish Pig Latin — to bamboozle all eavesdroppers. Like me.