Curt Leviant - Kafka's Son

“Please. I would like to film you. It would be such an important, riveting, even earth-shaking film.”

K started shaking his head as soon as I began. “No, my dear boy. I can’t do it. I must say no.”

“Like the Gerer rebbe said no to Dora’s father.”

That hurt, that comparison. But K didn’t flinch.

“You want the world to know I exist.” He gave me a sad smile of understanding.

“Yes, very muchly, to quote a Prague friend of mine. You would make such a great subject.”

“I’m sorry. I can’t. I won’t.”

“But why?”

“There are too many X’s and Z’s that surround that why. I would have to give you one hundred ten years of history.”

“I’m willing to listen.”

“I have protected my identity for decades. Please don’t spoil it for me. I trust you.”

“I would like to see you get the Nobel Prize.”

K gave a start. As if moving forward to me. A shift in his psyche. Had I hit a sympathetic chord?

“No doubt about it,” I pursued my lead. “You’d get the Nobel Prize.”

“The Nobel Prize is given to living writers.”

“So?”

“But I am considered dead.”

“That’s where my documentary will play a role. K lives.”

“They won’t believe it.”

Was I winning? Was he relenting?

“You can show them what you showed me.”

“They’ll think it’s trick photography. You’ll lose your reputation as a maker of true documentary films.”

“But let’s give it—”

Sharply, he said, “The answer is no.” Then in a more moderate tone: “It would go against the grain of everything I’ve lived and believed in. I am very sorry.”

K went to the hallway, picked up the phone and dialed. He spoke in Czech for a minute or so.

“Come. It’s all set. I’ll show you Dora’s letter.”

Once we emerged from the Metro, K took me up Parizska Street, past the Schweik sculpture, to the Altneu. The main door was open.

“Sit down here,” K said.

He walked up the three steps to the bimah, bent down, opened the two doors below the wooden reading table, reached in and moved his hand in the cabinet. He held up an envelope.

Then he approached me, opened the envelope and pulled out a single sheet of paper. He stood before me like a lecturer reading his notes to his class.

“I will translate Dora’s German.” He smiled. “Her German was never excellent. She grew up with Yiddish and got some education in Polish. Here is what she says:

“‘I’m sorry I have to say goodbye to you this way. But our relationship is doubly doomed. My family, as you know, is against us. And now that you are away, one of the nurses…”‘

At that last word—“nurses”—there was an infinitesimal hesitation. Its duration was no longer than the hesitation a ball makes when it’s thrown up in the air and stops for a fraction of a second before acknowledging gravity. But I caught that hesitation. I caught that fractional stop and it intrigued me. Why did K hesitate? Why did he stop? Was it the memory of one of the nurses that made him pause?

“‘…secretly told me that the laboratory confirms Doctor Klopstock’s diagnosis. I should be with you at this time but I cannot witness the ebbing of your life. I just cannot. The days I spent with you were, are, the happiest in my life. I want to remember the joy, the life, not the departure of life. I do not have the courage to be with you. Forgive me. Please forgive me. All my love. Your Dora.’”

I absorbed the words but still couldn’t fathom what difference it made if she left him because of her father’s intransigence or her own lack of courage in being with him when he died. But for K it was apparently crucial. He felt Dora had abandoned him. Many years had passed; he had made his decision. I couldn’t question him on this now.

“Thank you for sharing this with me. She writes so touchingly, so lovingly.” Then I asked him:

“Why do you keep that letter here and not at home?”

“As I told you. Because here it is safe. Despite evil regimes, nothing has ever happened to this synagogue in all the years of its existence. And nothing ever will. It is safer here than at home.”

K walked up to the Holy Ark, kissed the curtain, and returned.

“The last time I did that was sixty-nine, almost seventy, years ago.” He looked up at the soaring space of the synagogue, admiring the source of his salvation, as if beholding it for the first time.

“If not for the Maharal, where would I be?” he said suddenly into the silence. “Sometimes I think he breathed his spirit into me.”

Did K mean this or was it just a metaphor? Maybe wishful thinking.

“Especially during the war years,” he added.

I looked at him as if to say: Come on now, really! He caught the skepticism in my look. Suddenly he raised his hands. He stood taller than ever. In the synagogue’s chiarascuro light it seemed as if gauze were appearing between his outspread hands and his hips. K spread his wings.

“I am the Maharal,” he boomed slowly. His voice frightened me. I felt chills running down my spine.

I stepped back, saw the word emet , truth, glowing white on his forehead. Three Hebrew letters, aleph, mem, tov —the first letter, the middle letter, the final letter of the Hebrew alphabet.

I blinked, rubbed my eyes.

K dropped his hands, laughed again. “Sorry, I was just joking. How can anyone but the Maharal be the Maharal? But, still, I felt that something of him had rubbed off on me in the attic, protecting me.”

“What attic?”

“I told you. The attic of the Al-tnigh-shul. Here. Upstairs.” And he rolled his eyes up to the ceiling.

“But there is no attic,” I chittered. My voice laughed of its own accord, rolling the laughter around each word.

K laughed too, but I couldn’t gauge the timbre, the import of that laugh.

“So God made a miracle for you.”

The words that came out of my mouth had a familiar ring. But these words were someone else’s. Not mine. I heard sarcasm in those words, a sarcasm that belonged to someone else. Who had told me those words?

“The shamesh told you,” K said. “And where is he?” K looked at his pocket watch, one he may have had from before World War I, and then to the door. “That’s the shamesh’s position: ‘There is no attic.’ But there was an attic when I was there. Either that or I was living on thin air.”

“A miracle,” I repeated. I said it gently, bemusedly, admiringly. “How did you get up there?”

“A ladder.”

“Whose?”

“Jacob’s.”

I wanted to ask him if he met any angels descending as he climbed up.

“You ask how I got up into the attic. It’s not so simple. It’s like asking how one gets to the fifth floor of a three-story building…. Do you know The Guide of the Perplexed?”

“Not well.”

“In it, Maimonides writes that only a small, serpentine letter marks the difference between ‘comic’ and ‘cosmic.’ If you look at my story from a cosmic point of view, it’s not too strange at all. The light we see from the moon is one and a half seconds old. But the light we see from some stars is already millions of years old. In some cases, the light we see is shining from a star long dead. When we look up at the sky we look back in time. If you are aware, you see how the parameters we normally deal with are mixed up. Do you see?”

I said yes, but I didn’t see.

“And more, there is a force in the world called ‘dark energy,’ which accelerates the expansion of the universe.”

“I remember you once told me that you are blessed with dark energy. So what’s the connection?”