Curt Leviant - Kafka's Son

Did I see Schweik wink, or was it my overheated imagination, seeing things that couldn’t be seen? The language K spoke wasn’t Czech or any other language I didn’t understand; it was more like the language Jiri and Betty had used to confuse my thoughts.

“Is that Czech?”

“A version Schweik understands. The working-class dialect.”

“I see. And who are the two chaps with him?”

“I know only one. The chubby fellow next to him is the author, Hašek.”

“Do I look anything like him?”

K’s glance said: Why in the world are you asking that? But he looked at my face and at Hašek’s.

“No. Not at all. Why?”

“A girl here told me I looked like him. I didn’t like being compared to that fat guy.”

“She meant it as a compliment. In Prague slang, a good-looking man is always compared to Hasek.”

I don’t know if I bought it. I looked at K. At that moment he had the innocence of Schweik. How could I not believe him?

“By the way,” he said, “did you know that Hasek owes his worldwide fame for The Good Soldier Schweik to Max Brod? With his typical generosity of spirit, he worked enthusiastically on Hašek’s behalf to get the book published.”

I nodded, listened with half an ear, but I was interested in something else.

“May I ask you a question?”

He must have sensed what I was about to say, for he gave me a warning look.

“Not about that. That is a closed issue.”

“It’s not about that. It’s about what you did. It’s still hard to believe,” I said, “hard to understand why you cut yourself off.”

“I didn’t want to be K anymore.”

I shook my head. “Please forgive me for pursuing this. But your friendship with Brod. You loved him. You appreciated his generosity of spirit. He was like a brother; more than a brother. I read his book. You were like Jonathan and David. Inseparable.”

“Yes. That was the most difficult. I regret it to this day.”

“So please, please explain it.”

“I can’t. I cannot. I try to come up with reasons. I think about it. I can’t stop thinking about it. It’s a regret that spins like a never ending top in my mind. It haunts me. I can’t explain it.”

“Maybe it was ego.”

“Maybe,” K said.

“Or desire for drama.”

“Could be. But I still can’t explain it.”

“Not only the false death that Doctor Klopstock agreed to. But to continue the sham for decades.”

“Then I had a reason. Dora. But in retrospect I can’t explain it. It has run its course and now it’s too late to change. I don’t know. I admit it. I just don’t know.”

Tears sprang into his eyes. No wonder the word “sprang” is used with tears. They did not well up slowly, reflecting the slow buildup of feelings, the eyes moisten, then the tears coming. But here “sprang” is correct. Like a sudden hemorrhage they came, the tears.

“There are lots of things I know,” K continued, “but this I truly don’t know. Celine writes about the gratuitous act. This may be one. It’s like a runaway train on a downhill run. Once started, no turning back. Don’t you think I’ve asked myself countless times, Why did you do it? Why did you fake your death? I have no answer. Or, rather, different answers at different times, which is the same answer as no answer. Sometimes in the middle of the night it becomes absolutely clear to me. In a dream. But in waking, when I want to grasp it, to recreate the thoughts, the words, they elude me.”

“Maybe a moment of madness, which even Klopstock, loving you as a friend, admiring you, overwhelmed by your miraculous cure, acquiesced to.”

“That’s what it was. Undoubtedly. Maybe a moment of madness. But I hurt many people with that moment of madness, most of all my beloved friend Max…” K stopped, gazed at me, somewhat shyly, it seemed to me, and added, “When I met Brod I apologized to him.”

“You saw Brod again?”

“Maybe I’ll tell you some other time.”

And he smiled, in a good mood again.

Like a desire, that good mood of his sent a warm feeling through me. Perhaps I could ask him again. My argument would be: Filming you would be like undoing your mistake. It would help explain to yourself why you did what you did. It would undo your regrets. But K sensed what was going through me and I saw the subtle transformation on his face. It became stiff, suspicious.

K had me. I kept silent.

But other plans, inchoate still, but schemes nevertheless, were whirring through my brain like wild winds.

I was seeing K practically every day and he still eluded me.

I was torn between ambition and politesse; goals and mentchlikhkeyt , simple decency; the drive for a world-resonating scoop and my affection for K and my desire to protect his privacy. What do I do?

Sometimes I felt like a character out of a book — torn, not between ambition and politesse, but torn as if torn from pages of a book, torn out of that novella, Ladies and Gentlemen, the Original Music of the Hebrew Alphabet , where Isaac Gantz, an instructor of musicology, wants to get the manuscript of the music of the Hebrew alphabet from a poor, lonely, crippled Holocaust survivor, and finally make a name for himself and perhaps get tenure at his two-bit college.

Me, it wasn’t tenure I was after or a one-day halo of fame. What I was getting at was the entire rainbow — and then that word, shaped like a rainbow in my mind, brought back the other rainbow, the first rainbow I was hoping for, another person who was eluding me, the lovely Katya — a rainbow spanning east to west, in glorious Technicolor, sunrise and sunset at once, the cosmos spinning on my fingertip.

So what do I do? How do I preserve for posterity this living legend, in all caps or in italics, if not through chicanery? Then it caught me, that word. It caught and shamed me. I stopped, beheld my eyes behind and above me like a searchlight and, blinded by the beam, beheld myself. Is chicanery the only path? What is the correct path for a man to choose? asks the Ethics of the Fathers.

Had I met Rashi in Troyes, Maimonides in Fez, Mozart in Vienna, Mark Twain or Sholom Aleichem in New York long after their recorded death, wouldn’t I have raced to my camera and started the film rolling? Shoot first, ask questions later is not only a Special Forces order, it’s the photographer’s First Commandment.

Do we owe any debt to history — that is, to the future, to the public at large? Or is anything that is considered historically important discovered by a man of flesh and blood tainted with ego, the self-aggrandizement and ambition of the historian, the mediator between historic/legendary figures and the public?

In short, is the correct path ethical consideration or historical truth? And if precedent is our teacher, the guide that holds a single candle to light our way through darkness, we have Max Brod with K’s manuscripts willed to flames, but saved. Because Max was true to history, to literature, to K himself.

I should consult someone, I thought. Talk it over. Get the ethical slant from someone slightly removed. But with whom? I wish I had a rebbe to consult like Dora’s father. I had no friends here. And anyway, no matter how good, how objective the advice, no stranger, no friend, can make such a crucial and — in my case — life-changing decision for someone else.

And there was yet another quandary, a quandary wrapped in an enigma, to paraphrase (wrongly, you’ll say, and right you’ll be) Churchill’s famous phrase about the Soviet Union: in the very articulation of my ethical quandary, I’d be revealing, perforce I’d have to reveal, the details of my amazing discovery. What a trade-off!