Curt Leviant - Kafka's Son

“I understand. I don’t like my toothbrush moved either. And open windows have to be perfectly aligned.”

“Just like him.” Eva gave a broad smile. “You’re not related, are you?”

I sat down, not in K’s easy chair but on the wooden one next to his writing table where I usually sat. It moved back an inch as I sat down. I moved it forward.

“That’s right,” said Eva. “Mr. Klein is very, how you say, metic—?”

“Meticulous?”

“Yes. Meticulous. He likes everything in order, like I told you. He even combs his hair before he goes to sleep.”

“In case he meets a pretty woman in his dreams.”

“Not any pretty woman, but—”

Eva was about to say, I could swear a name was at the tip of her tongue. But she held back.

“Maybe someone he loved in the past,” I helped her.

“Could be,” Eva said.

Later, I thought about it and concluded that she wanted to say Dora — but for some reason kept still.

I didn’t think I would wait as long as I did. Every fifteen or twenty minutes I told myself, I’ll wait just ten minutes more. And every time I rose to leave, I would think, Suppose he comes back during the next few minutes and I miss him. I was dying to apologize about the Dora letter incident and then give my little speech. Then I decided: Since I waited so long, I might as well wait a bit longer.

At one point I heard a Mozart piano sonata. Probably Eva practicing.

While sitting, I was torn between curiosity, noting everything in the room — no radio I could see (perhaps he had a transistor under his pillow) and no television — and etiquette, hesitant to intrude on his privacy. Restraining myself from looking about too much, I actually felt my neck stiffen, the muscles of my hands and feet charley-horsed. How I wanted to open drawers, doors, to see how much farther I could penetrate the quiddity of K.

Then I looked at my watch. My God, it’s already twelve thirty. I stood. If I stayed longer, Eva would offer me lunch, and I didn’t want to impose. I stretched. Relaxed my tense limbs. Swiveled my neck left and right a few times. Enough. Time to go. I’ll go out and see if I can find him. Maybe he’s sitting in the park up the hill.

At the door, the recurring doubts about K’s story assailed me again. They actually crept on the skin of my hands, tiny prickles, moving goosebumps, that spread upward to my face. Could Mr. Klein be taking all the information about K, his entire gestalt, his persona, from perhaps a little-known Czech or German or Slovakian novel about K, a book perhaps entitled K’s Son or The Children of K , and it was this that fed his appetite for the grand drama, the luscious theater of his life? Could he indeed be a fraud like Karoly Graf, with his pathetic proof that he was K’s son? Too bad K couldn’t show me a birthmark on his abdomen or forearm that everyone would recognize from a well-documented source that would reveal him to be the lost princess of the classic fairy tales. Then that phrase that K had censored surfaced — about the pretty nurse, Miriam — and made me rethink Graf’s claim.

K really had me. I couldn’t even discuss my doubts, never mind the ethics of secretly videoing him, with anyone lest, if his story was true, I would betray his secret.

Then it dawned on me that one crucial question could be answered by Eva, who had probably known him for years.

The piano sounds had stopped. I went out to the kitchen, where she now was sitting reading a newspaper. I thanked her for her friendly welcome and, without even giving myself a chance to catch my breath, asked:

“Do you by any chance happen to know how old the gentleman is?”

“No. I don’t. But he’s certainly older than me,” and she laughed.

She knew I wasn’t going to ask her age.

“But, in any case, I make it a practice to protect the privacy of people who live here. You should really ask him yourself.”

“It isn’t polite.”

She smiled at me an admonishing smile, scolding me pleasantly.

“Neither is it polite to ask behind someone’s back.”

I had to admit she was right. But her attitude closed the door to any further personal questions.

Then she was back to her smiling, grandmotherly mode. “Look, since you waited so long, why don’t you wait another fifteen minutes? Why take a chance on missing him? And meanwhile I’ll make you some lunch.”

“That’s what I’ve been telling myself the past two hours. And no lunch, thanks.”

“You know what? Try just another fifteen, twenty minutes. Maybe they will be beneficial.”

“Okay.” I sat in K’s room, my mind a blank, staring at K’s old framed print of a wheat field, fearful that my staring might shift the angle of the frame and cause K discomfort. I ran out of fingers and toes counting the fifteen-minute chunks of time I’d lost.

Suddenly an idea popped into my head. Inspect K’s shem . Bottom drawer. Perhaps this is why Jiri sent me here. To get the shem . Jiri liked me and wanted to reward me. I imagined K standing in front of his chest of drawers, his back pressed against it, as if to say: Nothing doing — guarding his treasure like the fiery angel with the revolving sword who guarded the Garden of Eden to prevent the exiled Adam from returning.

But now I was drawn to that chest of drawers like a nail to a magnet. A wave of enchanted desire swept over me. Pulled me forward a force greater than my power of resistance. I wanted to, I had to see that piece of parchment. I wanted to hold it, inspect it, gaze at it, get my fill of it. But a strange thing happened. Not that I ever watch horror movies or suspense shows on TV, but sometimes as you switch channels you catch a moment of suspense or horror and an odd feeling begins on the nape of your neck and rills down your spine and a fright as though you’re in mortal danger overwhelms you. That’s what happened to me.

As I drew closer to the drawer I heard a hum: something vibrating. A combination of sound and touch. An electric thrum. The sound you hear on electric wires or telegraph lines in the countryside with total silence all around. First I heard it, then I felt it in my body, as if a tuning fork had been pressed against me and I caught its vibrations and moved in sympathy with it. And then the tinge of vibrating pain, first mild, uncomfortable, a subliminal pain, then stronger, as if I were holding on to a live wire or my finger were pressed into a bulb socket. A painful electric shock, a burn that made me step back quickly.

I looked to the door. No one. In one swift movement, as I imagine taking the shem , K enters and says calmly:

“But it is inefficacious.”

“What is?”

“Please don’t pretend.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Yes,” he says. That frustrating Yes of his.

“What are you talking about?”

“The shem in your pocket. In your hand. It is only a blank parchment.”

“But I didn’t take it.”

“Yes.”

I looked at him.

“But you thought of taking it.”

I was tempted to say that Yes of his.

“Take it out. You will see that it is blank.”

From out of my pocket I took the parchment I thought of taking but didn’t take.

“See?” he said.

It was blank.

K said, “It only works for me.”

Thinking of the shem , I recalled telling K once:

“You were so lucky to have that shem to sustain you.”

He said he was fortunate, doubly blessed. “You see, I have two of them,” he said with a soft shyness that was not characteristic of him.

And then he said something that made him sound like a faith healer, a spiritual guide. But it wasn’t facile, gimme-a-donation TV spirituality. He spoke out of experience. He meant what he said.