Curt Leviant - Kafka's Son

“You know what I learned over the years. Everyone has a shem in him. You just have to know where it’s hidden, where to find it.”

At once I moved my tongue in my mouth, exploring, like someone searching for a canker sore. I touched my upper lip, the upper palate. I went above my front teeth to the gum line, below my lower teeth, to the inside of my cheeks. I stretched the limits of the tip of my tongue, curled it, again searched the roof of my mouth, probed all around as far back as it could go. But I found nothing. Where could it be? I wondered. Maybe it wasn’t in my mouth at all. Who said the shem had to be in one’s mouth? But where else could it be? It wasn’t on my forehead. For if it were it would have been obvious to outsiders and plucked off long ago. If I had a shem , perhaps it was somewhere else. Maybe it couldn’t be found that easily. Maybe, like a magic elixir, one had to search hard and long before one discovered it. And maybe, like the fountain of youth, you had to search all your life only to discover, finally, when you looked in the mirror and were shocked, that it didn’t exist, but that, nevertheless, the search for it and the confidence that one had a shem was the blessing.

I turned to follow the singing sunshine in the room. Saw K’s writing table. Its one drawer was slightly open, like a woman’s parted lips, signaling, hinting at invitation. I stood; the chair moved behind me. Remembering K’s penchant for neatness and order, I brought the chair back carefully to its original position. I drew near the table, then backed away, pretending I was thinking about my next move but knowing that I would open the drawer. Without even turning, confident that K was nowhere near, I opened the drawer some more.

Jiri’s letter lay there, part of a packet of his letters held together by a rubber band. I recognized Jiri’s handwriting. Did K leave the drawer open on purpose? To tempt me? Test me? To see if I had learned my lesson or if I was an incorrigible recidivist?

At once — and you can’t imagine how quickly: as quick as movie frames, each of which is a still photo, running through a projector— at once the scenario for my film changed. Soon as I saw Jiri’s letter it changed. My film would not open with the statue of the Maharal in Prague’s Town Hall. The film would reflect my beginnings with Prague in New York. It would open with the building where my first encounter took place, the Eldridge Street shul. The image, in black and white, would linger, silently, like a long sustained note. I would video the synagogue from a roof across the street and capture its elegant Moorish, Romanesque, and Gothic façade. The audience would see the synagogue longer than they would normally have patience for, and with no commentary. Next I’d talk about Jiri and tell his story.

As I looked down at the drawer I wondered if K had left it open in compensation for not letting me have Dora’s letter. So there were two ways of looking at this: as test and as gift. If I passed the test and touched nothing, my reward would be a photocopy of Dora’s letter. I wanted…

I wanted, oh how badly I wanted to resist.

I wanted, oh how badly I wanted Jiri’s letter to his father.

I compromised. I didn’t take the top letter. I carefully removed one letter from the middle of the stack. I left the drawer open precisely as K had left it.

I was calm. My heart did not burst with fear as I took the letter, folded it once, and placed it in the inside pocket of my jacket.

The twenty minutes were up. K still had not returned. I rose and left his room.

At the front door of the apartment I said loudly:

“I’m leaving now, Eva. Goodbye.”

By the sound of my voice bouncing off nothing except walls, I could tell no one was at home. The stillness in an empty house is different from the absence of sounds when people are present.

I went down the stairs to the front of the house. As I stepped outside a girl emerged from another door at ground level at the corner of the house.

I don’t know if I said No! aloud or to myself. It cannot be. I must be dreaming. Are prayers really answered in this world? Just as I was lamenting the wasted hours, the useless trip, in one instant my lost time, my irretrievable hours, turned to gold — but it was not the gold of the earth; it was the gold of heaven. So the old lady was right again. The extra minutes I had spent staring at K’s print in his room were not only beneficial; they were as golden as the wheat on the framed picture.

For before me, immobile now, not gliding, stood the girl who had swooshed by me before, seen only from the back, like the vision presented to Moses as God’s glory passed before him. The girl with the oval face, alluring smile, and one dimple, and one dimple only, when she smiled. The girl whose long green eyes were sunshine. She had changed into slacks, the way she usually dressed when on the square, the girl from faux Georgia, the girl in the blue beret.

“What?” she and I cried out.

“You?” I and she exclaimed.

“Is it?” said either she or I.

Then we both said, “What are you doing here?”

“This is incredible,” I probably said, because it’s one of my favorite words.

Her mouth was open.

“Let me see,” and I took out a make-believe book from my pocket, licked my forefinger in the European manner as I turned nonexistent pages. “Let’s see on which page of the novel this astonishing, surprising, incredible meeting takes place, for it can happen only in a novel where a guy looks all over town for a girl and finds her in the house he’s been visiting for quite a while.”

I looked at Katya.

We both stood still.

So many questions burbled in my mind, I didn’t know where to begin. I put the book back into my pocket.

We faced each other. Now, for the first time, she wasn’t wearing a placard, demonstrating a marionette, or acting. Now we weren’t on the square but in the flowering little garden in front of the house, far from the tumult of town. Who had ordained that here, in K’s house, I would meet my lost rainbow, the girl in the blue beret?

Then, like out of a teenagers’ handbook, came simple, tentative, halting questions.

“Do you live here?”

“I have a little room on the ground floor.”

“But I saw you passing by upstairs. At least the back of you.”

“I was getting some milk from the refrigerator.”

We both started saying something at the same time, then fell silent for a long moment.

Then Katya asked:

“And you? Do you live here?”

“Well, I spend enough time to qualify as a resident.”

“I don’t mean in this house. I mean in Prague.”

“I’m renting a studio in an apartment hotel for a couple of months while I’m working on my film.”

“But where do you really live?”

“In New York.”

“Oh,” she said.

I looked straight into her eyes long enough for her to lower her eyes.

“You’re not from Georgia, are you?”

Said, still with her eyes down, “No…but you already guessed that.”

“Then why did you say that?”

“Do you know how many dozens of men, young and old, stop to chat with me? Everyone wants to take me out. Few are interested in concerts.”

“That’s what they get when they hire a beautiful girl.”

“I have neither the interest nor the time to meet and befriend strangers. So that’s why I said Georgia. When they ask to meet me after work, I say I’m going back to Georgia in a couple of days.”

“No wonder you weren’t impressed by my Georgian dishes…. Don’t people see you a few days later and ask how come you’re still here?”

“Do you know what the average stay in Prague is? Two-three days. And if by chance someone does see me again, I make up a wild story.”