Curt Leviant - Kafka's Son

“I’m okay.”

“I saw your skin moving. Most extraordinary.”

“The skin and body act on their own. For instance, you can’t control blushing. The body does what it does in response to outer stimuli.”

“But why the fear and trembling as soon as I mentioned Dora? One might almost think you were in love with her yourself.”

Again an unusual feeling enveloped me. This time it was a swirl of dizziness, as though I were just coming to after being sedated.

K looked at me as if awaiting a reply. What had he asked? Then the last words of his remark echoed in my mind.

“I was in love with her for you. If you know what I mean.”

“Yes.”

“Reading the biography I kept rooting for both of you to fulfill your destiny.”

“Kabbalists say there are many sparks in the world, as many sparks as stars in the sky, and only one of these sparks, a fragment of the Divine Name, is your spark. But with faith and determination, that spark can be yours.”

He stopped for a moment, then continued:

“Do you know she survived the war in England, my darling Dora?”

“Yes. I read that. I read all about you and her. Isn’t it amazing how books permit you to climb into a person’s head?”

“Yes.”

He looked over my shoulder, as if for a cue — perhaps, who knows? someone did signal him to continue. I looked up and back at the wooden partition behind which Michele Luongo was standing, filming everything we were doing.

“All right,” K said, as if concluding at that moment to reveal what he hadn’t thought of revealing before. “I’ll tell you a fascinating story.”

I felt the tension in me ebbing, my nervousness about broaching the subject of Dora melting away. An air of calm and satisfaction encompassed me. The sun streamed through the restaurant windows. I was in a different world. Happy, at ease. I was filming this. I looked down upon myself from some empyrean height. This was as incredible as K’s life itself. The happiness buzzed in my capillaries. I had not a care in the world.

“I already told you that every year, on my yorzeit, on the day the world assumes I died, I go to my gravesite to visit the poor man, Johann Eck, who died alone, without kin, without even a name on his tombstone. I go early in the morning before others come, because others do come, to place flowers by the tombstone. They come to show that K hasn’t been forgotten. And I come to show that Johann hasn’t been forgotten. I come early and say Kaddish for poor Eck and I light a yorzeit candle for him at home.”

I admired K for his faithfulness, for his devotion to the lonely man who died with another’s name. I was about to ask him what connection this had with Dora when he surprised me.

“A few years after the war, I think it was in 1950, early in June, around the time of my yorzeit, I saw a news item in the Prague daily that Dora Diamant, once the fiancée of K, was visiting Prague and staying at the Parizska Hotel. I was astounded. I read the item a dozen times to make sure my eyes were not deceiving me. But it was so. Dora Diamant in Prague. Dora alive! I had not known she survived. I thought she and her entire family were victims of the thorough German killing machine in Poland.”

“My God, you hadn’t seen her in twenty-six years. What did you do?”

“Believe me, I was torn. I felt myself tearing in two, like a piece of paper, and both pieces of paper were me. The love of my life. Young as she was, the only woman I felt absolutely comfortable with. But she was torn from me and I closed the book on her. Should I tear open an old wound?”

Yes, I almost cried out.

“Notice how often the word ‘torn’ appears in my thoughts, and in how many variations. I imagined myself going to her hotel room, introducing myself. She doesn’t believe me. I tell her what happened, the first person outside my immediate family with whom I share the news. She still doesn’t believe me. As you didn’t believe me. Which is natural, quite natural. I understand. I mention names of nurses at the sanatorium we both knew. She looks at me bewildered. How can this man remember so many names? she thinks. And how does he know all this? This is where my fantasy ends. I was tempted to go to the hotel and ask for her but I didn’t go.”

Why? Why? I hold myself back from shouting. I have to grip the edge of the chair with both hands and press hard to keep my lips sealed. Why did you do that? Destiny must play itself out. The huge maw of destiny must be fed, its hunger assuaged, its great thirst slaked. Go for it, K! Please go for it!

“Why are you so agitated? You look uncomfortable, distressed.”

“I’m rooting for you. For her. For both of you. Go. Go for it, K. Please!”

“We cannot undo the past.”

“We certainly can. Films reshape the past.”

“Films preserve. They change nothing.”

“Fiction reshapes the past.”

“Has it brought back one of the murdered?”

We both were silent.

Then I said, “Your life, rebirth, is a shaping of the past.”

“It’s all academic. What happened happened. Listen.”

“You don’t know how badly I want you and Dora to reunite,” I interjected. “I feel it in my blood and bones, in my marrow and in my soul.”

K gave a little smile. With both palms he brushed down his mustache and Van Dyke.

“You are a good Liebes Direktor, a good manager of love.”

“I always thought of your love as the love affair of the twentieth century. K and Dora, the love affair that could have been but never was.”

K drank some water. He put the glass down and then drank again.

“Common wisdom has it that, despite Proust, the past cannot be recaptured. Especially in my case, after the great divide of my death. But you know the expression, ‘Der mentch tracht un Gott lacht’? Literally, man thinks and God laughs. Or to make it rhyme in English: Man proposes, God disposes.”

“I remember Jiri also using that phrase in New York.”

K laughed. “You see. It shows he’s my son.”

He closed his eyes for a moment. As old as he was there was not a wrinkle on his smooth face. But I think I’ve mentioned that before. So what? An important observation can be repeated. Alexander Pope said it better in a rhymed couplet but I can’t recall it now. In any case, I wondered what thoughts were going through K’s head. Was he reliving his imaginary encounter with Dora? Perhaps after my provocation regretting he didn’t make the one move he could have made — to retrieve his spark, take that short ride to destiny on the Metro from his house to the Parizska Hotel, just down the block from the Altneushul, another destiny-laden landmark in his life, and reintroduce himself to Dora? It would have been hard but I was sure the spark of love between them could have been reignited. How many regrets can a man bear without battering his heart?

“For some reason I cannot now recall,” K continued, “on the day of my yorzeit I didn’t visit the gravesite early. I usually went at eight, or half after eight the latest. But that day I arrived close to ten, fearful I would encounter several people who would intrude upon my private meditation. Remember, I passed myself off as my second cousin, Philippe Klein, who had always resembled me. Isn’t it strange, my sisters didn’t look at all like me; my first cousins didn’t look like me, but my father’s first cousin, Flora, who also didn’t look like a K, had a son I had never met — he lived in Hamburg, then migrated in 1935 to Sweden — and it was family saga, and pictures proved it, that he resembled me.

“As I approached my tombstone I saw a figure crouching down, holding two roses. I looked closer. It was a woman. And once again I felt that electric shock in me. Could it be? For a moment I thought of fleeing.”