Curt Leviant - Kafka's Son

I put up my hand just like Betty had done before. They stopped and looked at me.

“I want to wish you well, Jiri. A refu’eh shleymeh,” I said in Yiddish, wishing he’d have a complete cure. “Get well and I’ll see you soon.”

“Goodbye,” said Betty.

But Jiri waved an index finger.

“No no. Not yet, bruderl . It’s not yet time for you to go. Just a few minutes more.”

I stood rooted. As if preplanned, as if programmed, as if he couldn’t help himself, Jiri again began speaking and Betty answered. Back and forth went the words until it was difficult to discern who was asking and who replying.

Again I tried to make out words but got only sounds. Yes, I concluded, they were making it up, improvising as they went along. That was their goal, to keep me in the dark. Even if by so doing they kept themselves in the dark too. But that didn’t seem to mesh with Jiri’s beneficent character. Something was wrong here. Maybe Betty was bewitching him and once he got caught up in the flow of words his day-to-day mentchlikh personality was swallowed up by their language. Many words sounded like voodoo, a cross between Cymric and Wendish with a dash of Ural-Altaic. In short, like no language under the sun. Even under the moon.

Once, in Canada — here comes secretive speech anecdote number three — while making a film about Jewish life in the western provinces, I was invited to a rabbi’s house in Manitoba for the Sabbath. This rabbi had had a harem of wives, serially of course. He hadn’t yet converted to Mormonism, but given his libido it wasn’t out of the question. Rabbi Menashe Buchsenbaum-Vardi went around, like a United Nations ambassador, from one land to another, choosing wives: Chinese, Italian, Swedish, French, Korean (one from each), converting each new goyish bride to Judaism, then abandoning her for another country. Increase mitzvas was his religious credo. The more Jews the merrier. Meet a girl, make her, then make her Jewish. His current one, Deidre, was a cute and spunky Irish woman with big eyes and a freckled face about twenty-five years the rabbi’s junior, he with grey and white crowding his beard, she a sexy, slender thirty. During supper they also spoke a language I didn’t understand. This obviously pre-planned little scenario lasted only a few minutes during the Friday night meal and was probably a bunch of nonsense syllables they had made up for their own amusement and for the consternation of their house guest.

Insulted, I wanted to get up and leave — but something had happened about an hour earlier that rooted me to the house. Their language too fascinated me. By no means was it equal in sound, complexity, or variety of tones to Jiri’s. And even though I understood neither of these outlandish tongues, I can say definitively that I didn’t understand Jiri’s better than I didn’t understand the Canadian rabbi’s.

Rabbi Buchsenbaum-Vardi may have wanted to be mysterious, but the wordless message his live-wire, attractive, pert-nosed wife sent me was quite clear. Before the meal, when a few other people were present, Menashe announced that they had a custom of holding hands and dancing in a circle while singing Sholom aleichem , the song that welcomes the Sabbath. All of us joined hands for the dance. I found myself next to Deidre and, in the course of the dance, she squeezed my hand a few times, press and release, press and release, while innocently looking straight ahead, a shy and somewhat enigmatic smile on her face. What I was supposed to do about that obvious come-on, which needed no words, no language, no syntax, I still can’t figure out. Did she expect me to press back as a signal that she should/could slip into my bed in the guest room that night?

But back to Jiri and Betty.

Listening to their language was a challenge. Maybe they even enjoyed my puzzlement. Focusing on the words, I thought one of them said “gra”—the first word of the two-word morning greeting (“gra dnasta”) that I had heard so often on the streets of Mustara. I had spent a few days there on that island nation off southern Europe, formerly under authoritarian rule, but now — free of the Soviet yoke — a model ex-communist dictatorship.

“Have you been to Mustara?” I asked into the air, addressing one, both, of them.

They looked at me blankly but did not stop the interchange of puzzling words. For a while they even spoke at the same time, at each other, over each other, and it sounded like a duet to me, full of rich, complex tropes.

I bet, I thought, if I had the text of their words and studied it long enough, I could break the code. One word, however, that I did not hear was “Prague” or “Europe.” Maybe they used words like “city” or even “there” to avoid giving me any hints.

Another thing: I usually ask people to identify a language I don’t understand. But now, for some strange reason, I did not. Perhaps because they spoke it around me, trying to bind me with the bonds of their unfathomable words.

Then Betty jumped up, walked quickly, with an oddly stiff gait, between me and Jiri’s bed and rushed into the bathroom. She probably had held back all along from going, not wanting to leave Jiri and me alone. Now she could no longer contain herself.

Jiri spoke quickly. “Tell Yossi I sent you. Very important. He’ll introduce you to some interesting people. Also, you’ll be pleased to meet, it will be important for you to…my…he will send you to a man named… An old man who will sh…”

But he did not complete his thought. Instead, he pointed to an old-fashioned pen on the night table, an item I hadn’t noticed before, or, if noticed, hadn’t paid attention to.

“Write down the following.”

I pulled out a notepad from my pocket and took the pen.

In the bathroom, Betty flushed, and I prayed she would stay there a while longer, perhaps affected by a stomach cramp or two. She was washing her hands. I leaned forward.

Jiri turned his head toward the bathroom.

“Quickly,” he said. “I want you to see…” Then his eyes fluttered shut.

Now it was too late to write. And in an unconscious gesture — a move I did not analyze until later — I slipped the pen into my inside jacket pocket, out of sight.

Jiri opened his eyes again, looked at me with his mild glance, and whispered, “Amschl, Amschl.”

“Yes,” I said.

How did he know my Hebrew name? He had stepped out of the sanctuary that Sabbath two weeks or so ago when I gave the gabbai my name before my aliya to the Torah.

But once more Jiri closed his eyes and fell silent, a morose, frustrated silence — perhaps I should even say angry silence — etched on to his face.

Betty came out of the bathroom, looked at Jiri, and put an index finger to her lips.

“He’s asleep,” she said in a low voice. “Please, mister, don’t sap the little bit of strength he has. He’s not a well man. Can’t you see that? Can’t you?”

“Seems to me you’re talking to him much more than me.”

Jiri opened his eyes. He turned to Betty.

“Please.” And he made a drinking motion with his cupped hand.

Betty looked at the night table. “Where’s the water? The nurse forgot to fill the pitcher. What’s the matter with those nurses? All they do is hang around the nurses’ station and jabber.”

Then she rushed to the bathroom again.

“Come tomorrow, bruderl,” Jiri said softly. “Early. She doesn’t come until…”

“I can’t, Jiri. I teach a film course on Monday mornings… What about the old…?”

But all Jiri said was, “I hope you weren’t hurt by our language. But I hope you’ll understand someday.”

Which sense of understand did he mean? That I would someday understand that language, or that I’d understand why they used it today?