Curt Leviant - Kafka's Son

I leaped up into the air. I thought I would stay up there. Gravity couldn’t bring me down. I almost bounced into the seat of one of K’s model aeroplanes and flew off into the vast blue yonder with the joy of Katya’s suggestion. What a brilliant idea! She’d just saved my film.

“So she likes you, eh?”

“Yes.” I laughed and laughed. “She does. She does. And thanks to you.”

Katya, you’re amazing, I thought. I would make use of the flawed audio, the failed video, just as I had planned to, but with a different slant. I would include K’s room, the house. Of course, now I would include Katya — not knowing, of course, how much she would say for the record — and Eva too. Everything I had videoed so far would be included. Johnny, Luongo’s assistant, had focused on the table where K and I sat but, cleverly, he took in an overview of the restaurant, including the balcony and the wooden partition. That too would be in my “failed film.” But I would not use Katya’s title. Perhaps the film’s name would be Imagining K .

Then I interrupted my own reverie with: “How did Katya know my Hebrew name?”

“I told her.”

“And how did you know?”

“Think about it.”

I thought and thought. I shrugged.

“Jiri wrote me.”

That was strange. How could he have known? Jiri Weisz-Krupka had stepped out of the synagogue when I was called to the Torah that first Sabbath we met. What kind of secret communications network did these people have?

“Amschl is a rare Hebrew name,” K said.

“I know. I’ve never heard anyone called up to the Torah with that name. And I’ve never seen it on a shul memorial tablet.”

“Come to shul when I get an aliya and you’ll hear it. Or visit my tombstone.”

“Really? Is Amschl your Hebrew name too?”

“Why so surprised? I thought you read everything I wrote and everything written about me?”

K’s clever eyes, the penetrating eyes of the early K photographs, encompassed me.

“It’s in Brod’s biography,” he said. “On the second page, where he quotes my diary, ‘My Hebrew name is Amschl.’”

“Imagine! I completely forgot that. But Jiri did say ‘Amschl’ twice last time I saw him.”

“Yes.”

Of course it was K speaking. Again that ambiguous, enigmatic Yes. Oh, that slippery Yes, that monosyllable with as many notes as the musical alphabet. That Yes of shifting tonalities. That continuum Yes. That multihued Yes, green and red and blue. That Yes of snowcaps and verdant valleys, of scald and ice. That Yes of assent, of silence and negation. A Yes that slid and jaggled on a wobbly-legged ladder from Yes to No.

And you know what? I don’t even remember the comment that prompted that Yes. Then my frustration, which I thought I had reined in, thought I swept away, suddenly surfaced.

I looked at K, felt so close to him. We had the same Hebrew name. I couldn’t help my plea, couldn’t restrain it. Maybe he would have pity on me.

“I want to live. To make films.” Perhaps the period wasn’t there and I said, “I want to live to make films.” And then I swallowed and added: “To succeed. To live. Like you. I love books. Your books. Your life is unique. There’s only one person who can record your story. Me. May I…?” But I couldn’t finish the sentence; rather, to my own surprise I shifted key, changed tonality, elided it to: “May I have…I want…I need…your blessing. Will you give it to me?”

Did I mean, were my words otherspeaking for, Please let me touch the parchment?

K looked at me. Who did I see in his face with the longish, pointy nose and Van Dyke beard — an old man or K? The man who really was K, at one hundred ten or one hundred eleven? Or did I see myself in the mirror of my hopes and dreams?

He looked at me. He looked at me with what I thought was beneficence in his bright blue eyes. He looked at me and said:

“You didn’t get the video of me you wanted, you know my view, but I have something else for you. It’s in the synagogue. Get it.”

“The Altneu?”

“No. The other one.”

“With the lions?”

“Yes.”

“Uh-uh. No no.” Just the thought of that place sent shivers of fear through me.

“It will be all right.”

“Where in the synagogue is it?”

“In the Aron Kodesh.”

“No. I’m not going there again. They don’t like me. I don’t know why, but they don’t like me.”

“They won’t come down again. I promise you.”

You can promise all you want, I thought. But can I rely on their promise?

“No. I won’t do it.”

“You’ll go. You’ll get the folder. Copy it if you like, and then put it back.”

“No…what’s in it?”

“You’ll see.”

“Why can’t you get it for me? You go there from time to time.”

K looked at me. K looked through me. K looked at me pityingly, as if I didn’t understand the simplest equation.

“Don’t you see?”

“No. I don’t see.”

“It’s a test. Remember Tamino, from our favorite opera?” K went to his desk and picked up the little puppet of Papageno that always stood there. “You too have to pass the test…. If I bring you what I’m sending you to fetch, it won’t be much of a test, will it?”

As I turned to go, K added: “And, ah, by the way…”—now I faced him, and a shy, kindly look waved across his face like a patch of sunshine suddenly appearing between moving clouds—“I have one more thing for you. And this you can have without undergoing a Magic Flute— like test.”

He went to his little writing table, opened the drawer, pulled it out as far as it could go, and from the very rear took out a small item.

Looking closer, I saw it was a pen top. No, not a pen top. The pen top. The top of the pen.

K raised it and gazed into my eyes.

I understood.

He understood.

We understood.

Although I wanted to, I didn’t ask him how he got it — and I smiled inwardly, proud of my restraint. But I imagined. For imagining no restraint needed. Imagining is my middle name. It may have been Betty who brought it to him. But I didn’t, wouldn’t, ask. Or perhaps there hadn’t been a Betty, not in the airport lounge, not on the plane. Perhaps it was a trick of the imagination, with me balancing, as I occasionally do, on the tightrope between the real and the dream.

K brought his hand toward me.

“Here. Take it. It’s mine. Yours. Ours…. The top of my, Jiri’s, your pen.”

I bowed my head in gratitude. I did not even have to say, Thank you.

Betty — the instrument in all this commotion, on the ground and (maybe) in the air — K did not name at all. It dawned on me that Jiri had never mentioned Betty to his father. And if Betty did not exist in K’s imagination, who was I to intrude her into K’s life?

And, of course, as I discovered later, the pen — complete now, whole — was, as I knew it would be, absolutely silent. Totally inefficacious. Sans Jiri’s voice. For I had already gotten to, destiny had brought me to, my destined destination.

And, in giving me the top of the pen, the way K handed it to me, bestowed it to me, presented it to me, transferred it over to me in almost formal fashion — a balletic gesture like a swan bowing her long elegant white neck; a hand gesture that has replayed itself over and over in my mind — in giving me what he gave me, I felt like young Elisha standing before the older prophet Elijah.

Receiving his mantle.

His tallis.

His quill.

His pen.

“You don’t go by Amschl, do you?” K said.

“No, only for aliyas.”