Curt Leviant - Kafka's Son

“Curt is a nice crisp name.”

The first time in all these weeks that he had articulated my name.

“I like the way you pronounce my name the European way… Koort.”

K’s unsaid Yes looked through me then looped back around my heart.

“Curt,” K repeated. He seemed to savor that one-syllable name. Perhaps preferred it to the eighteenth-century flavor of the first Rothschild’s name, Amschl.

“And you’re not a filmmaker, are you?”

“Yes.”

But that Yes wasn’t a Yes of assent. It was a Yes that said: I exist.

Then K rattled off a series of words I could not understand. From the inflection I gathered he had asked a question. For a while his words sounded like Jiri and Betty’s words, when Jiri was about to reveal something to me, words that ran backwards, had their centers cut out and attached to the beginnings and ends of other words. I waited a moment. The words reassembled.

“And you created all of this, this entire scenario: About being born in Prague and being adopted. You made this whole thing up”—he drew wide circles in the air with his right hand—“from, or out of, how do you say it in your beautiful, evocative, mellifluous English tongue, which given my history, my past, my survival, is a word I prefer to the word ‘language.’ You concocted all of this out of entire fabric.”

“Yes,” I said. “Together we wove this magnificent fabric. We made it up out of whole cloth.”

K frowned. “Cloth with holes? Moth-eaten?”

“No.” I laughed. “With a ‘w.’ Whole cloth.”

“Ah,” said K. “Just as I said. Entire fabric.”

“Yes.”

“Even me,” he said.

Did he mean that I had made up even him, or that even he had participated in the weaving?

“Yes. Me and you. You and I. All of us. Both of us. All of this. Together we wove it.”

“How did you do it?” K asked.

It was not a question I expected from the master weaver himself. And in any case, I couldn’t answer. Shall I tell him the letters hang in the air, in sunlight, and one by one we pluck them, sometimes stretched on tiptoe, sometimes by leaping up to a distant star to seize a shining letter? Or a destined spark? And if we miss, fall back to Earth like Icarus. Or, if we are lucky, the letters fall into our palms like rose petals, perfumed and velvety, ripe and ready to be used.

How did you do it? I was about to say. How did you weave your magic? With one word spun around another, like stars with satellites and moons. They call it writing, K, but they’re wrong. It’s not writing. For writing one doesn’t need paper. One doesn’t need pen. We write when we walk. We write when we talk. We write when we dream. We write when we sleep. We write when we hold, like Goethe, our beloved in our arms; while she is hugging me tight, we write. Sometimes we don’t even write when we write, for we are just jotting down what we have thought earlier. For what people call writing is really thinking. Calling us writers is a misnomer. We’re thinkers. First we think. Then we weave.

K probably thought I didn’t hear him, so he repeated:

“How did you do it?”

I was about to say Yes again, that slippery K Yes I had learned from him, a Yes that was at times life-affirming, at times ironical, at times meant silence, at times meant No. Instead, I decided to tell him the truth. About magic. Divination. Divine assistance. The mystical sparks that float about unseen until with a swift lucky move we snag them.

“How, you ask? Like this,” I said.

(to be continued)

[this page left blank intentionally]

“What’s your favorite piece of writing?” I asked K.

He looked at me and nodded. His head moved up and down several times. The loose skin beneath the chin you see on old men wasn’t there. I still couldn’t get over how young he looked. The shape he was in. The way he rose out of an easy chair into a standing position without grabbing his back or groaning or getting up in three or four installments. He had the movements of a vigorous man forty years his junior. I remembered reading how much K liked swimming and boating and hiking. Even decades later, the salutary aspects of physical exercise showed. Then again, maybe he was lying. Maybe he wasn’t 111. But maybe it was in the genes. My beloved uncle Monia, who used to take me to see Danny K in New York and looked more like K than I ever did, when Monia was in his mid-eighties and ill, he also jumped out of his chair into an erect position. And he never exercised a moment in his life. Unlacing his shoes, taking his pants off, and lying down to sleep at night was his most strenuous physical activity. Not too many people knew about K’s penchant for sports. Imagine how much time he lost from writing. Had he spent less time on sports and outdoor activities he could have written more, much more. He could have written “The Good Street,” “A Day at the Circus,” “The Lottery Agent,” and “In the Synagogue Courtyard,” the latter a major tale.

K regarded me. He still had not replied to my question. Was he thinking? Would he put me off? Give a definitive answer?

“You, and everyone else, will no doubt expect me to say: ‘The Metamorphosis’ or The Trial . But I won’t say that, no.” And he nodded again.

But I was insistent. “Then what will you say?”

K put his index finger to his lips.

Then I realized that I had phrased the question ambiguously. “What’s your favorite piece of writing?” could refer to his work, my work, or the work of others.

“I’ll have to think about it,” K said.

(to be continued)

I held Katya close to me.

“Do you know who the man you respectfully call ‘Grandpa’ is?” I asked her. She smiled at the private joke between us.

“Yes,” she said with that storybook Mona Lisa smile, a smile so wide it encompassed all the Ifs in the world. She thought it was a game I made up and she willingly played along.

“Shall we both say it at the same time?” I said, laughing. “Or write it on a piece of paper?”

Playing along, again she said, “Yes.”

And I thought of the magnificence of K’s analysis of “If,” the magic word that made the world spin on its story axis.

“If,” I said, but I didn’t know what I meant.

“If,” she said, in absolute synchrony with me.

Then together we said it both.

I said to the girl with the blue beret:

“Give me your hand.”

I thought I heard her say:

“And not the rest of me?”

Which prompted me to say:

“May I? May I ask for your hand?”

But she didn’t understand the idiom, for she said:

“Why ask if you already have it?”

“I may have it,” I replied, “but I don’t possess it.”

From somewhere came piano music. Bach. Upstairs. Eva was playing the gigue again.

I took Katya’s hand, her right hand, then took her other hand, her left hand, and brought both of them close. Touched now all four hands. I saw those sparkling long green eyes, those delicious lips, lips that lied early on that she lived in Georgia, the smooth high cheekbones, the soft enigmatic smile, much more sharing, giving, caring than Mona Lisa’s, the red lips on a face unsullied by, that needed no, makeup.

My lips approached hers.

They touched. Sparked a charge of voltage through me; surged my blood; rose my soul.

I felt the parchment under her tongue.

At once, we both pressed each other close, tight, in possession.

“Yes?” I said.

“Yes,” she said.

And at that moment I knew what K meant when he told me that everyone has a shem in him, he just has to know where and how to find it. When she said “Yes,” I discovered mine.