Curt Leviant - Kafka's Son

“Yes,” she said, taking my shem with her tongue and giving me hers.

“Yes,” we said.

“Well,” I asked K. “Have you thought about it?”

“About what?”

“What I asked you last time. Your favorite piece of writing.”

“Yes. I have now thought about it.” And he gazed at his two aeroplanes, his gramophone. He turned his head and regarded his endless shelves of books.

“And it is?”

He pointed.

I spread my hands, questioning.

He pointed to the book he was reading.

I was reading.

You are reading.

I unpacked my camera bag.

“You said I could film your room.”

“Yes. But not me.” K stood next to me, ready to move behind me.

“I understand.”

I lifted my camera.

“What’s that?” K said, holding the strap, looking intently at my ring.

“A ring.”

“I know it’s a ring. Beautiful. Unusual. Where did you get it?”

“I got it when I graduated college. It’s actually my mother’s.”

“I know it’s your mother’s ring.”

“How do you know?”

“I know everything.”

“You sound like the shamesh.”

K laughed. “He knows everything too.”

“Come on. Really. How do you know it’s my mother’s ring?”

“I gave it to her.”

I felt dizzy again. That feeling of vertigo. What’s up is down. Left is right. North is south. I was plummeting, eyes shut.

Before she died my mother told me the story of the ring with the two tiny diamonds and two tiny pearls. The woman at the orphanage, my mother revealed, had given it to her, saying it came as a gift to accompany the child.

“At the orphanage? You met my mother there?”

“Before then.”

“And you recognize the ring?” I asked K.

“How can one not? With its two tiny diamonds and two tiny pearls. Why, it’s a marker. Like in folktales. The birthmark.”

“How did I do it, you want to know?”

“Yes,” K said.

“Like this.”

I opened my mouth.

I lifted my tongue.

I brought my fingers to my lips.

I brought my fingers past my lips.

My fingers touched my tongue.

From under my tongue I removed the shem .

I pointed to the pile of pages. Pages scribed by hand. In varicolored inks, crossed out and re-corrected. Pages bent. Pages brittle. Pages hard. Pages filled. Translucent pages. Transparent pages. Pages scribbled. Pages neat. Pages worn. Pages torn from my fervid mind, the wounds still fresh, the scars not formed. Pages one could walk through, the letters so large, come swing on the bars of the T, hop through the hoop of the O. O, the ecstasy of imagination! The agony of it pulsing from brain to hand, from hand to pen and paper. I peeked at him from the crook of the K.

“See these pages? All of them?”

K looked. I riffled the manuscript. Pointed to the title page.

“See?” I said. “I created you.”

K jumped up. Again he impressed me — when would he cease to impress me? — with his alacrity, his youthfulness. He took the manuscript out of my hand, placed it on the desk. He stood next to me. Towered over me, it seemed, bent slightly, and put his left hand behind my back, his right hand behind and under my knees and lifted me up with ease. He held me like a baby. I became a feather in his arms.

“No, my boy,” K said. His voice soft and loving, lilting like a lullaby. His blue eyes shone. “No, no, you’re dreaming.” He drew nearer and nearer, his face almost touching mine. “You always have been a dreamer and you always will be.”

As I opened my mouth to speak — what I wanted to say I don’t recall; perhaps that I love him — K said:

“Oh, the joy of creation, my little Amschl.”

We went to his table. With his right hand he swept the pages, my pages, from his desk. They flew and floated in the room. His room was filled with sailing pages, hardly moving, frozen in a still photograph. Like the tiny snowflakes settling oh so slowly in a winter scene ensconced in a small round glass ball.

Pages floating. Like paper planes. Pages scribed by hand. Pages bent. Pages fixed. Pages brittle. Pages hard. Pages filled. Pages scribbled. Pages worn. Pages torn. Pages guided by the lifeblood of my soul.

K cradled me like a baby, gazing at me lovingly with his deep blue eyes like a mother at her infant child. I was like a newborn, weightless in his arms.

“Ah, the joy of creation, my little Amschl. So you created all of this?”

K pointed to the pages floating, frozen, sailing, filling the room. Pages so many we could not see his model aeroplanes; we could not see his walls, his books.

“Yes,” I said.

“With your art, your magic, your glamour, your grammar, the last two words, which as you know, are etymologically related.”

“Yes,” I said. “And I created you too.”

“Ahh,” K said, as if understanding. “You said that before. On the previous page…. Now you say, Aahh!”

“Ahh,” I said.

“Wider! Louder!” he commanded, his tone sharper.

“Aaahhh!” I said, my mouth open as wide as it could go.

Holding me with his left hand, with his right he plucked the shem from under my tongue.

“No no no,” he said.

K caught me as I fell, limp.

“No no, my boy, I created you.”

These journals are not diary entries. K felt that his daily life was too ordinary to jot down every mundane activity. In any case, he was not an obsessive diarist who keeps a minute record from one day to the next. Rather, one should designate his journals a memoir. From time to time, K recalls an important event from his fascinating past, revealing aspects of his life not heretofore known. However, on occasion he does depict in detail what he thought, felt, or experienced on a given day. For the most part K recalls salient events of what he has labeled his “miraculous rebirth.”

Although K has approved these selections, he declined explanations or commentary.

Not every entry in K’s journals is included. For reasons of privacy or confidentiality, some entries, in accordance with the writer’s wishes, will not be made public.

The journals were written on 8.5” x 11” lined spiral school notebooks, in German through 1930, and in Czech thereafter, in K’s easily recognizable, slanty calligraphy, handwriting that has, remarkably, changed little over the decades. Where on rare occasion it is not quite legible, I have noted it, and when a comment is warranted I have included a note at the end of K’s entry.

For safekeeping the notebooks were hidden in the Holy Ark of one of Prague’s synagogues. No one, not even close members of K’s family, was aware of these journals, whose existence was only recently revealed to us.

This is the first volume of a projected two-volume set.

— KATYA LANGBROT

When I had the shem under my tongue, I was in a different universe. Music was not the same. It was condensed. If spread on water, it would float. On the water, the notes were a raft. Numbers too were altered. They were in a different cosmos, scattered far apart, like stars, as if light years away.