Curt Leviant - Kafka's Son

Later, I got used to the shem . And it no longer felt like an excess of wine, but rather a kind of divine dizziness.

Dr. Klopstock told me there was a man dying in the next room. The idea came to me suddenly, like a curtain of light. I shared it with him. He looked at me as if a momentary madness had come over me. D had returned to Poland while I was away, and I was angry and depressed. I decided events would have to unfold the way they were destined to before I touched the Holy Ark of the Altneushul. Everyone knew I was dying. And so I would die. I gazed back at Klopstock’s eyes fixedly, as though I were hypnotizing him. In a slow, soft voice, hollow as if speaking from a tomb, he said it was possible — but complicated. No one must know, he said. I told him I want to tell my dearest friend, Brod. Klopstock replied, If you tell one you tell the world. I trust Brod, I said. Klopstock repeated his previous remark. Then I said, I must tell my parents and sisters; I can’t let them suffer. Of course, Klopstock replied. Absolutely. I wouldn’t have it any other way. I will swear them to secrecy, I said. They will be so happy with my miraculous cure, they will do anything.

On Tuesday I will return to Prague and let them know. And then I turned to him and begged, Please, Brod is my best friend, my other self. I can’t do this to him.

The doctor was silent. Then he said, If you want me to cooperate, this is my condition. I am taking a great risk. You know that.

I do, I answered.

Was it not complicated, perhaps even bureaucratically impossible, to make the arrangements? I am sure it was, but Klopstock, a true friend, never gave me the details.

The man who died, a slightly retarded fellow named Johann Eck, had been under the care of an old housekeeper, who herself was ailing and had to return to her village in Slovakia where she died. Johann had no parents; in their will they provided money for his lifelong care. With the old woman gone, Johann was all alone in the world. I don’t know exactly how Klopstock did it. Perhaps he sent out word when Johann died that the man had run away. But with Johann’s death, he became me and I was born again.

Now I had to prepare my parents for my “funeral”—which my father tartly called another of my fictions. But they were so glad to have me back alive they participated in the charade. Meanwhile, I had grown my Van Dyke beard and mustache and was quite transformed… *

I told them my plan and, as best I could, why I was doing it. As time passed the why became murky. But the deed was done and there was no undoing it. Once the process began it was like a stone rolling downhill. There was no turning back. I told my parents I would continue to live with them as a visiting second cousin from, let’s say, Hamburg, and work in my father’s business. They reluctantly agreed. I don’t know why they did it, but they did. They could have refused outright and the plan would have crumbled then and there.

At the cemetery during my funeral I saw a bonfire beyond the edge of the mourners. At first I thought it a memorial candle for me, then realized it was simply a banal bonfire. But the more I considered that little fire on that chill June day, the more it seemed to me, maybe — but no, it could not be. He would not do that on the day of the funeral. Brod had more sense than that. Then, gradually, the scene faded from my mind.

* Rest of line illegible. (K.L.)

Since English was not my native language, I looked at it with detachment and amusement, even frivolity, enabling me to see things a native English speaker might not see.

I once thought of a word, “contraditional,” and mentioned it to a professor of English at Prague University. Never heard of it, he said. I know, I replied, I made it up.

It’s a word that bears within itself its own opposite, like one of those unicum fish that is both male and female at the same time.

“Contraditional” could be read as “con tradition,” meaning, as in Spanish and Italian, “with tradition.” Or, it could mean its exact opposite: “against tradition,” as in “pro and con.” It could also be broken up into two words, “contra” and “ditional,” which makes it even more problematic, because it’s a word whose meaning I don’t quite know yet, but which hints at being against something, maybe against having more of something: “contra additional,” people who are satisfied with what they have and don’t want more. There you have it. One new word, many possible meanings.

I wasn’t known for word coinage or wordplay in my writing. But in conversation with Max, I liked to play dress-up with words. A root, for instance, would be the doll, and prefixes, suffixes, and bits of other words would be the clothing. Once you get into it, it’s hard to extricate yourself. One wordplay leads to another. There’s no end of games. Take the word above. By adding just one letter, “c,” you go from contradition to contradiction. In its stripped-down, basic form, “contradiction” means “against diction.” And this leads readily to “contradictionary,” an entirely new, ambiguous word, which has lots of meanings. “Contradictionary” can mean “anti-dictionary,” a book where you look up the meaning of a word and only then find the word. Or you look up a word and do not find any meaning. A contradictionary could also be a word book that specializes in giving you the wrong meaning of a word, like a clock that has stopped is still a clock, but it gives you the wrong time. There’s no end to wordplay.

The words one writes are like puppets without the puppeteer. They speak by themselves. I set them free. Once they go, like the stories and novels I wrote, they don’t need me anymore. Like grown children that you send out into the world. Like the dove that Noah sent out of the ark, that dove, like words that speak by themselves, that didn’t need Noah anymore.

Dora Diamant saved me. She was my miracle. She was the irrational force that went beyond medicine, treatments, fresh mountain air. It was love. Yes, love can heal, just as hatred, tension, ill feeling can cause malaise. Only lately have scientists found that many cases of breast cancer can be traced to unhappiness. Unhappiness does something to the body. It raises blood pressure, constricts the arteries, impedes blood flow, knots your stomach, blocks vitamins, diminishes antioxidants, causes deleterious chemical changes and lets wild cells grow and unhappiness cells spread. But love? Love is the best vitamin. It cheers the spirit and creates beneficent chemical bonds in the body. It was Dora Diamant’s love that cured me.

Then why didn’t I stay with her? Because I couldn’t stay with any one woman too long. It had nothing to do with sickness or health. It was programmed into my personality, a flaw in my character. And, anyway, a woman changes when a man changes. She loved me when I was ill, then went back home to Poland at her father’s behest. And departed for good when my condition was hopeless.

Dora left everything behind, family, tradition, to stay with me. Earlier, when Milena wanted to come and live with me for a while at the sanatorium, it wasn’t enough for me. She wanted to stay only two or three weeks. She claimed she couldn’t leave her husband, could not extricate herself from a miserable marriage to a husband who betrayed her three times a week with the three or four mistresses that he had and which she knew about. But, you see, that wasn’t enough for me, those two-three weeks. I wanted marriage with her and children. Oh, how I wanted children — but only in marriage. Those were my views, and that’s why I wrote to Milena not to write to me anymore. This drove poor Milena crazy, as may be seen by the frantic, hysterical letters she wrote to Max, asking for his advice. I told Milena not to write, not to come to see me, for it would destroy me, that unhappiness would worsen my condition, devastate my ravaged lungs, and kill me.