Curt Leviant - Kafka's Son

“It’s all right…absolutely fascinating… Please tell me about the old man.”

Betty returned with the water but Jiri’s eyes were shut again.

“You’re not very considerate,” she said bitterly.

Through still-closed eyes Jiri countered with, “Leave him alone.”

His remarks during Betty’s brief absence made me feel a bit better. Still, I couldn’t shake off my annoyance. Why did such a courtly, decent man use that private lingo right in front of me, shamelessly violating all standards of social politesse? It didn’t add up. Once again, I was about to share with him something about my Prague past but held back. A childish bit of getting even. Maybe next time, I consoled myself. When he clarifies that business with the old man.

I prayed Jiri would recuperate and return home soon. He was special. He was special from the moment I first saw him — tall, dignified, of princely demeanor — and heard his wise, gentle voice. Looking at him, kinships tumbled within me: father, zayde, uncle, brother.

Like other children of Holocaust survivors who had no grandparents, I missed the older people who surrounded my American-born friends, their faces beaming with love when they visited, crouching down, arms spread wide, waiting for their little grandchildren to dash into their embrace. Maybe for me Jiri was the zayde I never had.

Sad to say, I didn’t feel that way about his wife, or whatever she was. She was American, Lower East Side, crass, lowborn, simple, uncultivated. No match for him, despite her fluency in that Togo-flavored, Tagalog-spiced Ubangi Gibberish they wove like fine silken threads around me. From her I felt distant. I sensed her chill. Maybe she resented his warmth toward me. They didn’t seem to have any children and he treated me like a son or young brother — remember that sweet bruderl word? — like family. Maybe she wanted him all to herself, even though there didn’t seem to be any affection between them. To be fair, but, she devotedly cared for the much older man. And, somehow, I felt sorry for her. Yet, still, each time she left us alone, a distinct sense of relief waved through me.

“I’m going,” I said. I thought she’d say: to Prague?

“Go.”

I watched her lips. Was it my overwrought fantasy, or did I really see her mouth the words: Go to Prague, mister, go?

Still stood room the. Jiri, Betty, me in a frame freeze. Even the thin jagged jumping red lines of the monitor stopped. Into the instant video replay of my mind came all the words of that Babel tongue. All the words of that Babel tongue that comprised all sounds. All the words of that Babel tongue that comprised all sounds of all languages returned. All at once the words returned, not as hammer blows but as a massive pressure on my soul, soft walls squeezing me from all sides. And from the chrestomathy of unfathomable words, one phrase — that signature phrase — surfaced. Which then bubbled, blurted, out of me.

“Nepa tara glos,” I hissed at Betty. “I understood every word.”

It hit her like a bolt of lightning, a sudden storm wind — for her head snapped back like a dead branch on the easy chair and her eyes fluttered shut, the whites rolling as consciousness fades.

I said I understood everything. And a second later I did. What started out as bluff ended up as truth. Soon as I said those words I broke the code. I felt a surge. A flow. A current. A Rosetta Stone clicked into place in my head and at once it all made sense. The words lined up swiftly with their translations. What I read overwhelmed me. It was astonishing. Headline-grabbing. Page-one news. What a film this will make, I thought. But no one will believe it. It was too incredible. I couldn’t wait to get to Prague, and here I was still in Jiri’s hospital room, full of the secret language, its dense secret content — its dense secret content revealed.

I leaped up from my chair; better yet, the phenomenal revelation catapulted me from it. Wait a minute! What am I talking about? Was I in la-la land? There was no chair. I wasn’t sitting on a chair. I had been standing all along. Everything understood I now. No wonder they wanted to keep all this from me. I understood the language and I understood why they used it, meshing, as Jiri wished, both senses of understand. Anyone with information like that surely wouldn’t have shared it with outsiders. I would have done the same, I confess. Now I didn’t blame them for their secret language, that lingua polynuanced magnificent, that brilliantly orchestrated transcultural code.

Everything was clear now. Oh, how clear it was. Sunshine flooded my head. The clouds gone. I must get to Prague quickly. Before it’s too late. But the knowledge I now bore within me was like a forty-minute symphony, the molecules of whose notes are pressed together — to make it graphic, imagine a huge hot-air balloon compressed to golf ball size — to form a piece no longer than four seconds. Music of unbearable intensity. No sooner do you sense the first movement than the second is finishing. The tones as thick as smoke. The replay of their conversation, the torrent of words repeating in my mind overflowed like an open faucet pouring water upon water into a little cup without stop. What I held back from telling Jiri before fused seamlessly with what they didn’t want to tell me now. These two unsaids clicked together like pieces in a jigsaw puzzle.

Now I had the entire picture. I couldn’t wait to get to Prague. Oh, if only I were in Prague right now! But, alas, my torrent of understanding lasted only the four strides from the chair I wasn’t sitting on to the door. Only four seconds, as long as that supercom-pressed symphony. For as soon as I got to the door it all vanished, was vacuumed — whhsht — out of me. There, at the door, on the threshold, I promptly forgot everything. I didn’t even know what it was I forgot. It was as if I woke from a dream, knew I had a dream — was groping for words to describe the scenes and people I had just seen, but ended up clutching air, a passing shadow, grasping the edges of clouds — but remembered absolutely nothing of the dream.

Like the Italians say: I was kissing fog.

Later, when I walked out of the hospital, I thought I heard a woman’s voice. I turned but saw no one. Again, over the din and through the thicket of noise, I heard the insistent female voice, which now seemed to come from above me.

I looked up. It was Betty, way up on the fifth floor, shouting some words that were subsumed, absorbed, drowned out by automobile traffic, ambulance sirens, heavy trucks rumbling, an occasional motorcycle that revved up like a 747 taking off, mouthing something — how she was able to open a window which in hospitals never open I’ll never know — words that sounded like: “…take the pen.”

I waved my thanks to her and even cupped my hands around my mouth as I shouted, “Thank you” in appreciation of her astonishing generosity. Don’t feel bad you took the pen, she seemed to say. It’s my gift to you. Perhaps she was unwittingly — or maybe even unconsciously — reprising the famous Talmudic anecdote of a sage who witnessed thieves running off with items from his house. A goodhearted man, the rabbi did not want the thieves to bear the sin of theft, so he shouted, “Hefker!” —abandoned property.

Then, a moment later, my mind played with Betty’s words and spun them in a different dimension. I heard other words that turned her beneficent phrase upside down. Instead of “Take the pen,” she might have said, “Why did you take the pen?” And with the city swallowing the first three words, I heard the last three to my own rhythm. Rather than offering me the pen, perhaps Betty was complaining about my inadvertent act of taking it. No wonder she looked like she was ready to leap out of the window and swoop down on me like a predator bird, a hawk, an eagle, maybe even a pterodactyl. But if it was indeed her pen, and she was calling for it from the window, it was too late now to return it, for I had an appointment uptown. I figured I’d give it back at my next visit.