Curt Leviant - Kafka's Son

“Max, you can’t question me as K and yet not believe it’s me. But even if you don’t believe me, and I can understand why you don’t, please don’t tell anyone about this visit. Aside from my parents and sisters, the former long gone, the latter killed by the Germans, no one knows I’m alive.”

But as I got to the door, Brod invited me to visit him again next time I came to Israel.

That was another of my regrets — betraying dear Brod. We used to write to each other two or three times a week even though we lived in Prague, in the same neighborhood. And I never shared with him my most intimate secret. I had made my decision and adamantly kept it. No one else must know. Not even my friend, my other self. That is why it took courage to visit him when I was in Israel in 1950.

I can’t get Max Brod out of my mind.

I knocked. He opened the door and, as in a magic show, my friend appeared. It took all the strength I had to restrain myself from embracing him and kissing his cheeks. How I imagined — how powerful is fantasy — that we would at once recognize each other and fall into each other’s embrace, weeping with joy. I told him I have regards from someone he wouldn’t believe is alive, one of his dearest friends. He took me into his book-lined living room. While at sixty-nine my hair was already all white, his was a mixture of black and grey. Brod, same age as I, had remained slim, and from the back he still looked like a little boy.

Then I told him who I was. He didn’t believe me. I understood his incredulity. If the reverse had held true and he were me and I were him, I wouldn’t have believed him either. When I sounded out my family name, I saw a shadow of fright cross his face. Never had I seen Brod’s gentle, good-humored face so pale. He thought I had come back from the dead to haunt him, to punish him, to wreak vengeance on him for not obeying my will, for not burning, destroying my manuscripts as I had specifically wished. For not executing a dead man’s will is a serious violation of trust.

“I came to greet you, Maxie, not berate you. It was you who made me famous.”

He denied it, saying, “No, it was your genius. But if you really intended for me to burn your manuscripts, you could easily have chosen someone else, someone who didn’t appreciate your talent, some hack who would have been willing to be the executor of your estate and dumbly do what was ordered. You wouldn’t have chosen someone who loved you like a brother the way I did. By choosing me you knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that I would not obey your last will and testament.”

“But you waited about ten years after my death, until the early 1930s, to begin publishing my works.”

“Now you’re complaining about that too? You can’t have it both ways.”

“Neither can you, Maxie. You can’t criticize me as K and not believe it’s me.”

“And if you wanted to protest my publication, you could have asked your father or your sisters, to whom the royalties were being paid, to stop the publication.”

“Do you or do you not believe it’s me?”

Brod still didn’t believe it was me. He said it was impossible that I had come back from the dead and was now here in Israel. And why did I wait so long to contact him?

“You could have found me earlier,” he said in a plaintive tone.

In this strange manner, he both accepted and denied the fact that I was K.

As I think of that scene now that I’m writing it in my room in Prague, I recall how frustrating it was for me that my best friend did not believe me, how sad I wasn’t able to convince him.

With pen in hand, I sense that I frown, tilt my head, and even now I move my lips in a little moue of not quite disappointment, but rather as an expression of someone who shrugs and declares: That’s life. What can you do?

I knocked on the door. The piano sounds stopped. I heard brisk footsteps. My heart was pounding. He opened the door without asking who was there.

“Hello, Max,” I said. “Shalom.”

I could see he was puzzled.

“Shalom. With whom do I have the pleasure of speaking?”

“My spoken Hebrew is still weak. I would prefer speaking the language we used to speak: German.”

“But who are you?”

“K.”

Brod stepped back. “Impossible.”

“Stanley K,” I said. “Ks’ cousin.” By now I had moved from the small hallway into his living room. As I expected, books everywhere. “You never really met K’s cousin, except very briefly at the funeral. I was very moved by how you choked up and could not speak.”

“What funeral?”

“The funeral. K’s funeral. And when you could not speak, I stepped in and said a few words in honor of my beloved cousin.”

“The funeral,” Max said. He looked stunned. He looked as if he were holding on to that word to get his bearings.

“Yes.”

“I looked for you. I sought you out at the shiva. But you were gone.”

“I had to go back to Hamburg or wherever I claimed I was from.”

I saw the crease forming on Maxie’s brow. The ambiguity, the veiled hint at deception, he caught it. But it confused him.

“Stanley?” Brod wisely accented, questioned, the very un-Pragueish name.

“Yes, Maxie. Actually, no, Maxie.”

My use of the diminutive, the endearing name I always called him, gave him another shock.

“You look wonderful,” I said. “It doesn’t seem like twenty-six years have passed.”

But he disregarded that. “What kind of name is Stanley? That’s an American name.” He looked me up and down, measuring my height with his gaze.

Did Brod recognize me, or was it my wishful thinking? I had a question for him. At first I restrained myself — thought of asking, should have asked, it would only have been courteous, decent, mentshlikh , to ask, How have you been? But instead I blurted out:

“Why didn’t you destroy all of my manuscripts? I asked you to. My will specified it. It was a legal document. No one, absolutely no one, could claim it wasn’t a valid legal document. Drawn up by a lawyer. Me. Your best friend. Why couldn’t you honor it?”

“But you are…” and Brod didn’t finish the sentence, didn’t begin the word. His face was pinched, pale. In his voice a tremor palpitated.

I took a deep breath.

“Dead men don’t breathe. Argue. Question. It’s me, Maxie. I didn’t die…I was cured. Remember? From the sanatorium I wanted to go home for a week.”

“Yes. I was away in Slovakia. Your mother told me that Doctor Klopstock had consented to your trip.”

“The day I left Prague to return to Vienna, on my way back to the train station, I went in first to say goodbye to the Altneushul. Since it was noontime it was empty. I went up to the Aron Kodesh, touched the curtain, kissed it. An electric shock of ecstasy went through me.”

And then I told him the rest of the story, including the faux funeral. I apologized to him for deserting him, for not telling him, for not contacting him again. “Only my parents and sisters knew, and everyone was sworn to silence…. Do you believe me, Maxie?”

He didn’t reply. Again he looked me over from head to toe. I saw him staring at my white Van Dyke. I sensed the thoughts going through his head. He’s as tall as K, somewhat resembles him. But he could be an imposter.

Brod shook his head, thinking: Impossible. He’s playing a strange game.

“Why didn’t you obey the terms of my will?” I asked again.

Brod was apparently too overcome by my initial challenge a few moments earlier. But now that I asked the question a second time, he perked up. No doubt this matter must have distressed him for years. He shot back with an answer, parts of which were surely prepared ages ago for a question addressed to him no doubt many times. But never by the author himself.