Curt Leviant - Kafka's Son

It was good I didn’t have a child with D in the 1920s. I have often stated that I wanted a child with her under normal family circumstances. And anyway, they, them, the evil ones, would have killed the child. But when I met her after the war I was a different man and it was a different world. True, I was old, but after my so-called death I never looked at myself in a mirror again and so in my mind’s eye I was a young man and I felt good. In fact, the older I got the better I felt. My insomnia was gone, I was vital, strong, healthy. I never felt older than mid-thirties. Only one’s outside changes. Within, one is always young.

Twelve years passed since I was in Israel, since I saw Brod. Now I visited him again. This time I brought all the letters he had written to me that I had saved.

His eyes gleamed. He smiled. He hugged me, pressed me close to him. Tears stood in his eyes.

“Fear not, doubt not,” I told him. “It is indeed I.”

“So you lived,” Brod said. “And you let your friend, your brother, mourn for you. You let me suffer that day. I had no tears left.”

“Yes,” I said, and I could not look him in the eye. “And for that inexplicable decision I have not been able to forgive myself. From the bottom of my heart I beg for your forgiveness. I know I betrayed you.”

Brod nodded, closed his eyes as if understanding. But he did not say he forgave me.

“So you died and didn’t die.”

“Yes. Exactly. I died and didn’t die. I died because I never wrote again. Never wanted to. Never, never, never ever had an urge to. Once, I had a passing fancy of writing a memoir that I would call Davka K . But I never got beyond the title. The name of the book, with its delightful rhyme, was so brilliant no text could surpass it. So I stopped while I was ahead. True, I never interfered with you publishing my works. And each time one book came out I had the feeling that I had just written it. But then again, you thought, and so did everyone else, that I was dead. And I did not press my parents or sisters to stop you.”

“A staged death,” Brod said in bewonderment.

“Without Klopstock it would not have been possible. You see this Van Dyke beard? Same one I grew then. A beard, a slight stoop, a limp for a while at the funeral, a French beret and a walking stick— those were the props. The plan was, as discussed with Klopstock, that I would be a deaf, mute cousin. I would be reborn as Ignatz K and work in my father’s warehouse. But I rejected that idea. Suppose I slipped up. Suppose I hurt myself and yelled, ‘Ouch!’ Divesting myself of being K was bad enough. But not being able to talk? An impossible task.

“And besides Klopstock, Nora lifted my spirits. Why did I say Nora? Nora is from A Doll’s House . Of course, I mean Dora. My love. Do you know what a medicine love can be? And what a fateful virus scorn, hate, unlove, neglect can be? Only now, in the middle of the twentieth century, are scientists, doctors, oncologists finally conceding the power of the invisible atoms in love and hope, optimism and faith.”

“Do you have family?” Brod asked very gingerly. “Children?”

“I do.”

And a happy beam of light spread across Brod’s countenance as I told him about my children.

I looked at my friend. Who would believe that Brod and K would be embracing in Tel Aviv, renewing their decades-old friendship? Max Brod: my genius, my savior. It was Brod’s devotion that made K immortal. It was he who brought me worldwide fame. In 1950, when I left him, despite his remarks that he did not believe me, I sensed a modicum of doubt, even regret for his incredulity. Perhaps that is why he asked me to visit him again next time I came to Israel. Perhaps he realized that no impostor would want to play a trick like that on an innocent, decent man — or seek to impersonate his long-dead best friend.

I did not write to Brod between 1950 and 1962, although I later regretted this too. But we did correspond after my second visit, when we parted like brothers. All the love that had flowed between us during our youth was expressed in that parting embrace and exchange of kisses. We loved each other like David and Jonathan. Yet I never thought of moving from Prague and living in Tel Aviv next to Max, even though I was a Zionist, an early supporter of Zionism.

Like a true Zionist, I preferred my own homeland.

NOTE:While the June 1924 entry tells us that Dr. Klopstock asked, rather, obliged K not to reveal his secret to anyone outside the immediate family, in the above entry K apologizes to Brod for betraying him. He doesn’t tell his friend that his silence was one of the conditions that Dr. Klopstock had imposed as the price of his cooperation. Given this, Brod could have assumed that it was K’s choice to exclude Brod from his plan. (K.L.)

To celebrate my eightieth birthday, I attended a K symposium held in Prague to which scholars from all over the world came. In honor of the symposium, the communist authorities removed travel restrictions. People breathed easier for a few days. I would attend these conferences once in a while for my own amusement. Sometimes I would register with a shadow anagram of my name, like Malma or Tarta. Once I signed in as Gregor Samsa. The receptionist smiled at my little joke but said nothing, perhaps because she had nothing to say. But for my eightieth birthday, I registered as K. No first name, just K.

NOTE:K says nothing about the papers presented. Perhaps they did not impress him. See March 1965 entry. (K.L.)

After K’s death forty years ago, people occasionally gazed at me and said how much I resembled K. I’d smile and say, The men in our family have a tendency to resemble one another. Of course, no one said this to me immediately at K’s death because they were discreet and thought it might upset me, even though I was a distant cousin…* But of course later on, when my hair turned grey, then white, as did my Van Dyke beard, the longer the time passed from 1924, the less people mentioned any resemblance between me, Philippe Klein, and K.

*Rest of line illegible.

I ask myself sometimes: Do I miss being K? The answer I give is No. For I am still K and will be. I had the pleasure of reading my obituaries, which few experience. We all would like to do this; it’s a natural, universal phenomenon, something like the dream we all have of falling. Having a split personality was rather amusing. Divorcing myself from myself and being an observer. Here and not here. There and not there. The K conferences are the most amusing. Occasionally, I even make an abrasive, challenging, or absurd comment from the floor. They know me as a nudnick, but a knowledgeable nudnick. I chuckle at the stupidities I hear and those I read in the International K Newsletter , where people pontificate with absolute authority and even are professors of K studies. But they haven’t the slightest idea of the Jewish, Hebrew, or Biblical content or allusions in my writing. They substitute guesswork, gall, arrogance, and bluff” for true understanding. Main thing is that they have PhDs, are called professor, and attend conferences.

Do I miss writing? Publishing? I was always of two minds on this. And that is no contradiction, no post-mortem, *forgive the pun, change of heart. Even Max will aver that early on I refused to show what I had written. It took lots of cajoling and pleading just to get me to show him a manuscript. When I did show it to Max, it was done with such trepidation, with such fear of inadequacy, that it put my stomach in knots and gave me a splitting headache. And I mean splitting. It was as if I was cleaved in two. Like the feeling a pane of glass must have in the spot where it cracks. But then, when Brod praised my piece, I didn’t mind reading it aloud to my coterie of friends.