In an essay called “The I Without a Self,” W.H. Auden tells us about a rumor “which if true might have occurred in a Kafka story.” That is that Kafka, without knowing it, fathered a child. Kafka’s son, according to the rumor, died in 1921 at the age of seven. Auden further writes, “The story cannot be verified because the mother was arrested by Germans in 1944 and never heard from again.”
Let’s say for the purpose of the Lonely Voice (Purpose? Wait, this column has a purpose?) that the rumor is true. Let’s say that the man who knew so much, so uncomfortably much about father love and father unlove (see “The Judgment,” See “The Metamorphosis”) was a father himself. But he doesn’t know it. At least he doesn’t know it factually – but somewhere inside his tattered soul he does feel that someone related to him is out there walking around in the world and he finds himself at the end of the first decade of the last century in a crowded, morning tram and he spots a boy, an ordinary boy. An ordinary little boy with something oddly familiar about him. A round head, thick eyebrows, the eyes, yes, something too wide about the boy’s eyes. He stares at the boy and the boy stares back. Or the boy seems too anyway. But really he’s only gazing at just another man in a suit, in a hat, on this crowded tram. And but for the giveaway eyes, he’s a fat cheeked healthy boy with not an ounce of curiosity and, most amazingly, no consecrated halo of loneliness. A miracle, farewell burden of inheritance, hasta luego sins of the father. He fights the urge to howl out loud. What’s your name, kid? I’m your dad. Call me Franz. You’ll never see me again. I’ll fade away from this morning like the ghost I’ve always been. He looks at the boy’s feet. They aren’t small, aren’t big. They are blessed average-sized feet and he thinks of them withdrawing from battered shoes at the end of a day like today and what it might be like to cradle them in his sweaty, alone hands.
