In memory of Robert Scott Elenbogen
Although it was already the middle of April, Prague was still damp and cold when I arrived, colder than Baltimore. The sky was gray with dark, thick clouds that coated me with a chilling drizzle as I carried my bags from the subway station to the budget hotel, a thin, three-story concrete structure had until recently been a dormitory for ministry employees. While I unpacked my bags in the narrow, dingy room, I looked out through the grime streaked window at the street below, fascinated by the people in their wool coats walking into the cozy looking restaurants that lined the road and disappearing into the subway chute down the street. I wondered if there was something they knew that I didn't, that if simply by existing here under communism, under Hitler, under the Austrians, if they understood what I needed to knew. I wasn't even sure what I was looking for, but I knew that the answers I was searching for since Professor Adiz's funeral could only be found by experiencing what it had once meant to live in Prague.
From the sparse turnout at his funeral, further accentuated by the arched ceilings and airiness of Baltimore's largest mosque, it had been obvious that Professor Adiz did not have many friends in Baltimore. Though he was the friendliest, most affable of the mechanical engineering professors at Johns Hopkins, he stood outside the web of its society. His entire family remained on a farm in the countryside of Iran, his ties to them severed by politicians and Mullahs. He had long avoided any connections with religious groups in this country, and as long as I had known him, he had spent all of his free time in the laboratory in search of fundamental, scientific truths.
Except for a few people I didn't recognize, everyone else at the funeral was also from Johns Hopkins, mostly other professors in the mechanical engineering department whose name I had already forgotten and who I was certain had already forgotten the face of their best student only a few years ago. Unfamiliar with the Moslem rituals, we watched the motions of the few Moslem mourners and tried to remain unobtrusive.
Much in the ceremony, the chanting, the bowing, and the feeling of watching something deathly unjust to the memory of the deceased, brought back vivid memories of Mike's funeral. It seemed wrong that a man so full of energy and spirit would take his own life. Wrong that a man so devoted to science, so scornful of religion and meaningless ceremony, would be sent off in this manner to wherever devout atheists spend their eternity. I remembered thinking the same thought at Mike's funeral. There had to be a reason, some sort of logic, and I knew Professor Adiz would have told me that the answer lay with Kafka in Prague.
I first met Professor Adiz as the instructor of my required Elements of Heat Transfer class during my third year of mechanical engineering studies. After two years of boring classes taught by old, lifeless professors wearing chalk-smeared trousers in dingy gray classrooms with broken wooden seats and no ventilation, Professor Adiz's quiet energy and conviction in science was just the spur I needed at the time when I was beginning to lose mine. The Professor had a passion for science and for teaching it, which transformed the inherently dry subject from a collection of meaningless, easy to forget equations into the foundation of all modern society. He not only taught us the equations, but showed us what the theory meant, how fire cooked our food, how Thermos bottles keep our coffee hot and Coke cold, and how sweat and wind cooled us off. And every Monday morning, he showed us his latest watercolor drawings of the chickens that surrounded him as he grew up on the farm in rural Iran, the name of each chicken, its personality, and how it had tasted. He gave us essay exams, unheard of in engineering, explaining that even a monkey could solve the equations and that we should show what we really understood on the exams. The other students in the class thought the Professor was strange. They were happy just to receive a passing grade so that they could continue on in their quest for a diploma that would land them a job. I thought he was a godsend and enrolled in every class he taught, changing my specialty from solar energy to heat transfer so that I could complete my thesis in his lab. We spent long hours together my senior year, hours on end sitting in front of a monitor together, waiting for the microsecond when something interesting happened. We killed the time talking about the Orioles, about his ex-wife, about my girlfriend, about Mike, and often about religion and science.
The Professor had come to Johns Hopkins to study many years ago when the Shah was still our ally against Communism. After the revolution, it was impossible for him to return home. "Not a safe place for a simple, educated atheist like me," he always joked. He described the rituals he had performed as a child and tried to explain what they really meant and why people would continue following what he called "such foolishness." The Mullahs welcomed everyone home, but he knew he could never go back because he couldn't perform the rituals again that he no longer believed in.
Maybe I understood him because my background was much the same, only completely different. I was from Pikesville, a mostly Jewish enclave about forty minutes from Johns Hopkins in the suburbia outside of Baltimore. As a child, I had immersed myself in Judaism and on Saturdays, dragged my parents to Beth Israel, our synagogue on Liberty Road. But I was also fanatical about science. In junior high school, I studied hard for my Bar Mitzvah and in my free time, when I wasn't reading Isaac Asimov, I read the Bible. Slowly, I started to see a contradiction between my beliefs and by the time I graduated from Pikesville Senior, I wanted to move away. Only by moving away could I leave behind the synagogue, escape from the talis that sat buried in the bottom of my bureau, and avoid the lectures of my parents who insisted that I could be Jewish and atheist at the same time. I escaped only as far as Johns Hopkins, but to my new friends, I admitted only to being an atheist, and if anyone pushed me, I stated that my parents were Catholic. I found it easier to be accepted as an atheist if people thought I was Christian.
In the Professor I found a friend and only to him did I ever admit my Jewishness. The Professor's ex-wife had been a Jewess from Manhattan, but in the end, he had been married to science and she could never understand why he preferred to stay in the lab all night watching thermocouple readouts while she was waiting for him in bed.
Later in my senior year, after returning from Mike's funeral, I was even more listless than usual. Late one night, as we stared together at the laser refraction of a drop of burning kerosene, the Professor quietly said, "Whenever I'm feeling down or lonely, I reread one of Kafka's books. Reading Amerika and feeling the enthusiasm for this country of someone who had never been here was the only thing that got me though the days when I hated this country. The Metamorphosis was good, too, of course. It made me realize we woke up a different person each morning and we have to make the best of whatever we are. But The Castle is the best because The Castle is God. It made me see how foolish we are if we listen to authority too much. The Castle runs itself and all of its petty emissaries tell everyone what to do on the authority of the king, but there is no king in the castle. You should read it. Maybe it will help somehow."
But of course, it didn't. We each have to write our own separate treaties with death. I read all the books the Professor loaned me but found not the answers I wanted or even the comfort, but instead only the silent loneliness we all have to confront somehow.
After graduation, we sent occasional e-mail messages to each other, and at the end of each year, a Christmas card. The Professor continued on with his experiments into the fundamental nature of heat transfer, teaching new batches of disinterested students, and drawing his watercolor chickens. I joined a defense electronics firm in Silver Spring as a heat transfer engineer. But I kept copies of all of Kafka's books on my shelf to remind me of the Professor and his solitary devotion to science. Occasionally, when I was bored or wanted to relax at home on Saturday night instead of going out on another frustrating, fruitless search for the companionship that I prayed would tear down the walls of isolation, I pulled one of the books from the shelves, opened it to a random page and began reading. That was the beauty of Kafka, I eventually realized. There was no start, middle, or ending. Everything merely existed, disconnected from the rest and from itself, making each sentence, each paragraph, each chapter an independent being, like bricks in a castle wall built without mortar.
No one knew why the Professor swallowed poison. When he was discovered in his apartment, there was no note. But there was nothing left of value in the room. He had sold everything, even his bed, and sent the money back to his mother, everything except his mechanical engineering textbooks and Kafka's novels which sat in a carboard box on the bare wooden floors beside where he had chosen to leave his corpse.
During the ceremony, as the incomprehensible Arabic words washed through my brain, I decided to travel to Prague. I didn't know why, didn't have anything that I hoped to accomplish, just knew that I had to go. As soon as the ceremony ended, I stopped in a travel agency on the way home, and was aboard a KLM 747 the next morning.
* * * * *
On the plane, unable to sleep, I closed my eyes and tried to wring consciousness from my brain. But I couldn't stop thinking about the Professor, what his life had stood for and what his death was supposed to mean. And then I thought again, as I still sometimes did in those few times when my body relaxed and my mind was allowed to take a slow walk away from the grind of daily existence, about Mike.
Mike had been dead for three years already. We had been best friends since junior high school, since the time of his Bar Mitzvah. I remembered the first time I had met him, during lunch during our first day in seventh grade and thought he was strange. Everyone had come from one of two elementary schools, and in the cafeteria we broke back up into our elementary school cliques. John, Gary, Steve, Doug, Bobby, me and a few others found each other and sat down at a table and began eating. As we discussed our new teachers, new classmates (especially the girls), and new school, Mike sat down at our table. Nobody knew him. We continued talking while Mike silently took his lunch out of his Superman lunchbox and ate his two sandwiches and Doritoes. At the end of the lunch period, he stood up and left without saying a word.
The next day, he again sat down next to us and ate without talking, and again the next day, and the next. Finally, at the end of the week, in the middle of a conversation about Allison, Gary suddenly stopped talking, looked directly at Mike, and said, "Jesus, man. Who the fuck are you? Are you stupid or something?"
Mike looked up from his sandwich and said, "I'm Mike." Then he looked back down and began eating again.
Gary grabbed Mike's Doritoes. "Look, you can sit with us on one condition - you have to arm wrestle me. Winner gets the Dorts." Gary wasn't particularly strong and Mike was already six inches taller than him, but with Mike's pencil-thin arms, Gary though he had found someone he could beat at arm wrestling. Mike put out his arm and Gary slammed it down on the Formica, the impact nearly knocking over my Coke. "Thanks," he said, and dug his hands into Mike's bag of Doritoes. Mike went back to his sandwich while Gary ate a couple of chips, pretending to savor the taste, then put the rest of the bag back in front of Mike.
Every day from then on, lunch began with the same routine, smashing Mike's arm onto the table, taking a few chips and giving the rest back. But eventually, Gary got him to say a few words and soon, we came to consider Mike a part of our table.
This was also the year that we turned thirteen and the Jews among us had our Bar Mitzvahs. I had been looking forward to the ceremony. I devoutly attended synagogue every Saturday, studied in Hebrew school Monday, Wednesday, and Thursday after regular classes were finished, and on the other days worked on the speech and Talmud reading for my own Bar Mitzvah. My birthday was near the beginning of the year, the first at our table, and I invited everyone at the table including Mike. Although Mike was Jewish - that was the box he checked when filling out forms that asked for religion, it must have been his first time in a synagogue. He arrived dressed in jeans and a button down shirt, a step up from his usual worn-out tee shirt, but still conspicuous. I could see him from the alter and had difficulty suppressing a laugh whenever I looked up from the holy scriptures and my eyes met his.
Later in the year, I was surprised when I received an invitation to Mike's Bar Mitzvah, and even more surprised when he began asking me questions such as "What is the difference between Jewish and Christian besides celebrating the holidays on different days?" I started at the beginning, but sometime during the course of my tutorial, the answers which had seemed so obvious at the beginning failed to withstand his naïvete. I wondered why he was having a Bar Mitzvah, and he didn't have an answer for that. It seemed his parents thought it was something he needed.
None of us attended the 5:30 am service - we were politely told not to. In the afternoon, his father drover a few of us in his blue Thunderbird to the reception. I had never met his father before, a tall, slim, quiet man with a heavy beard and the deep eyes of a scientist, nor his mother, a petite but powerful woman with the intensity of an artist.
I was the only person in the car wearing a suit, the same pale blue one with wide labels my parents had bought me for my Bar Mitzvah. I sat next to Mike. His parents had given him a twelve-speed racing bicycle for his Bar Mitzvah present of which I was jealous, and we agreed to go riding all the way out to Liberty Dam later in the week. That was when our friendship really began.
Throughout the summer, we went bike riding together. With his long legs, I struggled to keep up with him as we traveled as far as Carrol County, dehydrating in the hundred degree heat and matching humidity. Then we went back to dive into the pool at his house. In the evenings, we played tennis at the high school courts until exhausted and covered with mosquito bites, I peddled home in the dark and collapsed in front of the television. I hoped that all the exercise would help me with my weight problem, but it only seemed to make me want to eat more.
As junior high wore on, our cafeteria lunch group slowly dwindled. Gary moved, a few people got into fights with each other and found other places to sit, and most of us found more popular groups to hang out with, until by the time we reached high school, the group consisted only of Mike and myself.
Neither of us were accepted by any of the cliques at the high school, the Jews who were obsessed with orthodoxy, the preppies who were obsessed with themselves, the brainiacs who were obsessed with their attempts to prove they were smarter than us, the druggies who were just obsessed, the rednecks who terrorized everyone, and the few blacks who kept to themselves. We were both pathologically shy, our natural inclinations exacerbated by our physical awkwardness. Mike had become exceedingly tall but his bones seemed covered only in a thin layer of skin while I was the shortest boy in the class and still weighed more than him. While the rest of the class spent its free time in parties and rudimentary dating, I read my science books and worked on proving mathematical theorems, while Mike tore-down, cleaned, oiled, and reassembled his bicycle. And we spent a lot of time together.
I was shocked when his mother allowed him to purchase the dirt bike, a 50 cc Yamaha, from his lawn mowing earnings. She was usually over-protective, keeping him from watching anything but the mildest movies and watching over us from the kitchen window while we played in the pool to make sure Mike didn't climb up the tree and cannonball into the pool. While I worked at Hardees, he rode along the creek, terrorizing the neighborhood dogs. In the evenings, we still played tennis until the lights went out at 11 p.m. and we went back to his house to shoot pool on his new pool table. Late at night, now that we had stepped through the ritual passage into adulthood of obtaining a driver's license, we went driving, attempting to get lost in the woods behind Randallstown, passing my grandfather's grave, the radio on full blast to 98 Rock, stopping occasionally to play pinball or shoot pool. When we felt hungry at 2 AM, we headed into the 7-11 on Reisterstown Road for pizza burritos. But mostly during those drives, we talked, shouted over the radio, discussing God, math homework, the meaning of life, English term papers, and the girls we were in love with that wouldn't even condescend to insulting us.
Sometime during those long drives together, I discovered the meaning of my life. If there were no God, and certainly no afterlife, what was the point of all the loneliness, all the years of studying, and the work that never ended until we died? Mike didn't know and didn't care. For him, his motorcycle and our time together was enough. Why did there have to be anything else? But I needed a reason. If all our work was in vain, I saw no reason for the work. The solution that I found to my dilemma was to ensure that my life wasn't wasted by making some vital contribution to human existence, ironic given that most humans seemed to dislike me, nor was I enamored with more of the individuals that made up he human race. Nevertheless, I decided to become a scientist, to discover the secrets of solar energy so that we would experience no more oil crises, no more pollution from burning fossil fuels. Mike decided to become a mechanical engineer so that he could bring his ideas for the perfect motorcycle to fruition.
When Mike broke his leg in a motorcycle spill in the summer before we started university, I spent most of the hours that I wasn't working as a computer programmer at his house. For a month he couldn't walk, couldn't even step into he car, so we stayed inside and taught ourselves how to play backgammon. The Playboy Channel moaned in the background, the remote control close at hand to switch to MTV whenever we heard his father's footsteps, though we both suspected that his parents subscribed to that channel hoping we would learn something. We spent so much time together that many people suspected we were homosexuals. I even overheard my parents, with their excessively loud whispers in bed when they thought I was asleep, wondering to each other about our relationship.
Although we had made a pact to go to the same university, when I was accepted into Johns Hopkins and Mike wasn't, we decided it best if we went our separate ways. He ended up at Georgia Tech. Our phone bills were in the hundreds of dollars each month, which would have been worse had we not made use of the stolen MCI codes that floated around campus. My roommates hated the 2 a.m. calls, and I became a familiar sight sitting on the floor in the hallway long after midnight, a telephone in my hand while girls slinked past me out of the male dormitory, and the grinning boys danced past me on their return flight from their girlfriend's dorm. But eventually, away from the stigmas that had followed us since junior high, we made new friends and found girlfriends, Mike with Carol, a born again Christian who took him to "Christian Rock" festivals and me with Melissa, a "retired Catholic" studying drama whose goal in life was to have a role in a Star Trek movie.
When I came back from summer vacation at the beginning of our senior year and Melissa announced that she had found a new boyfriend, I spent the next six months as a dead person. I attended classes and did my homework, even managed to maintain a 4.0 GPA, but didn't see the point. In fact, I didn't see the point in anything, even breathing. I knew by then that I could never be a scientist - I couldn't stand to be in school any longer nor did I have the patience to spend my life in minutia, researching a single reaction that might lead to someone else finding the secret to another reaction and so on until something useful was created. Even when Mike came to visit, driving through the night in an ice storm just to cheer me up, we spent the entire weekend playing backgammon while discussing one point: what was the reason for continuing on through the misery if the pot of gold at the end was just a fable? But he didn't understand. He told me I would find someone else, which I thought irrelevant. He told me I would find a good job, which I knew was impossible. Finally he gave up trying to explain and dragged me into a pool hall and beat me so badly that I got angry at him, at my own incompetence, at the whole world and everything in it, and at the god that I didn't believe in who had forsaken me, that I began smashing the balls as hard as I could until they relented and ducked into the pockets.
But when Mike left, it grew stormy again, and even when it stopped snowing two days later, a thick, sooty, frozen, slick-gray color covered the sky and ground for weeks on end. I was jealous of Mike. He had a girlfriend that he loved, though I couldn't stand her proselytizing, and a job lined up with a major motorcycle racing parts maker. I was about to graduate jobless since I couldn't find anything that seemed worth doing to me.
Every night, I sat in my cold, barren dorm room and stared at the vial of cyanide that I had stolen from the chemistry lab, listened to Pink Floyd, and cried. Finally, midsemester, I took my vial and drove out of town without telling anyone, expecting not to come back. I planned to drive until I became too tired to drive anymore when I would stop in a cheap hotel, register under a false name, swallow the contents of the vial, and find peace in sleep. But as I headed south, out of the snow and cold, my mood gradually grew brighter. I became able to listen to music without finding death and Melissa in every refrain, and the energy of the music and the sun carried me forward, without sleep, through Texas, past the desert, until I ran out of road at the beach in Santa Monica.
"I'm in Los Angeles," I told Mike when he answered the phone at 4 AM. "Do you want anything while I'm here?"
He thought for a second, then answered, "Bring me back some sand. Some California Pacific Ocean sand."
When I returned, it was Melissa who found me. She knew my hiding spot next to the heat exhaust on the dorm roof. She sat down beside me, looking ready to cry and for an instant I knew she had just dumped her new boyfriend so she could some back to me. But such endings only happen in television and bad movies, and as much as she liked both, her eyes were filled with pity, not love. I zipped up the backpack so that she wouldn't see the stoppered test tube full of potassium cyanide crystals inside. I desperately wanted to show it to her, show her what she had done to me, but I had vowed to myself that I would not involve her in my battle, not make her feel guilty for a fight that was between God and me, not her.
"You're not here for me, are you?" I asked, hoping I was wrong.
She didn't shake her head, but through some imperceptible gesture, with two years of familiarity, I knew something awful had happened or she wouldn't be here. "Mike's dead. Motorcycle accident. Your parents want you to call." Then she hugged me, a light, arms-length, warmthless hug.
"I'm sorry," she said and left.
When I heard the door of the roof close, I laughed. I felt glad to be rid of her. What had I even liked about her?
I took off my down coat and threw it over the side of the building. Then I opened the bag, extracted the test tube, put it on the railing, and stared at it. The white crystals inside looked identical to the snow that obliterated the entire landscape.
I was supposed to be the one to die. I was the one who wanted to die. Why Mike? "You were supposed to take ME, you idiot!" I screamed into the frozen, muffled nothingness.
"The world's greatest writer dies at age 40 before he can finish any of his masterpieces and before anyone can even know he's a writer," Dr. Adiz had told me. "Kafka would have found it amusing."
I stared at the bottle, into the deathly crystals, until my eyes were tearing with pain and my body shivering so hard I could no longer hold the vial. I put it back into the backpack and climbed down into the dormitory, then drove home.
* * * * *
The day of the funeral was suddenly sunny and unseasonably warm. At the front door, the solemn men in charge handed me a yarmulke. I hadn't worn one in eight years. Mike had worn one only twice in his life - at my Bar Mitzvah and at his own.
His service was in one of the smaller rooms. About a hundred people filled the room, mostly adults, few of whom I recognized. I sat in the second row, behind his parents, and felt the press of adults behind me and death in front of me. A rabbi entered and began the service in Hebrew, words that caused the hair on my arms to stand on end. I had once chanted these words without knowing what they meant. Now I only recognized them as an echo of the past as they washed through me and I resisted the temptation to join in the chanting. The rabbi began his eulogy, in English, saying how he had been honored to conduct Mike's Bar Mitzvah, how Mike was such a fine young man, how this accident which had struck him in the prime of his life seemed such a terrible waste, but that we have to understand that God took Mike from us because he had some other purpose for him.
I must have started shaking, because Mike's mother turned around and as she touched my hand, I heard myself scream, "It's wrong!" The rabbi stopped. The room was silent. "It's wrong!" I screamed again. I could feel two hundred eyes staring at me. And sympathizing. They also thought it was wrong. Wrong for God to take someone so young. They didn't understand that accidents happen and have no meaning. They didn't understand that it was wrong that Mike should be buried in a ceremony in a language he didn't understand, with prayers to a god that he didn't believe in, in a religion that never meant anything to him and eulogized by a man who had only met him once eight years before. I could feel everyone's misguided pity and started crying, crying because Mike was dead and I was still alive, crying because this was the humanity to which I had devoted my life to helping and they were all worthless.
Later, at the grave site in a cemetery off Greenspring Road that Mike and I had past a thousand times during our midnight drives together, the rabbi chanted a few more prayers, then asked Mike's mother to begin pouring the dirt into the hole that held his coffin. I stepped up with her, pulled a zip-lock bag from my pocket, and poured the Santa Monica sand over him.
I spent the first two days wandering about Prague, enjoying its air of nineteenth century strength. I walked along the brick streets lined with distinctive Austrian style buildings, visited the art museums, the opera, the new Hard Rock Cafe, enjoyed the local beers and heavy, fatty food. I thought how much Professor Adiz would have enjoyed the symmetry of the architecture if he were here. I though how much Mike would have thought the buildings resembled the sand castles that we built together on the beach in Ocean City, engineering feats that held back the pounding waves with only sand until they were finally buried under the tide, and how he would have climbed in amazement under the first rickety Czech auto that he found.
I spent a day touring the castle, across the Charles River from downtown. A tourist attraction now, lit up at night and beautiful its white splendor. It seemed as close to Kafka's castle, the one from which power manipulated an all-believing, unquestioning populace as Cinderella's Castle at Disneyland. I purposely waited until my last day in Prague to visit Kafka's grave.
It was a Friday morning and a messy mixture of snow and rain was falling. I bundled up and walked from the hotel to the I.P. Pavlova subway station, riding to the outskirts of the old city at Zelivskeho.
Outside the station, old, rust-colored Russian buses spewing black smoke lined up to take people to and from the city. Across the street from the station, in front of a stone wall that reminded me of the castle of Kafka's story, was a row of wooden carts, manned by identical old, stout women in heavy wool coats, hats, and gloves, selling flowers. An elaborate iron grille, painted black, interrupted the wall that continued around the corner. I walked up to the gate, past one of the old ladies that muttered something in Czech to me. Through the grille, I could see the caretaker's shack. The tombstones were marked with Jewish stars. I had found the right place, but the gate was locked, a piece of paper taped to it.
I began searching for the other entrance to which I assumed the paper was directing me. I walked down the street and found another locked black iron gate. I kept walking, down the hill, but the fence turned a corner and there was only woods further down. I walked back up to the main intersection and around the corner. I kept walking and soon the stone wall and barbed wire gave way to a low iron fence with a wide, unblocked entranceway. I walked thorough the gauntlet of flower carts that lined the entrance and into the graveyard. All the graves there were marked in Czech and Russian and topped with a cross. I wandered through the place, reading the dates on the graves, all from the 1950's. I walked down the main path to the end to another iron fence, then back along the fence, where it ended at the stone wall. I continued walking through the Christian cemetery along the stone wall, hoping to find another entrance, but it continued without interruption all the way back to the main road. I stared at the wall, considering trying to scale it, but knew that even if it weren't impossible for me climb the ten foot wall, slick with rain and snow, I wouldn't be able to traverse the row of barbed wire. I left the Russian cemetery and hurried back to the first entrance.
I was getting cold. The slushy precipitation was turning to a heavy, drenching, chilling rain. I wanted to go home. I wanted to go back to my meaningless job, the useless banter, the quiet loneliness of my life. But I still had to see Kafka's resting place before I could leave.
I looked through the grating of the main entrance to see if I could find Kafka's name. I hoped it wasn't written in Hebrew which I could no longer read at all. But I couldn't find his name on any of the headstones that I could make out in the distance. I examined the piece of paper taped to the gate, hoping to find a clue. The words were in both Czech and Hebrew, both meaningless to me. Except I noticed something familiar in the last word in the line of Czech. "Pesach," it read. And I understood - it was Passover and the cemetery was closed for the Jewish holiday.
* * * * *
I walked down to the one other gate and peered through the iron bars. There, in the front, was one grave covered in flowers, bright landmarks in the dreary landscape. Squinting through he rain, I cold see the names on the old stone - Franz Kafka, and next to it, his father, the man he both hated and devoted his life to. I stared at the two graves, simple, worn, and marked with Jewish stars. I stood against the wall. One of the flower women walked up to me, thrust a bouquet in my face and I let her pick the korunas from my hand. I tossed the flowers over the fence, over the barbed wire, where they landed on the path just in front of Kafka's grave. Then I went home.
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