Just then in the cottage to the left a tiny window opened; closed, it had seemed deep blue, perhaps in the reflection from the snow, and so tiny now that it was open that one couldn't see the full face of the onlooker, only the eyes, old brown eyes. "There he is," K. heard the tremulous voice of a woman saying. "It's the surveyor," a man's voice was speaking. Then the man came to the window and asked, not in an unfriendly way but as if he wanted everything to be in order on the street in front of his house: "Who are you waiting for?" "For a sleigh to take me," said K. "No sleighs come along here," said the man, "no traffic comes through here." "But this is the road that leads to the Castle," objected K. "Even so, even so," the man said rather implacably, "no traffic comes through here."
Franz Kafka, “The Castle” (“Daß Schloss”)
Every morning for more than 40 years, I wake up with a feeling that something is missing. There is a breach a sense of incompleteness. I cannot put my finger on what it is. Sometimes it drives me crazy, this search for the unnamed, for the undefined. An unremitting anxiety propels me to find ways to fill this void. Over the years, I have found out that travel relieves the discomfort temporarily. I wake up in a new location, a hotel or a rented apartment and I feel fine. Food tastes better, the sun shines brighter and if it happens to be snowing I find it romantic and charming. But inevitably, the ill-defined black hole in my consciousness will reappear. And when it does, there is no amount of distraction that makes it go away. Naturally, over the years, this has caused me to move from house to house and from country to country in order to experience a few blissful months of completeness. Not a recipe for stability or career success. So what is it that I need? What do I desire? What is missing? What blueprint undrawn, what land un-surveyed, what structure un-erected? What hope extinguished, what desire unanswered, what love unrequited?
At one point I even began thinking that perhaps there is nothing missing and never has been. Perhaps the feeling is just some crazy mental construct, like a phantom limb. But I have discarded that theory because where there is a phantom limb, there once was a real limb. No scar is possible without an injury preceding it.
I was born during the most unrelenting, dark age of communism, in a country that was one of the darker, more oppressive practitioners of the regime. Comrade Stalin reigned supreme in the Soviet Union and its vassal territories, though he had the good sense of departing this world a couple of days after I had entered it. Uncle Joe had cast a long lasting spell and no thaw would be in sight for many years yet. A few years before my birth, the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia had staged a series of elaborate show trials, in which a dozen or so defendants (most of them of the Hebraic persuasion) were tortured into admitting collaboration with Western agents to “undermine the workers’ socialist regime”. They were sentenced to death by hanging after providing the pathetic spectacle of beating their chests in agonizing contrition, apologizing for their betrayal. All the defendants had been high functionaries of the party and none – it goes without saying – was guilty of any crime whatsoever. Franz Kafka had written prophetically about such things thirty years prior and, though no longer murderous, or twisted in a self-flagellating pretzel, Prague felt Kafkaesque during my childhood: its bureaucracy labyrinthine, its politics riddled with ill-will and absurdity, cause and effect opaque.
I recall no feature more prominent in my childhood than darkness. I remember darkness being the dominant backdrop upon which life unfolded - no matter what the season or the time of day. Prague was a city of dark corners and alleyways, of long dark winter nights truncated by short and gloomy days, of damp and dark autumns when grey sparrows and hungry blackbirds perched on low hanging branches, set against murky skies. From the kitchen window, my view was blocked on all four sides by low rise apartment buildings, with a patch of limp grass in the middle of a soot covered yard. No sunrays ever reached the yard, a repository of large metal garbage containers and emaciated cats. When I was in third or fourth grade, my buddy Otto, who lived on the ground floor of the adjacent building, stretched a wire between our windows, installed a small pulley and we’d send notes to each other across the yard. The white notes flapping in the wind were the only thing not gray, black, or rotting brown.
I’m sure there must have been plenty of color...somewhere! But if there was, I recall it only as a smell. The smell of lilacs in May. The smell of chestnuts in the fall. The smell of pines on short summer outings. But whenever I cast my mind back and try to actualize a vision, it’s darkness I see.
From the living room, you would see a street of pre-war family homes; villas previously occupied by middle class intelligentsia, now a more impoverished and embittered intelligentsia. Their yards were small but relatively well tended and the street was lined with dusty oak trees. Elsewhere in the neighborhood, there were dwellings of the witches and ghouls of the 1950’s: Communist party apparatchiks. Black Tatra or Volga limousines arrived at odd times, dislodging men in long overcoats, carrying well-worn leather briefcases. I was told not to speak to these mysterious characters other than a courteous “Good day, Comrade”
The winters were damp with freezing rain more frequent than snow. Linden, oaks and elms bare against the ashen sky, fallen leaves heavy with black decay, a sadness settling down on the cobblestones of the ancient city streets. Not far from our apartment building was one of Prague’s main cemeteries, a place of majestic trees, narrow winding paths and large, shiny black tombstones. The trees whispered during summer nights and howled in the late fall and winter as ripping winds whipped their crowns. When I was very young, perhaps 4 or 5, the earliest age I can remember, my nanny used to take me out for long walks. Even back in those days, before I could possibly comprehend what the word “mystery” meant, there was an odd feeling in the air about us: an unease, an inscrutable sense of foreboding and dread. The city always had a vaguely menacing vibe when I was a young lad; her strange darkness tangible even in broad daylight. There was a history of pain in the cobblestones and a history of betrayal, and a history of terror. And history is something one breathes in – even at the age of four. And of course, there was the tangible and constant fear the adults lived in, a fear of the secret police, of the government, of our neighbors. Even as a small child it wasn’t difficult to pick up on. And so, predisposed to feelings of guilt and shame as I was, the child of parents who had barely made it through the war only to be thrown into new upheavals following the Communist coup d'état, a feeling of vague anxiety took root early on.
Our minds, living in a universe of words, struggle to name things all the time. But perhaps some things do not want to be named. Perhaps some things prefer to continue lurking below the surface, engines of nervous energy, inquisitiveness and creativity. In the beginning there was a word. There was a word, even though there was nothing to describe. Isn’t that the crux of the matter? Our drive to describe the indescribable? I will continue to live with the unnamed as long as I breathe. And still I thank God for the gift of temporary light between two eternities of gloom