The Professor of Desire (22 page)

In fact, one reason the novels to be read during the first semester are all concerned, to a greater or lesser degree of obsessiveness, with erotic desire is that I thought that readings organized around a subject with which you all have some sort of familiarity might help you even better to locate these books in the world of experience, and further to discourage the temptation to consign them to that manageable netherworld of narrative devices, metaphorical motifs, and mythical archetypes. Above all, I hope that by reading these books you will come to learn something of value about life in one of its most puzzling and maddening aspects. I hope to learn something myself.

All right. This much said by way of stalling, the time has come to begin to disclose the undisclosable—the story of the
professor's
desire. Only I can't, not quite yet, not until I have explained to my own satisfaction, if not to your parents', why I would even think to cast you as my voyeurs and my jurors and my confidants, why I would expose my secrets to people half my age, almost all of whom I have never previously known even as students. Why for me an audience, when most men and women prefer either to keep such matters entirely to themselves or to reveal them only to their most trusted confessors, secular or devout? What makes it compellingly necessary, or at all appropriate, that I present myself to you young strangers in the guise not of your teacher but as the first of this semester's texts?

Permit me to reply with an appeal to the heart.

I love teaching literature. I am rarely ever so contented as when I am here with my pages of notes, and my marked-up texts, and with people like yourselves. To my mind there is nothing quite like the classroom in all of life. Sometimes when we are in the midst of talking—when one of you, say, has pierced with a single phrase right to the heart of the book at hand—I want to cry out, “Dear friends, cherish this!” Why? Because once you have left here people are rarely, if ever, going to talk to you or listen to you the way you talk and listen to one another and to me in this bright and barren little room. Nor is it likely that you will easily find opportunities elsewhere to speak without embarrassment about what has mattered most to men as attuned to life's struggles as were Tolstoy, Mann, and Flaubert. I doubt that you know how very affecting it is to hear you speak thoughtfully and in all earnestness about solitude, illness, longing, loss, suffering, delusion, hope, passion, love, terror, corruption, calamity, and death … moving because you are nineteen and twenty years old, from comfortable middle-class homes most of you, and without much debilitating experience in your dossiers yet—but also because, oddly and sadly, this may be the last occasion you will ever have to reflect in any sustained and serious way upon the unrelenting forces with which in time you will all contend, like it or not.

Have I made any clearer why I should find our classroom to be, in fact, the
most
suitable setting for me to make an accounting of my erotic history? Does what I have just said render any more legitimate the claim I should like to make upon your time and patience and tuition? To put it as straight as I can—what a church is to the true believer, a classroom is to me. Some kneel at Sunday prayer, others don phylacteries each dawn … and I appear three times each week, my tie around my neck and my watch on my desk, to teach the great stories to you.

Class, oh, students, I have been riding the swell of a very large emotion this year. I'll get to that too. In the meantime, if possible, bear with my mood of capaciousness. Really, I only wish to present you with my credentials for teaching Literature 341. Indiscreet, unprofessional, unsavory as portions of these disclosures will surely strike some of you, I nonetheless would like, with your permission, to go ahead now and give an open account to you of the life I formerly led as a human being. I am devoted to fiction, and I assure you that in time I will tell you whatever I may know about it, but in truth nothing lives in me like my life.

The two pretty young prostitutes are still unattended, still sitting across from me in their white angora sweaters, pastel miniskirts, dark net stockings, and elevating high-heel shoes—rather like children who have ransacked Mamma's closet to dress as usherettes for a pornographic movie house—when I rise with my sheaf of stationery to leave the café.

“A letter to your wife?” says the one who strokes the dog and speaks some English.

I cannot resist the slow curve she has thrown me. “To the children,” I say.

She nods to the friend who is stroking her hair: yes, they know my type. At eighteen they know all the types.

Her friend says something in Czech and they have a good laugh.

“Goodbye, sir; nighty-night,” says the knowing one, offering a harmless enough smirk for me to carry away from the encounter. I am thought to have gotten my kick by buying two whores a drink. Maybe I did. Fair enough.

In our room I find that Claire has changed into her nightdress and is sleeping now beneath the blankets. A note for me on the pillow: “Dear One—I loved you so much today. I
will
make you happy. C.”

Oh, I
have
come through—on my pillow is the proof!

And the sentences in my hands? They hardly seem now to be so laden with implication for my future as they did when I was hurrying back to the hotel from the Old Town Square, dying to get my hands on a piece of paper so as to make
my
report to
my
academy. Folding the pages in two, I put them with the paperbacks at the bottom of my suitcase, there along with Claire's note that promises to make her dear one happy. I feel absolutely triumphant: capacious indeed.

When I am awakened in the early morning by a door slamming beneath our room—down where the Bulgarians are sleeping, one of them no doubt with a little Czech whore and a dachshund puppy—I find I cannot begin to reconstruct the meandering maze of dreams that had so challenged and agitated me throughout the night. I had expected I would sleep marvelously, yet I awaken perspiring and, for those first timeless seconds, with no sense at all of where I am in bed or with whom. Then, blessedly, I find Claire, a big warm animal of my own species, my very own mate of the other gender, and encircling her with my arms—drawing her sheer creatureliness up against the length of my body—I begin to recall the long, abusive episode that had unfolded more or less along these lines:

I am met at the train by a Czech guide. He is called X, “as in the alphabet,” he explains. I am sure he is really Herbie Bratasky, our master of ceremonies, but I do nothing to tip my hand. “And what have you seen so far?” asks X as I disembark.

“Why, nothing. I am just arriving.”

“Then I have just the thing to start you off. How would you like to meet the whore Kafka used to visit?”

“There is such a person? And she is still alive?”

“How would you like to be taken to talk with her?”

I speak only after I have looked to be sure that no one is eavesdropping. “It is everything I ever hoped for.”

“And how was Venice without the Swede?” X asks as we step aboard the cemetery streetcar.

“Dead.”

The apartment is four flights up, in a decrepit building by the river. The woman we have come to see is nearly eighty: arthritic hands, slack jowls, white hair, clear and sweet blue eyes. Lives in a rocking chair on the pension of her late husband, an anarchist. I ask myself, “An anarchist's widow receiving a government pension?”

“Was he an anarchist all his life?” I ask.

“From the time he was twelve,” X replies. “That was when his father died. He once explained to me how it happened. He saw his father's dead body, and he thought, ‘This man who smiles at me and loves me is no more. Never again will any man smile at me and love me as he did. Wherever I go I will be a stranger and an enemy all my life.' That's how anarchists are made, apparently. I take it you are not an anarchist.”

“No. My father and I love each other to this day. I believe in the rule of law.”

From the window of the apartment I can see the gliding force of the famous Moldau. “Why, there, boys and girls, at the edge of the river”—I am addressing my class—“is the
piscine
where Kafka and Brod would go swimming together. See, it is as I told you: Franz Kafka was real, Brod was not making him up. And so am I real, nobody is making me up, other than myself.”

X and the old woman converse in Czech. X says to me, “I told her that you are a distinguished American authority on the works of the great Kafka. You can ask her whatever you want.”

“What did she make of him?” I ask. “How old was he when she knew him? How old was she? When exactly was all this taking place?”

X (interpreting): “She says, ‘He came to me and I took a look at him and I thought, “What is this Jewish boy so depressed about?”' She thinks it was in 1916. She says she was twenty-five. Kafka was in his thirties.”

“Thirty-three,” I say. “Born, class, in 1883. And as we know from all our years of schooling, three from six is three, eight from one doesn't go, so we must borrow one from the preceding digit; eight from eleven is three, eight from eight is zero, and one from one is zero—and that is why thirty-three is the correct answer to the question: How old was Kafka when he paid his visits to this whore? Next question: What, if any, is the relationship between Kafka's whore and today's story, ‘The Hunger Artist'?”

X says, “And what else would you like to know?”

“Was he regularly able to have an erection? Could he usually reach orgasm? I find the diaries inconclusive.”

Her eyes are expressive when she answers, though the crippled hands lie inert in her lap. In the midst of the indecipherable Czech I catch a word that makes my flesh run: Franz!

X nods gravely. “She says that was no problem. She knew what to do with a boy like him.”

Shall I ask? Why not? I have come not just from America, after all, but out of oblivion, to which I shall shortly return. “What was that?”

Matter-of-fact still, she tells X what she did to arouse the author of—“Name Kafka's major works in the order of their composition. Grades will be posted on the department bulletin board. All those who wish recommendations for advanced literary studies will please line up outside my office to be whipped to within an inch of their lives.”

X says, “She wants money. American money, not crowns. Give her ten dollars.”

I give over the money. What use will it be in oblivion? “No, that will not be on the final.”

X waits until she is finished, then translates: “She blew him.”

Probably for less than it cost me to find out. There is such a thing as oblivion, and there is such a thing as fraud, which I am also against. Of course! This woman is nobody, and Bratasky gets half.

“And what did Kafka talk about?” I ask, and yawn to show just how seriously I now take these proceedings.

X translates the old woman's reply word for word: “I don't remember any more. I didn't remember the next day probably. Look, these Jewish boys would sometimes say nothing at all. Like little birds, not even a squeak. I'll tell you one thing, though—they never hit me. And they were clean boys. Clean underwear. Clean collars. They would never dream to come here with so much as a soiled handkerchief. Of course everybody I always would wash with a rag. I was always hygienic. But they didn't even need it. They were clean and they were gentlemen. As God is my witness, they never beat on my backside. Even in bed they had manners.”

“But is there anything about Kafka in particular that she remembers? I didn't come here, to her, to Prague, to talk about nice Jewish boys.”

She gives some thought to the question; or, more likely, no thought. Just sits there trying out being dead.

“You see, he wasn't so special,” she finally says. “I don't mean he wasn't a gentleman. They were all gentlemen.”

I say to Herbie (refusing to pretend any longer that he is some Czech named X), “Well, I don't really know what to ask next, Herb. I have the feeling she may have Kafka confused with somebody else,”

“The woman's mind is razor-sharp,” Herbie replies.

“Still, she's not exactly Brod on the subject.”

The aged whore, sensing perhaps that I have had it, speaks again.

Herbie says, “She wants to know if you would like to inspect her pussy.”

“To what possible end?” I reply.

“Shall I inquire?”

“Oh, please do.”

Eva (for this, Herbie claims, is the lady's name) replies at length. “She submits that it might hold some literary interest for you. Others like yourself, who have come to her because of her relationship with Kafka, have been most anxious to see it, and, providing of course that their credentials established them as serious, she has been willing to show it to them. She says that because you are here on my recommendation she would be delighted to allow you to have a quick look.”

“I thought she only blew him. Really, Herb, of what possible interest could her pussy be to me? You know I am not in Prague alone.”

Translation: “Again, she frankly admits she doesn't know of what interest anything about her is to anyone. She says she is grateful for the little money she is able to make from her friendship with young Franz, and she is flattered that her callers are themselves distinguished and learned men. Of course, if the gentleman does not care to examine it—”

But why not? Why come to the battered heart of Europe if not to examine just this? Why come into the world at all? “Students of literature, you must conquer your squeamishness once and for all! You must face the unseemly thing itself! You must come off your high horse! There,
there
is your final exam.”

It would cost me five more American dollars. “This is a flourishing business, this Kafka business,” I say.

“First of all, given your field of interest, the money is tax-deductible. Second, for only a fiver, you are striking a decisive blow against the Bolsheviks. She is one of the last in Prague still in business for herself. Third, you are helping preserve a national literary monument—you are doing a service for our suffering writers. And last but not least, think of the money you have given to Klinger. What's five more to the cause?”