Letters of Farewell

Abstract

Letters of Farewell Christopher Merrill (bio) 8 Dear Y, We never met. And yet I feel as if I knew you because, as you wrote, "Everything that lives and endures/for more than a day after we die/is eternal"—lines that live and breathe as surely as the mourning dove cooing from the eaves of a dormitory in Prague, which used to house the secret police. Ironic, no? Here in a tiny room, in which dissidents may once have been interrogated, I wonder what you would make of the wall they have built in your holy city of Jerusalem to separate the Israelis from the Palestinians. This afternoon, to escape the heat of high summer and the crowd of tourists at the castle, I went to a café on Petrin Hill and, brushing away the bees that circled the bottle of black currant juice I had drained after my hike up from the river, read Kafka's "Jackals and Arabs"—a prescient work, it seems to me, about the situation in your homeland. You will recall how the jackals descend upon the carcass of a donkey, tearing its flesh to pieces even as the Arab leader of the caravan beats them with his whip. The narrator, who is from the north and presumably open to the jackals' arguments about the despicable Arabs (the mere sight of whom is enough to send the pack running off into the desert in search of purer air), finally catches hold of the leader's arm to stop the beating. This brought to mind the story of a woman with a view of the castle from her flat. She went to her cottage in the country just before the Velvet Revolution, and although she heard something about a disturbance in the capital, she was not prepared, upon her return, to open her curtains to the banner hanging from the ramparts: havel to the castle. She wondered if she had lost her mind, for when she had left town, it was forbidden even to mention the playwright's name in public. Now he was being summoned to the castle, like Kafka's surveyor "gazing upward into the seeming emptiness," and like the pair of identical twins rising from the next table: two elderly women dressed in the same khaki suit, with the same graying hairdo. I took this as my signal to call for the check. [End Page 138] The walk from the elevator to my room is two hundred paces, down one corridor after another, all painted white—to disorient the prisoners; and when the surly desk clerk gave me the wrong key again, it took a half hour to reach my room, by which time I was in no mood to plot out a route to the Jewish Cemetery, where Kafka was buried. That I will not visit his grave—I have an early flight tomorrow—grieves me to no end. After the Great War, when his lungs were ravaged and his hopes for love all but extinguished, Kafka dreamed of immigrating to Palestine. In the desert's dry air, freed from the tyranny of his father, the office, and the Jew-baiting gangs roaming the streets, he might have recovered from consumption and lived into old age. Then of an evening he would meet you and the other young writers in a café to read aloud his latest parable. It is comforting to imagine such a scenario: this is how peace is won or lost, no? Yours sincerely, 9 Dear E, The seminar on leadership was canceled at the last minute, and so the caterers and waiters joined the generals in the tent to hear a lecture on the connection between The Old Man and the Sea and the Book of Job. No doubt you would have scorned the scholar, not for his effeminate ways but for his bloodless discussion of religion. Even the generals snickered at his definition of suffering, which revealed his vast ignorance of a subject you understood better than any of your literary colleagues—and many soldiers. Smoke was on the wind from the wildfire at Galena Pass. But the smoke-jumpers refused to work...