The man with the rose

“Are you coming to meet Kafka?” He had a red rose next to his glass of beer. His skin was half sunken, hunched over, and his eyes were watery.

I sat next to him in the Irish Pub. The television was on, that evening the entire bar population was following the results of the Eurovision Song Contest, a show that had lost much of its original purpose but still managed to entertain.

Except for this man. We got talking, at first slightly hostile, like a schoolmaster facing a cocky youngster, but gradually our conversation became a source of life, transience, and recognition. He spoke in short fragments, his memory was far gone, and every now and then he would start quoting beautiful verses in a hallucinatory, prophetic way.

He was a writer, knew Harry Mulisch, and used to be a professor of philosophy. Kafka and Wittgenstein were his great companions in life. He called Heidegger an ‘asshole’ and mourned Nietzsche.

“I find it regrettable that people identify that man with nihilism and pessimism. No, that man is an optimist. People didn’t understand him, that was the problem!”

He was right. Nietzsche’s texts had also offered me more comfort than anger. He asked me to show him my hand, to hold it up for a moment. He looked at my fingers with fascination.

“Just like piano fingers, beautiful long slender fingers,’ and then he looked at his own, ‘thick with lots of pigment… but then again, what does it matter,” he said with a small smile.

We continued talking about Nietzsche. He saw nothing and I agreed with his nothingness, but added that there were solutions.

“Nietzsche already pointed out a hundred years ago, and before him Socrates, that we can only come from nothing to something, and from that nothing there is your own breath that you can discover and set free, or at least make your own.” That was the meaning for me, in the non-sense. Nothing more.

His drunken haze grew worse and his speech more confused. I drank along with him, at my own pace. Now the conversation turned to Kafka—whose main work I had not yet read—as I did not consider myself mature enough for it at the time.

Whenever he talked about Kafka, you could see the passion for his work streaming from his eyes. It was powerful and impressive, but apparently something in him was broken because a deep sadness lurked behind his words. When he talked about his early death, tears crawled out of his eyes like prickly scorpions, stinging violently in his decaying skin.

Finally, he wiped them away and put on his woollen gloves, without fingertips.

We said goodbye, and he asked me, “Are you going to meet Kafka?” as he took the metal hip flask from inside his coat, unscrewed the cap, and put the orange gold liquid to his lips.

A cold shiver ran down my spine, and I shook my head.

“I will never forget you, young man. Thank you for this conversation, for listening. Now, now I’m going to Kafka.”

We shook hands warmly.

“It’s a full moon tonight!” I said excitedly, looking up. He also looked up, saw this glittering sphere above him, and beamed; he understood me.

He gave the rose he still had to a woman coming out of the bar, waiting for the blush that would adorn her face. She politely nodded a thank you and threw it a little further into the trash can.

I would never forget him. Later, I couldn’t remember if this had really happened or if it was a drunken vision.

Perhaps it was a warning to myself about the power of words, words that, if you love them too much and leave no room for peace in your mind, can gradually drown you.

And he was vulnerable in that, just like the rose he gave away.