Kafkaesque

Kaf·ka·esque (käf'kə-ěsk') adj.
Of or relating to Franz Kafka or his writings.
Marked by surreal distortion and often a sense of impending danger: "Kafkaesque fantasies of the impassive interrogation, the false trial, the confiscated passport . . . haunt his innocence" (New Yorker).

Lunch again. The original two Guests have swelled to about twenty regulars, those hilarious students who come in during lunch to laugh, flirt, and talk, play cards and guitars, and beg me to intervene in squabbles over anything from relationship disputes to the occasional marker-on-face incident. Sometimes I feel like a sibling, sometimes a mother, and seldom a teacher in these wild half-hours. Mostly, I sit and read the paper, drink tea, and try to relax as well as possible against the colorful, moving background of faces and voices.

Today, I look up from a newspaper article, about a typo vigilante who corrects restaurant menues with chalk and white-out all around the country, when a small word is shoved between my eyes and the paper.

Actually rather a long word, Kafkaesque is printed on a rectangular magnet in 13-point font, and now one of my students is holding it out with concern.

"What's this mean?" he queries.

I smile. I wondered when this would happen. Two days ago, I brought the magnetic poetry set from my old house's refrigerator and put it on the side of the file cabinet next to my desk. Since the magnets were getting no use at my old house, I doubted that we could want them at the new place. So I scooped the whole collection into a plastic bag, then spent twenty minutes on Monday sticking them to the black cabinet while my docile first period worked on chapter questions. I had liked the effect of the white magnets on the black metal, but I anticipated a problem.

You see, this set of magnetic words was the "Genius Edition," given to me by some wry family member years ago in response to my penchant for ridiculously and unneccesarily large words. I tend to use "purchase" instead of "buy," or "indeed" instead of "yes," so they got these words to mock me. And they are long words. Wild words. Words that I don't even always recognize. On Monday, I considered the consequences of having a student ask for a definition that I was unable to give. It would be humbling. But humanizing. They can't really think I'm a genius, anyway. Not after this long.

Fortunately, I do know this word. Hopefully, lunch will end before he finds ersatz or salient.

"Ms. D?" he prods, as I take my time looking up from the typo-bandit article. "KAFF-KAIS-CUE?"

While I know that the normal teacher response is something snide like, "Look it up, why don't you, and learn something?" I'm also vaguely aware that the cruel dictionary expects some knowledge that Kafka is a person, not a Ukranian village or a Russian car or a drink made from vodka.

"OK, so there's this author named Kafka, and he writes crazy books. Like, really crazy. You don't know what's going on crazy. So, if you call something 'KAF-KA-esque,' you're saying it's weird, bizarre, wacked out, out of control..." (I always speak in italics and fragments at lunch. Class is the time for well-planned, rhetorical speech. This is the time for passion.)

"OK, OK, I get it," he nods, deep in comprehension. He disappears behind the overhead screen, while his friends begin handing me more magnets to define. I scrape definitons together from past reading, roots, context, and synonyms, none of which would probably have stood the Webster test.

As the bell rings for lunch, the first student pulls up the overhead screen to reveal the whiteboard behind it.

"Look what I wrote!" he is saying to anyone who will listen as they shuffle off to fifth period. His claims are proud, expansive, and extremely proper. "In my own words, this is what I believe about my teacher. This is how I can best describe her."

His scholarly syntax catches my ear; this is a student who will say "don't" when he shouldn't, and adds infinite "ed"s to actions in the very distant past. I look back at the board to see what he's talking about.

There, written in large, neat letters on the length of my whiteboard, is a simple and perfectly correct sentence.

"Ms. D is Kafkaesque."