The daily digest of Twin Cities culture | Secrets of the City

I'd not even been in my new place an entire day before I received a postcard from Kafka. 
I'd just gotten back from returning the rental truck when there was a knock at my apartment door. 
I made my way through the confusion of boxes and gave the peephole a quick look.

There was a middle-aged mailman slouching out in the hall.

"Where were you when I was hefting all my books upstairs?" I greeted him. "Better late than never, I guess. I could use some help dragging my futon around that corner, into the bedroom. I'd really appreciate they extra muscle."

The mailman frowned. "Isn't that what friends are for?"

"Ouch. Kick a guy when he's down. Anyway, get you a beer?  I'm grabbing another. What?"

"It's ten-thirty in the morning."
I shrugged. "You're pretty judgmental for a mailman."

"I'm sorry. I wouldn't be bothering you at all, except I'm supposed to hand deliver this." He held up a plastic sandwich baggy with something inside. "It recently appeared in our 'unclaimed and undelivered' pile. So here I am. Through rain and sleet and snow and all that. How a postcard could go undelivered for so long, I don't know. We're really a lot better than people give us credit."

I opened and downed a little beer. "Believe it or not, I've thought about becoming a mailman."

He eyed the moving boxes everywhere. "You wouldn't happen to know somebody in this building named Brian Beatty, would you? Who could've lived here back when this postcard was apparently sent? Looks like you're new to the building, but no other tenants were home."

I sighed. "I should have known. I'm Brian Beatty. No, seriously."

He sdidn't believe me, so I took out my wallet and flashed him my driver's license.

"If this is some kind of joke, I sure don't get it," the mailman said, shaking his head.

He handed me the seal-locked baggy containing a crumbling postcard from Franz Kafka.

"I don't find this one bit funny," he said. "Not at all. Saturdays are supposed to be easy.

Enjoy your postcard, Mr. Beatty."

The front was a sepia-toned photograph commemorating early 20th century Prague, a quaint cityscape I'd never seen firsthand but vividly recalled as if I'd lived all of my life among the homes and shops lining its narrow brick streets. The message side of the cracked, yellowed card, dated November 11, 1919, included my new mailing address and a short, jittery note scribbled in German - signed simply with that familiar K. 
    As usual, my unlikely pen pal had forgone a return address.

He hadn't written in a while, but Kafka had been in touch with me since I was a young boy. 
 Usually he wrote about everyday stuff - recent weather, what he'd eaten for breakfast, his job, etc. - or to encourage me about things going on in my life at that given moment. But more than once Kafka's postcards and letters disintegrated before I could find out what they said, as if that was what their odd author had intended.

Or had I become paranoid, like a character in one of the author's bizarre stories?

I looked up to see the mailman still in my apartment, leaning against a stack of the boxes of my life here and now in 21st century Minneapolis.

"Don't you have some appointed rounds?" I asked him.

"I'm curious," he sighed. "What's it say? Who's it from? Because..."

"Because your name is Brian Beatty, too. Of course it is. That's how this always happens. Probably just another coincidence.? There sure are a lot of Brian Beatty's working for the post office."

Mailman Brian Beatty rubbed his brow. Shrugged. "But who's it from?"

"Franz Kafka, the weirdo writer. Born 1883, died 1924. I have no idea what it says. I swear. Later, after I unpack my laptop, I'll type his message into one of those Internet translators and see what it spits out. Interested in that beer yet?"

As he nodded, an enormous cockroach scuttled out from beneath my futon, speeding toward me on its wiry legs. Mailman Brian Beatty crunched it flat beneath the thick heel of the blackest shoe I'd ever seen.