by Jay Cantor
“Cruel, yes,” Kafka said, “but not malign. The teasing is probably more meant to ease the torment the cat feels than to add to the pain of the mouse.”
This made Brod sure that Kafka’s disease had, if such a thing were possible, increased his sensitivity, allowed him to read Brod’s mind even more clearly than he had before, when Kafka had often understood him without Brod’s knowing how, and in a way that saw his concerns in their purity—the ambiguous gift of such vision being that Max’s worries, seen that way, became crushing insoluble burdens, and he could no longer imagine anymore what wine he might rightfully drink if there was no one to pray to Who might bless it.
“But why,” Brod asked, “does the cat need to distract himself from his joy in his meal?”
“Joy? Oh, no. Cats loath having to earn their wages by killing mice, who in themselves are not only living beings like the cat, but in addition have for them the thoroughly bitter taste of the cat’s servitude.”
“How awful for the both of them, then.”
“Worse for the mouse.”
“Yes, it’s about to die.” Max had lost track for a moment which of the two of them was the rodent.
“Not only that. The mouse must forgive the cat his death as well. After all, by hunting and eating mice, the cat is doing what it must to get a place indoors. Cats seem so sublimely indifferent to everyone only so they might bear with dignity their sense of the depth of this degrading slavery.”
“And the Angel of Death?”
“He’s just like the cat. He does his Master’s bidding, but he hates his work. Who else would God have chosen for the task? If He employed an Angel who rejoiced in vengeance, humanity wouldn’t have lasted an instant. Instead, God chose an Angel of the greatest sensitivity, one who feels every death to the core of his being. So we shouldn’t begrudge the Angel the momentary distraction he gets from tormenting us. Of course, he also takes a little revenge on us, too. After all, isn’t it the man himself who forced the Angel to do this hateful thing by being unfit for life?”
Forgiving the Angel had exhausted Kafka this afternoon. He closed his eyes. Brod stood by him for a moment before he left, to make sure he was asleep. But as he got to the door, he heard Kafka’s barely audible voice. The most considerate of men, who knew how busy Brod was (between mistresses, wife, and work), nearly demanded that he come to visit the next day.
By then, in an almost superhuman effort, Franz had finished “Josephine, the Singer,” who by the strength of her demand convinces her mouse folk that her wheezing is sublime song. “I think,” Kafka whispered, “that I may have started the investigation of animal squeaking at the right moment.” Some ghost had whittled away his voice, and when he tried to moisten it with fruit juice, his throat burst into flame. They pretended not to know what that meant. Brod, Kafka said, must place this story as soon as possible to pay something of the cost of a sanatorium at the Wienerwald, where Franz could receive treatment—and be with Dora again for however long he had left.
5
AT THE SANATORIUM, he and Max went over the galleys for that story and prepared the other things that he’d written in Berlin to pay for treatment and, Franz said, for their life in Berlin after. Franz weighed less than 45 kilos and ran a fever without cease. He was in agony swallowing not just with fruit juice but from water. Yet he and Dora, each for the sake of the other, pretended that recovery, and a return to their life in Berlin, might still be possible.
Dora sat by the bed, delicately offering Franz a spoonful of water. Franz lay flatter as the spoon went in, and his face contorted, as if a shard of glass was stuck in his throat and dug more deeply into the tender skin when he tried to swallow this boulder. Dora looked down at him with a pride and love strangely untouched by pity, as if Kafka were a brave soldier and not even one wounded and in hospital, but one still in battle.
That afternoon the doctor came and, not bound as the three of them were, told Franz the truth, that he had tubercular lesions of the larynx. He would need more serious treatment than this sanatorium could provide—at the least, alcohol injections into the nerve and perhaps surgery—or he would die of dehydration and starvation. He recommended the university clinic of Professor Hajek in Vienna, where, he said, sometimes miracles had been performed.
Had they, Brod wondered, or was it unbearable, even to this man who hardly knew him, that Kafka might die?
6
AT HAJEK’S CLINIC Dora could be with him during the day, but at night she wasn’t there to protect him. Franz had a bed in a ward like a cell, where he lay between other tubercular patients. “This morning,” she wrote to Brod, “he pointed to the bed of a jovial man who’d died the night before. Franz was not shaken but positively angry, as if he could not grasp that the man who had been so gay had to die. I cannot forget his malicious, ironic smile.” At Kafka’s own expense, Brod supposed, if he believed in God, and at God’s expense, if He believed in His own goodness.
It was a rare night in the ward, when there wasn’t occasion for that smile. Dora felt sure the place would kill Franz—kill him faster, one should say—if they couldn’t get him a room of his own. Franz, though, didn’t believe he’d the right to ask for a special privilege, thought himself only a nearly nameless sailor who in better times had simply held to his desk all night. His only skill, he’d once told Brod, was to cling to the wood with sufficient desperation.
Brod may have found this a little disingenuous, but Dora respected his view of himself. She didn’t try to use Kafka’s reputation (such as it was at that point), only demanded—with a piercing purity of spirit that even a demon couldn’t refuse—that Dr. Hajek give Franz a room of his own because “he was a person of the greatest sensitivity.”
Dr. Hajek looked down at his chart—no doubt to remind himself of the patient’s name—and said that whatever his sensitivities, Franz Kafka would be treated no differently than any other patient.
Franz, to spare his voice, sometimes scribbled things on slips of paper, and perhaps it was in response to Hajek’s refusal that he wrote to Max when he arrived:
It occurs to me that I am not like other people, though I pretend to be. Of course, that I can pretend probably shows that I am very much like other people, for that is no doubt what they are doing, too.
That day Max also saw the spectacle of a nurse spraying Kafka’s larynx with menthol, and a doctor stabbing him there with an injection of alcohol. Kafka shivered like a tree hit by an ax, but for a little while after he could swallow again, and he ate a few strawberries and cherries. He smelled them for a long time first.
The relief lasted a few hours. By the evening Kafka wrote Brod a note: To think that I was once able to manage a big sip of water. He gave a malicious smile at his or God’s expense, and asked if he might watch Max swallow some wine on his behalf, so he might experience drinking.
Brod complied, tried to indicate with his eyes how wonderfully tasty the wine was for him. Or was that cruel? Again, Max had had the good fortune to have Kafka contrive a problem for him that could have no right answer.
“I must ask your forgiveness, Max,” Kafka whispered, again having read Brod’s mind. “I deceived you before.”
“Unlikely.” He had never known Franz to lie.
“Well, let’s say, then, that sometimes I have a hard time getting to the point.”
“I thought that was part of your point.”
“You are so kind, so generous, Max. It’s impossible not to love you.” Franz looked delighted to be naming Max’s good qualities.
And then, very seriously and apologetically, he said, “I should have told you, Max, that the real reason the cat teases the mouse is to prepare him.”
“Prepare him? For what? For the afterlife, you mean?”
“Oh, I doubt there is any. And if there is, I doubt there’s any preparation for it. No, for this one. After all, the mouse the cat teases is the one most likely to escape.”
Did his friend hope that Death, having teased him
so much, would now withdraw? “Then what has the mouse learned from his education?” Brod said. “Beware of cats?”
Franz opened his eyes and raised his shoulders in bewilderment, more likely at what was about to overcome him than at Brod’s question. He grasped the glass flask from the table in his long, expressive fingers and began to convulse with coughs. Dora ran to put her arms behind him. He filled the flask with bloody sputum.
Brod felt sure he’d understood what Kafka had meant. The cat tormented the rodent, and let him escape because he wanted to be remembered by someone, even a mouse, and even as a tormentor. He wept a bit to think that Franz Kafka imagined Max Brod could ever forget him.
When the coughing finished, a doctor and a nurse came with the syringe for Kafka’s larynx. This time they made Brod leave the room.
7
FOR FRANZ, the deaths in the beds near him were far less bearable than the silver needle plunged into his decaying throat. Franz and Dora contradicted Dr. Hajek’s orders and moved him to Dr. Hoffman’s sanatorium. They each said that they believed that the private room there, filled with bundles of flowers Dora would gather, the balcony with sunshine and fresh air, and the vegetarian meals, might effect a cure. Did either of them really think that? Or did each say that for the sake of the other, so they could make Kafka’s last weeks comfortable?
Brod, too, had lied. He said he had to be in Austria for the premiere of an opera, and not so he might say farewell to Franz. The man who most loved truth, Brod thought, found himself, when dying, surrounded by lies, albeit loving ones.
A few weeks previously, Franz had written to Dora’s father, saying that he was not a practicing Jew, but one who was honestly repentant. He asked him for permission to marry his daughter. The morning of the afternoon Brod had arrived, they’d received a letter; Dora’s father had carried Franz’s note on the long journey to the Gerrer Rebbe. The rabbi read it, put it to one side, and said, “No.”
“This no,” Brod said, “changes nothing.” After all, Franz and Dora had already joined themselves together more than any man or wife he knew, himself and Elsa most certainly included.
And yet the rabbi’s refusal had changed everything for Franz, who was certain that the wonder rabbi had pronounced this judgment because he knew Kafka would die soon.
Dora argued that the rabbi had said no to punish her for having run away from paternal authority.
“Or,” Brod added, “it’s because Franz is not a Hasid.”
Kafka stared at them with characteristic astonishment, then slowly wrote:
Such is the power of a no that comes without justification. It gathers into itself all the reasons one might suspect for why one should rightly be refused. And who could be a better prosecutor in this matter than one’s self?
“If,” Brod said, “one is Franz Kafka.”
Kafka had smiled in that ironic and malicious way that now terrified Max, since it seemed to call both God and Kafka’s right to live into question. In response to the rabbi’s judgment that he would die soon, Brod knew Franz would set himself to work at dying soon.
As if in response to that thought, Kafka passed Brod a note, with a revision of the title of one of the stories he’d written in Berlin. Why scribble, and with such painful difficulty, of a change to a manuscript that was supposed to be burnt? But Brod didn’t ask that, afraid that it might lead to Franz repeating that he was to burn his work, words that would send a flood of bile into Brod’s throat.
Brod had left the room, and Dora came up behind him in the corridor, handed him another note Kafka had written her that morning: How long will you be able to stand it? How long will I be able to stand your standing it? Dora wept, and Brod—even as he embraced her—put the note in his jacket pocket.
8
MANY YEARS LATER, Brod and his terrified wife ran to the station to catch what would probably be the last train to leave Prague before the murderers arrived. Like Brod, almost everyone in the oddly silent crowd—as quiet as an audience just before the orchestra begins—clutched a suitcase or two of their treasures. For Brod, that meant some of Kafka’s papers that he hadn’t been able to send ahead, fragments of stories, little notes from when Franz could no longer talk, like, Here it is nice to give people a drop of wine, because everyone is a little bit of a connoisseur, after all. And even the letter, too, that Max had found when he’d cleaned out the drawers in Kafka’s desk in Prague: Dearest Max, My last request: Everything I leave behind me in the way of diaries, manuscripts, letters (my own and others), sketches and so on, to be burned unread, which he saved because all of Kafka’s papers were precious to him, even the one that confirmed that he’d betrayed Kafka’s last wish by not burning his precious papers.
Max hardly ever thought of that vow he’d never made, but today he had the ridiculous feeling that the things in his suitcase were stolen, and that the people on the platform had decided that this crime was responsible for their predicament. They might gather round him and Elsa and forbid them to get on the train.
But who anymore, he reminded himself—or who but for the Nazis—wanted Franz Kafka’s great work to have been destroyed? Only Dora Diamant, perhaps. She didn’t care about Franz’s reputation, had no desire that anyone else should read him. She opposed every publication—even after Max had the royalties made over to her. “Nobody,” she said, “can get even an inkling of what he was about unless they knew him personally.” She was a selfish widow, he wanted to tell his accusers on the platform. But Kafka was a great dark forest, and no one, not even Dora, could know all of it or keep it for themselves.
By the time the train arrived, Max’s bad mood had passed, and he’d gathered up his strength again. The people on the platform began to push forward with an implacable wavelike motion, but Max swung the dangerous suitcases and cleared some space. He got on the train, pulled his wife up immediately after, and found a seat for her.
The train soon got under way, and, overcome by terror and relief, Max felt both lightheaded and nauseated. He gazed down at his precious Elsa, the reluctant Zionist. She lacked the spark, he thought sadly, that made the difficult Dora Diamant always want a commitment to something greater than herself. But the murderers had made the decision for Elsa and Max; and now they would make a life building the one place where they surely would both belong, the Jewish homeland.
9
THOUGH PERHAPS they didn’t belong there together. Many years later, Max sat sullenly in his study in Tel Aviv after too much wine and another fight with his wife, one that was the more embarrassing because it had happened right outside a restaurant, after a party given in his honor as the director of the Habima Theatre. Anyone in the company might have heard them.
The fight had been his doing. He’d been afraid all evening she’d discover his affair with an actress at the theater who looked (for reasons that fascinated his analyst) a little like Dora Diamant, and so he’d naturally started an argument with Elsa, saying she no longer had any passion for him, meaning (but unsaid) that someone did, thus betraying the thing he meant to hide.
“My God, Max,” Elsa had said, “what do you want from me after twenty years?”
He barely became hard with her anymore, but blamed her for that, though it was true with Hannah, too. (After all, Dora’s looks weren’t really to his taste.) “Even at the beginning,” he’d said to her, “you only ever cared about my fame.”
She laughed at him. “Your reputation?” she said. “For directing a provincial theater in this provincial desert, where, like Ben-Gurion said, even the actresses are Jewish whores?”
He felt more wounded by the insult to him than worried by this clear sign that she already knew of his affair. Still, he’d managed skillfully to make her the one who cried. By the time they’d gotten home she’d been raking her own cheeks with her long fingernails, drawing blood, and had run upstairs screaming (as she often did) that she never wanted to see him again.
As she left him, though, the room got larger and larger, and he
got smaller and smaller, and he felt bereft and helpless. He shifted about completely. He wanted to be reassured that no matter what might happen with Elsa—would she actually leave him?—he had made a name for himself, that people could see him, and might be attracted to him.
He looked to his desk and saw the bright red-and-green cover of his new novel. In response, the book spun about a little—the effect of wine, or its anxiety for itself. Would anyone be attracted to it? He told the book, “I’ve published forty-eight volumes, you know,” as if that should reassure it, rather than the reverse, given that most of those books were out of print and forgotten. The book only spun faster, turning brown.
Like rot. This novel would never give Brod a place in people’s minds. Nor would the theater. Nor would his music. No, to the world only one of his titles mattered: Franz Kafka’s literary executor, the man who’d refused to fulfill his friend’s last wish. The world’s gratitude usually drowned out any slight uneasiness about that. Probably the platform and the suitcases had been the last time the thing not done had made him truly uneasy. But tonight he’d made his wife dig at her own face with her fingernails—again—and the two betrayals mixed together in his stomach, like red and green, making a nauseating shit-colored mixture.
He could never defend himself to Franz against Franz’s accusation that he hadn’t acted like a friend, hadn’t filled his clearly stated last wish. He couldn’t offer Franz better reasons to save his work than Kafka had given him for destroying it, because Franz had never said why he wanted his work destroyed. He’d only pronounced his absolute judgment, and, like the Gerrer Rebbe, offered no justification for it.
He had a better chance to defend himself to his wife. He ran steadily up the stairs to the bedroom, clinging all the while to the tipsy banister. He resolved (again) that he’d break it off with Hannah at rehearsals on Monday. He would plead piteously and sincerely to Elsa. He’d promise that he would never again give her cause to doubt him, if she would only let him return to their bed, where he could feel the warmth of her body, and her acceptance of his.
