by Jay Cantor
17
HE MUST HAVE passed out. When he woke up he was in the hospital again, with tubes coming from his arm. He could still hear the whirring blade, though, and felt like he wanted to vomit his insides onto the floor. “I can’t bear this alone,” he said.
“I’m here,” Esther said, sitting by his bed again.
“Why did he do this to me?” he said.
“The doctor moved you because they can give you stronger narcotics here.”
He’d meant to Kafka, of course. That he’d been Kafka’s friend had been his greatest honor; more than that, Kafka had been—this was never hidden from Elsa or Esther, or anyone—Max’s true love in this life, the only one to whom he’d wanted to be faithful; and this one true love, this Kafka, had betrayed Max by forcing him to betray Kafka, just as Franz had known he would. Thus Max had been faithful to no one, and all so that Kafka could play the egoless, self-denying saint.
It was hard to die feeling like that about Franz, maybe because to lose faith in him was to lose consolation altogether. If Franz’s longing for the absolute had been a sham, there wasn’t even the possibility that God existed. The universe became infinite, but not as Franz had imagined, as a series of courts within courts that put one off and passed one on, yet let one continue to believe, but as a vast, desolate emptiness that would draw all of Max’s particles apart into its silence. It made Max want to scream.
18
MAYBE HE HAD. A middle-aged nurse had appeared with a tray with a hypodermic needle on it. She asked his name, said they had to check each time before administering morphine.
He stared at her in bewilderment. He could have sworn he’d seen her before, that she should know who he was. That she didn’t confused him, made him forget that himself. He looked about the room to find his name, but as he did, he lost other words, like the noun for the role of the woman in the room, or for the brightly colored things in bowls. If he couldn’t say who he was, those things wouldn’t tell him their names. The world would stare back at him blankly. He had to remember his own name.
But before he could find it, the nurse relented, put the tray down on the night table, and picked up the silver needle.
19
HE RAN DOWN A STREET in Tel Aviv, but the city seemed unfamiliar, the buildings older and smaller. He knew he was still chasing a name, but the harder he ran after it, the faster it sprinted ahead of him, like in a fairy tale.
In a doorway ahead a man petted a small lizard with a ridged back. The ridge reminded the running man of his own hump and made him wonder if the people in the windows thought the oddly shaped scurrying creature looked ridiculous. I need to hide my hump, he told himself, and—as in a fairy tale—that became a refrain he repeated with each step.
He ran past the doorway, and the man held the lizard out to him and smiled. The man had perfectly cut fingernails that reflected the glint of the sun. That sight made the heat today seem pleasant, and he began to walk rather than run. Not having his name began to worry him less, too. In fact, he felt lighter for the loss; after all, the absence of a name gave him the freedom of the city. He could go to a bar if he wanted—not that he did, but he could—or to the houses of ill repute, and all without worrying about maintaining his reputation, because he didn’t have one anymore. Of course, if no one knew who he was, he might indeed have to go to those low places to buy company for himself.
That prospect made him sad, and he distracted himself with the thought of visiting a restaurant he’d heard about, the sort of place where one could chat with other people who also had barely any name. Franz K. would surely be there.
But wait, wasn’t his name enormous? No, perhaps not to K., because he had hated it. At that, Max felt again how much he wanted to see him, realized, with a searing poignancy, how much—
20
“HE’S MAX BROD,” he heard Esther saying, and he returned to the hospital room, as angry at having been interrupted as a sailor who clung to his desk would be when a sound made the ocean disappear and left him looking ridiculous in a dry room in Prague.
Esther was speaking to another nurse with another tray, a man this time, who must have come in while he’d been away. Probably if the man hadn’t gotten that name from Esther, he’d have walked out of the room. Max, though, felt a distaste for the name Esther had used. But what else could he offer the man with the needle instead, so he would give him his drugs? “I’m in pain,” he said.
That seemed to satisfy him. He helped Max turn over, lifted the hospital gown, and gave him the injection in his withered buttock.
The nurse shut the door, and Max told Esther that he’d been chasing his own name in Tel Aviv. That sounded like something from a fairy tale. Esther, a practical person, had no use for stories like that, and started to cry.
“No, no, darling, don’t worry,” Max said. “It was an altogether fine thing, my not having a name.” Had it been? “Well, it did mean I’d have to go to a whorehouse. You know what they say, houses of ill repute are for those who have none.”
That seemed to make matters worse.
He ignored her. It probably was a fairy tale, or simply nonsense, but it pleased him to think about it more, gave him a moment away from his body, and from this mildly officious woman who was certainly no whore. No, she’d taken him into her bed because Max most certainly did have a name, and even a decent woman wanted one like his. And if the woman wasn’t satisfactory, he could, once upon a time, anyway, always find another, and even at the same time as the first one, that being what Max desired really, not one faithful Dora Diamant but a crowd of women where he could hide his hump from himself.
The ponderous analyst had seen that well enough, but he’d missed the reason poor Max remained restless: a lover couldn’t reassure him that he was attractive, because she’d taken his titles into her bed, not the little fellow with the hump. That must be why Franz had come up with his story of “The Poisoned Title.” He’d made Max into Kafka’s literary executor, a name that would feel as stolen as the role of land surveyor, and as hateful as that of Judas; it would be a name Max would hate, even as he used it to earn his living, he’d want to be rid of it to be reduced to a nub of a thing, a letter, a B. That was why Franz had hung that title round his neck, not for his sainthood but for Max. “The real reason the cat teases the mouse is to prepare him.”
That made Esther sob the more. “Franz meant to make me into a character in a story by Franz Kafka,” Max said, as if that might stop Esther from crying.
It didn’t. She turned away from him, afraid probably that he was raving, or maybe because no woman could ever want a mere B.
But honestly, no, he wasn’t that, even here, withered and dying. Franz hadn’t seen that he, himself, was the flaw in Kafka’s plan (supposing he’d had one). The world’s thanks to Max for bravely breaking his promise to Franz meant the poisoned title had led not to infamy but to honor after honor. Max, the brave and much-loved executor of Kafka’s estate, had become Brod, Brod the director of the national theater, Brod the composer, Brod the author of who can remember how many published books (well, he and Esther could). How could Max think about how Brod meant betrayal, when he was surrounded by so many who were grateful for what he’d done? To hate his name in all that admiring din, Max would have had to have been … Franz Kafka.
He wasn’t. And the one by his bed wasn’t Dora Diamant. But having unriddled Kafka’s ruse—or probably just having comforted himself with a little Kafka story of his own devising—had given him his Franz again, at least for long enough, he hoped, for Max to finish dying.
He gave Esther’s hand a squeeze. She was his sort, really, the kind of woman who knew that titles can be used to overawe even a doctor to obtain a better bed for a Brod. “Like finds like,” he said to her.
Esther smiled, as if pleased.
At that, the pain sank its claws into him in earnest, and all stories, whether true or false, disappeared from his mind. He bellowed, and the male nurse came in. Brod said,
“It was just playing with me before.” He must have sounded mad, and without asking who he was, the man gave him another injection. It transported him
21
to right outside the place he’d wanted, the Tel Aviv restaurant No Soup Today. And under its name on the sign, nonstop, though the implication was that it was nonstop not so much because it was service always but service never.
Still, he was glad he’d gone in. Despite its brown walls and simple wooden furniture, it seemed a cheerful place, though something about it also made one think things here were if not actually haphazard, then operating by a different system whose reasons might be as hard to understand as those for the kosher laws. Dora, the chef, could be seen standing in the kitchen, reading a book of Kafka’s stories, edited by Max Brod. Dora looked up and waved to him, smiling. “Back to work,” she said, but then returned to her reading, not to her stove.
The other diners—and there were quite a few of them—were shouting to the waiter, but in amused rather than angry voices—for now, anyway. After all, no matter how fond they might be of him and the cook, however glad to be in the homeland, still hunger would be a cause of complaint even for the Jews who had been grateful (one might assume) that they’d recently been freed from not having a place, a nation, a name.
Max found himself already seated at a table, looking at a menu that said at the bottom Not responsible for orders not received and then added, ominously, or the ones received. When he looked up, he saw that his old friend, dressed, as always, in a well-tailored dark suit, was the waiter, which one could tell because he had a white towel draped over his arm.
Max must have looked surprised. “You know what Ben-Gurion wrote,” Franz said. “He wanted a country where even the whores and the thieves are Jews, and the writers and luftmenschen are the incompetent waiters.”
“You wear a very fine suit for a waiter. You know, I always meant to ask you about those—”
“Luxuries?” Kafka said. “If he does his job dutifully, even the sailor is entitled to his dignity.”
“Will there be food?” Brod said nonsensically.
Kafka shrugged. “Probably so. It’s a restaurant.” He poured Brod some wine. “Here it is nice to give people a drop of wine, because everyone is a little bit of a connoisseur, after all.” He spilled a few drops and wiped them up with the towel from his arm, though that meant only that both towel and tablecloth were now stained.
Brod said, “How can I drink if there’s no one to pray to Who might bless it?”
Kafka had perhaps become something of a comedian now that he had a homeland—or perhaps because he’d found that even here, he didn’t have a homeland. He said, “The trick is to manage the first few sips, Max, then I promise you’ll forget about needing Someone to bless it.”
Brod drank. The wine was good; sunlight in it, but enough bitterness to keep one tethered to the earth. “Can you drink again, too, Franz?”
Kafka smiled. “There the news is not so good. You must still drink for me, as you did before, in so many different ways.” He looked longingly at the wine. “To think that I was once able to manage a big sip of water.”
Brod smiled. “So that’s why you imagined new clothing?”
“Yes, I couldn’t drink it or bathe in it, but perhaps I might at least wear a top hat made of water.”
They laughed, and Brod noticed that he was sitting ridiculously in his hospital gown, and maybe because of the wine, or because he was in Franz’s presence again, it didn’t bother him.
He was glad, in fact, that Esther had appeared at the table to see it. “When I die,” Brod said to Kafka, “she’ll be in charge of your manuscripts.”
“You must burn them,” Franz said to her. “Even the burnt things.” He poured her some wine.
“I won’t,” Esther said. “Max loves them too much.”
“He does,” Kafka said. “You have put it exactly right. Anyone encountering my work after reading his description is bound to be disappointed.” He smiled, ironically, even a touch maliciously, and readjusted the towel on his arm. Was the smile at Brod’s expense for loving Kafka too much? Or at Franz’s own expense, for some more basic mistake, like having even for one moment thought highly of himself?
“Max, Esther may stay awhile longer,” Franz said, “but you know that you must now free up that precious bed. You must go into the depths, in the deep harbors.”
“Is there a harbor?”
“I was a human being,” Franz said.
Did he mean only that; so how would I know such things? Or that he’d been a human being, and now he was here, so there was surely more than met the eye to life?
Before he could ask, Franz had adjusted the stained towel over his arm and gone off to take another table’s order. Or perhaps to calm some other customers, who, like diners everywhere, were upset over both what has and what hasn’t been received.
A LOST STORY BY FRANZ KAFKA
—AN ODD TITLE, set apart as the first page of a manuscript found among papers in a box in the attic of a pension in Prague. It has no author’s name on it, but given, as we’ll see, what the owner said about how she’d come by it, it was not unlikely that Franz Kafka himself may have written this story about a man who finds an unpublished story by … Franz Kafka.
The story begins when a scholar, long after Kafka’s death, had already spent a week in the meager archives in Prague, but had returned each night, disappointed, to the room he’d rented in the attic of a house in a poorer section of Prague. On his way up the stairs, this particular evening, he’d indifferently told the landlady how he’d once again discovered nothing about Kafka that afternoon, nothing new, nothing that might bring him if not fame, at least tenure, and the possibility of the great impossibility for one like him (or he might have added, a little proudly, one like the great Kafka) of an ordinary life, with a wife, and perhaps a child or two. He was careful with his diet, he added almost nonsensically (something about the landlady moved him to speak more personally), but time, nonetheless, was moving on—and seemingly without him.
At that, the landlady, a black-haired gentile, gave him a bold look and a smile, and told him almost proudly that her grandmother had known Kafka, and, she would like to add (for apparently there was something about this thin, wan gentleman that caused her to speak more intimately as well), she had not known him trivially, but known him in the very bed the scholar now used.
Kafka, the woman added, had been quite the lover—the remark showing (for please remember that you are here, we imagine, reading a story by Kafka) that the supposedly retiring author was not without his vanity in this matter. The full-bosomed woman gave a wink, and even a leer that the scholar (who was not very familiar with female desire) couldn’t forget on his way up the stairs, perhaps because, as he noted to himself, it was exactly the sort of thing Kafka found attractive—at least in his women characters.
He stopped on the second landing, a little short of breath, and thought that one might be hard-pressed to say that his landlady’s “quite” hadn’t been, in fact, her way of saying odd, which interpretation would mean that as a lover Kafka wasn’t a man mighty in appetite but perhaps one more like the Kafka who chewed each mouthful of meat precisely three hundred times before swallowing, supposedly for health, but really (who would know better than the author) because of a self-imposed kosher law that made any meal a difficulty for himself and a source of disgust to others. The scholar could only imagine the equivalent laws that he obeyed in bed, even (he’s resumed climbing; he’s arrived in the room and thrown himself down to rest) this wonderfully and improbably soft feather bed.
Perhaps the large-breasted woman noted the scholar’s avidity for her story. The next morning she came to his attic room in her dressing gown, and, seemingly without a thought for the proprieties, sat on the edge of the bed where he still lay under bedclothes that were much nicer than one had a right to expect in such a shabby house. The scholar felt unsure as to what the exact nature of this encou
nter was to be—until he saw in her hand some yellowing, badly smudged manuscript pages that were, she said, one of her family’s most precious possessions (though that hardly would account for how haphazardly, even carelessly, the supposed treasure had been treated). The pages, she said, were a story of Franz Kafka’s.
It is hard to explain how eager the man was to see the story, though perhaps, for our purposes, the most appropriate analogy would be that the story was to him like a tethered animal to a hungry wolf. Perhaps some of that avidity on his part also flowed over the story and onto the woman in whose hand it rested. Still, he snatched it from her and began to read even before she had left the room to make his breakfast.
This story within a story within a bedroom may seem very odd to you, and almost make you doubt its authenticity—but perhaps not so very odd if it’s by the same author who, without any explanation, turned a man into a dung beetle, and imagined an art that consisted of starving one’s self to death. And the handwriting—ah, if only one had a chance to look at the actual manuscript, which would be in a spidery scrawl, a design that looked so very much like the patterns traced by the harrow of the penal-colony torture device—well, really, even if it hadn’t been so much what the scholar desired, he, at least, would have no doubt that he had found a lost story by Franz Kafka.
One which began by reminding the reader of the familiar, though always terrifying, Bible verses about Abraham and Isaac, the father whose much-loved son had been the gift the patriarch had been promised by God for his faithfulness, though it was not, such is God’s way with time (as the Jews who await their messiah, or the Christians who await his return), a promise that the Lord seemed to have been in any rush to fulfill. Fortunately, Abraham always took great care with his diet (immediately this odd chiming translated the scholar into the story within a story; he saw himself as the father of the Jews); he ate no meat, for example, and was still hale at a hundred years old when God had gotten around to him, and his son had been born, the first of those many descendants who God had promised him would someday be more numerous than the stars. Abraham had trusted in God; God had kept faith with him. Now God had said he must kill this very son.
