Forgiving the Angel (3 page)

“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.

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:

“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.

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.

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.

A YEAR LATER, the night Elsa died in that same bed, Max had cried and moaned like a beaten animal. He couldn’t have survived her death if it hadn’t been for the support of his dear secretary, Esther Hoffe, a woman with a pleasant bosom, a fuller figure, but an equally matter-of-fact manner to his wife. She had tended his many manuscripts
through to publication, arranged his appointments, and though she was married, had also tended him, had responded to Max as a man (which was, he had to admit, all the sweeter, really, because she was married).

But after her husband died, he and Esther hadn’t married. He had felt loved by her, but not wanted (or was it the other way round?). Esther, like Elsa, lacked that purity of concentration that Dora had had, that he thought could make him feel he had been
seen
. So his own eye wandered, looking for another eye to look back at him.

With dissatisfaction and a wandering eye came the usual scarifying arguments, wounds, calluses, coldness. On the afternoon the very well-known Italian interviewer had called asking for him, he’d been glad for the distraction.

“I’m Max Brod,” he’d said, but as he did, he’d felt that that wasn’t really his name. Perhaps this unsettling effect on her subjects was part of what made her so successful as a journalist. He’d been intrigued by his unease, and, in return, he wanted to intrigue her, win over this famously beautiful woman. An admiring interview done by her would add his name to her distinguished list of subjects, so that it might become Fidel Castro, Sartre, De Gaulle, Mao, Max Brod.

Two days later, they met in his study, where he’d carefully placed all seventy of his books on the shelf just behind the chair where he sat—one of two large armchairs he had set in front of his desk, to show that he wasn’t the sort to insist on position.

The woman who walked into this room, and almost immediately asked for an ashtray, was even better looking than her pictures. She had lustrous black hair that framed
piercing eyes, and lovely long legs that she boldly showed off with a short skirt. She was young, yes—but was she really utterly too young for him, or his prostate?

She set a suitcase-sized tape recorder to work beside her. He was glad for it. Max looked forward to defending his view of Kafka’s themes to her, doing battle against Adorno and Benjamin, who’d said Brod made Kafka too religious a figure; once and for all he’d put on record the amazing spiritual qualities of his friend.

“Dora Diamant,” the interviewer began, surprisingly enough, “loved Franz Kafka.”

“Yes, and he loved her.” This made him remember the two of them performing, and Dora saying,
“No, fortunately for you, we have no soup today.”
Franz had stood stiffly beside her, a white waiter’s towel over his arm, and something innocent and foolish about his grin. If Kafka had recovered and he and Dora had lived together longer, would they have the sort of problems he’d had with Elsa? With Esther? He didn’t rejoice in his friend’s death, but he very much didn’t want him to have had those problems, either.

“Perhaps Dora Diamant loved Franz Kafka more than anyone else did, even you.”

“Yes.” Of what might she be accusing him? Not loving Franz enough? That was not a charge that any court would take seriously.

“And she burnt his work.”

Did the woman really imagine he hadn’t considered that? The Italian’s beauty was real enough, but her skill as an interrogator was dubious. “Kafka was alive then,” he said, “and he ordered her to do it. What choice did she have? If she hadn’t, he would have dragged his own body
out of bed by the scruff of his own neck and done the burning himself.”