Forgiving the Angel (6 page)

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 encounter 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.

He delayed only long enough to sharpen his knife (and he so wanted to delay, and so wanted his son’s end both never to come and to be painless and quick when it did, that you can imagine how long he worked and how sharp he must have made that knife); he packed wood for the offering and left immediately, not telling anyone why he must make this trip. Truly, he didn’t know
why
, could not understand this monstrous demand. But he had to trust God’s murderous guidance, and if he did—he looked up
at the night sky for reassurance—God, perhaps, would (in time!) keep faith with him again.

Fire made. Child bound to the rocks. Then, at the last instant, as his knife was poised over his son’s throat, God had relented. Had it all been a test whose right answer was that if Abraham so trusted God that he would kill his own son, then he didn’t have to kill his son, but could—as God now commanded—kill the goat that the Lord had made conveniently available, tangled in a thicket nearby?

Of course, since Adam was cast from the Garden, there was never a time when the animals could talk; but in Abraham’s time, one closer to Eden, they were far more expressive, and could make their feelings, and even their thoughts, known to men. The goat used its eyes—so haunting and lovely, with an air of sad bewilderment, however goatish his actions had been in the past—to plead for its life. He offered promises—but what can a goat promise compared to God? and he flattered Abraham, who was, he said, a good man, one who never ate meat—cleverly adding (to show his sincerity) that that goodness persisted even if Abraham followed that diet only because he thought it was healthier. Surely, here, as always, Abraham had done (the goat conveyed) what God wanted all men to do. Hadn’t God once, in the time before Noah, already drowned the world because men weren’t satisfied with the bountiful fruits and cereals He’d offered them for their food, and had fallen ravenously on the animals? Which
must
mean that God wanted us to spare His creatures, and by simple logic, must want Abraham to spare him.

All this the animal spoke with its eyes, and with the panting panic of his heaving chest, the quiver in his legs, the slight turns of his body (though he could hardly move,
Abraham’s knife was pressed so close to the veins in his neck).

Abraham remembered that he, too, had heard of that first flood, God discarding the grand labor of the six days because men had eaten meat. But had God destroyed the world because men killed animals (in which case, he should spare the expressive goat), or because they had disobeyed Him (in which case he should do as God had ordered him and kill the wily goat)? Abraham couldn’t decide. This, too, might be another test, just like the command to kill his son. But what was the right answer? The goat’s pleading was driving him mad, and trembling with fury with the goat (or was it with God?) for putting him in this quandary, his arm moved ever so slightly, almost haphazardly, and sliced the thick but delicate vein in the goat’s neck, a shallow cut that nonetheless could not ever be taken back, one that was so small that it caused the animal’s blood to drain slowly, though inevitably and irretrievably, onto the desert floor. But worse than the blood, if such a thing’s possible, was the last look of disappointment, of bewilderment made infinite, that the kid gave him as its life trickled away.

Abraham was certain he’d made a mistake. He stood still, head bowed, and waited for the divine knife that would cut his throat. But God did not punish him. If there had been a test, perhaps he’d passed.

Abraham, as the goat had said, had never eaten meat, but not out of goodness, or even, truly, for health. He simply didn’t care for its taste, which smelt rotten in his nose. Now it all the more reminded him of death and, worse, his own murderous impulses; the odor made him sick to his
stomach. But he knew he must not betray that he’d ever had doubts, that he’d nearly not fulfilled God’s command to him. So he ate meat at every meal to show God that the blood of animals meant nothing to him. Chewed it thoroughly to show that this horrifying thing didn’t horrify him (or perhaps the repeated motion leached some of the horror out of the flesh for him, made it possible to swallow and digest this carrion thing). Alas, each bite, each working of jaw and mandible, reminded him of the goat’s eyes, the goat’s blood, his own confusion, his haphazard violence—and, most of all, his near mistake when he’d almost been won over by the devilish goat into disobeying God.

Worse still, Abraham knew he hadn’t meant to kill the goat, that he hadn’t been truly obedient, and he suspected, too, that his hiding of his real feelings (bite by bite) toward the goat was to pile error on error. At any moment, God would punish him. Perhaps, in fact, this continual nausea was punishment, though only a first installment of the final pain he’d feel. (Where? In his neck? In his heart?) Or maybe he was being punished like this because God had wanted him to spare the goat?

It may be that eating meat didn’t shorten Abraham’s life (though, again, perhaps it did), but it did make every meal a misery to him—and equally wearying to those who happened to eat
with
him, most particularly for Isaac, his beloved son, a child of delicate digestion. Perhaps because of those awful meals with his father—for God’s sake, three hundred grindings of teeth before he would swallow a bite—this dyspepsia was handed down from generation to generation of the Jews—

Until Moses, who understood what had happened to Abraham (and then to Isaac, Jacob, and Joseph, and their
progeny more numerous than the stars). In order to justify the Patriarch, and perhaps ease everyone’s burden, Moses, without divine sanction, turned the goat’s slow bleeding into a Law, hoping this might restore his people’s appetite.

Of course God was horrified that a man, even Moses, would meddle with his intricately calibrated Torah—condemning His animals to lingering deaths. But He, in his wisdom, didn’t want to call this human and invented law into question, lest people begin to pick and choose among the other mitzvahs, saying maybe some of them had been added on by men as well. He didn’t correct the text, but punished Moses for this transgression by barring him from entering the promised land.

So the story ended. Or did it? A scholar who found this parable would know, of course, that Kafka had told his friend Brod to destroy all his work upon his death. Surely, though, that must mean only the known work? After all, this lost story could make the scholar’s reputation, and though, from the quality of the parable, he might doubt that the story would add much to Kafka’s luster, he might hope it wouldn’t detract much, either.

Should he publish? What would Kafka want done? Hadn’t he really just told Brod to burn his work in order to make Brod into what he’d most wanted to be, a divided ever-miserable character in a story by the genius he most admired, Franz Kafka? And if this man were a true scholar, then that would be how he, too, felt about himself and his author—that his life was a story narrated by Kafka.

And if Kafka had written
this
story, in which a man is visiting Prague because of his work, it would seem to indicate
that he’d imagined that whatever he’d intended, he at least suspected that Brod might not obey him, and that he would be famous long after his death.

Would the scholar, as he himself suspected, be saying all this only to justify his publishing the story, getting tenure, and so being able to do what Kafka had never done, which was to marry his beloved? Even if the scholar didn’t eat meat, he might be said to have a good appetite, so he didn’t make meals a misery for the other guests at this pension. Why shouldn’t such a man marry? Perhaps even the woman who had rented him this low-ceilinged room with the comfortable well-stuffed bed, this grandchild of Kafka’s lover, whose ample bosom, and open, even wanton, sexual look he would have found he couldn’t bar from his dreams. Perhaps he could have her here, in this bed that she had said had been blessed by Kafka, the two of them lost in feathers.

But not tonight. The confusions around and in this story would give a man a stomachache.

Of course, he would publish the story and be recommended for tenure. And marry. But a man who’d found a new parable by Kafka would also discover that all the questions posed in it—which are really one question: What does God really want from us?—had taken up residence in his body. But, far worse, he would see from the way his own children walked, always as if a wind buffeted them from side to side, that he’d burdened them with the same worries, the same ambivalence, whose result would be that one felt that a world so insecurely both held and pushed away might be snatched from you at any moment. Or perhaps
he gave them that fatal gift not because of a story but because that would have been the kind of person he always would have been, whether he had found a lost story or not, and maybe that “gift”—which is to say, his personality—would have been what had first attracted him to the study of Kafka, in whose work he might see his flaws made even worse, and yet at the same time transformed into art.

Whatever the reason was for what had happened to his children, burdening one’s progeny does not answer a question of whether (for example) God wanted the goat to die. To know the answer to that is perhaps the way to the true promised land. But like Moses, he and his children were barred from that.

Fortunately, and though a scholar’s once healthy wife surely would lose her own appetite from the contagion of eating and sleeping alongside him, and though the children have found themselves so divided in heart, not everyone feels crushed by questions. In Kafka’s other stories, the burdened and so burdensome characters will most likely die, and perhaps this scholar will choke to death at his dinner this very evening. (Dear God, Max, even I was surprised when I wrote that, shocked at how easily an author stops his character’s throat when he can barely get any water down his own anymore. It seems one is both executioner and goat—a worn insight, and one which I can assure you does not lead to the promised land.) But after a disaster, to mock the melancholy character, or to give the reader hope, Kafka often also ends his stories with a vision of health. After Gregor Samsa’s corpse is swept into the trash, his sister, freed finally from feeding and caring for him (however halfheartedly and disgustedly), extends her body in a gesture of youth and joy; and next to the cage where the
emaciated corpse of the Hunger Artist lies forgotten in the hay, the sideshow customers stare avidly through the bars of the prison next door at a beautiful pacing leopard. So at the end of this story, please remember that many will sit down happily tonight to a well-cooked meal, will eat their meat with good appetite, and—mercifully for their families—quickly, too. And they’ll drink, too, without giving it a thought. After all, Max, as I once told you, when we sat together on that bench one gray Prague day, “There’s plenty of hope, an infinite amount of hope,” and plenty of meat and air, too, I might have added. Though I admit, I also said, “but not for