Forgiving the Angel (2 page)

Dora was bent over that “stove” now, making coffee for them. Kafka looked fondly toward her, and she, as if she could feel his eyes on her, gazed back toward him for a moment with a singleness of concentration that made Brod understand what it meant to be the apple of someone’s eye. This made him say, “Oh, why couldn’t the Hunger Artist also find something he liked to eat”—that being the story whose galleys he held in his hands. Brod was thinking not of the Prague butter, of course, but the greater miracle, the round-faced woman from Poland.

“Ah, but the Hunger Artist’s career would already have made him more of an outcast than those American performers who bite the heads off poultry,” Franz said, immediately, as if he’d already considered this possibility. “Once
he started eating, no one would give him another job, and no one would be willing to teach him a new skill. He’d soon be a Hunger Artist again,
malgré lui
.”

“Which makes his situation,” Dora said, her back to them both again, “like any man who has nothing to sell but his labor. Prices go up, wages go down, and the food he can afford soon brings less new strength than he used getting the money to pay for his food.” Dora had fled to Berlin to read Talmud for herself but had encountered socialism along the way. She didn’t sound doctrinaire, though, but musing, like someone testing the reality of a formula for herself.

At her words Kafka’s eyes widened, and his face took on another kind of sadness. He’d seen the spark inside Dora, one that, like the tuberculosis bacillus, might also burst into a flame and consume her life. It was as if, Brod thought (years later and under his own sky), Franz had seen her life in the KDP, her flight to the Soviet Union and then away from it, seen that not in its terrifying particulars, of course, but like a broad shadow passing over the earth.

“You know,” Franz said to Brod, “you must eventually burn the story you’re holding in your hand.”

“That’s beyond my powers,” Brod said. “What I hold are proof sheets of the story for you to correct. This story’s about to be published.”

“You’re right, of course. Now, let’s hope that to mock my wish, the Malevolent doesn’t set to work destroying Europe’s libraries.”

“Or its readers,” Dora added, having learned from a master.

“The demons don’t need an excuse to destroy,” Brod
said. “Best, though, that your work is here to sustain us when they do appear.” At that, he wondered (and not for the first time) why he’d never envied Franz his genius. Perhaps because to write like Franz Kafka, one would have to be Franz Kafka, and that hadn’t been bearable for anyone, even Franz Kafka. Until now, that is.

“Still,” Kafka said, “you must do your part and burn my remaining papers.”

Brod looked to Dora for help. “He isn’t appointing me his literary executor,” he said, “but his literary executioner.” Max knew he was perhaps too pleased with the cleverness of this, but his cry was heartfelt as well.

Dora, however, nodded her agreement with Franz. She didn’t know what priceless things they were talking about, as she hadn’t read a whit of Kafka’s writing from before he met her. All botched, he’d said, and though she didn’t believe that, she didn’t seek his work out, either; she had his presence, and didn’t need to possess his past. “He believes that burning the papers will keep the ghosts from coming after him anymore.”

Brod knew this was insane, and yet such was his belief in Franz’s intuitions about the manifold and hidden connections of things that he also worried that Franz might be right. After he left that day, Brod planned to consult a psychoanalyst about himself, and then see the demanding mistress who was the reason he needed the doctor. He wondered what a therapist who had studied with Kafka would be like. Perhaps you would tell him a dream and, as in a fairy tale, he would hand you a lizard. Or clip your nails.

“Make Dora your executor,” he said, annoyed with
them both, but not meaning it, as, after all, she might burn Franz’s work.

“No. She loves me differently than you, Max. You’re the person to do this for me.”

In the meantime, Dora had finished her conjuring over the spirit lamp. She offered Franz a cup, and held out a glass to Brod.

The coffee tasted bitter, but it had been made by a woman who was unambivalently in love. What powers might such a potion have?

NONE FOR BROD. His mistress threatened to take up with a straight-backed gentile man if he didn’t leave his wife. And though the Gospels might say that love was stronger than death, it still remained weaker than German inflation. Kafka and Dora had chased prices up and down Berlin’s streets and avenues, but they hadn’t caught up with them before Franz had run out of breath. Franz had to return to his bedroom in the family flat in Prague. Here, Brod and he plotted out where he might send the work he’d written in Berlin, and so raise enough money that he could escape from his father’s house—a horror to which he wouldn’t expose Dora—and rejoin his beloved in Germany.

“This story,” Franz said (it was “A Little Woman”), “will have to hide itself in the world. The others will have an easier time of it, though. Those, you’ll burn.”

“No,” Max said. “I won’t.” He steeled himself. The world, he knew, would thank him for his great refusal.

“Max, you’re an honest man, and I am proud to call you my dearest friend. I know you can’t ignore my dying request.”

Franz Kafka’s dearest friend
. Brod felt deeply honored. How could he not do as Franz asked? “I most certainly can and will ignore your request,” Max said. “I won’t do it.” Franz Kafka’s works would be like a well of water for the world, and yes, Max, would benefit, too. This role, saving Franz’s stories, might be the difference between his endless, grinding
career
, and doing something truly worthwhile, something that would be remembered.

As if in reply, Kafka described a small revision he would like made to one of the unpublished, and therefore supposedly to be destroyed, manuscripts. Max felt as though Kafka was teasing him. If so, the activity must give Kafka a little ease, and so, as his closest friend, Brod would simply have to bear it.

And strangely, just after Brod had had this thought, Kafka said, “Do you think the ebb and flow of pain means the Angel of Death is playing with me, the way a cat plays with a captured mouse?”

“Cruel, that cat,” Brod said, also meaning Kafka Kat toward Max Mouse.

“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.

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?

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:

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.”