Sweeter Than All the World (19 page)

Karen is silent as Adam bends to the keyhole. On the other side of the bolted planks of the door he half expects an insect’s legs to waver in unresisting air. The door is at street level, and the long brick cemetery wall in which it is set stretches a metre above his head, but farther along, gravestones abruptly thrust
out above it almost to the height of the eavestroughs of buildings at the far end of the wall, gravestones blurred by the moving branches of trees. With stones up there so high, was the city sinking even as it was being torn apart, levelled and rebuilt, the remains of the sinking dead rising up slowly from their centuries? A cemetery rising out of decrepitude and bordellos into tourism, a happening worthy of Kafka himself.

Just inside the ancient plank door—it can’t be that old, the wood would be more rotten—the cemetery appears to drop down to the level of the cobbled street they are standing on; no huge insects anywhere. Gravestones only, thick as files in a cabinet, blundered over with moss, engraved with what may be Hebrew, or German, or perhaps Bohemian, every body pulling its slab down to its unique angle of decay. Tall sunlight, a mossy garden of stone knives.

“He isn’t buried there, never,” a woman’s voice says behind them. Gravelly, like her desiccated face.

“Who do you mean?” Karen asks in her delicate German.

“They’ll charge you five korunas to go in, but you won’t find him. In the graveyard in Prague-Straschnitz, there’s his stone.” A dark, round mound of a woman, her crushed face held together snugly by a cowl. “Though who knows,” she continues, “if he has a body.”

“We’re interested in Franz Kafka,” Karen says.

“Who else”—her mouth gums the words—“on this street?” Amusement ripples, a small wind shivering over her. “But I wouldn’t bother going to Straschnitz to look either. If he still has a body, it’s been dug up seventy times over.”

Karen steps close to her. “Dug up? Who dug him up? When?”

They face her together, startled, almost a little frightened at this sibylesque apparition on a sunlit, baroque street in a magnificent city roaring with markets and voices and cars, its historic centre designated “heritage.”

“Heh! They were such organized hunters, where is there ever ground enough to hide a Jew, dead or not?”

“Dug up when?” Karen insists. Her hand has lifted, as if to tug out the next word.

“If he was ever there, and his parents lying right there too.”

Karen’s mouth is open a little, just showing the tips of her teeth. The sunlight is so dazzling Adam understands how Hermann Kafka could once live here in a house called “At the Golden Face.”

“Where? Where do they lie?”

“Straschnitz. There you’ll see what they did—to the few Jews that ever got rich in Prague.”

“We were there, it’s just … an ordinary gravestone.”

The crumpled face crumples farther, into what must be laughter. Sympathetic perhaps; or ghoulish.

“That poor Franz. Only seven years’ peace in the earth, alone,
ach
, and then his heavy papa lies down on him again.”

His mama too. That’s what the stone they saw there said:
Dr. Franz.… Hermann.… Julie…
. Franz, not Frantisek, as the river for him was Moldau, not Vltava. But facing this apparition their quest—or Karen’s obsessive quest, so convenient an excuse to travel without her husband—seems even more ridiculous to Adam. To retrace all possible facts about someone, you would have to literally relive their total life, stupidities and all. Thank god this particular life lasted only forty-one years and not, like Goethe’s, eighty-three—but whatever their span, time wiped
facts away. In any case, what did it matter where Kafka lived, or how, or even why he wrote, or if his body was no longer disintegrating somewhere? Time had not wiped away his stories and novels, though his literary executor Max Brod had famously published the bulk of them after his death in direct contravention of his will that they be, without exception, burned.

“Max Brod!” Adam swore the name when their conversation in the Straschnitz Cemetery stumbled into that will again. “What kind of a shit friend, and executor—executioner?—was he, huh?”

“You’re the shit,” Karen told him. “You bully people, you see what suits your fixed preconceptions. You don’t listen, you remember even less, you’re preoccupied with no one but yourself.”

“Why attack me? I’m talking about friendship.”

“Friends sense what their friends are saying, no matter what their words are.”

“Don’t ask me about that,” he said, turning away from the tombstone. He had almost added, How would I know, I have no friends—but that would have simply proven her point.

Now he is tilted against the cemetery door in old Prague, and he thinks: I should walk away. I will anyway, better for me to leave her here in Josefstadt with this old sibyl and go away alone, past that parked yellow Skoda to the stone building at the corner and pay the five korunas and pass the weathered doorkeeper who’ll be asleep at the entrance, her hand open for a ticket, and in my ignorance search among those crusted gravestones behind the wall. Maybe alone he would find something he could not misconstrue, or forget: an entrance opening down and bottomless, a helpless beetle on its back, a printing machine ripping its
bloody text back and forth across the page of a living body—maybe even find a Mennonite there, suffering of course. As Karen had explained to him, over and over, Kafka was like the writers of the Old Testament: he anticipated everything conceivable by humanity and so all his horrors already existed as facts, were already taking place, somewhere. And would in the future; especially, Adam thinks, if you were a good Christian and did unto others as you did unto yourself.

The old sibyl faces Karen chuckling, oddly, without amusement. “And his three younger sisters,” she says, “they were so close, those four Kafka children—Elli who travelled with him to Hungary and at last to Müritz on the Baltic, and good little Valli, and Ottla the youngest, she gave him his last summer cottage when he almost couldn’t eat any more. Ottla he loved best, but he died in the arms of Dora Diamant.”

“So”—he finds his German voice—“where do you say his three sisters are buried?”

Karen turns to him, staring.

“You can look in the air,” the old woman croaks. “Gone in smoke, Auschwitz garbage.”

“The Kafka word would be
Assanierung,”
Karen tells him in English. “You know what happened, why ask?”

“I know, but…” Such a long list of women Kafka loved, as much or as little as he could, who within twenty years were grotesquely annihilated one way or another. “Only Felice Bauer survived, whom he refused to marry every five years, and—”

“Only refused twice.”

“All the fives he had time for.”

“And Dora Diamant. Dead in London, 1952. ‘The Human
Assanierung’
of Franz Kafka.”

“What does it mean?”

“The word they used in Prague then for architectural clearance—‘cleansing’ is the word today. They razed every house in Josefstadt, after 1893, and built this quick imitation Vienna. Kafka wrote, ‘Our heart still doesn’t know anything about this completed
“Assanierung.”
The sickly old Jewish town is much more real to us than this hygienic new city.’ ”

Hygienic cleansing. Her calm, straightforward explanation twists rage in him. “God! You know every word he scribbled, down to his casual letters.”

“Why should that bother you?”

“Why clutter your mind? Even he wanted them destroyed.”

Her tone shifts, acid. “Well, I study them. That’s my job. But I don’t think Kafka’s words are the Eternal Word of God.”

“Hell no!” Furious irrationality bursts out of him, surprising him.
“You
never have to ‘think,’ you just
know
everything, and declare it to the world!”

“And I also ‘just know’ you’ll never divorce your wife.”

“No more than you will your husband!”

“You’re ready to decide?”

“You don’t want to either.”

“Why in hell should I? So you and I can kill each other the first time we’re not making love?”

“Sweet holy shit!”

The jumble of Friday market in the Great Ring he is now striding through is so much the imploded mess of his feelings when she slices him like that, the perfect angling of her polished words, that he can only long to smash, throw, crash into—something physical, violent, break this relationship forever and absolutely—his mind, legs, feet, arms cramp and hands clamp empty,
heave up—a pile of cobblestones slams against his toes.

The mason looks up at him calmly from his padded knees, his hammer poised for another tap on the last stone he has placed in its necessary curve. Wearing a bruised leather apron. Speaking some word in Czech, could it be
comrade?
Adam discovers his arm is raised, a stone clutched high in his hand.

The great clock in the City Hall Tower faces him. Such an amazing clock of interlaced faces. Emperor Franz—Franz’s namesake indeed!—-Josef I should be riding by with his splayed white whiskers and inbred Hapsburg chin, in medals and fourteenth-century uniform, on a perfect black horse. Riding, riding, nowhere.

From behind him Karen lifts the stone away, his hand left up and foolishly empty. She hands the stone to the mason, who places it in the sand at his knee, then reaches to choose a black one. He is talking to her, Czech perhaps or a dialect of it, and she nods, answers in a perfect accent with the few words Adam knows she knows, “Yes,” “Why?” “Thank you,” as if she understands every word the man is, at length, uttering. “Goodbye.”

“This,” she says at Adam’s ear, “is the Clock of the Apostles—all of them except Judas. And that”—her warm arm turns him slightly, pointing across the encircling stones set ready for the mason’s thick hands—“that is the one Kafka house still standing. That’s his ‘Minuta.’ You ran right to it.”

Their mutual, inevitable rage.
You ran right to it
.

Karen continues, so calmly. “His three sisters were born in this house, the family lived here seven years. They moved away to Zeltnergasse just before his bar-mitzvah in the Zigeuner Synagogue.”

“ ‘Gypsy,’ oh, gypsy,” he mutters. “When?”

“June 13, 1896, 10:30 in the morning.”

A Sabbath in a leap year. He knows Kafka lived in the house called Minuta between the ages of six and thirteen: when everything new and growing in a life has already happened, when it is all over but the variations, the repetitions, the occasional understanding. Minuta stood attached to all the other houses, three storeys above arches and below a steep tile roof. Blank as a stupid cobblestone. The attempt to reassemble even the tiniest life out of the minutiae of accidental survivals overwhelms him with futility. And this life was not tiny.

“Come,” she says. Kissing him with her particular softness among the rushing comrades and anti-comrades of the Great Ring of Prague. “We’ll go to Ottla’s rented house in the Street of the Alchemists—his most beloved sister. It’s over the Charles Bridge.”

Ottla’s tiny house: two odd windows, a chimney, a door, below the immense Gothic castellated cathedral on the hill where the queens and kings of Bohemia were crowned; when they still had bodies to bury.

“I told you and told you,” she explains, papers and books circling her on the cloister bed. “He lived his whole life in that ghetto, within two hundred metres of where he was born. Born, grew up, was sent to a Hapsburg dying Empire German school, to Charles University eventually, graduated a doctor of laws, went into business right there, recommended by his business uncles, but didn’t stay. His father moved the family incessantly from one house to the next, upwardly mobile in that cramped Jewish corner—and when he was twenty-five only one of the fourteen buildings in which he had lived—the Minuta—remained standing.”

“Yes. So, what’s the problem?”

“I’m talking about his past literally being razed behind him, immediately after he’s lived it, vanishment.”

“My parents homesteaded in Alberta. If I went back I wouldn’t find even a cellar depression.”

“Jesus, you’re a self-important bastard.”

“If you’re talking vani—”

“You travel the world and see nothing but your past, your ancestors, your self.”

“And you’ve got keyhole vision. Franz-endless-bleeding-Kafka, middle-class, super-educated, super-achieving Sufferer on a huge and absolutely—as you would say—permanent disability pension!”

“You’re being an ass.”

“Who the hell hasn’t suffered? See anybody? Wars, massacres, extermination camps happen to people, right here in his Prague!”

Very quietly: “I know your people suffered, but I’m talking about the writer of
The Metamorphosis.”

“Franz Kafka is an opera, forever dying with gorgeous women in every spa in cultured Europe wiping the sweat off his suffering brow.”

“Did you hear what I said?”

“Yes. And he also wrote “The Great Wall of China” and
The Castle
and
Amerika
and
In the Penal Colony
and whatever else he scribbled all his life, thousands of pages. Which he ordered burned.”

“How do you know what Kafka ordered?”

“Whatever he wrote—why shouldn’t he ash it if he wanted to? You showed me his will. But considerate Max Brod and dear
Momma decided his
Nachlass
was worth much too much for burning.”

“Worth. Money.” She makes a disgusted sound. “You still have no clue, do you? Kafka’s problem of being a Jew but having to write in German, while living in the massively German, oppressively Christian society of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.”

He says, “A problem like being a semi-demi-secular Lowgerman Mennonite in a massively Nothing society?”

“I’d prefer not to talk about that, about you, just now. But you can’t possibly imagine anything Kafka wrote was that simple—do this, don’t do this—even in his will.”

“Okay, maybe he was too depressed to write it, maybe he just signed it.”

“What difference would that make?”

“Karen, he had a Ph.D. in law. His will—”

“And however he wrote this very personal document, his will, did he mean it literally, word for dictionary word?”

Adam groans. “I’ll tell you what I know,” he says, “because he published it while he was alive, he didn’t burn it:
A Country Doctor
, Kurt Wolff Verlag, 1919. And in it a postage stamp story, ‘The Next Village.’ I quote the 1933 Muir translation: