Epstein touched his own eye reflexively, got out of bed, and went barefoot to the window. What had he known of relations of grace?
He could have still gone back to Tel Aviv had he wanted. Could have called the taxi back, walked down the still-dark hallway to the waiting car, texting Klausner with the excuse of a forgotten meeting. He could have finalized the details of a donation in memory of his parents to the Weizmann Institute or the Israel Museum, finalized the hotel bill, finalized Moti, who would have come to the lobby with sweat stains under the arms to see him off and receive the usual envelope of cash, could have packed up and gone back to the airport, left the city where he’d been born, and to which he had returned countless times to regain what he could never put his finger on, flown six hundred miles an hour in the opposite direction from Judah Halevi’s heart, and watched the Eastern Seaboard emerge out of the dark and fathomless. And after the pilot, fighting high winds, had brought the plane down askew to the scattered applause of those who found themselves still, surprisingly, alive, he could have sailed through Global Entry, hurtled in a taxi along the Grand Central, empty at four thirty in the morning, glimpsed the Manhattan skyline, and felt the rush of emotion that comes with returning after having been far away, at a place where one’s arrival had felt very nearly final. He could have gone home had he wanted to. But he hadn’t. And now other things would have to happen.
He felt the ballast gone. Everything and everyone that held him to the pattern of himself was gone now. He leaned his forehead against the glass and looked out at the immense realm of the sky, hemmed below by the jagged line of primordial masses. He felt aroused, not only by the view but by his own receptivity. Something had been dislodged, and in the cavity the nerves conducted raw feeling without purpose. He probed tenderly and discovered, as one discovers with all absences, that the emptiness was far larger than what had once filled its place.
Kaddish for Kafka
In the morning everything was calm again, the sky still and cloudless. I’d slept hardly at all, and as always during nights of insomnia, I’d had the feeling that the shore of reason, with its familiar hills and landmarks, was drifting farther and farther away from me, and was touched by the fear that I was in some way willing myself away from it, and had chosen sleeplessness as my method. I sat drinking bitter coffee on my sister’s terrace. The brightness irritated my eyes, but from there I could look out for Friedman, who in my exhaustion I half hoped wouldn’t show up. Sitting in my grandmother’s chair, I thought of how she used to take me to the Dead Sea as a girl. She would pack us a lunch, and we would take the bus from the Central Station out to the desert, and in a couple of hours the two of us would be floating belly-up in the salty, electric blue remainder of an extinct sea, with the ancient mountains of Moab behind us. Floating in a concentration of history reduced by the slow evaporation of time, my grandmother in her white bathing cap decorated with rubber flowers. I imagined Friedman floating there, too, in his darkened glasses, controlling the transmission of national literature while his white hair rippled out on either side like underwater life.
At ten sharp he rattled up in his white Mazda, another symphony pouring through the windows. I lifted myself out of the old chair and tucked Parables and Paradoxes into the plastic bag that held my change of clothes. Hazily, I grabbed my bathing suit and stuffed that in, too. I glanced at the computer left open on the table from my middle-of-the-night e-mail home, then closed the door behind me, locking both upper and lower locks as my sister had instructed me to do whenever leaving the apartment for any length of time. The stairwell was cool and dark going down, and the sudden switch from the brightness made me dizzy, as if the roof over my thoughts had been suddenly raised, letting in a cold rush of space. Just beyond exhaustion there must be something else, just as beyond hunger they say there is an exalted clarity and lightness. But I’d always preferred to read about altered states rather than risk them personally. My mind was too permeable as it was; what few drug trips I’d taken had dipped all too briefly into euphoria before plunging me into panic. I sat down on the steps and put my head between my knees.
A warm wind came in through the open windows of the car as we drove. Friedman had brought me some chocolate rugelach from the bakery, and, feeling better, I ate these, one after another, while his dog rested her head on my shoulder, breathing in my ear. When I’d had dinner with Matti a couple nights earlier and told him about the other Friedman I’d met, who might or might not be former Mossad, Matti had laughed and said that if all the people in Israel who hinted that they worked for the Mossad actually did, then it would be the largest employer in the country. Think of all the banal domestic secrets whose cover-up the Mossad has unknowingly sponsored, he said. The truth is that by then I didn’t really believe I would be called on to write the end of Kafka’s “play.” The idea now seemed so ludicrous that it wasn’t necessary to consider seriously. The dog and the cookies, the crumpled bag of disintegrating paperbacks, the cats, the Mossad, and Friedman, who may only have been looking for a way to entertain himself in his retirement—it all struck me as almost playful. I had also retired, for the time being, from my former purpose. The purpose of writing a novel, I mean, though it is never really a novel that one dreams of writing, but something far more encompassing for which one uses the word novel to mask delusions of grandeur or a hope that lacks clarity. I could no longer write a novel, just as I could no longer bring myself to make plans, because the trouble in my work and my life came down to the same thing: I had become distrustful of all the possible shapes that I might give things. Or I’d lost faith in my instinct to give things shape at all.
I was along for the ride, I told myself as Friedman shifted gears. To get away from the sirens for a while, and because I liked the Judean Desert as much as I liked anyplace: its smell and its light, its millions of years, several thousand of which had been written into me via sources known and unknown, inscribed on a level so deep that it couldn’t be differentiated from memory. If I didn’t ask exactly where we were going or why, it was because I didn’t want to know. What I wanted was to lay my head back and close my eyes, to put myself in someone else’s hands for a while so that I might rest and not think.
Rest, but also, I’d have ventured had I not been so dead tired, so that I might be swept toward someplace that I hadn’t meant to go. It was a long time since I’d allowed that to happen. It seemed to me now that I’d been making plans for myself for as long as I could remember. Truly, I excelled in both the planning and execution: step by step, my plans came to fruition with such exactness that if I had looked more closely I would have seen that what drove my rigor was a kind of fear. When I was young, I thought that I would live my life as freely as the writers and artists I took as my heroes. But in the end I wasn’t brave enough to resist the current pulling me toward convention. I hadn’t gotten far enough along in the deep, bitter, bright education of the self to know what I could and couldn’t withstand—to know my capacities for constriction, for disorder, for passion, for instability, for pleasure and pain—before I settled on a narrative for my own life and committed myself to living it. Writing about other lives can, for a while, obscure the fact that the plans one has made for one’s own have insulated one from the unknown rather than drawn one closer to it. In my heart, I’d always known this. But if at night my body would twitch as I tried to sleep, as it did the night I agreed to marry my future husband next to a shining black lake, I would try to ignore it, as one tries to ignore the unexplained screw left over after assembling the bed one has to lie in. And not only because I didn’t have the courage to admit the things I sensed about myself, or the man I’d agreed to join my life to. I ignored it because I also longed for the beauty and solidity of the form, the one on which all of nature (and a few thousand years of Jews) bestows the greatest praise: the mother and the father and the child. And so I turned away from the accounting that would have required me to foresee what would happen to all of us once the form had been asse
mbled, once the atoms had all aligned in us. Instead, fearful of the kind of violent emotion I’d known in childhood from my family, I harnessed myself to a man who seemed to have a preternatural knack for constancy no matter what happened within or without. And then I harnessed myself to the habit and schedule of a highly organized, disciplined, healthy life as if everything depended on it, as if my children’s well-being and happiness required this harnessing of not only all my hours and days but my thoughts, too, my whole spirit. While the other unformed and nameless life grew dimmer and dimmer, less and less accessible, until I succeeded in closing the door on it completely.
We drove up King George Street, passing the entrance to a park where I’d often taken my children to play and climb on a giant rope apparatus from whose apex they claimed they could see the sea. We had to make one quick stop before we could be on our way, Friedman told me. I thought maybe he’d forgotten something at home, and began to wonder about his life. I pictured his apartment filled with old books, and imagined a wife, large-busted, practical, with the shorn head of gray hair so common in a type of Israeli woman over sixty. Kibbutznik hair, a friend of mine calls it, though to me it always channeled the concentration camp, or would if the severity were not so often accompanied by huge earrings and a grandchild. A Yehudit or Ruth from Haifa. The father a doctor from Germany, the mother a pianist who gave lessons, both survivors, from whose darkness this Yehudit or Ruth had to free herself, though in the end she became a psychologist and spent her adult years trying to make sense of other people’s traumas. The kind of woman whose kitchen people liked to come and sit in when she wasn’t busy at work, who took a walk with the same two friends every morning for forty years. Already I loved her, this Yehudit or Ruth; already I was ready to take my place at her kitchen table covered in a plastic floral cloth and tell her everything. But it wasn’t Friedman’s apartment we were headed toward, it was the street named after the Dutch lens-grinder.
Friedman put the car into park in front of the building he’d brought me to two days earlier, where Kafka and the cats lived together in a state of unholiness, awaiting a verdict from the courts. I thought he was going to give me another lecture, but this time he got out and told me to wait. He would only be a few minutes, he promised, and before I could protest he slammed the door and started across the street with his cane.
The dog whined, watching until Friedman had disappeared into the building, then began to howl as if at some terrible injustice. She paced the cracked leather seat, gouged with a long history of such agitated waiting. I tried to soothe her, but not knowing her name or the words she would understand, couldn’t help. When she seemed as if she were about to choke on her own rapid breath, I climbed over the gearshift and into the back with her. She walked across me a few times before finally settling down with her catastrophe, front paws splayed on my lap. I pulled gently at the baggy skin on her neck, just as I did to the dog I’d lived with for almost as long as I’d lived with my husband.
Ten, then fifteen, minutes passed. I thought about a story that a friend had told me many years ago, about a trip he’d taken to Prague when he was young. One night he’d gotten completely sloshed, and become convinced that he needed to go out and kiss the Altneuschul, directly across the street from where he was staying. The next morning he woke up unharmed, still embracing the shul, watched over, he imagined, by the remains of the golem supposedly buried in the attic. That afternoon he decided to go to the Straschnitz Jewish Cemetery to visit Kafka. The writer was buried next to his father, my friend told me, which was more or less the worst insult he could imagine. My friend decided he was going to say kaddish for Kafka. When he finished, he turned to go, and standing there behind him was the exact same headstone. He stood there, bewildered. A few minutes later, some kids sauntered over and explained that they’d just finished a replica of Kafka’s headstone for a movie that was being shot, and had left it there while they went to lunch. I’d said kaddish to the replica, my friend told me. He helped them load it into their truck. The rubbing they’d done of the real headstone was sitting there, and he asked them if he could have it.
I wondered what Friedman could be doing inside. The dog’s hot breath steadied and became rhythmic. I pictured the crowded rooms behind the window bars, humid with houseplants slowly dropping their yellow leaves over the disarray of Kafka’s fading manuscripts, whose pages must have stunk of cat pheromones. Frustrated at being kept from seeing all of this for myself, I finally nudged the dog off my lap and got out of the car. The cats were absent today—gathered inside, maybe, to roll on Prague ink—but their smell still hung in the air, and the little dirty bowls set out on the ground suggested they would be back soon enough. I found Eva Hoffe’s name on the top buzzer, but, peeking into the lobby at her door, and imagining the stringy-haired spinster’s magnified eye blinking at me through the peephole, I backtracked and ducked under the broad fig leaves, swatting a sticky cobweb out of my face.
The night after my first meeting with Friedman, I’d read online about the trial over Kafka’s archives. Everything he’d told me was corroborated there: the case, which was still being deliberated, came down to the question of whether Kafka’s manuscripts—in a sense, Kafka himself—was a national asset or private property. So far no verdict had been given, but in the meantime the court had granted the National Library’s request that the papers in Eva Hoffe’s possession be inventoried. Eva, who often referred to the archive as an extension of her own limbs, had likened this to rape. After two appeals were overturned, keys to safe-deposit boxes in Tel Aviv were finally pried from her, but they didn’t match the locks. On the day the boxes were finally to be opened by the lawyers, Eva was witnessed chasing them into the bank, shouting that the papers belonged to her. But however crazy she at times appeared to be, however bizarre the stories of her behavior, however difficult it might have been for the State of Israel to accept that a Jewish writer who meant so much to so many could be anything other than national property, her claim was not without legal strength. The results of the inventory had not been made public, but Haaretz had confirmed that she was sitting on a large amount of original Kafka material. And either it was everyone’s and no one’s, or Israel’s, or only hers.
Approaching the row of ground-floor windows, I saw that behind the grid of heavy white bars enclosing them was a second layer of wire mesh, the sort used to cage small animals. It was too dark within to make anything out. Around the side of the building the conditions were even more extreme: the bay of windows, meant to allow for a kind of open sunroom, was grotesquely imprisoned by the rusted bars and filthy cage, patched or reinforced at the corners by the energetic attentiveness born of paranoia. Or was it not so much the reflection of an ill mind that had lost touch with reality, I wondered, as of the absurd reality of what against all odds was contained within: something so rare and valuable that there were those who would stop at nothing to lay their hands on it? The apartment had allegedly been broken into a couple of years earlier, though reports of the incident in the Israeli papers suggested the likelihood of an inside job.
I heard something moving. Softening my focus, so that the metal grid dissolved to the background, I saw the skinny black cat that had flattened itself between the bars and the mesh and was slinking through the narrow space between them. Had I believed in such things—and I suppose I did believe in such things—I might have taken it as an omen. A moment later I heard something being dragged down the stairs, as heavy as a body, and when I hurried back around the corner to the front, Friedman had emerged, pulling behind him a black suitcase. The stitching had come loose along the seams, and the handle was bound in duct tape. It was a suitcase more to do with a door-to-door kiddush-cup salesman than a Mossad man, or even former Mossad, or even former Mossad from the broom-closet department of Jewish literature. Not that this stopped me from believing, with a surge in the heart, that something of the lost Kafka was contained inside it.
Whatever it was, Friedman wouldn’t say.
Not yet, he said, glancing in the rearview mirror as we drove away. First there were things he had to tell me. We could stop in Jerusalem on the way to the desert and have lunch at a small, quiet vegetarian restaurant in the Confederation House in Yemin Moshe, overlooking the walls of the Old City. There we could talk without being bothered.
If things were not strange already, from the moment the suitcase was in our possession, things became far stranger. Now it seems to me that before the suitcase I was operating in a world of familiar laws but unusual circumstances, but afterward the familiar laws began to shiver and bend a little. More than that, it seems to me that I had been moving toward that bend for a long time without knowing it, which is to say, moving toward the suitcase, a suitcase that in some sense I’d been aware of since I was seven, having been given it in a story. But I’d had to wait all these years for it to finally open into my life.
The story was told to me by the woman who took care of my brother and me as children. She lived in our house for nearly a decade, beginning when she was twenty-two, but the word nanny could never be applied to her, nor even babysitter: she was too wild for that, too free and unconventional. She was also mystical, and though she had been raised Catholic, her beliefs drew on many sources and followed no prescription. Her room in our house was filled with crystals and her airbrush paintings of goddesses, wizards, and Disney characters, and around her throat she wore a small portrait of Jesus with a crown of thorns whose little trickles of blood induced in us both fascination and nausea. But we saw no evidence of piety or dutifulness in Anna; the many stories she told us of her childhood were always about subversion, not only of the authorities in her life but of all that lived under the regulations of normality, and which denied the magic she saw at the edges of everything. This particular story was about a job she had been hired for when she was nineteen, a few years before she came to live with us. An operation would be a better way to describe it, since all she had to do was to pick up a black suitcase in the middle of the night from one place, and drive three hours to deliver it to another. I can’t remember what words Anna used to describe the nature of what was inside the suitcase, but we understood that it was illicit, and that she was putting herself in danger by undertaking the drive. The story she told us was mostly about the white-knuckled journey down a dark and winding road, during which a car, which was an exact replica of the one she was driving, began to follow her. We begged her to tell us what was in the suitcase, but she refused. My brother guessed that it was filled with money, and I guessed that it contained a magic necklace. But Anna, who in certain respects knew us better than our own parents, said we would have to wait for the answer until my brother’s bar mitzvah, four years in the future.