The years passed, and sometimes my brother or I brought the suitcase up to see if Anna would finally reveal the secret contents. But she would only remind us that we had to wait until the agreed-upon point in time. And then at last my brother’s bar mitzvah came—came and went, and we didn’t ask. Probably we forgot, or we were old enough to suspect the answer without having to be told, and wished to avoid the awkwardness of asking. But as a result the mystery became permanent, and what Anna had given us, in the form of a story and a suitcase, outlasted the other countless things we had been given in those years and later lost or forgot.
With Kafka in the trunk, Friedman drove to the highway. It took us past palm and cypress trees, past fields above which dark flocks of starlings suddenly shifted directions in unison, then shifted sharply again. Past the new city of Modi’in, after which the landscape grew older, and beneath the grass the white skull of the world showed through. We drove past hillsides lined with broken walls from terraces long ago left to fall, but whose rows of ancient olive trees kept growing, past Arab villages and a shepherd nimbly picking his way down the hill in the wake of his sheep. A metal fence appeared on either side of the road, topped by circles of razor wire, and we passed through a checkpoint where the guards stood in riot helmets and dark uniforms thickened by bulletproof vests. After some miles, the fence was replaced by high concrete walls that ran all the way to the outskirts of Jerusalem, before giving way to forests of pine. Entering the city, we drove past Independence Park and through the streets of Rehavia, past Montefiore’s renovated windmill and the renovated King David Hotel, once bombed, once no-man’s-land, once, not very long ago, host to my brother’s wedding.
Friedman pulled the car into a small lot next to a park, dislodged his dog from the backseat, and led me down a broad hill settled with crows. The stone Confederation House was the only structure around, surrounded by a garden of olive and palm trees, and fragrant with lavender. The restaurant was empty, and the lone waiter led us to a table by the window that looked across the narrow valley onto the walls built by Suleiman the Magnificent. The dog lowered herself with a groan onto Friedman’s sandaled feet. While the waiter went to get her a bowl of water, Friedman busied himself with sorting through the wrinkled photocopies stuffed into a leather portfolio he’d brought with him from the car. Only after our order had been taken, and the waiter, who also appeared to be the cook, disappeared into the kitchen, did Friedman finally lean forward and, with a last gratuitous look around the empty restaurant, lower his voice and begin.
For the next two hours, I listened as he laid out his extraordinary tale. It was so far-flung that at first I was convinced that Effie the fabulist had delivered me into the hands of another of his kind, this one also potentially delusional. I made up my mind that I would wait until he had finished—it was too sensational a story not to hear to the end—but when the meal was over I would excuse myself and call Effie. He had gotten me into this, and now he could get me out. At the very least, he could give me a ride back to Tel Aviv.
And yet the more Friedman talked, the less certain I became of what to believe. I knew how highly improbable what he was telling me was. And that, if by some chance it had really happened, there was no way it would have been kept secret all this time: almost ninety years had passed since Kafka’s death in a sanatorium outside Vienna. But presented with Friedman’s persuasive eloquence and air of authority, and his seemingly exhaustive knowledge of Kafka, I found myself beginning to consider the distant, wholly unlikely possibility that what he was telling me might be true. And I suppose that, as with all incredulous things we open ourselves to, I wanted to believe it could be: that Kafka really might have finally crossed the threshold, slipped through a crack in the closing door, and disappeared into the future. That, thirty-five years after his funeral in Prague and his secret transport to Palestine, he could have passed away peacefully in his sleep on an October night in 1956, known only, if he was known at all, as the gardener, Anshel Peleg. That in Tel Aviv, not far from my sister’s apartment, there could be a house, and behind the house a garden, and in that garden, now wild and overgrown, an orange tree that Kafka himself had planted. The last time Friedman had been there, he told me, a crow had fallen right out of the sky and landed dead at his feet just like that, without any explanation.
II
Gilgul
His Hebrew name, Anshel, was all he’d kept from his old life. It’s a Yiddish diminutive for Asher, interchangeable with Amshel, which is also derived from amsel, German for blackbird. It might easily have been discarded for a name more commonly chosen by those emigrating to Palestine, for Chaim, Moshe, or Yaakov, had it not held the echo of the last name he had to give up, and which would one day become more famous than he could ever imagine. Kavka, in Czech, is a jackdaw, a word so common that Hermann Kafka chose that species of crow as the logo for his fine goods and clothing business. That his son, Franz, was drawn to transmogrification between human and animal, and that at times the writer identified with the animal side more, is obvious in works that would one day be read all over the world. That with his glossy helmet of black hair, pulled low over the forehead like a severe cap, and his piercing, widely set eyes and beaklike nose, the writer looked like no animal so much as the jackdaw is perhaps one of those accidents of fate, Friedman asserted, which in his many stories Kafka was master at revealing to be the projection of a conflicted inner desire. That the surname he assumed, Peleg, was commonplace for those who arrived during the Third Aliyah, suggests that it was chosen in the interest of anonymity, presumably by some other authority, who saw no reason to object to the name Anshel, or failed to see the blackbird Kafka had smuggled through inside it.
He barely survived the journey. When the ship docked in Haifa, the deckhands, who had grown fond of the pale, kind, impossibly thin man, had to carry him off on his back so that his first view of the Promised Land was of the brilliant blue, utterly cloudless sky that arched above it. A child who had been waiting to welcome a distant relative on the dock began to cry, believing it was a corpse they were unloading. So it was that the first Hebrew sentence Kafka heard spoken in Palestine was “How did he die, Father?” And the impossibly thin man, face turned heavenward, who had always been posthumous to himself, smiled for the first time in a week.
He’d been staging his own death for years, hadn’t he? Away from here, just away from here! Remember the line? Friedman asked, his glasses casting muddy shadows over his eyes. It’s what the horseback rider in one of his parables shouts when asked where he’s going, but it might well have been the epitaph carved on Kafka’s headstone in the Jewish cemetery in Prague. All his life, he’d dreamed of escape, yet he remained unable to bring himself to so much as move out of his parents’ apartment. To be trapped and confined in a bewildering environment hostile to one’s inner conditions, in which one is fated to be obtusely misunderstood and mistreated because one can’t see the way out—from this, I don’t need to remind you, Friedman reminded me, Kafka made the greatest literature. No one—not Joseph K. or Gregor Samsa, or the Hunger Artist or the mouse who flees as the world narrows toward its trap without realizing that all it need do is change direction—not one of them manages to escape their absurd existential conditions; all they can do is die of them. Is it any coincidence that Kafka believed his finest passages were enactments of his own death? He once told Brod that the secret to them lay in the fact that while his fictional surrogates suffered, and felt death to be hard and unjust, he himself rejoiced in the idea of dying. Not because he wanted to end his life, Friedman said, dropping his voice as he leaned toward me across the table, but because he felt he had never really lived. The light was diffuse in Friedman’s soft white hair, and for a moment he wore it like a halo. He continued: When Kafka imagined his own funeral in a letter to Brod, he described it as a body that had always been a corpse being at last consigned to the grave.
It took time, but the tuberculosis that would have killed him in Prague began to re
cede in Palestine. And though one might be tempted to attribute this to the care of his excellent doctors, or the frequent sojourns to the desert, where the dry air did wonders for his lungs, to do so, said Friedman, would be to ascribe to reality powers that in truth belonged to Kafka himself. He’d always maintained that his lung disease, like his insomnia and his migraines, was nothing but an overflowing of his spiritual disease. An illness born of feeling trapped and suffocated, without the air he needed to breathe or the refuge to write. At the very first hemorrhage, when the blood kept coming, he’d felt a stir of excitement. He’d never felt better, he later wrote, and that night he slept well for the first time in years. To him, this terrible illness had arrived as the fulfillment of a profound wish. And though it would almost certainly kill him, Friedman said, until then it was his reprieve: from marriage, from work, from Prague and his family. Right away, without any delay, he broke off his engagement to Felice. And as soon as he’d done that, he applied for immediate retirement from his job at the Workers Accident Insurance Company. He was granted only temporary leave, but the eight months that followed were, Kafka often said, the happiest of his life. He spent them on his sister Ottla’s farm in Zürau, in a state of near euphoria, working in the garden and fields, feeding the animals, and writing. He’d always felt that the nervous disorders of his generation came of being uprooted from the countryside of their fathers and grandfathers, estranged from themselves in the claustrophobic confines of urban society. But it was only during his convalescence in Zürau, Friedman told me, that Kafka had the chance to experience firsthand the restorative effects of being in contact with the soil. He became passionate about the Zionist agricultural schools opening all over Europe, and tried to convince Ottla and some of his friends to enroll. That same year he’d begun teaching himself Hebrew, and in Zürau he diligently worked through sixty-five lessons in his textbook, progressing far enough to be able to write to Brod in Hebrew. Woven together, Friedman said, the longing for a lost relationship to the land and for an ancient language coalesced into something more concrete, and it was during this same period that Kafka began to seriously develop his fantasy of emigrating to Palestine.
He may never have been as ardent or involved a Zionist as his closest friends, Friedman said. Max Brod, Felix Weltsch, and Hugo Bergmann, his oldest friend from school, all took active roles in the movement, first becoming involved in the Bar Kochba student group in Prague, then publishing essays, lecturing, and committing themselves to making aliyah. But Kafka’s most famous line about Zionism—“I admire it, and I’m nauseated by it”—says more about his constitution than anything else, one that couldn’t abide conforming to any ideology. He read the Zionist newspapers and journals compulsively, and published his stories there. He attended the Zionist conference in Vienna, and even promised to promote shares of Hapoalim, the Workers’ Bank. It was through exposure to thinkers like Buber and Berdyczewski, whose lectures he heard in Prague, that Kafka came into contact with the Hasidic folk tales, Midrashic stories, and Kabbalistic mysticism that had such a profound influence on his writing. And the more fascinated and consumed he became by these texts, Friedman said, the more taken he became with that distant, lost native ground they originated from and referred back to.
And yet, Friedman said, holding up a thick finger—to truly understand why Kafka had to die in order to come here, why he was willing to sacrifice everything to do so, you have to understand a critical point. And it is this: it was never the potential reality of Israel that inspired his fantasies. It was its unreality.
Here Friedman paused, letting his watery gray eyes rest on me. Again I felt he was deliberating, that the jury was still out on me, though it seemed too late for that now that we had found ourselves sitting across from one another, with Kafka’s suitcase in the trunk and his secret spilled out on the table.
Friedman asked if I remembered the first letter Kafka ever wrote to Felice. But he had written some eight hundred letters to Felice: No, I said, I didn’t recall the first. Well, they’d met a few weeks earlier, Friedman went on, and as a means of reintroduction, Kafka reminded her of the promise she’d made to accompany him to Palestine. In a sense, their entire relationship began on this note of fantasy, and one might say, Friedman said, that it continued in that vein for five years, for part of Kafka must always have known that he wouldn’t or couldn’t marry her. Once their epistolary relationship was under way, and Felice apologized for not writing back fast enough, Kafka told her that she wasn’t to blame, that the problem arose from her not knowing where or even whom to write to, because he himself couldn’t be found. He who had never really lived, who only felt himself to exist in the unreality of literature, had no address in this world. Do you understand? Friedman demanded. In a sense, Palestine was the only place as unreal as literature, because once upon a time it was invented by literature, and because it was still yet to be invented. And so if he were to have a spiritual home, a place he might actually live, it could only be here.
The fantasy of a relationship with Felice may have begun with the fantasy of a life in Palestine, Friedman continued, but it was only the fantasy of a life in Palestine that Kafka never gave up. Over the years it just changed form. He imagined himself doing manual labor on a kibbutz, surviving on bread, water, and dates. He even wrote a manifesto for such a place, “Workers without Possessions,” outlining a workday of no more than six hours, belongings limited to some books and clothes, and the complete absence of lawyers and courts, as personal relationships would be based on trust alone. Later, once Hugo Bergmann made aliyah and became the director of the Jewish National Library in Jerusalem, Kafka imagined a little bookbinder’s bench for himself in the corner, where he would be left in peace among old books and the scent of glue.
But it was Kafka’s last fantasy, the one he kept alive in the final year before his death in Europe, that Friedman found most beautiful, he told me, perhaps for being the most Kafkaesque. In that last year, he met and fell in love with the daughter of a Hasidic rabbi named Dora Diamant, who shared Kafka’s dream of emigrating to Palestine. They would have a restaurant in Tel Aviv, they decided, where Dora would cook, and Kafka would wait tables. He spoke about this dream more and more often, especially to his young Hebrew teacher Puah Ben-Tovim, who years later pointed out that Dora couldn’t cook and Kafka would have been a terrible waiter, but also that in those years Tel Aviv was filled with restaurants run by such couples, and in that sense Kafka’s surreal fantasy was more real than one might first be inclined to think. Can’t you picture it? Friedman asked me with an amused smile. The wooden tables and the faded poster of Prague Castle ironically hanging on the wall, the kuchen under a glass dome on the counter? And the waiter with the black widow’s peak in a short, dark jacket, who swats at a fly with a wry little smile?
Speaking in a hushed tone so as not to be overheard by Kafka’s progeny drying glasses by the espresso machine, Friedman told me that some thirty years ago, one of Kafka’s biographers had turned up Puah Ben-Tovim in Jerusalem, and published an interview with her in the New York Times. She was Dr. Puah Menczel by then, and nearly eighty years old, and to read between the lines of the article was to see the “Kafka fog machine,” as Friedman called it, at work, a machine powered by Brod but which would have been impossible without Bergmann and Puah, both of whom had been instrumental in the plan to bring Kafka to Palestine in secret. Puah had been employed in Bergmann’s library when she was eighteen, and the story goes that when he saw how overqualified she was for the work, he sent her to study mathematics in Prague, and even went so far as to arrange for her to live with his own parents. It’s that last bit that makes one raise an eyebrow, said Friedman. Or would if one were to look askance at the official biography, which tells us that Bergmann sent Puah to Prague not as an emissary, not to begin work on a clandestine plan already taking shape, but simply out of the kindness of his heart, and only as an afterthought decided to send her to meet Kafka, to whom she began to give private Hebrew
lessons twice a week.
By the time Puah arrived in 1921, Kafka was already very ill. In the interview she gave to the clueless biographer who tracked her down sixty years later, she described the painful coughing fits that interrupted their lessons, and Kafka’s huge dark eyes imploring her to continue for one more word, and one more after that. By the end, Kafka had progressed enough that they were able to read part of a novel by Brenner together. But in the Times article, Kafka’s biographer also notes that after Puah Ben-Tovim dropped her math studies and moved to Germany, and Kafka followed her there, installing himself next door to the Jewish children’s camp where she worked, she abruptly fell out of the picture and never saw him again. Among the mountains of recollections later offered in the wake of Kafka’s posthumous fame, most inaccurate or of dubious authority, there is not a single word from Puah Ben-Tovim, the biographer notes. And when he finally tracks her down in Jerusalem, and she graciously invites him into her book-lined apartment, she explains her disengagement simply: Kafka was thrashing about like a drowning man, ready to cling to whoever came close enough for him to grab hold of. She had her own life to live, and she didn’t have the will or the strength to be a nursemaid to a very sick man twenty years older than her, not even if she’d known then what she now knew about him. In other words, her poise was flawless, said Friedman. She managed to extricate herself, putting the biographer’s curiosity permanently to rest. And now she is dead, and we can no longer ask Puah Ben-Tovim anything.