Sometimes I believed it was Kafka’s bed, and sometimes I didn’t. Sometimes I think I almost forgot, blissfully, who Kafka even was. His suitcase stood by the door, but at times I no longer remembered who it belonged to, or what was in it, though I never lost the sense that it mattered very much, and that whatever happened to me now, I couldn’t lose it. That somewhere somebody’s life, perhaps my own, depended on it. Sometimes I called the dog Kafka, as the name was readily available, and because using it for the dog felt like a stroke of lucidity. She came, too, though by then she was so hungry, the poor animal, that she probably would have answered to anything. Maybe it was that hunger that brought out such a deep intelligence in her eyes. I gave the dog whatever I could find in the cupboard. I think she took this to be a greater sacrifice than it was, and it aroused her loyalty. But by the time I became ill, there was very little left in the house for either of us to eat, except for a large supply of a peanut-flavored snack called Bamba. When she heard the familiar crinkling of the bags, she would come immediately. Great clouds of dust or maybe dry skin would rise up from her when she shifted, and I got it into my head that this, too, was a form of time, of whatever time she had left.
Sometimes I addressed the dog. Long monologues, to which she would listen with ears pricked as she wolfed down pieces of snack from my pocket. Once, all out of Bamba, I turned to her and said, “Why don’t you have a corned beef sandwich?” which is what my grandfather said to me from his hospital bed, right before he asked me if he was dead yet. But I knew I wasn’t dead; on the contrary, there were moments that I felt, in that illness, thrillingly alive. More alive, I think, than I had felt since I was a child. Awake to the sound of many kinds of wind, and the swelling and contracting of the house, the wings of a fly caught in a web who had not yet given up, and the low, steady note of sunlight playing across the floor. I had always been a little feral in my ways, despite all of the domestic fuss I’d made to the contrary, but left alone now, stroked by fever, I gave up on washing my clothes in the sink and slept often during the day and awoke at night and didn’t bother to brush my hair or sweep the floor, which was slowly being covered with the fine grit of the desert. In the closet I found an old wool coat, and I took to wearing this, even to bed. When the pain became unbearable, I would seize on some small discoloration on the wall or ceiling, or a smudge of dirt on the window, and force myself on this tiny defect with enormous intensity, boring down on it with every last shred of concentration. Either as a result of this, or of the patience that naturally develops from being alone and confined to bed, I slowly became aware of a sharpening of my vision, and after experimenting with this clarity, studying the fibers on the blanket that stood up like the hairs on an insect’s leg, I discovered that I could also apply it when looking inward. For a while, it seemed to me that I needed only to brandish the razor of my acuity for the subject, whatever it was, to immediately surrender itself up to be flayed. But then a foreboding thought cast a shadow over the rest, blunt and unadorned, and it was simply this: that for most of my life I had been emulating the thoughts and actions of other people. That so much that I had done or said had been a mirror of what was done and said around me. And that if I continued in this manner, whatever glimmers of brilliant life still burned in me would soon go out. When I was very young it had been otherwise, but I could hardly recall that time, it was buried so far below. I was only certain that a period had existed in which I looked at the things of the world without needing to make them subordinate to order. I simply saw, with whatever originality I was born with, the whole of things, without needing to give them a human translation. I would never again be able to see like that, I knew that, and yet, lying there, it seemed to me that I’d failed to fulfill the promise of that vision I once had, before I began to slowly learn to look at everything the way others looked, and to copy the things they said and did, and to shape my life after theirs, as if no other range of being had ever occurred to me.
It’s not impossible that it was myself that I was flaying, because at times the pain was quite spectacular. It was all through my body, to the very core; I’ve only once felt anything like that. But as I already said, physical pain doesn’t frighten me anymore. It ceased to frighten me after my oldest son was born. The night before I went into labor, a woman came to the house to give me some baby clothes she no longer needed, and, sitting on my sofa, she told me that in the throes of childbirth, the last thing she had wanted was to be prone on her back, numb from the lower spine down. On the contrary, the only conceivable approach was to be able to get up and walk right toward the pain, to meet it with every ounce of strength she had. This sounded like such common sense to me that when my water broke the very next night and I found myself in the hospital, doubled over with pain, I refused everything, refused even the IV that they insisted on trying to jab into the back of my hand the moment I arrived, and for the next seventeen hours I went right toward the pain of bringing a nearly ten-pound baby through what had always struck me as a rather narrow passage. When I could finally speak again, having come to after the blood lost from all the tearing, and was lying flat out on the bed, trying to sweep together the shredded filaments of my mind, I told someone who called on the phone, curious to know what it had all been like, that I felt like I had met myself in a dark valley. That I had gone down and met myself in the valley of hell. And so this pain, this flaying of the self or whatever it was that was happening to me now, was not about to do me in. This pain, as if my whole being were being pared away from the bone. Or maybe I was not afraid of the pain because I believed that my illness, whatever it was, was also a form of health, the continuation of a transformation already under way.
It must have been during the eye of the storm of my fever that I found myself half a mile out from the house, without a clue as to how I’d gotten there. I was watching a blot in the sky that I took to be an eagle circling overhead. It cried out, and as if the cry had come from me, I suddenly felt that what was straining behind my lungs was joy. A wild exultancy of the kind that would sometimes attack me without warning in childhood. A joy so powerful that I thought it might break my chest. Then it did, it must have broken right through, because for a moment I wasn’t contained inside anything anymore. I went clean through to the sky. Isn’t that the meaning of ecstasy, as the Greeks gave it to us? In that garden on the Mani, in love and fury, I’d read it: Ex stasis: to go out of oneself. But as much as I may have admired the Greeks then, in the end I could never be that, and if you are a Jew standing in the desert going completely out of yourself, falling out of the old order, it will always be something different, won’t it? Lech lecha, God told Abram, who had not yet become Abraham: Go—go away from where you live, the land of your fathers the land of your birth, to the place that I will show you. But Lech lecha was never really about moving from the land of his birth over the river to the unknown land of Canaan. To read it like that is to miss the point, I think, since what God was demanding was so much harder, was very nearly impossible: for Abram to go out of himself so that he might make space for what God intended him to be.
In the eye of the storm—I don’t know what else to call it. It must have also been then, during that bolt of energy that came from the cessation of pain, that I decided to drag the bed outside. It was difficult to get it through the door. I had to turn the bed at an angle to fit the headboard through, and naturally it jammed and I had to climb out through the window and come round the front to pull it. While I tugged maniacally, the dog howled from inside, skittering around and sniffing the other side of the bed. I think she thought that I meant to trap her inside and leave. When the headboard suddenly popped free, I fell back and the dog shot out of the house.
I dragged it some twenty feet out. With great satisfaction, I smoothed out the bedsheets and the tartan blanket and lay down under the tremendous sky. The dog finally cooled off and lowered herself onto the stony ground next to the bed. She rested her chin on the edge of the mattress, waiting to see if I had
anything more to add. She must have once had a litter, maybe many, because her teats hung morosely down from her belly. I wondered where they were now, her children. I wondered if she ever considered them. Perhaps I spoke to her like that: as one creature that had borne the physical demands of bringing life into the world to another, who had the story of life-giving written into her body from conception, leaving her no choice, it seemed, but to enact it. Who felt the sheer force of its law move through her, and wondered whether there was any difference between it and love. Otherwise, I no longer remember the subject of our talks.
It was late afternoon, and the desert was turning ochre and the temperature was perfect as I watched a few pink clouds pass overhead. I was pleased with the results of my work. So much so, that after a while I decided to drag the rest of the furniture outside, too. The reading chair covered in a piece of old canvas to hide the ripped seat, the worktable, and even the typewriter and the stack of pages and the stone paperweight, which would now serve a purpose, as without it the pages would have been scattered by the wind. At first it looked like some sort of desert tag sale, which was not at all what I’d had in mind, and so I spent a long while arranging the jumble out in the open in front of the house, adjusting the spaces between each pair of items, laying it all out toward some inexpressible perfection. When it was almost perfect but not quite, I nipped back into the house and came out with the slippers, which I placed next to the bed, and Forests of Israel, which I laid on the night table.
A wave of exhaustion broke over me. I could barely take another step, and sank down on the mattress. I couldn’t imagine how I’d found the strength for it all. And yet, lying there out in the open, I felt close to that fullness that one sometimes senses is there beneath the surface of everything, invisible, as Kafka once wrote, far away, but not hostile, not reluctant, not deaf, and which, if we call it by the right name, might come.
I must have fallen asleep. When I opened my eyes again, it was night, and I was shivering in the cold, looking up at the raging stars. I pulled the old woolen coat more tightly around myself. Searching for the constellations, I thought of the day the boyfriend and I drove all the way down the crooked finger of the Mani to the supposed gate of the Underworld. Old lives are always coming back, but during the decade of my marriage, that particular day had returned to me more often than others, and now it came to me again. To see into the small mouth of the cave, I’d gotten down on all fours, and as I did, the boyfriend had lifted my dress and mounted me from behind. The tall blades of grass rustled gently in the wind, and so as not to scream out, I sank my teeth into his arm. When we got home, we discovered that a rat had fried itself in the electrical box, and that night, we had no choice but to have mercy on each other in the dark. And now, flat on my back under the stars, it struck me that that’s what had lain behind all of my Greek fury: the abrupt moment when resistance gives way to nearly shocking love. I don’t believe I have ever known real love that does not come with violence, and at that moment, lying under the desert sky, I knew that I would never again trust any love that doesn’t.
I was too weak to drag anything but the bed back inside. I left it in the middle of the room, and discovered that from there I could see out through all three windows. The only book I had in English was Parables and Paradoxes, and after rereading the section on Paradise a few times, I looked out the windows and was struck by the thought that I’d misunderstood something about Kafka, having failed to acknowledge the original threshold at the source of every other in his work, the one between Paradise and this world. Kafka once said that he understood the Fall of Man better than anyone. His sense came from the belief that most people misunderstood the expulsion from the Garden of Eden to be punishment for eating from the Tree of Knowledge. But as Kafka saw it, exile from Paradise came as a result of not eating from the Tree of Life. Had we eaten from that other tree that also stood in the center of the garden, we would have woken to the presence of the eternal within us, to what Kafka called “the indestructible.” Now people are all basically alike in their ability to recognize good and evil, he wrote; the difference comes after that knowledge, when people have to make an effort to act in accordance with it. But because we lack the capacity to act in accordance with our moral knowledge, all our efforts come to ruin, and in the end we can only destroy ourselves trying. We would like nothing more than to annul the knowledge that came to us when we ate in the Garden of Eden, but as we are unable to do so, we create rationalizations, of which the world is now full. “It’s possible that the whole visible world,” Kafka mused, “might be nothing more than the rationalization of a man wanting to find rest for a moment.” Rest how? By pretending that knowledge can be an end in itself. Meanwhile, we go on overlooking the eternal, indestructible thing inside ourselves, just as Adam and Eve fatally overlooked the Tree of Life. Go on overlooking it, even while we can’t live without the faith that it is there, always within us, its branches reaching upward and its leaves unfurling in the light. In this sense, the threshold between Paradise and this world may be illusory, and we may never have really left Paradise, Kafka suggested. In this sense, we might be there without knowing it even now.
It became clear that no one was coming back for me. Maybe they’d forgotten. Or maybe whoever was in possession of the whole story had been called away or killed in the war. Kaddish for the whole story. I hadn’t even tried to do my part: the suitcase sat untouched where Schectman left it. But, no, that isn’t entirely true. Before I fell ill, and at times in my fever, too, I’d thought a lot about Kafka’s afterlife. I imagined his gardens most of all. Maybe it was the barrenness of the desert all around that gave me a thirst for lushness, for the heavy, almost sickeningly overripe smell of crowded leaves, but I found myself repeatedly conjuring their fragrant paths, busy with insect life, their arbors, fruit trees, and vines. And always Kafka among them, at work or at rest, mixing peat or lime, fingering hard buds, untangling root balls, watching the work of the bees while still dressed in the dark suit of an undertaker. I never pictured him in clothes appropriate to outdoor work or the heat. Even after my vision of his gardens fell into keeping with what I knew could grow there, after I filled them with honeysuckle and pomegranate trees, I still couldn’t see him in anything but that stiff suit. The suit, and sometimes that odd bowler hat that always looked too small for his head, as if the merest wind might knock it off. If I couldn’t fully accept the idea of him shedding his old clothes, however inappropriate in his new life, I suppose it was because I couldn’t fully accept that he would prefer to plant a tree, to water and fertilize and prune, than to organize the light through its leaves, to put it through the paces of three hundred years in a sentence or two, and to kill it at last in a hurricane that brought too much salt to its roots and left it as fodder for the ax. Could not, finally, accept that he would want to toil under nature’s harsh and limiting conditions when his powers extended to being able to surpass them for something that, in his prose, had always been soldered to the eternal.
There was a Hebrew dictionary on the shelf, and I turned its pages, trying to imagine that after his death in Prague Kafka really had crossed over into Hebrew, and gone on writing in those ancient letters. That the results of the union between Kafka and Hebrew was what had really lain hidden all this time in the fortress of Eva Hoffe’s Spinoza Street apartment, protected by a double cage and her paranoia. Was there such a thing as late Kafka? Was it possible that the unspoken subtext of the ongoing court case between the National Library of Israel and Eva Hoffe, acting as Brod’s agent, was really that: the struggle to preserve the myth, versus the struggle to claim Kafka by the state that regards itself as the representative and culmination of Jewish culture, and which depends on an overcoming of the Diaspora, on the Messianic notion that only in Israel can a Jew be authentically a Jew? The knowing smile that played on Friedman’s lips that day he’d dropped me at my sister’s apartment came back to me again: You think your writing belongs to you? Only now that he was gone w
as I ready to argue with him, to tell him that literature could never be employed by Zionism, since Zionism is predicated on an end—of the Diaspora, of the past, of the Jewish problem—whereas literature resides in the sphere of the endless, and those who write have no hope of an end. A journalist interviewing Eva Hoffe once asked her what she thought Kafka would have made of it all had he been alive. “Kafka wouldn’t have lasted two minutes in this country,” she’d shot back.
The dog watched me from her place in the corner as I got up to return the Hebrew dictionary to the shelf. She had sat there all through my fever, whining only when she had to go outside to relieve herself. Otherwise she didn’t leave my side. I won’t soon forget the look in her dark, wet eyes: as if she understood what I myself didn’t. But now she seemed to know that the fever had broken, and began to stretch and move about, and even thump her tail against the floor, as if she also sensed that time was returning to us. When I went to the kitchen to get her some water, she leaped up and trotted after me with a new spring in her step, as if in the course of my fever she had shed many years. There was nothing left to eat, the kitchen was bare. I had no interest in discovering what it felt like to starve, or to watch the dog starve. All night I’d heard her stomach bubbling with hunger.