I had to suppress a laugh. It was becoming increasingly hard to keep up with Friedman. All morning I’d been trailing a few steps behind him, but now I’d lost him completely.
“He seems to make an appearance in all of your books. Once you even wrote an obituary for him, as I recall. So the story of the fate of his papers after his death is no doubt familiar to you?”
“You’re referring to the note he left for Max Brod, asking him to burn all the manuscripts Kafka had left behind, which Brod—”
“In 1939,” Friedman cut in impatiently, “five minutes before the Nazis crossed the Czech border, Brod caught the last train out of Prague, carrying a suitcase stuffed with Kafka’s papers, saving his life and rescuing from almost certain destruction all the remaining unpublished work of the greatest writer of the twentieth century. Brod came to Tel Aviv and lived out the rest of his life here, where he published more of Kafka’s work. But when he died in 1968, a portion of the material in the suitcase had still never been released.”
I wondered how many times Friedman had recited this story, too. The dog herself seemed to have heard it before, because after pausing in a wide stance to see where things were going, she now traced a few pathetic circles in the grass, lowered herself with a groan, and conked down her head in such a way that she could keep a lazy upside-down eye on Friedman.
“I know all that, yes. I’ve read my fill of Kafka porn.”
“And so you also know that everything left in that suitcase is moldering in the most heinous conditions less than three meters from where you’re standing now?”
“What do you mean?”
With the tip of his cane, Friedman pointed to the window of the ground-floor apartment. It was protected by a cage of curved iron bars in whose hold three or four mangy cats were nestled in a pile. Two more cats were lazing on the front steps of the building, and the stench of feline urine hung in the air.
“Unfinished novels, stories, letters, drawings, notes—God knows what, sitting under the neglectful but pathologically obsessive watch of the now elderly daughter of Brod’s lover, Esther Hoffe, whose hands they came into through various questionable channels of inheritance. The daughter, Eva Hoffe, claims to have stored some of the papers in safe-deposit boxes in Tel Aviv and Zurich to protect against potential theft. But the truth is that she is too fanatically possessive and paranoid to let any of it out of her sight. Behind those bars in Eva’s apartment, along with twenty or thirty more cats, are hundreds of pages written by Franz Kafka that almost no one has ever seen.”
“But surely Kafka’s manuscripts can’t be hidden from the world on the claim that they’re private property?”
“The National Library of Israel filed a lawsuit challenging Esther Hoffe’s will after she died, asserting that Brod had intended for the papers to be donated to them, and that they belong to the state. The trial has been going on for years. Each time a judgment is handed down, Eva appeals.”
“How do you know that most of it’s here, and not locked up in the bank, as Eva claims?”
“I’ve seen the papers.”
“I thought you said—”
“I’ve only told you the beginning.”
Friedman’s cell phone rang, and he looked thrown off guard for the first time all day. He fumbled in his pockets, patting down the vest while the phone kept going off with the loud, alarming tone of an old-fashioned telephone ring. When he still couldn’t find it, he handed me the cane and started lifting one flap after another, until at last, just as the phone gave up, he found it in his inside pocket. He glanced at the screen.
“I didn’t realize it was so late,” he said, turning back to me. In the silence that followed, he seemed to be studying me, and I wondered if he had found something in my face to trust. He called the dog, and the beast came to and began the long process of rising.
“Among the papers sitting in that apartment is a play that Kafka wrote near the end of his life. He nearly finished it, but just before the end he abandoned it. The moment I read it, I understood that it had to be realized. It took a long time, but at last it’s happening. Shooting is scheduled to begin in six months.”
“You’re turning it into a film?”
“Kafka loved the movies. Did you know that about him?”
“That doesn’t mean he would have approved!”
“Kafka approved of nothing. Little could have been more foreign to Kafka than approval. The afterlife of his work would have sickened him. And yet no one who has ever read him believes that his wishes should have been carried out.”
“Why should Kafka’s intentions be irrelevant,” I asked, “while you glorify the intentions of the writers and redactors of the Bible who were—what was it you said before—‘supremely conscious’ of the choices they were making?”
“Where is the glory? We don’t even know who they were, and most of their intentions were lost or overridden by the needs of everyone who came afterward. Beneath the countless revisions, there’s a Genesis written by a singular person who had all of the genius and none of the moral intention. Whose greatest invention was a character called Yud-Hay-Vav-Hay, and whose book might have been called The Education of God, had it not been absorbed by another destiny. But in the end, it isn’t up to the writer to decide how his or her work will be used.”
“And the pathologically obsessive, paranoid Hoffe daughter has agreed to this? What about the National Library of Israel? In the middle of a trial, you got the rights to a piece of highly disputed material, a play by Kafka, which is going to be made into a film?”
Friedman looked past me at the house. It was clear he wasn’t going to be solving any mysteries that afternoon; he was too busy sowing them.
“Changes need to be made to the script, of course. And there remains the problem of an ending.”
Now I really did laugh. “I’m sorry,” I said, “it’s all a bit much.”
“Take your time,” Friedman said.
“For what?”
“To decide.”
“What am I deciding?”
“Whether my proposal is of interest to you.”
“I don’t know what you’re proposing!”
But before I could ask anything more, he gave me a grandfatherly pat on the back.
“I’ll be in touch soon. Don’t hesitate to contact me in the meantime.”
Unzipping a bulging pocket of his vest, he removed his wallet and extracted a card. ELIEZER FRIEDMAN, it read. PROFESSOR EMERITUS, DEPARTMENT OF LITERATURE, TEL AVIV UNIVERSITY.
Out of the corner of my eye I saw the curtains of the ground-floor apartment move slightly, as if with the wind. Only the window was closed. I might have missed it had the cats lying on the bars not suddenly stiffened with alertness, feeling whoever was moving within. Their keeper.