I spent the rest of the night after I met Friedman stuck in the juncture between sleep and waking. Whenever I closed my eyes and drifted into a thin, disturbed sleep, my mind filled with the rows and columns of the hotel’s windows, lighting up and whirring like a slot machine or giant abacus. I couldn’t glean what these anxious and repetitive calculations meant. Only that they had significance for me, and what my life would come to. The events of the day stretched and warped in my mind, and at some point I became convinced that Kafka himself was sitting in the chair by the window, half turned toward the terrace. I was certain of his presence, as certain as I was, the next moment, of the absurdity of what just a moment ago I’d believed. There was the face I’d studied so many times in the photograph taken during the last year of his life: forty years old, eyes burning in either illness or the excitement of escape, cheekbones bulging from the gaunt face, pointed ears pulled sharply up and away from the skull as if by some outside force. Torqued by the strain, no longer merely human—weren’t they always evidence, those ears, of an incomprehensible transformation already under way?
The door was cracked open, and through it came the gentle, slow rocking of the sea. From time to time Kafka delicately lifted a foot and rubbed his slender, hairless ankle against the long curtains. His preoccupation filled the room, heavy and foreboding, and somewhere in my subconscious the suicidal fantasy Kafka had often rehearsed in his diary of jumping out the window and smashing himself on the pavement below must have twined together with the man who had leaped to his death from the hotel terrace.
But Kafka, my Kafka, made no movement toward the terrace door, and so instead I became convinced that he was deliberating whether or not to marry one or another of the succession of women in his life. Reading his letters and diaries, one has the sense that this was the main subject he applied himself to, second only to his writing. Vaguely, I considered telling him that he had wasted far too much energy on it all. That his hysteria was useless, that he was right to believe he wasn’t made for marriage, and that what he saw as his failure and weakness could also be seen as a sign of health. A health, I might have added, that I’d begun to suspect I might also possess, insofar as health is that part of one that recognizes what is making one unwell.
In a year I, too, would be forty, and the thought came to me that if my beginning was conceived at the Hilton, it would follow that my end would be, too. That this was what my research was meant to look into. In the fog of semiconsciousness, it didn’t frighten me. It seemed not merely a logical thought but one touched by profound logic, and for the moment before I finally fell asleep it filled me with strange hope.
In the morning, sun streaked through the windows, and I was woken by a brusque knock on the door. I staggered out of bed. It was a woman from housekeeping come to restore order, all the way from Eritrea or Sudan. Her cart was piled high with pristine towels and little packages of scalloped soap. She peered past me into the room at the twisted bedsheets and scattered pillows, gauging the size of the job. She must have seen all kinds of things. A woman who had wrestled with sleep all night was nothing to her. But she realized that she had woken me, and she began to turn away. It occurred to me then that if anyone knew something about the man who had jumped or fallen, it would be her.
I called her back; I was checking out shortly, I explained, she might as well get started now. Get started on erasing my presence, as it were, so that the next person who arrived could enjoy the illusion that the room was meant especially for him, and not have to think about the parade of people who’d slept in his bed already.
I followed her into the bathroom, where she began to tidy up around the sink. Sensing me hovering, she caught my eyes in the mirror.
“More towels?”
“I have enough, thanks. But I wanted to ask you something else.”
She straightened up, drying her hands on her apron.
“Do you know anything about a guest who fell from the terrace a few months ago?”
A look of confusion, or perhaps suspicion, clouded her face.
I tried again: “A man who fell from there—” I gestured toward the windows, the sky, the sea. “A man who died?” When this elicited no reaction, I quickly drew my finger across my throat like the Polish brute in Shoah who demonstrated for Claude Lanzmann how, from the side of the train tracks, he would give the Jews a sign that they were careening toward their murder. Why I did this, I don’t know.
“No English.” She bent to scoop a used towel off the floor and squeezed past me. She took fresh towels from her cart, dropped them on the unmade bed, and told me she would come back later. The door clicked shut behind her.
Alone again, a depressed feeling washed over me. For months I’d clung to the idea that this ugly hotel held out some sort of promise for me. Unable to make anything out of it, I’d allowed it to keep its grip on me, and instead of giving up and moving on, I’d packed my bags and gone right toward it, actually checked in to it, and now here I was pressing this poor woman to make good on the possibility that someone had tossed himself to his death so that I might discover that there was a story here after all.
I packed my suitcase, eager to leave the hotel and be on my way to my sister’s apartment on Brenner Street, where I normally stayed whenever I came to Tel Aviv. She spent only part of the year there and at the moment was back in California. I’d spent days writing in her empty apartment in the past, so it was not impossible to believe that, no longer at the Hilton, but not so very far from it, I might finally sit down and begin my novel about the Hilton, or in some way modeled on the structure of the Hilton, which I’d had in mind to write for half a year but of which I had not written even a single chapter.
The news on TV reported that there had been no further rockets. So unnewsworthy a night had it been that between footage from Gaza and a speech from the defense minister, who was largely indistinguishable from the culture minister, there was time for a report about a whale sighting in waters north of Tel Aviv—a gray whale, whose likes had not been seen in the Mediterranean for some two hundred and fifty years, having been hunted to extinction in our hemisphere. But now a solitary member of its race had appeared here, and swum from Herzliya to Jaffa before disappearing again into the deep. A man from the Marine Mammal Research and Assistance Center was interviewed and explained that the whale was emaciated, almost certainly lost. They believed he’d become confused when he arrived at the Northwest Passage and found the ice melted, that without familiar landmarks, he’d accidentally turned south instead of north and ended up in Israeli waters. Sitting down on the hotel bed, I watched the shaky video footage of the spray from his spout and then, after a long pause, the huge, scarred tail rising.