“To help you think,” Friedman said, but did not elaborate.
I crumpled the bag closed. We were stopped at a light, and a young couple crossed in front of the car, their arms slung around each other’s waists. The boy was beautiful, as only a person raised in sunlight can be. His shirt was open at the neck to reveal his throat. I turned back to Friedman, who was busy fiddling with the rearview mirror. He looked too old to be driving. His right hand had a tremor—there was no question about it. Was it not possible that, like my father’s cousin Effie, he too had entered into the twilight years where reality, of less and less use, begins to dissolve at the edges?
The light changed, and he turned left onto Allenby. Within a few minutes we’d arrived at my sister’s small, quiet street. I pointed to number 16, fronted by a parking lot that the building overhung, and something of a garden that managed to be at once bare and wild. We both got out, Friedman with the help of his cane, which had been resting across the backseat, hairy with dog fur. His calloused feet were shod in leather sandals today, the toenails cracked. I worked my suitcase out of the trunk for the second time.
“You always pack so heavily?”
I protested that I was the lightest packer in my family; that my parents and siblings didn’t go on so much as an overnight without three suitcases each.
“And this makes them happy?”
“Happy has nothing to do with it. For them, it’s a question of being prepared.”
“Prepared for unhappiness. For happiness one doesn’t need to prepare.”
He turned and gazed up at my sister’s first-floor windows, shuttered by metal blinds. Lady Gaga floated toward us from the kindergarten across the street.
“You can write there?”
I paused, pretending to consider my answer; pretending, as it were, that there was a chance that I might write there, while knowing full well that there wasn’t.
“If you want the truth,” I admitted, “my work hasn’t been going well. I hit a wall with it.”
“All the more reason to try something else for a while.”
“What? Finding an end to what Kafka couldn’t finish, or chose to abandon, like most of what he wrote? Works that made their way into the world regardless, without any ending, to no less effect? Even if I could get past the intimidation, the sense of transgression would be intolerable. My own work makes me anxious enough as it is.”
Through the large leaves of a jungle tree, the sun fell dappled on Friedman’s face, and a little smile tugged at the corners of his dry lips, the inward smile that the wise give themselves in the face of other people’s foolishness.
“You think your writing belongs to you?” he asked softly.
“Who else?”
“To the Jews.”
I broke into laughter. But Friedman had already turned away and begun to comb through his bulging pockets one by one. The hands, their papery backs blotchy with sunspots, patted and pressed, worked open the Velcro closures. It was an ordeal that could go on all day: he was as thickly packed as a suicide bomber.
Amid the laughter, the famous line from Kafka’s diary came back to me: What do I have in common with the Jews? I have hardly anything in common with myself. It was often quoted in the tireless argument about just how Jewish Kafka’s work really was. Then there was what he’d written in his diary about wishing to stuff all of the Jews (including himself) into a drawer until they’d suffocated, opening and closing the drawer from time to time to check on the progress.
Friedman didn’t respond and went on searching his pockets, which I now imagined to be filled with scraps of paper, assignments to be delivered to other writers to keep the great machine of Jewish literature rolling forward. But nothing was found or discovered, and either he forgot what he was looking for or lost interest. Jewish literature would have to wait, as all Jewish things wait for a perfection that in our hearts we don’t really want to come.
“Anyway, you said it yourself,” I reminded him, “no one cares about books anymore. One day the Jews woke up and realized that they needed another Jewish writer like they needed a hole in the head. Now we’re back to belonging to ourselves.”
A disapproving look made the already deep furrows in Friedman’s forehead deeper. “Your work is good. But this false na?veté is a problem. It gives the impression of immaturity. You don’t come off well in interviews.”
A wave of fatigue came over me. I took up the handle of my suitcase.
“Tell me, what is it you want from me, Mr. Friedman?”
He lifted the bag of Kafka from the low wall where he’d set it down, and held it out. There was a small tear at the bottom, and it looked as if the whole thing were about to rip open. I reached for it instinctively to stop the books from spilling all over the sidewalk.
“I’m flattered that you approached me, really I am. But I’m not the writer for you. I have a hard enough time with my own books. My life is already complicated. I’m not looking to contribute to Jewish history.” I tugged the suitcase toward the front path of my sister’s building. But Friedman wasn’t finished.
“History? Who said anything about history? The Jews never learned from history. One day we’ll look back and see Jewish history as a blip, an aberration, and what will matter then is what has always mattered: Jewish memory. And there, in the realm of memory, which will always be irreconcilable with history, Jewish literature still holds out hope of having some influence.”
Opening the car door, he tossed in the metal cane, slid into the driver’s seat, and started up the engine.
“I’ll come for you at ten tomorrow morning,” he called through the lowered window. “You like the Dead Sea? Pack an overnight bag. The desert gets cold after sunset.”
Then he raised an open palm and drove off, the tires crunching over broken glass.