I flipped ahead and reread what has always been, for me, one of the most unforgettable passages that Kafka wrote, a section from The Trial, which he chose to extract and publish alone. A man comes to the doorkeeper who stands on guard before the Law and asks for admittance. He is refused, but not outright—the doorkeeper tells him that he might be admitted later. The man can’t advance but neither can he turn away, and so he sits down on the stool the doorkeeper offers, to wait before the open door to the Law. He’s not allowed to go through; indeed, it seems the door remains open only to taunt him with the idea of passage. He spends a lifetime waiting, a lifetime on the threshold of the Law, and every attempt he makes to get in is always denied. The man grows old, his eyes become dim, his hearing faint; at last his life is drawing to a close, and “all that he has experienced during the whole time of his sojourn condenses in his mind into one question.” He summons his last bit of strength to whisper it to the doorkeeper: Everyone strives to attain the Law, so why in all these years has no one tried to go through but me? To which the doorkeeper, shouting to make himself heard to the dying man, bellows, “No one but you could gain admittance through this door, since it was intended only for you. I am now going to shut it.”
In the kindergarten across the street, Lady Gaga had been turned off, and the children began to sing. The tune was familiar, as were the words, though I couldn’t understand all of them. I grew up with Hebrew in my ears—among other things, it was the language my parents argued in—but never enough to learn to really speak it. And yet, the sound of it felt intimate to me, like a mother tongue I’d forgotten, and over the years I’d taken up studying it numerous times. Kafka had also studied Hebrew during his last years in preparation for the move to Palestine that he dreamed of making. But of course in the end he never made aliyah—in Hebrew, the phrase literally means “to go up,” and perhaps some part of him knew that he would never “go up,” just as one cannot “go over” to the beyond, and can only remain stationed before the open door. After seeing a film about Jewish pioneers in Palestine, Kafka wrote in his diary about Moses:
The essence of the path through the desert . . . He has had Canaan in his nostrils his whole life long; that he should not see this land until just before his death is difficult to believe . . . Not because life was too short does Moses fail to reach Canaan, but rather because it was a human life.
No one ever inhabited the threshold more thoroughly than Kafka. On the threshold of happiness; of the beyond; of Canaan; of the door open only for us. On the threshold of escape, of transformation. Of an enormous and final understanding. No one made so much art of it. And yet if Kafka is never sinister or nihilistic, it’s because to even reach the threshold requires a susceptibility to hope and vivid yearning. There is a door. There’s a way up or over. It’s just that one almost certainly won’t manage to reach it, or recognize it, or pass through it in this life.
That evening I went to a dance class held in an old yellow school whose window frames were painted sky blue. I love to dance, but by the time I came to understand that I ought to have tried to become a dancer instead of a writer, it was too late. More and more it seems to me that dancing is where my true happiness lies, and that when I write, what I am really trying to do is dance, and because it is impossible, because dancing is free of language, I am never satisfied with writing. To write is, in a sense, to seek to understand, and so it is always something that happens after the fact, is always a process of sifting through the past, and the results of this, if one is lucky, are permanent marks on a page. But to dance is to make oneself available (for pleasure, for an explosion, for stillness); it only ever takes place in the present—the moment after it happens, dance has already vanished. Dance constantly disappears, Ohad often says. The abstract connections it provokes in its audience, of emotion with form, and the excitement from one’s world of feelings and imagination—all of this derives from its vanishing. We have no idea how people danced at the time Genesis was written; how it looked, for example, when David danced before God with all his might. And even if we did, its only way of coming to life again would be in the body of a dancer who is alive now, here to make it immediate for us for a moment before it vanishes again. But writing, whose goal it is to achieve a timeless meaning, has to tell itself a lie about time; in essence, it has to believe in some form of immutability, which is why we judge the greatest works of literature to be those that have withstood the test of hundreds, even thousands, of years. And this lie that we tell ourselves when we write makes me more and more uneasy.
So I love to dance, but nowhere do I love to dance more than in this class in the yellow school, in those old rooms from whose large windows one can see the red flowers of trees that give me endless pleasure, but of which I’ve never taken the trouble to learn the name, and where upstairs Ohad rehearses with his company in a room with a view of the sea. The teacher told us that we should try to feel small collapses inside us as we moved, collapses that were invisible on the outside, but which were happening inside of us all the same. And then after a few minutes, she told us that we should feel a continuous collapse, soft but ongoing, as if snow were falling inside us.
When the class ended, I walked to the beach. I sat in the sand and thought about how what was behind me had once been a desert. One day a stubborn man came and traced lines in the sand, and sixty-six stubborn families stood on a dune and drew seashells for sixty-six plots, and then went off to build stubborn houses and plant stubborn trees, and from that original act of stubbornness an entire stubborn city grew up, faster and larger than anyone could have imagined, and now there are four hundred thousand people living in Tel Aviv with the same stubborn idea. The sea breeze is just as stubborn. It wears away the facades of the buildings, it rusts and corrodes, nothing is allowed to stay new here, but people don’t mind because it gives them a chance to stubbornly refuse to fix anything. And when some know-nothing comes from Europe or America and uses his foreign money to make the white white again, and the porous whole, no one says anything because they know it’s just a matter of time, and when soon enough the place looks decrepit they’re happy again, they breathe more easily when they pass, not out of schadenfreude, not because they don’t want the best for him, whoever he is who only comes once a year, but because what people really long for, even more than love or happiness, is coherence. Within themselves, first of all, and then in the life of which they are a small part.