Ten, then fifteen, minutes passed. I thought about a story that a friend had told me many years ago, about a trip he’d taken to Prague when he was young. One night he’d gotten completely sloshed, and become convinced that he needed to go out and kiss the Altneuschul, directly across the street from where he was staying. The next morning he woke up unharmed, still embracing the shul, watched over, he imagined, by the remains of the golem supposedly buried in the attic. That afternoon he decided to go to the Straschnitz Jewish Cemetery to visit Kafka. The writer was buried next to his father, my friend told me, which was more or less the worst insult he could imagine. My friend decided he was going to say kaddish for Kafka. When he finished, he turned to go, and standing there behind him was the exact same headstone. He stood there, bewildered. A few minutes later, some kids sauntered over and explained that they’d just finished a replica of Kafka’s headstone for a movie that was being shot, and had left it there while they went to lunch. I’d said kaddish to the replica, my friend told me. He helped them load it into their truck. The rubbing they’d done of the real headstone was sitting there, and he asked them if he could have it.
I wondered what Friedman could be doing inside. The dog’s hot breath steadied and became rhythmic. I pictured the crowded rooms behind the window bars, humid with houseplants slowly dropping their yellow leaves over the disarray of Kafka’s fading manuscripts, whose pages must have stunk of cat pheromones. Frustrated at being kept from seeing all of this for myself, I finally nudged the dog off my lap and got out of the car. The cats were absent today—gathered inside, maybe, to roll on Prague ink—but their smell still hung in the air, and the little dirty bowls set out on the ground suggested they would be back soon enough. I found Eva Hoffe’s name on the top buzzer, but, peeking into the lobby at her door, and imagining the stringy-haired spinster’s magnified eye blinking at me through the peephole, I backtracked and ducked under the broad fig leaves, swatting a sticky cobweb out of my face.
The night after my first meeting with Friedman, I’d read online about the trial over Kafka’s archives. Everything he’d told me was corroborated there: the case, which was still being deliberated, came down to the question of whether Kafka’s manuscripts—in a sense, Kafka himself—was a national asset or private property. So far no verdict had been given, but in the meantime the court had granted the National Library’s request that the papers in Eva Hoffe’s possession be inventoried. Eva, who often referred to the archive as an extension of her own limbs, had likened this to rape. After two appeals were overturned, keys to safe-deposit boxes in Tel Aviv were finally pried from her, but they didn’t match the locks. On the day the boxes were finally to be opened by the lawyers, Eva was witnessed chasing them into the bank, shouting that the papers belonged to her. But however crazy she at times appeared to be, however bizarre the stories of her behavior, however difficult it might have been for the State of Israel to accept that a Jewish writer who meant so much to so many could be anything other than national property, her claim was not without legal strength. The results of the inventory had not been made public, but Haaretz had confirmed that she was sitting on a large amount of original Kafka material. And either it was everyone’s and no one’s, or Israel’s, or only hers.
Approaching the row of ground-floor windows, I saw that behind the grid of heavy white bars enclosing them was a second layer of wire mesh, the sort used to cage small animals. It was too dark within to make anything out. Around the side of the building the conditions were even more extreme: the bay of windows, meant to allow for a kind of open sunroom, was grotesquely imprisoned by the rusted bars and filthy cage, patched or reinforced at the corners by the energetic attentiveness born of paranoia. Or was it not so much the reflection of an ill mind that had lost touch with reality, I wondered, as of the absurd reality of what against all odds was contained within: something so rare and valuable that there were those who would stop at nothing to lay their hands on it? The apartment had allegedly been broken into a couple of years earlier, though reports of the incident in the Israeli papers suggested the likelihood of an inside job.
I heard something moving. Softening my focus, so that the metal grid dissolved to the background, I saw the skinny black cat that had flattened itself between the bars and the mesh and was slinking through the narrow space between them. Had I believed in such things—and I suppose I did believe in such things—I might have taken it as an omen. A moment later I heard something being dragged down the stairs, as heavy as a body, and when I hurried back around the corner to the front, Friedman had emerged, pulling behind him a black suitcase. The stitching had come loose along the seams, and the handle was bound in duct tape. It was a suitcase more to do with a door-to-door kiddush-cup salesman than a Mossad man, or even former Mossad, or even former Mossad from the broom-closet department of Jewish literature. Not that this stopped me from believing, with a surge in the heart, that something of the lost Kafka was contained inside it.
Whatever it was, Friedman wouldn’t say. Not yet, he said, glancing in the rearview mirror as we drove away. First there were things he had to tell me. We could stop in Jerusalem on the way to the desert and have lunch at a small, quiet vegetarian restaurant in the Confederation House in Yemin Moshe, overlooking the walls of the Old City. There we could talk without being bothered.