If things were not strange already, from the moment the suitcase was in our possession, things became far stranger. Now it seems to me that before the suitcase I was operating in a world of familiar laws but unusual circumstances, but afterward the familiar laws began to shiver and bend a little. More than that, it seems to me that I had been moving toward that bend for a long time without knowing it, which is to say, moving toward the suitcase, a suitcase that in some sense I’d been aware of since I was seven, having been given it in a story. But I’d had to wait all these years for it to finally open into my life.
The story was told to me by the woman who took care of my brother and me as children. She lived in our house for nearly a decade, beginning when she was twenty-two, but the word nanny could never be applied to her, nor even babysitter: she was too wild for that, too free and unconventional. She was also mystical, and though she had been raised Catholic, her beliefs drew on many sources and followed no prescription. Her room in our house was filled with crystals and her airbrush paintings of goddesses, wizards, and Disney characters, and around her throat she wore a small portrait of Jesus with a crown of thorns whose little trickles of blood induced in us both fascination and nausea. But we saw no evidence of piety or dutifulness in Anna; the many stories she told us of her childhood were always about subversion, not only of the authorities in her life but of all that lived under the regulations of normality, and which denied the magic she saw at the edges of everything. This particular story was about a job she had been hired for when she was nineteen, a few years before she came to live with us. An operation would be a better way to describe it, since all she had to do was to pick up a black suitcase in the middle of the night from one place, and drive three hours to deliver it to another. I can’t remember what words Anna used to describe the nature of what was inside the suitcase, but we understood that it was illicit, and that she was putting herself in danger by undertaking the drive. The story she told us was mostly about the white-knuckled journey down a dark and winding road, during which a car, which was an exact replica of the one she was driving, began to follow her. We begged her to tell us what was in the suitcase, but she refused. My brother guessed that it was filled with money, and I guessed that it contained a magic necklace. But Anna, who in certain respects knew us better than our own parents, said we would have to wait for the answer until my brother’s bar mitzvah, four years in the future.
The years passed, and sometimes my brother or I brought the suitcase up to see if Anna would finally reveal the secret contents. But she would only remind us that we had to wait until the agreed-upon point in time. And then at last my brother’s bar mitzvah came—came and went, and we didn’t ask. Probably we forgot, or we were old enough to suspect the answer without having to be told, and wished to avoid the awkwardness of asking. But as a result the mystery became permanent, and what Anna had given us, in the form of a story and a suitcase, outlasted the other countless things we had been given in those years and later lost or forgot.
With Kafka in the trunk, Friedman drove to the highway. It took us past palm and cypress trees, past fields above which dark flocks of starlings suddenly shifted directions in unison, then shifted sharply again. Past the new city of Modi’in, after which the landscape grew older, and beneath the grass the white skull of the world showed through. We drove past hillsides lined with broken walls from terraces long ago left to fall, but whose rows of ancient olive trees kept growing, past Arab villages and a shepherd nimbly picking his way down the hill in the wake of his sheep. A metal fence appeared on either side of the road, topped by circles of razor wire, and we passed through a checkpoint where the guards stood in riot helmets and dark uniforms thickened by bulletproof vests. After some miles, the fence was replaced by high concrete walls that ran all the way to the outskirts of Jerusalem, before giving way to forests of pine. Entering the city, we drove past Independence Park and through the streets of Rehavia, past Montefiore’s renovated windmill and the renovated King David Hotel, once bombed, once no-man’s-land, once, not very long ago, host to my brother’s wedding.
Friedman pulled the car into a small lot next to a park, dislodged his dog from the backseat, and led me down a broad hill settled with crows. The stone Confederation House was the only structure around, surrounded by a garden of olive and palm trees, and fragrant with lavender. The restaurant was empty, and the lone waiter led us to a table by the window that looked across the narrow valley onto the walls built by Suleiman the Magnificent. The dog lowered herself with a groan onto Friedman’s sandaled feet. While the waiter went to get her a bowl of water, Friedman busied himself with sorting through the wrinkled photocopies stuffed into a leather portfolio he’d brought with him from the car. Only after our order had been taken, and the waiter, who also appeared to be the cook, disappeared into the kitchen, did Friedman finally lean forward and, with a last gratuitous look around the empty restaurant, lower his voice and begin.
For the next two hours, I listened as he laid out his extraordinary tale. It was so far-flung that at first I was convinced that Effie the fabulist had delivered me into the hands of another of his kind, this one also potentially delusional. I made up my mind that I would wait until he had finished—it was too sensational a story not to hear to the end—but when the meal was over I would excuse myself and call Effie. He had gotten me into this, and now he could get me out. At the very least, he could give me a ride back to Tel Aviv.
And yet the more Friedman talked, the less certain I became of what to believe. I knew how highly improbable what he was telling me was. And that, if by some chance it had really happened, there was no way it would have been kept secret all this time: almost ninety years had passed since Kafka’s death in a sanatorium outside Vienna. But presented with Friedman’s persuasive eloquence and air of authority, and his seemingly exhaustive knowledge of Kafka, I found myself beginning to consider the distant, wholly unlikely possibility that what he was telling me might be true. And I suppose that, as with all incredulous things we open ourselves to, I wanted to believe it could be: that Kafka really might have finally crossed the threshold, slipped through a crack in the closing door, and disappeared into the future. That, thirty-five years after his funeral in Prague and his secret transport to Palestine, he could have passed away peacefully in his sleep on an October night in 1956, known only, if he was known at all, as the gardener, Anshel Peleg. That in Tel Aviv, not far from my sister’s apartment, there could be a house, and behind the house a garden, and in that garden, now wild and overgrown, an orange tree that Kafka himself had planted. The last time Friedman had been there, he told me, a crow had fallen right out of the sky and landed dead at his feet just like that, without any explanation.
II
Gilgul