“What makes you so sure the edits weren’t Kafka’s?” Friedman asked. “Or that there weren’t extra-literary reasons for Brod’s editorial decisions? Did you ever wonder why the novel Amerika wasn’t published with Kafka’s own title, Der Verschollene? Do you know what Der Verschollene means? The Man Who Disappeared. Or even The One Who Went Missing. Barely three years after Kafka’s death in Prague, such a title was completely out of the question.
“As for publishing so-called unfinished work,” Friedman continued, “can’t you see the brilliance of it? Think about it: Wouldn’t every writer want his stories and books and plays to be published with the claim that they remained unfinished? That he’d died, or been otherwise waylaid, before he could bring them to the state of perfection he’d envisioned for them, which lived within him, and which he would have brought to bear on the work had he only been given more time?”
The waiter came by the table to clear our plates, but though more than an hour had passed, neither of us had touched our food, and so he refilled our water glasses and returned to the kitchen.
I asked where Kafka had lived here, and Friedman told me that when he’d first arrived, he’d been put up in a house close to the Bergmanns. His health steadily improved over the summer. Secrecy was paramount, and outside of the small cabal immediately involved, the only person who knew was Kafka’s sister Ottla. The moment he got off the boat in Haifa, he was no longer the writer Kafka. He was simply a thin, ailing Jew from Prague, convalescing in the warm climate of his new country. That fall, Agnon returned to Palestine after twelve years in Germany—a fire had broken out in his house there, destroying all of his manuscripts and books—but there is nothing to suggest that the two writers ever met. Schocken set Agnon up in a house in Talpiot, and a few months later moved Kafka to a house in the brand-new German Jewish garden suburb of Rehavia, where his rooms overlooked the land behind the house. In the afternoons, following the Schlafstunde, during which quiet had to reign in all the streets and stairwells of Rehavia, he would often go outside to sit under a tree in the plot that had been left to grow wild for centuries. He began to putter around—to weed here, and clip and prune there—and very soon he discovered that where he had been merely an average, or even less than average, gardener in Europe, in Palestine everything he touched seemed to thrive. Else Bergmann made him the gift of some seed catalogs, and he began to send away for crocuses and Algerian iris bulbs. A visitor who peeked into the garden in the afternoons might discover the thin man with the cough bent over some roses whose roots he was soaking in Epsom salts, or removing stones from the soil. In no time at all, the plot behind the house in Rehavia began to bloom.
Not long ago, Friedman told me, he’d come across the following lines in Kafka’s Diaries: “You have the chance, if ever there was one, to begin again. Don’t waste it.” And a few pages later: “O beautiful hour, masterful state, garden gone wild. You turn from the house and see, rushing toward you on the garden path, the goddess of happiness.” The entries were dated to his first days in Zürau, and yet I can’t help but believe, Friedman said, that they were written after he moved to the rooms in Rehavia instead.
When I expressed confusion, he reached into the leather portfolio for the last time, and produced a final photocopy, which he pushed across the table. The passage in question was underlined with shaky pen. “Why did I want to quit this world?” it read.
Because “he” would not let me live in it, in his world. Though indeed I should not judge the matter so precisely, for I am now a citizen of this other world, whose relationship to the ordinary one is the relationship of wilderness to cultivated land (I have been forty years wandering from Canaan); I look back at it like a foreigner, though in this other world as well—it is the paternal heritage I carry with me—I am the most insignificant and timid of creatures and am able to keep alive thanks only to the special nature of its arrangements.
I read the extraordinary passage three times. In the upper right corner of the page was the title of the book it was taken from, Letters to Felice. When I looked up again, Friedman was watching me. “Do I need to remind you,” he whispered, “that Schocken didn’t publish these letters until 1963?” Trying to keep pace with him, I asked if he was suggesting that there were things Kafka wrote after 1924 that Brod had slipped in among the pages he published from his diaries and letters. The corner of Friedman’s mouth lifted into a smile. “Tell me, my dear,” he said, “did you really believe that Kafka wrote eight hundred letters to one woman?”
A sense of what Friedman might be asking of me began slowly to sink in: not to write the end of a real play by Kafka, but to write the real end of his life. Max Brod and his fog and schlock were long gone. Soon Eva Hoffe would be, too. In the meanwhile, the case would finally be decided by the Supreme Court, and if Eva Hoffe lost, which was almost certain, Kafka’s hidden archives would be handed over, and his false death and secret transport to Palestine exposed to the world. Did Friedman want to get in front of the story to control how it would be written? To shape, through fiction, the story of Kafka’s afterlife in Israel, as Brod had shaped the canonical story of his life and death in Europe?