I must have fallen asleep. When I opened my eyes again, it was night, and I was shivering in the cold, looking up at the raging stars. I pulled the old woolen coat more tightly around myself. Searching for the constellations, I thought of the day the boyfriend and I drove all the way down the crooked finger of the Mani to the supposed gate of the Underworld. Old lives are always coming back, but during the decade of my marriage, that particular day had returned to me more often than others, and now it came to me again. To see into the small mouth of the cave, I’d gotten down on all fours, and as I did, the boyfriend had lifted my dress and mounted me from behind. The tall blades of grass rustled gently in the wind, and so as not to scream out, I sank my teeth into his arm. When we got home, we discovered that a rat had fried itself in the electrical box, and that night, we had no choice but to have mercy on each other in the dark. And now, flat on my back under the stars, it struck me that that’s what had lain behind all of my Greek fury: the abrupt moment when resistance gives way to nearly shocking love. I don’t believe I have ever known real love that does not come with violence, and at that moment, lying under the desert sky, I knew that I would never again trust any love that doesn’t.
I was too weak to drag anything but the bed back inside. I left it in the middle of the room, and discovered that from there I could see out through all three windows. The only book I had in English was Parables and Paradoxes, and after rereading the section on Paradise a few times, I looked out the windows and was struck by the thought that I’d misunderstood something about Kafka, having failed to acknowledge the original threshold at the source of every other in his work, the one between Paradise and this world. Kafka once said that he understood the Fall of Man better than anyone. His sense came from the belief that most people misunderstood the expulsion from the Garden of Eden to be punishment for eating from the Tree of Knowledge. But as Kafka saw it, exile from Paradise came as a result of not eating from the Tree of Life. Had we eaten from that other tree that also stood in the center of the garden, we would have woken to the presence of the eternal within us, to what Kafka called “the indestructible.” Now people are all basically alike in their ability to recognize good and evil, he wrote; the difference comes after that knowledge, when people have to make an effort to act in accordance with it. But because we lack the capacity to act in accordance with our moral knowledge, all our efforts come to ruin, and in the end we can only destroy ourselves trying. We would like nothing more than to annul the knowledge that came to us when we ate in the Garden of Eden, but as we are unable to do so, we create rationalizations, of which the world is now full. “It’s possible that the whole visible world,” Kafka mused, “might be nothing more than the rationalization of a man wanting to find rest for a moment.” Rest how? By pretending that knowledge can be an end in itself. Meanwhile, we go on overlooking the eternal, indestructible thing inside ourselves, just as Adam and Eve fatally overlooked the Tree of Life. Go on overlooking it, even while we can’t live without the faith that it is there, always within us, its branches reaching upward and its leaves unfurling in the light. In this sense, the threshold between Paradise and this world may be illusory, and we may never have really left Paradise, Kafka suggested. In this sense, we might be there without knowing it even now.
It became clear that no one was coming back for me. Maybe they’d forgotten. Or maybe whoever was in possession of the whole story had been called away or killed in the war. Kaddish for the whole story. I hadn’t even tried to do my part: the suitcase sat untouched where Schectman left it. But, no, that isn’t entirely true. Before I fell ill, and at times in my fever, too, I’d thought a lot about Kafka’s afterlife. I imagined his gardens most of all. Maybe it was the barrenness of the desert all around that gave me a thirst for lushness, for the heavy, almost sickeningly overripe smell of crowded leaves, but I found myself repeatedly conjuring their fragrant paths, busy with insect life, their arbors, fruit trees, and vines. And always Kafka among them, at work or at rest, mixing peat or lime, fingering hard buds, untangling root balls, watching the work of the bees while still dressed in the dark suit of an undertaker. I never pictured him in clothes appropriate to outdoor work or the heat. Even after my vision of his gardens fell into keeping with what I knew could grow there, after I filled them with honeysuckle and pomegranate trees, I still couldn’t see him in anything but that stiff suit. The suit, and sometimes that odd bowler hat that always looked too small for his head, as if the merest wind might knock it off. If I couldn’t fully accept the idea of him shedding his old clothes, however inappropriate in his new life, I suppose it was because I couldn’t fully accept that he would prefer to plant a tree, to water and fertilize and prune, than to organize the light through its leaves, to put it through the paces of three hundred years in a sentence or two, and to kill it at last in a hurricane that brought too much salt to its roots and left it as fodder for the ax. Could not, finally, accept that he would want to toil under nature’s harsh and limiting conditions when his powers extended to being able to surpass them for something that, in his prose, had always been soldered to the eternal.
There was a Hebrew dictionary on the shelf, and I turned its pages, trying to imagine that after his death in Prague Kafka really had crossed over into Hebrew, and gone on writing in those ancient letters. That the results of the union between Kafka and Hebrew was what had really lain hidden all this time in the fortress of Eva Hoffe’s Spinoza Street apartment, protected by a double cage and her paranoia. Was there such a thing as late Kafka? Was it possible that the unspoken subtext of the ongoing court case between the National Library of Israel and Eva Hoffe, acting as Brod’s agent, was really that: the struggle to preserve the myth, versus the struggle to claim Kafka by the state that regards itself as the representative and culmination of Jewish culture, and which depends on an overcoming of the Diaspora, on the Messianic notion that only in Israel can a Jew be authentically a Jew? The knowing smile that played on Friedman’s lips that day he’d dropped me at my sister’s apartment came back to me again: You think your writing belongs to you? Only now that he was gone was I ready to argue with him, to tell him that literature could never be employed by Zionism, since Zionism is predicated on an end—of the Diaspora, of the past, of the Jewish problem—whereas literature resides in the sphere of the endless, and those who write have no hope of an end. A journalist interviewing Eva Hoffe once asked her what she thought Kafka would have made of it all had he been alive. “Kafka wouldn’t have lasted two minutes in this country,” she’d shot back.