Forgiving the Angel by Jay Cantor Read Free Book Online

imagined new clothing?”
    “Yes, I couldn’t drink it or bathe in it, but perhaps I might at least wear a top hat made of water.”
    They laughed, and Brod noticed that he was sitting ridiculously in his hospital gown, and maybe because ofthe wine, or because he was in Franz’s presence again, it didn’t bother him.
    He was glad, in fact, that Esther had appeared at the table to see it. “When I die,” Brod said to Kafka, “she’ll be in charge of your manuscripts.”
    “You must burn them,” Franz said to her. “Even the burnt things.” He poured her some wine.
    “I won’t,” Esther said. “Max loves them too much.”
    “He does,” Kafka said. “You have put it exactly right. Anyone encountering my work after reading his description is bound to be disappointed.” He smiled, ironically, even a touch maliciously, and readjusted the towel on his arm. Was the smile at Brod’s expense for loving Kafka too much? Or at Franz’s own expense, for some more basic mistake, like having even for one moment thought highly of himself?
    “Max, Esther may stay awhile longer,” Franz said, “but you know that you must now free up that precious bed. You must go into the depths, in the deep harbors.”
    “Is there a harbor?”
    “I was a human being,” Franz said.
    Did he mean
only
that; so how would I know such things? Or that he’d been a human being, and now he was here, so there was surely more than met the eye to life?
    Before he could ask, Franz had adjusted the stained towel over his arm and gone off to take another table’s order. Or perhaps to calm some other customers, who, like diners everywhere, were upset over both what has and what hasn’t been received.

A LOST STORY BY FRANZ KAFKA

 
    —AN ODD TITLE, set apart as the first page of a manuscript found among papers in a box in the attic of a pension in Prague. It has no author’s name on it, but given, as we’ll see, what the owner said about how she’d come by it, it was not unlikely that Franz Kafka himself may have written this story about a man who finds an unpublished story by … Franz Kafka.
    The story begins when a scholar, long after Kafka’s death, had already spent a week in the meager archives in Prague, but had returned each night, disappointed, to the room he’d rented in the attic of a house in a poorer section of Prague. On his way up the stairs, this particular evening, he’d indifferently told the landlady how he’d once again discovered nothing about Kafka that afternoon, nothing new, nothing that might bring him if not fame, at least tenure, and the possibility of the great impossibility for one like him (or he might have added, a little proudly, one like the great Kafka) of an ordinary life, with a wife, and perhaps a child or two. He was careful with his diet, he added almost nonsensically (something about the landladymoved him to speak more personally), but time, nonetheless, was moving on—and seemingly without him.
    At that, the landlady, a black-haired gentile, gave him a bold look and a smile, and told him almost proudly that her grandmother had known Kafka, and, she would like to add (for apparently there was something about this thin, wan gentleman that caused her to speak more intimately as well), she had not known him trivially, but
known him
in the very bed the scholar now used.
    Kafka, the woman added, had been quite the lover—the remark showing (for please remember that you are here, we imagine, reading a story by Kafka) that the supposedly retiring author was not without his vanity in this matter. The full-bosomed woman gave a wink, and even a leer that the scholar (who was not very familiar with female desire) couldn’t forget on his way up the stairs, perhaps because, as he noted to himself, it was exactly the sort of thing Kafka found attractive—at least in his women characters.
    He stopped on the second landing, a little short of breath, and thought that one might be hard-pressed to say that his