Forgiving the Angel by Jay Cantor Read Free Book Online Page A

landlady’s “quite” hadn’t been, in fact, her way of saying
odd
, which interpretation would mean that as a lover Kafka wasn’t a man mighty in appetite but perhaps one more like the Kafka who chewed each mouthful of meat precisely three hundred times before swallowing, supposedly for health, but really (who would know better than the author) because of a self-imposed kosher law that made any meal a difficulty for himself and a source of disgust to others. The scholar could only imagine the equivalent laws that he obeyed in bed, even (he’s resumed climbing; he’s arrived in the room and thrown himselfdown to rest) this wonderfully and improbably soft feather bed.
    Perhaps the large-breasted woman noted the scholar’s avidity for her story. The next morning she came to his attic room in her dressing gown, and, seemingly without a thought for the proprieties, sat on the edge of the bed where he still lay under bedclothes that were much nicer than one had a right to expect in such a shabby house. The scholar felt unsure as to what the exact nature of this encounter was to be—until he saw in her hand some yellowing, badly smudged manuscript pages that were, she said, one of her family’s most precious possessions (though that hardly would account for how haphazardly, even carelessly, the supposed treasure had been treated). The pages, she said, were a story of Franz Kafka’s.
    It is hard to explain how eager the man was to see the story, though perhaps, for our purposes, the most appropriate analogy would be that the story was to him like a tethered animal to a hungry wolf. Perhaps some of that avidity on his part also flowed over the story and onto the woman in whose hand it rested. Still, he snatched it from her and began to read even before she had left the room to make his breakfast.
    This story within a story within a bedroom may seem very odd to you, and almost make you doubt its authenticity—but perhaps not so very odd if it’s by the same author who, without any explanation, turned a man into a dung beetle, and imagined an art that consisted of starving one’s self to death. And the handwriting—ah, if onlyone had a chance to look at the actual manuscript, which would be in a spidery scrawl, a design that looked so very much like the patterns traced by the harrow of the penal-colony torture device—well, really, even if it hadn’t been so much what the scholar desired, he, at least, would have no doubt that he had found a lost story by Franz Kafka.
    One which began by reminding the reader of the familiar, though always terrifying, Bible verses about Abraham and Isaac, the father whose much-loved son had been the gift the patriarch had been promised by God for his faithfulness, though it was not, such is God’s way with time (as the Jews who await their messiah, or the Christians who await his return), a promise that the Lord seemed to have been in any rush to fulfill. Fortunately, Abraham always took great care with his diet (immediately this odd chiming translated the scholar into the story within a story; he saw himself as the father of the Jews); he ate no meat, for example, and was still hale at a hundred years old when God had gotten around to him, and his son had been born, the first of those many descendants who God had promised him would someday be more numerous than the stars. Abraham had trusted in God; God had kept faith with him. Now God had said he must kill this very son.
    He delayed only long enough to sharpen his knife (and he so wanted to delay, and so wanted his son’s end both never to come and to be painless and quick when it did, that you can imagine how long he worked and how sharp he must have made that knife); he packed wood for the offering and left immediately, not telling anyone why he must make this trip. Truly, he didn’t know
why
, could not understand this monstrous demand. But he had to trust God’s murderous guidance, and if he did—he looked upat the night sky