Forgiving the Angel Read Online Free PDF Page A

something hard in his belly that he could neither digest or excrete. It rubbed and rubbed against the insides, producing endless amounts of bile.
    Even now, he could taste it. Why
had
Franz done this to
him
? Why tell
him
to do something Max had said he wouldn’t do? He remembered Franz’s description of Kafka Kat tormenting Max Mouse. “I think Franz gave me this task that he knew I wouldn’t perform so I’d always remember him. Only a law one wants to fulfill but can’t because it conflicts with another law one also wants to fulfill keeps God before our eyes.”
    “We aren’t talking about God, Mr. Brod, but a fallible man. And that man couldn’t have thought you much of a friend, if he thought he had to do all that to be remembered by you.”
    At that, Max Mouse’s eyes grew moist. He wiped them like a child with his sleeve, looking to see if her face softened.
    It didn’t. “I think,” she said, “that you’re making yourself ridiculous by avoiding the obvious explanation. Franz Kafka wanted the world to remember him as someone who believed in the Absolute, someone indifferent to audience or reputation, but he also, much more strongly, wanted to have the immortality and fame that would result from his work. So he told you to burn the work, while knowing that he’d prepared you not to do it.”
    Prepared. That was the word Kafka had used
. But what she’d said couldn’t possibly be true. He’d never seen Franz be duplicitous or selfish with a friend. Or with
anyone
.
    But what might a man do at the last moment, to ensure his good name for eternity?
    “No, no, no, no,” Max said. He covered his face with his hands and wept in earnest.
    “Oh, yes, I can certainly see that vanity and meanness would be particularly hard for you to accept in someone that you—as Benjamin and Adorno have written—have spent a lifetime making into a religious writer, even something of a saint.”
    Could it be so simple, so obvious? Had he missed it only because he’d been blinded by his love for Franz, and—like his own wives had been toward his lies—wouldn’t let himself see how duplicitous one’s beloved could be? That thought gave him cramps so terrible that he wanted to scream. With his head still buried in his hands, he barely noticed when the interviewer packed up her tape recorder and left.

11
    HE PUT WHAT SHE’D SAID out of mind, not refuting it, not examining it. Six days after the interview, though, and still in some pain, Brod had been looking over some pages in Kafka’s own hand, preparing a new volume of Franz’s letters to friends and family. Pages lay scattered on his desk in piles, edges sticking out like wayward children. Overcome by an annoyance so great that it made the cramps worse, he picked up a handful of this paper, and without looking to see what was in it, he shoved it all into a brown accordion folder.
    As soon as he did it, his stomach quieted, and he knew immediately that the pages must remain forever unread, though now that the world was as avid for anything Kafka as he’d always been (and yes, still was), he’d no idea how to keep them hidden, supposing he didn’t actually burn them—which, even now, he would never do.
    Still, from that moment on, for every thirty pages or so that he prepared for publication, he also put some paper into the folder without looking at it. Not the best things, perhaps—on the other hand, who knows, perhaps some were the best things. It was absolutely necessary that he
not
know that, and that no one ever knew.
    Of course, sometimes he couldn’t help it; his eye glanced down at what his hands did. Once, he saw some pages that could have been a lost story by Franz Kafka, which he feltparticularly virtuous for not examining, and once a note from the sanatorium that he thought said
into the depths, in the deep harbors
. But he didn’t stop and look further at any of it. These were
the destroyed pages
, the burnt things, and so not meant for anyone’s