Forgiving the Angel Read Online Free PDF Page B

evidence for the obvious: he wasn’t in Vienna but Tel Aviv, dying of stomach cancer, not tuberculosis, and this woman’s affection for him was in no way like Dora Diamant’s love for Franz Kafka.
    Here, however, morphine was freely available, and the drug allowed him a serenity, almost a shrug to these discoveries. Had the seeming perfection of Dora’s and Franz’s love, he wondered calmly, made him always deprecate what he had? Thus his affairs.
    Don’t be silly. After years of analysis, he knew it was thehump. If a woman accepted him into her bed, he thought he might believe he wasn’t deformed. But no, for some reason, the strategy failed; he couldn’t believe it; and so … on to the next. That meager insight, he thought, had cost him years on the couch, thousands of shekels, and done nothing to change him or to make him feel as good as morphine did.
    His surgeon came through the door, as if pushing against a strong wind. “You’ve clean-shaven cheeks,” Max said, “but I can see from your expression that you are my Gerrer Rebbe.”
    Esther and the doctor looked bewildered.
    “We opened him up,” the doctor said—not to him, though, but to Esther—“and what we found inside … well, we just had to close him up again.”
    “Can I take him home?” Esther said. They spoke as if Max had lost the power of speech. Apparently, to be condemned to death was like being turned into a bug.
    “If you think you can keep him comfortable.”

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    SHE DID. She found light cotton blankets, pillows for his bed, and nurses for the day, who came with bedpans, sponges for baths, and all the other necessary equipment involved in modern dying.
    People came to say goodbye, some as individuals, someas representatives of organizations; one or two, also, who had been his lovers. He was annoyed by how little the representatives knew him, and Esther was annoyed by the former lovers, and as she was his sole support now, that made the visits not worth the bother. He asked Esther to put them off.
    A day or two after that, Esther, practical as always, said, “What should I do with the things in the folders?” Esther was like him—one who arranged for publication, who got the best price, who managed to immigrate to Palestine. She was sensible. Still, her attitude gave him a pang. She valued him, but mainly because he was a source of support for her.
    “You mean the burnt things—”
    “What? No, I mean the brown folders in your study, the ones with Kafka’s papers in them.”
    He felt anxious that she knew about them, but he had the presence of mind to tell her that no one must see those things while either of them were alive. “The world would despise you for revealing them,” he said; and, as he didn’t know what was inside the folders, maybe what he’d said was true. Maybe Kafka had done unspeakable things—besides making Max his executor. He doubted it, though. He probably had saved all his meanness for his supposed best friend, his dupe, his front man for sainthood.
    “Sell the manuscript to
The Trial
,” Max said. “That will give you plenty to live on. Leave the folders to your children. By that time, they can be sold. But tell them, too, that I’ve stipulated no one can see the material before they bid on it. Tell your daughters they’ll get the best price that way. People might be repelled by what the folders reveal and not make an offer. This way the unknown will lead toa bidding frenzy.” Really, he had in mind that such a ridiculous restriction might stop anyone from bidding at all. It had become desperately important to Max that the burnt things stay hidden forever, yet he couldn’t tell Esther to burn them. No one should ever make that decision. “And remind your children that they’re entitled to sell to the highest bidder, even the murderers.” Surely the government would stop that, put the whole matter in the courts for some long process that would have made Kafka weep and laugh at once until