“But who are you?”
“K.”
Brod stepped back. “Impossible.”
“Stanley K,” I said. “Ks’ cousin.” By now I had moved from the small hallway into his living room. As I expected, books everywhere. “You never really met K’s cousin, except very briefly at the funeral. I was very moved by how you choked up and could not speak.”
“What funeral?”
“The funeral. K’s funeral. And when you could not speak, I stepped in and said a few words in honor of my beloved cousin.”
“The funeral,” Max said. He looked stunned. He looked as if he were holding on to that word to get his bearings.
“Yes.”
“I looked for you. I sought you out at the shiva. But you were gone.”
“I had to go back to Hamburg or wherever I claimed I was from.”
I saw the crease forming on Maxie’s brow. The ambiguity, the veiled hint at deception, he caught it. But it confused him.
“Stanley?” Brod wisely accented, questioned, the very un-Pragueish name.
“Yes, Maxie. Actually, no, Maxie.”
My use of the diminutive, the endearing name I always called him, gave him another shock.
“You look wonderful,” I said. “It doesn’t seem like twenty-six years have passed.”
But he disregarded that. “What kind of name is Stanley? That’s an American name.” He looked me up and down, measuring my height with his gaze.
Did Brod recognize me, or was it my wishful thinking? I had a question for him. At first I restrained myself — thought of asking, should have asked, it would only have been courteous, decent, mentshlikh, to ask, How have you been? But instead I blurted out:
“Why didn’t you destroy all of my manuscripts? I asked you to. My will specified it. It was a legal document. No one, absolutely no one, could claim it wasn’t a valid legal document. Drawn up by a lawyer. Me. Your best friend. Why couldn’t you honor it?”
“But you are…” and Brod didn’t finish the sentence, didn’t begin the word. His face was pinched, pale. In his voice a tremor palpitated.
I took a deep breath.
“Dead men don’t breathe. Argue. Question. It’s me, Maxie. I didn’t die…I was cured. Remember? From the sanatorium I wanted to go home for a week.”
“Yes. I was away in Slovakia. Your mother told me that Doctor Klopstock had consented to your trip.”
“The day I left Prague to return to Vienna, on my way back to the train station, I went in first to say goodbye to the Altneushul. Since it was noontime it was empty. I went up to the Aron Kodesh, touched the curtain, kissed it. An electric shock of ecstasy went through me.”
And then I told him the rest of the story, including the faux funeral. I apologized to him for deserting him, for not telling him, for not contacting him again. “Only my parents and sisters knew, and everyone was sworn to silence…. Do you believe me, Maxie?”
He didn’t reply. Again he looked me over from head to toe. I saw him staring at my white Van Dyke. I sensed the thoughts going through his head. He’s as tall as K, somewhat resembles him. But he could be an imposter.
Brod shook his head, thinking: Impossible. He’s playing a strange game.
“Why didn’t you obey the terms of my will?” I asked again.
Brod was apparently too overcome by my initial challenge a few moments earlier. But now that I asked the question a second time, he perked up. No doubt this matter must have distressed him for years. He shot back with an answer, parts of which were surely prepared ages ago for a question addressed to him no doubt many times. But never by the author himself.
“Then why did you choose me? You knew, deep down you knew I would not, could not possibly, obey your ridiculous, immature, childishly willful instructions. If you really wanted your writing destroyed, you could have done the job yourself when you were back home in Prague for those few days, or you would have, could have, chosen someone else. You knew, don’t tell me you didn’t know, that I wouldn’t do it. As it is forbidden to take a life, so it is forbidden to take a life’s work.”
“Do you believe me that I am K?”
“Frankly, no.”
“Then how can you talk to me, argue with me, as though K stands before you and at the same time not believe me?”
I laughed. I laughed at the absurdity of it. I laughed at the absurdity of K standing before Brod in Tel Aviv in 1950.
Brod laughed too..
“Man is a complex, contradictory creature,” he said.
On my way to the door I imagined I was on stage, in a play, and I stopped dramatically. I addressed the first three words to the door, speaking loudly:
“And another thing…” And then I wheeled and faced him. “About the sex passages.”
“What sex passages?”
“Exactly. What sex passages? You took the words right out of my mouth. And out of my books. I’ve looked and looked and couldn’t find them. Why did you delete? Why did you act as a censor? Who gave you permission to impose your prudery on my works? Who gave you permission to be holier than me?”
As I spoke I saw him turn white. And then a wave of rose, reddening to scarlet, filled his face. My God, my Maxie blushed like a sixteen-year-old girl caught by her parents kissing a boy. Like a sky flaming at sunset the flush came over his cheeks, to his ears, to the bridge of his nose, red even up to his eyelids. And I immediately regretted hurting him, embarrassing him. The Ethics of the Fathers in the Talmud states, “He who makes his friend’s face turn white in public loses his share in the World to Come.” But it was just the two of us. No one else was in the room. Still, I felt bad for him. I hadn’t anticipated such an emotion.
“As if ‘The Metamorphosis’ has a lot of sex,” Brod said.
“You know as well as I do it’s not there, so why are you saying that? It’s from The Trial and The Castle and Amerika and other works, works that you recast to your standards.”
“I wanted your works to be acceptable. And accepted. I didn’t want to take a chance of having them rejected just because of those passages.”
“Whose works?” I said slyly.
“Yours.” But Brod choked on the word.
“Aha,” I muttered through barely parted lips. “But you still don’t believe I’m K, do you?”
“No.”
“Then how can you defend yourself so vigorously? And if I were not K, how would I know about the deleted passages, Maxie? You can’t have it both ways.”
Brod did not — could not — reply.
“All right! Then I don’t believe you’re Brod. Why did you put that faux Dr. Brod sign on your door?”
But Max saw the twinkle in my eye. He understood, even after all these years; he got the nuance of my voice, its special comic timbre, and he smiled, then began to laugh.
“If I’m not Brod, and you may very well be right,” and now the laughter faded from his voice and face, “because Brod died that day along with you in the cemetery — if I’m not Brod how can you complain about what I did? You can’t complain about me not adhering to your will, and then complain about censorship. The two are mutually contradictory…. You can’t have it both ways.”
We looked at, we stared at each other. At an impasse. Which way would it turn?
“Then we must conclude,” I said, “that we’re living in a K-esque world where illogic prevails and contradiction is king.”
I think I saw a slight nod. Brod barely, but just barely, ticked his head up a millimeter, down a millimeter.
“Sex maniac,” he said, giggling like he used to.
“Censor.”
“Skirt-chaser.”
“Jesuit. Fanatic. Deleter of holy writ.” I could barely speak for the laughter interlaced my words.