I should have prepared him. I should have gone about it more delicately.
“I’m…it’s me.”
I thought he would rush to embrace me with a cry of joy.
But my words, as if propelled from a wind tunnel, made Brod move back. They seemed to push him toward the wall. His eyes widened and his mouth dropped. I had never seen my friend’s gentle face so white.
“Impossible,” he cried out. “But…but…this is utter nonsense. Do you expect me to believe this? Who are you? I, we, his family and friends attended his funeral.”
“I know,” I said softly. “You tried to speak but you broke down, my poor Maxie. And I had to step in and say a few kind words about myself.”
“Please stop — or leave.”
“Don’t you believe it’s me?”
Brod sat down. “No.” He sighed. “I do not…. Why are you doing this?”
“Am I so unrecognizable? Can’t you see past my white beard and mustache?”
“It has nothing to do with recognizability. Human beings do not return from the dead. Nor do normal people create painful theater for strangers.”
I asked for five more minutes to explain. Brod consented. I told him the entire story from beginning to end, including most of the speech my “cousin” delivered that day. It probably took fifteen minutes but Brod did not interrupt.
Max looked me over. His tone changed. “Well, the height matches my friend’s. And that eulogy — most extraordinary. But that is all. I am sorry.”
“And I, Maxie, am even more sorry…and the voice? Has my voice changed that much, Brod of the fine musical ear?”
He did not reply.
“I liked your biography.” It was a little thick in the prose, I thought, but I did not tell him this. But I did say, “You remember the long passage in your book where you quote an article of mine in a professional insurance magazine outlining the danger to workers from cutting machines? You miss pointing out how similar in style is my precise, analytical, bureaucratic description of the saws to my detailed description of the horrendous machine in ‘The Penal Colony.’”
“You never intended that I totally burn all the manuscripts, right?” Brod said suddenly.
He brought it up, not I. I didn’t want to make him feel uncomfortable.
Nevertheless, I said, “It was in my will.”
“But I did destroy them,” was Brod’s response.
“But you didn’t.”
“But I did. You commanded that I destroy your unpublished works.”
“But you didn’t, Max. Why do you keep saying you did?”
“But, as you will soon see, I followed the letter of your instructions if not their intent.”
“But how?”
“As soon as I heard you died, I copied out the first page of some of your works into a bundle and at a clearing not far from the gravesite I burned them…”
“The bonfire—”
“…thereby fulfilling…”
“—at the cemetery that day.”
“…your wish.”
“So I was right. I always wondered about that fire. For a while I thought it was indeed you burning my manuscripts.”
“And you wanted to stop me.”
“But I couldn’t…it would have ruined everything.”
“Aha! You see?”
“I couldn’t undo my pose.”
“Just as I thought. You never really wanted me to destroy your work. Otherwise, you would have chosen someone else.”
“Max, you can’t question me as K and yet not believe it’s me. But even if you don’t believe me, and I can understand why you don’t, please don’t tell anyone about this visit. Aside from my parents and sisters, the former long gone, the latter killed by the Germans, no one knows I’m alive.”
But as I got to the door, Brod invited me to visit him again next time I came to Israel.
JUNE 12, 1950. THOUGHTS ON BROD
That was another of my regrets — betraying dear Brod. We used to write to each other two or three times a week even though we lived in Prague, in the same neighborhood. And I never shared with him my most intimate secret. I had made my decision and adamantly kept it. No one else must know. Not even my friend, my other self. That is why it took courage to visit him when I was in Israel in 1950.
I can’t get Max Brod out of my mind.
I knocked. He opened the door and, as in a magic show, my friend appeared. It took all the strength I had to restrain myself from embracing him and kissing his cheeks. How I imagined — how powerful is fantasy — that we would at once recognize each other and fall into each other’s embrace, weeping with joy. I told him I have regards from someone he wouldn’t believe is alive, one of his dearest friends. He took me into his book-lined living room. While at sixty-nine my hair was already all white, his was a mixture of black and grey. Brod, same age as I, had remained slim, and from the back he still looked like a little boy.
Then I told him who I was. He didn’t believe me. I understood his incredulity. If the reverse had held true and he were me and I were him, I wouldn’t have believed him either. When I sounded out my family name, I saw a shadow of fright cross his face. Never had I seen Brod’s gentle, good-humored face so pale. He thought I had come back from the dead to haunt him, to punish him, to wreak vengeance on him for not obeying my will, for not burning, destroying my manuscripts as I had specifically wished. For not executing a dead man’s will is a serious violation of trust.
“I came to greet you, Maxie, not berate you. It was you who made me famous.”
He denied it, saying, “No, it was your genius. But if you really intended for me to burn your manuscripts, you could easily have chosen someone else, someone who didn’t appreciate your talent, some hack who would have been willing to be the executor of your estate and dumbly do what was ordered. You wouldn’t have chosen someone who loved you like a brother the way I did. By choosing me you knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that I would not obey your last will and testament.”
“But you waited about ten years after my death, until the early 1930s, to begin publishing my works.”
“Now you’re complaining about that too? You can’t have it both ways.”
“Neither can you, Maxie. You can’t criticize me as K and not believe it’s me.”
“And if you wanted to protest my publication, you could have asked your father or your sisters, to whom the royalties were being paid, to stop the publication.”
“Do you or do you not believe it’s me?”
Brod still didn’t believe it was me. He said it was impossible that I had come back from the dead and was now here in Israel. And why did I wait so long to contact him?
“You could have found me earlier,” he said in a plaintive tone.
In this strange manner, he both accepted and denied the fact that I was K.
As I think of that scene now that I’m writing it in my room in Prague, I recall how frustrating it was for me that my best friend did not believe me, how sad I wasn’t able to convince him.
With pen in hand, I sense that I frown, tilt my head, and even now I move my lips in a little moue of not quite disappointment, but rather as an expression of someone who shrugs and declares: That’s life. What can you do?
JUNE 20, 1950. WITH BROD
I knocked on the door. The piano sounds stopped. I heard brisk footsteps. My heart was pounding. He opened the door without asking who was there.
“Hello, Max,” I said. “Shalom.”
I could see he was puzzled.
“Shalom. With whom do I have the pleasure of speaking?”
“My spoken Hebrew is still weak. I would prefer speaking the language we used to speak: German.”