Life Times Stories - By Nadine Gordimer Page 0,168

at home. Going away. My poor boy. You could hardly get yourself to the next room. You shut yourself up when people came to visit. Always crawling off to bed, sleeping in the day (oh yes, you couldn’t sleep at night, not like anybody else), sleeping your life away. You invented Amerika instead of having the guts to emigrate, get up off the bed, pack up and go there, make a new life! Even that girl you jilted twice managed it. Did you know Felice is still alive somewhere, there now, in America? She’s an old, old woman with great-grandchildren. They didn’t get her into the death camps those highly educated people say you knew about before they happened. America you never went to, Spain you dreamt about . . . your Uncle Alfred was going to find you jobs there, in Madeira, the Azores . . . God knows where else. Grandson of a ritual slaughterer, a schochet, that was why you couldn’t bear to eat meat, they say, and that made you weak and undecided. So that was my fault, too, because my poor father had to earn a living. When your mother was away from the flat, you’d have starved yourself to death if it hadn’t been for me. And what was the result? You resented so much what I provided for you, you went and had your stomach pumped out! Like someone who’s been poisoned! And you didn’t forget to write it down, either: ‘My feeling is that disgusting things will come out.’

Whatever I did for you was dreck. You felt ‘despised, condemned, beaten down’ by me. But you despised me; the only difference, I wasn’t so easy to beat down, eh? How many times did you try to leave home, and you couldn’t go? It’s all there in your diaries, in the books they write about you. What about that other masterpiece of yours, ‘The Judgement’. A father and son quarrelling, and then the son goes and drowns himself, saying ‘Dear parents, I have always loved you, all the same.’ The wonderful discovery about that story, you might like to hear, it proves Hermann Kafka most likely didn’t want his son to grow up and be a man, any more than his son wanted to manage without his parents’ protection. The meshuggener who wrote that, may he get rich on it! I wouldn’t wish it on him to try living with you, that’s all, the way we had to. When your hunchback friend secretly showed your mother a complaining letter of yours, to get you out of your duty of going to the asbestos factory to help your own sister’s husband, Brod kept back one thing you wrote. But now it’s all published, all, all, all the terrible things you thought about your own flesh and blood. ‘I hate them all’: father, mother, sisters.

You couldn’t do without us – without me. You only moved away from us when you were nearly thirty-two, a time when every man has a wife and children already, a home of his own.

You were always dependent on someone. Your friend Brod, poor devil. If it hadn’t been for the little hunchback, who would know of your existence today? Between the incinerators that finished your sisters and the fire you wanted to burn up your manuscripts, nothing would be left. The kind of men you invented, the Gestapo, confiscated whatever papers of yours there were in Berlin, and no trace of them has ever been found, even by the great Kafka experts who stick their noses into everything. You said you loved Max Brod more than yourself. I can see that. You liked the idea he had of you, that you knew wasn’t yourself (you see, sometimes I’m not so grob, uneducated, knowing nothing but fancy goods, maybe I got from you some ‘insights’). Certainly, I wouldn’t recognise my own son the way Brod described you: ‘the aura Kafka gave out of extraordinary strength, something I’ve never encountered elsewhere, even in meetings with great and famous men . . . the infallible solidity of his insights never tolerated a single lacuna, nor did he ever speak an insignificant word . . . He was life-affirming, ironically tolerant towards the idiocies of the world, and therefore full of sad humour.’

I must say, your mother who put up with your faddiness when she came back from a day standing in the business, your sisters who acted in your plays to please you, your