Life Times Stories - By Nadine Gordimer Page 0,171

. . . ah, it all moves away, it’s getting faint . . . But I haven’t finished. Wait.

You say you wrote your letter because you wanted to explain why you couldn’t marry. I’m writing this letter because you tried to write it for me. You would take even that away from your father. You answered your own letter, before I could. You made what you imagine as my reply part of the letter you wrote me. To save me the trouble . . . Brilliant, like they say. With your great gifts as a famous writer, you express it all better than I could. You are there, quickly, with an answer, before I can be. You take the words out of my mouth: while you are accusing yourself, in my name, of being ‘too clever, obsequious, parasitic and insincere’ in blaming your life on me, you are – yet again, one last time! – finally being too clever, obsequious, parasitic and insincere in the trick of stealing your father’s chance to defend himself. A genius. What is left to say about you if – how well you know yourself, my boy, it’s terrible – you call yourself the kind of vermin that doesn’t only sting, but at the same time sucks blood to keep itself alive? And even that isn’t the end of the twisting, the cheating. You then confess that this whole ‘correction’, ‘rejoinder’, as you, an expensively educated man, call it, ‘does not originate’ in your father but in you yourself, Franz Kafka. So you see, here’s the proof, something I know you, with all your brains, can’t know for me: you say you always wrote about me, it was all about me, your father; but it was all about you. The beetle. The bug that lay on its back waving its legs in the air and couldn’t get up to go and see America or the Great Wall of China. You, you, self, self. And in your letter, after you have defended me against yourself, when you finally make the confession – right again, in the right again, always – you take the last word, in proof of your saintliness I could know nothing about, never understand, a businessman, a shopkeeper. That is your ‘truth’ about us you hoped might be able to ‘make our living and our dying easier’.

The way you ended up, Franz. The last woman you found yourself. It wasn’t our wish, God knows. Living with that Eastern Jewess, and in sin. We sent you money; that was all we could do. If we’d come to see you, if we’d swallowed our pride, meeting that woman, our presence would only have made you worse. It’s there in everything you’ve written, everything they write about you: everything connected with us made you depressed and ill. We knew she was giving you the wrong food, cooking like a gypsy on a spirit stove. She kept you in an unheated hovel in Berlin . . . may God forgive me (Brod has told the world), I had to turn my back on her at your funeral.

Franz . . . When you received copies of your book ‘In The Penal Colony’ from Kurt Wolff Verlag that time . . . You gave me one and I said ‘Put it on the night-table.’ You say I never mentioned it again. Well, don’t you understand – I’m not a literary man. I’m telling you now. I read a little bit, a page or two at a time. If you had seen that book, there was a pencil mark every two, three pages, so I would know next time where I left off. It wasn’t like the books I knew – I hadn’t much time for reading, working like a slave since I was a small boy, I wasn’t like you, I couldn’t shut myself up in a room with books, when I was young. I would have starved. But you know that. Can’t you understand that I was – yes – not too proud – ashamed to let you know I didn’t find it easy to understand your kind of writing, it was all strange to me.

Hah! I know I’m no intellectual, but I knew how to live!

Just a moment . . . give me time . . . there’s a fading . . . Yes – can you imagine how we felt when Ottla told us you had tuberculosis? Oh how could you bring it over your heart