The Collected Stories

chewing. “Sit down,” he said. “A master does not have to follow the rules.”
    “There are some rules even a master must follow. No novel should be longer than
War and Peace
. Even
War and Peace
is too long. If the Bible consisted of eighteen volumes, it would long since have been forgotten.”
    “The Talmud has thirty-six volumes, and the Jews have not forgotten it.”
    “Jews remember too much. That is our misfortune. It is two thousand years since we were driven out of the Holy Land, and now we are trying to get back in. Insane, isn’t it? If our literature would only reflect this insanity, it would be great. But our literature is uncannily sane. Well, enough of that.”
    Bamberg straightened himself, scowling with the effort. With his tiny steps, he shuffled away from the table. He went over to the gramophone and put on a dance record. It was known in the writers’ club that he had not written a word in years. In his old age, he was learning to dance, influenced by the philosophy of his friend Dr. Mitzkin, the author of
The Entropy of Reason
. In this book Dr. Mitzkin attempted to prove that the human intellect is bankrupt and that true wisdom can only be reached through passion.
    Jacques Kohn shook his head. “Half-pint Hamlet. Kafka was afraid of becoming a Bamberg—that is why he destroyed himself.”
    “Did the countess ever call you?” I asked.
    Jacques Kohn took his monocle out of his pocket and put it in place. “And what if she did? In my life, everything turns into words. All talk, talk. This is actually Dr. Mitzkin’s philosophy—man will end up as a word machine. He will eat words, drink words, marry words, poison himself with words. Come to think of it, Dr. Mitzkin was also present at Granat’s orgy. He came to practice what he preached, but he could just as well have written
The Entropy of Passion
. Yes, the countess does call me from time to time. She, too, is an intellectual, but without intellect. As a matter of fact, although women do their best to reveal the charms of their bodies, they know just as little about the meaning of sex as they do about the intellect.
    “Take Madam Tschissik. What did she ever have, except a body? But just try asking her what a body really is. Now she’s ugly. When she was an actress in the Prague days, she still had something. I was her leading man. She was a tiny little talent. We came to Prague to make some money and found a genius waiting for us—
Homo sapiens
in his highest degree of self-torture. Kafka wanted to be a Jew, but he didn’t know how. He wanted to live, but he didn’t know this, either. ‘Franz,’ I said to him once, ‘you are a young man. Do what we all do.’ There was a brother I knew in Prague, and I persuaded him to go there with me. He was still a virgin. I’d rather not speak about the girl he was engaged to. He was sunk to the neck in the bourgeois swamp. The Jews of his circle had one ideal—to become Gentiles, and not Czech Gentiles but German Gentiles. To make it short, I talked him into the adventure. I took him to a dark alley in the former ghetto and there was the brothel. We went up the crooked steps. I opened the door and it looked like a stage set: the whores, the pimps, the guests, the madam. I will never forget that moment. Kafka began to shake, and pulled at my sleeve. Then he turned and ran down the steps so quickly I was afraid he would break a leg. Once on the street, he stopped and vomited like a schoolboy. On the way back, we passed an old synagogue, and Kafka began to speak about the golem. Kafka believed in the golem, and even that the future might well bring another one. There must be magic words that can turn a piece of clay into a living being. Did not God, according to the Cabala, create the world by uttering holy words? In the beginning was the Logos.
    “Yes, it’s all one big chess game. All my life I have been afraid of death, but now that I’m on the threshold of the grave I’ve stopped being afraid. It’s clear, my partner wants to play a slow game. He’ll go on taking my pieces one by one. First he removed my appeal as an actor and turned me into a so-called writer. He’d no sooner done that than he provided me with writer’s cramp. His next move was to deprive me of my potency. Yet I know he’s far from checkmate, and this gives me strength. It’s cold in my room—let it be cold. I have no supper—I won’t die without it. He sabotages me and I sabotage him. Some time ago,