Spurious (7 page)

We’re Brod and Brod, we agree, and neither of us is Kafka. Neither of us; but we can dream, can’t we, of the imaginary Kafka we would fawn over and whose work we would promote? We can dream of our fervid works of commentary and our public statements—always needlessly simplifying, always full of empty pathos and sham hagiography—on behalf of our friend.

We can dream of nursing him through his final sickness and then of preserving his work for posterity. He’d ask us to throw it all away, all his unfinished drafts and private correspondence, but what would we do? Publish it piece by piece for a grateful humanity, with our stupid editorial comments that generations of scholars would read to one another in disgust and amusement.

‘We’re in free fall’, says W. ‘Or Limbo. We must have committed a terrible crime in a former life, that would account for it, wouldn’t it? That’s what you Hindus would say’.

This is our Purgatory, W. says, or perhaps it’s just his. Perhaps I am his Purgatory, says W., and I am his Limbo. Perhaps his friendship for me is only a punishment for some great crime he committed in a former life, he’s not sure what.

Above all, W. says, I should work earnestly on another book. It’s the only way I experience my own inadequacy, he says. He knows me: without some project, I’ll become far too content. My idiocy will become an alibi, an excuse, which is just a way to avoid it altogether.—‘You have to run up against your idiocy, to shatter yourself against it’, W. says. ‘Nothing can begin unless you experience your idiocy’.

My idiocy is theological, W. tells me. It is vast, omnipresent; not simply a lack (of intelligence, say), though neither is it entirely tangible or real. We picture it as a vast, dense cloud, and then as a storm, flashing with lightning. It can be quite magnificent, he says. It can shock and awe, W. says.
I am that I am
, says W., that’s all it says.

On the other hand, he says, sometimes my idiocy is only a simple absence, a pellucid sky. Not a thought crosses my mind for weeks, does it?, says W. Nothing at all. I’m untroubled by thought and untroubled by thinking.

His idiocy, says W. is more a kind of stubbornness or indolence. It’s never thunderous as mine can be, and nor is his head ever really empty. His idiocy is only a niggling reminder of his own incapacity, against which he runs up freshly each day.

Sometimes I think the damp is receding, I tell W. on the phone. True, the air is still full of water and little spores of mildew—no doubt of that, but the plaster is lightening, there at the edges where it was most soaked, and the walls no longer run with water, though the new cabinets are still full of mildew and the whole flat smells of damp and rot.

It’s the oldest smell, the most familiar one: the great rotting of everything, the great saturation. Away for a few days, my return confirmed it, I tell W.: home, for me, will always mean the smell of damp, and that first of all. Open the door, there it is, the old smell, breathe it in, along with the spores of mildew …

Of course, I’m also worried that the damp is returning to itself to regather its strength: withdrawing only to bloom once again across my walls and ceiling, only more magnificently this time, with a new palette of colours. What colours this time? What richnesses? No doubt the damp is regathering itself to return, I tell W., with more force, with more splendour, and with new and splendid spores to send out into the air.

There’s crumbled brick and wood on the work surfaces, I tell W.: the ceiling continues to cave in; the hole is still wide open. What’s up there? Something terrible. Something dark. There’s an open slice between the flats. I hear the voices of the tenants upstairs echoing there, ghostly, so I can’t make out what is said. Yes, there’s something terrible there, the source of all damp, there between the flats.

‘So how fat are you now?’, says W., ‘you must be really fat. Are you eating at the moment? What are you eating?’

W. has always been intrigued by my eating habits. He likes to put his hand on my belly.—‘It’s big’, he marvels. ‘But this is just the start. You’re going to be enormous’.

W. remembers the elasticated trousers of the American professors he’s met. There was a whole herd of them, he says, like walruses on a beach, all with elasticated trousers. That’s what you’ll be wearing soon, says W., great billowing trousers with trouser legs like circus tents.

Food is a sacrament, W. has always believed, which is another reason he thinks I am so disgusting. I have no sense of food, he says, I could be eating anything. For a long time, he remembers, I lived only on discounted sandwiches from Boots, 75p a packet.

He remembers me telling him of my circumambulations of town in search of discounted sandwiches. My great circumambulations, W. says, taking in every possible shop that sold stale, discounted sandwiches.

For a long time, W. remembers, I ate only gingerbread men, five a day. I would buy a packet of five stale gingerbread men from the discount bakery and a fourpack of own-branded supermarket lager from Kwik Save, the very worst.

‘No wonder you were always ill’, W. says. ‘No wonder you were always complaining about your stomach’. Of course, I was poor then, W. concedes, but that was no excuse.

Gluttony has always appalled W., who has a small and delicate appetite. He always undertakes special measures when I come to visit him, to make sure there’s enough food in the house. It was part of the reason he bought his new fridge, W, says.—‘You’re greedy, greedy!’

When I text from the airport to tell him I’ve arrived, he opens a bottle of Chablis or Cava and puts the glasses on the table, and then unwraps a block of Emmenthal and brings out his sliced meats, along with olive oil and relishes. He’ll offer bread, which he will have made himself, and slices of smoked salmon.

‘Only the best!’, says W. ‘Only the best for my friends!’ Food’s a gift, W. says, the greatest of gifts, which I desecrate every time I visit him.

A little later.—‘Food is for the other’, W. announces. ‘It’s a gift’. He lays out slices of Emmenthal and cold meat.—‘You’re the other’, he says, ‘so I have to feed you’. From your own mouth?—‘That’s what Levinas says’. W. opens his mouth. – ‘Do you want some? Do you?’

Sometimes, I remind him, W. likes to explain things about me to other people like an indulgent mother.—‘The thing about Lars is …’, he’ll begin. Or: ‘What you have to understand about Lars is …’ And best of all, when he’s feeling very tender, ‘What I love about Lars is …’ Is that it, then?, I ask W., do you love me?—‘Yes, I love you’, says W. ‘You see, I can talk about love. I can express my feelings. Not like you’.

I keep a mental list of W.’s favourite questions, which he constantly asks me so as to ask himself.—‘At what point did you realise that you would amount to nothing?’; ‘When was it that you first became aware you would be nothing but a failure?’; ‘When you look back at your life, what do you see?’; ‘How is it that you know what greatness is, and that you will never, ever reach it?’

‘What does it mean to you that your life has amounted to nothing?, W. asks me with great seriousness. And then, ‘Why have your friends never made you greater?’ This is W.’s great fantasy, he admits: a group of friends who could make one another think. Do I make him think?, I ask him.—‘No! The opposite! You’re an idiot!’

Then: ‘What do you consider to be your greatest weakness?’ W. answers for me: ‘Never having come to terms with your lack of ability. Because you haven’t, have you? Have you?’

I ask him what is most distorted about
his
understanding of the world.—‘I have this fantasy of being part of a community, and this prevents my individual action’. And then, dolefully, ‘I don’t work hard enough’. But he works night and day, I tell him.—‘Oh compared to you, I work. Compared to you, we’re all busy’.

‘What time did you get up to work this morning?’, says W. Five.—‘I was up at four. At
four!’
, W. says. But he laments the fact that he watches television in the evenings. He used to work in the evenings, he says. In fact, he worked all the time. A room with a bed and a desk and his books, that’s all.—‘That was my peak’, he says. ‘When are you going to peak? Are you peaking now? Is this it?’

W. admires my
adamantine apocalypticism
, he says. It’s very cold and pure, he says, like the sky on a winter morning.—‘Your sense of the apocalypse is absolute’, he says, ‘you’re sure of it’. He’s not sure of it, he says. He still believes something could save us, though he also
knows
nothing will save us. He
knows
nothing will save us, but he
feels
something will save us, that’s the thing.

That’s his messianism, W. says. But there’s no messianism in me whatsoever, W. acknowledges. I’m far beyond that. Some process has completed itself in me, he says. Something, a whole history has been brought to an end.

How long has he been reading Rosenzweig?, W wonders. It’s like rain hitting a tin roof, he says. Nothing goes in. It makes no impression. But at least he
does
read; at least there is the steady rhythm of his non-understanding as it beats against his intelligence. He knows his limits, W. says, because they are constantly tested. He has a sense of what he does not know.

What’s he working on, and why is he bothering?, W. asks himself. What does it matter? Why does he read these books that are too hard for him? Why does he batter himself against the wall of mathematics? What difference does it make? What’s it all for? Who could he possibly influence or persuade?

And finally, who will listen to him but me, who has no idea what he is talking about, and can only regard the work of Rosenzweig and Cohen with the awe of an ape before the thundering power of a waterfall?—‘What can it possibly mean to you?’, says W. That’s what makes it even worse: the only person paying attention to him, says W., is the one least capable of understanding anything he says.

But then too, W. says, he doesn’t really understand Rosenzweig and Cohen either, and he too can only hoot and point like an ape at their mighty oeuvres.

Yesterday, I tell W., the workmen came and took the ceiling down and fitted new joists next to the old, rotten ones. Then they hammered boards over the joists. But it makes no difference: the walls are still wet.

‘It’s what will happen if you lay plaster on wet brick’, the Loss Adjuster told me, looking at the discoloured walls of the kitchen, deep brown and rich green.—‘It’s very porous’, she said of the new plaster. ‘That’s why the damp spread so quickly’.

‘Your bathroom’s okay’, she said, ‘but we’ll have to dry out your wall. Everything’ll have to come out. We might have to replace the cupboards, too. And you’ll have to empty them. And we’ll need the washing machine out’. Looking up at the ceiling she said, ‘I’m surprised the washing machine from upstairs hasn’t come right through. The joists are completely rotten’.

She warned me I wouldn’t be able to cook, I tell W. Never mind!, I said, and meant it. For months, I said, there was no electricity in the kitchen. Nothing worked; I couldn’t cook, even if I wanted to. For months! Because of the damp! Because the electricity was affected by the damp! In the end, I had to get the kitchen rewired.—‘I’ve never seen anything like it’, said the electrician. Not even in an old house?—‘Never’, he said.

W. always flails about when he has to do administrative work. He pings me obscenities and shaky drawings of cocks. He rings me up and asks me how much I’ve eaten. This seems to calm him.

I always exaggerate. I’ve eaten too much, I tell him, far too much!—‘Go on, tell me, what’ve you eaten?’ I tell him he’s a feeder.—‘Go on, tell me’, says W., getting excited. ‘How fat are you now?’

All jobs are becoming the same, W. observes. We’re all administrators now, all of us. What do any of us do but administer? We administer and prevaricate about administration. Work time is either administration time or prevaricating about administration time, which occupies an enormous part of W.’s day, he says.

He doesn’t know how I
just get on with it
, he says. He’s always marvelled at it: my ability to launch myself into administration, to get to work early, to sit at my desk and begin. It’s incredible, W. says, though it also indicates there’s something very wrong with me. There’s something wrong with my soul, he says.

For his part, W’s given to endless prevarication. He can never make a start, no matter how early he gets in. He stares out of the office window instead, W. says. He makes himself some tea, he says, and sips at it amongst the great parcels of books that get sent to him for review.

His life is absurd, says W. It’s a living absurdity, and mine is no better, although I have the strange capacity to
just get on with it
. Where does it come from?, W. wonders. Who am I trying to please?

I always feel the world’s about to end, that’s what W. likes about me, he says. I always think I’m about to be found out and shot. I want to lick the gun I think is pointed towards me, he says, which is why I’m such a good administrator.

But this apocalypticism is the reason I’ve succeeded to the extent that I have, W. reflects. Whereas I’m all apocalypticism, W. says, he’s all messianism: he’s always full of joy and serene indifference to the world. What I suffer, he laughs at as the most extreme folly.

It’s all mad, he says. The world went mad some time ago.—‘But you take it too seriously’, he says. In the end, I want only to be spoken to gently and soothingly like a wounded animal, a dog run over at the side of the road.—‘But that’s how they talk when they’re about to shoot you’, W. says. ‘And they are going to shoot you, no matter how much you lick the barrel’.

Perhaps I want to be shot, W. muses. Perhaps that would be the kindest thing that could be done for me. But he has an application to write, that’s why he’s phoning me, he says. He’s applying for a job in Canada, he says. He needs motivation.—‘Give me a sense of urgency’, he says. ‘Give me a sense the world’s about to end’.