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barely any name. Franz K. would surely be there.
    But wait, wasn’t
his
name enormous? No, perhaps not to K., because he had hated it. At that, Max felt again how much he wanted to see him, realized, with a searing poignancy, how much—

20
    “HE’S MAX BROD,” he heard Esther saying, and he returned to the hospital room, as angry at having been interrupted as a sailor who clung to his desk wouldbe when a sound made the ocean disappear and left him looking ridiculous in a dry room in Prague.
    Esther was speaking to another nurse with another tray, a man this time, who must have come in while he’d been away. Probably if the man hadn’t gotten that name from Esther, he’d have walked out of the room. Max, though, felt a distaste for the name Esther had used. But what else could he offer the man with the needle instead, so he would give him his drugs? “I’m in pain,” he said.
    That seemed to satisfy him. He helped Max turn over, lifted the hospital gown, and gave him the injection in his withered buttock.
    The nurse shut the door, and Max told Esther that he’d been chasing his own name in Tel Aviv. That sounded like something from a fairy tale. Esther, a practical person, had no use for stories like that, and started to cry.
    “No, no, darling, don’t worry,” Max said. “It was an altogether fine thing, my not having a name.” Had it been? “Well, it did mean I’d have to go to a whorehouse. You know what they say, houses of ill repute are for those who have none.”
    That seemed to make matters worse.
    He ignored her. It probably was a fairy tale, or simply nonsense, but it pleased him to think about it more, gave him a moment away from his body, and from this mildly officious woman who was certainly no whore. No, she’d taken him into her bed because Max most certainly did have a name, and even a decent woman wanted one like his. And if the woman wasn’t satisfactory, he could, once upon a time, anyway, always find another, and even at the
same
time as the first one, that being what Max desiredreally, not one faithful Dora Diamant but a crowd of women where he could hide his hump from himself.
    The ponderous analyst had seen that well enough, but he’d missed the reason poor Max remained restless: a lover couldn’t reassure him that
he
was attractive, because she’d taken his titles into her bed, not the little fellow with the hump. That must be why Franz had come up with his story of “The Poisoned Title.” He’d made Max into
Kafka’s literary executor
, a name that would feel as stolen as the role of land surveyor, and as hateful as that of Judas; it would be a name Max would hate, even as he used it to earn his living, he’d want to be rid of it to be reduced to a nub of a thing, a letter, a
B. That
was why Franz had hung that title round his neck, not for his sainthood but for Max. “The real reason the cat teases the mouse is to prepare him.”
    That made Esther sob the more. “Franz meant to make me into a character in a story by Franz Kafka,” Max said, as if that might stop Esther from crying.
    It didn’t. She turned away from him, afraid probably that he was raving, or maybe because no woman could ever want a mere B.
    But honestly, no, he wasn’t that, even here, withered and dying. Franz hadn’t seen that he, himself, was the flaw in Kafka’s plan (supposing he’d had one). The world’s thanks to Max for bravely breaking his promise to Franz meant the poisoned title had led not to infamy but to honor after honor. Max, the brave and much-loved executor of Kafka’s estate, had become
Brod, Brod
the director of the national theater,
Brod
the composer,
Brod
the author of who can remember how many published books (well, he and Esther could). How could Max think about how
Brod
meant betrayal, when he was surrounded by so many who were grateful for what he’d done? To hate his name in all that admiring din, Max would have had to have been … Franz Kafka.
    He wasn’t. And the