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one by his bed wasn’t Dora Diamant. But having unriddled Kafka’s ruse—or probably just having comforted himself with a little Kafka story of his own devising—had given him his Franz again, at least for long enough, he hoped, for Max to finish dying.
    He gave Esther’s hand a squeeze. She was his sort, really, the kind of woman who knew that titles can be used to overawe even a doctor to obtain a better bed for a Brod. “Like finds like,” he said to her.
    Esther smiled, as if pleased.
    At that, the pain sank its claws into him in earnest, and all stories, whether true or false, disappeared from his mind. He bellowed, and the male nurse came in. Brod said, “It was just playing with me before.” He must have sounded mad, and without asking who he was, the man gave him another injection. It transported him

21
    to right outside the place he’d wanted, the Tel Aviv restaurant No Soup Today. And under its name on the sign,
nonstop
, though the implication was that it wasnonstop not so much because it was service always but service never.
    Still, he was glad he’d gone in. Despite its brown walls and simple wooden furniture, it seemed a cheerful place, though something about it also made one think things here were if not actually haphazard, then operating by a different system whose reasons might be as hard to understand as those for the kosher laws. Dora, the chef, could be seen standing in the kitchen, reading a book of Kafka’s stories, edited by Max Brod. Dora looked up and waved to him, smiling. “Back to work,” she said, but then returned to her reading, not to her stove.
    The other diners—and there were quite a few of them—were shouting to the waiter, but in amused rather than angry voices—for now, anyway. After all, no matter how fond they might be of him and the cook, however glad to be in the homeland, still hunger would be a cause of complaint even for the Jews who had been grateful (one might assume) that they’d recently been freed from not having a place, a nation, a name.
    Max found himself already seated at a table, looking at a menu that said at the bottom
Not responsible for orders not received
and then added, ominously,
or the ones received
. When he looked up, he saw that his old friend, dressed, as always, in a well-tailored dark suit, was the waiter, which one could tell because he had a white towel draped over his arm.
    Max must have looked surprised. “You know what Ben-Gurion wrote,” Franz said. “He wanted a country where even the whores and the thieves are Jews, and the writers and luftmenschen are the incompetent waiters.”
    “You wear a very fine suit for a waiter. You know, I always meant to ask you about those—”
    “Luxuries?” Kafka said. “If he does his job dutifully, even the sailor is entitled to his dignity.”
    “Will there be food?” Brod said nonsensically.
    Kafka shrugged. “Probably so. It’s a restaurant.” He poured Brod some wine. “Here it is nice to give people a drop of wine, because everyone is a little bit of a connoisseur, after all.” He spilled a few drops and wiped them up with the towel from his arm, though that meant only that both towel and tablecloth were now stained.
    Brod said, “How can I drink if there’s no one to pray to Who might bless it?”
    Kafka had perhaps become something of a comedian now that he had a homeland—or perhaps because he’d found that even here, he didn’t have a homeland. He said, “The trick is to manage the first few sips, Max, then I promise you’ll forget about needing Someone to bless it.”
    Brod drank. The wine was good; sunlight in it, but enough bitterness to keep one tethered to the earth. “Can you drink again, too, Franz?”
    Kafka smiled. “There the news is not so good. You must still drink for me, as you did before, in so many different ways.” He looked longingly at the wine. “To think that I was once able to manage a big sip of water.”
    Brod smiled. “So that’s why you