Forgiving the Angel by Jay Cantor

confusion, his haphazard violence—and, most of all, his near mistake when he’d almost been won over by the devilish goat into disobeying God.
    Worse still, Abraham knew he hadn’t meant to kill the goat, that he hadn’t been truly obedient, and he suspected, too, that his hiding of his real feelings (bite by bite) toward the goat was to pile error on error. At any moment, God would punish him. Perhaps, in fact, this continual nausea was punishment, though only a first installment of the final pain he’d feel. (Where? In his neck? In his heart?) Or maybe he was being punished like this because God had wanted him to spare the goat?
    It may be that eating meat didn’t shorten Abraham’s life (though, again, perhaps it did), but it did make every meal a misery to him—and equally wearying to those who happened to eat
with
him, most particularly for Isaac, his beloved son, a child of delicate digestion. Perhaps because of those awful meals with his father—for God’s sake, three hundred grindings of teeth before he would swallow a bite—this dyspepsia was handed down from generation to generation of the Jews—
    Until Moses, who understood what had happened to Abraham (and then to Isaac, Jacob, and Joseph, and theirprogeny more numerous than the stars). In order to justify the Patriarch, and perhaps ease everyone’s burden, Moses, without divine sanction, turned the goat’s slow bleeding into a Law, hoping this might restore his people’s appetite.
    Of course God was horrified that a man, even Moses, would meddle with his intricately calibrated Torah—condemning His animals to lingering deaths. But He, in his wisdom, didn’t want to call this human and invented law into question, lest people begin to pick and choose among the other mitzvahs, saying maybe some of them had been added on by men as well. He didn’t correct the text, but punished Moses for this transgression by barring him from entering the promised land.
    So the story ended. Or did it? A scholar who found this parable would know, of course, that Kafka had told his friend Brod to destroy all his work upon his death. Surely, though, that must mean only the known work? After all, this lost story could make the scholar’s reputation, and though, from the quality of the parable, he might doubt that the story would add much to Kafka’s luster, he might hope it wouldn’t detract much, either.
    Should he publish? What would Kafka want done? Hadn’t he really just told Brod to burn his work in order to make Brod into what he’d most wanted to be, a divided ever-miserable character in a story by the genius he most admired, Franz Kafka? And if this man were a true scholar, then that would be how he, too, felt about himself and his author—that his life was a story narrated by Kafka.
    And if Kafka had written
this
story, in which a man is visiting Prague because of his work, it would seem to indicatethat he’d imagined that whatever he’d intended, he at least suspected that Brod might not obey him, and that he would be famous long after his death.
    Would the scholar, as he himself suspected, be saying all this only to justify his publishing the story, getting tenure, and so being able to do what Kafka had never done, which was to marry his beloved? Even if the scholar didn’t eat meat, he might be said to have a good appetite, so he didn’t make meals a misery for the other guests at this pension. Why shouldn’t such a man marry? Perhaps even the woman who had rented him this low-ceilinged room with the comfortable well-stuffed bed, this grandchild of Kafka’s lover, whose ample bosom, and open, even wanton, sexual look he would have found he couldn’t bar from his dreams. Perhaps he could have her here, in this bed that she had said had been blessed by Kafka, the two of them lost in feathers.
    But not tonight. The confusions around and in this story would give a man a stomachache.
    Of course, he would publish the story and be recommended for