Although Franz Kafka had been dead a number of years and was thus beyond the reach of petty concerns, he decided one day to visit Prague, his hometown. He hated the place.

His writing had not received just due during his lifetime, but that was not why he detested the city and had been heard to comment, "They should burn it to the ground." His hatred was for its history: for the torture chambers stained with the blood of those who refused to turn brass into gold; for the hangings of dissenters from the lampposts, for those who betrayed Jan Hus and burned him at the stake. Most of all, he hated Prague’s castles and towers, their unbarred windows conducive to the political gambit of defenestration, stemming from the words for "window" and "thrown out of." Still, it was home.

This visit was to be short, just long enough to replenish his stock of reading material. He’d hoped to make the trip much earlier but was delayed by, first, that sainthood business (which he’d yet to get to the bottom of and intensely resented; not only because he was a Jew), followed by much devotion to the celestial, but far from current, libraries of his current abode.

He touched down in Prague around noon and went immediately to his favorite bookstore where the window display caught his eye. Kafka, who wrote in the German of his schooling as opposed to his native Czech, was familiar with the term doppleganger, and could accept in general terms the idea of a double. Nevertheless he was surprised to see his name in the title of several stacks of religious tomes.

But religion had never been his venue. These books were obviously about another Franz Kafka, and probably one who was not even a writer, just some local clown who’d caught the public eye.

The books, with his name in the title (perhaps he would dream a little), were attractively displayed although their covers were somber. Scattered about were a few purple volumes, these with the title The Enchanted Kingdom of Love (Zauberrich der Liebe), (1926) by Max Brod. Kafka immediately recognized the name of the German intellectual, his old friend and champion; and felt a pang at the ridiculous title.

He went in and briefly riffled the pages of his three black-covered novels, which warmed his heart when discovered beneath a fallen poster, but did not excite his curiosity. He then purchased one each of the four volumes which had drawn his attention: Franz Kafka: A Biography (1937); The Faith and Teachings of Franz Kafka (1946); He Who Shows the Way (1951); and Despair and Salvation in the Work of Franz Kafka (1959). By then, he’d noticed these volumes were also by his friend Max Brod and realized everyone had to make a living. Out of loyalty, expecting neither entertainment nor enlightenment, he also purchased a copy of Brod’s novel and the shopkeeper tied the books together in a neat stack with a convenient carrying loop.

Kafka turned to leave the shop, and collided with a tall blond man about his own age who took one look at the books and burst out laughing. "My dear Franz," he said, "you’re not going to be happy with the contents. You’ve been crucified, canonized, and tattooed. You’re not a writer anymore, you’re a cottage industry and a saint."

"What do you mean, what happened?" Kafka asked, straightening his hat. "And introduce yourself, if you please."

The stranger then told Kafka of the devotion of Max Brod who had struggled to posthumously publish Kafka’s three novels, and of the complete lack of response to this event. "Be glad you weren’t around. Your humiliation would have been total. My name, by the way, is Milan Kundera," Kundera said. "Max finally realized the only way to bring attention to your work was to publish your diaries."

"My diaries!" Kafka turned pale.

"And if that didn’t work, and it didn’t because he censored them so heavily, he felt compelled to build on the advance press he’d incorporated into his own novel, the one you’ve purchased. Perhaps you shouldn’t read it for you are portrayed therein as a veritable saint; as a man who knows nothing about women, for example, being altogether too saintly to live; if you’ll forgive the expression."

The word saint rang a bell with Kafka. He was wearing his halo. There was no escaping it, but he’d twisted it and slipped his left hand through the loops as though it were a bracelet (now hidden by the coat he carried over his arm), for he could not bear it hovering overhead.

As for his diaries, he recalled the long ago day of 1924, when he’d requested of Max that certain items be burned—namely an early and immature publication or two of no value. This was something he’d have attended to himself had he not been confined to the sanitarium. He repeated the request several times, "And my diaries, be sure to burn them, also. As for the undelivered letter to my father which you will find under my mattress at home, deliver it at once."

He wished to maintain his privacy, of course, and had no desire to hurt anyone he may have carelessly mentioned in the diaries. Of the letter to his father, the less said the better.

Among other items left in the care of Max Brod were Kafka’s few acceptable publications and many unpublished manuscripts; including his three novels, none of which was complete—despair and humiliation having led to abandonment. Like most writers, Kafka would have responded with a steady stream of completed works had he felt the slightest warmth of demand.

"A saint, you say?" Kafka asked.

"Garta is what he calls the character whom everyone knows is meant to be you. A saint no less, and yet," Kundera pointed to the corresponding passage in The Enchanted Kingdom of Love, "‘he turned to Garta for advice in affairs of the heart,’ it says here. That doesn’t make any sense at all for he also says you were the religious thinker, quiet, reticent, lacking in self-confidence perhaps, yet sincere—what would such a man know of romantic love? Or of sex, for that matter?

"And this," Kundera continued, reading aloud, ‘Garta was a saint of our times, a veritable saint.’ But can a saint go to brothels? For we both know from your uncensored diaries, now available to scholars, where you spent many evenings and were well-versed in the theory and practice thereof. And wasn’t the protagonist of Amerika put out of his parental home and sent to America because of his unfortunate sexual mishap with a housemaid who ‘had seduced him and got herself a child by him.’ Are these the earmarks of a saint? By the way, I’ll be publishing these thoughts on the matter under the title ‘The Castrating Shadow of Saint Garta’ in a few years."

"But he delivered the letter to my father, did he not?" Kafka asked, a stricken look on his face.

"Oh, that, well no. I believe it’s included with the diaries, which weren’t published until 1937. By then both your parents were dead. Brod took care to see no harm was done."

"What a fuck-up!" Kafka exclaimed. "I took satisfaction in the thought my father at last confronted the monster he’d created. I almost thought it worth dying for."

At that moment he felt the halo unwind itself from his wrist. It hovered before his eyes for a long moment, then zoomed out the open door of the shop, and was last seen crossing the Vltava in the direction of the mountains.