My dear son,

     You wrote me a letter you never sent.

      It wasn’t for me—it was for the whole world to read. (You and your instructions that everything should be burned. Hah!) You were never open and frank with me—that’s one of the complaints you say I was always making against you. You write it in the letter you didn’t want me to read; so what does that sound like, eh? But I’ve read the letter now, I’ve read it anyway, I’ve read everything, although you said I put your books on the night-table and never touched them. You know how it is, here where I am: not something that can be explained to anyone who isn’t here—they used to talk about secrets going to the grave, but the funny thing is there are no secrets here at all. If there was something you wanted to know, you should have known, if it doesn’t let you lie quiet, then you can have knowledge of it, from here. Yes, you gave me that much credit, you said I was a true Kafka in ‘strength…eloquence, endurance, a certain way of doing things on a grand scale’ and I’ve not been content just to rot. In that way, I’m still the man I was, the go-getter. Restless. Restless. Taking whatever opportunity I can. There isn’t anything, now, you can regard as hidden from me. Whether you say I left it unread on the night-table or whether you weren’t man enough, even at the age of thirty-six, to show me a letter that was supposed to be for me.

     I write to you after we are both dead. Whereas you don’t stir. There won’t be any response from you, I know that. You began that letter by saying you were afraid of me—and then you were afraid to let me read it. And now you’ve escaped altogether. Because without the Kafka will-power you can’t reach out from nothing and nowhere. I was going to call it a desert, but where’s the sand, where’re the camels, where’s the sun—I’m still mensch enough to crack a joke—you see? Oh excuse me, I forgot—you didn’t like my jokes, my fooling around with kids. My poor boy, unfortunately you had no life in you, in all those books and diaries and letters (the ones you posted, to strangers, to women) you said it a hundred times before you put the words in my mouth, in your literary way, in that letter: you yourself were ‘unfit for life’. So death comes, how would you say, quite naturally to you. It’s not like that for a man of vigour like I was, I can tell you, and so here I am writing, talking…I don’t know if there is a word for what this is. Anyway, it’s Hermann Kafka. I've outlived you here, same as in Prague.