Before long, he is reading Max the first chapter of The Trial, and he sends an inventory of the texts he has been working on: “Memories of the Kalda Railway,” “The Village Schoolmaster,” “The Substitute.” “Here I am,” he says, “with five or six stories lined up before me like horses in front of a circus ringmaster.” He finishes only “In the Penal Colony” and the last chapter of Amerika: “The Oklahoma Theater.”
No news of Felice since the “Askanischer Hof Trial.”
He doesn’t seek her out. In late October, he receives a letter from her, another letter of regret: regret at having been hostile, nervous, and at the end of her strength.
“Can you explain to me,” she writes, “what your position was? What it is today?”
The balance of power has shifted. Now, it is Felice who is begging Franz to write.
He spends several evenings answering her. Reading the many pages he produced, one senses a change, hears a certain weariness, as though Franz were a teacher patiently addressing a student whom a fly has distracted.
“For me, nothing has changed in the last three months, absolutely nothing, either for good or ill, you are still the greatest friend to my work and its greatest enemy.”
He explains that there are two beings at war within him: one is more or less congruent with the man that Felice would like to marry, and this man loves her beyond all measure; the other fights against her tooth and nail because of the hatred and fear she feels toward his work and his way of life. And nothing about either one of these men can be changed without destroying both.
He adds: “If I said nothing at the Askanischer Hof, it’s because I couldn’t shake from my mind your aversion to the way I organize my life.”
And he has a duty to protect his work, which alone gives him the moral right to live.
“Our letters never benefited us much,” he writes. “Even the most beautiful contained a hidden worm; I’ll write you infrequently, we must not start torturing each other again.”
Fewer than thirty letters and postcards are exchanged in 1915. But there is again talk of a meeting, again talk of getting married. On January 23 and 24, they rendezvous at a halfway point, in Bodenbach. Felice had gone to the trouble of getting herself a passport. She was forced to make a long detour and spend a sleepless night on the train.
Now they are face to face. She wears a jacket that he finds very handsome. Each of them notices that the other has not changed. In the hours they spend together, they pick up their discussion where they left off before the breakup. Neither will budge. Felice still insists on a comfortable apartment, one to which she can bring her personal taste (he trembles at the idea), ample meals (it could be worse), with bedtime at 11:00 p.m. (out of the question) and a heated bedroom (he is already suffocating). To demonstrate that reason is on her side, she adjusts Franz’s watch to the correct time: “Setting a watch an hour and a half ahead makes no sense,” she says. “It’s absurd.”
She asks him not a single question about his work. Nothing. Not a word. And he relents not a bit in his demands. All day they talk at cross-purposes. That night, each retires to bed alone. They occupy adjoining rooms, with a key on either side of the door. At a moment when Franz is experiencing nothing but boredom and emptiness, Felice cries out: “How happy we are together here!”
Not knowing what to do to occupy the hours they must still spend together, Franz reads her the first chapters of The Trial. She listens and says nothing, lying on the sofa with her eyes closed. She asks him blandly if she can take the manuscript home to transcribe. She had hoped for something more than this endless reading aloud.
They part.
We have not spent one good moment together, not one minute of total freedom, he tells himself on the train that carries him home. Each of them loves the other just as he or she is, but neither believes, given the other’s nature, that they could ever live together.
On May 24, four months later, there is a second meeting in Bohemian Switzerland. It is Whitsuntide, Felice arrives in the company of Grete Bloch (is this not odd?) and her sister Erna, who has recently married. Franz (wanting to leave a record?) sends Ottla a postcard with his signature and those of the three women accompanying him.
The following month, in June, they meet again, this time—at Franz’s behest—alone. Little has survived of these two days in Carlsbad: Felice sings several songs for Franz, her voice remarkably true. He in turn hums “À Batignolles,” his favorite French song. Once more, Paris casts its spell on him.
In 1916 the rhythm of their correspondence picks up. He writes to Felice several times a week, almost always on a postcard. Letters, which have to be censored by the military authorities, would take weeks to arrive. With the war on, Franz has hardly a moment to himself. “Even more responsibilities, more worries, more insomnia, more headaches (brief dagger thrusts above and to the right of my eye),” that is the tenor of his life now. The management of the wretched asbestos factory has fallen to his lot, as the brother-in-law who ran it has been drafted. At the office, for lack of personnel, his hours have increased. He now works eight hours a day. And to crown it all, his father makes him help out in the store, since most of the employees are at the front. He works hard from morning till night. He no longer has a second to himself, or the strength to write. He is desperate, a rat in a cage.
In April, tired of reading letters that don’t lead to anything, Felice asks to see him. Cautious, Franz warns, “Think back to our earlier meetings, and you’ll stop wanting another.”
He announces his intention of spending the summer vacation in Marienbad, an incredibly beautiful place with large and handsome forests on all sides. He often goes there for business, only last month he was there again. Felice proposes it as a meeting place.
“I am in extraordinary agreement,” he answers.
On the evening of July 1, he has the great pleasure of closing his files, dictating a few final memoranda, saying good-bye to one and all, and leaving his office in impeccable good order.
In Marienbad, Felice is waiting for him at the station. His room at the Hotel Neptun, though, is hideous and looks onto a courtyard. Things are starting off badly. The first night is one of distress. The next day, both are determined to make their stay a success, and they move into a palace, the Hotel Schloss Balmoral. There, Franz is given a large and lovely room. But their quarrels ruin everything. To escape the cul-de-sac they are in, they walk a great deal, at times under the pouring rain, at times under clearing skies. He amuses himself by reading the Bible.
He tries to restrict his conversations with Felice to one subject that excites him beyond measure: the Jewish People’s Home in Berlin, founded in May by Siegfried Lehmann, Max Brod, and Martin Buber. He urges Felice so insistently to become a teacher there that she agrees to consider the possibility. Franz is elated and immediately asks Max to send her a prospectus. The organization is designed to promote greater contact between Eastern and Western Jews, and to provide an education to the orphaned children pouring into Berlin from Russia and Poland.
Franz encourages Felice: “There is more honey to be drawn from this work than from all the flowers in the forests of Marienbad.”
On July 8, they go to Tepl, where Franz has a lawsuit to settle for work. Their relations continue to be abysmal. From the little town, where they spend only a few hours, Franz finds the time to scribble a line or two to Max: “What a creature I am! What a creature I am! I torture her—and torture myself—to death!”
On July 9, nothing has changed, the clouds have not parted—how could they? And yet, after a series of horrible days and worse nights, a miracle occurs. They live airy days together such as Franz had never thought to see again.
They get along so well, they feel so strong in their love, that on July 10 Franz writes—it must be at Felice’s request—to Frau Bauer. Once again he has the right to call her “Dear Mother.” He announces the “assurance for the future” of his relationship with Felice.
On July 12,
he sends a message to Ottla that things are going much better between him and Felice.
The next day, they go to Franzensbad, a spa near Marienbad where Julie Kafka is taking the waters with her daughter, Valli.
“We will get married as soon as the war ends and we will live in a suburb of Berlin,” he announces. The interview with his mother, at which Felice is also present, proceeds so perfectly smoothly … that it terrifies him.
What has happened? The several-page letter that he sends Max (his confidant) on July 12 gives some insight. His fear of seeing Felice in her full “reality” (should we read “nudity”?) has evaporated. He has realized that he didn’t know her at all, that she was reaching out to him. He has accepted her help. He has entered into a relationship with his fiancée such as he has never known before. Once in her intimacy, he saw the confident gaze of a woman.
“How beautiful the softened glow of her eyes, this blossoming from the well of womanhood. I have no right to resist it. For the first time I believe in the possibility of married life,” he writes.
Such reserve in telling his story! Such difficulty in saying that the locks had popped! They made love.
For the first time? We don’t know. What is certain is that Felice gave him confidence that night. He overcame his fear of the “long, narrow, terrible slit.” He discovered, he would say, the beauty of the slim, noble body of his fiancée. And the same pleasures seem to have been renewed on the following nights. Five days of happiness.
Felice returns to Berlin on July 14. He remains in Marienbad alone until July 24. Though he complains of violent headaches, he is calmer, more relaxed, more sensual, quicker, more decisive. He advises his uncle to spend his vacation in Marienbad, a place as peaceful as the Garden after the expulsion of man. He sends him, along with a guidebook to the city, a list of good things and good places: “Take breakfast at the Dianahof (sweetened milk, eggs, honey, butter), grab a bite at the Maxtal (curdled milk), lunch briefly at the Neptun, eat fruits at the greengrocer’s, take a quick nap, have milk in a plate at the Dianahof, drink a quick curdled milk at the Maxtal, dine at the Neptun (vegetable omelette, Emmenthal, a portion of raw eggs and a portion of fresh peas), then sit on a bench in the municipal park to count your money, visit the pastry shop, and then sleep as much in one night as I was able to sleep in all the twenty-one that I spent here.”
The forest air has stimulated his appetite. Franz bankrupts himself buying good lunches, strolls along eating juicy black cherries. He has put on weight, is writing, walks for hours in the woods. Bare-chested, he lies down full length in ditches lined with warm, thick grass. He stays there, alone, in the sun, sheltered from view. Such happiness! This landscape of low hills is his favorite landscape, the sea and mountains are too heroic for him.
He learns from Max that his Hebrew professor, Georg Langer, is in Marienbad with a distinguished personage, the Rabbi of Belz, one of the leaders of Hasidism. Out of curiosity, and to please Max, he joins the dozen people escorting the sainted man on one of his evening strolls. The next day, he sends Max a long account of the actions and gestures of the rabbi, an enigmatic man who rarely spoke.
Once back in Prague, the prospect of marriage awakens his anxieties all over again. He says to himself: We feel close to each other, we think we grasp each other solidly, whereas we are grasping the wind.
In his letters to Felice over the next four months, he talks about nothing but the Jewish People’s Home, where she has agreed to volunteer. His tone is despotic, he expects a kind of submission or obedience from her. He is savoring, he says, the happiness of commanding another human being.
He requests photographs of his fiancée surrounded by all the little girls she is teaching: “The photographs show many traits that one would never see with one’s own eyes,” he tells her.
He gives her advice on every aspect of these young refugees from Eastern Europe, whose lives fascinate him down to the smallest detail. He sends them books almost daily, comments on every volume, heaps praise on Dickens’s Little Dorrit, and tops off his packages with candies, chocolate, cocoa, and games.
He even writes her: “It’s a little as though these girls were my children. The Home brings us so close together, creates such a strong spiritual link between us, that I want to pay for any expenses you incur on behalf of these children. Give them your help.”
His only other topic of conversation is the Goltz Gallery in Munich, which organizes evenings of modern literature and has invited Max Brod and Kafka to read from their works. Max decides to read poems, and Franz will read “In the Penal Colony,” which he believes to be the best thing he wrote in 1914.
He suggests to Felice that she join him in Munich. He doesn’t yet know the date of the reading, he is not even sure it will take place. But he keeps returning to the subject of the trip. It will take place—no, there will be no trip. I’ll go—no, I won’t have obtained the visa nor the necessary permission from the censorship bureau.
“Miracle upon miracle,” everything falls into place. Felice gives an excuse why she can’t go. He insists. She gives in. He leaves Prague alone on Friday, November 10, very early in the morning. Max is staying behind. The Post Office Bureau, where he has a high-ranking job, has refused to allow him two days off. He assigns Franz the task of reading his poems.9
Franz arrives in Munich late in the afternoon. Felice is waiting for him at the Hotel Bayerischer Hof. That night at eight o’clock, Franz reads his “sordid story” without the slightest emotion, he says, as though the text meant nothing to him, his mouth colder than the mouth of an empty stove.10 Whereas in general, he warms up to the point of frenzy. His friends still remember his reading of “The Metamorphosis” as energized and intoxicating.
The reading at Munich is a staggering failure. Felice, like most of the other listeners, is horrified at the cruelty of the punishments inflicted on the inmates of the penitentiary, where everyone is guilty, where there is no other penalty than death, where suffering never leads to redemption.
The next day, a Saturday, at lunchtime, they enter an abominable pastry shop. Felice, angry, tells him abruptly what she thinks of his text, and the devil take the hindmost. Her hostility wounds him deeply. In lively tones he tells her: “My sense of guilt is always strong enough, you don’t need to excite it further. But I am not strong enough to take such abuse. And this is not the only one of my texts to be painful. Everything I have written up to now is also like that. Our times, and mine in particular, are extremely painful. Mine for longer than anyone else’s. God knows to what depths I would have descended if I had been allowed to write as much as I wanted!”
“Thank God you’ve been kept from it! No one needs to hear such atrocities.”
“Atrocities are everywhere, even at our door. I sent you Arnold Zweig’s book, Ritual Murder in Hungary. Did you read it? I burst into tears at certain passages. I had to put it down.”
“Your penal colony is even more disgusting than that Jewish tragedy! The harrow that carves the law into a prisoner’s flesh, what sadism! How could you!”
“The Law cannot be taught, it must be absorbed into one’s blood. But you haven’t liked anything I’ve written. Not one of my collections has met your approval. Not even Meditation, whose royalties—with your consent—are paid to you.”
“That has nothing to do with it! And you’re the one, I shouldn’t have to remind you, who wanted it that way. I never asked you for anything. And let’s talk, why don’t we, about the sums your publisher sends me!”
Building to a pitch of irritation, she reproaches him for having made her come to Munich: “I wanted to see you in Berlin. But once again, you only thought of yourself, of your own pleasure, not mine. I’m getting to know just how selfish you are.”
“I can’t accept the fact that you—you in particular—reproach me for selfishness, and that you do it so lightly, as though it were the most obvious thing.”
He leaves at dawn on Sunday.
While their first separati
on had blocked his creative energy, the disaster and the argument in Munich trigger an extraordinary spate of productivity. Other than the fourteen stories that compose A Country Doctor, he also writes “The Bridge,” “The Hunter Gracchus,” “Astride the Coal Scuttle,” “The Great Wall of China,” “The Neighbor,” “An Everyday Incident,” “The Truth About Sancho Panza,” “The Silence of the Sirens,” and “Reflections on Sin.”
He has never worked so well or in such agreeable conditions. During the day, he lives in the lovely little house lent to him by Ottla on Alchemists Street. It’s wonderful to live there, and wonderful to walk home around midnight to sleep in the apartment he rents at the Schönborn Palace, a handsome structure on Mala Strana with two beautiful high-ceilinged rooms, red and gold; he could be living in Versailles. He describes it to Felice at length at the beginning of January.11
In July, the Kafka family celebrates the pair’s second engagement, less sumptuously than the first, the war has been raging for three years. The day after the ceremony, the engaged couple leave for Arad, in Transylvania, where one of Felice’s sisters lives. The two stop over for a day or two in Budapest, the trip is long, not very restful, and their relationship is up and down.
He returns to Prague alone after a brief stay in Vienna.
He sleeps a little better.
The wedding is set for September.
7 None of Kafka’s letters to Erna has survived.
8 The Strindberg work published in 1909 in Munich as Entzweit is a novella known in English as “The Doctor’s Second Story,” from the Swedish author’s collection Fair Haven and Foul Strand.
9 Kafka was irritated to discover that the Goltz Gallery had invited him only at Max Brod’s request, and he was determined to give his friend a portion of the honorarium he received for his double performance.
Kafka in Love Page 7