Kafka in Love

by Jacqueline Raoul-Duval

  10 Rilke did not attend this reading, as some have believed, but after reading “The Metamorphosis” he wrote to Kafka’s editor: “Please keep for me anything published by FK. I am not, as I may promise you, his worst reader.”

  11 Between this letter dated early January and another dated September 30, 1917, no letters have survived. A black hole of nine months.

  Freedom … Freedom!

  He doesn’t know exactly when during the night it started. He tells Ottla four o’clock in the morning, and Felice five o’clock. He was sleeping and a strange sensation wakes him, a flow of saliva in his mouth, an unusual taste. He sits up, spits it out. And then he lights his lamp to see what he has vomited up. Odd, it’s a clot of blood, bright red and glistening. Excited as one always is by something new, at the same time frightened, he gets up. Immediately he spits up a second clot. Then a third, then a thin, continuous trickle of blood. He paces back and forth in his room, goes to the window, opens it wide, looks outside, breathes in the warm air, dawn is a long way off. He looks distractedly at his watch, walks back toward his bed. More blood keeps coming. He drinks a little water, rinses his mouth to clear it of the unpleasant taste. He stares at the towel soaked with blood, which has now turned to a dark, almost black, shade of red. He tells himself he has just lost the battle that he has waged for the last five years, he is not Napoleon, he will not emerge from Corsica. His headaches and insomnia have worn him out. It is a crushing defeat, an unconditional capitulation, which he signs with his blood.

  Behind this sense of failure, behind this bitterness, he feels excitement mounting in him, an exhilarating sense of freedom. The battle is over. It is the end of five years of torment, the end of the headaches, the end of the insomnia, that have driven him crazy. From the rubble arises a wonderful sensation of freedom, a sudden lightness. He soars, at peace with himself. He goes back to bed, sleeps until morning.

  He has never slept better.

  The next day, the blood starts up again, less abundantly. He decides to say nothing to his parents. He goes to his doctor, Dr. Mühlstein, who diagnoses an acute bronchitis.

  “A chest cold in August, when I have never had any sort of cold even in the depths of winter?” says Franz skeptically.

  That same night, and the following days, more blood. The doctor orders tests and a chest X-ray. At Max’s urging, Franz consults a specialist, Professor Pick, on September 4: “The upper portions of both lungs are infected, and there is a risk of tuberculosis. You need to take a long cure in the countryside, with a great deal of rest, light, fresh air, and sun.”

  To the doctor’s surprise, Franz shakes his hand and thanks him warmly. Very well!

  He bounds wildly down the staircase from the third-floor office and runs to tell Max the news.

  Max is thunderstruck. “There is a risk of tuberculosis? You don’t seem to realize how serious this could be.”

  “Illness can be a tutelary angel, only its progress is diabolical. For the moment, the blow I have just received feels like something wonderful. There is a great deal of sweetness in being ill.”

  “I don’t understand. Does this disaster make you happy?”

  “You shouldn’t say it in that tone. It’s not as simple as all that. But three months in the country, in sunlight, far from the office. Such freedom!”

  He adds: “I am not going to keep my illness a secret, but I don’t want to say anything about it to my parents. They have enough to worry about. Be careful around them.”

  On September 9, three months after spitting up blood, he writes to Felice. He tells her the reason for his silence: a pulmonary hemorrhage, suffered at the age of thirty-four with no prior warning or family precedent. He goes on to say that he has tuberculosis, but that the headaches and insomnia—his worst sufferings—have stopped tormenting him. In typical fashion, he makes a joke of it: “The brain said, Things can’t go on like this, and after five years the lungs decided to do something about it.” He adds: “I behave toward tuberculosis like a child clinging to its mother’s skirts.”

  He further informs her that he is going for a rest cure to his sister’s farm in Zürau. Ottla is an angel who carries him on her wings through a world full of hazards. In this farewell letter, which he starts “Dearest” as usual, he shows no trace of self-pity. He is drawing up a report for his “poor, dear Felice,” a report that sounds the knell to their singular love affair.

  He arrives in Zürau on the night of September 12, 1917. Other than two brief returns to Prague for further X-rays and a doctor’s visit, he doesn’t budge from there. “On no account do I wish to leave Zürau,” he writes Max, “I hang on to it with clenched teeth.” He will stay there until April 30, 1918. Seven months, the most peaceful in his life.

  When he arrives at his sister’s, she is just putting the last of the hop harvest into the barn. Her brother-in-law, Karl Hermann, is fighting at the front, and she is running his farm, with the help of a farm manager.

  There are several photographs of Franz and Ottla standing in front of the farmhouse, a squat, welcoming structure in a wooded, hilly landscape. Franz’s room, though it faces northeast, is perfect, spacious, warm. His only complaint is the noise: a tinsmith starts to hammer on his tin at dawn, and if he stops for a moment it is only to let a worker take his turn pounding on wood. From the barnyard across the way come all the animal sounds of Noah’s ark, the geese run shrieking to the pond like furies, and the mice make an inordinate noise in the attic. In a nearby house is the only piano in all northwest Bohemia, belonging to a rich farmer’s daughter who presses fiercely on the pedal while dreaming of a life in Prague.

  Franz is no longer looking for peace and quiet in this life. The pure air, the forest, and the light are enough for him. He has found a spectacular spot in which to stretch out in the sun: it is on a height, or rather on a small plateau in the center of a vast semicircular basin. Bare-chested or in his underwear, he lies there looking out like a king, on a huge old armchair with two footstools in front of him. He is almost entirely hidden from view. From time to time, though rarely, a head or two may pop up above the edge of the plateau and shout, “Come down off your bench!”

  He doesn’t move. For hours at a time he sits motionless in the sun, drinks liters and liters of raw milk, as his doctor ordered, either chilled or very hot.

  “Perhaps,” he says to Ottla, “I will become the village idiot some day.”

  He joins in the farmwork a little. He feeds the goats, which consists of bending down the leafiest branches of a bush until the goats can reach them. He watches the animals as they noisily crunch their meal. They look like Polish Jews, this one like his Uncle Alfred, that one like Felix, that other like Ernst.

  At night, in the kitchen, he sits and peels vegetables. He takes the trouble to send a pair of partridges and four kilos of flour to Max and Oscar. Even in farm country, it’s hard to find meat or butter at this point. Eggs are scarce too.

  He rereads David Copperfield, to which “The Stoker,” the first chapter of his American novel, owes so much, as he freely admits. He dreams of his father, of the battle of Tagliamento, which was fought the previous month, of Franz Werfel. He writes letters to his parents, his friends, and to Max, who is facing a marital crisis.

  He composes a letter breaking off his relationship with Felice but decides it is even more equivocal than his feelings and does not send it.

  He observes the peasants whom he sees around him: “They are nobles who have found refuge in agriculture, they have organized their work with such wisdom and humility that they are protected from all upheavals, true citizens of the earth.”

  His illness? He is hardly aware of it. He has no fever, hardly coughs, admittedly sweats and is short of breath, but he has gained some weight back and he is sleeping better. His sister is glad to have him around. When he sees her at nightfall coming toward him with a blanket or a bowl of hot broth, he says: “We make an ideal couple. I’ve never felt so well as living alone with you.”
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br />   Felice announces her intention to visit. Franz tries to talk her out of it, such a long journey, so many transfers from train to train … She insists. All right, then let her come! She arrives on September 21 after a trip lasting thirty hours. Weariness and emotional distress are stamped on her face. Her presence awakens nothing in him but guilt. He looks at her, surprised at feeling no emotion except anxiety at having his routine disrupted. He finds nothing to say to her, relying on Ottla to keep the conversation going and lead Felice on a tour. That evening, under his sister’s gaze and solely to be agreeable to everyone, he manages to play his part, he hasn’t lost his talents as an actor. Felice relaxes, perhaps even starts to hope again. Franz seems in such good health!

  She leaves the next day in the late afternoon. He watches her climb into a carriage with Ottla and start off around the pond. He takes a straight line and finds himself once more in front of the woman he has pursued with his love for five years. Today, his face impassive, he waves at her listlessly. Farewell!

  The following Sunday, he goes to the train station to meet his mother, who has come down for the day. She is unaware of her son’s illness, delighted only to know that he is resting at Ottla’s, in the countryside, far from the horrors of war. Stepping off the train, she exclaims, “My, how healthy you look!”

  Seeing him smile, she adds that two or three days before she asked Felice whether her son was in a better mood: “And do you know what she answered? That she hadn’t noticed!”

  He avoids looking directly at his mother, who has never had the time to think of herself. She is puffy and distended from her six confinements, a lifetime of toil, and a total lack of care. He thinks of his oldest sister, a slender young woman just three or four years ago, who now, after giving birth to two children, has a swollen body that is already starting to look like his mother’s. He feels so much distress on their account that he wants to avoid burdening them with his illness. As far as his family is concerned, he is resting. Nothing more.

  Hermann Kafka is not so easily fooled. He asks Ottla repeatedly: “Why is your brother extending his vacation week after week? Just because he is tired? It doesn’t seem possible.”

  On a visit to Prague on November 22, Ottla takes advantage of her mother’s being busy in the kitchen to tell her father briefly about Franz. The mention of tuberculosis makes a strong impression on him, he says nothing to his daughter but his face registers a change of expression.

  She reassures him: “In Zürau, Franz is putting on weight, he is sleeping well, he has everything he needs. Freed from the office and the factory, he is a different man. He is going to recover, ask his doctor, you’ll see!”

  Her father remains concerned.

  “Don’t say anything to Mother, or to my sisters,” adds Ottla. “Franz asks you not to.”

  After receiving visits from Felice, his mother, and his secretary, Fräulein Kaiser, all highly agitating, Franz is loath to have Max, Oscar, or Felix come to visit. He no longer feels in any condition to see them, he prefers writing. He tells them about his “night of mice.” “What a race they are, mute, noisy, horrid. The clandestine work of an oppressed proletarian race that rules at night. I didn’t dare get up and light the lamp yesterday. All I could manage was to shout a few times to frighten them. In the morning, sad and disgusted, I couldn’t get out of bed. I lay there listening to the sound of one tireless mouse working in the cupboard, either finishing last night’s work or getting a start on tonight’s. Now I’ve brought the cat into my room, the cat I’ve always secretly hated. Even the warm smell and good taste of the home-baked bread is tinged with mouse.”

  He tries to create a void around and within him, as the Taoists prescribe.

  “I am a Chinese man,” he says to his sister.12

  Stretched out on the newly arrived deck chair, a blanket over his legs, he looks out at the hills. The forests, in their late autumn colors, glow in the evening light as though on fire.

  The voices of the world fall silent, or become scarce.

  12 According to Elias Canetti, Kafka is the only typically Chinese writer to be found in the West.

  “It Wasn’t to Be Your Destiny”13

  In Zürau, in front of Ottla, Felice didn’t dare to question Franz closely, and he parried her attempts to talk to him privately. Riding the train home, she doesn’t know what to think. Franz is in good health, he coughs only at night and not that much. Why was he so distant, cold, and uncommunicative? Before her departure, they stood for a fairly long time on the doorsill looking at the village square. They hardly spoke, she was unhappy about the senseless trip and Franz’s strange behavior. Was it possible he had forgotten about Marienbad? Forgotten that he was writing her barely a few weeks back, “You are a part of me”?

  Back in Berlin, she waits for his letter. The days go by, nothing comes. Her bridal trousseau, arranged in neat piles around her room, seems to taunt her. Her mother’s gaze bristles with reproach. Her aunts, her friends, and her colleagues are continually asking, “So when is the wedding?”

  Uncertainty taints even her simplest pleasures. She must see Franz alone, face to face as at Marienbad, demand an explanation, even if it’s to be the last. Though her Christmas vacation may have to be sacrificed, she must get to the bottom of the whole thing.

  She asks Franz in a pleading letter to meet her in Prague.

  “You can’t hide away any longer. You owe me the truth, the whole truth.”

  He leaves Zürau on December 24. On December 25, Felice is in Prague. Their first day together goes well, they discuss every subject but the main one. Felice is calm, affectionate. That night they go and visit Max. Neither Franz nor Felice manages to join the general conversation. Struck dumb for the entire evening, they both seem at a loss. The next morning, Franz rings Max’s doorbell at 7:30. Spend the morning with me, he says. They meet up at the Café de Paris.

  After a long moment of silence, Max asks, “What do you want from me?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Then why did you ask me to spend the morning with you?”

  “To help me kill time. I have made my decision and it is unshakable. What I have to do, I can only do alone. I am convinced that in breaking off my engagement, this time once and for all, I am doing the right thing. I don’t doubt it for a second, or I could never do it. But putting an end to five years of love, however right it may be, is still a great injustice. What remains an enigma to me is Marienbad. Why …”

  He doesn’t finish his sentence.

  That afternoon and the following day are terrible. He has to convince Felice that she cannot become attached to a man like him. He accuses himself of ruining her life, he has made her fall out with Grete Bloch, he has made her fall out with her sister Erna, he has contributed to the death of her father, he has tortured her in every way conceivable, he has tyrannized her, he has insisted that she learn to swim, that she perform gymnastics, that she stop eating sugar cubes, that she volunteer ever longer hours at the Jewish People’s Home …

  Felice puts her hand over his mouth: “Stop, Franz, please, you are talking nonsense, absolute nonsense.”

  “Then stop asking me why I am putting an end to it, don’t prolong my humiliation.”

  More gently, he continues: “I’ll tell you a secret, I am not going to recover my health. My tuberculosis is not an illness that you put to rest on a deck chair, it is a weapon that I need, one that will stay with me as long as I live. And we cannot both remain alive, my illness and I.”

  On the morning of December 27, he accompanies Felice to the train station. He knows that he will never see her, never hear from her again. He watches her climb into a carriage, watches the train pull away, he cannot contain the emotions working in him. Pale, his face hard and cold, he seeks out Max. His friend is at the office, and he is not alone. One of his colleagues sits at an adjoining desk. Paying no attention to this man, whom he seems not to see, paying no attention to the bustle going on around them, Franz sits down next to his frie
nd. He bursts into tears.

  Max is worried, it is the first time since he has known Franz that he has ever seen him cry, cry openly, the tears rolling down his cheeks. Between sobs, he hears him say: “Isn’t it terrible that it should come to this, isn’t it terrible?”

  13 The consolation that Julia Kafka offered her son, on learning that his second engagement had been called off.

  “One has simply been sent out as a biblical dove, and having found nothing green, now slips back into the darkness of the ark.”

  —LETTER TO MILENA

  Julie, the Forgetting

  Spanish influenza, rampant across Europe, strikes him in early October. His temperature soars to 105 degrees Fahrenheit and remains there. His mother tends to him day and night, thinks he will die, cries at his bedside. She remembers her two sons Georg and Heinrich, who died at the ages of six and eighteen months.

  Franz recovers, then relapses. His lungs deteriorate. When he gets over the flu, he is so weakened that his doctor prescribes a long rest cure in the countryside.

  On November 30, 1918, his mother drops him off in Schelesen, a village north of Prague that Franz knows. At this time of year, he is the only guest at the small hotel kept by Fräulein Olga Studl. He stays there four months, at sixty krone a day.

  He spends the days lying in a deck chair on his balcony, breathing the fresh air, swathed in blankets, looking out at the wooded hills. The quiet is broken only at lunchtime by the snarling of the hotel’s dogs, Meta and Rolf, fighting over the remains of Franz’s meal, which he tosses out the window to them.

  One day in January, a second guest arrives. It is a young woman of twenty-eight, Julie Wohryzek. Winter is at its height, and the hotel, the hills, the forests are buried in crystalline snow, which sparkles as far as the eye can see. It could be Lapland, and there is no traveling except by horse-drawn troika. But the intense cold outdoors keeps the two convalescents prisoners inside “this truly enchanted habitation.”